My house broke my iPhone.

To be more specific, the concrete back patio broke the glass screen of my iPhone, after the phone had leaped out of my pocket in a desperate attempt to free itself from the shackles of bondage to its human overlord. Silly phone.

Apple wants $200 to repair it. Some dude on Craigslist wants $70. I could repair it myself after paying $40 for the part, waiting a week to receive it, and then successfully not breaking the LCD while separating it from the glass. In all cases this has to wait until I get paid on Wednesday, and between now and then I may die of withdrawal.

Friends are aware that I may be the single most iPhone-dependent human on the face of the earth, but it took the iPhone itself to stage an intervention. See, it has an app for that.

As much as I adored my house yesterday, my love for it increased a thousandfold today, upon receipt of the following information:

The movie Cthulhu was filmed in my house.

For the first time in a year, I am settled. As of 4pm this afternoon, my name is on a lease. I know where I live and where I'm going to live. I have my own mailing address, apart from being C/O the tremendously patient and generous ravennajoy.

I'm in a three-room, four-closet suite on the third floor of a 1906 mansion in the Volunteer Park area of Seattle (aka the north end of Capitol Hill.) My leaded glass windows look out onto the park and the brick water tower, and I can hear birds chirping from every direction. My bathroom has an original claw-foot tub. There's an Art Deco era oak wardrobe that's been left in the suite, too big to fit out the door. Original furnishings decorate the main floor and the enormous kitchen has original built-in ice boxes. I'm walking distance to all of Broadway, and to the small shopping area on 15th. I live directly across the street from the Shaffer-Baillie Mansion. It is the only street on Cap Hill, to my knowledge, where parking is both free and ample. I have seven housemates, almost all of whom are 30-something IT professionals, all laid back and funny and responsible.

Best of all, I negotiated half price rent until November. It's a buyer's market.

Beyond the clear awesomeness that is my apartment, I feel a vast sense of relief. Sitting on the unfurnished floor of my living room, I breathed in a deep sigh of contentment, of rest. After a year, I can finally take the backpack off my back, sink down into thick carpet, and just rest. I can stay here for awhile, for as long as I want, and bask in the warm butter-colored gabled walls and idyllic beauty out the windows. It's quiet here. My mind and my feet are still and relaxed. I can wash the dust of travel off of myself and just stay, just sit, just listen to the birds and watch pale grey clouds roll over the Cascade mountains.

At long last and after many adventures, I'm home.

I'm pulling together my adventures into a book and feel a bit like I'm wrestling jello.

Since people seem to like following the stories I've been posting, I'd like to hear what it is you like best about it. What kinds of stories or information do you like most? Why do you read? (Other than just to make sure I haven't died.)

Just a quick note for those who have emailed/called/etc --

I'm back in Portland, jetlagged but 80% recovered.  Basically I'm just tired, resting, taking it easy.  I'm also profoundly unplugged (for me) so haven't been checking messages in any form.  I'll get around to it next week, but for now I'm going to be selfish and spend some time in R&R.  I'm reading a novel, eating amberhush 's fabulous cooking, and curling up on a couch or two.  This is quite literally what the doctor ordered, so it's what I'm up to.

I'll catch up with you all some time next week.  

Rice Field
Originally uploaded by maramaye

Including the latest travel to Molave (moh-LAH-vay), a remote town four hours' drive south of Plaridel.

Due to a horribly confusing experience with the Singapore airport, here I am in Manila, landed 6 hours early and 2 hours closer to my destination. Yay!

Eat first. Then sleep. Thinking comes later.

So far, first impressions say that I love the Philippines. Manila is like a perfect marriage between San Diego and Bangkok. So you can take a tuk-tuk to the Krispy Kreme. I'm not joking.

Also, this makes the sixth country in which a random stranger has told me I look just like the Mona Lisa.

Oh, and I write this on an HP Mini 1001. There are no EeePCs anywhere on this side of the planet, I'm told. That makes me very sad. But the HP is perfectly serviceable.

( Cut for those who don't care. )

In India, camels still pull wagons and elephants carry loads of bricks and cement. Donkeys and horses share a lane on the highway with pedestrians and bicycle rickshaws. It is a country with one foot in the nineteenth century, where the stamp of the colonial British and the East India Company are still visible around every corner. Step a single foot out of the wealthy areas of cities like Bangalore, and the IT industry and huge tech companies we read about become almost invisible. It's like going to London and discovering Camelot.

( <...> )

I'm arrived in New Delhi, India.  For $35 a night, my hotel is fabulous.  It has an enormous bed with soft fluffy everything, and wifi. 

