A long overdue update

I don't really know what happened. I just stopped writing in this space, although I was writing profusely in other places for other purposes. What happened? A lot of changes and happenings and not enough time/effort to reflect. Fear of actually putting my fingers to the keyboard, as some of the best realizations, and the hardest, sometimes come as my hands type out my thoughts and stories, in the process of writing and not before. I actually remember thinking of updating this blog and feeling that sensation of dread, of being overwhelmed, overcome my body, my shoulders clenching and my teeth grinding. Overwhelmed is the word. But not unhappy. Challenged. But here I am. Since March 4, life has been a maelstrom of threads all crossing, twisting and then spontaneously reordering.
A visit to New Orleans in mid-March for the Brazilian Studies Association meeting. Bourbon Street was like Disneyland for suppressed middle-class white housewives, who have zydeco bar musicians play washboards between their legs on the street while they scream and their children watch. Away from the French Quarter, the meeting was a great moment for me, in which I was encouraged and inspired to continue the lines of thought I have begun in my own intellectual work.
I crashed in mid-April in Boston when I gave a horrid talk at a session on alternative commodities and certifications at the AAG. That brought me back to Earth, and people's words to me reminded me that it doesn't really matter, in more than one way.
From there to Cuba and a really incredible week with Ian and Keith and our 32 undergraduate Geography students from Exeter on a fieldcourse. I loved, absolutely loved going through the process of shock, questioning assumptions, positionality, realizing that Cubans are people, lovely, not just denizens of a socialist country, with our students as they went through it. Think of 20 Cuban abuelas (grandmothers) teaching 32 22-year-old Brits how to be young. It was beautiful.
From Cuba back to England and the race to the finish. At least that is how it felt--finishing classes, writing and giving a seminar on my research project, applying for and then agonizing about a PhD position at Exeter. A couple of trips to Edinburgh to see fantastic Felicity, who made me sing two songs to a full bar. She was shameless and wonderful, and made me feel the same way. Thanks, Felicity...you have no idea what that meant!
Finally the sad/happy decision to turn it down and go back to Kansas. Kansas, my Kansas.
A week in Lawrence with Erin and Charlotte, basically spent staring at and entertaining baby Seimoah, who had me at his beck and call.
And now in Champaign, Illinois, studying Swahili in an intensive course for 8 weeks. A quiet town, a college town without the charm and culture of Lawrence. But I am occupying myself with Swahili, and have bought a guitar. After 3 weeks of practicing a half-hour a day, I can now play Ode to Joy on the first two strings. Huzzah!
All of these threads of life probably deserved more written reflection on this blog, or at least the people who enjoy reading my accounts deserved more. Will try to get back on this horse.
Love,
H.

Text of an informal talk I gave last week for Fairtrade Fortnight

So it’s Fairtrade Fortnight here in the UK, and organizations like the Fairtrade Foundation and Oxfam are hosting events to engage people—consumers—in the idea and practice of fair trade through speaking tours, meet-the-farmer events, and…events like this one, which bring Fairtrade closer to your heart by also pleasing your palate (and making you feel a bit more receptive after the first glass, which makes me think we should have done the wine tasting before my little talk).

So why am I giving this talk? I am here from the University of Kansas Geography Department, on a six-month visit to work with Ian and generally get some exposure to geographies that I don’t have access to in Kansas Geography, so that I can get a well-rounded PhD. I work in ethical consumerism/consumption, a bit of rural development, and social movements. Before I started my MA in 2005, I lived for three years in Nicaragua, working for a fairtrade coffee cooperative as a project coordinator for a community-based rural tourism project in four rural communities in the mountains just north of Matagalpa, Nicaragua.

Now, I am sure we all have an understanding of fairtrade and ethical consumerism and perhaps a lot of you will have read the literature on it and will know some of the debates that surround it. Well, this is not an academic talk, so we won’t go into literature. Instead it will be about my experiences with fair trade in Nicaragua and in other places. What I aim to do is to give you a picture of how fairtrade works in a Nicaraguan cooperative, through the lens of my experience of the work I did with the cooperative during those three years and after. But let me start by asking you—what is fairtrade?

