Small adventures

Spring break is over. It was a weird, wonderful week. A day trip to Genoa resulted in a spontaneous train to Nice, a wrong train, a missed train, and three days later back in Bologna. A trip down to a friend’s house in Puglia was all rain and no beach. But we compensated in food, drinks, and a long game of Monopoly, in which everyone embodied their national stereotypes (the Germans were good with money, the Italians lost the game early on, the Americans were pushy, and the Australian was belligerent). We cooked a lot of family dinners. We had a cliff-notes Ceder, a five-course Italian seafood extravaganza, and lots of American-style eggs (cheese, butter, cheese). Once, it stopped raining long enough to walk on the beach and take moody pictures of each other staring out into the waves.

I didn’t want to to back to Bologna, until I landed and realized how much it feels like home.

I am writing from Paris. It was stupid to have any expectations for this trip because this city is so unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. It feels like five cities rolled into one. It feels realizing a childhood dream – kind of triumphant. I had such a cliche moment of overwhelmed at-peace-ness in the Musee d’Orsay in the Impressionist gallery, confronted with the originals of pictures I’d pored over in art history books as a kid. These things exist in reality.

Our weekend getaway corresponds with the first round of French presidential elections, so in between macaroons and museums, we’ve been nerdily talking French Politics. The main opposition candiate (Francois Hollande, of the socialist party) seems to garner the bulk of his support due to the fact that he is not Sarkozy. It seems a little like the Bush-Kerry election of 2004, where it was pretty universally acknowledged that Bush was a bad president, but nobody could get excited enough about any other candidate. On va voir in the second round. right now Hollande is ahead in vote counts.

Once I get back to Bologna tomorrow it will be non-stop until the end of the semester. Exams, last minute day trips, visa procurement, packing, shipping, and moving. This is why God invented caffeine.

Poeting, Spring

Spring is here. We have 1.5 months left of this semester. We are all getting prematurely nostalgic, dipping out of the library to catch trains and planes, exploring Bologna, walking home at three in the morning struck by the statues that have become familiar.

I am doing spring break in Italy, a combination of financial restraint and realizing I don’t have much time left to check off stops on my bucket list. I went to Palermo two weekends ago with some friends. On Monday, I am heading to Genoa and on Thursday, we are heading to Puglia, on the heel of the boot, for a weekend of beach and friends. Wondering if it’s possible to work Pompeii into there somewhere.

Poeting lately, and it feels good:

 

Springtime in Bologna

 

Tonight, I feel young for the first time in years. Young

like being broke without any debt, like cheap wine

before you knew good wine, like rooftops in July,

roman candles in the hallway. Like running

for the wide open space of it, like dancing

just so you can touch, like seeing smog

lit up pink-gold skyscrapers and calling it beautiful.

 

I don’t want to talk sense tonight, don’t want

to theorize the great awful important humanity.

Tonight, I don’t even want to talk.

I want some music, a good strong glass of something

and the world just the way it is, tilting toward the sun

and all of us coming out of our houses, surprised. 

Kony 2012

There’s nothing I can add to the #Kony2012 debate (discourse? frenzy of liking/tweeting) that hasn’t been said already and said better than I could (importantly: see here and here and just for fun see: here). But, in the interest of not alienating any more of my classmates with my ranting:

The LRA is not an uncomplicated issue. The LRA has largely moved out of Uganda. The LRA is now, more than ever, a regional challenge. Any solution will need to take a holistic view of the problem. I am not entirely sure what Invisible Children wants to accomplish – full-out military intervention? I am also unclear how they intend to rescue abducted children-turned-combatants without injuring/killing anyone but the ‘bad guys’ (i.e. Kony). Or where the proceeds from this advertising campaign will actually go, beyond supporting an organization that seems to view conflict in ‘Africa’ as static (i.e. still talking about night commuters six years after that largely stopped being relevant).

Beyond issues with the Kony2012 campaign, it’s been interesting watching the social networks light up with different points of view. Last night, I counted twenty statuses on my minifeed sharing links to the video and encouraging people to watch. This morning, I counted five statuses saying that maybe we should take a step back and take a more critical examination of this campaign. However, the general consensus seems to be that, regardless of problems with IC or the Kony2012 campaign, “at least we are more aware today than we were yesterday.”

The idea behind awareness-raising campaigns is that awareness is the first step toward action. I think this hugely misses the point. The conceptual goal should not be awareness that there is a ‘problem’ but understanding of the causes, factors, and possible consequences of that problem. Awareness-raising campaigns that distill their message to a selective few talking points which are then re-tweeted ad nauseum are not likely to generate effective policy/action. It is more likely to generate ineffective policy which runs the risk of exacerbating existing conflict. This is the foundation of Do No Harm approach to intervention. Before acting, it is absolutely necessary to consider the potential implications of your actions and whether or not you are equipped to handle them.

We live in exciting times – social media, information-sharing makes it easier than ever before to inform, educate, connect, and work together for shared goals. The individual has more power of expression than at any time in human history. We need to use this power wisely.

Spring is here!

As Bologna melts out from under all this snow and the days get longer, it becomes harder and harder to go to the library. I just want gelatto, long walks around town, day trips to every city on the map. I know it’s irrational, but I feel like the Rest of My Life is waiting for me back in D.C. and all I want to do is frolic for the next three months.

Saturday was a perfect Bologna day. We hiked up to San Luca, a beautiful basilica at the end of 2 km of porticos. We ate gelatto and made our ascent back down into the city. A friend took me out for aperativo at an Osteria that doesn’t serve any food. People bring their own, buy drinks, join random tables, make friends. The party spills out into the street.

