OCS Summer Blogs 2008

Rome-ward bound

2008-08-30T05:15:00.000-07:00

In exactly an hour, I'll be leaving Hotel Vannucci, hopping in a cab and taking a train to Rome--my last stop on this 3-month European adventure before I head home to New York on Monday afternoon.

It's really surreal, the thought that this is the last time I'm going to have to sit on my suitcase(s) and pray for them to close, that after the next three days I won't have to wrestle with a foreign language to get my point across. On one level, I can't believe it's already been a month at Hotel Vannucci, but on a million more levels, I can't believe it's only been a month. I still may not be able to read Calvino fluently, but I can ask you to put the goose under the vacuum sealer in perfect Italian. I've learned how a kitchen is run, how to cook and cut and bake--I tried sitting down and writing everything I learned how to make here, and it felt like when I was four and tried writing down all the words I knew; I just couldn't keep up.

I've also gotten so close with the staff. They're all just incredible. I'll miss joking about being a New Yorker and not an American with Marcela, the breakfast lady (because I'm picky about my coffee), I'll miss chatting with Laura about her daughter and joking with the kitchen staff about how every single man who walks into the restaurant should be the man of my dreams. I'll miss hearing "Ciao bella" and "Come va tesoro," from Debora, the most perpetually cheerful woman I've ever met. I'll even miss Orlando and his jokingly chauvinistic remarks. I'll miss--gah--everything about them.

Yesterday was my last day in the kitchen (I made it out, against all odds, with all 10 fingers--a small burn on my left forearm is the only real lasting damage from the kitchen foray). The day went by exactly as all the others did. (Actually a good opportunity to write down my daily schedule, since I never did explain it):

8:30-9:30: Breakfast with the guests
9:30-11:30: Made 2 focacce (one focaccia, two focacce), made egg pasta dough with beets for red-tinged ravioli
11:30-12:00: Family meal with kitchen staff, Orlando and waiters. Spaghetti all'amatriciana
12:00-3:30: Dessert line on the lunch rush. Between plating desserts, I made 2 torte di mele and 2 apricot cakes for breakfast the next day. Prepared whipped cream all'albicocca for the desserts.
3:30-5:45: Afternoon break. Packed.
5:45-6:30: Made 2 frittate, prepared fruit salad for breakfast (snuck in, as usual, some triple sec. And they wonder why there's never any leftovers...).
6:30-7:00: Family meal. Salad and pistachio-crusted lamb.
7:00-11:00: Dinner rush. Helped with the contorni before the dessert rush started because Pasquale has been out the past few days. He fainted while taking a shower, hurt his back and needs at least 5 days to rest and recover. The kitchen has been strained to the max to make up for his absence; Alessandro hasn't had a day off in the last two weeks. Moved on to plating desserts (I've never seen so many orders for torta di mele in my life) for the pizzeria and the trattoria. This tiramisu was the last dessert I made on my shift. Basta. A normal day that went off without any major mistakes. A month into the shift, I've finally hit my stride.

After I finished cleaning, the chef told me to go downstairs, change and head to the pizzeria to say goodbye. I did, gathering my belongings from the locker-room downstairs (I'm keeping my kitchen whites more because I'm assuming no one would ever want to wear them after the month of sweat I poured into it), and headed up to the trattoria but no one was there other than Eli who was cleaning up.

I lingered, not really knowing what to do or how to say goodbye when suddenly the chef appeared with a beautiful fondente--a white chocolate, dark chocolate, amaretto, caramelized nut-crusted spectacle, Deborah appeared with an armful of champagne glasses, Sandy popped out with three large bottles of prosecco and everyone else--Freddy, Flavio, Roxy, Enzo, Orlando--filed in and started clearing a table.

We sat down, popped open the bottles of the sweet prosecco and I handed a card to Orlando. I was going to give it to him the next day--a thank you note to everyone in the hotel--but I figured it was as good a time as any. It was written in my best Italian (writing it sort of felt like the closing chapter to my Italian education) and Orlando read it out loud. About the time he got to the sentence, "Sono venuta cui per imparare l’italiano, per fare uno stage alla cucina ed io non ho fatto solo così (benché io scambi sempre pesche/ pesca e uva/uova…), ho incontrato anche gli amici che io non dimenticherò mai," (I came here to learn Italian, to do an apprenticeship in the kitchen, and not only did I do that (even though I still mix up fish/peach and grape/egg), I also met friends who I'll never forget) I just started crying. It was partially because I was thoroughly embarrassed by my Italian and by what I was saying, partially because I was relieved that the month was over because this has truly been one of the most challenging and tiring experience of my life (always running, always trying to understand, having to remember everything after the first shot, always in danger of being scalded or cut or slipping or sending something tumbling), partially because this experience ending meant that my whole summer was coming to a close and mostly because I was just so thankful and happy that everything worked out more perfectly that I ever imagined months and months ago when I was planning this summer from the Adams library.

Deborah walked over to stroke my head, "Che carina, lei piange!" (how cute, she's crying) and I said, "In English, you'd say I'm a sap." Orlando said, "In Italian, we'd just call you a woman." Everyone hissed and laughed and it lightened the mood enough to finish the letter.

We cut the cake and I opened my presents. A Sadler cookbook, one of the most famous Italian chefs and Alessandro's favorite, a card from everyone, a magnet of Citta della Pieve ("we hear in America you all decorate your fridges with magnets. Is this true?), and a clay mold of the city.

* * *
I spent all day today packing and cleaning. Had one last meal with the staff. Dan's grandmother (with whom I went to the opera. haha, oh life) came by to say goodbye and now I'm just worrying about how I'll manage with my suitcases on the Italian trains...but I'll do it somehow. To get home, it's worth it. As sad as I am about leaving, I've never felt more ready to go home.

I have David Daniels' baby!!

2008-08-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

It's true:
David Daniels earned fame in the independent animation world as the inventor of the stratacut technique of animation. Normally, when someone invents a new filmmaking technique, it gets ripped off by someone a lot bigger who gets credit for it. For example, bullet time was not invented for the Matrix; an independent filmmaker named Dayton Taylor had been using what he called a "Timetrack" camera years before The Matrix came out. And a recent art school graduate named Javan Ivey devised "stratastencil" animation, which now shows up in this Pharell video. David Daniels' stratacut claymation is unique for the fact that it hasn't been stolen by anyone big -- he's still the one and only master of stratacut over twenty years after he unveiled it in his film Buzz Box [you MUST click on this link].

Stratacut animation is achieved by sculpting a "log" of clay with images embedded inside. You set up the camera so it's looking at a cross-section of the log, and then you start slicing thin layers off and taking a new picture each time. The animation is all programmed into the log of clay: if you wanted to have a circle grow, you would construct a cone shape and slice it from the thin end to the fat end. Thus, time is translated into depth, resulting in 2D animation whose 3rd dimension is time. This seems simple when you're only making a circle grow, but stratacut gets a lot more complicated:

Stratacut on this scale boggles the mind. Not just my mind, but EVERYONE'S. And that's why no one has stolen it yet. David's the only one who understands it!

Here's the point: David Daniels is one of the founders of Bent Image Lab, and I had the pleasure of meeting him today. About 30 seconds after I shook his hand, he gave me that stratacut baby from right off his desk (it's for a mutual friend, but heck, I still felt like it was Christmas). He was generous not only with his stratacut sculptures, but also with his time, and we talked about college, film careers, and the future of stratacut. I told him he should come do a lecture at Harvard (this is the second time I've blurted this out to a professional animator), and he said he'd try!

In other news, Tooey's August cake party was this last weekend. She mailed me an invitation that said, "Eat Cake! (this Sunday at 2pm) Poop Cake! (later)". It was a nice reunion with the people from last month. I tried to make a conquistador helmet but it looked like a dunce cap.

Reflections from East Aurora, NY

2008-08-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

Our final days in Sierra Leone were spent in Freetown, soaking up sun on the beautiful beaches, and eating our first pizza after many months of cassava leaves. I maintain my initial opinion of Freetown (formed during my first two days in the country)- it is crowded, noisy, and for the most part quite scary. I miss the stillness and warmth of Gobaru.

I am putting the pieces of my life back together now- going back to where I started and weaving the memories into the tapestry of my new self. I hover between two worlds; an old world, in which, when I press a light switch, there is light, when I swipe plastic, there is money, when I open my computer, there is a wireless network available from every angle. When I wake with the dawn, there are no chickens or Moniatu to greet me, but the cold wooden floorboards on my bare feet, and the smell of my mothers' folgers brewing in the kitchen. The house is silent. I am left alone in my thoughts.

I am so thankful for every second of this experience, and to those without whom it would not have been possible- Mr. and Mrs. Weissman and the Weissman Foundation staff, the Davis Foundation, the Harvard College Sierra Leone Initiative, Saving Lives through Alternative Options, dosomething.org, the Sengeh family, and of course, my own family! If I have learned anything through this experience, it is the importance of reaching out and supporting each other- that we cannot stand unless we have others to lean on.

One of my students called yesterday, and it was like a thick reality infiltrating this East Aurora dream in which I have been living for the past two weeks. I am left speechless, searching for words that will bridge the distances which now divide us. The only resolution I find within myself is that, while this may have been my first time in Gobaru, it will not be my last. And this is the only certainty which remains.

An insalata mista, if you will.

2008-08-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

A short entry for once:

A. I spent yesterday morning chopping wild boar. OH man.

B. With Nicola's reappearance, the sweets duties are shared and I can do more than just the dessert routine. I learned how to make wild boar ragù, I pinched and folded hundreds of ravioli, I prepared some béchamel for the lasagna and made two kinds of focaccia yesterday. It's great to be out of the butter, sugar, flour, egg routine for a bit.

C. I emailed Bill Buford to let him know how much I appreciated his book--I mean it is half the reason I'm here--and against all odds he wrote back:
Dear Rebecca Cooper,
Thank you for your email hope that there won't be any lasting damage and that you'll get out of the kitchen as soon as possible.

Best wishes, and good luck. Yours,
Bill Buford. [Suhweet!]

D. The chef keeps all his recipes in an agenda book. One copy with the recipes scribbled--we mistook "farina" (flour) for "panna" (cream) once--is batter splattered, well-loved and well-used. The other is pristine, written with an architect's penmanship and tucked away in his locker. He lent it to me to copy down anything I want. "I normally never let it out of my sight. Becky, you're the first and the last," he said.

If you have any way of measuring ingredients with the metric system, here's how to make Fagottini di Pasta Brick alla Ricotta con Scaglie di Cioccolato Fondente e Miele Di Castagno--aka Pastry Shell Filled with Ricotta and Dark Chocolate, Drizzled with Chestnut Honey (tastes better than it sounds, I promise):

800g ricotta
140g powdered sugar
20g flour
40g chocolate chips (It's best if you get some melting chocolate and chop it coarsely.)
2 eggs
10 disks of fine pastry dough. (Buy it at Whole Foods or something?)
Chestnut honey (If you can find it.)

1. Prepare the filling.

2. Fold aluminum foil into strips to tie off pastry.

3. Lay out the pastry rounds (in French it's called feuilles de brick. The translation on the back says "fine pastry dough". Good luck)

4. Prepare a honey-water mixture. Just runny enough to spread over the pastry rounds.

5. (Do all the following as quickly as possible so the dough doesn't dry out.) Brush the pastry rounds with the honey.

6. Scoop a fist-sized dollop of the ricotta mixture onto the pastry.

7. Gather the pastry around the ricotta and tie off with the foil strip.

8. Place a cooling rack on top of a baking sheet (to allow some dripping/breathing room for the dessert) and line the fagottini up on the tray. Brush with more of the honey mixture.

9. Cover with plastic wrap and refridgerate until ready for use. Keeps fresh a week or so in the fridge.

10. When you're ready to serve, preheat oven to 183 degrees celsius (about 360 degrees farenheit). Place on a lightly buttered baking sheet, and heat for about 8 minutes or until the pastry turns a very light golden brown.

11. Plate, drizzle with honey, and sprinkle hazelnuts on top. Add some whipped cream, blueberries and mint if you want to get fancy schmancy. Et voilà!

E. Looking forward to this weekend. Raphael '06 is heading here on Saturday night and we're planning on watching the parade and archery tournament that ends Città della Pieve's annual festival. Rumor has it the target for the bow and arrow contest is three spinning cows.

Buttered fingers.

2008-08-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of job that gets harder before it gets easier. Last week, if I fumbled or dropped something or didn't understand directions, it was because I was the stranger who strolled in the kitchen and happen to find herself wearing a uniform. My only fault was "organization". Imagine that. The girl who color-coordinates her notes.

Week two, things are a little different. I'm expected to remember how the panna cotta is plated vs. how the chocolate souffle is (the former is with strawberry sauce, fresh berries and mint, the latter is put in the oven for 8 minutes, 20% vaporization, 183 degrees celsius and set on a plate with orange cream swirled into a circle in the middle of the plate with a dusting of cocoa then powdered sugar and topped with mint and berries). There's about 10 different desserts and a different plating procedure for each. And that's just plating...I also have to remember how to make it in the first place--what size the logs should be for the cantucci (really really tasty almond and raisin biscotti), what ratio the honey-water mixture should be for the fagottini, the fact that the vanilla gelato cannot be made in an aluminum pot, how much each biscotto should be dipped into espresso for the tiramisú.... I'm expected to do everything faster, better, and make less mistakes (one morning, I had to make 4 batches of vanilla gelato, 4 batches of lemon sorbet, 2 apple cakes, 1 chestnut cake all while preparing all the desserts for lunch. Gah! Since each cake cooks a different amount of time I had to constantly keep track while also making sure the gelato wasn't over-freezing. And since the gelato can only go in a batch at a time I was constantly running from the kitchen to the ice cream machine. But as soon as I'd reach the machine, I'd hear "Via dolci!"--and I have to drop what I was doing, run back to my little corner of the kitchen, clean the counter (i'm SO tired of the word sporca, "dirty"), and plate whatever dessert order had just been placed. Phew! And that was a pretty average morning....) My pants literally split my first night alone on dessert duty. Haha. Porca miseria!

And yet, somehow, I'm still in love with this job.

The people in the kitchen never gave me a hard time--and I'm being overly critical of myself. The chef would just say, Non vabbene--"That's no good", would help me correct my mistakes, and would show me the right way to go about it the next time. How he has such endless stores of patience, I'll never know. Everyone actually managed to find the comedy in my fumbles. My less-than-pristine kitchen record (forgetting to put water in the lemon gelato, dumping gelatin into cold [but not ICY cold] water and having it turn into a goopy mess, my endless cycle of mistake --> concentrate so hard on not making another one and whaaamo!--> forgetting to do something else because I was thinking so hard about my previous mistake) was lovingly poked at when we went out last Wednesday after work. We could do nothing but laugh.

But regardless of my foibles, I'm definitely doing my share for the hotel. Apparently some guests complimented this morning's breakfast cakes, the impossible-to-please Senora Franca (she's from Rome but lives here for a month every summer) only wants the mixed fruit plate if I make it (variations from the past week, pictured. Gah. They all want me to take her with me when I head to NY. I refused on account of never wanting to make a fruit plate again in my life), and the manager of the hotel pulled me aside and said, "Thank God you're here. You're really a help."

A bit about the characters at hand:

Alessandro, 27, is the most breathtaking leader I've ever seen in my life. I'm convinced he led troops in Greece millennia ago before being reincarnated as head chef in Vannucci. He always knows exactly what's going on in the kitchen. He can simultaneously prepare a goose to be stewed (where does someone learn how to do that?) and warn Nicola that his soup is about to burn, remind me that I almost forgot to put something red on the dessert plate, scold Freddy that his spaghetti is no longer al dente and send down Pasqual to check on Giuseppe who's been missing for too long and is probably up to no good in the cellar. He never went to cooking school, he majored in engineering in college, and at 27, hes already the head chef of two fine restaurants.

I asked him if he wants to be a cook forever. He laughed.

"I'm here one, two more years tops. This isn't a job you can do forever. With the hours, you just don't have a life. I don't know what I'm going to do after, but not this for sure."

The whole kitchen staff is equally young. ("Whole" is actually exaggerating. I'm shocked at how many people a kitchen of 4 people can feed. Between the two restaurants, on an average night we do about 200 covers.)

Alfreddo, 26, is in charge of the antipasti--salads, bruschetta, etc etc. He's been working here about 6 months. We bonded over the fact we both speak French, and he taught me how to make his tiramisú. Of everyone in the kitchen, he's definitely the most quiet.

Pasqual (right) , 28, takes care of the primo piatti--the papardelle al ragu di cinghiale (he promised to teach me on Thursday. It's currently my favorite food), the risotto, the spaghetti, the lasagna. He started about the same time as Alfreddo. He's the easiest out of everyone to understand because he talks more with his hands than with words. (He's from Napoli, it makes sense.) He's always whistling or singing or joking around with the chef. He also only sees himself working here for two more years tops. He wants to go to Paris and New York, work for a while in some kitchens there and then head to Milan to teach cooking. "At least the hours will be more normal," he said. "I just can't keep going like this. It's mentally and physically tiring, you know."

Orlando (left), 40, is the manager of the hotel and his life aspiration is to become emperor. My third day here, he invited me to take a spin with him on his ATV. He drove along the windy highway roads and then we turned sharply into the woods. "Ok, we're off road. Now you drive." I've never hated rocks more in my life. I couldn't decide whether uphill or downhill was more terrifying. I mean it was gorgeous--the terrain when we got out of the brush was breathtaking--but all I really wanted to do was sit in my air conditioned room, take a shower and a nap and get ready for the next 6 hour shift. Peeling the branches from my forehead as we peeled ourselves from the ATV, I was ecstatic to get back to the kitchen. "Thanks so much for taking me!" I said. "No problem! I get the ATV back Saturday. We can go down the steep slope through the sunflower patch next time." I've made sure always to have an "article" to write during my midafternoon breaks.

Giuseppe is 21 or 22, calls me "Betty" and eats the last breakfast cornettos, the ends of my cakes, and the clump of tiramisú from my slice that was just slightly too big. He's also an apprentice and shuffles around cutting and frying potatoes, and then peeling and cutting and frying some more.

Alessandra, 27, trained me for the dessert station when I first came. She only works at night because she's working on her comparative literature (yes) thesis on medieval lit. We had discussions about the role of the stranger in German, French and Irish works while stirring batter for the breakfast cake. I'm going to miss her--she's switched to reception ever since Nicola came back (I feel like there's trouble with him on the horizon. We'll see.). She, like Alessandro her fiancé, always knew what was going on and could anticipate the next 10 steps while also joking and making silly voices and dancing around. Now that she's gone, it means the desserts are entirely my responsibility and that I'm the only girl in the kitchen.

Laura, the morning dishwashing lady, has become my surrogate mother in exchange for me being her substitute daughter. We were always friendly, but when she found out I was exactly three days younger than her (only) daughter who's currently in Rome, our roles were sealed. She helps me find the kitchen tools I can't find, shows me where the ice machine is when I have to redo my gelatin sheets and demonstrates the best way to zest an orange before Alessandro has time to realize I need correcting. She greets me with "Ciao amore!" every day. It's like a little bit of home here, a place I can run to if I send all the pots and pans tumbling. It's a nice break from the all-male, go go go of the kitchen and the quiet, reflective solitude of my hotel room and my walks through town.

This, needless to say, is not the kitchen that Anthony Bourdain writes about, or the dark, dank, terrifying one I envisioned to prepare myself for anything this summer. With everyone whistling, the breeze blowing, everything spotless (we scrub the place down every Monday morning), the food always clean and fresh, the chef commanding respect without imposing a dictatorship--I have no horror stories to tell. I'm afraid to work in any other kitchen because I know this can't be what they're all like.

On another note, a few days ago, Italian just suddenly clicked. I went from not understanding what was going on around me (nod, smile, gesture), to just getting it. What a great feeling. Speaking is still a little foggy. But it's better than it used to be (which was essentially English translated to French translated to Italian with some grammar added in and a gesture for good measure to make sure my point came across. I think the sign language I developed worked better and faster in the kitchen for a while.) I can't believe I'm going to be in an English-speaking country in less than two weeks. (A side-effect of being so estranged from the US: I still haven't seen The Dark Knight... but as consolation have you seen this yet?? 80s International Music Fest...) But honestly, after all this traveling, all this seeing, all this everything, the only place to go now is home.

* * *

Tomorrow I have the morning off and I'll probably head to breakfast with the guests like always, do some reading poolside and have lunch in town. Serving people all day has really made me appreciate eating in a restaurant in a whole new way. Then I'm back on for the dinner rush at 6 or so. But since Wednesdays are the easy day (Zafferannoooooooooooo is closed and the staff gets individual pizzas for the family meal--it's a big deal when I'm used to being served a big pot of braised meat and I have to ask what it is. "Oca." "Goose?" "Si." ), so I should have an early night if I don't decide to go out with the kitchen staff. But it's Renaissance fortnight in this crazy town, and I don't know if I can say no. We'll see we'll see.

Buona notte!

Wisdom from the Art Department

2008-08-18T18:53:00.000-07:00

After about a month here, I have transcended the ennui of art department work and found enlightenment. Every layman's definition of stop-motion animation includes the word "tedious." You move a puppet one frame at a time, only finishing a second of animation after 24 frames. But even before that, you have to build the puppet out of wire, foam, cloth, and clay, and build the set he's standing in, and build the props he's holding. The animation component of stop-motion takes less time than the preparation for it. Sometimes, you wonder whether all this building is worth the animation at all...

This is particularly true in the land of commercials, where if you're doing a 15-second spot, and if four seconds of that gets used up with live action and shots of the logo, then you've got a total of about 11 seconds of animation. For an example, watch the commercial above, which Bent Image Lab made last year. In those 11 seconds, the commercial packs in 9 shots of animation, many of which are about half a second long. Nevertheless, every detail has to be fully realized. For instance, did you notice the items on the shelf inside the van? Probably not -- they're out of focus and in the background for less than a second. But rest assured that someone spent several days constructing and painting all of them, including the ones off-screen that never show up in the commercial at all.

So if no one's really going to see these things, why take the time to make them look good? Well, for one thing, somebody made the shelves, and somebody else made the back wall. A half-hearted job on the shelf items would tarnish the good work that the other artists have done. So part of the motivation behind doing good detail work is respect for the detail work everyone else is doing.

But what about the shelf items that we never see onscreen? Why bother making them at all? Oftentimes, the storyboard won't reflect the exact shot the director decides to use, and so first of all, it's unclear exactly what will be seen until they start shooting, so it's best to make things as if they will show up. Also, it's a matter of giving the director options. If a background element looks like crap, the artist who made it has essentially made a decision for the director that that element will not show up onscreen.

And ironically, in the land of commercials where most props get maybe three seconds of screen time, it is especially important for the art department's work to be impeccable. The client has 15 seconds to convince the TV audience that they NEED this product. There's no cushion time for the spectator's mind to wander. The mind control has to be perfect and complete. So if someone's watching a commercial and thinking, "Wow, that brick wall looks like they printed out a pattern from Google images..." then the commercial fails and it's the art department's fault.

See, I bet you never thought that art department peons like me are the titans that hold on our shoulders the global consumer economy. Well, now you know. So don't honk at me when I ride my bike on Division Street.

Back To Work

2008-08-11T09:45:00.001-07:00

This week I was back at lab – no more vacation! Unfortunately, I came down with some sort of virus over the weekend so I was unable to attend our Monday night panel where PRISE Fellow alumni talked about getting into graduate school. Luckily, I was able to attend the Distinguished Speaker Series on Thursday, and I had a great time listening to Professor Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay. The title of her talk was “NEW FLASH: Robot finds ice on Mars (Martians on Earth Rejoice).” Although this has been all over the news lately, on July 31st, 2008, NASA announced that the Phoenix Mars Lander had found water on Mars: “We have water”. Professor Stewart-Mukhopadhyay talked about what Mars and it atmosphere were like, and then delved into her work on impact craters. Pretty much, she uses a 40-mm gun that fires projectiles (plastic cylinders with metal plates) with gunpowder or compressed helium that reach velocities of up to 2.7 km/s (that’s 6000 mph!), and these experiments are over in a microsecond (but take days to set up). She does all of this in her Shock Compression Lab, and while she joked that it would be nice to have undergraduates manning the gun 24/7, after hearing what can be done with liquid nitrogen over dinner, she decided that probably wouldn’t be a good idea :). This was personally exciting for me because I’m from Tucson, and I’ve been excited about the Lander since I was in high school and we would get posters and sticker to put on our Chemistry lab books from the University of Arizona (I considered having my mom dig up my Honors Chemistry book and take a picture of it. It was blue and shiny with a huge Phoenix sticker on top).

