My friend, Julianne, goes to Indonesia

My friend, Julianne, is going to Indonesia. She just finished her masters in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Teachers College, Columbia University, and she was selected to be teaching fellow in a U.S. government program. She'll be there an academic year.

I met Julianne in 2002 when we both took a teacher training certificate course in Boston. Julianne had been in Switzerland for more than a year, and she had her sights set on returning. After the course, she found a job in Basel, teaching English to the blind. Then, five years later, she got into Columbia the same year I did--a total coincidence.

Now, she's back on the road, and blogging about it. If you'd like to see what she's up to, go to http://www.julianne-in-indonesia.blogspot.com. (She's only just started writing, though, as she leaves the U.S. tomorrow.)

Catching up and sand animation...

Yes, it's been MONTHS since my last post. No, I have not stopped writing here. I've just been a bit busy.

Since May, this is what I've done: graduated from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University with a M.S. degree (didn't do the cap and gown, though--not my thing), left New York, drove up and down the California coast with a lovely, young Frenchman, got my visa to study in France (not as simple as one might think), saw my sister graduate from her master's program at UC Irvine, went back to Hawaii for four days, flew to China and chaperoned a group of teenagers in and about the country, took a few days for myself in Beijing, flew to Paris via Doha, got an apartment, a bank account, a phone, an internship at the International Herald Tribune, and a folding table for my place. It has been a long couple of months and if I had been able to see one of my best friends get married in New England last week, I would have made it AROUND THE WORLD.

So now I'm settled, mostly. I'm waiting on the last two pieces of French bureaucracy that make me 100 percent legit--my carte de sejour, a kind of a residence permit, and a carte vitale, my health insurace card--and that's it. Then, I will be fully settled-in.

I do want to write about some of the things I've done, but then again I don't want to bore people with long and rambling tales of travel. So, my solution to this is a plan to post a few snippets, with photos, about the things from my journey that I liked best. Then, once I start school and get moving with my internship, I'll post normally again, I think.

In any case, that won't happen today. Maybe I'll start tomorrow. But until then, I wanted to share this. I saw it today and was so so so impressed. It's well worth the entire 8:33 minutes. I promise.