I'm back in Doha, just in time for sandstorm season. Woo.

Pictures of my trip to Spain with my friend Ryan are now posted. Someday Ryan will post his pictures there too, but it may be a while since he's in the midst of moving and starting a job right now.

Since not everyone may want to peruse all 260 photos, I've posted one highlight picture for each city below. ( Click here to see my top 7 pictures! )

Or, if you totally can't be bothered, here's the extremely redacted version:

kit_ping posted a meme in she wrote about five topics that someone picked because they associate them with her, and then offered to pick five things for other people. So here are the my explanations of five things kit_ping associates with me. (Comment if you'd like five things for you to write about, I guess.)

( travel )( activism )( vegetarianism )( college )( murder mystery parties (with bonus pictures!) )

Our friend David takes panorama pictures of the Doha Corniche every two years. Here's 2009, 2007 and 2005:



Even the dhows are getting bigger! :-D

Sri Lanka pictures are up here.



It was a very enjoyable trip. Sri Lanka is a beautiful country, with interesting history and architecture, and lots of friendly people.

Its tourism industry isn't doing very well, though. It's just been one thing after another, I guess: the tsunami, the worsening civil war, the global economic downturn. I saw no other Americans the entire week I was there, and only a handful of Europeans -- and this is supposed to be the beginning of a peak season!

At the recommendation of a Sri Lankan colleague, I arranged the trip through Pership, who were very helpful. I had a really awesome guide/driver for the week, who can also arrange things independently and more flexibly. I'm happy to give his contact info to anyone interested in traveling there.

( Couple more pictures behind cut )
Those of you who knew me before orthodontia will share my amusement at the the lengths I went to to have fangs for the evening.

Our pictures from the Czech Republic are up.



We're experimenting with using SmugMug, so at least for the next two weeks the pictures are here. Unless I hear complaints about the format, we'll get a permanent account and start transferring our other pictures there. [Update: they're now here.]

Notes on the format: if you don't like the thumbnails-and-highlighted-picture view, you can click other options at the top under "Style." Parental units: I know you like the "Slideshow" view; it doesn't work in Firefox. It should work in Safari or IE, though.

Edit: Some pictures were taken specifically for particular people -- Mum, Dad, Lorraine, Grandma Carlson, Andrew (1, 2), Mary, Doug, and Steve.

I'm back in Doha after two weeks visiting my family in Oxfordshire.

Realizatons made on this trip:

• babies are cute
  
• childbirth is not cute, but anyone who has gone through it has my undying respect and awe [Edit: gone through it on the birthing side, that is. Obviously we've all been through childbirth on the being-birthed side.]
  
• I desperately desire to live in a city that is not just walkable but walking-centric, like English towns with a medieval city center tend to be
  
• Britain is full of these brown, fibrous upright cylinders with little green wavy bits at the top; Doha should look into acquiring some:
  

The original plan had been to go hike the Ridgeway Trail for a week, but for various health reasons I had to scrap that plan. In the end I managed a 1.5-day, 29-mile hike from my sister's house in Abingdon down the Thames Path for a day, and then east on the Ridgeway following a prehistoric earthwork called Grim's Ditch (pictured above). It covered some really beautiful scenery, and hiking is always good for my overall serenity. I wish I could do more of it.

Pictures of the trip are here.

And in case anyone is jealous of my jet-setting ways, I also spent three days in bed with a migraine and a new medical condition that you don't want to hear about. I like to travel, but my body sure does not. Dear roboticist friends: please to make me a cyborg body to transfer my brain into, for I am royally sick of this one, kthxbye.

My nephew was born yesterday! I got to England at just the right time; they induced labor just before I got to the hospital.

Witnessing childbirth is a little unnerving but mostly just hugely fascinating. I still can't believe that I just saw a tiny little person entering the world for the very first time! Like whoa.

Real-life newborns don't look like newborns on TV. They're extremely purple, and their heads are way, way more conical than I ever imagined. Also, babies aren't like puppies or kittens; they can open their eyes right away! That was pretty cool.

Picture album here.


Aunt Marjorie, Cousin Dr. Evil Rayna, Grandma Kathleen and Mum Mary with Sproglet

Last weekend, I was forced to retract all the snide comments I've made about Qatar's depressing lack of geography.

After a friend came across a reference to a large cave called Dahl al Misfir, I did some investigating and found its GPS coordinates (25°10'27"N 51°12'45"E). Last Friday, three friends and I went to check it out.

It's around halfway across the country, on Salwa Road just this side of the Umm Bab cutoff, not far from the Earth Satellite Tracking Station. It's not the world's most exciting cave, but it's definitely worth checking out! Pictures here.

EDIT: Dave's pictures are here.

Also: Happy Eid al Adha!

Our pictures (and a couple videos) from our Eid trip to Thailand are now online here.