Thursday morning I had a two and a half hour lab meeting, which was slightly longer than normal, but it was in our new meeting room with super-comfortable chairs (at least I think so). Of course, we have a really nice system where the two people presenting bring in breakfast foods (normally bagels and donuts from Dunkin Donuts and some sort of fruit or pie) and the rest of us get to eat. Later I had a meeting with my PI, Dr. Sanes, to update him on my project because he is going on sabbatical fall semester to Cambridge University.

I also did some more exploring in our new building, which will eventually house Life Sciences 100r, IGEM, labs for MCB 52 and 54, and other classes.
Looking up the stairs from basement level one (there are apparently four basement levels)

Friday I was really excited because it was 8-8-08: the start of the 2008 Olympics. PRISE fellow Jack ’11 had set up a liquid nitrogen ice cream making session right before the opening ceremonies started at 7:30, and we all crowded into the G-Tower common room to watch the opening ceremonies together. Continuing with my Olympic coverage, the Men’s 400 Freestyle on Sunday night was amazing! “We’re going to smash the Americans. That’s what we came here for.” Yeah, that didn’t work out for the French so well. :) (Picture of Phelps courtesy of NBCOlympics.com)

Finally, there have been lots of other PRISE fellow-initiated activities going on. This weekend, there was a trip to Six Flags New England on Saturday and a hike in the White Mountains on Sunday. Since I am rather afraid of roller coasters and don’t know if I would have survived the hike, I wasn’t able to participate in those, but here’s a picture of the group at the ridge (from PRISE fellow Brad Seiler).

What I did do was head over to a lab party on Sunday with the two other undergrads (and PRISE fellows) who work in my lab – Jenn ’09 and Iris ’10. Our PI is going on sabbatical to Cambridge (the one across the Atlantic) fall semester, so he had a party at his apartment for our lab. There was a buffet with ribs (everyone’s favorite), chicken, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and lots of other goodies - and a lot of laughing. It was really nice to finally meet all the people who make my lab the great place it is and hear a little about their lives.

La dolce vita

2008-08-09T07:51:00.000-07:00

Running from Paris to Berlin to the IHT to Prague and then back to the IHT has left me little time to do the past few weeks justice on this blog. It will come--piano piano--albeit in tinged flashback form. But first, two major things need to be noted.

1. I finished my IHT internship.
2. I've changed languages, changed careers, changed clothes and changed country.
oh and 3. Now I'm actually sleeping.

Things are DIFFERENT. Exactly a week ago, I was having dinner with my best friends in Paris at my favorite neighborhood restaurant and I was swing dancing at a club off Boulevard Sebastopol where it was unlimited champagne and macaroon night. Today I gave about 50 porcini mushrooms a sponge bath. Exhibit A:

I feel like I've shed skin and put zipped on a new life. The Becky that worked in the (air-conditioned) office of an international newspaper, slugging stories and writing captions in a comfy rolly chair during the week and traveling to fantastic cities during extended weekends is lost somewhere in Charles de Gaulle's Terminal 2. The second I arrived at Hotel Vannucci and donned my kitchen whites (exhibit B), my old life seemed like it never existed.... It's kind of like the Zimbardo Stanford prison experiment where the people wearing the guard costumes stop being actors playing guards and actually become them, except without the permanent psychological damage, etc. After only a week, it's stopped being a game of dress up. I even appreciated the accidental poignancy of Rome's Fiumicino airport; they temporarily lost my suitcase and during those first 4 transitional days, I was literally free of old baggage. By the time the suitcase arrived at the hotel, my transformation was complete. Wearing my chef outfit, peeling the potatoes, I've abandoned my old cares and thoughts and habits. And I'm loving every minute. (I'm also reading too much Calvino.)

I guess I need to explain a little bit about how I got here and why I'd want to spend 12 (yes, apparently twelve) hours a day, 6 days a week in a kitchen in the very middle of Italy that averages 38 degrees celsius.

Last summer I was in New York designing a map of Manhattan and falling in love with food writing during the commute, namely Bill Buford's Heat (the story of the former fiction editor of the New Yorker obsessively following Mario Batali's footsteps through random kitchens in Italy). He describes tortelli di zucca as "a mouthful of autumn" and I was determined to try some. I was also planning to take some language classes (because everyone had told me "don't waste your time at Harvard on languages. you can learn them any time" and I took any time to mean that summer), but between the internship, friends, and the commute, I didn't have any spare time.

Ok, the scene is set for my trip to Italy that closed out the summer. The second to last night of the vacation, I had dinner at El Mercante, a tiny agriturismo just north of Lake Como. Their restaurant had, you guessed it, tortelli di zucca (ravioli and tortelli are arguably interchangeable). Buford's description barely does their pumpkin ravioli justice. I really had to close my eyes between bites. That Buford moment--"I went to Italy...I ate a homemade pasta, and my life, in a small but enduring way, was never the same" (106)--clarified everything. I knew I was going to take Italian in the fall and I was determined to cook in that kitchen the next summer.

6 months later, a semester into Italian A, it was time to set up the internship at El Mercante. But the agriturismo's so small, it could only be reached by phone and my Italian wasn't good enough to explain my request live ("Can I please be an apprentice in your kitchen for the month of August? I promise I won't steal your family recipes," apparently isn't a part of the fall curriculum). I asked my friend Dan to do it for me. "Sure no problem," he said and called me back half an hour later.

"So I spoke to the mom," he said, as in the mom, the grandma and the daughter who run the place, "and she said, 'Sure, but why don't you just work for the hotel instead? They're desperately looking for staff this summer.'"
Agriturismo, hotel. Didn't make much difference to me. "Ok, of course! Sounds great."

We hung up and I played back what had just happened. I yelped.

He hadn't said "the" mom, I realized. He had said "my" mom. Dan's mom owns a hotel in Umbria...So with the mixup of one simple word, I was working for my ex-boyfriend's mother instead of for a rotund Northern Italian grandmother. Woops.

Anyway, things couldn't have turned out better if I tried. This apprenticeship is better than anything I imagined it to be at that dinner a year ago. The hotel has two restaurants, a relaxed, neighborhood-restaurant style trattoria and an upscale, fine-dining restaurant, Zafferano. (Zafferano has turned into such a terrifying word. Every time someone says it in the kitchen, I shudder. Nothing ever seems to be good enough for it.) Both serve really authentic Italian fare and I'm learning to make it all, little by little. This is the most hands-on internship there is--I make foccaccia and dough for the egg pasta in the morning, cake for the next day's breakfast in the afternoon, gelato, tiramisu and torta di mele (the cake on the silver platter), and little odds and ends of things (degunking mussels, cleaning and cutting squid for calamari, slicing bread for bruschetta, peeling figs) until it's time for the dinner rush during which the dessert station is my responsibility. I snuck some pictures of desserts I plated before they were whisked off. The first is panna cotta with frutta di bosco sauce and the second is a black and white fondente for Zafferanooooooooooooooooo. In exchange for working in the kitchen, I get free room and board--which works out to be a hotel room for a month, delicious family meals (my favorite time of day?), unlimited Italian coffee and a staff of young, sweet Italians who are as excited about my arrival as I am. Sweet deal.

I'm On My Way

2008-08-08T07:48:00.001-07:00

(Again, this entry is one week late! I’m sorry)

I had a pretty good week – with a lot of sleeping - because I haven’t been to lab since last Wednesday. That’s right – I got a week off because of our lab move from the Sherman Fairchild Biochemistry Building to the new Northwest Building. When I went in Thursday morning, there were crates, boxes, and people – both from our lab, from the moving company, and from IT – everywhere!
The pile of boxes next to my bench

My new desk

My new bench

The outside of the Northwest Building! Our lab is on the third floor.

Before I got back to work at lab, I had to get to work on my PRISE Presentation for our Presentation Practicum Monday night. We were divided into tables and given 10 minutes to talk about our research and receive feedback on our presentations from our peers. I found the night really helpful, and here are a few pictures taken by our Program Assistant Stephanie:

On Thursday it was The Cheescake Factory’s $1.50 cheesecake slice day, and I was really excited about this. However, you had to dine in (you couldn’t just go the the counter and order a slice of cheesecake and leave), so I gave up on that idea. Instead, later this week I went to UNO’s with Frank ’10 and Qi’11 where I had a Mini Dessert version of their famous Ice Cream Cookie :) Yum!

Thursday night was still exciting, because our Distinguished Speaker that night was Noam Elkies – who, just as a short introduction, received his PhD at the age of 20 and became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard at 26! Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the grand piano out, but his talk on math and music (specifically, on canons) was still amazing – and many non PRISErs from the Harvard community attended as well.

That scene in Ratatouille, and Flugtag

2008-08-06T22:26:00.000-07:00

You remember that scene in Ratatouille when Colette tells Linguini about all the other cooks working at Gusteau's? So-and-so fought with the resistance, this other guy killed someone using only his thumb... It's the scene where the new guy meets everyone else, and they all seem to have unique quirks. It happens in almost all of the Pixar movies: "I'm from Playskool." - "I'm from Mattel!"

Well, last week was that scene at Bent Image Lab. Work-wise, I was still occupied with those crates, now encircling each of them in plastic wrap, which I have to confess didn't really hold my interest. So I kept things lively with conversation. Our painter, for example, legally changed his last name from Sullivan to Superstar. So did his wife. The supervisor of the art department moonlights as a DJ, and a seamstress in the back of the room is also the front-man for a cyber-techno-glamour band called Fleshtone. My favorite surprise was watching Kimmy, a young, bubbly art director, collect dead grubs from a wasp nest so that she could make molds from them and cast a necklace / earring set.

Over the weekend, I had another great Portland experience. High-school friend Ben and I returned to Waterfront Park on Saturday, having recently enjoyed the Brewers Festival there, this time to attend Portland's second Red Bull Flugtag (German for "flight day). The idea is that teams of amateurs join together and construct homemade airplanes out of cheap materials. The plane has to carry one passenger, and the rest of the team has to push it off an elevated pier into water, with the goal of flying it as far as possible. The airplanes are based on a funny / creative / preachy environmentalist theme, and the flights are preceded by skits, of widely divergent quality. Begin photo essay:

It was packed. This is only a fraction of the 80,000 people that filled Waterfront Park.

People even took boats out to watch from the water.

This guy climbed a lamppost for a better view.

As we made our way through the crowd, we got to see the lineup of airplanes waiting for their turn. This flying squirrel craft had notably dismal chances at staying in the air. Cool design note: the beer bottle plane behind the squirrel actually poured "beer" out the front when they unscrewed the cap. Despite this, it proved incapable of flight.

The "Banana Boat" took a pretty spectacular nosedive.

Our friends in the Flying Squirrel didn't do much better.

This was the best flight I saw. Very exciting to see a plane actually fly instead of just dive bombing ten feet away from the pier.

Well, what else can I say about Flugtag? I've never been to anything like it, but I hope to see more of it in the future. It was a lot of fun - there were kids, teenagers, old people all spending the afternoon outside enjoying the entertainment. I was thinking the whole afternoon that Flugtag was right up MIT's alley -- maybe they'll hold it in Boston one of these days...

NWL

2008-08-06T11:14:00.000-07:00

(This entry is two weeks late – I apologize!)

You’re probably wondering what NWL stands for. Well, like I mentioned in previous entries, my lab (Dr. Josh Sanes) as well as some other labs (Dr. Jeff Lichtman and Dr. Takao Hensch) are moving to the new Northwest Building and hence the Northwest Labs (NWL). I have never worked in a lab that moved while I was there (although my high school lab partly transferred to Cambridge University), so I found this pretty exciting. Of course, I didn’t really have to pack anything, but the last couple of days before the move involved a lot of maneuvering around piles of boxes and crates :)I said goodbye to my old desk and looked on the blueprint to find my new desk ("Alissa" between "Lilley" and "Valdez" - note that only the undergraduates are referred to by first name :) )

Monday night we had a wonderful panel on “Careers Off the Bench” – scientists who received their PhD but then went into the private sector. The panel was composed of Mary Lynne Hedley, the Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for MGI Pharma, Incorporated; Stacie Weninger (who received her PhD from Harvard in ’99), the director of science programs at Fidelity Foundations (and previously a senior scientist at Neuron (!)); and Brenda Jarrell, a partner with Choate, Hall, and Stewart who “practices intellectual property law specifically for scientific enterprises” (Brenda is the daughter of Nobel Laureate Dudley Herschbach and Dean Georgene Herschbach, both of whom also attended the talk!). Although I was pretty tired, I was captivated by the stories of these three women, especially their choice to stray from the typical path and their difficulties with balancing their careers and their families.

Three days later, our Distinguished Speaker Series continued with Dr. Thomas Michel, the new Dean of Education at Harvard Medical School, who came and talked to us about his work on NO (nitric oxide) and ended with a very interesting explanation of why fireflies light up. The title of his talk (intended to keep us awake) was “Nitric Oxide: a key signaling molecule in sex, death, and vascular biology”. He preceded the main portion of his talk with 5 key points on how to do well in science: ask important questions, don’t think about it – just do it!, believe in your hypothesis – create your own luck, don’t be afraid of new approaches, and, most of all, have fun! We all laughed when he said, “I like to use drugs in lab,” (of course, not in the illegal drug sense), and he ended with what I felt was an important remark: “Beware that things can sometimes be even more interesting than you may imagine.”

Walking around Cambridge and Boston, it’s very obvious that there is a lot of Red Sox spirit – whether in the form of hats, foam fingers, shirts, or banners. However, as I was walking back from lab the other day I saw this car’s license plate and had to pull out my cell phone to take a picture of it.

I have also noticed that Harvard Square is home to some giant dogs. The first dog, whose owner had a hat out for tips, I saw on PRISE move-in weekend. The second dog I stumbled across just last weekend, and its owners were in the process of convincing worried parents that their toddler would be safe petting it.

My favorite part of last week was definitely dinner with my PI, Dr. Sanes. Since PRISE encourages the Fellows to invite their PI’s to dinner at Dudley House, Iris, Jenn, and I (the three undergrads and PRISErs) in the lab, wanted to invite Dr. Sanes. However, he took us out to dinner at Chez Henri, a really good restaurant between Harvard and Porter Squares! It was great to get to know Dr. Sanes better, and we spent 2 ½ hours talking and laughing over our dinner before Dr. Sanes biked home and the three of us ran back to Leverett House in the rain :)

The Grand Finale!

2008-08-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

Construction on the youth center has finished. The workers have packed up their things and left (fully certified in basic computer operation!), the walls are layered with a fresh coat of white paint, the curtains that Maryama made hang in the windows, the photographs from the photography class adorn the walls, and a wooden sign, created by our newest team member from Harvard (Amy Wu, ’09) stands in front of the entrance proclaiming its name and purpose to passersby. Maryama and I are preparing to leave, while Amy (called Aminata here in Gobaru) is just beginning; she has a fresh outlook and enthusiasm which brings revitalization to those of us who have been here for a while. We go through most of our days now without considering the little details to which we have grown accustomed, and it is very interesting to reflect back on how we live our life here. How do you flush a toilet without running water? How do you take the shortcut to Pujehun? How do you teach computer to people who don’t speak your language? How do you ride a motorbike in a skirt? Just as we have had to learn these complicated lessons with the help of our host family, we too have become teachers for our newest team member.

The summer school classes Maryama and I taught ended this week, and we finished up the program with a special peer leadership training workshop for the students who we have been working with for the past two months who have demonstrated leadership, scholarship, motivation, and enthusiasm. The workshop lasted for three hours, and included several team-building activities and discussion/planning time. At one point we even blindfolded half the students and took them on a trust walk to a nearby peanut farm planted by a coalition of women working towards gender equality and community development. We crossed through the rainforest, over logs and through mud, and (unfortunately) at one point through a trail of soldier ants. When I think of ants, I think of “A Bug’s Life,” and those cute, harmless little guys. Sierra Leonean soldier ants are a bit different. When those of us who were not blindfolded came across the ants, we instructed our trust-walk partners to “run through this part.” Unfortuantely, our student Sheku did not run fast enough. When we got to the peanut farm, he was still blindfolded and running around in circles smacking different parts of his body and flailing around in pain, trying to remove the biting critters. Other students started to hit him too, just to help out. I should have been a more concerned leader, but, having endured a soldier ant attack myself (and knowing that the pain, while unpleasant, is at least tolerable), I simply enjoyed the blind-folded Sheku ant attack that unfolded before me. After a few minutes he was ant-free and laughing with the rest of us.

Using the peanut farm as an example of a feasible project, we asked the students in groups to create their own projects addressing community issues they expressed earlier in the workshop. One group will plant a youth community garden behind the center to promote agriculture, nutrition, entrepreneurship, and generate funds for the center. Another is doing a food sanitation project in the marketplace. The group working on gender equity will host a soccer tournament with co-ed teams, and the final group is setting up a tutoring program through the center. Amy will meet weekly with the teams to ensure that they are on track with the projects, and if all goes well they will be up and running by the end of the month!

Saturday afternoon we held the opening celebration for the youth center. We spent so much time last week helping our students to prepare speeches and skits. The event was much bigger than I had anticipated- people came from as far as Freetown to cram into the center, trapped for more than five hours by the long list of speakers in the program and the downpour outside. Our MC was the famous Dr. Sylvia Olayinka Blyden, a Sierra Leonean medical doctor turned activist and journalist. We were also honored with the presence of the Paramount Chief, the District Chairperson, the District physician, the director of the University of Njala’s public health program, most of the family of David Sengeh (’10), and (most importantly) our wonderful students. It was such a momentous occasion that they actually killed the goat that has been living in our cooking hut for the past year and a half. I wish I wouldn’t have watched it die because that ruined the eating part of the ceremony for me. I am so in awe and grateful for all of these women who arrived at our house the night before the event to prepare all the food. They crammed into our tiny four-bedroom home, and with the dawn we awoke to a mass of ladies (including Ngor Lizzy) cooking the biggest pot of rice I have ever seen. The spoon for the rice was the length of half of my body. I suppose that is how you prepare food for two hundred people, although I am still amazed at the speed and organization of such a feat.

For me the best part of the program was hearing from our students. They spoke not just of the summer school and youth center, but also of the need for education and development. They spoke words of admonishment not just to their peers, but also to their elders- that these aspects of a community are the most important to work toward and build together. We have provided a structure and some basic training in select subjects, but after hearing their voices I have such faith in their ability to learn, to teach each other, and to persevere. They truly understand the importance of collaboration, education, and peace, and I will leave (and hopefully someday soon) return to this place knowing that there is at the very least a core group of young people who are working in unison towards a noble goal.

Cindy and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (make that Week)

2008-07-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

Wow, boy, am I glad last week is over. We basically had all the drama you could possibly ever have in a music festival (minus the three light bulbs bursting during concerts at the beginning of the festival) rolled into about 5 days. Eeeesh.

Here's how it went:

Monday - Actually, Monday was pretty awesome. Each year, the President's office sponsors a picnic for all the students, faculty, and staff up on top of Aspen Mountain, so we all get to ride the Gondola up to the top for free and get a free lunch (pizza, burger, or caesar salad - I went for the burger. yummm.). The view from atop was gorgeous, and it was so much fun having a chance to hang out, discuss plans to go paragliding, and wander around at 12,000 feet.

The gondola - it just keeps going and going and going...the whole ride was maybe 5 min long.

Say hello to the gorgeous Artistic Admin team (minus myself; we all came together in my giant Suburban). Front row, left to right: Courtney [Asst. Artist Liaison], Jessica [Head Artist Liaison], Rachel [Program Book Intern], Manasseh [Assistant Program Book Editor and my wonderful roommate]. Back row: Shelby [Music Production Coordinator], Donovan [violinist in the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Jessica's boyfriend - just an honorary member of the Artistic team]. Not pictured: Frances [Head Program Book Editor], Asadour [Artistic Administrator].

The complete hullabazoo as we approached the top of the mountain. Yes, that's about 750 students + 200 faculty + 100 staff...yeah, that's a lot of people.

From left to right: Me, Laura [AACA (American Academy of Conducting at Aspen) Assistant Manager], Evan [Orchestra Coordinator], Leslie [Student Performance Coordinator], Lizzy [AOTC (Aspen Opera Theater Center) Orchestra Manager], Dave [Aspen Concert Orchestra Manager - whose students came up to him during the picnic and said, "Mr. Nischwitz, can you please take a picture of us?"], Jessica, Courtney

Tuesday - Apparently I'd been getting Monday 7/21 and Tuesday 7/22 mixed up on a ton of different things, resulting in a few mix-ups. Nothing major though...

Wednesday - This is where it all begins. Wednesday afternoon, I pick up baritone AB for a rehearsal with his pianist, CD, in the middle school. After dropping off AB, we realize that CD is nowhere to be found, so I wander around the middle school searching for him in case he couldn't find the room. Meanwhile, because I left my cell phone in the car, apparently it's ringing off the hook with the entire world telling me that CD is at Harris Hall and somehow missed the boat on the fact that his rehearsal was at the middle school. No one is sure what happened - I assumed that because AB was the one who told me that his rehearsal was at the middle school, he had already discussed time and place with CD. Apparently that wasn't the case, resulting in several frustrated people. Grr.

Thursday - Apparently conductor Ludovic Morlot, who had been scheduled to conduct Sunday's concert, has a family emergency and has to go back to France. After some frantic searching, conductor (and former BachSoc conductor!) Hugh Wolff '75 is set to take his place. This is all exciting, except now it means that we have an entirely different repertoire and a new itinerary to take care of.

Friday - As Courtney introduces herself to CD at another one of their rehearsals, he says to her, "Oh, are you my page-turner?" Somehow, we never got the memo that he'd wanted a page turner - his management had indicated earlier that he didn't want one. Whoops. Their concert is on Saturday evening, and we don't have time to contact the collaborative piano department - Courtney calls me, and I head over in a flash. I've had a few odd experiences here and there turning pages...and I quickly realize that they want just about everything to be attacca, which means all the movements to flow with minimal (if any at all) break in between. What makes it more difficult is that AB and CD speak to each other in German, and I have no idea what they're saying or where they're starting and have to find their place by listening and matching it with the music. It's not hard, but it's difficult when they start a few measures before a page-turn and then I have to leap up and flip the page - as quietly as possible, of course.

AB and CD have another rehearsal that evening, so I pick up AB to take him to the concert hall. On the way, he tells me that he wants to have more rehearsal time in the concert hall the next day. I tell him I'll try and figure out what I can arrange for him, but ultimately, the hall's basically booked from 7AM until the time of the concert. This is where it gets fun: he then tells me that unless he can get more time in the concert hall, he won't be able to perform the next night. Oy vey.

I go find Brad, the production manager, and tell him about the predicament. The schedule for the hall the next day basically went something like this:

9:00-12:00 - Aspen Festival Orchestra rehearsal
12:00-2:30 - Removal of the stage extension put in for the AFO rehearsal
2:30-3:30 - Piano tuning time
3:30 - House opens for 4:00 concert
4:00 - Chamber Music Concert
6:00-7:30 - Piano tuning time
7:30 - House opens for 8:00 concert
8:00 - Concert featuring AB and CD

Now, the real complication was that, well, 100 feet away from the concert hall the next morning, the Dalai Lama would be speaking in the Benedict Music Tent. Yes, welcome to Aspen. Yes, John McCain was also in town. As was John Travolta. And a few other luminaries. Because of that, the entire orchestra had to show up at 7:30AM to go through security, and then they would all be locked in the hall until the rehearsal was over, and then get escorted out. We all had to carry credentials with us at all times and our names and photos had to be on a master list that was handed to the members of the state service on duty the next day. So basically, there was barely any time to squeeze in an extra hour-long rehearsal.

Brad came with me and helped me explain to AB and CD that there was no way that they would be able to get any extra time in the hall the next day - they could free up maybe an hour in the evening, cutting into the piano tuning time, but other than that, absolutely nothing. AB insisted that the morning orchestra rehearsal be moved so that he could have a chunk of time to rehearse in the middle of the day, or that the chamber music concert use an untuned piano. Otherwise, he was firm - he wouldn't perform.