San Luca

The piazzas are filling back up. Piazza Maggiore  is bustling at all hours of the day. While waiting for a friend at the landmark Neptune Statue, I started chatting with two men who told me they were from Nigeria. They told me they were working in Libya when the war started last year. They refugeed to southern Italy, and have been more or less wandering ever since, unable to find work, in a state of semi-permanent limbo. Their next stop is Holland, but “who knows?”

Neptune Statue in Piazza Maggiore

Italy is contrast. So much of it feels so magical, so much of it is hard to look at, so much of it I could look at forever.

Italian gyms

Bologna has been paralyzed by two feet of snow for about a week. No one has shoveled. Streets alternate icy and slushy. Porticoes are perilous – like walking miles over wet linoleum. I haven’t seen a single Italian woman wearing heels since the snow started. Bicycles have all but disappeared. People half-heartedly throw salt outside their door and dig into their wine reserves. The city’s general inability to deal with what is basically a New England flurry is  amusing, increasingly disgusting, and ruining my boots.

It’s also preventing me from running. I’m not saying I do this a lot, but I do it enough that I miss it. Since the streets don’t look like they are going to be safe for even leisurely strolling anytime soon, I bought a block of passes to the gym near my house.

And oh my GOD Italian gyms. Women wear their hair down and meander on treadmills, pausing to drink water and lift weights cutely while not-so-subtly checking out the jacked, tall, and very handsome men all around. But half of them are gay and jazzercising like it’s cool. In short shorts and ironic (I think?) I heart NY t-shirts. The music is 90s throwbacks mixed with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Everyone flirts. A handful of sweaty Americans floats around looking lost. Personal space or clothing is not a concept in the locker room.

Sometimes I wish I was pursuing a masters in Anthropology or Women Gender Studies so I could write research proposals for papers with titles like : “Last Friday Night: the intersection of gender and sexuality in Italian physical training centers.” Or something like that.

Homework time. Academia forever.

Semester break was a lot of things

Semester break was last week. I went to Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of a study trip. It was a long overland journey from Bologna. We took the train from Bologna to Ancona, the ferry from Ancona to Split (sleeper cabins! so fun!), and the bus from Split to Sarajevo. The bus ride was just ridiculous – I was glued to the window the whole time as coast gave way to mountains. We stopped to buy oranges, so the driver could make a phone call, so we could take pictures and wonder where we were.

Sarjevo feels so improbable. The city center is surrounded by hills. Bombed out buildings share the same block with world-wide chain stores. We found a club with salsa dancing. The mosques have stars of david on them. Tombstones have writing in arabic, cyrillic, and latin script. The bars play Turbofolk and Bob Marley. Everything is cigarette smoke and meat products.

Post-conflict is always a tricky process of balancing coming to terms with the past with moving forward. I wrote about our trip to Srebenica elsewhere (will post link for anyone interested), but there were some things that really struck me about Bosnia-Herzegovina’s current post-conflict status:

• Dayton has resulted in political gridlock and the constitution will need revising sooner or later
• Sarajevo is not indicative of the rest of the country.
• In parts of the country schools are ethnically segregated. The next generation is not learning how to co-habitate. There is not consensus about the history of the conflict.
• Before the war, ethnic divisions were not institutionalized. Now they are, and there does not seem to be any real impetus for change.
• Actors benefit from the current divisive status quo. The impetus for change is not necessarily reflected in the system as it stands.

I also learned that Sarajevo is a really fun city. We spent our last night in a basement Turbo-folk (can’t get enough) bar. People don’t sleep. Staying out until 4 in the morning is going to bed early.

We took a 13 hour bus from Sarajevo to Vienna where it was a different world. We met up with the rest of our class for a ball. Among other things, the ball was hands-down the best people watching I’ve ever done. Diplomats, soldiers, college kids … everyone dressed to impress, very few people sure how to actually waltz. We ended the night in the “disco room” where the ball’s main organizer danced on the bar and told us ‘come back next year. no smoking.’

Magic.

Back in the library, I feel ready to tackle this semester.

Wait it’s almost the end of January?

The past three weeks have been a blur of late night library, microeoncomics problem sets, and a paper or two or four. I have fifteen pages standing between me and a study trip to Sarajevo. Progress is painful – like my last paper of undergrad, when all I could manage was to stare at the computer screen and make  playlists on Grooveshark.

But things always get done, and I am very much looking forward to further travels in Eastern Europe. I spent New Years in Belgrade with 18 other SAIS students. It was a silly, giggly, full type of weekend. We rang in the New Years in front of the Parliament building to a soundtrack of metal music and firecrackers. Almost every Balkan-head I’ve talked to says Sarajevo is one of their favorite cities. So, the post-conflict travel theme continues into 2012.

On that note, I will be spending my summer in Jakarta, Indonesia. This was my first choice internship placement. In between not-writing Public Sector Economics papers, I while away hours on airasia.com looking up cheap flights. Do you live in Mongolia, Vietnam, Australia, or Cambodia? Can I stay on your couch?

Today is officially the five month mark of my time here. A lot of us are a bit homesick. My flatmate and I both admitted to covert Bruce Springsteen/Tom Petty sessions in our respective rooms. This week, I paid 4 euros for the tiniest jar of peanut butter. Last night, we found the only bar in Bologna willing to play the football game (it was something important, and the Patriots won, shockingly I don’t follow football). The more I travel for long periods of time away from home, the more I am realizing that homesickness comes in spurts and cycles. And skype is a beautiful thing.