Leaves are falling all around..

! w e l c o m e b a c k ! bienvenue ! ようこそ ！ youkoso !
friends and lovers,
to the online frittering of empty time that my "blogs" have always aspired to be.
(i never can get used to that word, "blog". it sounds like something a toddler would be scolded for saying.)
attempts to read meaning into my title will be met with great amusement.

A touch of background, though probably unnecessary, just for fun: I am getting ready to embark on a bit of a trip to the middle swath of Africa in a few days here. I'm going along with a prof who is consistently referred to by most of his department as "Indiana Jones." It is my first time going to Africa unless you count a half-day stint in Tangiers during which my great-aunt and I discovered that we are both very naive. One never learns so much about oneself as when one attempts to succeed at another country.

So I imagine I'll probably be learning a lot about myself.

Anyway, so I'm not actually that well-versed in 'travel' per se; my prior experiences in other countries have been almost exclusively of the squatting nature. I go, I stay, I putter around and try to emulate those around me in a desperate bid to blend in. Mixed success. Some in Europe, none in Japan. But most other travelers (resisting the urge to add that second L) can talk me under the table on the topic of railpasses, Lonely Planet, backpack smell, and bars in Amsterdam.

I tell myself I'm ready for the hygenic part, at least, thanks to showering in a vat for most of the last year. And my very newly-acquired skill of eating whatever it is that happens to be on my plate, in motion or otherwise, is definitely going to become handy.

Things I'm wall-bouncing-ly excited about:

• the food
• learning any amount of Arabic
• not being cold
• getting to experience what dictatorships are actually like from a non-intellectual perspective
• the Red Sea
• hearing the complete version of any one of 45,203 party-stopping tales of past adventures that David, aka "Indiana Jones" keeps tantalizingly half-alluding to, but refuses to properly tell, given how much "bonding time" we'll be having later for storytelling.
  

Things I'm wretchedly anti-excited about

• having crackedly dry hands
• not getting to meet any dictators, or even high-ranking ministry of information types
• missing charles, the inspiration for all my ambitions and honored in the bottom right corner
• mosquitos
• the inevitable date at which point David will discover I am not, perhaps, all I seem cracked up to be in terms of competence, and am really quite a bit of a fool (see islandgaijin.blogspot for details.) In the meantime, if you know him, don't tell.

So, this is where i'll be dumping commentary as we go along. i have absolutely no idea how often internet will be a part of my life, and I'd be lying if i pretended to be a timely poster. the stories will be written. the blog will be created. but whether the stories will make it into the blog is, well, sort of a toss-up... i'll ganbaru!