Ohhhh dear. So we then call Asadour in, and take him out of a concert to have him explain the situation to AB and CD. We eventually compromise and give them time from 5:45-7:00, which seems to somewhat placate the duo (although not entirely). In the meantime, I'm in my complete don't-shoot-the-messenger mode as they chatter away in German to each other about the situation. Eeeks.

The rest of the rehearsal goes as smoothly as it can, and then I take AB home. Afterwards, I head back to the concert hall and pick up credentials for myself, Hugh Wolff, and Gil Shaham, all of whom will be attending the lock-down rehearsal the next day. I call Hugh and Gil and make sure that they're all set, that we'll meet at the front desk of the lobby at 7:30AM and take the shuttle over, and I'll have my car parked close by overnight so that the next day I'll be able to take them both home after the rehearsal.

VIP passes to the Dalai Lama! Too bad it means that we can't go anywhere near him.

Then, as I'm finally about to head home, I have my first traffic accident. Whoops. I was backing out of my parking space, and saw an ostensibly empty space behind mine (then again, it was pitch black in the parking lot and the back lights on the giant red monster don't work too well), and I back into it...until I hear a crunch. Oh dear. Nothing serious - just a few scratches on my car, and scratches and a busted light on the other, but, well, let's just say that that was the last thing I needed in my otherwise perfect (hah.) day.

When the dust settles (and I make copies of insurance information, yada yada yada), I finally get to park my car about a block away and then walk the 6 or so blocks home (yes, in the pitch blackness). Oyyyyy.

Saturday - I'm stuck in the morning running a few last-minute errands and I can't make it over to pick up Gil and Hugh at 7:30 on the dot (especially since I'm zipping around town on my bike and not a car), so I call the hotel and leave them a message at the front desk. Then, when I finally get there, Gil and Hugh are nowhere to be found. The front desk tells me that they'd already taken the shuttle to the hall - apparently they never got my message. Ohhh dear. So I hop right back on my bike and race over to the hall as quickly as my legs can do at about 7:55 in the morning, meet them on the other side of security, and then hand them their credentials. Funny, despite all the buildup, the actual event is really lax - all they did was check my VIP badge and then put me through the metal detector. We spend the morning locked in the hall while I work with Sara the librarian on putting bowings into parts for upcoming concerts, and everything with the rehearsal goes finely and dandily.

I have maybe a half an hour of down-time after the rehearsal to take a shower, then zip to the middle school to where AB and CD are rehearsing, sit with them in their rehearsal and practice turning pages (I swear, there's a particular art to it...), take CD home, have about an hour to make/eat lunch and pack myself a sandwich, and then race over to the concert hall again to work the 4PM concert. It's my last concert with members of the Ying Quartet, who are perhaps the coolest people in the world - they're super-chill and I've been a huge fan ever since they played in my Beethoven String Quartet seminar freshman year.

Afterwards, I stay at the hall, getting ready for the 8:00 concert. Since this is already super-long, I'll just say that it went as well as it possibly could, and it was quite amazing. I was nervous as heck, but I've now made my Aspen debut :-). Courtney and I went out to dessert with her mom and friend afterwards to celebrate the end of an excruciating week. Mmm creme brulee.

Sunday - I'd been looking forward to this day all week. Whenever I work Aspen Festival Orchestra concerts, the schedule always has a 9:30-12:00 open rehearsal and a concert at 4:00 that day. So in between, Rachel, the orchestra manager, and I always go to our favorite restaurant downtown, a super-delicious vegetarian place called the Explore Bistro, which sits above the Explore Bookstore. Believe me, I'm a complete and total carnivore, but their seitan soft tacos are to die for. Mmmm. Over some of those, a tofu reuben, gazpacho soup, and warm pumpkin cake a la mode, we melt away all of the stress of the entire week before - it's about an hour and a half of heaven in our hectic day.

The concert itself goes relatively well - Gil Shaham is an Aspen favorite, which means that afterwards, there is a fire-hazard-worthy amount of fans crowding the backstage area. We tried to give him a chance to put away his instrument, but he decided not to so that he could visit with all of his fans - and there still wasn't enough time for him to visit with everyone before intermission ended! He's one of the most genuinely nice people I've worked with all summer - completely easy-going and ridiculously funny with his Zoolander references and knowingly terrible puns. He's been here almost all summer so far, and will be leaving next week. We're all going to miss him.

Rachel, Nick (another orchestra manager), and a few others and I make plans to soak in the hot tub that evening at the female orchestra managers' house. A few hours later, though, I get a text message from Rachel - she's going to bed. We were all exhausted.

So there you have it. After that, I can do anything - right? (Actually, I don't even want to try.)

Pallets and Porters

2008-07-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

This week, there was good news and bad news. Remember that big warehouse set we had to fill up with crates? Crates made of paper we had to cut, foam cubes we had to sand, and glue we had to wash out of our clothes? Well, we finished them! It took four interns four days, but we did it! (That's the good news.)

The bad news was: next, we had to make a forklift pallet for each one. This involved more X-Acto knives and more glue, with the difference that these pallets were so fragile that you could demolish one just by resting your elbow in the wrong place.
But even though these took more time and more care than the crates did, they were more satisfying to make. I think we felt like there was more craftsmanship involved, so we could be proud of the work. My frustration with the crates was that I thought, "Any old Schmoe can make these things... " Which may be true, but it doesn't necessarily mean interns can; in the end, the art director rejected about half of the crates we had made. Whoops!

After work hours, I spent a lot of time with an old high school friend of mine named Ben. He's a student at Portland's Lewis & Clark College, and this week, we explored another reason twenty-somethings love Portland: beer. Portland is home to many, many microbreweries. Ben and I went to one of them, the Rogue brewpub, for a friend's birthday. In addition to hot dogs and hamburgers made from Kobe beef, Rogue serves delicious dark beers. Mine was a mocha porter. They also offer hazelnut and chocolate brews.

I was also excited to find out that July is Beer Month in Portland. Ben and I celebrated by going to the Oregon Brewers Festival on Friday, along with his friend Maddy. The festival was in an enclosed section of Waterfront Park. There were two huge tents, one on each end of the enclosure, which together housed about eighty beers. You buy beer with wooden tokens worth a dollar each. A sample of beer costs one token, a full mug costs four. And of course you have to drink the beer out of your very own 2008 Oregon Brew Fest official souvenir mug made out of genuine recyclable plastic ($5).

At first, we went for beers with delicious-sounding names, like Dragon's Milk, Pliny the Elder, and Quilter's Irish Death. We bought the one-token samples in order to maximize our sampling range, but soon found that it was also a good way to maximize our beer intake. This was particularly true for Maddy, a cute Filipina girl, whose "samples" tended to be larger than ours.Ben and I decided the Best In Show was the Almond Brown Ale from Standing Stone Brewing Co, Ashland, OR. Maddy concurred with our other decision that the Worst In Show was Widmer Bros.' Full Nelson IPA, which tasted like alcoholic armpit sweat. Appropriate for a beer named after an illegal wrestling move.

Since that was the last weekend in July, there are no more beer festivals in the cards. But there are still plenty of microbrews to be sampled, and as Dorothy Parker (quoted in some beer literature we read this weekend) once said, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

Dwi Ga!

2008-07-26T07:01:00.000-07:00

Moniatu’s father arrived on Sunday and took her with him to Liberia. She left without a warning, dressed in a jean jumper and a little white bucket hat. It was the first time I have seen her looking neat. She carried a broken umbrella, and a sorry, expressionless face which indicated she knew not where she was going, with whom she was going, or even that she was going at all. When I tried to say goodbye, she did not respond. Our house is silent, with a void that her giggles once filled. Liberia has claimed our alarm clock, our coloring buddy, and a bit of our joy.

Moniatu is not the only one who has left us. The four University of Njala students, with whom we were co-teaching our classes, have decided to quit and return to Freetown for the summer. Maryam and I are now trying to teach the extra classes we are able to, and reschedule the ones we aren’t. The greatest disappointment in all of this is not for us, but for our students. Many come from over ten miles away to attend the summer school, jumping at the free opportunity to enrich their education in a way that has never before been offered. Now, when they come, we must tell them the revised schedule, and that their teachers have left (and were not even respectful enough to tell the students themselves). Facing countless challenges, these students prioritize learning above all else, and yet, those who have made it to college and claim the title of teacher cannot even support them through this endeavor. I am frustrated with my colleagues, and disappointed on behalf of my students who I know work so hard to be here. What kind of message do we send our students if the teachers themselves are unwilling to be in the classroom?

We have however, in spite of all of this mess, managed to add one class which brightens every day. We have started a computer class, late at night, for the workers of the youth center. They have been unable to attend any of the summer school classes during the day because of their work. After our last official class leaves at eight, we go through the center rounding up the boys from whatever sanding or painting project they are working on and bring them into the small room in the back. Mohamed loves the computer (and has been watching us teach for the past month, so he know a lot of it already). He translates for three of the other boys who speak only Mende. Michael, who knows English quite well, goes ahead of the class in Microsoft Word to type sentences such as, “I love my mother,” while the rest of us are still trying to find the File button, or learning how to click and drag with the mouse. Stephen doesn’t know his letters, so the youngest member of the construction team (only 14 years old), sits beside him and together they type out assignments, finding the keys- clicking on the correct buttons. We learn in the darkness, at a time of day when we are (for once) completely alone and without spectators. Our classroom is a space of complete safety, comfort, and exploration, and I feel so joyful to work with my peers who have given so much of their time and energy to bring this center to life.

After the announcement of the election results on Wednesday, the Pujehun district had a big party, and Maryama and I experienced our first clubbing experience in rural Sierra Leone. We walked from our home in Gobaru to the Pujehun, down a road thick with mud from the rains that came all day. By the light of the moon and kerosene lamps on front porches we found our way to the town pavilion, and the mass of dancing Pujehun district residents. We danced for hours in the dark heat, a thick layer of moisture developing on every inch of human skin, as well as the cement poles of the pavilion. When our favorite song came on (“Put up your lighter, I want to see you fire…Fire fire fire! Fire fire fire! Fire fire fire fire fire fire!) we went mad with excitement (perhaps a bit too excited), and started up an intense flail dance. I think we shocked people a bit with that, but soon our girl friends were catching onto our infectious glee, and we got much of Pujehun flailing around with a movement unknown to this town. Sadly, an older man came up to me after the song, furious, and spouting a rhetoric of what correct African dancing consists of (apparently not flailing!). Now when we walk through the community, however, people shout out “fire fire fire, dwi ga (dance)!” and bust a move.

Frrrrrrrrrrom Paris to Berlin, and a little Corsica: Part I

2008-07-24T04:18:00.000-07:00

Trite and true (har har) lessons from the past two weeks:

1. Be ballsy.

2. Ask strangers for advice and take it.

3. The world is tiny.

4. Make the most of everything.

Paris:

Gideon ('10) and Sarah ('10) stopped into Paris for the day a couple of weekends ago. Charlie and I joke that our tiny apartment is more like a hostel--there's an extra person in the place more often than not. But I love having visitors in this town because when they get obsessed with Paris, it makes me fall in love with it all over again.

Gideon and Sarah's Paris in 24 hours: They stopped by the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay before meeting up with me for lunch at a traditional bistro in my neighborhood. We walked across Pont Neuf and along the Seine to Notre Dame and continued on to Berthillon on Ile de St. Louis. Met up with Gideon's uncle at the Hotel Costes (it's the kind of place where you feel underdressed unless you're wearing an Oscars-worthy gown) for some cappuccino. Gideon's uncle is friends with a NY Times columnist and he promised to set up a lunch for the two of us when I get back to the city. Sick.

After coffee, Gideon and Sarah visited the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre while I cooked dinner for Giuli, Elsa, and her best friend from middle school. Gideon and Sarah joined us after their escursion and left painfully early in the morning, pain au chocolat and viennoise in hand. I don't know if I succeeded in making Sarah fall in love with Paris the way she wanted to. It's hard when you come to this city with such a picture in your mind of how it'd supposed to be. Eventually Paris more than fulfills those expectations, but it takes time.

"There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished—so that he quite literally sometimes can't see what's coming at him from the suburbs of the place he looks at—his struggle to adjust the country he looks at to the country he has inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye." Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon.

It's getting to be the time of the trip that I have to say goodbye to people. Giuli left for the States as did most of the kids doing the Columbia program. Elinor threw a going away party for the Columbia kids and somehow everyone I knew in the city ended up in her apartment. Six degrees of separation at its finest in a flat overlooking the Eiffel Tower lit up in blue for the EU presidency. Small small world.

Corsica:

Flew to Napoleon's hometown with Elsa for a weekend of much needed sun (Paris has been freakishly cold all summer) and rest. Corsica is amazing--the water's more turquoise than the Caribbean, the food is perfect, and the temperature is always exactly right. Elsa has a gorgeous house on the island in the Mediterranean and we spent every day sleeping, eating, swimming, boating and shopping. Tough life.

Jean, the chef who I made a meal with early into my trip to Paris was also visiting the Paparembordes in Corsica when I was there, so good food was not hard to find. Since Corsica is halfway between France and Italy geographically, and its cuisine is equally bicultural, he thought it would be the perfect segue for my culinary summer in France and Italy. There was, as a result, an abundance of traditional Corsican fare that weekend. The first night was lobster salad, veal with olives, roasted fennel and endives, and peach sorbet with fresh peaches. Lengthy discussions about the pros and cons of Sarko and the future of the EU (Corsica is still France after all) were as free-flowing as the champagne.

The next day, after tea with almond canistrelli (think: tiny biscotti) for breakfast, we joined the couple I met at dinner the night before on their boat. We cruised the Mediterranean for the good part of the afternoon and pulled up to a quiet cove for lunch--un repas de roi. Steamed prawns, preserved and pressed fish eggs wrapped in paraffin for safe keeping (quite the delicacy, I promise), hard boiled eggs, roast chicken, salad, addictively good bread and a raspberry tart. How Jean could call all that a "picnic" with no trace of irony in his voice, I'll never know.

Shopping, pizza and nightswimming rounded out the night.

Sunday was met with another royal meal--a Corsican brunch of mimosa eggs, chicken salad, roasted red peppers in garlic olive oil, roasted baby artichokes with red onion and pecorino--and a poolside pedicure. (What?!) Swam and shopped away the afternoon before dinner on the (mosquito-infested) beach.

Monday was Bastille day and we celebrated it down to the roasted wild boar and parade down the Champs Elysees on TV. A tart with sauteed onions, olives and anchovies was everything I wish a quiche always was and salad was the perfect counterpart to the intensity of the maquis-coated meat. Elsa and I headed back to colder, grayer Paris that night and watched the fireworks on the Champ de Mars during the taxi ride back from the airport.

Still to write about: a new shift at the IHT, the best place to get dinner in Paris, Crazy P and Niels (the tour guides from Montmartre)'s reappearance, an epic night on the Pont des Arts, exhilarating moments in Berlin, etc etc etc. But I have a visitor (Anna '10) coming tomorrow (today!) at 8 (in 4 hours) and some sleep would be more than nice. Haven't done much of that recently. (Too much to see, to think, to write, to read....but that's a whole other blog post....)

"In the sky there is heaven, and on earth there is Hangzhou..."

2008-07-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

ed. note: I'm continuing to upload posts for Mercedes, who is unable to upload for technical reasons...

This past weekend was the second trip for the Harvard China Internship Program in which the affectionately named “Beijing kids” and “Jim from Qingdao” came to visit Shanghai. Their first day here we all traveled to Hangzhou, about an hour train ride from Shanghai and a popular weekend retreat from the city. I’d heard the Chinese had a saying about this place: “In the sky there is heaven, and on earth there is Hangzhou,” so I was really excited to see the renowned lakes and mountains. However, we ended up spending most of the day touring three Chinese companies: Alibaba.com, Wahaha, and Wanxiang. This actually turned out to be a pretty interesting experience as we had a chance to talk to people who worked at the companies and learn more about how Chinese employees think about work and business.

Our first stop was at alibaba.com, the so-called “e-bay of Asia” which is actually a very successful global business that started in China and has since taken over much of Yahoo’s operations within this country. We took a tour of the office and it seemed a bit Google-esque--open areas, bright colors, casual dress, pictures of the company on fun trips around China--all ingredients that probably bode well for the company’s success. However, there was one part that I found a bit odd--the fascination with Jack Ma, their CEO. During the presentation they spoke about his life for a lengthy amount of time and pictures of his face were plastered all over the building. “Jack Ma is the face of Alibaba, he is a very good and charismatic leader,” one of the employees told us. There probably are companies in the U.S. like this, but I don’t know them and certainly have never seen something like it for a company of that size.

One of our later stops took us to Wanxiang, an automotive parts manufacturer that is a supplier for General Motors and Ford among other companies. We’d read a case study HBS had written on the company so we had a pretty lengthy discussion with the manager we met. He gave us some advice about the Chinese work ethic “Work as hard as you can, with as little complaining as you can,” and also “Always be patient and do whatever your boss asks of you.” The first I agree with, the second only in the perfect-world scenario where my boss asked me to do everything I wanted to do [kidding--sort of]. With that presentation and a look at their exhibition room (the companies we visited sure loved their exhibition rooms--I, not so much) we finished up

our Hangzhou tour and headed back to Shanghai where we spent two days touring the sights I’ve become all too-familiar with: The Bund, Jinmao Tower, People’s Square, the Yuyuan Gardens, and so on. I sort of reached that wow-I-feel-like-this-is-my-city moment when I realized I was giving Ieva ’08 long winded, tour-guide worthy snippets about buildings we were passing.

Sunday afternoon the Beijing kids went back north and I headed to the fabric market to order my first custom-made clothes (trench coat debut next weekend!). That was the last bit of fun I’ve had in the past few days as I put myself on lock-down and 12-hour working days in order to prepare for the big end-of-summer presentation next week. The presentation is actually about 2 to 3 weeks before we leave, but I guess that’s so we can get feedback. It’s just a little thing on the 1970s and 1980s oil crises, the ensuing stagflation, how Japan/US responded to it, what lessons China can learn from it, and oh make some recommendations on the asset and sector class levels. Eeek. Help anyone?

'This too is Liberia'

2008-07-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

I write from the lounge balcony of the Royal Hotel, sipping an unusually metallic tasting Lebanese coffee to the pulse of Daft Punk over the speakers. As I glance around, I see mostly internationals, tapping away at their characteristic laptops. Expat life here is comfortable, often disturbingly so.

I feel like I have been living in a bubble the past 4 weeks. Teeming with a plethora of NGO partners and the largest peacekeeping force in the world (as well as a lot of summer interns), post-conflict Monrovia has almost developed a parallel economy to cater to us. We go to the finest restaurants, the best bars, and the nicest beaches. We live in the best compounds and usually have our own reliable drivers to take us wherever we want. There is even a sushi bar and at least two casinos. While the quality and quantity of such facilities is still meager, life here still vaguely resembles a good lifestyle in a developed country. The picture to the right is the view from our veranda.

One of my favorite places to visit here is the bar and restaurant at Golden Beach, where sometimes I feel like I’m in a Corona commercial. There are gazebos, palm trees, a little garden area, and a duiker (mini-deer-like thing) that runs around. Given the abject poverty in Monrovia and the conditions in the not-so-immediate area surrounding this beach, I was initially quite surprised no one had eaten it yet. However, the duiker was protected within the confines of this small garden area. I feel like we too, like this duiker, are often stuck frolicking in our own little world (okay, so it’s a bit of a stretch...).

The hypocrisy of our existence here became particularly apparent when we went to an 80’s party at the UNMIL (United National Mission in Liberia) compound, complete with a disco ball and a large fleet of identical white SUV’s. As the hour grew late, the contents of the bar began to dwindle, and the 80’s party gradually transformed into a pool party, I couldn’t help but wonder about how painfully detached I was from those on the other side of the coils of razor-wire.

In all fairness, we all do work pretty hard. In the past couple of weeks, I have been working with the program manager of the National Leprosy and Tuberculosis Control Program (NLTCP) to implement parts of the work plan from the Global Fund Round 7 Proposal. The NLTCP is currently undergoing a revival with new management and a lot of funding (read: they have $1 million to spend in the next 2 months). The building to the left is the TB annex where they house a lot of TB patients.

I have also been working on developing a standard operating protocol for procurement and supply chain management of essential drugs. Overall, it’s kind of exciting to participate in rebuilding this country’s health care system at a time when it seems this country has the spotlight of the world.

nananana BATMAN

2008-07-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

PRISE is already half over! That means we have to start thinking about our presentations, which was the theme of both of our talks this past week – our Seminar Series and our Distinguished Speaker Series.

Our Seminar was on ‘Presenting Research and Public Speaking’ and was given by Rebekah Maggor from the Bok Center. She helped us learn how to write abstracts for science research, and spent much of the talk bringing student volunteers (and non-volunteers ☺ ) up to the podium to deliver their abstracts, receive feedback, and then deliver it again – in all cases, with much improvement.

On Thursday, Dean Stephen Kosslyn, chair of the Psychology Department, came and talked to us about the ‘The Dirty Dozen’ - The Twelve Most Common Powerpoint Errors: Pointless Powerpoints, Wrong Audience, Bad Structure, Not Enough Direction, Too Much Material, Too Small or Indistinct, Too Busy, Too Few Graphics, Murmurs and Monotones, Talking to the Screen (don’t you hate it when all you see is someone’s back and their back covers the actual powerpoint?), Derailed by Questions, and Stressing the Audience. If you want to know more, pick up a copy of his book, ‘Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling Powerpoint Presentations’, which all of us PRISEers received at the end of the night (I even got mine autographed – Sweet!). We all laughed when he joked at the beginning, “You all understand that Psychology is a science” and later when he said, “There are so many talks where they end with ‘Well, I guess that’s all for now’, and I wonder, ‘Well, what else is there for later?’” (Book image courtesy of Barnes and Nobles)

In between these two presentations, I had an amazing experience – I attended Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience at TD Northbank Garden Wednesday night. Since not all of PRISE was able to go, I was really lucky to get off the wait list (45 minutes before we had to leave!) and didn’t know what to expect. A group of us met up at the Harvard Square T Stop

and later met up with another group coming in from Longwood. We got our seats just as the lights dimmed and the show began! The dinosaurs were HUGE and pretty realistic, and the special effects were just as good. Unfortunately, we weren’t supposed to take pictures, but here’s one from my cell phone:

My question is how they manage to take these dinosaurs apart and transport them from city to city (when I was in New York last week, so many taxis and all the banners outside Madison Square Garden had ads for the show).

On Friday lab cleanup continued as I helped my postdoc Brendan clean out our fridge as well as the fridges and refrigerators in the cell culture room. Cleaning out our own fridge wasn’t too bad (we did need a scissor to pick away at some of the ice…), but we had to resort to drastic measures to get everything out of the cell culture freezer, namely, a stop hammer, which apparently plays a critical role in the movie Shawshank Redemption (I haven’t seen it, but I will).

I didn’t have time to see it over the weekend because I saw a different movie – The Dark Knight. Everyone I knew couldn’t wait for this movie to come out (according to Aditi ’10, every ticket in NYC was sold out). I saw Batman Begins, didn’t really like Katie Holmes, and thought it was an okay movie overall (the butler and Fox were my favorite). However, this movie was amazing, and Heath Ledger played the Joker almost too well - the poster creeps me out! (Images courtesy of Google Images)

It was intense! I don’t want to give anything away, but if you haven’t seen it already, you should. The headline on the Metro this morning said it broke box office records and swept the Spiderman movies away.

Saturday I also took part in the PRISE Cultural Food tour, heading to Sultan’s Kitchen on State Street with a bunch of other PRISE fellows. I had Tandoori Chicken Kebab and Baklavah and it was delicious! Another group headed to Midwest Grill on Sunday, and the last PRISE initiated event this weekend was the Dodgeball game, which apparently involved 1000 water balloons and a lot of soaking wet PRISEers (of course, the torrential downpour Sunday afternoon probably didn’t help!)

A Whale of a Tale

2008-07-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe it’s already Monday and I still haven’t blogged about what happened last week. Well, here goes!

On Monday, we PRISE fellows had a good talk with Craig Rogers from the Bureau of Study Counsel about Managing Expectations in the Lab. One of the points I took away from the talk was that we should not feel burdened by our Harvard degree – that we should not have to go on to do what we and others see as bigger and better things because we went to Harvard. After the talk, some of my PRISE friends and I (Sara '11 and Chris '11 pictured here) visited Annenburg during Brain Break (for the Summer School kids) and thought back fondly to our freshman year meals.