Since I was unable to sleep on the plane, and it's 2am for me (7:30am here), I am going to get some much-needed sleep.  Today, rest.  Tomorrow, the world!  

Hello from Gloria Jean's Coffee in Bahrain International Airport.  

Like you, I thought to myself, "Where the hell is Bahrain?" and promptly looked it up on wikipedia.  Quite likely unlike you, I was actually in Bahrain at the time.  

As it turns out, I'm on a little island just off the east coast of Saudi Arabia.  I have officially left Europe, closing the chapter on that leg of my journey.  As I watched the Mediterranean out my window, it occured to me that this is the farthest east I've ever gone.  In a month or so, I'll cross the boundary of the farthest west I've ever gone, and thus have made a complete circuit of the globe.  

This airport is a major international hub for this side of the globe, and it shows.  It's a swirl of every regional dress and costume, a babble of languages and accents, polyglot signs and directions to prayer rooms hanging beneath directions to business centers.  I see women in saris chatting with women in burkas, Saudi men in white robes holding hands, Western Europeans in high fashion with gorgeous leather boots, Americans like me intensely involved in smal bits of technology.  Gloria Jean's Coffee has free wifi, and but there's no toilet paper or flushing apparatus in the bathroom.  I sit in a chic, plush chair, while the terminal across the hall is a cattle call, complete with high-walled pens for each flight.  

I absolutely love it

I have a layover of several hours, and will arrive in India at 5:15am local time, quarter til midnight according to my body.  (Yes, that's quarter til;  India is on GMT+5.5.)  My hotel says its driver will be there to meet me.  I'll sleep, and then I'll go shopping and buy myself some local clothes.  (The only light-weight top I have isn't quite modest enough for this part of the world, and it's black so will make me too hot.)

I am glad to have this layover, a halfway house for escapees from Europe and winter.  The eastern world is looming large but the western world is still a dominant force.  It makes a pleasant transiition to the chaos that I've read of India.  My guidebook (purchased in Paris so it's in French; I get about 80% of it) assures me that spending a couple of days doing nothing but adjusting to the culture is a good plan.  I think I'm getting a bit of a head-start on it here.

It feels good to be on the move again.  My feet miss the dust of travel.

My Indian visa has been processed and is ready for pickup this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll catch a flight to Delhi. (Every day is the same price for a ticket, thank goodness.)

My plan is to spend 2 days or so in Delhi getting acclimated, then head by train to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and surrounds. Two days later I'll catch a train to Jaipur and meet up with bjennings76 's dad and stepmom.  We'll head back to Bangalore and visit.

That's as far as I've planned, and it's more of a rough idea of a plan.  It's India, so I expect to be delayed - I just don't know where or for how long.

Yes, there will be pictures.  No, I don't know where I'm going after that; the Philippines isn't ready for me yet.  I'll figure it out.

Yet more on my Flickr, courtesy of clockwerkdragon whose gift of a paid account means I still haven't run out of space.

The first Sunday of the month is Free Museum Day in Paris, so I went to Musee Galliera and Musee d'Orsay.  I was going to go to Musee Rodin, but there was so much Rodin at the Musee d'Orsay that it seemed like overkill.  

I've also taken several hundred pictures, though most of them are on my iPhone and thus not at great resolution.  I've put up just a few here:



And now I'm really tired, so more uploading and updating will happen later.   Hooray for a hotel with wifi, finally.

Today I ate a crepe about 30 feet from Victor Hugo's apartment.  Appropriately, I spent most of the time at the cafe writing in a handmade leather journal.

Yes, I'm still stuck in Paris, and the Indian embassy still has my passport.  Tomorrow is the first Sunday of the month, when all the museums are free.  There are worse things.

But for some reason, I'm really missing television.  I've been watching BBC news nonstop, but it's just not the same as getting my pop-culture fill of Lost and Heroes.  You wouldn't think such things are meaningful or in any way a grand contribution to life and culture... but seriously, life without Doctor Who and Battlestar Gallactica reruns is really a shadow of what it ought to be.  We take for granted the ability to have stories around us constantly, like a never-ending campfire tale, full of meaning and human experience and beauty and symbolism and the range of human emotion from its noblest to its most petty.  Entering a world without that constant swirl of stories is like having all the music shut off in your life.

Hollywood is the dominant art form on our planet for a good reason.

Hello from Paris!

I'd been planning a trip to Paris next week, and then to head out soon to India to visit bjennings76</lj>'s dad and step-mom. Due to the holiday schedule and the difficulty of being an American getting an Indian visa in Belgium, it ended up that it's a lot easier to just get the visa in Paris. They have same-day service here instead of having to send a passport back and forth, and the flights to Delhi are $150 cheaper and 6 hours shorter.

