Spring Fever

So, not to brag or anything, but Honolulu weather in November is just like Memphis weather in May. I've got Spring Fever, and I got it bad.

May in Memphis is the point at which, finally, the many long several days of cold weather ends a few months ago. The air is wet and windy with thunderstorms and grass and budding vegetation and huge fat clouds and possibilities streaming like the stray spiderwebs that blow through the air.

November in Honolulu is the point at which, finally, the many long several months of hot, dry summer ends a few months ago. The air is wet with hazy misty rain and random storms that pour and humid warmth and strong winds that carry driplets from the clouds over the mountains several miles away. My hair flies in all directions and it's warm but not hot and it's humid but not muggy.

May was always my favorite month. The weather is perfect and people give me presents. November here is pretty awesome too.

Fall is the new spring.

Back Again

Hey everyone, I'm home! I'm still in the process of recovering from my trip. Been back a couple days already. I've been sleeping intermittently, sometimes for very long stretches of time, and my body's been aching. Kiriko tells me I need to get some sunlight, so that's one of my goals for today. Ooh! I can actually go for a long walk along the beach! Cheers.

Anyhoo, I intend to give you all the lowdown on my trip, which was quite awesome. As I told a number of you already, participating in things like this (smart people getting together to figure out how to change the world) has been and still is one of my super-happy goals for life. I had thought maybe in ten years I would get chances like this one that fell into my lap about three weeks back. Joining this trip was fast and easy and completely unexpected. I responded to an email and six hours later I was getting ready to go to Bangkok. All very fortuitous for me.

The flights over were very long, but one thing I discovered was that if you want to eat some decent, or even good, airplane food, you should go to Asia. Flights in Asia cater to a clientele with wholly different tastes than flights within the United States (which seem to make you pay for your food nowadays anyway). But flights to and around Asia serve foods that taste actually quite good if you happen to own an unsophisticated American palate. Which I do. So that part was fun.

Three of us grad students from UH arrived in Bangkok after midnight. We took a cab to the Asian Institute of Technology where we were staying, and it was at this point that we realized just how far outside of Bangkok we were staying. We had single rooms that were modest but comfortable. And, granted, I'm used to living in the lap of poverty, but I thought my room was quite good.

Carrie, Shem, and I went into town the next day. We managed to take basically every form of transportation that was available, excepting riding on the backs of motorcycles even though everyone kept telling us we should try it. But we road in boats along the canals, along the river; rode in tuk-tuks, which are small covered cars with open sides that zip in and out of traffic; air conditioned buses; non-air conditioned buses; taxis; the skytrain (which was very smooth and really, one of the nicest trains I've ridden); and this thing that was basically a pick-up truck with seats installed in the bed that people would pile into (sometimes hang out of) for shorter rides to places the major buses didn't go.

In between these transportation experiences, we got to see a few temples which are really rather incredible. Bangkok is a contradiction of aesthetics. The city part of the city, that lines the streets and weaves in and out of the nice hotels and temples, is crowded and dilapidated and dirty and vibrant. The smells alternate between luscious aromas of good cooking on the streets, incense wafting from temples and shrines, and car exhaust. People are everywhere, bustling about, streaming rivers of pedestrians and automotive traffic. Anyone will speak to you kindly, even if they don't speak your language. People are quite happy to communicate by smiling and pointing. And then you enter a temple or a shopping mall or a hotel courtyard and all traffic ends. The smells are gone. The crowd is gone. All that remains is the quiet and clean beauty of ancient spirituality or modern architectural comfort. I found very little bridge among these worlds. There was no Thai feel to the shopping malls. There seemed to be a cultural disconnect between the markets and the temples, as though two different Bangkoks were occupying the same space. One of them held its ancient and pristine beauty. The other was rapidly industrializing.

Of course, this could just be me. In fact, I said this to several people at the workshop and no one nodded emphatically and stated, "Yes, I know what you mean." People did seem to agree very readily, though, when I told them how I liked Thai beer.

We got a tour of AIT from a couple of the students in the Environmental Engineering department. I never did hook up with the Gender and Development department, but I'm sure that was just as well. It was a pretty packed trip and I did appreciate my downtime. The tour we got showed off the main campus buildings -- places to eat, the bookstore, the convenience store, the library -- and the Environmental Engineering department and all its technological glory, very little of which I understood. I mean, I understood the point of the machines they showed us, but when they went into detailed explanations about how they worked, I tended to space out and think happy thoughts of nested ecological culture and community microsystems and macrosystems. (Really, I try not to use jargon too much in my community psych stuffs, but here I felt the need to assert that I'm smart too, even though I didn't have much of a clue what those guys were on about)

:)

That afternoon, and a few other times during the week, us grad students separated out some time to get our homework done. Gina, you'll like this part especially. We would go off into our separate rooms with various lists of what we wanted to accomplish. And, well, I was the only one who did it. Actually did my homework. While I was in Bangkok. The others would wind up resting, or surfing the internet for post-election news, or watching BBC, or all of the above. But not me. I'm so anal that I took no rest. Well, I rested by reading about qualitative research methods and working on my thesis proposal re-write. But at any rate, it turns out that yes, it's just me. But, you know, play to your strengths, and all that.

The workshop itself was quite an experience for me. The official title was, "Near-Roadway and On-Road Exposure to Air Pollution: Risk Communication and Decision Making" which doesn't acronym very well. The purpose of the workshop was to get a bunch of experts in the field together and figure out what we know and what we don't know regarding roadside air pollution, and then to develop projects from that which would help to direct future clean air initiatives (as opposed to Bush's Clear Skies Initiative, which I consider to be one of clean air's greatest nemeses). This workshop was a pre-event of the Better Air Quality conference held in Bangkok starting the day after the workshop ended. BAQ is held as part of the Clean Air Initiative - Asia, which as far as I can tell really is working toward making the air cleaner.