This is the question I asked myself one day in 2000 when I went into a café at UCLA after transferring there as a third-year undergraduate—I saw on the menu board ‘Fairtrade Dark Roast, 5 cents extra’. I bought myself a cup, looked at the poster on the wall that said something like ‘A Fair Deal for Farmers’, liked the flavor and kept buying it every morning, not thinking too much about how it was a fair deal for farmers, or why a fair deal was even needed. Soon after, I met the group of students that had just the year before campaigned to get that fairtrade coffee option into that campus café. I joined their group, and we continued working to try to convince the university to switch all of its coffee to fairtrade, getting students to write letters saying the five cents extra per cup was worth it. We didn't succeed while I was there. But I wanted to know more about fairtrade. I wanted to know what farmers did with this social premium. I suspected that there was more here than just a higher price.

But this experience did lead me to Nicaragua during my last year, via Fort Bragg, CA. I had gotten a grant to do fieldwork but did not have any contacts with fairtrade coffee farmers. I happened to be up in Fort Bragg working on a farm for the summer, and my friend’s mom suggested that I talk to Paul Katzeff, who owns Thanksgiving Coffee Roasting Company, and who she thought maybe worked with a cooperative in Nicaragua. Paul is an old hippy, a radical New York Jew living in No. California. Kind of has a reputation for being hard but visionary but is still a kind of old-timer father-figure in the fair trade movement. I and my friends went and met him at the his plant, where we sat on stools around a round rotating table filled with clear glasses of coffee samples, and chatted while Paul taught us how to cup coffee (that’s where you taste coffee under controlled conditions and classify its quality and cup characteristics. Like wine.). He offered us a smoke, and said, ‘Yeah, there are these great cooperatives in Nicaragua. They’re revolutionary. Literally. Came out of the revolution. We are finishing up a project with them to install nine rural cupping labs in the coops . That way they can keep improving their quality and they know what they are selling, so they can have some power when they negotiate with a buyer like me. Or someone less sympathetic.’

So I went to Nicaragua the following January for three months to do my undergraduate study on fairtrade. I got off the airplane at the airport in Managua, where a man in a Toyota pickup 4X4 picked me up. My Spanish wasn't that great, so I couldn't answer all his questions. I only knew he was from the cooperative. He drove me north for two hours through a hot, dry, flat, beige landscape, passing coffee processing mills along the way, and then we began rising into green mountains, finally arriving to Matagalpa and the office of CECOCAFEN, the cooperative. What I met when I arrived there, and later when I went to live in a rural community named La Reyna, was not what I expected. I don’t know what I had expected. I know I didn't expect running water only one or two days a week, or becoming an expert at one-bucket bathing.

What I walked into was a place of incredible history, struggle, and hopeful vision: an organized cooperative of 1600 coffee farmers with less than 10 ha each that most had received through the agrarian reform during the revolution of the 1980s, all organized into small base cooperatives originating in the revolution. Some of these base cooperatives had formed larger Unions of Cooperatives after the revolution was voted out 1989, when many of the rich large landowners who had fled the uprising and subsequent land confiscations of the Sandinistas and settled in Miami, returned and began using the courts and the new right-wing government to reclaim their farms, sometimes legitimately and often not. Small-scale farmers in Matagalpa, who before the revolution had been landless workers often working in slave conditions for the same families that were now returning, fought in the courts and also on the highways to protect their rights to their farms. It was their livelihoods at stake, and everything they had struggled for during the revolution, and organizing themselves into larger unions of cooperatives allowed them to act collectively to protect that.

After securing their lands in the early 1990s, these cooperatives and Unions of Cooperatives faced another challenge—commercializing their coffee. Farmers had two options—they could sell to the coyotes at whatever price they offered, usually not much, or they could look to the outside and get a better price. The cooperatives did have contacts, people and companies in Europe and the UK that had bought their coffee in solidarity during the revolution to help support it. Many of these solidarity workers had in fact formalized that kind of relationship and started fairtrade certifications or importing companies. In 1994 some base cooperatives and one union of cooperatives in Matagalpa joined into an umbrella cooperative called CECOCAFEN and exported their first container to Europe. 100% of the coffee they exported that year was fairtrade certified and in the years that followed they grew and used their growing market savvy to find other markets as well.