Thus, without any particular plan to do so, I'm spending New Year's Eve in Paris. I took a high-speed train from Mons yesterday morning, found a cheap but nice little guesthouse, and slept and relaxed. Tomorrow I'm going to walk to the consulate, which is just under a mile away, then attempt to find an English language bookstore, then maybe-possibly-if-there-are-still-tickets watch the New Year's performance of the National Ballet at the grand opera house in Paris. I can't describe the awesomeness of that.

Assuming I get my visa on time, I should be flying to Delhi on Friday. The plan is to spend another 2 days in Delhi sleeping and adjusting to the weather (it will take a lot out of me to go from snow and -2C to, um, India) then take a train down to Agra and visit the Taj Mahal and various sites there. After a day or two I'll take another train to Jaipur, where I meet up with Dean and Kendall. From there we'll head back to chez lui in Bangalore.

I haven't got a plan about when and how I'm getting from there to my assignment in the Philippines, but I know I can fly out of Bangalore on low-cost airlines and actually end up on Mindanao instead of having to go through Manila. Whenever I figure that part out, I'll post again.

Since I don't necessarily trust consulates with an ability to be on time, I haven't yet booked my Paris-Delhi flight. So, on the off-chance that they take longer than planned, I might not be flying out of here until Saturday. Or at the very latest, Tuesday. In any case, I'll post the details of my itinerary. For the moment I'm staying on a quiet little street in Paris just off Boulevard Voltaire, and I'm quite content with that.


****EDIT****

Due to holiday closures and traffic, my visa will take approximately a week to process, with "approximately" being at the mercy of the Indian embassy.   It`s not cost effective to go anywhere else to wait it out, so I am essentially stuck in Paris for a week.  Oh dear me, whatever shall I do.

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers.  His books are pop social science, and I like them a lot.  They're the greatest airplane books ever - thoughtful, intriguing, well researched, and a quick read.  "Outliers" talks about success - those stunning examples of people so astonishing that they skew the curve for the rest of us: Einstein, Bill Gates, Mozart, Bobby Fisher, etc.  Specifically, it discusses how these people were shaped by a combination of their environment and plain old-fashioned hard work.  

I'm not sure whether the book or the widespread awareness came first, but I have in recent weeks seem numerous references to the "10,000 hour" theory of expertise described in the book.  It seems that if you do something for 10,000 hours, you will be a world-class expert at that thing, regardless of what it is or when you start it.  Whether it's hockey, chess, programming, baking bread, or bagging groceries, if you do some practical skill for that many hours you cannot help but be a world-class expert at it.  Conversely, if you don't do it for 10,000 hours, you won't be a world-class expert at it.  Even Mozart had been composing for well over 10 years before he produced a truly remarkable and original work.  (Bobby Fisher is a noted exception, requiring only 9,000 hours.)  

By comparison, other sources have suggested that the level of "pretty good", or just capable professional, is 5-6,000 hours, and a decent amateur is about 2,000 hours.  Consider that there are roughly 2,000 hours in a work year, if you have a 40 hour per week job.  After 3 years on the job you generally know what you're doing; after 6 to 10 years you can be qualified as an "expert."  Subtracting non-productive hours in which you were drinking coffee or fixing the photocopier rather than getting your stuff done, this seems to hold with the theory.

Of course, Gladwell wasn't the first person to say it, and I dare say even the researchers he quoted weren't the first.  I first came across the concept in 1998, on an advice column for screenwriters, written by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio (of Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, Aladdin, etc.)  "If you do something for 10 years," Ted wrote, "you cannot help but be an expert at it.  Whether it's bagging groceries or flying a space shuttle, do it for 10 years and you will be the expert."  He said that the idea had freed him to do what he truly wanted to do, without fear of failure; all he had to do was keep doing it for another 10 years.  

It also brings to mind a quote from a friend, a very long time ago, about playing games:  "In the amount of time you've spent pretending to be a ninja, you could have become a ninja."  This has become ever more poignant to me as I've known people who have actually become ninjas, or at least ninjas-in-training, as well as people who continue to pretend.  I can't make any claims as to which of the two are happier with their lives or as human beings, but I know which of them is more likely to do a cool back-flip.

In the spirit of this spate of recent posts about the 10,000 hour rule, I decided to calculate how many hours I've actually spent doing things that I love.  How much time have I really dedicated to doing the things that my conscious mind tells me are my highest priorities?  Do those numbers reflect how much I actually care about them?  Should I shift my focus to spend more time on them?  Should I just accept the fact that they're not as important as I think they are?  Or am I spending more time on them than I've given myself credit for?  

