the dangling carrot

So, as of last night, I have squared away my flight to Amsterdam and twelve nights of accommodation split evenly amongst two locations. The first is a studio apartment in an area of Amsterdam known as De Negen Straatje, or The Nine Streets. The second is a private en suite room in a hostel on the edge of a large public park, just slightly south-west of the first location.

Neither location is quite in the bleeding heart of the city, for which I'm grateful. I don't really have any desire to be smack in the middle of a bunch of doped-up twenty-something tourists behaving badly in the Red Light District. I'm excited because this arrangement will let us get to know Amsterdam from more than one vantage point. I'm also excited to be spending time in a city best explored by foot. (I've been warned against renting a bike in the city and getting horribly lost/in the way of the poor Amsterdammers who are just trying to get to or from work. Instead, I'm hoping we can take a train a bit outside the city, rent a bike at the station and cycle round the countryside.)

So, now that I have the carrot firmly fixed in place, let's see if I can get done the work that must be done before I leave!

countdown

Welcome to another colour scheme. I got tired of all the pink, and I wanted the menu on the left. Everything should be this easy. On the other hand, to be honest, it's probably a good thing everything is not this easy.

It's Botswana (Independence) Day in Botswana, and the jacarandas are in bloom. It's been dry as we move through the spring, and the fallen purple blossoms stand out in stark contrast to the dust in the side of the road. The screen door is open, and I can smell the first rains trying to fall.

In other news, I am out of the loop. I didn't know anything about the shoes Sarah Palin wore for her acceptance speech. I didn't know that my home institution has a new smtp server. I didn't know that scrabulous.com had been taken down and moved elsewhere. I still don't understand exactly what is going on with the bail-out business.

What I do know is that I will be standing on American soil five weeks from today, and I am trying not to panic. Somehow I must get as much data as I still can, hit the archives, help plan and run a conference, sing Handel's Messiah, pack up, say good-bye and thank you, and get out in one piece. I must remind myself to look forward to going back to the land of Trader Joe's and bagels and what-what. I must remind myself to not use phrases like what-what. I must remember this return is part of the process.

Wish me luck.

work = play = work...

Q: What do you do when you're trying to get back into the groove after two months on the road?

A: You go on holiday again.

There is something of a logic behind this... Botswana has two major holidays in July (Sir Seretse Khama Day and President's Day) that tend to result in three- or four-day weekends. The city really clears out; everyone goes to the villages. I've stuck around for some of them in the past and had a nice, quiet weekend. This time, however, I'm back on the road. For the first holiday, which is this coming weekend, I'm headed back up to Planet Baobab to camp on the salt pans and try my hand at quad biking. For the second holiday, which is in three weeks' time, I'm headed back to Tuli Block in the eastern corner of Botswana for a walking safari. I've never done anything like a walking safari, and I am thoroughly excited.

I am trying to use the 'work hard, play hard' logic here. After all, I have five conference papers to give between now and the end of the year, and I need a serious draft of the first one in four weeks. But whatever, I won't be in southern Africa that much longer, and who knows when I'll get to do anything like this again?

hip, hip, hooray

Monday is a holiday in Botswana. Holiday weekends in Botswana bring on two complicated things. One is a travel frenzy. The other is a massive overriding sense of guilt and shame if one does not travel. You're in Africa, for christ's sake! What are you waiting for? Go somewhere!

I've been looking around at where I can go with the time I've got. My schedule's a bit complicated as I'm in Pretoria for the next few days, and I really can't leave until Saturday morning as I don't want to drive back to Gabs in the dark. I've also got a birthday party to attend in Mochudi around noon on Saturday, which I'll be able to attend if I really get on the road early on Saturday. But I don't think I can go straight from the birthday party up to any of the spots I've got in mind. All this means is that I get a one-night trip out of a three-day weekend.

All this has put the out-of-doors on my mind. At dinner, a friend was talking about having camped one night in the middle of hippo territory. Before I could stop myself, I said that if I ever opened a game lodge, I would put it right in the middle of hippopotamus territory and call it:

(you guessed it) hippo campus.

make-up design for the revolution

Because I had said I would and because I am a good girl (most of the time), I went to the 'American Community' 4th of July picnic on Saturday. (Nevermind that it was a July 4th picnic on July 7th... We don't want to seem un-American by pointing that out, do we?)

Anyway, I had signed up paint the faces of little kids. This is a fine idea, except for the fact that 99% of the kids I approached looked terrorized or bored by the idea. (Can face paint compete with a jumping castle? Can anything?) So I painted a lot of young(er) adult (read: my age-mates) and adolescent faces instead. (Yes, there is just a teensy-weensy bit of inner-playground-bully that comes out in these moments: 'You will be decorated!' Still getting over all the thumpings I took in grammar school? You bet, but in a Julie Taymor kind of way.)

But I was being a good girl. (Being a good girl means not writing, for example, 'Stop the War' or 'Bush lies, people die' across picnickers' faces in red, white and blue.) So, using a very cool set of face-painting crayons, I drew red stars with white and blue sparks coming off them, little clusters of stars (one in each colour), etc. Someone requested the presidential seal, and I was absolutely up for it, but we would have been standing there half an hour at least.