A few days later my Thursday schedule was switched up by Lab Cleanup Day (!). As I’ll detail in a later entry, my lab, along with Prof. Lichtman’s lab and a couple others, are moving to the new Northwest Building next week. This meant that we had to cut our Thursday morning lab meeting short and spend a good 2-3 hours cleaning up common areas like the cell culture room, cold room, and dissection room, as well as starting to sort through the refrigerators and freezers. I wasn’t much help in this clean up as I haven’t been around long enough to know what I’m supposed to be cleaning, and would probably have ended up throwing away all the important things. Luckily, at lunch time we all got pizza in the tea room and one of the postdocs daringly drank a beer found in the cold room. (Good idea? I don’t know – it had apparently been there for at least a year!)

Thursday evening we attended another talk, this time by Professor Richard Losick, known to undergraduates for teaching MCB 52 and being co-Head Tutor of the Molecular and Cellular Biology Concentration. He spent the first 10 minutes convincing us that it’s a great idea to do research as undergraduates (he even showed us pages of his senior thesis from when he was at Princeton!). We all laughed in agreement when he said, “If you were a doctor and failed 95% of the time, that would be unacceptable. In science, failure is the norm. Your experiments will fail 95% of the time.” He also joked, “It’s really good I got a tablet [PC] because otherwise I’d have to use two pointers,” twisting his arms while referring to the two projector screens on either side of him. Most of his talk was about stochastic switches in Bacillus subtilis, a bacteria closely related to anthrax. Since I did research on B. subtilis for most of high school, this talk was pretty cool ☺

The next day, I left lab early and packed up my bags (well, just an overstuffed back-pack) and headed to South Station to take Megabus (free wireless!) to New York City (I first considered taking the Fung Wah, but decided it was in my own best interest to take a safer mode of transportation). Max ’10, Lauren ’11, and I were visiting Aditi ’10, who managed to get a three-bedroom apartment to herself (!) We got into Penn Station about 10:00 pm and headed back to her apartment, which was located about 12 stops away on the metro, drank some orange tangerine juice, and fell asleep with the help of a giant inflatable mattress.
The next morning we woke up refreshed, ate some Special K cereal, and put on our sunglasses.

We then started our journey on the New York Metro.

Our first top was Times Square, where we took lots of pictures of Elmo and WALL-E.

After a quick lunch at Cosi, we passed by the Apple store (Max '10 was really excited)

and walked a good couple of miles along Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Along the way, we passed a 20 block-long line for the Bon Jovi concert that evening.

The Museum was pretty sweet, and our favorite exhibits were probably Arms and Armor and Superheroes, which featured Tobey Maguire’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Spidey suits from Spiderman 3, Christopher Reeve’s Superman Suit, and Christian Bale’s Batman suit from Batman Begins (unfortunately, no pictures were allowed in the Superheroes exhibit).
We would have been awesome knights during the Crusades.

We were psyched to see Ellsworth Kelly in the Modern Art exhibit (he has single color canvases - genius?)

...as well as Andy Warhol (chicken noodle or tomato?)

After indulging in some Dippin’ Dots in the cafeteria,

we met up with Ap ’10, Steven ’10, Katherine ’10, and James ’10 (all of The Crimson Business Board) and tried to decide on a good spot for dinner.
We ended up in Union Square at The Heartland Brewery, where I had my usual chicken fingers.

We then headed over to Magnolia Bakery for some delicious frosted cupcakes!

The next morning I woke up ridiculously early to catch the 8:30 am bus back to South Station.

I got in about 12:45, and I then took the Red Line to the Green Line to the Blue Line and made it to New England Aquarium in time to go whale watching with PRISE. Now, I had head a lot about this whale watching, and I was a little worried about getting seasick. My only real boat experience was last summer when I was on a dinner cruise on the Potomac River, and I didn’t get seasick then, so I naïvely assumed I would be fine. The sea breeze was great as we pulled out of the harbor, leaving the city of Boston behind us, and it was amazing to see 5 humpback whales – a mom, her baby, and an escort, and then two other females. Unfortunately, I soon began to feel a little dizzy, which turned into nausea, leaving me sitting on one of the benches breathing in and out slowly so as not to get really sick (as some fellow PRISEers did). All in all it was a good experience, although I don’t think the Voyager III will be seeing me again soon.

"Animation" in Portland

2008-07-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

Well, better late than never.

I'm not just referring to my blog. (For the record, I was on tour with the Harvard Glee Club until a week ago, which is why I'm posting for the first time today.) "Late" describes a good portion of my experience with this internship.

For instance, I only heard on June 20th that I had an internship at all. That left me three weeks to buy a plane ticket and find a place to live. So, I bought a plane ticket and started looking for a place to live.

And kept looking for a place to live.

On July 13, the Glee Club tour ended. And I was still looking for a place to live. Maybe other people were beating me to the sublets; maybe my inquiries made me sound like a sociopath; or maybe Craig's List just isn't the most reliable way to find housing. In any case, two days before I was scheduled to arrive in Portland, I finally found a sublet.

And here I am. I only got to work two days before this weekend, but I'll tell you what I know. The company is Bent Image Lab (http://www.bentimagelab.com). It's a small animation studio which produces commercials and music videos. It does both CG (3D computer) and stop-motion animation, of which the latter is my interest. I've been working in Bent's art department, which is where the sets, puppets, and props are made, to be used later by the animators on set. This last couple days, I've been cutting paper and gluing it to foam cubes in order to fill a large warehouse set with crates. I haven't been doing this alone; there are three other interns working with me. We're all about the same age, 20 or 21. Two of them go to CalArts, an animator factory, and the other goes to a liberal arts college whose name I forgot.

But enough about animation. What about Portland? Well, first off, I'll say that this is a great town for twenty-somethings. And apparently, that's no secret, because Portland is full of twenty-somethings. Part of it is that the streets are very bike-friendly. There are also farmers' markets all over the place and open-mics every night. In short, it's a town that attracts the easygoing, "herb"-smoking, tattooed and perforated set that likes their music acoustic and their coffee fair-trade. Earlier today, I attended a "cake party," put on by Tooey, a friend of my housemate Kate. (Tooey, I'd like to add, is also the nickname of the carnivorous flower in "Little Shop of Horrors.") Tooey's cake parties are "for friends and strangers," which means that Tooey invites all her friends, all well as anyone she happens to run into at open mic nights, farmers' markets, etc. The draw is that she bakes a cake for each party, and in the cake are hidden secret goodies. Today someone found a slip of paper with an unlabeled phone number, under which Tooey had written, "It was her birthday three days ago!!!" And so the idea behind the cake parties is that Portland's twenty-somethings, uprooted and adrift, friendless in a bike-friendly city, will meet each other over homemade cake and find people with common interests. I should have known that it was going to be soul-crushingly awkward. It was the kind of overbearing awkwardness that makes people pluralize nouns by adding "-ness", as in, "Could you pass the marionberry-ness?" But of course, Tooey had seen this coming, and came to the rescue by providing an activity to distract us during awkward silences: making funny hats out of construction paper! Hmm. Call me a curmudgeon, but I wasn't convinced. I squatted, noncommittal, while men and women five years older than me (and older still) cut and stapled colored paper into creative shapes and adorned their heads with the results. The cake was cut, the drinks poured, the blueberry ice cream passed around the circle, and soon I found myself in a conversation with this guy here in the blue shirt. Turned out he's working with a friend on an animation project of their own. We both liked the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, and I recommended the work of Yuri Norstein. Soon I had met several other people, all wearing funny hats, and Tooey eventually plopped hers onto my head. By the end of the party, I had tossed the Frisbee, thrown a boomerang, tried out someone's recumbent bike, and sat down to listen to Kate play the fiddle in an impromptu bluegrass jam. In other words, I ended up having a really good time. These cake parties happen once a month. Maybe by mid-August I'll have a friend I can bring to the next one.

Mishmash

2008-07-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

We're now at the end of Week 5 (of 9) of the festival. Oh my, how time flies. I'm currently sitting on the lawn by the tent, enjoying the sounds of Aspen Festival Orchestra and Nadja Salern0-Sonnenberg performing Astor Piazzola's Four Seasons of Buenos Aries, meanwhile trying to figure out how to sum up all that's happened these past few weeks.

My job isn't particularly challenging. I contact people to get information about people, and compile all of that information into one document and distribute it. At some times, it gets complicated - scheduling interviews, for example (wouldn't it be so much easier if the interviewer and the interviewee just talked to each other about scheduling these things rather than going back and forth when you don't know both of their scheudles to begin with?). The perks, though are that I get to interact closely with the musicians that arrive and observe their rehearsals and performances. Alan Gilbert called me two nights ago and told me that he'd be happy to come visit BachSoc next year when he's in town conducting the Boston Symphony. Sarah Chang gave me a really nice bottle of face serum. I got to sit in on a live performance interview between Fred Child, host of American Public Media (and formerly NPR)'s Performance Today, and the Ying Quartet, who was up until this year Harvard's Quartet-in-Residence.

At the same time, though, I do find myself with a lot of down-time. It feels a little funny to me - I sit at rehearsals and wait for disasters to happen so that I can control them, but otherwise (as is mostly always the case), I sit and find myself reading or playing freecell or doing other things completely unrelated to my job. It's actually sort of nice to have that free time; I think I'm currently on my 6th Cultural Revolution memoir of the summer and I'm plowing my way though C++ for Dummies. But then again...this is definitely not the sort of thing I'm used to. Last summer, I was a PRISE fellow, working in the Schier Lab at all random hours of the day, meanwhile running to rehearsals of the Harvard Summer Chorus and the Brahms Society Orchestra, and finding plenty of time for excursions into Boston and surrounding areas with friends.

It feels, though, that in switching between the world of science and music, I've needed to change the way that I think about things. Science is about proof and consequence - every claim is put through a series of tightly controlled experiments for verification. On the other hand, music is about emotion and interpretation - as the composer Osvaldo Golijov said a few days ago as we lunched with the League of American Orchestras Management Fellows, music is about representing the entire palette of human emotions. Just the sheer number of musical genres that exist attest to the complexity of human nature. Because of that, though, I find it so difficult to criticize music. Experimental design and data analysis can very much tell us the differences between a "good" and "bad" science experiment, but how do you calculate whether a piece of music is "good" or "bad?" In my Postcolonial Classics class last semester, Professor Homi Bhabha spent a few lectures trying to categorize the definition of a classic novel. His opinion was that it dared to question the beliefs of the time, leaving readers with a sense of uneasiness that would transcend race and generation. That certainly seems to be the case with all the old masters - Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stravinsky - they were all revolutionaries in their day, exploring new forms, new chords, new techniques. But what is the case with new music today, when "Classical Music" as we know it is becoming more and more of an esoteric pallette of what my cohort Shelby calls "dings and beeps," and the popular music of the day always (excuse my over-generalization and over-simplification) seems to be a series of repetitive chord progressions?

I have no answers, and I don't think I ever will. And in the full manner of shirking all the heavy stuff (it is summer vacation, after all), let's look at some pictures!

Cottonwood. It's EVERYWHERE. Giant piles of the stuff have been floating through the air, almost giving the illusion of a soft winter snow. Now, if only the stuff actually melted like snow, instead of piling in every corner imaginable. Seriously, Disney should just plant a few cottonwood trees and they'd probably save a ton of money on all of that confetti that they sprinkle to simulate wonderland, meanwhile helping the environment. Think about it.

Hunter Creek. There's a trail that goes along the creek up to the valley at the top of the mountain. This is what the creek looks like at the bottom...

...and this is what it looks like at the top. Soooo pretty.

At the top of the creek, there's all these dilapidated log cabins. Kind of creepy, but it's be cool to camp out in one of them sometime...

As I was on my way home, I ran into a giant moose-on-a-truck. Errr. Coincidentally, last night I went over to my fellow liaison Jessica's house, and in her parking lot, I saw another one of these things. Trust me, it's a lot creepier at 1AM under a dim streetlight.

And, of course, the long-awaited picture of my new ride. Heck yeah. Sort of. (Actually, between the three of us Artist Liaisons, I'm the only one who hasn't yet had an accident this summer. I'd say that's pretty impressive, considering I failed my driver's test three times...)

Classes, life, etc.

2008-07-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

The rainy season brings with it at least one small joy- the image of three year old Moniatu, donned in her pink bathing suit with the glitter stars, standing and screaming on the front steps while Sylvia scrubs her down and rinses her off in the downpour. Her face, normally glowing with happiness, is dark and intense with the anguish that coincides such a cleaning, and although this may be cruel, I find it unbearably amusing. Moniatu is not the only one enduring some rough times.

Our classes are in full force, and Maryama and I are usually working from 10am until at least 8pm, leaving space for lunch breaks of course. The photography class is the best part of my week (and probably the best part of my summer). Oh how to make shutter speed and focus stick into my students heads’? Sometimes when I try to explain things they nod in agreement, but do they understand? “Your photos are too dark- more light!” I exclaim. Nods of agreement. In the background I hear Abraham’s voice, translating everything into Mende for little Justin. He is the only elementary school student in the class, and although he is young and exceptionally little for his age, he has the biggest smile on Earth, and an eagerness to learn that is unparalleled by anyone else in the class. As Abraham teaches, Justin picks up the camera and gingerly adjusts the aperture ring, looking at the light meter, trying with all his might to understand this translation of a very technical language. Sylvester is curious and attentive. Sheku is quite and thoughtful, always the last to volunteer ideas and answers, but probably the most competent. Swadu skipped classed this week. Oh why!? As one of three girls (out of fourteen students) she in an endangered species of sorts. Tomorrow I will go on a campaign to save the Swadu. Ansumana is the laughter and light of the class. We high-five after he gives my favorite response to, “how do we make this picture better?” “Move closer!” (High-five). I would not trade in these students for anything, and this class has been a learning process on both ends. I am really proud of not only the artwork produced, but also the teamwork and reflection (on both lives, and communities) that have resulted.

For the second half of the class the students wander around the community; some go to Yoni or Pujehun (nearby villages), others stay in Gobaru, usually visiting their favorite section, Old Town. I go on a scavenger hunt to try and find them. It’s one of my favorite games. I set off in some direction, and when people see me coming, they hold up their hands to signify a person taking a picture and point me in the right direction. These hints can come from an old lady sitting on her front porch, or a small girl pumping water, or a group of teenagers, doing nothing but causing trouble and of course, aiding me in my treasure hunt. When I find my students shooting in someone’s kitchen, or wandering through a church, they are always shocked. “How did you find us?” they exclaim, convinced that they had buried themselves in the ends of the earth. I usually check in for a few minutes and make sure they are following the assignment, and then set off to stalk another set of students. No one wants to take photographs with me around because I always manage to make them break the number one rule (no pictures of people who are looking at the camera!) When I hover, it is impossible to prevent the stares, the “Bowa (hello)!” and eventually, the lengthy conversation which always ends in “God cannot be blamed,” from my end (this is most of what I know in Mende). And hence, when we determine that shutter speed, aperture, and light meter are all understood, I find my way back to the main road, and to the various people who helped me find my target (still holding up their hands up to their faces, in snapping position, when they see me).

The youth center is growing closer to completion every day, and as we occupy these rooms with our classes, we form relationships with the workers who are piecing it together. Francis is the lead contractor, and is a native of Ghana, transplanted to Bo. Because he is not from Pujuhun, he lives, eats and works in this building. After I let on that I know a bit of Twi, he has continued to greet me in his mother tongue (every time I turn the corner), with a joy and charisma that I could not have anticipated. The other workers are younger, mostly my age, and they come to our computer room after class ends at 8pm to listen to music on the computers and enjoy the light from the generator. Mohamed shows us his latest dance moves, while Mustapha is more inclined to seek help answering the multiple choice practice questions for his upcoming national examination to pass middle school.

On weekends, we go to Bo. Our host brother went with us this past weekend. We sat at the taxi park in Pujehun, waiting for a vehicle for over two hours. While we baked in the hot sun, a commotion started and an old man began beating a young boy with a stick. In the next few seconds all I could catch were images of this child, eyes round with fear, fingers extended, reaching with every ounce of strength for a moment without pain, legs searching for solid ground, screams of terror filling the marketplace. I cannot tell if this drama was the cause or result of the scene which played out next, but they are inexplicably connected. Attention drawn away from the screaming boy, our gaze turned downward to a small girl picking up tiny brown nuts from the ground, tears streaming down her face. She placed each one meticulously on top of the wax paper, protecting from contamination those that remained safe from the spill. We stared at her as she reached and placed, gently, with anguish. Our host brother, from his spot on the bench next to me, called her over to his side. She rose slowly, summoned from her sorrowful task for an unknown reason. He asked her how much she was selling the nuts for, and, granted a response, he reached into his pocket and proceeded to purchase the quantity of the ruined produce. Tears drying, she dug through her tiny purse for his change, but was only able to pull together 200 leones. Without hesitation, he offered his newly purchased nuts up to a slew of youngsters who looked longingly at the snack; a group for whom we could say the “ten second rule” is an understatement. He then went back to reading his book, and I was left to ponder in silence the intense generosity and thoughtfulness of the people with whom I am so blessed to share a home. The rainy season is a time (Auntie Umu reminds me), during which almost all people struggle to find food. Everyone is hungry. And yet, one will without question, give family, friends, and even strangers everything they have. I come from a world where such inclinations are not the norm but the exception, and I find that I am learning more every day about the power and importance of this virtue.

When we reach Bo we spend time fulfilling our craving for Internet, and the delicious cassava leaf and rice of Ngo Lizzy (our host brothers’ mom). If we are lucky, then she will take us with her to town. In the market, Ngo Lizzy is Queen. I never realized how vast and extensive it was; in fact, if I didn’t follow her then I would probably never even find one of its many entrances, and I would certainly never be able to find my way out again. The openings are concealed beyond curving alleyways that appear to lead to nowhere, and then open up to an exploding world of vibrant moving colors, fabrics, umbrellas in stands, and roaming animals and children. I keep my eyes on the ground so I don’t step on anything I shouldn’t. I find my way by glancing up occasionally, making sure Ngo Lizzy isn’t too far head. There are smells and noises and sounds I have never encountered. In one section, Ngo Lizzy purchased a white dough substance; the area smelled like rotten fish, and I could hardly breath except that I was trying to dodge the puppies a man had pulled out of the bottom of his bag to show us. The space is too close and claustrophobic to avoid brushing up against people. We become equal in our inability to move quickly, though not equal in our purchasing power (I buy nothing, but instead leave Ngo Lizzy to do the bargaining, because I will never get a fair price). I am bothered by the people who reach out to grab my arms, and snatch the soccer ball I carry for the youth center. There is a whistling and a smacking of lips which echoes from vendors and from behind windows as we pass. We look like ducklings following our Mother Goose. When children see us, they scream and run to hold their mothers’ legs. Plastic bowls, baskets, bags of okra are shoved in eyesight to coax a sale out of us. We deny all offers, but instead follow the curvy maze of lines Ngo Lizzy has set before us.

Tuesdays for the Win

2008-07-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

“Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday, Who could hang a name on you? When you change with every new day, Still I’m gonna miss you.”
-From The Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday”

I love Tuesdays; always have, always will. But until starting my internship with Rolling Stone, I didn’t know the extent to which entertainment news utilizes, dare I say relies upon, Monday’s relief pitcher. Important things in every department of the magazine just seem to fall into place on Tuesdays. It’s the day when advertising reps seal back-cover deals, when layout tends to wind up the next issue’s cover, and when the online editors post the final articles detailing the sex-and-drugs slugfest better known as Bonnaroo. Take out Tuesdays, and you have no sales confirmations, awkwardly late music festival recaps, and one less soft rock favorite to help give The Rolling Stones the breadth that truly makes them “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World.”*

For us interns, however, all this frenzy boils down to one thing: confirmations. Editorial interns spend Tuesdays confirming facts and tax interns (yes, they have those, and no, I don’t know how they live with themselves) spend Tuesdays confirming, well, taxes. I’m lucky enough to spend Tuesdays confirming contact information and calling to get RSVPs that, while originally finalized months ago, were accidentally deleted by someone in upper management when they tried clicking on the dancing kitty in a popup ad. Calling clients, aka our advertisers, can be a frustrating process. No one wants to give out contact information, nor do they want to commit to being in a certain place at a certain time on a day when they could otherwise be golfing. This initial hesitance, though, usually dissolves once I utter those five magic words: “I’m calling from Rolling Stone.” Conversations usually unravel something like this:

“Hello?”

“Hi, my name’s David Tao, and I’m calling for Mr. Peterson to….”

“Mr. Peterson is out today. I’m his secretary. If you’d like to leave a message I can send you to his voicemail.”**

“I’m calling from Rolling Stone.”

“Rolling Stone?! I love Rolling Stone! Oh my God, I just thought today was my lucky day. Okay, okay, okay, this is soooo coooool. Like, oh God, how did you get a job there?”

“Uhm, actually I’m an intern. I just needed to find out if Mr. Peterson was coming to our luncheon tomorrow at 12pm and if….”

“Wait! Do you know John Mayer? I bet you know John Mayer! I looooove John Mayer. You know that one song he sings? It totally makes my heart MMM-EEE-LLL-TTT!”

“I’m afraid I’ve never met Mr. Mayer. Look, is Mr. Peterson coming tomorrow or not?”

“Oh, yes, he’s really looking forward to it. Wait, are you John Mayer?!”

Click

“Continuum” freaks aside, Tuesdays are also when we get our most important assignments. For example, while compiling the entire magazine’s ad sales for the past two years seems a bit tedious, it’s also a vital process that gives me unparalleled knowledge regarding the print business. Sure, that’s just me convincing myself that sitting in the library with a calculator and pen for two hours isn’t the worst task of all time, but I’m a sucker for a good self-directed Tom Sawyer stretch.***

My favorite part of Tuesdays, even ahead of hearing another intern talk about the true genius of Soulja Boy Tell 'em, has to be the radio. In various parts of the Rolling Stone office, including the library, waiting areas, and conference rooms, cleverly hidden speakers emit a steady stream of commercial-free hits. I don’t know why, but I only notice the music on Tuesdays. Maybe it’s because I’m usually working alone, or maybe someone different puts the play list together on Tuesday. Whatever the case, the free tunes are very agreeable, and I would be lying if I said I could complain about the track selection. My only suggestion would be including more of Gunther and the Sunshine Girls (shown with me above), but somehow I think “Ding-Dong Song” might not be appropriate for the office.

Well, folks, that’s all for me until August. I just finished packing for a family trip to Switzerland, so hopefully I’ll have some neat-o pictures upon my return to spice things up a bit. A European blockmate of mine (though I won’t name names, let’s just say he has an acute fear of Gypsies) told me that Switzerland is the most boring country in the entirety of Europe. As someone who’s never been across the pond, I’m not complaining about a trip completely on my mom’s tab.

-Tao

*Quick history note: during an American tour in 1969, manager Sam Cutler introduced “The Rolling Stones” with this line, a title which has stuck to the present day. Whether you believe the statement or not, I think we can all agree Keith Richards’ inability to die is truly extraordinary.
**In the internship business, one quickly learns that “send you to his voicemail” is code for “make sure we never, under any circumstances, get back to you.”
***You know that scene where Tom convinces everyone that whitewashing a fence is sooo fun? Yeah….

Fourth of July and the Black Cafe in Shanghai

2008-07-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

ed. note: Mercedes is having some technical difficulties posting from China, so I've posted her lastest entry for her...

This is my fourth week in Shanghai, and it’s crazy to think that I’ve been here for almost a month now. I can now recognize most of the roads, so now I can tell when a taxi is trying to rip me off by going the long route. My daily Chinese vocabulary has improved as well, allowing me to direct the taxis to my hotel. I now no longer have to get out two blocks away and walk because they couldn’t find the location. What great strides I’ve made!

Work also picked up at the office this week as Michael ’10 and I had to give our presentation on how the economic/fiscal policies of McCain and Obama will affect the economy. Our bosses on the investment team, Tsz Long (affectionately called TL because his name is a bit hard to pronounce) and Matt, upped the ante last week when they told us the CEO, Andy, would be attending our presentation as well. This knowledge, as well as a terrible penchant for procrastination we both share, drove us to spend long hours of our precious weekend in the office. It was especially hard to be in the office last weekend because both days were blue-sky days in Shanghai. These are an extreme rarity as “Shanghai Skies” is the name given to Shanghai’s year-round gray skies. How rare? Our second week here I asked one of my co-workers at CUAM how often there are blue skies. “Blue skies….? I don’t know about those.” was his reply.

