In case you're interested . . . (Updated)

In this obligatory post-graduation travel blog, I have decided to acknowledge and support the obligatory post-graduation blogs of a few of my friends. If you're ever bored with the Balkans (or just my take on the region), might I suggest you check out:

Eric at Polysemic.org -he's on a Fulbright grant studying linguistics in the Macedonia. While I might tell a funny joke about mixing up the words for 'poop' and 'cheese' - they are quite similar - he'll be able to explain it in a way that puts me to shame.

Harper at BumblingMumbler.com - an old friend of mine who has somehow stumbled into a job teaching adorable children in Japan to speak English. Check in daily for updates on how to inadvertently offend provincial bureaucrats and meet interesting naked Japanese men in saunas.

Tim Fox at Grace with Taste - another old friend, and an anglophile Anglican. In another time he would be tipping his hat to elderly ladies outside the Main Street barber shop, but modernity and the lingering effects of John Rawls have forced him to barricade himself behind volumes of Eliot and Newman in a last-ditch effort to save the Protestant mainstream. This blog is his only way of communicating with the world.

Jesse Bright's Merry Amer-Adventures - another old friend, Jesse has decided to forgo the bourbon-and-cigars fatcat lifestyle of a graduate student in the sciences for a bit, and participate in the Americorps program. Between fire watching, storm chasing, and other manly charitable pursuits, Jesse may grow the mightiest beard imaginable.

Update

One more:

Chelsi in the Land of Eagles - Chelsi West is another Fulbrighter who will be wandering around neighboring Albania. She'll probably turn one of Hoxha's old pillboxes into the most stylish pad this side of Tirana. It should be an interesting blog - Albania is a rough land where the men are still manly, and the women are, well, manly as well.

Urgent News

This just in:

The BBC Macedonian News Service is reporting that that on Wednesday, September 2nd (or 20th?), the minister of ? will ? to the ?, which the ? and ? ?-ed the ?. The problem, they said, is that ? ? ? ? ? to/for the ?.

Also, I think the word children was involved. Something with minorities?

Stay tuned for more prepositions and basic adjectives with definite article suffixes.

The Countdown Begins

September 1st has arrived, which means my relatively unproductive buffer month of August has ended. I leave for Macedonia on September 30th. 

That means that I no longer have any excuse for an extreme (or so it feels) lack of preparation. And one of the most important aspects of international-post-undergrad-preparation is the establishment of a blog. I think it ranks just below purchasing plane tickets, and just above finding housing, though that may be particular to my own case. 

If anyone reading this doesn't already know why I am off to the Republic of Macedonia, here's a brief rundown: 

The official story is here, on my alma mater's website:

Seth Elder '08 to Research Economic Development and Cultural Heritage in Macedonia with Fulbright Award

The unofficial story differs on the following points: 

1. While the story offers a lot of lovely, academically verbose quotes from my proposal (enough to make Orwell rise from the dead and reprint "Politics and the English Language"), I actually have very little clue what I'm doing. I'm being hosted by an institute that doesn't know what to do with me,  my language skills are limited, and my area of interest is incredibly broad. 

2. I have nowhere to live when I arrive, and the visa situation is murky, to say the least. Also, I am arriving not in Skopje, my future-home city, but Sofia, in neighboring Bulgaria. How I will get from one to the other with my luggage and without getting ripped off is anyone's guess. 

3. I am purchasing a new computer with half the memory of my current machine. That means that my blues, bluegrass, country, southern rock, and 90's pop music collection will have to be whittled down to only the most important tunes. I'm facing some very tough choices: Will I best be able to connect to Macedonian youth through Sugar Ray's "Fly", or "Folsom Prison Blues"?  Will the native drink rakija lend itself to my "Scotch Drinking Music" playlist, or will I have to create a completely new late-night musical atmosphere?

These problems are not insurmountable - for instance, regarding #3, I'm sure I can buy scotch in Macedonia. They make for more of an adventure, which is really what this is all about. And by that, I mean that this entire year is really just to pad my resume in order to reach my true vocation as a member of the world-famous Team Phaeton.

In the meantime, I recommend this site, written by my fellow-Fulbrighter/super-linguist who has already been in Macedonia for some time.