That’s the history. What I learned during those initial three months as I went about interviewing cooperative leaders and members, and lived amongst them in La Reyna, was that fairtrade was a continuation of the revolution, and not in any abstract way. The cooperative leaders of CECOCAFEN had all been guerrilla fighters during the struggle of the late 1970s before the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza, and now were leading a national cooperative movement; the members of the solidarity brigades that had come during the 80s to help harvest coffee or to be present in rural communities to deflect attacks on those communities by the contras, twelve years later had now become fairtrade business people or leaders of social justice or environmental NGOs or workers in development aid organizations and they kept their ties to Nicaragua; to small-scale farmers, the cooperative was a way of securing their land, dignity, and livelihoods. I fell in love with all of these visions and wanted to be part of it, and not just by convincing people to buy coffee with the fairtrade seal. I went back to LA to finish my last term, and returned to Nicaragua the week after I completed my degree.

I stayed for three years. When I first got there, I was idle for about five minutes, CECOCAFEN quickly took advantage of my English-speaking skills to accompany groups of buyers or visitors from development NGOs to interpret and entertain as needed. These NGOs were important, because CECOCAFEN was more and more taking on the role of administering development-type projects, aimed not only at improving coffee quality and commercialization capacity in the cooperative, but also at gender education, rural youth development, and, more and more, economic diversification. Economic diversification was crucial at that moment, in 2002, because the 'coffee crisis' was at its most deadly point. World prices had sunk to as low as 40 cents a pound and this had dire results on a country like Nicaragua. Five thousand workers were marching from Matagalpa to Managua to demand emergency aid and long-term development aid from the government after they were left without home or livelihood after 80% of the large haciendas where they were employed were closed. These were large latifundias that had been in operation since the mid-19^th century. At the same time, small-scale farmers, the most vulnerable to price swings, were abandoning their farms. Slums were quickly appearing on the hills surrounding Matagalpa, full of dispossessed rural people with nowhere to go. Only farmers belonging to fairtrade certified cooperatives were surviving and were able to stay on their land and continue producing.

Fairtrade certification was also crucial to the environment at that moment—people were clearing out their coffee to plant corn or raise cattle, anything but coffee, which meant essentially an environmental crisis in addition to the economic and social one—coffee in Nicaragua is grown under shade, so switching from coffee to cattle or corn means cutting down the shade trees above the coffee plants. Small-scale farmers with FT certification were less vulnerable, so did not have to abandon their land or cut down their coffee. As a response to the crisis, the cooperatives were adopting a strategy of integrated development, working with International NGOs to administer economic diversification, social development, and environmental projects. An entire development complex focused around fairtrade cooperatives developed in Nicaragua and in Central America.

In late 2002, I was hired to administer a community-based tourism project in five base cooperatives in four rural communities that were especially hard-hit by the coffee crisis because they were at lower altitudes. The major project goals were income diversification for the families involved, and increasing relationships with consumers. By community-based, I mean that from the beginning the idea was that the families involved would run the project and make the major decisions through a democratic structure. It is not easy for a coffee cooperative to go into the business of tourism, nor is it easy for a community of farmers with very low literacy levels, striking gender inequities, and low environmental consciousness to suddenly do things differently. We embarked on two years of training for the men and women who would house tourists in their homes, and for the sons and daughters of farmers who would be community tourist guides, as well as infrastructure improvement in the communities.

So groups of church members, university students, activists, and just curious people came to the mountains of Matagalpa to experience this fair-trade tourism project. Imagine yourself going through this experience—you are a middle-class person who knows about fair trade and buys fair-trade products. Your church organizes a study tour to visit coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua and you decide to go along. After visiting the cooperative office in a small city surrounded by green mountains, you are taken in an old schoolbus painted obnoxious colors north of the city along impossibly pitted dirt roads with cinderblock houses and wooden shacks hung with beer adverts on either side. After a couple of hours the bus stops. You are met outside by a young man named Alfredo who through the interpreter you learn is your guide. He tells you about the community you are in, its name is EL Roblar, it used to be a hacienda, there are two cooperatives, a men’s and a women’s. He then leads you walking up a muddy track up a mountainside and eventually to the house of Dona Dionisia and her nine children. He leaves you there with them. It takes you a couple of hours to get used to the dirt floor, the coffee growing seemingly up to the doorstep, and the overall unfamiliarity of it, but by dinnertime you are side by side with Dionisia’s daughters washing up and drinking coffee afterwards. You ask them about fair-trade, their lives. Your first reaction to their answer of, it isn’t enough is—it must be a fraud. But you continue talking, and you listen to their stories of forming a women’s cooperative and how that has changed their lives; how CECOCAFEN has invested in community projects, and much more. How they are starting to farm organically, how the daughters are attending school when their mother never had the chance. How much hope there is in the future. You see how the project of improvement is an everyday activity here. You return to your home in Exeter thinking that this visit was not about what fairtrade is doing, it was about what these people are doing to improve their lives, and your effort to buy fair trade gives them a step up.