Nonetheless, Michael and I ended up giving our presentation on Tuesday in front of the investment team and a few others from the office who wanted to stop by and see what some of the “Harvard Interns” were presenting. Andy ended up leaving 3 minutes into the presentation when he received a phone call. So much for spending our weekend in the office to impress the CEO!

With less work at the office (for now) I can spend my evenings relaxing a bit more. Last night I went to a very interesting restaurant called Black Café. You eat your meal in pitch black and are served by blind waiters. On the first floor, the “Visual Zone,” you’re made to leave any belongings that produce light (cell phone, camera) in a locker before you head upstairs. I went with Bret ’11 and I had to hold onto his shoulder while he held onto the waiter’s to walk into the dining room. Finding our food was a bit difficult but it actually was a nice experience. It’s a lot easier to concentrate on what another person is saying when you’re not distracted looking around. It did make me feel a bit inhibited though. I realized when I wanted to stand up during dinner and go to the washroom that I could not do it. Instead I just had to finish out the rest of the meal. The owners say part of their mission is to raise awareness about the plight of the blind. I don’t think that mission was quite accomplished. It was not impressed upon me that I was blind, but rather I knew this was a one-time experience I would soon leave in 45 minutes. However I was very impressed with how our waiter completely avoided banging my plate into my wine glass which I kept moving around.

I am going to have another interesting experience today as it is the 4^th of July in Shanghai! Last summer I spent the 4^th of July in Madrid at TGIFriday’s. This year I will be spending it at Malone’s, an American café, and eating my first burger since arriving in China a month ago! Happy 4^th of July everyone!

A day in the life.

2008-07-09T22:23:00.000-07:00

7:30 AM - Alarm goes off. Snooooooooze.

8:10 AM - Panic and drag myself out of bed. I've got a 9:30AM airport pickup, and I need to drive over to the house to make sure I know where I'm taking the guest artist.

8:25 AM - Scramble downstairs, throw bread into the toaster, slather it in peanut butter, and scramble into my car.

(Speaking of my never-ending car saga, I now have a new one! Well, sort of. The festival owns a ginormous bright red 1995 Chevy Suburban that they had put at the airport for a guest artist to drive around in the winter, but when the guest artist arrived, it was no longer there. Whoops. Unfortunately for me, though, it turned up a few weeks ago, and I had to return my shiny new Trailblazer for this 35-gallon-tank guzzler.)

8:40 AM - After making a few wrong turns, I arrive at 184 Mountain Valley Dr. I make sure the key is under the mat and open the door. Holy moly the place is ginormous and gorgeous. Oh my goodness.

9:00 AM - Make it through the morning traffic to the airport. I run into Jessica, another of my fellow artist liaisons, who's picking up Misha Dichter. However, we can't seem to find his flight on the monitor. We check with a United attendant and find out he's on a later flight - the same one that James Conlon, whom I'm picking up, is on.

9:32 AM - United flight 7181 arrives from Denver. Jessica and I stand by the gate holding our signs. I feel like a hotel chauffeur...which I guess I am. Sort of.

9:50 AM - We pick up James Conlon's rental car, but his luggage hasn't made it here yet. Oh, Aspen. Julia Fischer had the same problem when she arrived last week, and so did Anders Hillborg, and a long line of others...but oh well - it's scheduled to arrive on the next flight, which thankfully is less than an hour away. We depart and I lead him to his house.

10:14 AM - I show James into his mansion that the festival's rented for his stay here. We take a walk around and oooh and ahh at everything. The house is actually two houses in one, and every detail - from the marble countertops to the giant vaulted ceilings in the master bedrooms (yes, rooms plural) - is gorgeous. I told him that if he ever wants a break from the house during his three-week stay, I'd be happy to take over. He tells me that if I were to live in this house, he probably wouldn't even notice.

10:34 AM - I depart from the James Conlon mansion and make my way over to where David Robertson and Orli Shaham were staying. David and Orli showed up last week with their entourage of eight: the husband-wife team, their nine-month-old twins, David's two teenage sons, a nanny, and a cute little Chihuahua named Milo. Orli called last night and they apparently had a lot of leftover diapers and baby toys and wanted to donate them to the common good (i.e. other festival "brats," as we affectionately call the children and grandchildren of the guest artists), so I was going to load up the 'burban with all their excesses and tote them back to campus.

10:36 AM - Jessica calls. Apparently Misha Dichter needs a ride from his practice room in Aspen Middle School to his hotel at 11:30, and Jessica's picking up Joyce Yang from the airport at that time. I add it to my schedule.

10:37 AM - I realize that while talking to Jessica on the phone, I miss the turn to get to the Robertson/Shaham residence.

10:52 AM - All diapered and ready to head back to campus.

11:11 AM - I finally arrive in the office to unload the toys and the diapers. I flag down potential carters.

11:31 AM - I pick up Misha Dichter from the middle school, who claims that he'll collapse if he practices any more. Poor guy had a concert last night, followed by a post-concert dinner, and then a 6AM flight out of Chicago. And he still needs to get used to the altitude. I take him to Hotel Jerome, and on the way he tells me about how Aspen's changed in the past 30 years (apparently it wasn't always this schmancy), and gives me a few restaurant recommendations.

11:55 AM - I hustle over to Paepcke Auditorium for the High Notes lecture that James Conlon is delivering with Alan Fletcher, President and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School. We've all got Alan's title memorized like clockwork because he often makes short speeches at the beginning of each concert, always starting with the words "Hi, I'm Alan Fletcher, President and CEO..." High Notes lectures are a way for the audience to get more acquainted with the music that we present, but on a much more general scale rather than specific to each program. For instance, today's lecture was about the role of myth and legend in music, and to get to that, they first discussed music and the orchestra as a cultural vehicle, and moved to composition and circumstance. It was really interesting to hear the two of them talk, although...

12:22 PM - I get a call from Shelby, the Music Production Manager, that Emanuel Ax was not yet there for his 12:15 conductor-soloist meeting with David Zinman. Even more strange was that the meeting was not in his itinerary, although I distinctly remember putting it in there. I get a momentary feeling of dread as I realize that I had forgotten to sync the pdf with the updated word document. Sh**t.

12:43 PM - I work things out with Manny Ax and he gets to his meeting, albeit a tad late. Whoops. We all decide to avoid both him and David Zinman for the rest of the day...or at least for a few hours.

12:56 PM - I drive back "home" to make myself a super-omelette for lunch: broccoli, mushrooms, turkey, zucchini, and hot sauce, with toast. Yum.

1:30 PM - Time to mosey back to the office, where the rest of the day will be filled with joyful itinerary-making, interview-scheduling, and procrastination. Oh, and all sorts of logistics for Open Door, which is a recital series that I'm coordinating. The first one is tomorrow, and I need to finalize the program, notify the performers, make the program (and get it proofed), and also work out all the logistics for the other recitals on Friday and Saturday evening. Oh boy.

------

6:10 PM - Time to go home! Jessica and I are the last ones in the office, and we set the alarm as we walk out. I wanted to go to the Aspen Concert Orchestra performance, which started at 6, but, well, it's a little late now. Instead, I go home and make myself a scrumptious dinner.

7:18 PM - Fooooood: basil shrimp pasta with assorted veggies. Yum! I switch on Law and Order and chow down.

8:21 PM - I finish doing the dishes, hop on my bike, and head over to Harris Concert Hall for the Cavani String Quartet performance at 8:30. They're a dynamic group, and were students at the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies here in Aspen in 1984. We hear three pieces: Dvorak American, Bartok 2, and the Schumann Piano Quintet with pianist Ann Schein. I didn't really enjoy their Dvorak - I thought they took a few too many liberties with the sporadic tempo changes - but the other pieces were excellent!

10:30 PM - I bike home in the pitch black darkness. Oy. No streetlamps = kind of scary.

10:45 PM - I get home, hop in the shower, surf around on the internet, and then decide to write my blog entry as my eyes try to force themselves shut. I'm so ridiculously tired; my pictures are going to have to wait until tomorrow.

12:30 PM - Bedtime! Things to look forward to tomorrow: Cho-Liang Lin's violin masterclass, first Open Door Recital, calling the grocery store to see if they can make a fruit and cheese platter for Sarah Chang, and making the weekly fruit basket delivery chart. Yay.

Fireworks and Fourth of July

2008-07-08T07:39:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday night my roommate and I were walking back from the Distinguished Speaker talk (more on that later) when I said something to the effect of “This week seems really long for some reason” and she said “what do you mean? Tomorrow’s Thursday and then it’s the weekend!” and I became really excited. That’s the great part about public holidays like the 4th of July – you get a three day weekend!

I still had Monday through Thursday, however, but they weren’t so bad ☺. After lab on Monday, my roommate and I met up again with Gracie ’11 to try out the new ice cream store on Mass. Ave – J.P. Licks. The walls of the store are made of (fake) grass, and there are a lot of pictures of cows and monkeys. Since my favorite flavors of ice cream are chocolate chip cookie dough and mint chocolate chip (yet surprisingly I don’t like chocolate or chocolate chip), I got those and we sat at the window and watched people walking by. The ice cream was yummy, and it’s clearly a popular place.

Tuesday brought a surprise – President Drew Faust’s University wide ice cream bash. On Monday afternoon, we all received a rather surprising email inviting us to the Yard for free ice cream, so we of course all went. Since I covered this for The Crimson, I don’t want to plagiarize myself when describing it, but there were a lot of people – students, faculty, staff, tourists (!); humorous Harvard themed ice cream flavors like Lemon Lamont and Berry-tas, and even Celebrity Scoopers – higher-up administrators who were, as their name suggested, scooping ice cream. I again indulged in Cookie Endoughment (get it?), which seemed to be a popular flavor. I saw lots of PRISE fellows (John '11 is clearly confused about which coast he is on) and I even got to talk to President Faust! She asked me where I was from and what my favorite science was ☺ (photo of Faust and I taken by Stephanie Lo, one of our PRISE Program Assistants).

The second Distinguished Speaker in our PRISE series, Professor Jenny Hoffman, talked Wednesday night about “Superconducting Vortices”. She told us she only realized five minutes before the talk that 70% of us were biologists and so she was going to “skip a couple of slides”. Even though I wasn’t completely sure what she was talking about the whole time, her work sounded pretty interesting and her stories were really funny. I especially liked the story about the poor graduate student who got abnormal results and was fired by his PI, and then his PI did the experiment again and got the same results and he won the Nobel Prize. “Well guys, life is unfair.”

On Thursday, I was growing some bacteria in lab, and it turned out that I had to use colonies 1, 3, and 7, which, due to my Eppendorf labeling scheme led to 1-3-7 being written across the tops. Most people would not see anything in this, but I was happy about it because I happen to be the 137th Guard of the Harvard Crimson. Cheesy, I know. I like it when the different parts of my life connect together in weird ways. Talking about weirdness, this week the MCB department was apparently testing their fire extinguishers. There was a silver pan outside my window filled with a liquid that would light on fire when one person pressed a red button, and then another person would take a fire extinguisher and put out the fire. This happened at least a dozen times as there were quite a few fire extinguishers to test and actually garnered quite a crowd, some of whom took turns putting out the ‘fire’ and had a lot of fun.

That night, a bunch of PRISE people went to listen to the Boston Pops, who play on July 3rd and July 4th. Due to placement, you can’t actually hear the Pops and see the Fireworks from the same place on the 4th, so if you go to the concert on the 3rd and then get a good seat on the Esplanade for the fireworks on the 4th, you can do both. The Pops, who we had heard earlier this summer, are amazing, and luckily, there were really big speakers near where PRISE was sitting on the 4th. Since it’s extremely crowded, PRISE camped out most of the day to save a spot on the grass with a great view of the fireworks, which are launched from a barge on the Charles. Taking pictures of fireworks proved more difficult than I imagined, and my pictures sadly don’t portray how amazing they were, but I should add that there were fireworks of smiley faces and cubes. It was cool.

I admit I slept most of the weekend, but I did have one more adventure Sunday night. I became good friends with my Life Sciences 1a TF (teaching fellow) over the course of the semester, and she had invited me and another PRISE fellow who works in her lab to dinner at 6. We were also eating with her lab baymate, a graduate student named Mollie, (and Mollie’s husband, Adam) who in another example of “It’s a small world after all” happened to be my favorite MIT admissions blogger and part of the reason I became interested in neurobiology. Sweet. So Kevin ’11 and I left at 5:45, since we were told the walk would take about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, it turns out that there are two Harvard Streets, one in Cambridge near Kendall and one in Somerville. We walked the 40 minutes to M.I.T. and walked up and down Harvard Street looking for her apartment. Her address was in the teens, and this Harvard Street started at 100 and went up. One of the residents told us if we walked far enough down the street, the numbers would stop going up and start going down. Being the smart Harvard students we are, we assumed she was right (because numbers going up and then down again is normal) and of course, no such thing happened. We eventually figured out we were in the wrong city, took the T from Kendall to Porter Square, went up a very long escalator (the random guy in front of us almost knocked me over as I was trying to take a picture...the perils of blogging!) and walked up a big hill to the correct Harvard Street. It was okay, thought, because we got in a good 5 mile walk and a delicious dinner of salmon and wild rice. However, Google Maps can lie. Remember that.

Finally, I leave you with a picture of a WALL•E that was bigger than me and absolutely adorable. Guys I know have cried in this movie (no kidding!) and it’s PIXAR animation.

"I almost feel guilty closing my eyes"-Gtron

2008-07-05T00:19:00.000-07:00

After experiencing the side effects of mild vagrancy for the first few weeks--feeling tired, lost, not entirely at home--I finally feel totally and completely settled. There are, of course, moments when I get a pang of nostalgia for wandering Elizabeth Street with a cup of iced coffee (the three things I will perpetually miss: fire escapes, coffee-to-go and iced cubes), but they've become completely overshadowed by Parisian disbelief. Walking by St. Eustache or the Seine on a beautiful day, I still can't believe this is my summer, that the Louvre is in my backyard, that I'm a native of the monthly unlimited metro card variety and that in some small way I'm as much a part of this place as these monuments.

A month into my stay in Paris, I feel like I've hit my stride. Such a good week.

I spent last weekend at Elsa's house in the 17th. Went to Le Racing, Elsa's country club near Bois de Boulogne for Giuli's bday dinner #1; hit the soldes (Paris has giant month-long sales twice a year); had an impromptu dance party at Sophie's; went to a bbq chez Elsa's high school friend: (a) leave it to the French to have sit-down bbqs (b) it was exactly what I had in mind for this summer--native Parisians, frenzied debates in French, lots and lots of really great food; and rushed off to a music show that my 6-year-old au pair girl's school put on--picture little Frenchies singing extremely high. Closed off the weekend with Giuli's birthday dinner # 2 at Chez Fernand, a cozy restaurant in the 6th (with the absolute best scallops and truffle risotto) that we americanized just enough to turn off all the lights, light a candle on top of a gateau au chocolat and have the whole place sing Joyeux Anniversaire. Not a bad way to turn 21 all in all.

I was off from work on Monday and decided it was time to be a flâneuse and find the subject for Globespotters article #2. On my way to mine the boards at Sciences Po or La Sorbonne for a hidden movie screening or lecture series, I passed by a tiny store in the 1st full of dozens of wooden boxes labeled with country names--Tunisia, Madagascar, Egypt--and walked in. The store was stuffed with postcards--some scattered, most tucked in shoeboxes and filed in the wood containers--and there was a little Petit Ecolier cookie in the window that the neighborhood sparrows flew in to nibble. The owner, an older man with a thick gray mustache and a Trump trumping combover, was chatting to a customer about the small town south of Paris he grew up in.

Two hours later, I had 12 pages of notes, 10 pictures, 3 postcards from the 1800s and my next globespotters article. It was incredible. After I left the store I was practically skipping with the feeling of yes, this is why I came to Paris, this is what I was supposed to learn, yes this is why I want to be a journalist. It also inspired me to pitch a series of globespotter articles on vestiges of paris d'autre fois, so hopefully I'll get in three more before I leave for Italia: one on this postcard store, one on a sweets shop in the neighborhood, and one based on a tour of Paris that an older woman in the postcard store offered to take me on. Glowing, I ran around to the places on the postcards that I bought and took before and after pictures. Symbolic?

Tuesday continued the everything's-going-perfectly trend. It started with the IHT human resources tour (a month late). Now I officially know every nook of the building in Neuilly and I got a copy of the handbook that all the new employees get, even the reporters.... It almost feels like I'm cheating the IHT system. I'm getting the benefits of being a full-time employee at the Tribune, being privy to all the workings of the office and its gossip (Lenny Kravitz is apparently on 13 rue de beaux arts at l'hotel with Alex Rodriguez' wife and another man), but I also have time to run around the city with my friends, write articles for Globespotters, and travel on the weekends. I guess that's my compensation for putting up with mail sorting and emailing slugs half the day.

After the meeting, I ran to lunch with Elsa on the Champs, got my carte bleue (I have a bank account in France for life!), got my restaurant tickets, and updated my navigo. Everything was shockingly easy. After work that night, I met up with Charlie, Alina '10 and Andres '10 (the NYU in Paris Program kids finally arrived) at Cafe Lazare, the restuarant off Rue Montorgueil that Charlie and I had seen a couple weeks back and made a mental note to return to. It was everything we imagined it to be. Great food, great atmosphere (Alina: "I'm obsessed with this street!") but not so sceney as to be inauthentic. It was like one of those great moments with friends at home, when you know exactly what's going on around town and there's nowhere else you'd rather be.

Another plus to this week has been working downstairs in the business section. The atmosphere's a lot more lively, I'm working a lot more closely with the editors and the journalists--they actually know my name! We banter across the tables, tease each other when we yawn or say stupid things (picnic Chuck will never live down "Pump it up"). And when I have nothing to do, I alternate between reading the NY Times and IHT (it's actually encouraged. This is why I have to work at a newspaper) and writing the Financial Communications intern bible. "Congratulations, you will soon join the ranks of picture choosing caption writing masters."Writing captions and choosing photos actually beats mail sorting and stapling any day... Apparently people do read captions: A big stir was caused on Friday when a blog entry questioning Richard Branson's "green"ness was illustrated with a picture of him on an SUV and captioned "Note the gas-guzzler. How green is he really? You decide." Bonjour angry comments!

I've also been feeling a lot more integrated into work. There was an intern get together last week in St. Germain, I have plans to go to an indie cinema with Paula, the Panamanian intern, and Simon, the graduate in charge of the audio slide shows and videos on the IHT website, and I are heading to a jazz club in the 2nd on Thursday. Sweet. (Confusingly, Ignacio and Isobel are the interns in the picture.)

I think I also like working downstairs better because the tension in the office is a little less evident. The paper's been undergoing a lot of changes recently--there's been two going away parties just within the last week--and people have been more than a little on edge.Two Fridays ago, the Deputy Managing Editor Bob Marino retired after 30 years at the Tribune. Last Thursday, Michael Oreskes left the tribune for the AP. Part of it's to do with the fact that the NY Times is trying to swallow us whole. They bought the IHT in 2003 and have since added "Global Edition of the New York Times" under the International Herald Tribune heading on the paper copy. At a meeting two weeks ago, they announced their plans to do away completely with the International Herald Tribune name and to completely merge the IHT and NYTimes websites. Bad idea New York Times, bad idea. A lot of people have things against the Times and would much sooner pick up a copy of the Herald Tribune. The Times needs to realize that the Herald Tribune name really does command a lot of respect and that it fills a very different niche than the NY Times could (should?) ever. Regardless, the Tribune's hoping to move out of its office in Neuilly by the end of the year. I can only imagine what the fall interns'll have to do. I can all too easily picture them paddling down the Seine three boats in a row-- The I, the H and the T--lugging second editions, the NDR India supplement and Alison Smale.....Needless to say, this is a very interesting time to be working at the Tribune.

At both going away parties, the overriding sentiment of the speeches was that this will be a very trying period for the Herald Tribune, what with the economic model of print media being financially impractical and the NY Times trying to take us over.

Bob Marino: I'm extremely proud to have worked with journalists and editors like you. For the amount of people we have, the paper we put out is incredible. I don't think the people in New York realize how hard you all work. [Someone shouts: "They will soon!" Everyone half laughs, half sighs.] You should be very proud of yourselves.

Michael Oreskes: Everywhere I go, people know and read the Herald Tribune. It is the paper people turn to and you guys are the ones who make it. I am extremely honored to have worked with all of you. Now don't stop drinking. [More bottles of champagne pop.]

Oh! Side note about Bob Marino. After his speech, we got to talking about his career in journalism and he said (unprovoked by this foodie), "Food got me into the Herald Tribune, and 30 years later, it's food that's getting me out." Turns out he was bound for food writing in Italy the day after his going away party. He said he might try and come visit my kitchen's restaurant. Crazy.

One night after work, I was taking the train back to Paris with the business reporters and they asked me what it was i wanted to go into.

"Newspaper writing?" they asked.

"Well, yes, actually. Maybe." I said.
"Agh! No!"

With all this turmoil at the Herald Tribune and all this talk of doom and gloom for the newspaper industry, I really shouldn't be even more determined to go into journalism. ("More determined" would be a stretch. I swore off the school newspaper in high school and only dragged myself onto The Crimson when I could write a biweekly column on food.) But somehow in the past few weeks, journalism's become more and more something I just have to do.

* * *

On Wednesday, I finally had the picnic on the banks of the Seine that I've been dying for since I got here. Emily, an old friend from nerd camp (CTY) who is currently interning at the Times in Paris, called and invited me to join her and her friends on the quai under Pont Neuf. We lived up to our nerd camp past, telling jokes with allusions to Freud, and we confessed our bipolar Parisian mood swings (ah yes, I'm not alone). She may be living in a water closet in the 16th, I may live in fear of knocking my bed over if I sleep too close to the edge, but how can we complain when we're in our twenties, with our friends, and doing journalism in Paris?

* * *

I may have missed a giant Leung family reunion in New York yesterday, but my version of July 4th wasn't too shabby either. Independence Day started early here with a dinner party on the 3rd at Sophie's apartment. Sanders '10 joined the Ile-de-Harvard crowd for pan-fried chicken, a cranberry walnut salad and a patriotic berry dessert (raspberries, blueberries and vanilla ice cream).

On July 4th proper, I was off from work to babysit for a bit before a galette and cider picnic in the park by Les Halles with Charlie and Ana '10 who's visiting for the weekend from the Berlin. We decided that this summer was "Cafe Pamplona, but real life." Lying on the grass, sun shining, St. Eustache looming in front of us, we couldn't figure out how all this was even possible. Ana: "I almost feel guilty having my eyes closed." Perfect day. Perfect everything.

Met up with Elsa, Giuli, Andres and Alina at Parc des Princes for the Mika Concert. WHAT a way spend the fourth of july. 6 hours of standing for Yelle, Panic! at the Disco, Dionysos and MIKA was so worth it. How is this real life?

* * *

Now that I'm fully trained in two posts, I'll be working by myself tomorrow for the first time in the Newsroom. I'm a little scared because it's been a while since I've worked the post and I've never worked a Sunday before and they're run a little differently than normal days, but I'll study my notes beforehand and hopefully all will go smoothly. I'm glad to have more responsibility.

Oh and I emailed Alison Deighton, the owner of Hotel Vannucci, and everything is all set for the apprenticeship in Italy. I can't believe i'm leaving in less than a month. If life is surreal now and I feel like it's only going to get stranger.

Gi ga li a Gobaru

2008-07-04T06:03:00.000-07:00

There is a rain here which does not cease. In English we sing “rain rain go away.” In Mende, it is also a rhyme, “Je je ba nya va way.” I guess I am just lucky that the literal translation is effective in both languages although more applicable here. There are buckets that rest on our front porch to catch the water so we can use it for washing. The women gather on small stools and concrete ledges sitting in silence, mostly, braiding each other’s hair and listening to the drumming of the rain on the roof. We squeeze through with our box of books for our students, opening umbrellas in the small space and sending the women so that they back to corners and flatten themselves against the walls. An army of middle and high school students await us in the court barry (the town pavilion) to pick up their class schedules and materials.