There are four folders for each of our four destinations: Phang Nga, Phuket, Chiang Mai, and Bangkok. It is also worth noting that graphic pictures of self-mutilation at the Vegetarian Festival in Phuket are in a separate folder within Phuket, so you don't have to look at those if you don't want to.

If you don't feel like looking at all the pictures, here are a dozen of my favorites: ( Cut for bandwidth )

This may be my all-time favorite picture of Justin and me:



Other, equally awesome, pictures of our Halloween party are here. I'm so glad David D. is such an awesome photographer.

I don't even celebrate Ramadan, but after next week I'm sure going to miss these iftars.

Since Flickr is down, I can't post my photo of the day at September I'll Remember, and thus I post it here.

This week, we finished the move into the LAS building. Our tutoring space and computer cluster are far from finished, but my cubicle now exists!

Cubicle Sweet Cubicle.	Wall of Nostalgia, featuring some of my favorite peeps who've come and gone from Qatar.

There are more pictures of the new ARC (and for that matter the old ARC) here.

I like my new workspace, and I think the LAS building is prettier than Cornell's. So it's been a bit of surprise, and a testament to my own capacity for nostalgia, that I managed to feel a pang of sentimentality about leaving Cornell.

I had some really wonderful times in the Cornell building. Every time I walked down the hallways I was reminded of those happy memories, as I passed the couches where I argued religion with Leland, or the lockers where Jess first ran up to me and said "We should talk about process theology!", or the office where Doug helped me prove Pierce's Law, or the Student Affairs office where I hung out with Ryan and Caryl, or the TA cave where Paul used to greet me with a cheerful "Marjorie!", or even the stain on my office's rug where Andrew spilled his drink in a typically hilarious fashion. I am continually grateful for all of the friendships I've gained here in Qatar and all of the wonderful people I've had the good fortune to meet. Now I'm ready to people the halls of LAS with similarly warm memories!

Below are my notes on our trip to Gabon during the first two and half weeks of July.

We went there to visit Justin's friend Kendra, who did conservation work in Gabon for two years through the Peace Corps and who still spends every other semester or so there, researching elephant-farmer interactions. The other folks on the trip were Justin's parents, Kendra's parents, and Kendra's brother-in-law.

Kendra, Marjorie, Justin, Jeff, Lorraine, Steve, Trudi, Guy, Chef Mokoukou (chief of Makoghe), and Don -- the folks we were traveling with. Well, we didn't really travel with the chief of Makoghe.

( Cut for length, pictures )

All in all, I absolutely loved Gabon. It is an amazingly beautiful country, and though it's not really set up for tourism (yet), there is a great deal to see. This was my first time visiting Africa (Egypt doesn't count), and I very much hope it will not be my last.

Many more pictures, and a couple videos, are available here.

We are home from Gabon!

I am semi-officially in love with Africa.

Pictures and videos will be forthcoming. For now, suffice it to say: GORILLAS! ELEPHANTS! HIPPOS! ZOMG!

You all have evidently been busy in my absence, since my Livejournal friends page has 220 new posts since July 2. Since friends pages only go back 220 posts, you'll have to tell me if you posted something super-exciting on July 1. :-)

Two pictures to whet your appetite:

The Ndogo Lagoon, taken from an airplane. Every little scrap of land is teeming with life. Qatar this is not!	GORILLAS ZOMG!

Last Monday, a group of my friends wore our (or borrowed) thobes and abayas to work, and at lunchtime to the food court of the closest mall.

This was my first time wearing an abaya outside, and it was interesting to see people's reactions. I was a little worried that students would feel we were mocking their dress or treating it like a Halloween costume, but all the reactions I got were positive. One student even hugged me.

At the mall, my friends and I got stared at a lot: we could see people wondering what four obviously non-Arab women were doing in abaya. The stares were definitely not hostile, though, and I personally feel we got checked out a lot more than we do in Western dress.

Another interesting reaction occurred when Nikki and I were standing in line at Pizza Hut. A male, Muslim colleague passed by us, did a double take, said "Holy s***," and stopped to see what we were up to. He chatted for about ten seconds and then said he should move along before other people started wondering what he was doing talking to us. He's never said that when I've run into him while in Western dress....

I think wearing abaya was a different experience for each of us. Caryl wrote about her experience on her blog. Another friend reflected that she had always disliked abayas and thought of them as unglamorous, but after spending a day in a rather gorgeous one she now wants to buy one.

I found the experience fun but oddly unremarkable. Other people reacted to me very differently, but the abaya itself is unobtrusive enough that I didn't feel any different wearing it. (I did feel more aware of my clumsiness; I am not graceful enough to be an abaya girl.) The shayla, on the other hand, cannot be called unobtrusive. I think I spent about half my workday wrapping and rewrapping it.

( pictures! )

Forgive the barrage of photo posts, but I've updated my Flickr set with more pictures of International Day.