I left this work Nicaragua in mid-2005 to go do my MA in Geography at Kansas. It seemed to make sense to me to write my MA thesis on the community-based tourism project, and after some dialogue with CECOCAFEN, we came up with a study that would serve as an evaluation of the long-term goals of the project and as my MA thesis. Four years after the project was begun, I conducted an email survey of North Americans who had visited the project, to see if, and how their visit to Matagalpan cooperatives had impacted their lives. The results? Most of the people who responded to the survey said their perceptions of fair trade had not changed radically as a result of the visit, but they had become conscious that just buying a labelled product was only the first step, and they knew there was more at stake than a price. I also went back to Nicaragua and interviewed the families in the project to see if the project was achieving its goals. They did feel they had a sense of belonging to something larger than their community, they knew people out there cared about them.

I was sitting in a café yesterday on Queen Street drinking a cup of coffee, and I wondered if I had a more concrete answer to that question I had asked myself in that café in UCLA. I can’t say that I am any closer to a concrete answer. Are you? I have come to understand fair trade as something either indefinable or something with many definitions. It depends on where you are. The point I want to get across, is that it is much more than a guaranteed minimum (‘fair’) price, much more than farmer organizations building their own capacity for engaging in the market on an equal footing, much more than long-term relationships between producers and buyers. The ‘indefinable’ part of fair trade is the ‘much more’ part—fair trade becomes a thing of the place(s) it is happening in, the people and culture of those places, and it is constantly changing. It is a process of interactions between producers, buyers, NGO, consumers, and everyone between and around these people and the places they occupy. It is affected by politics, personal relationships, and historical context. Its effectiveness at being ‘fair’ is impacted by these things. There are issues of access to the certification, issues of corporate involvement. The farmers I worked with at CECOCAFEN are now facing the problems of privatized water and electricity being sold at a premium, rising food prices, rising prices of cooking gas, rising prices of petrol. Fairtrade coffee prices provides stability and access to resources for farmers, but at this moment does not address all of these problems. They require more. Just as people within countries like Nicaragua are organizing and looking for solutions, so can we, so are we. It is hope that is required, but also a willingness to have open eyes. Look for the fairtrade label when you buy coffee, but then ask the question of why this is necessary in the first place.

Pirating in London

I wouldn't say that going out in public in the guise of a pirate is normal anywhere (except maybe in Penzance). Least of all in central London, where narrow, traffic-filled streets lined on all sides with stout grey edifices standing like dignified soldiers at attention characterize places like Trafalgar Square, the South Bank, Picadilly Circus. The pavements below seem to mock the stern stone facades--people of seemingly every nation and appearance, tourists and londoners, crowd and crash into each other as they stop the flow of pedestrians to snap a photo of Big Ben or some other monument, or exit one of the multitudes of designer boutiques, embassies, private businesses, or government offices to step into the rough flow of people.

The few times I have traveled through central London on foot or on bus, I have been simply overwhelmed by it. The beautiful, the rich, the elite are all here. The self-proclaimed pinnacle of Western civilization puts on its best face in this place, and seems to say to me, come join, wear gorgeous branded clothing, walk proud knowing you are one of the beautiful, here, in this place. It is hard not to succumb to its call, and even if I never gave in, I usually leave feeling slightly inadequate, as if I had never succeeded in completely engaging with progress and beauty, the progress and beauty that are thrown in your face as the only truth worth knowing, a thousand times over as you walk the distance of one city block in central London.

