A New Journey!

About three weeks ago, I received an e-mail from the department administrator which went something like this: "Blah blah blah Ph.D. students blah blah teaching assistantships not available for you in the Spring 2008 semester yada yada not enough positions to go around yada yada you already have funding yada yada have a nice day!" That e-mail turned out to be an electronic Gandalf to my Bilbo Baggins, comfy in my hobbit hole surrounded by books and papers and a vaguely happy sense that my dissertation fieldwork was still at least a semester away. Less than a month before the end of the semester, I now find myself forced to figure out how to utilize my last semester of fellowship funding to go abroad and do my fieldwork.

For the first half of next year, this blog will be a travelogue as I make a five-month sojourn to the Philippines for dissertation fieldwork. I have never been to Southeast Asia before, I speak virtually no Tagalog, and I much prefer cold weather to hot and humid weather, so I should have plenty of blog fodder! For now, though, I am scrambling to move out of my apartment, pack up all my stuff, and deal with a veritable vortex of visas, vaccinations and a vast variety of valedictions, all in less than three weeks. This should be fun.