The first day and a half of the three-day workshop consisted of presentations. This was the "What do we know?" section of the event. Most of this had to do with the science of not only pollution levels, but of exposure levels to people. If the pollution level is high, but population level is low, then exposure level is low and therefore health risks are low. On-road and near-road exposure tends to be high in heavily trafficked areas, especially in population dense cities, and especially to the portion of the population that spends a lot of time in cars or on the side of the road.

A lot of the presentations dealt with specific pollutants that I had never heard of, but they all seemed to = health risks of similar type. Some of the people who know more about that stuff could argue endlessly about which pollutant they should focus on, but me, as a social scientist, I was far more concerned with the people portion of the event. These presentations and conversations had to do with when people are exposed, what level of risk do they perceive to themselves and to their children, what are people willing to do about it to protect their own health and/or to protect the air quality of their city, how do government organizations communicate what they know with each other and to the people, what can we do to help facilitate this communication and to aid in decision making of both government and populace? These were the juicy questions to me.

It was interesting to me to watch people discuss and argue these points and try to come to some consensus of where we should go next. The language was different and the "mission" was different, but the people behaved the same as the non-profit people I've seen discuss and argue points and try to come to some consensus of where we should go next, and the religious people I've seen discuss and argue points and try to come to some consensus of where we should go next. This really only furthered my idea that people is people, however our different values and beliefs and cultures and worldviews may lead us on strongly variable, unique, and oftentimes opposing paths. We are similar in our fundamentally human flaws. That is a universal truth -- we are not all people in our greatness. We are all people in our folly.

And sometimes it's really fun to argue about stuff. I enjoyed this process for the most part. Sometimes, though, it was really quite tedious. Especially when people would get caught up in trifling details of the semantics of the project when we were still trying to figure out broad arcs of purpose. Several projects and papers did come out of the workshop. I haven't yet figured out if I have a place in these, and if so, what it is. I'll update on that if/as it happens.

Roadside air pollution is in a way tangential to my goals of working for social and environmental justice, but in other ways, it aligns well. It would be neat to have some place in what is to come. We shall see.

The final step of this trip began the night before we left. I had a "grad school moment". Shem said, "Did you know that we have a seven hour layover at Narita?" My first and immediate thought was, "Oh good, I'll have more time to work on my thesis." Shem must have seen my eyes light up because he said, "Yeah, we'll have time for a quick trip into Tokyo." To which I thought, "Oh, that's a much better idea."

Still, it took me about five hours to realize that my original reaction was in any way abnormal or "grad school moment-y".

So, yeah, I got to see Japan! Total bonus trip. We really had just enough time to take the train into Tokyo, eat dinner, walk around a very little bit, and take the train back. We got to the gate less than ten minutes before boarding. We were held up at security because our boarding passes failed to mention the fact that we were flying from Bangkok to Honolulu VIA NARITA! Looked like it was a direct flight. But it all worked out.

And, total bonus trip into Tokyo!

Japan is so cool, and so very, very Japanese. In the rural areas we passed on the train, in Tokyo, everything about the place screams, "This is Japan!" There was no aesthetic contradiction, though there were varying levels of technology and development. All of it, though, all of it was Japanese. I loved Japan and really wish I had more time there to get a fuller experience.

We ate dinner at this curry place. Apparently, a lot of restaurants have machines that look like vending machines. The menu is pictured. You punch in your order and feed in your money and then out pops a ticket that you give to the cook. Oh, and it was tasty! Also, I had this canned alcohol thing that was saki and grapefruit juice. I only finished half and was quite toasty by then, but it was really good and not syrupy sweet like a lot of fruity mixed drinks I've had before. We met some really nice people, and a crazy guy in the train station who talked about starting a revolution in Thailand and sold us handmade books of haiku he'd written. I lost my umbrella, but I like to think that that guy found it and is carrying it around Tokyo as we speak.

Then we boarded the plane and I thought, "One more leg and then I'll be home. And then I'll get to see Michael again." And granted, I'd been up for about two days at this point, but that thought made me so happy I cried a little.

Melodi picked me up from the airport 8 hours later. She had also dropped me off, and had made me a travel pack with handwipes, a neck pillow for the plane, ginger candy, a security pack to hold my money, and Emergen-C. When she dropped me off at my place, I intended to sleep a couple of hours and then go to class. She said, "Maybe I'll see you then, or if you decide to sleep, I'll see you some other time." I thought, "No, no, I'll be there, of course."

But then I woke up an hour before class and found myself unable to function. That whole "putting on clothes" thing had me stumped for over twenty minutes before I gave up with the job unfinished. I went to get a glass of water, but couldn't figure out which cup in the cabinet I should drink out of. So I gave up on the whole "drinking water" bit too. Seriously, I was one incoherent mess. Time to leave for class came and I was still wandering around the house half-dressed and unable to decide how to get my school books out of my suitcase so that I could bring them to class. And so I decided that I would be no good to the class, would have nothing to offer a roomful of intelligent people. I went back to bed.

I slept 8 hours that day. I slept another 10 that night. And I've been pretty tired since then, though I'm getting better. Is this jet lag? Because it kind of sucks. But this, as all things, is temporary. So no worries. This was an awesome trip and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to go. It's crazy what life brings.

Have I mentioned lately how I'm the luckiest person on Earth? Because I totally am.