Two Saturdays ago I left my house dressed as a pirate, with striped tights, black dress, black leather boots, leather belt, and bandanna tied around my head. I met Kerry, also in striped tights, at St. David's station in Exeter, and we boarded a train to London. We alighted two hours later at Paddington Station and took a bus to Bond Street Tube Station, where we spied another pirate, this one carrying a large drum and a backpack. We crossed the street to wait on a corner that was sheltered by the wind. Stephan, the pirate with the drum, crossed and joined us. Every few minutes, another pirate would approach us and stand with us, waiting. Pretty soon, we were a good, sizable group of pirates, conversing, greeting those we knew or recognized, or introducing ourselves to those we did not. More pirates with drums appeared. A police officer crossed the street from the station and politely asked where we would be heading. Two pirates who seemed to know what was going on engaged with him and replied that they didn't yet know. Well, the officer responded, I think you're going to the National Portrait Gallery first. Well, one of the pirates replied, you know more than we do, eying him warily. The officer laughed jovially and said, we're traffic police, so don't worry. Some jokes and witty words were exchanged and the tension passed. We waited some more, passing out leaflets to passersby. One taxi driver rolled down his window and yelled angrily as he drove slowly by--You should support the soldiers who are fighting for you! And then the treasure map was passed out and after a few more moments of waiting for pirate stragglers, we began to move.

It wasn't hard to move, as a skillful marching samba band called Rhythms of Resistance led our rowdy band of marchers, and colorful banners sporting the words HANDS OFF IRAQI OIL were held above our heads. I and others were given shiny flyers with information to pass out, which detailed how Shell Oil and British Petroleum are benefitting from the war , and we skipped ahead of the drummers, handing flyers to passersby. Some of whom smiled as we passed or even gave us a thumbs up; others simply put up their hand, palm up, and speedily walked by without making eye contact. Some tourists, cameras ever at the ready, accompanied us for blocks and blocks as we progressed through the city. At one point, I handed one of my last flyers to an older man in a long grey wool coat standing on the corner observing us with a slight smile. He chuckled merrily as he took the flyer from my hand, and said, You're talking to the wrong person--I'm an oil executive! We both laughed, each patting the other on the shoulder as I continued on my way with the others.

We made noise as we progressed on our route, drumming irrestibly dancable riffs that had shopkeepers tapping their feet, shouting our message, emitting obnoxious pirate growls---Arrrggghhhhh!---that echoed off the grey stone buildings. At one point I mentally stopped to observe the scenario that I was part of--there were we, dressed in our most beautiful pirateness, gleefully enjoying our romp and our efforts to raise awareness about the role of Shell and British Petroleum in the Iraqi War, while highly polished people with shopping bags on their arms stopped to contemplate us, or didn't. I felt free--I was free, shouting in a place where no one shouts, growling in a place where that would be considered insane, pirating in a place where that is totally out of place.

Go to Indy Media for more photos of the Hands Off Iraqi Oil Protest in London: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/02/392147.html

For more information about Hands Off Iraqi Oil, go to: www.handsoffiraqioil.org

My notebook (a short memoir)

My notebook.

It started out as a practical thing. I had always had a notebook in the field with me—whether that was the field of work when I ran a tourism development project in Nicaragua or the field of research…which was sometimes the same field. But journaling, that was another issue, a more difficult one, my entire life. I have never been able to journal, to really write down what I was feeling or doing or not feeling or doing. People always gave me journals, pretty blank notebooks with lines or without, and I would write something mundane on the first page, and then it would sit blank on my bookshelf. I think I have a box full of these blank books in the closet of the spare room in my mother’s house.

So before leaving for Brazil in late August of last year, I purchased my three-pack of large Moleskin notebooks (the big, thin, floppy ones—squared pages, not lined) as my research notebooks for my fieldwork. I had not written anything in quite a while, and was feeling the urge to, especially after I started my blog and began to get positive comments after my first couple of entries. I was also feeling…lonely and frustrated by my communication problems as I went through the process of culture shock and becoming fluent enough to express finer ideas and feelings. At the same time I was had fallen for a guy and became a bit emotional when he decided to return to the longterm girlfriend he had recently broken with. As a result of this, I also began listening to lots of melancholy music on my IPod and got even more into the type of mood that is conducive to reflecting on the meanings of life, love and, well, you know. The point is that all of these circumstances converged to put a pen in my hand at various moments during my three-month stay in Campinas, Brazil, to write lots of sad, frustrated love poetry in my supposed research journal.