As inevitably happens, someone noticed that the painter herself sported no paint. So I handed over the crayons and allowed a friend to draw a white star on my cheek. I thought this was a very funny visual pun, overlapping symbols of American patriotism and sinking ships.

I don't think anyone else got it. They probably thought I was from Texas. So much for subtle insurrectionary humour.

channeling the bad fairy

Recently, a good friend of mine had strange experience wherein he responded to a public blog entry with a private email. The blogger then posted that email, in its entirity, on the blog itself, making what had been a private commentary a very public one. We (and by 'we' I mean good friends with whom I generally see eye-to-eye with whom I discussed this situation) all agreed that this was bad form on the part of the blogger.

That said, and fully admitting that I know better, I am going to do just that. I am that annoyed. This is probably going to seem really petty at the end of the day, but whatever.

Some background: There are two kinds of Fulbrights for students, the IIE and the Hays. The IIE is administered by the Dept. of State, and open to anyone with a bachelors degree. The Hays is administered by the Dept. of Education, and open to students enrolled in Ph.D. programmes. The grants don't differ greatly, though there are some reporting and financial particularities to each.

Or so I thought.

The experience has been a bit different. Sure, I invited myself to the Fulbright reception last September on somewhat dubious grounds, as I hadn't actually activated my grant yet. But when my paperwork finally went through a few months later, I did got through all the orientation crap at the Embassy. I have received mail there. I signed up for the weekly newsletter. Hell, I even volunteered to paint children's faces at the Embassy 4th of July picnic this Saturday.

But the fact remains that the IIE students are far more present on the Embassy radar than Hays students are. I was warned about this by someone who held Fulbright-Hays here in the late 1990s: she gave me the impression the Embassy hadn't a clue who she was or what was doing. So much for institutional support.

Here's the sticky part: this is a small town, and I know the students who have spent the past year here on IIE grants. (In fact, I've been sharing living accommodations with one of them for the past month.) And it's ususally from them that I hear about Embassy events. In fact, I think I was able to crash the Fulbright reception last September because one of them had mentioned it to me, assuming I was already in the know.

Well, yesterday my IIE housemate asked if I was going to the 4th of July party. Why, yes, I replied, I've already signed up to paint faces at the picnic on Saturday.

Not that one, she said. The one on Friday, pulling out a fancy, embossed, card-weight invitation bearing her name in flowing script and admitting her to the ambassador's residence this Friday from 1pm to 3pm (business dress).

Let me take this moment to assure you, Reader, that my housemate wasn't waving this invitation in my face; she was only hoping to have some company in what she rightly thought would be a stuffy affair.

I wanted to know where my invitation was. I had checked my mailbox on Friday, so what could the matter be? I sat down and wrote the person at the Embassy who generally handles such matters:

Dear Ms X,
I hope this finds you well. I have a quick question regarding the Embassy's Independence Day celebration on 6 July. I fear that the Embassy doesn't have a record of my postal address, and therefore any invitation that would have been mailed to me would not have reached me. This is an oversight on my part, for which I apologize. Please let me know with whom I should update my contact information.
Many thanks for your help,
-Fluffy

She wrote back:

Dear Fluffy,
I will see if an invitation was issued to you. Meanwhile, where would you suggest, in the case that one has been, that it be sent? Or would you collect it from Public Affairs?
Ms X

Now, how on earth am I to imagine where the Embassy would have sent the invitation? I don't think like Embassy folk; I don't have that particular chip in my neck. But I tried to play along:

Dear Ms X,
I'm not sure whether it would have been sent at all, because I can't remember whether my postal address is on file with the Embassy. It's entirely likely that it went to Public Affairs. I will check my post box today just to make sure.
Thanks very much,
-Fluffy

And this is what I got in response!!!

Dear Fluffy,
I am sorry, but you are not on the list of invitees for the official reception on July 6-- it may be that, as we hadn't heard from you for a good while, we made the assumption that you were no longer in country. If you would wish to come to the all-American Saturday, July 7 picnic at [xxx] School, do contact [Y], embassy community liaison officer, at [Y@email.com], or give her a call at xxx-xxx ext. xxxx
Best,
Ms X

Not on the list of invitees? No longer in the country? Oh, I was furious. Not that I am so deeply in love with America these days, but look at it this way: I am a graduate student. I thrive on free food. I thrive on relationships wherein people with more money than I have pick up the bar tab while I tell interesting (but, they hope, not deeply problematic or disturbing) stories about my research. (That probably sounds smarmy. I do reserve the right to discriminate among possible (m/p)atrons.) Regardless, the fact is that I would have enjoyed it. Yes, I would probably have walked away thanking my lucky stars I didn't wind up in the foreign service and gone back to ignoring the Official Americans for at least a few months, but I would have done so on a full stomach.

Anyway, I was angry -- angry like Maleficent was angry when she got left out of Aurora's christening. I lost my temper:

Dear Ms X,
I'm sorry that it comes as a surprise that I'm still in country, particularly since I've had fairly regular correspondence with various embassy personnel, have retrieved mail and packages from the embassy, etc., etc. over the course of the past six months that my grant has been active. I'm sorry also that some Fulbright students seem so much easier to keep track of than others. Thank you for your reminder of the Embassy picnic on Saturday, for which I signed up a month ago.
Very best,
Fluffy

Now, I know I lost my temper, but really: who wouldn't?!