On registration day, we were greeted by a mass of youth waiting outside the center for us to arrive. They came in droves, from Yoni, Pujehun, Massam, some from as far as twelve miles away. If there is such a thing as over publicizing, surely that has been our greatest fault. After a seven hour marathon of taking down names, grades, ages, and class preferences, the ache in our hands was nothing compared to the knowing reality that we were to plan a full-fledged summer school for 400 people.

Orientation, however, turns out to be very similar (It is not an easy task to cram 400 students into a five day week!). After a week of determining class schedules, writing them out for every student, and making books, Maryama and I are exhausted and very tired of our room, which is where we sleep, work, eat, and entertain guests of all ages. The place is beginning to look like the Lost Boys’ lair. There are pieces of printed cloth, and an assortment of damp clothes which hang from wires extending across the open spaces. It is impossible to walk across without getting slapped in the face with a pair of wet jeans (which never do manage to dry in this humidity), or a dangling sock which retains, relentlessly, the smell of must. Even to sit on the bed is a challenge- fighting to hold down the corners of our green and red sheets and find space amongst the piles of paper, books and this mosquito net which sags under the weight of our drying clothes.

Classes commenced this week, and we have started with computer, photography and the peer health mentor trainings. Our biggest challenge has been getting the students to come to class on time, as schedules here (we are learning quickly) can be fickle and entirely unpredictable. At the 1pm photography class, only one student had arrived on time. By 1:15, two others sauntered in. The rest came after forty-five minutes, making it pretty difficult to teach. This realization has been remedied by our new system of visiting students’ homes before class times. This is the greatest benefit of a small town- we walk up to people on the street and in the market, ask for the student, and we are lead directly to their house. I have tried to get more girls involved in the classes, but for now, must of our registrants are boys. One of the greatest frustrations for me has been that the people who I think will benefit most from the classes are the least able to attend. My beautiful neighbor Kadiatu was signed up for the 3pm photo class, and, although Maryama volunteered to watch her three-month old child, Bill, he started whimpering a few minutes into the class and soon they had both disappeared from the room. As I walked home past the youth center, I saw Mohamed, who is also supposed to be in that class. He has been working from 8am to 6pm on the construction of the center, and when I questioned his absence he explained that he cannot leave work. “Why then, did you register?” I pleaded. He shrugged and went back to smoothing cement onto the wall. I thought he should be first pick for the class since he has been so active in the creation of the center, and Kadiatu, I thought, could benefit from learning how to take pictures, especially those of her baby. Alas plans like these are broken so quickly. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that sometimes those most in need of outreach are the least likely to access it, be it free or seemingly accessible.

When we teach, we don’t just teach our students, but a cohort of unintentional guests- primary school boys who come to the barry to plan soccer with a small gourd, a woman with a baby who sits on the edge, watching, before she returns to selling okra, a group of youngsters who are complacent to stand behind me, hands on knees, and look on, learning what they can from my difficult accent. They ignore my attempts to shoo them away with various, “Li’s, and ba nya va way’s,” and a flicking motion of the hands. Yesterday the first classroom in the youth center was opened, and has been adorned with a 2-foot fluorescent light, a single outlet, a chalkboard, two long wooden benches, and the curtains that Maryama and I hung in the doorway and windows. Although it provides the illusion of privacy, when we teach, it is impossible to prevent the small fingers and eyeballs which poke through the edges, eager to absorb what is going on in this place. Our scare tactics are as useless as they were in the court barry.

At the end of the day, when we return home, we are greeted by Ramatu, bent over pot in the cooking hut and shrouded by a thick layer of smoke. If I am lucky, she will allow me to help. She teaches me, day by day, and somewhat impatiently, how to cut the krin krin, and how to peel the gourds (I am not yet ready for the weighty task of peeling the yams). She speaks to me only in Mende, although as a 13 year old I’m sure she understands my English. When she sees that my technique is poor with the peeling, or the washing, her face crunches up into a tight scowl and she tells me to go away. I usually refuse, and we continue as such, insulting each other in our respective languages. Ramatu will pull her finger across my shirt, lick it, and spit in disgust, telling me that I need to do my wash. She will point to my feet indignantly to demonstrate just how dirty I am, and try to pin down my hair behind my ears, chastising me for my lack of braids. The only time Ramatu smiles is when, after much chiding, she gets me to sing and dance her favorite pop song, which, performed in Krio, I am fairly terrible at.

The town of Gobaru is currently buzzing with the excitement of elections, and we frequently receive politicians campaigning in our home, view billboards supporting democratization, and hear advertisements and songs on the radio promoting specific candidates or parties. I used to think that Sierra Leone was unique and exceptional for its slew of pop songs which reflect political themes, but my opinion has since been altered. I have come to discover that these themes and songs are written because they have been sponsored by external (and to the extent of my knowledge, only US) organizations vying for specific candidates. What is USAID doing in rural Pujehun supporting “democracy” when what the district really needs are basic things like a clean water supply? We met with the USAID representative in Freetown at the beginning of our stay in the country and learned that the organization is absent from Pujehun altogether (which is one of the poorest districts in the country), aside from its democratization projects. The representative blamed the lack of budget money. I wonder who decides how to allocate this money, and although I cannot claim to know the precise needs and desires of the community, I think I would focus first on water, agriculture, and healthcare before sponsoring events and campaigns for a democracy which will inevitably falter in such a resource poor setting.

I still cannot reconcile my life with these giant critters who inhabit our room. They have launched a full-fledged attack. Our host brother, standing over six feet tall, can deal with most of these creatures by daylight. But after night falls Maryama and I are left to our own devices. Two nights ago, we stumbled upon a foot-long centipede (or millipede?) making its way down our wall, and as we struggled to formulate a game plan for how to deal with the beastie, we came across a man-eating spider on the opposite wall. This one was fast, and Maryam went to war. They danced around each other, the spider fleeing under the table for cover, only its long curled legs indicating its presence beneath the cracks. Maryam forced its exist with the broom and some permetherin spray (note: not convinced that permertherin spray has any potency against man-eating spiders) and the creature darted past her in a fury. But she was even more furious. They battled it out, and eventually the whack of her broom won all. The spiders’ body curled into a ball while it lay motionless on its back, and its carcass was left to the flesh-eating ants which occupy our foyer. This place has abnormally large beasties.

Still, every night, even those in which we must partake in a war of the bugs, is followed by a morning wake-up from the three-year-old Moniatu, who, screaming from behind our door, ends our slumber with “Myima, wa! Lizbet, wa!” Who created this child and who is her keeper? She giggles and screeches at any facial expression, any sound- someone so eager to laugh that you have to but make a noise and her whole world will erupt in brightness. She frolics between Maryama and I, whispering Mende (is it Mende?) in a sweet sing song voice, pinning down our messy hair and trying to feed us her food. Perhaps she is a Sierra Leonean pixie, arising from the dust of the Earth (to awake us in the morning) and returning there to sleep. Why else would this child, who is so often without clothes or braids, be so jubilant, so concerned with our welfare instead of her own? We do not know to whom Moniatu belongs, but we are learning very quickly that in this place, such information is irrelevant. In this home, she has five mothers, three fathers, and at least ten siblings, and that, I am sure, is enough.

Gooooaaaaalll!

2008-06-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

This weekend involved a lot of soccer – Saturday, I went to Gillette Stadium (also the home of the New England Patriots) with a bunch of PRISE people to watch the New England Revolution defeat Toronto FC 2-1.
We were seated in the hardcore fan section, and the game became even more exciting due to the five-year-old boys in the row behind us who stood on their chairs and shouted things like “It would be great if the referee had eyes!” and “Noooooooo!” in high-pitched voices. Sunday was the final game of Euro 2008 – Spain vs. Germany. Although I was rooting for Germany (being part German), it was a good game all around and Spain came out the victor.

During the week I went to lab. One thing a lot of people don’t realize about lab work is how many times you get things wrong before you get something right. Case in point: my PCR reaction should have amplified my DNA, but when I ran a gel no bands appeared. No good. So I spent much of last week with my postdoc trying to figure out what was wrong. It turned out we had to tweak the temperature and length of two of the cycles. Similarly, my friend purified his DNA, only to discover that there was actually no DNA there. Also no good. My dad would always remind me of Thomas Edison and the light bulb – legend has it he tried 1000 times and no light, and finally, on try 1001 – light! At least he knew what not to do.

Outside of lab, I went to Boston Tea Stop and got boba tea with Veronica and her blockmate Gracie ’11 Monday night, which made me miss my blockmate Cara ’11, who recently dropped her phone in iced tea for an extended period of time and is currently accessible solely via e-mail.

On Tuesday, PRISE’s Distinguished Speaker Series kicked off with Professor Erin O’Shea, who has too many titles for me to list here, but she received her PhD in 2 years (from M.I.T. and in Chemistry!) and is well known to Harvard undergrads for being one of the teachers of Life Sciences 1a. Her talk was about the “Mechanism of Oscillation of a Three Protein Circadian Clock”, and even though I was tired from a day at the lab, I found her talk and her groundbreaking research engaging and interesting.

The next afternoon I took a risk and ate lunch from the Chinese food truck on Oxford Street, and while I thought I was going to die, the Chicken Lo Mein was pretty good and apparently many of my friends eat from said truck daily. I also noticed a cute sign on the door of Fairchild for applying to be a TF for Life Sciences 1a, namely, that while Life Is Good, Life Sciences Is (also) Good.

On Thursday, PRISE’s Seminar Series started with a talk by our director Greg Llacer on Fellowships and Proposal Writing, with one of the main points being to know thy audience, which is important for blogging as well.

Friday was the MCB Departmental picnic, which is “the departmental event of the year” according to Brendan. The Biolabs Courtyard was filled with tents, food, and fun. The food ranged from hamburgers, hotdogs, and corn on the cob to snow cones, cornbread, cupcakes, and brownies. Many of the professors and students brought their families, and their were activities for the kids as well, including crawling through tunnels, spraying each other with water, and – my favorite – the parachute. Sadly, our picnic was cut short by a mini monsoon, but it was great to see all my PRISE friends who work in other labs, talk to others from my own lab, and play with the adorable daughter of Professor Victoria D’Souza, who taught my Freshman Seminar Unraveling HIV: One Molecule at a Time.

Friday night I headed over to the Central Square Block Party, which featured few recognizable songs, but was enjoyable nonetheless and resulted in Mass. Ave being closed for a few blocks to the dismay of the #1 bus drivers.

While my week was certainly filled, I wasn’t able to fit in everything PRISE had to offer. Saturday morning my roommate Veronica and the PRISE team headed over to Boston Commons for the first ever Boston wide Scavenger Hunt, featuring clues that led to historic and famous landmarks like Postal Square and Frog Pond, and later she and a bunch of other PRISE fellows went on a tour of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox.

Finally, this entry would not be complete without WALL•E (short for Waste Allocated Load Lifter Earth Class), a little robot who embarks on a cosmic space adventure with his robot love Eve and brings humans back to Earth. I am referring to the Disney movie WALL•E, which I saw last night and which I think is one of the best movies I have seen, (especially considering the lack of dialogue) and which you should all see. As my friend Aditi ’09 commented, when WALL•E is fully charged, he makes the same sound a Mac does when it loads up, much to the delight of the audience (Yes, I am a Mac user).

Monday Mondays

2008-06-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

“As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both.”

-Bono*

The first day of any new job can be scary. Can I handle the work? Will I get along with my coworkers? Will the receptionist immediately develop a stern hatred for me, thus providing for numerous awkward encounters a la The Janitor from Scrubs? Needless to say, such questions swarmed my head the first time I entered Wenner Media Headquarters, located in the heart of Midtown Manhattan at 1290 Avenue of the Americas (or 1290 6th Avenue for those New York natives reading in). After going through several rounds of temporary ID’s and briefly meeting two out of seemingly countless bosses, I was ushered into a conference room straight out of 1979, complete with faux wood paneling and poorly hidden electrical outlets (apparently Rolling Stone first occupied the building in 1991, so I have no clue as to why the conference rooms resemble the Brady Bunch house). For your convenience, I've included a few pics from around the office.** This would be the first of many weekly sales and marketing meetings, which start promptly at 9:50am every Monday.

First note to self: don’t be late on Mondays. Even though interns are relegated to sitting along the windowsill when the chairs inevitably fill up, it’s always good to be in the know regarding the week’s sales goals. Or at least, and this is according to my bosses’ bosses’ boss, I should assume so.

After the meeting, which lasted about 40 minutes and ruined my posture for life as I struggled to get comfortable on the windowsill, work began. As I would figure out after three weeks into the job, Mondays are all pretty similar. The interns head to the Rolling Stone library (pictured above, and yes, there are stacks of free magazines ripe for the picking) and start searching through copies of competing publications for various types of adds sorted by product, targeted age groups, etc. Then we compile massive spreadsheets for the higher-ups so they can see how Blender handled the Sony client, how many pages Spin dedicated to in-house promotions, and what cool new scratch-and-sniff fragrance Details included in a fold out. Personally, I’m partial to covering the Maxim and FHM spreadsheets. For the articles, obviously.

Mix in a few RSVP confirmation calls, update some complimentary copy lists, and maybe help a panicking editorial intern research Amy Winehouse’s latest crack bust, and you have a fairly standard Monday. Fairly standard, fairly boring. Three hours into my very first day, and I was praying for lunch hour to arrive, hoping that some change in scenery could save my brain from boredom and my eyes from spreadsheets.

I needed some respite from the monotony. But where? How? Who?

Thankfully, New York City is a place filled to the brim with Harvard influence, and friends from school aren’t hard to find. Every summer the undergrads of America’s oldest and most crimson university head about 250 miles south to find jobs, fight for housing, and pay $6.75 for a half-gallon of 2% milk. So when I found out that my good friend Teddy Coleman, first chair on Harvard’s chess team and all-around swell guy, was working in Manhattan this summer, I was elated, if a bit unsurprised (I’ve include a picture of Teddy for your convenience; feel free to approach him on campus any time during the school year, and make sure to tell him I sent you). I was even more pleased to find that his office sits only a few blocks away from Rolling Stone headquarters, making our weekly lunch meetings both convenient and inevitable.

It took us a few lunches to find the restaurant that best suited our needs. After two weeks, however, we settled upon a Chinese place connected to the building housing Rolling Stone. The combination of cheap entrees, questionable ingredients, and ornery chefs serving the food up hot was just too good to pass by. Expect to here more about Teddy and his wacky adventures in future entries.

After lunch it was back to the grind. One great thing about Mondays, if there’s anything great about Mondays, is the end. Such oppressive boredom can’t last forever. Luckily for me, my first day ended on a rather high note when the Intern Coordinator commented on how quickly I was catching on. Now, most interns will tell you, and I’m no exception, that their jobs aren’t the most glamorous in the world. They work for their respective companies diligently, often without payment (much like yours truly), and can expect little in the way of congratulations or thanks. From time to time, however, an employer will mercifully throw old Joe Intern a compliment, thus brightening the day and ensuring that a career counselor somewhere gets their wings. It won’t be too flowery, and they might get your name flat out wrong, but they noticed you nonetheless and took two seconds to distinguish you from the copying machine and coffee maker. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what really keeps us going.

Tune in next time when I cover more from around the office, highlight the dangers of trying new places for lunch, and reveal why gentlemen (and interns) prefer Tuesdays.

-Tao

*The author is not a paid representative of “U2,” although he did find the South Park episode that uncovered Bono’s true identity very, very funny.

**Due to copyright law, certain parts of the office and non of the artwork present therein can be displayed online. Unfortunately, that means you won't be seeing any one of several Beatles murals, a blouse-wearing Prince portrait, or an image of Jimi Hendrix with a guitar bridge for a spine. This, of course, does not mean that I don't enjoy the artwork.

London, or Why There Will Be Bumper Cars at My Wedding if I Have Anything to Say About It

2008-06-27T03:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a 2-hour delay on the Eurostar on the way in and the free one-way ticket offered as compensation, what would have been a whirlwind weekend for Jack's ('10) 21st birthday turned into a 5-day (Harvard in the) UK fest.

Before Elsa and I realized we could extend our trip, we designed the ultimate 24-hour tour.

How to Visit London in a Day:

1. Sleep in

2. Borough Market for Lunch. (Imagine olive stands, wheels of cheese under a flame and toasted bread to catch the run-off, artisanal tomato farmers, organic produce vendors, lines 50 people deep for chorizo sandwiches, freshly grilled coquilles st. jacques--and samples of everything.)

3. Walk along the South Bank, past the Globe Theater, above the Thames on the Millenium Bridge, towards St. Paul's Cathedral.
4. Tube it to Kensington to stroll through Hyde Park.
5. Run into an old high school friend (named Emily, perhaps) at the Goethe Institute for a Fete de la Musique Concert.
5. A hearty London curry for dinner.
6. Night on the town on Savile Row to fulfill the undying Annie in you.

That was day one. For the next 24 hours, after remarkably authentic dim sum in London's chinatown--beef tripe and chicken feet? no problem--real life disappeared for a while. Picture Romeo and Juliet meets Disney Land all to yourself meets the British royal treatment. (Side note: Actually all of this summer has been pretty surreal, so I guess that would make last weekend the mid-epic dream sequence.)

Elsa and I bought our tickets for the Stratford-upon-Avon line (Shakespeare reference #3, I know) and as we turned the corner to wait for the train, we stumbled upon the entire troupe of the Din and Tonics. They were on the floor waiting to head to the party as well. Apparently Jack's parents secretly arranged for them to fly out from Luxembourg where their worldwide tour had brought them so they could perform at the party. Surprise! Ridiculous.

An entire entourage of Harvard in Europe kids eventually piled onto the train with us. After about an hour and a half, we arrived at Notley Abbey, the former home of Sir Laurence Olivier that dates back to the 12th century.... Basically a place that seemed as accessible two years ago to a girl from Briarwood, Queens as Buckingham Palace.

The party itself was no big deal. It only set the highest precedent for my (hypothetical) wedding and no fête will ever live up. Thanks, Jack.

There was a giant chess set in the lawn, cricket set up in the garden, cocktails in the courtyard. A ballgown or a tux and an elaborate Venetian mask was the norm. (The giant part of the fancy mask memo failed to make it across the Atlantic.) The Dins performed to a mostly Oxford, Cambridge, Eaton and Harvard crowd. Fireworks were the equivalent of the seventh inning stretch between courses 6 and 7 of our seven-course dinner. Afterward, there was dancing with a live band; coffee, tea and chocolate truffles; and BUMPER CARS. Bumper. Cars.

I will never get over it.

The next morning, after sleeping on an airbed in the refectory (and hearing the word "duvet" more times than I'd ever heard theretofore in my life) and enjoying a tasty croissant breakfast buffet spread, I headed back to London with Elsa, Jack, Brian '09, Zander '07/08, Xandra '08, and Tali '10. Instead of returning to Paris that afternoon, Elsa and I cashed in on our Eurostar vouchers since my boss had intensely overestimated how much time I needed off for a "weekend" in London and her elusive internship in the ministry of foreign affairs still had yet to start. We pubbed it with everyone and crashed at Jack's.

The last full day in London was spent on a day trip to Oxford. The transportation was ridiculously convenient. 12 pounds roundtrip on the Oxford Tube bus that leaves every 15 minutes and got us there in under two hours. Very reminscent of my beloved Chinatown Bus to New York.

Oxford felt like home plus more tradition, more history, and more of an accent. The late Toscanini's of Harvard Square even met its match: The Queens Lane Coffeeshop that claims to be the oldest coffee house in Europe, est. 1654. The visit furthered my conviction that studying abroad post-grad rather than studying in Paris next spring is what I should do. The longer and longer I spend in Paris, the more I realize that this city will be here forever and ever (it's not like Prague or Berlin whose intrigue derives largely from its transcient limbo status), while Harvard's only around for two more years. I do love Paris, but I also really miss Harvard and its quirks. (We'll see though. There's something about taking my French Lit courses in Paris. Something like common sense. [Wow, I really love parentheses.])

Wednesday morning, I became one of those people who commute into work in Paris from London--although I'm not even entirely sure that breed of people exists. Elsa and I took the 6:55 back and I ran straight to the office only to find out there that the slideshow training had been canceled at the last minute. I asked if there was anything that I could do since I was already in the office but the boss said I should just go home. Great.

Today I finally restarted at the IHT, and they moved me to my new post in the Editorial and Business Newsroom. Now, instead of organizing the different editions for the day and moderating user comments (ethically and morally draining), I'm responsible for constructing slideshows, publishing articles on the business page of the IHT website, finding appropriate pictures for the text, etc etc. It's not exactly the most hands-on internship, but there's definitely a ton to pick up from the job directly or indirectly. Ex: My trainer is a student at the American University in Paris and I got a gig freelancing restaurant reviews for the AUP school newspaper. Chouette. Probably going to head back to the Basque restaurant in the 11th that I've been dreaming of for two years.

The weeks ahead bring the arrival of Alina '10, Andres '10, and Sanders '10; Giuli's birthday dinner at Le Racing tomorrow night; a weekend at Elsa's house in the 17th; a Mika concert on the 4th; hopefully Globespotters article #2; and Corsica from the 11th to the 14th. Magic.

Liberia

2008-06-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

Reality set in when I saw the gun. After nearly 30 hours of travel and layovers, my flight landed at 3:30 am on Monday in Robertson Int’l Airport. I was being escorted from the airport to my apartment by a driver, a colleague from the Ministry of Health, and one of the President’s armed security guards. We made our way through the countryside along the 35 km long road leading to Monrovia in the dead of night. An armed escort was a precaution against gang violence at night, a rare yet horrifying vestige if this country’s war-torn past.

I have been shielded from further exposure to that aspect of Liberia since my arrival. I am living with 15 other interns from Harvard’s various schools who are placed in various ministries in Liberia. The Liberian government has been incredibly generous to us: we live in spacious apartments with fully furnished rooms, running water, regular electricity, a cook, domestic aid, and even a balcony, within a walled, guarded compound. We even have a minibus that transports us to and from work each day.

I will be working in the Liberian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare this summer. It is one of the more functional ministries in the Liberian government. The government has recently passed a landmark National Health Policy and begun to implement its resultant National Health Plan to provide a basic package of health services (BHPS) to all citizens. While progress on traditional health indicators may be decades away, the Liberian government has finally begun the remarkable rebuilding of the health infrastructure, which was utterly destroyed during the civil wars.

My first couple days at work have been fairly slow. The senior staff is in Berlin this week, so there is very little motivation for most people to do anything. There is a fair number of American expats here. The Clinton Foundation has its own office within the MoHSW building with about 8 employees, and there are 3 other summer interns: 1 student from the Kennedy School and 2 students from Yale Law. I will most likely be working on a project dealing with HIV/TB co-infection once the senior staff gets back next week. In the meantime, I am reading through health policies, doing some random tasks, and getting used to how things work (or don’t) in the ministry.

In other news, some other interns and I ended up meeting with President Bush's brother, Neil, yesterday. He was visiting Liberia brokering some business deal, and we caught him coming out of his meeting in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He sat down and talked with us a little while. All I can say is that he was very much a Bush.

Learning to get pushed around (Week 1, out of order)

2008-06-25T00:20:00.000-07:00

**This post was written June 15^th , but couldn’t be posted because of *ahem* blogspot inaccessibility (see previous post on Blogspot). Also, pictures don't really correlate that well to blog, they will in future ones.

I arrived in Shanghai on June 7th for my first trip to China. My flight from Chicago to Shanghai was delayed by six hours and I was afraid the woman from China Universal Asset Management (CUAM) who was supposed to pick me up would no longer be there. After the other Harvard students were all picked up by their respective hosts, I still could not find mine. So, I decided to take a taxi. No big deal, right? I soon discovered the Chinese I had taken for a year was not nearly sufficient enough to explain my destination. Luckily, my dad had texted me the hotel address earlier and some of the airport staff could read and translate the address for the driver. He called the hotel to ask for more details, and we were on our way. Thus began one of the scarier car rides in my life.

When driving in Shanghai, lanes are vague suggestions and for many taxis so are stoplights. I discovered this on the way to my hotel that first night as well as on numerous other rides I have taken through the city. I also discovered the concept of personal space is a bit different here. Little nudges in the back, shoulder bumps strong enough to knock my unaware self over, and the shrinkage of my personal bubble space by approximately 2 feet pretty well describe public experiences on the metro, at malls, or anywhere busy- which in Shanghai, is everywhere. Learning how to accept being, quite literally, pushed around is definitely necessary in order to go with the flow and successfully make it onto a metro car during rush hour. So far, driving and spatial assumptions were pretty different. Would everything be shaken up?