And it all went downhill from there. My research journal became a book of poems, lists of songs to put into song lists dedicated to certain people, notes on interviews, notes on reflections on interviews, to-do lists, ideas for future research, phone numbers, pasted-in business cards and small paper memoirs. And lo and behold, my research journal became the journal of my life. All-in-one. I periodically flip through its pages and remember, which I think is the point of this exercise. I read (or try to read) its notes and entries, the combination of the written practical and personal, and I can piece together entire days, what I was thinking and doing, and sometimes it conjures up images of where I was, what the light was like, what the air smelled like. All because I called the thing a ‘research’ notebook, instead of a ‘journal’. Somehow it, combined with the other happenings in my life, created a space for, and gave validity to my musings. Now I have a notebook full of them. I must say, the notebook itself has transformed along the journey: it is now raggedy-edged, covered with various stickers and decals from Kansas, Brazil, and the UK, and is full of personality. As I reach the last five pages of this notebook, and look to the Moleskin I have already purchased to replace the old one, sitting on my desk and ready, I feel a bit of sadness. But excitement as well. Hopefully it will have as interesting a life as the first one.

Body language blundering and more

Hiya!
That's Devonshire speak for "hello". So here I am still in Exeter, trying to find my feet, so to speak, but I think I still feel like I am constantly falling over, tripping, bumping into things, all in an effort to just have some normal-feeling, comfortable interactions with people. A big part of it, I am learning, is learning how to read gestures, body language, and facial expressions, not so much the spoken words themselves, as I stated last time. Right, the major cultural differences in respect to communication, between USers (aka Americans, but I hate calling us Americans when there are two entire continents called America, and thus two entire continents full of people who are Americans!) and the English is in nonverbal communication. So I have stopped reacting to people who, when I am speaking to them, are looking at me with an expression that I would normally interpret as "My God this girl is crazy and I do not understand a word she is saying", because I am beginning to understand that the English ALWAYS have that expression on their faces. It is a natural national defense mechanism which is really indicative of thoughts like "Oh My God I hope she doesn't ask me anything personal. Please go away please go away please go away!". Basically, as my friend Keith says, the English are shy. Which doesn't make it very easy to get to know them. But then I wonder how they are interpreting my own body language...

Otherwise, lots of new experiences...that field course on Cuba that I am helping Ian and Keith to teach had its first meeting, and it was a blast. I was so nervous beforehand that I think Keith was going to kill me, but it went really well. The class will basically be constructed by the students themselves with us facilitating the experience, so they have to research Cuba, get contacts, and develop methodologies in collectives, and then develop small research projects together that they will then present when the class goes there in complete and present in Cuba in April. I wish I had had a field course experience like this as an undergraduate!

I continue to be incredibly impressed by the Geography Department here at Exeter--it and everyone in it is so dynamic--there is always something going on, a reading group, a seminar, or some other activity where people are debating, learning, and interacting with each other. The result is that I am being exposed to so much that I am already integrating into my own PhD project. That was why I came, no? It's great.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, and I do hope the candidates can stop badmouthing each other for at least a day, and say something that matters. I am following the elections from here, and it is so tiresome and uninspiring watching how some of them are constantly looking for some other weak point to attack in the others. I wish they would realize that really, we would be so much more inspired to vote for them if they would speak sincerely on real problems with some ideas that might work. That is what I want to hear and consider. But it is hard to sort it all out with this bullshit they are throwing at each other. And the media doesn't help.

Okay, I am done ranting. Hope all is well.
H.

On Culture (Stranger in a Strange Land...)

People said to me before I came to England, "Well, this should be easier than working in Brazil or Nicaragua, it's the same culture, and they speak the same language!". I would say they were correct only so far as the language. No. I totally disagree, actually. The English are about as far from Americans culturally as pygmies. Okay, okay, I am exagerating, but I'm trying to make a point here. I have compiled a list of differences, some more obvious than others:

1. First, let's hit the language myth on the head. We do not speak the same language. After four centuries of incubation on the American continent, we have developed a completely distinct one. Do I illustrate my point by telling you that I understood NO ONE my first three days here? I then slowly began to connect sounds to letters--a strange 'A' sound was actually a long 'O', etcetera. And the words for things--a 'jumper' is a 'sweater'. And the accents. You would think that television and movies and other globalizations of media would make the striking schism between our respective Englishes much smoother, but I am here to tell you that it backfired. What you will encounter among the young and hip here (and not just in London) is a strange accent, or rather, intonation of words. It is like an American Valley Girl accent superimposed on an upper-middle-class Posh Londoner accent, with strange, drawn out, whiny monosyllables at the end of every sentence or question.

