Itinerary

(Pre-script: Due to being in India, the posting of this blog was delayed. I apologize for breaking my initial teaser, and will explain the reasons in the next posting)

Yesterday morning (I think it was still technically yesterday) I got up at the first hints of dawn (although in reality I think I had gotten up about every half hour since going to bed) and caught a plane to New York City. I had a 1.5 day layover there, which saved me about $100 in arifare for some reason and gave me the chance to visit my dear old friends Eric and Katie.

Last night, I caught a direct flight from NYC to Mumbai, and tomorrow I'll be in Pune, India for a week. Pune is the first substantive leg of my trip, and my reason for being there is that I am teaching a short course on cultural perceptions of climate change to some grade 12 students. Its run in conjunction with a camp in State College, and the students will be blogging (yes, more blogs!) about their views of climate change and then going out and interviewing people in the community about their perceptions as well. Should be really fascinating. I'm also fortunate that my good friend Sameer's parents will be hosting me during this portion of the trip, and his friend Rasika will co-teach the class with me.

Following Pune, I'll be heading up to Nepal for a couple weeks. As many of you know, returning to Nepal is a bit of a homecoming for me, as I studied abroad there. I'm looking forward to visiting my old host family and some other friends there. My activities in Nepal are somewhat open still, I'm hoping to regain quite a bit of my Nepali language skills, perhaps go on a short trek, and work on the next stage of my trip, Bhutan.

Bhutan is the reason that I'm on this side of the world (and indeed, I'm now on that side, or rather, 10,000 meters above it, as this post got delayed by trip preparations). I'm hoping to conduct my PhD dissertation work there, you may have heard of Gross National Happiness, an alternative quality of life metric developed by the old king of Bhutan. Bhutan has also adopted a sustainable development paradigm that they have labeled “The Middle Path.” Tentatively, I'm hoping to gain a better understanding of the people who interact with these concepts on a regular basis (government officials as well as local NGO activists) to better understand how the concepts evolved and impact environmental interactions.

But to do this, I need to figure out a way to get invited into the country for an extended period of time (hopefully an academic year to start), and so while I'm in Bhutan I'm hoping to meet with as many government and NGO staff as possible to make that happen (wish me luck). I have ten days in Bhutan to achieve this goal.

Following Bhutan, I return to Nepal briefly before heading back to India. This time I'll be on the east coast, just outside Vishakhapatnam. I'm co-leading a group of 6 undergraduate honors students and we will be volunteering at an orphanage there for three weeks. I'll fill you in on more details on that later.

And then I'll be returning. Two months, just like that. Each day filled with new sights, sounds, lessons, joys and miseries, and all of it will pass in memories before I can say "kuzu zhangpo la."