The building I'm working in and my co-worker, Shreya '10

My first day at work showed me they wouldn’t be. CUAM is just like other financial firms in the U.S. complete with amazing views of the city, elegant conference rooms, and late, hard working individuals. I have spent a lot of my time here paying attention to how oil and food prices are moving and giving my thoughts on the matters of global inflation, interest rates, economic growth, subsidies, etc. to the rest of the department. In a weird way, I am coming to love oil. After learning how to use Bloomberg a world of information was opened up and I went from just analyzing daily movements to seeing a much bigger picture. Talks with the analysts at CUAM have given me a really global view of the world’s markets and are causing me to see things in a way I haven’t before. All my experiences in Shanghai are slowly causing me to do this. I already think getting pushed often is normal.

Me at a restaurant eating hotpot chicken bones- with a plastic glove on my hand and slurping juice out of the center...

Things I learned this past week

2008-06-23T17:57:00.000-07:00

1. Cellist David Finckel, of the Emerson String Quartet, travels so much with his cello that it has its own series of frequent flier cards, under the name Cello Finckel.

2. David Finckel's wife, the pianist Wu Han, is actually not as intimidating as she seems in all her press photos. When I picked them up at the airport, she was absolutely nice and charming and even gave me a hug when I left.

3. The pianist Richard Goode is mostly a vegetarian. He and his wife Marcia met while performing the Franck Piano Quintet together, although Richard's not a fan of the first movement (he finds it a bit gushingly excessive). Also, although his contract says that he's supposed to have apple juice in his dressing room, he actually prefers orange juice.

Richard at his piano selection (they usually have 2-3 instruments to choose from)

With Richard and wife Marcia backstage after the concert

4. Violinist Ed Dusinberre of the Takacs Quartet is an avid soccer fan. The other day, he showed up at rehearsal and immediately mumbled that he was 10 minutes into an amazing soccer game (Russia v. Netherlands). "Oh, the sacrifices we make for art."

5. Jeffrey Kahane is actually really short. Actually, so is David Zinman. Hrm.

My days lately have consisted mostly of going to rehearsals and performances, which has been worlds better than sitting in front of a computer screen all day. For those of you who want to follow along, we're actually streaming the first ten days of the festival online at Medici TV. It's pretty cool, but it's also been a bit nerve-wracking these past few days, setting up interviews and wrangling backstage controls and such.

One last photo: me and composer and Harvard alum and former BachSoc conductor John Harbison! The Aspen Festival Orchestra just premiered his piece Suite from the Great Gatsby, after Harbison's opera, last night.

What's up with the Weekend?

2008-06-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

How was this weekend? Friday night, I got to go see the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall, featuring Amanda Palmer from The Dresden Dolls as part of their Edgefest week. PRISE had bought us five rows on the second balcony, and it was an eye-opening experience. For the first half of the concert, the Pops played from The Planets as images from NASA flashed across the screen, and the second half featured Palmer and vocalists and actors from the Boston Conservatory and Dresden Dolls. On my way there, I noticed that the T stations are literally covered with iTunes ads.

Saturday night, my roommate and a bunch of other PRISE fellows went to the Baobob Dakar concert at Somerville Theater. In case you’re wondering, Orchestra Baobob is “one of Africa’s great iconic bands, creators of one of the world’s most sublime and truly distinctive pop sounds.” That’s one of the really cool parts of PRISE – we get to experience the sights and sounds of Boston – and shows that come to Boston - for free!

Earlier, I was actually in lab (Yes, it was a Saturday) running a gel, and went out to lunch (Chipotle!) with a few other PRISE fellows who work down the hall from me in Bauer. The view from my desk at lab, which is on the second floor of Sherman-Fairchild, is really pretty! Luckily, the weather in Boston has been perfect the last few days (not sticky and hot). Yesterday, my postdoc Brendan (who is awesome!) and I went to the Biolabs Courtyard for free pizza and beer during the MCB Happy Hour (I only partook in the pizza part ☺ ) and watched some impromptu volleyball and the kids of some of the grad students and postdocs running around in the grass.

I then headed over to buy a fridge with my roommate form the Habitat for Humanity Sale – I had no idea they sold stuff at the beginning of summer, too – and then we went and sat by the Charles. After, we headed over to our entryway meeting where our proctor bought us Felipe’s and we somewhat unsuccessfully tried to learn each others names.

Sunday, I slept in ☺ and went to Bertucci’s to eat dinner and celebrate Jack ‘11’s birthday. Tomorrow it’s back to lab and another week of neurons!

Finally Home!

2008-06-21T05:54:00.000-07:00

After more than a week of transport, I have finally reached my village, Gobaru. It is smaller than I anticipated, but to my delight is connected to three other villages by winding dirt roads and small footbridges that lead to the other sides of the dividing rivers. We came to Gobaru on Monday evening, and were greeted in the darkness by most of our neighbors (including a large group of eager toddlers who were crawling over each other to meet their new friends). Our home is next to the Youth Center, and is shared with a large family, which includes Moniatu (age three), who likes to sneak into our room at all hours of the day and observe us, giggle, and crawl under the mosquito net with us when we take naps.

I share a room with Maryam Janani (class of ’09), who has been renamed Maryama (the Mende version of Maryam). My naming was a bit more difficult, as Elizabeth is long, hard to pronounce, and doesn’t have a Mende counterpart. However, as part of our project, we have been visiting the schools in the area, and it was a great honor to receive a naming ceremony from the ladies of the Holy Rosary Secondary School in Pujehun. We have been speaking at several school assemblies, but it was at this particular school, beneath a cotton tree, that the audience voted, decided, and proclaimed my new name. I was made to stand and pronounce in Mende, “Nya bea mia Yaima!” to a crowed of young girls who erupted in cheers. Now, when Maryam and I walk through the villages we hear the cries “Maryama and Yaima!” from front porches, backyards, windows, and passersby. It is quite a warm welcome to our new home.
It is definitely an adjustment living in the village (as opposed to the cities we have been in so far), but one that I am starting to love. Our access to internet, electricity, and running water is fairly non-existent, but the pace of life here is slow, and we spend hours on end just visiting people and enjoying these friendships. There is a warmth and communalism here that is difficult to find elsewhere.

During the evenings, the young women in the neighborhood cram onto our bed and share the light from our single, forty-watt bulb which hangs limply against the concrete wall and casts an orange glow around the room. Like moths, they have followed us to the light. Our small, lackluster space is filled with vibrant, studious women, smiling and giggling in spite of their exams which will commence with the dawn. The peace and stillness of Gobaru is infiltrated by the cacophony of this generator, installed (much to my dismay) on our second day in the village. The result is this light bulb, and a noise that rumbles like a jumbo jet that is perpetually in take-off next to my window. I am angry at this generator. Angry at the dust that it kicks up in my nieghbors’ faces. Angry that it makes it impossible to speak and congregate outside our home. Angry that it draws so much attention to a lifestyle I try my hardest to avoid. It does, however, provide a much-needed resource for these students who need so desperately to study in a village that has no other power source, and for that, I must be thankful.

Our second night in Gobaru, Maryam and I woke in terror as we heard feet shuffling through our house and outside our window. Cell phones at bay, we attempted to call everyone we knew to come save us from the thief and murderer who had broken into our house. Why didn’t we change the locks sooner? Why didn’t we learn the number for the police office? Is there a police office? We realized after a forty-five minutes of nauseating fear, desperate text messages, and silent prayers that there was light streaming through the cracks in shutters, and it wasn’t (as we had assumed) the middle of the night, but six in the morning. The noises we were hearing were normal, because this is when people start the day in Gobaru. For those who do not have the luxury of a generator, days begin and end with the sun. That means people sleep by 7pm, and wake up by six. This schedule will wreak havoc on my circadian rhythms. Nonetheless, we have learned to take the noises of the morning as an alarm clock instead of an intruder alert.

Most of this week was spent settling into our house, meeting with village chiefs, publicizing the project (including a radio interview!), meeting with community members, and listening to their ideas, questions and concerns. I have never met a chief before so I wasn’t sure how to approach that particular circumstance, but the chiefs we have encountered thus far have been kind, insightful, and very helpful for the project. The Chief of Gobaru has even allowed us to use the community pavilion for our classes until construction on the youth center is finished. The students we have met are also very inspiring- so full of hope and ideas for partnership.
The realities in this place, however, remain daunting. As we drive slowly down these jagged roads, Auntie Umu points out every home that was burnt down or destroyed during the war. The Youth Center itself was formerly the Ministry of Education, but has been completely gutted by the rebels (leaving gaping holes where the wrought iron windows were pulled from the walls). It seems that every day, there is a new funeral procession which passes by our house on Yoni Road, and just yesterday an infant died in the compound next to ours. In the Holy Rosary Secondary School, two hundred girls enter the middle school, but less than twelve graduate from high school every year. I write these things not for sensationalism, but because these are the overwhelming realities with which I am coming to terms.

I am still searching for comfort and familiarity in my new home. This process is not at all aided by the fist-sized spiders which seem to fancy my bedroom (and send me shrieking for help when I find them), and the rice and stew (which is a little bit more hot pepper than it is stew); but on a whole, I am inspired every day by the students and community members I speak to, and I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to learn and work here.

A Moveable Feast: Paris and Le Fooding

2008-06-20T00:58:00.000-07:00

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor the right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. (A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, p. 58)

When Cat came to visit, she gave me four things: a Zabar's mug to remind me of home every morning, heart-shaped measuring spoons, rubber measuring cups, and Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

In one fitful, insomniac night earlier this week (plagued by bouts of nausea, I didn't sleep much on Monday or Tuesday), I plowed through the entirety of Feast. (To be honest it was my third attempt--the first two were six years ago when I flipped through the French translation Mme Sébag had given me for my 8th grade graduation. But reading Hemingway in French seemed self-defeating.) It's Hemingway's account of his ex-pat years in Paris in the 20s and 30s. He talks about the struggles of being a budding writer, he describes his circle of friends (no one important really: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald) and he analyzes what it means to be in love with (and in) Paris.

I loved the book like I love Paris. On the whole, it's an easy read with long stretches of uneventful wandering. But there are these magical moments that just grabbed me and I can't shake them and they became the entirety of the book once it became a memory. Paris is like that--the moments of absolute seduction become the only things I know about it--so that even though those transcendent moments are few and far between when I'm actually living there, whenever I'm not in Paris, all I dream about is returning.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. " (211)

Anyway, aside from illness-induced literary marathons, this week in Paris brought Max, another old high school friend, a night of dancing at Club Rex where I ran into Avis '08 (Harvard people are everywhere), a pseudo picnic in the Jardin du Luxembourg, dinner with my old au pair family, a comfortable (if uneventful) week at work, and an intern lunch with (/narrated by?) the astute Managing Editor Alison Smale:

"We were at Checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin and they pushed me into a small corridor. Somehow an East Berliner followed me and we walked together to the other end. A pimply youth checked my passport, let me through, and then checked the East Berliner's. She must have been high class because it was stamped saying that she could leave, but not until November 17th. It was November 9th.

'You can't go,' the pimply youth said to the East Berliner.
'Can't you see what's happening all around you?' I said. 'November 9th, November 17th, who cares?'
'OK,' the pimply youth said and stepped aside.

And that was how I crossed into West Berlin with the first East Berliner and that was how the Berlin wall fell."

Being a foreign correspondent may not be glamorous or money making, but she does make it seem pretty perfect. My only worry (well one of many) is how much being a journalist is something you can learn or whether it's just something you naturally are. I don't think I'm a "natural" journalist--I'm pretty shy, not the fastest writer in the world, and my memory for names and places is limited. But can that change with time and training? Probably. Plus, for the kind of journalism I dream of doing--longer feature pieces that are less time-sensitive, my not-so-aggressive disposition (see picture) poses less of a problem. We'll see.

[Seriously, I couldn't have timed it better if I tried:] Oh MAN! Just as I was writing about how I hoped the first article I wrote for the IHT would get published, my gmail notifier binged with an email from the reporter in charge of Globespotters.

"Hi Rebecca,
I've just edited your post and placed it on Globespotters. Thanks for your swift response. I'm writing a story myself and don't have time yet to format the illustration that you sent on , but will do it later today. Let's talk later when I'm done with my story.

doreen"

Ahh!!! It's about a giant Parisian picnic put on by an organization called "Le Fooding" (fooding- food + feeling) that'll take place this Sunday on the Esplanade of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Although its mission to make food more hip, more sexy and more fun may be dated (um The Naked Chef, Top Chef, etc etc), Le Fooding’s goal to shake up traditional cuisine remains a good one.

From pitching to interviewing (in French!) to writing, I had 24 hours to turn in the article. It's really just a brief little blog entry, but still! I remember reading about Le Fooding in Cambridge and wishing I could participate. I'm still actually going to have to miss it (heading out to London tonight), but writing about it is just as good (if not better!).

Woo! Published in Paris! http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/travel/globespotters

Coming back to Cambridge

2008-06-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

“Actually, I’m not a particle physicist anymore. I’m an un-particle physicist now”

Getting a laugh out of his audience, Professor Howard Georgi described his current research as part of his remarks to the PRISE (Program for Research in Science and Engineering) Class of 2008. Our inaugural dinner Monday night also featured Director Greg Llacer and (now the official!) Dean of Harvard College Evelyn Hammonds. Over 100 students chomped down on some pretty delicious food as we kicked off what will be an awesome summer.

The days before I spent shopping at Target and CVS for all those little things I’d forgotten to pack, frequenting Berryline, Chipotle, and abp, and of course, moving all my stuff from storage to my new suite with my roommate Veronica ’11. This was by no means an easy task, but we have pretty sweet rooms in Leverett G Tower along with the rest of the PRISE fellows.

How did I get here? Well, on one hand, after finals I flew down to Washington, D.C. to help out my brother’s Science Olympiad Team at Nationals, and got to spend time with my parents (they were chaperones) and the team touring the Smithsonian museums, national monuments, and meeting my Senator and Representative. After the competition I flew home to Tucson, Arizona and basked in the over one hundred degree weather for another week, and then flew back to Boston Friday night – luckily, the day before the Red Line started using shuttles between Park and Kendall.

On the other hand, I started working in a Biophysics research lab at the end of my sophomore year of high school. My work focused on convection cell patterns, a kind of “bacterial ballet”, in Bacillus subtilis, a bacterium closely related to anthrax. My PI accepted a professorship at Cambridge University while I was still in high school, and in one of those moments that’s makes you realize “It’s a small world after all”, my next door neighbor in Leverett happens to be the Harvard student who worked at his lab in Cambridge over last summer while I was at the partner lab at the University of Arizona.

This summer, I am working in the lab of Dr. Josh Sanes, a Professor of MCB. His lab focuses on synaptogenesis, the process by which neurons, or nerve cells, form synapses. I will be working with a postdoctoral student on a project studying two kinases – SAD-A and SAD-B – which are enzymes that might play a role in the way neurons polarize, or form processes called axons and dendrites that help pass signals along. Without these signals, we would not be able to walk, talk, think, speak…you get the point.

Since PRISE just started this week, everyone is still getting into the swing of things – it’s weird to be on campus working in a lab without the flurry of other extra-curriculars, problem sets, and looming midterms – but I’m looking forward to having the time to run along the Charles and spend hours talking with other undergrads about our research projects over meals in Dudley House.

And the masses descend upon us

2008-06-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

I swear, the population of Aspen has quadrupled in the past week. What were once quaint streets now teem with cars, bikes, and plenty of hazardous pedestrians. The Food and Wine Classic has brought fireworks, mouth-watering smells, and thousands of foodies from the pros such as Bobby Flay to the amateur upper-class connoisseur (I say upper-class because, well, let's just say the cheapest ticket for a few morsels of high-end deliciousness runs somewhere around $300.). In addition, the music festival's 750+ students have all mostly arrived in the past three days, not to mention the beginning of the summer tourist season - this is probably the first of many times I will mention this summer how much I utterly despise driving.

Oh, to be young again...

But at least I got a new car! Yes, it's a shiny 2008 Chevy Trailblazer, quite a nice contrast to the pre-1997 Previa that I had. That said, I still prefer biking and walking. The festival owns about 300 bikes that they dole out on a first-come first-serve basis, and I've been dallying my way around town and the trails. A few days ago, I hiked around Maroon Lake and saw the famous Maroon Bells; two days ago I hiked my way up Aspen Mountain, and just a few hours ago, I made my way up the rocky cliffs surface of Red Butte.

The Maroon Bells as seen from Maroon Lake

A panoramic view of Aspen from the top of Aspen Mountain

The sunset from Aspen Mountain

Another view of Maroon Bells from the top of Red Butte

Red Butte

The physical activity is a nice therapy for all of the menial office work that I've been doing thus far. Perhaps I've just never really been exposed to the amount of compiling/photocopying/collating/stapling that goes on in the real world - I mean, I have been shut away in labs and classrooms (and the occasional fancy wedding or party violin gig) for most of my improperly short money-making career. We've so far been taking rehearsal and performance information entered into ArtsVision, our nifty database, and been formatting the information into an itinerary on a Word document. After a few rounds of proofing, we print the itineraries and distribute them to about 15 different people. It's times like these where I wonder why the festival didn't just hire a compsci nerd who could create a button that would automatically format the information that's already in ArtsVision into an itinerary. That way, they could totally cut down on the number of summer staff that they needed, and save a whole ton of money every year providing housing and compensation for everyone. Oy.

All in all, though, it's been great. I love being paid to be out here, and once the artists get here, it'll be like we're getting paid to attend all these world-class concerts and rehearsals of some of the world's most famous musicians (for all you fans, Joshua Bell arrived this afternoon). We actually had our first airport pickup yesterday - Anders Hillborg (more like Ahnduhz Heelbourg - gotta put on that thick Swedish accent!) arrived yesterday on his heavily delayed flight with his wife and son. Jessica, another Artist Liaison, and I met them at the airport, helped them file a missing bag report when one of their suitcases didn't show up, helped them get a rental car, and took them to their condo. It was cute - they asked about breakfast places, tennis courts, and all those other semi-random necessities of life.

Finally, a quick word about the weather: Wednesday morning it snowed. Not just a few flakes falling on your jacket, but full-service flurries. Midday, with the sun shining, it was probably 80 degrees. This morning they opened up the ski slopes on Aspen mountain. My roommate went snowboarding in her swimsuit. And we all thought Cambridge was quirky.

"All the News That Fits"

2008-06-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

“Well, we're big rock singers/We got golden fingers/And we're loved everywhere we go..... (that sounds like us)/We sing about beauty and we sing about truth/At ten-thousand dollars a show..... (right)/We take all kinds of pills that give us all kind of thrills/But the thrill we've never known/Is the thrill that'll gitcha when you get your picture/On the cover of the Rolling Stone.”

With these words (penned by non other than Shel Silverstein), Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show achieved both chart-topping success and their long-standing dream: their faces on the cover of music’s most respected publication, Rolling Stone Magazine. Like the good doctor and his band of medical musicians, I’ve long fantasized about my picture on the front of this legendary bi-weekly. As I moved further towards adulthood and reality, however, I discovered a few key details holding me back from said dream. First and foremost, I’m no rockstar, at least not the kind with Top 40 potential; I doubt three years of concert handbells experience qualifies me to open for The White Stripes. I’m also no famous actor or comedian, one of the rare exceptions The Stone makes for their cover. Lastly, I’m not photogenic. Guess that counts me out for a potential gig as Mariah Carey’s arm candy whenever she makes her next cover.

Taking these various epiphanies in stride, I’ve changed my dreams significantly. I don’t want to just be on the cover, I want to be the guy who chooses who’s on the cover. When I checked the company’s website in late December for job openings, though, “benevolent dictator” didn’t show up on the openings page, so I had to go with the next best thing: summer intern. A few emails later, and my resume and cover letter were in the hands of Rolling Stone’s internship coordinator, my name thrown into the ring for a spot assisting the editors of my favorite magazine. Sort of.

See, what I didn’t realize until much, much later is that Rolling Stone (or rather, Wenner Media LLC, its parent company) offers several different types of internships at its various publications. Let this experience stand as my first of many lessons to come when applying for summer jobs: ALWAYS CLARIFY AS TO THE EXACT NATURE OF WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING. Unbeknownst to me, the powers that be assigned me to the Marketing/Advertising branch of Rolling Stone, not really where I imagined myself working for two and a half months. Just to give a quick spoiler, this mixup hasn’t ruined my summer. If anything, it’s opened my mind to new experiences and multiple aspects of magazine publication. I don’t care if you’re a movie reviewer who hates numbers, it’s important to know how the people in Marketing insure you get that nice paycheck every month. Obviously my duties are different than those of an editorial intern, but there is a good bit of overlap.

Before I delve into the finer points of being the low man on the publishing totem pole, I’ve decided to fill my first blog entry with some vital background info regarding both Rolling Stone Magazine and myself. Growing up in a small town, I had to rely on movies to learn life’s essential lessons: never talk to strangers, be punctual, and sit facing the door in case someone from a rival mob family enters with bad intentions. So coming into this summer, I thought I pretty much had my bases covered. Two weeks in, though, I’ve come to think New York might just teach me a few new pointers in this wonderful game of life. It’s a pretty decent setting which also happens to mimic the plot of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous: aspiring young journalist takes on the world and achieves fame despite his naivety in this big, big universe. A few key aspects, however, have shifted in the past 30 years: rock sold out, rap rolled in, and you can forget about an editorial career in this economy. Thanks a bunch, Kate Hudson.

As for my employer, Wenner Media, a quick glance at Wikipedia yields a fairly comprehensive history. Rolling Stone was founded in 1967 by modern media-mogul Jann Wenner (shown at the right in 1979), who launched the publication after borrowing $7500 from family and friends. Wenner described his magazine as containing “all the news that fits,” a phrase that has since become The Stone’s motto and the title of this particular blog entry. Starting with the first cover, which featured John Lennon, the magazine caught the public’s attention much more effectively than a multitude of competing publications. Such notoriety came about in large part due to the advent of The Rolling Stone Interview, an excellent source of insight for fans about artists who might otherwise remain hush. Wenner became famous for discovering talent and launched the careers of such journalistic icons as photographer Annie Leibovitz, gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson, and filmmaker Cameron Crowe (who began contributing to the magazine at age 15). Wenner is also largely responsible for transforming the roll of magazine covers from catchy selling points to profound cultural statements (although the two roles are rarely mutually exclusive). In more recent years, Wenner Media acquired both Men’s Journal and Us Weekly, pushing both the company and its founder to the forefront of newsstand dominance. Obviously there’s a lot to live up to if I’ve got any chance of taking over someday.

Now that you have all* the necessary background, I suppose it’s time for a disclaimer: for my soon-to-be loyal readers, I ask only that you look at everything as objectively as possible despite any sensationalism on my part. If I ever sound frustrated with those menial tasks plaguing us interns, remember that I’m working for the universe’s coolest magazine and those tedious assignments go towards producing said publication. If I ever go off the deep end with an inflated sense of power and self-importance, remember that I am just an intern. Everyone clear? Great.

Next week I’ll go in-depth about what exactly I do from day-to-day, the people I work with, and the importance of having a lunch buddy. Oh, and you might even get some pictures from around the office. Excited yet?

-Tao

*In the context of this and each future blog entry, “all” is entirely up to the discretion and fancy of David Thomas Tao, II.

The beginning...

2008-06-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

My host in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Madame Fo, tells me that

"here, there is no such thing as Aunts and Uncles, cousins, nieces, or
nephews. Here, Every person is a brother or a sister, every woman is a
mother; every man a father."

Her statement resonates the truth of what I have experienced this far into my journey (which is only the very beginning of my first chapter in this country). There is a family and a community that has been open to me here, and even during my transit through London. I have been adopted in a mode of inconceivable generosity, and for this I am eternally grateful!

I was in transit between East Aurora, NY and Gobaru SL when I met Auntie Maggie, and untie Umu in Uncle Josiah's London flat. They are Sierra Leonean citizens who have been scattered across the globe, and have been kind enough to take me in. Auntie Hannah, who has committed her life to empowering and honoring women doing grassroots around the world, reminds me every day that

"if a woman cannot do it, then it cannot be done."