2. Parsnips. Buttered parsnips. Honeyed parsnips. In the U.S. parsnips are a mythical vegetable, something you read about in required Victorian Literature classes in college. Here, they are a way of life. They are everywhere. (And they are yummy.)

3. Communication. Body language. To say it simply, Americans express everything, either verbally, or nonverbally by acting out. The English simply put on a stone face (oh, wait, they always have on a stone face...), and wait for you to figure out that you have done something inappropriate or displeasing. So, being an American, it takes me a while to figure it out.

4. Meeting people. While I was in London, Felicity and I conducted many experiments in many a pub over many a night, in which we would try to make eye contact with attractive men (attractive to us). The responses were interesting: About a third looked directly away to the side (we call that the "Right-glance"), a third looked straight up (the "Up-glance"), and the other third looked up, then to the side, and then to an unidentified point in front of them (the "Triangle"). Needless to say, our success rate at actually meeting people was 0%, since none of them would look at us. That is, if you don't count the outlyers, who were two elderly and drunk men named Graham and Mike, but they don't count. They were so drunk they started performing the experiment as well! We also repeated the experiment every time we had to walk across London Bridge. Same results except that more than half did the "Triangle" (probably because if they looked to the side, they would have to look at someone else crossing the bridge!).

But don't get the impression that I am not enjoying myself or meeting interesting people here. I am. And I am.

Cheers!

On Dropping the Ball and Globehopping...

Hey,
So, I did drop the ball after that last, brief posting on 80s Night in Campinas, Brazil. The problem was that once I found out that I had to leave Brazil 2 WEEKS early, I became a bit depressed, and was too busy trying to finish up my research project, say goodbye to everyone, and being stressed out about my UK visa application. For those of you who do not know, you cannot apply for a UK visa from outside your country of residence, which was why I had to leave Brazil early--to rush back to Kansas, send in my application, supporting documents, and passport to the Consulate in Chicago, and--wait. So the waiting, coupled with some uncertainties about the ever-changing UK visa rules, had me a little stressed out. The good news, was that the visa arrived the day before my flight was scheduled. All's well that ends well, no?
The unplanned 2 weeks of waiting in Lawrence, KS turned out to be fabulous, as I got to spend lots of time seeing people, hanging out, and doing the pre-Christmas thing. I really enjoyed all the parties and other events that I got to attend and help out at. I love Lawrence, and those two weeks reminded me of why--good people, good projects, good ideas, and good parties.
I arrived in London on the 15th of December. I know, it is now the 12th of January, so what exactly did I do for an entire month? Basically, turistiar around London and vicinity with Felicity, my dear, dear friend from Nicaragua, who has recently moved back to England and is trying to (re) start a life here (which, I have to say, is not easy in this country)--we spent many moments together reminiscing and reflecting on what it means to live in a country like Nicaragua, a magical and harsh place, where you feel part of a struggle, at least, but lose something of your identity and (female) dignity in the process; what it means to re-patriate yourself afterwards, after leaving loved ones and relationships behind. I am convinced that we (or at least I) never get over this; it is always present in your life, always there as some unresolveable thing in your soul. So we talked a lot about these things as we visited some great sites in London, like Brick Lane (curry central), Soho, Trafalgar Square, London Bridge, the Tate (complete with crack), and others. I like London--it is a nice place to visit, but I would not want to live there.
I feel incredibly privileged to have had the opportunity to spend a traditional 3-day Christmas with Felicity´s entire family at her aunt´s house in Croydon, a suburb of London. How do I describe it? Let's see: basically, imagine 17 people staying together in one (large) house, eating together, playing group games, and opening presents for three days, and there you basically have it. English Christmas. I was much impressed by the lack of blowups. Really impressed.
Thomas Overly, friend and compañero from Kansas, jetted over from Copenhagen via Germany, and spent New Years with us. I am sooo happy he did! We had a great time, and he really added a different perspective to the pub nights that Felicity and I had already made tradition.
I then moved to Exeter on the 2nd of January, and have been here since then. I am renting a room in a house a little outside of town, but it is a 10-minute train ride. I will talk more about that, as well as post some pictures, later this week.
For now, Happy January!