She tells us of an award ceremony in which she honored a principle from a rural school district in SL who taught throughout the country's civil war, when most left. "If we weren't doing this work, would this woman ever have been recognized for all that she has done? Certainly not. This work is what keeps the world going. It (and the women who carry it out) are irreplaceable." This wisdom was the best I could carry with me to Gobaru, SL, a place which has the highest maternal mortality in the world, a place which struggles with teenage pregnancy (53 girls dropped of the secondary school in the community this year alone due to pregnancy), a place in which men outnumber women in university almost 20:1 in the sciences, 3:1 in humanities, but most importantly a place where the ability, spirit, and compassion of women (and men too!) is immeasurable. I will be working with Auntie Umu (the director of the NGO Saving Lives through Alternative Options), two Harvard Students (Maryam Janani, and Amy Wu), and four students from th nearby University of Njala, with the same goal that Auntie Hannah speaks of- to recognize the abilities and talents of youth in the community (especially the young women), giving them a safe and empowering space in which to work and learn, seek help physically, mentally and emotionally, and communicate with other members of the community.

With the help of a Davis Grant for Peace we will be constructing the Pujehun Youth Center for Peace and Wellness. The idea for the center originated from an expressed need by the community, and will be implemented with the assistance of the Harvard College Sierra Leone Initiative, Saving Lives through Alternative Options, the United Nations Peace Building Commission for Sierra Leone, and dosomething.org. Sierra Leone is one of two countries in which the UN is launching a pilot project to focus on rebuilding after conflict, instead of just intervening in the conflict and then pulling out. We share this goal, and plan a center where youth can study at night (one of the only lit places in the area), provide peer health counseling in contraceptives, mental health, and wellness (in addition to a referral services), a section for clinical services (for the times when visiting health professionals come to the community), and a space for teaching and learning. With the University of Njala students, we will implement the peer health advising program, a computer class, a class on photography and wellness, as well as workshops on human and children's rights.

I have travelled to Freetown on Sunday night, accompanied by Auntie Umu. We came by car, ferry and then another car, and I only had glimpses of the city by dark. The scenes become like those in a flip book, and the more I try to trace each instant as an image, the more I try to memorize these lines, the more overwhelmed and blank my mind becomes. In some sense, there is no way to process these things so quickly. Every day I spend here I try to capture and understand these scenes, and although they are constantly changing, they have so much in common that they begin to appear uniform. I should try hardest not to think of them as such. That each pocket and street I pass is somebody's home, somebody's life- that is a difficult thing to register in a split second.

The people I have met in Freetown like to discuss politics and often go to great lengths to explain their preferences for specific candidates or officials. I was also able to meet a few of the candidates and politicians themselves. Most often, they speak of what needs to be done to take this country off the bottom of the list of underdeveloped countries. Advise and ideas circle through the room continually- "we must make the country, then make the money." "It is impossible to be in power and not be part of the network of corruption." "People must leave the city and go back to the land." Oh to have such answers! I am wary of these prescriptions. I am especially cautions of suggestions that we send people back to their villages, if we ourselves are unwilling to go and live there. If these are our solutions, let us answer to them ourselves, with our own lives.

Unfortunately, on the second day of my stay, a tree cutting company had a mishap (well actually, they just neglected to tie the tree before cutting it) and we greeted the midday with a giant crash and two bedrooms caved in. Mr. and Mrs. Fo, now referring to themselves as refugees, watched as their possessions were rescued from the rooms, and stacked in the living room or into empty water barrels. They relocated to a different house, while four of us remained in the only room with a ceiling still. That night, as the only thing guaranteed in life, it rained. The house flooded, and yet again to relocated the contents of the living room to the porch outside. Oh what a surprising arrival in SL. In spite of all this, the Fo's have been unwaveringly kind and helpful.

In Freetown, Auntie Umu, Maryam and I met with the head of USAID in Sierra Leone, in addition to the President of the University of Njala. Yesterday, we travelled by bus to Bo (a fantastic ride in which I shared a seat with a live chicken!) and am now staying with the family of David Sengeh ('10) and the beautiful baby Nyalimia. Monday, we head to Gobaru!

Where to begin?

2008-06-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

My life has changed drastically since my first post: I didn't have a roommate, I didn't have a job, and I was fighting with the navigo machines instead of wrestling the true battles (croissant or croissant beurré?).

Cat and my roommate Charlie '10 both arrived on Thursday morning and they spent the afternoon recovering from jet lag. Good thing Charlie can sleep almost anywhere. Sort of:

We had a relaxing dinner in our dining room (read: cafe table in the corner of the living room). I made the chicken tagine with dried apricots, plums and olives with couscous that I'd practiced making the night before at Elsa's house for her family and Sebastian '10. Tasty. At that point, I figured if my job at the Herald Tribune never got under way, at least I'd know my way around the kitchen.

For the next few days, Cat and I did a combination of touristy activities and other kinds of explorations (Palais de Tokyo--their "Superdome" exhibition was far less jovial than the crocodile one from two years ago, sorry Kitty; the Eiffel Tower; Kickback lessons 101 for Becky [The essentials: 30 Rock, The Office + wine, cheese and hazelnut bread]; Moroccan dinner near the Sorbonne with friends doing the Columbia University program; Père Lachaise cemetery (Proust's grave--of course he was buried with his family--was the perfect closure to last semester's beast of a Proust class); the Centre Pompidou (it may look like plumbing from the outside but it's home to one of the best collections of modern art I've seen); dinner and wandering in the Marais at night; a Harvard in France picnic on the tip of Île de la Cité; sidestand crepes; all-nighters spent laughing). And of course everything was lubricated with café crème-s galore.

On Saturday, Charlie, Cat and I headed to Elsa's house for dinner since her mother's longtime friend Jean, un cusinier célèbre, offered to give me cooking lessons for a night. It was amazing to see someone with a true chef's mind in action. No recipes, just a sketch of a shopping list that reminded us to get whatever meat and vegetables looked the freshest. We opted for pintades (Elsa: "like chicken, but tastier"), white asparagus, and spring vegetables.

Le menu:
Entrée (FYI: Americans botched this. Entrée really means entrance, as in first dish, not main course): Quiche Lorraine, steamed white asparagus and dressed greens.
Main course: Les Pintades with Carrots, Pearl Onions and Butter Potatoes and Peas.
Cheese: Salers, Comté, Roquefort (Papillion Noir is the best), Camembert and Brébis
Dessert: Apricot and Raspberry tart.

Exquisite and so simple.

Cat's last night was when things really got interesting. We were having coffee as usual on Rue Montorgueil, talking about Corenthen-the-Parisian who became a summer-long friend last year after a chance encounter in Central Park. We were trying to figure out how he cemented himself so easily in the native New Yorker scene so we could do the same in Paris. Cat pointed out three random kids walking down the street and said out of their earshot, "Why can't we meet kids like them? They'd be great." Five minutes later, those same kids--two boys and a girl--came back and invited us to watch a soccer game with them. Within an hour, they were our tour guides for Montmartre and Sacre Coeur. They took us to their favorite spots and introduced us to their group of friends who cycled in and out the whole night. Surreal. (Bonus note: Did Kitty find true love?)

(<--courtesy what else but discoverfrance.net.)
Since Cat left on Tuesday morning, the apartment's seemed really empty, but it's given Charlie and me a chance to set up a routine. We've decided to be hyper Parisian for 6 days of 7--speak French, hide cameras, refrain from map use etc. And then for the 7th, we have to be unabashed tourists: Les Bateaux Mouches in the Seine, obliviously block metro doors, find the American Diners in Paris.

Work also started for me on Tuesday. After sticking up for myself (the IHT was going to stick me on "special projects"--mining the French media for references to the IHT or organizing an awards ceremony) by citing the internship agreement, I was assigned to the night copy shift (3:30-9:30pm) in the newsroom. Perfect! It's soooo good to have a schedule, to have a sense of purpose... (They also seem pretty flexible about requesting days here and there to go traveling. Dream trips: Corsica chez Elsa, Southern France with Elsa and Jean the cook, Prague, Dublin, Amsterdam, Berlin and Turkey. I mean, nowhere in particular?) I'm training for the next two weeks with an intern, Katyln, from Berkeley. For now, my job entails organizing the 4 different daily editions of the IHT, publishing the daily Oxford Analysis, answering Web Help emails and setting up the news meeting. The meeting's my favorite part of the day. The managing editor Alison Smale, with a British accent to match her no frills demeanor, is brilliant and perspicacious. A typical exchange:

The Financial Editor: "I heard a panda died in the China quake."
Ms. Smale: "I HATE animal stories."
Silence.

The job's pretty administrative for now, but it's really giving me a lot of insight into how a newspaper's run. (Layout, systems for organizing the reporters and editors, how much thought goes into the stories that make the front page, the relationship between various news media outlets, etc.) It's really made me want to get more involved in The Crimson when I get back to school. Also, hopefully I'll get to write actual copy soon--apparently a recent intern situation put a temporary (?) hold on interns publishing articles--but there's a globespotters blog on the IHT website we can still contribute to. It's kind of like Let's Go for the Herald Tribune. Food journalism in real life, here I come.

And finally, last night after work, I ran along the Seine with the Louvre to my right, les ponts to my left and the Eiffel Tower off in the distance. Paris really does turn a cold shoulder until the very last moment when pulls out everything to seduce you. Well done sneaky Pareeee, well done.

Other news:

There's a silent movie on exhibit at the Centre Pompidou called This Is not a Time for Dreaming staring puppets named Le Corbusier and Mr. Harvard (an ominous Darth Vader-esque black blob described as "the dean of deans"). It tells the story of the construction of THE Carpenter Center.
Jean offered me an apprenticeship at his friend's restaurant in the Côte d'Azur next summer. Sick.
The mark "Concession à Perpetuité" (Concession to Perpetuity) on French graves is exceptionally beautiful.
Found the French equivalent of Pinkberry/ Berryline: My Berry. Terrfying/ Something for American day.
Booked my tickets for London for the weekend of the 22nd when Elsa, Giulia '09, and I will be off to a masquerade ball for a friend's birthday. Crazy.

"The rest of the economy doesn't really affect Aspen."

2008-06-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

Such were the words of wisdom spoken to me by Asadour, the Artistic Administrator at the music festival, on one of my first days here. We were driving through the town and he pointed out some of the houses along the streets, citing how much each of them cost. It was ridiculous. I'm currently living in a two-bedroom duplex that I'm sharing with one other person. It's a really nice, quaint little place in a quiet part of town. The thing is, though, when it comes down to it, the place nowadays would sell for at least $1.2 million. That's, umm, about 4x as much as my own house in the Chicagoland suburbia would cost, and it's also about 4x the size of this place. Eeks. Next to the Hamptons, Aspen is the most popular vacation destination of the rich and famous. Many of them own giant houses here that they only occupy for 2 weeks out of the entire year. The streets downtown are lined with stores such as Burberry, Prada, Gucci, and Ralph Lauren. And the cars - loads of BMWs, Ferraris, and the like.

Which brings me to my own car. The festival has provided me a car for the summer, and the car I'm currently driving is a hulking Toyota Previa. They stopped selling Previas in the US in 1997, if that gives you an idea of how ancient it is. I had my first minor panic attack on Friday when the key woudln't turn in the ignition. All you experience drivers are probably rolling your eyes going, well, duh, your wheel's locked - just jiggle it while trying to turn the key. But I went to a boarding school, extra-long summer camps, and then got sent straight to college. At any rate, this is my summer to get acquainted with all those life skills that I never really had a chance to use: driving, cooking, not working in a bio lab...

This is probably my only real weekend, since once the festival starts we'll be working round the clock. It's been quite enjoyable - yesterday Manasseh and I explored Glenwood Springs, a town about 40 miles away that actually has a decently-sized and not-as-overpriced grocery store, and today a few of the other interns and I are heading over to Snowmass for the Chili Pepper and Brew Fest. (Well, actually, I'm the only intern who's not actually old enough to legally drink. But the chili should be good!) Afterwards, if it stops snowing (oy), we'll head over to Glenwood Springs again for a soak in the famed hot springs. And then tomorrow, it's back to the glorified secretary-ness of copying and pasting and making itineraries. But the students start arriving on Wednesday, and our first guest artist arrives on Friday! Yep, next week we've got composers Anders Hillborg and John Harbison (a Harvard alum and former BachSoc conductor), pianist Richard Goode, violinist Joshua Bell, to name a few :-).

P.S. We got our business cards and name badges!

First week at General Motors

2008-06-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

My first week working for General Motors was exciting... and overwhelming! Over the first few days, a lot of people I met would say, "Welcome to the exciting world of automobile manufacturing" with a hint of sarcasm in their voice. For me, the world of automobile manufacturing is exciting... so much is going on in the assembly center, it amazes me. But I can see how it might get boring after you've been working there awhile. The cars move down the line, pieces get attached, more cars move down, more pieces get attached... I'm sure it gets quite repetitive after some time. But I'm still in a wide-eyed phase.

This summer, I'm working for General Motors at their Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center. Technically, all of their plants are called "assembly centers", which I guess has a nicer ring than "plant", but most people still call them plants. The Detroit-Hamtramck plant is so named because it actually lies in both cities, Detroit and Hamtramck. Hamtramck is a city just north of Detroit, and parts of the plant, like the paint shop and power plant, are in Hamtramck, while parts like General Assembly are in Detroit. This causes strange things... for example, there's a law against public smoking in Hamtramck but not in Detroit, so people can't smoke on the Hamtramck side of the plant, but they can on the Detroit side. Of course, no smoking is allowed in the plant at all, so they have to go outside to smoke anyway. There's differences in tax laws too.

There's a cemetery on the grounds of the assembly center too. When GM built the assembly center there, Hamtramck would only let them build if they kept the cemetery intact, which has historic value. The graves date back to the 1800's, which seems young compared to Massachusetts cemeteries, but is pretty old for Michigan! One day, when the line was down, one of the workers took me out a side door and pointed it out to me.

At Dham (as the plant is called), we build two cars - Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne. On Tuesday, GM announced that our plant is going to build the new Chevy Volt, which is great news for all of the people who work there, because electric/hybrid cars are the future. They are much better off than the people who are working in many of the truck and SUV factories that are closing.

I'll apologize right now for my lack of pictures this summer... there's a ban on cameras in the assembly center, except for special work purposes (like taking pictures of defects that need to be fixed). But, courtesy of gm.com, I'll include pictures of the beautiful cars that we build:

Cadillac DTS

Buick Lucerne

This summer, I'm working in the Body Shop, which is the beginning of a car's journey. Here, we literally build the car from the bottom up, building the underbody, then adding the sides and roof, then all of the moving pieces like the doors, hoods, and decklids. There's lots of welding and sharp metal, so I have to wear safety glasses and protective sleeves, and I have to wear gloves whenever I need to touch metal. At some point, I'm going to be a production supervisor, managing a section of the line in Body Shop, but for now, I've been going around with different supervisors and learning how things work and how the car gets put together.

I do a lot of walking... I'm basically on my feet all day long, except for lunch time and the two meetings we have each day. Line time is 6am to 2:30pm, so I have to be there at 5:30am. This week, I've been leaving at 2:30, but once I become a supervisor, I won't get to leave until the line shuts down, and every day this week, the line has run overtime (have to meet the production quota!). Also, we work two out of three Saturdays, so I'm going to be really busy, but at least I'll get a lot of overtime pay!

Here's a quick overview of my week:

Sunday: I moved into my apartment. GM is wonderful and provides all of its interns with free housing. My apartment is 17 miles north of work, so I do a lot of driving, but it's in a very nice area with lots of stores and restaurants and shopping malls. My favorite mall is about 15 minutes away, there's a grocery store 5 minutes away, and a Target right on my corner! I've made lots of trips to target this week to pick up things I forgot.

My apartment is beautiful - much nicer than I expected GM to give us! It came completely furnished. In fact, the only things they told us to bring were linens and a phone. For three of us, we have a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, bathroom, and sink room. The living room has a cathedral ceiling, all of the furniture is really nice, we have laundry machines right in our apartment, the kitchen is stocked with any dishes or pots or cooking appliances you might need (except measuring cups for some reason). We have cable TV and internet (I had to buy a wireless router though, because I didn't want to plug in). I claimed the single bedroom - I'll switch if someone complains, but I don't think they'll mind, because I get up at 4am and they get to sleep much longer.

Monday: Orientation. A full day of having different people talk to me and four other student interns about General Motors and procedures and standards. Nothing too exciting happened, except it was good to meet other interns. We all work in different areas, so we might not have met otherwise. I do see the other interns around the plant every now and then though.

Tuesday - Friday: Shadowed four different supervisors in Body Shop
Tuesday: Skid Loop
Wednesday: Metal finishing
Thursday: Cartrac
Friday: Body fitting

I'll describe the different areas of Body Shop in a later entry, since this is getting pretty long. However, I do want to say that Friday was the most exciting day, because I got to drive a Lucerne. There was a problem that couldn't be fixed in body fitting (which is actually at the end of the line, far away from the rest of Body Shop), so I had to drive it all the way around the plant to take it over to the repair hole in metal finishing. It's a very nice car, great to drive (though I didn't go over 20mph), and I think it looks great too. Later this summer I'll get to drive a Cadillac -- they have a program where new hires get to take a Cadillac home for a night! For someone who had never driven a brand new car (until Friday) and has never driven a Cadillac, it will be very exciting!

Next time... more about the exciting world of automobile manufacturing!

The hills are alive...

2008-06-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

Well, not quite hills. More like mountains. Giant, imploring green mountains surround the small town of Aspen, Colorado, where I'll be spending this summer. Let's begin with a few points of reference: I was born in urban China, moved to the flatlands of the Midwest at age 3, and have remained there ever since (minus, of course, the current stint in the also relatively flat terrain of eastern Massachusetts). A handy chart, for comparison (information courtesy of Wikipedia):

State	Highest Point (ft.)	Average Elevation
Illinois	1,235	600
Massachusetts	3,487	500
Colorado	14,440	6,800

Aspen itself is at an altitude of about 7900 ft., and you can definitely feel it. My sinuses have been acting up a lot since getting here, and every now and then I suddenly feel short of breath. I'm completely stoked about getting to the hiking trails, but my roommate Manasseh advised me to wait about a week before actually engaging in any sort of real physical activity. Also, another funny thing - even though it's about 80 or 90 degrees by midday in the sun, there's still snow on the ground.

For now, though, I've been spending most of my time at work every day, compiling itineraries, phone and address lists, and all sorts of goodies for the guest artists this summer. As an Artist Liaison, my main responsibility is to make sure that each of the guest artists have an pleasant stay while they're in Aspen. That means making sure that all of their flight/hotel arrangements are in order, configuring all of their transportation, and organizing any dressing or practice room reservations and requests. The festival doesn't officially start until the week after next, though, so right now I'm just a glorified secretary to people liks Richard Goode, Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell, Marin Alsop, and even Condoleezza Rice (who was once a piano student at Aspen). Yes, that means that I'll actually be calling some of them on their personal cells. And yes, we do gossip about who's more high-maintenance than others. But no, unfortunately, I'm not allowed to share that information with any of you.

The cutesy, picturesque building in which I spend my days.

Still to come: Aspen's freakishly expensive economy, the ups and downs of not having HUDS around, and the joys of Microsoft Outlook. Stay tuned!

France! Week one

2008-06-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

After four days of trying to sort out my Parisian stuff--through a forest (?) of red tape--I'm finally settled into my apartment in the 2nd. But to backtrack a bit:

Before I left for France on Friday, I was in my high school visiting friends and hearing Jonathan Safran Foer read. I couldn't have been farther from a summer on my own in France and Italy. I kept saying how great it was that I had no idea how my summer was going to pan out--"If I can't picture it, then I can't picture it being over!"--and I boarded the plane really not knowing very much. I knew I was going to stay with the family I au paired for two years ago for the first few days, before the tenant in my apartment moved out--but that was about it. I hadn't bothered looking up how to get to apartment from the airport, I didn't know what time I was starting work on Monday (more on that later) and I wasn't 100% sure the apartment I'd rented even existed (craigslist phobia). I came with an I-can-figure-it-out-along-the-way attitude which in some ways was great (when going abroad, you really can't ever expect to have everything figured out and I'd already been to Paris a bunch of times already, so I wasn't truly without a clue) but in other ways, it really bit me in the butt. It all boils down to forgetting that everything in France has about 10 steps to every 1 in the US.

I present: The Navigo (monthly unlimited metro card) Debacle.

I needed a ticket from the machine to go to the teller to get the card (only available in certain stations) to go back to the machine to charge the card (but not with any of my bank or credit cards, only cash, but only one in three machines take cash). But even when I got the card and put money on it, I couldn't use it before I attached a photo of myself from a photomaton also available only in certain stations, but not necessarily the ones that provide the cards....etc etc etc.

Anyway, enough complaining. It was great being back with the family I au paired for the summer after senior year. Well great and surreal. Suddenly I was 18 again, taking care of three little girls, speaking baby French. But now they could walk and feed themselves and talk amongst themselves--unbearably cute. Dinner that night with Erinn '10 and Elsa '10 smoothed out any remaining hard feelings against Paris.

I went with the au pair family to their grandmother's the next day for lunch, was saddled with French and Russian cookbooks by the very generous relative, and then was off on my own. I opted for exploring the neighborhood around my apartment over checking out the office territory because, well, I was afraid I would need time to apartment hunt. Eek.

But! I found it--or the building at least. It's on rue d'Aboukir in the second, right near Rue Montorgueil, which is kind of like New Zealand in that it has more sheep than people, except instead of sheep there's a million pastry shops. (As soon as I figure out my schedule at work, I'll try and offer my services.) There's also a bunch of great restaurants (Lebanese! Sushi! Italian! French! and my brunch staple in New York, Le Pain Quotidian), artisanal bakeries, Italian gelato places, a cheap supermarket with all the essentials, an open air market a couple blocks away, and a North African spice store with every kind of dried fruit, legume and spice I could ever need--and the tagines to cook it all in. SO GOOD. Plus, I'm right by Les Halles--the old marketplace of Paris--that I'd studied in two classes at school. Perfect.

My first day of work was, well, very French--I just went home: After accepting the fact that my slew of emails to the boss would remain unanswered before Monday morning and that I had no other way to get in touch with her, I figured the best way would be to show up, as planned 3 months ago, at 9am on Monday. Waiting in the lobby, I caught up on the morning's International Herald Tribune, listened to the security guard rave about Morocco (I REALLY want to go), and counted the number of tiles on the floor (4 times over?) before she arrived at around 1030.

IHT Boss: "I thought we were going to email before you started."

Out of the loop intern: "Me too. I sent you some emails..."

IHT Boss: "Oh. Well. Come back tomorrow. Get your documents."

Documents. Woops. Had to figure my way through the city to get third party liability insurance (that was fun), a copy of my beloved Navigo card (only slightly easier than getting the card itself and open a bank account (I think I do need a visa, dear Christy of CES).

But turns out there's no rush. I won't be starting until 2:30 pm (hello Eastern Standard Time hours) on Tuesday. So in the mean time, I finally got my keys, and shlepped all my stuff to the apartment. It's nice. A one bedroom with a fully stocked kitchen (phew!), silk curtains, wireless and a phone that calls the states. Only thing is that the living room is a little dark since the shutters of two windows are bolted shut (for safety?). Also, I hope my roommate will be ok on the pullout couch. (He called the bedroom the apartment finder's fee.) Dear Charlie, it's a little sad and wilted. Please forgive it.

My friend Cat from high school gets in at 10 tomorrow morning so I enjoyed a quiet night in tonight. Went grocery shopping, made myself dinner. There's really nothing as satisfying as knowing you can make your own coffee (this morning's achievement) and your own dinner. Listening to a plump New Zealand man play the Beatles on acoustic guitar, I ate a spinach, cherry tomato and shallot omelette, with some leftover tabouleh, and a spinach, tomato and walnut salad on the side. I'd also picked up a nut roll from the open air market 30 minutes before dinner (so fresh!) and some fig and nut cheese. And dessert? A rhubarb yogurt with a cup of tea. And it all took about 20 minutes? Oh France. Hopefully I'll be prepared for Italy this way...

Left on the to do list: Open a bank account, find a gym in the neighborhood, unpack.

And finally, the most exciting discovery of the day: An espresso machine in the closet.