So here it is, my honest assessment of how much time I've spent doing the things I love.  Note that these are practical skills; I don't include things like "reading" or "traveling" or "watching movies," since I wouldn't know how to differentiate a world-class expert from a novice.  I also do not include my professional career - hobbies only.  I included things I've studied only if I truly loved them and pursued them outside class hours, and there is a recognized expertise that can be gained from them.  I erred on the side of conservative estimates, and rounded to the nearest 100.

1. Writing (for pleasure, not for work):  14,400  
2. Dancing:  5,300 
3. Studying economics:  2,500
4. Studying foreign languages:  2,100
5. Playing a musical instrument:  1,700

Storm clouds are gathering in Eastern Europe.  Ukraine, Hungary, and Iceland share the news headlines as the wold's foremost victims of the global financial crisis.   Political infighting and tensions with Russia, along with a severely declining steel industry have deepened the effects across Ukraine.  There is a silver lining, but more on that later.

In the western world, "political tensions" essentially mean that 24-hour cable networks switch to all politics, all the time.  In Ukraine, due to "political tensions" between local officials, last week many districts of the capital city of Kiev lost heat and hot water.  These are government-controlled commodities - the local goverment can literally shut off your apartment building's gas heating at a whim.  In sub-zero temperatures and bitter continental winter conditions, losing heat for a week is a hardship to pale at.  People couldn't even wash dishes, because the water was literally freezing out of the tap.  Even now, three days after the heat was turned back on by these same officials, radiators are merely lukewarm, homes are still freezing, and people are sick with colds and flu.   

In addition, the value of the UAH (or "grivna") has fallen from 5.05gr to $1 on October 1 to 9.45 to $1 on December 17 - a loss of nearly 50% of its value in two and a half months.  This has a direct impact on many citizens, since half of all bank loans and most rents are denominated in either dollars or euro, but most people get paid in grivnas.  Imagine that your rent was 2,525 grivnas ($500) per month on October 1.  At current exchange rates, your rent due on January 1 is now 4,725 grivnas.   

Banks are feeling the crunch most keenly, since most of their own debts are denominated in foreign currency as well.  Informal reports from Kiev state that it is nearly impossible for individuals or businesses to get dollars out of ATMs or money changers - banks are holding on to all foreign currency reserves and refusing to sell them.  One source attempted to find USD from over 20 different ATMs and exchange kiosks, with no luck.  

Add to the mix the near-collapse of Prominvest Bank, one of the largest in Ukraine, earlier this fall.  To prevent a bank run, they froze all depositor accounts until at least January.  People and companies can see their money sitting in their account, but cannot withdraw it, and cannot use the bank to transfer funds or make payments.  As of December 16 a Russian bank has been in negotiations to buy the troubled bank.  Many Ukrainians view this nervously as Russian attempt at economic, rather than military, takeover of their country.  Ukraine is in a vulnerable position, as its GDP is expected to decline by up to 10% in 2009.  Consider that the predicted 3.4% decline in the US is considered a deep recession, while a generally accepted definition of a "depression" is a GDP decline of more than 10%.

This is particularly hard on financial institutions - like Kiva's field partners.  

Kiva's business model is more complex than it appears at first glance.  When a lender sends $25 through Kiva to an entrepreneur, that money is received and disbursed by our field partner in that country - in this case, HOPE Ukraine.  The field partner is a microfinance bank which is authorized as a financial institution in that country.  They do the leg-work of finding clients, performing due diligence to ensure the borrower is solvent, writing profiles, and handling the transactions between Kiva's lending community and the local entrepreneur.  Critically, they also handle foreign exchange risk.  

When Kiva sends $300 to an entrepreneur, it's exactly that: $300.  So we're expecting that same $300 back, regardless of the value of the local currency.  Imagine that HOPE Ukraine had raised $300 on Kiva on October 17 for an entrepreneur named Tanya.  They would have converted it into grivnas at 5.05, and given Tanya 1,515 grivnas on a 10-month term.  Her principle payments are 152 grivnas, which is what she gives to HOPE Ukraine each month, and HOPE Ukraine promises to convert it and send it back as $30.  However, when HOPE Ukraine converted Tanya's monthly payment back into dollars on December 17, that 152 grivnas is no longer worth $30 - now it's worth only $16.  HOPE Ukraine must then pay $14 out of its own pocket in order to send Kiva lenders a $30 repayment.

That sounds pretty grim for HOPE Ukraine, doesn't it?  But we promised you a silver lining, and here it is:

Due to the crisis, none of the big traditional banks will give out loans anymore, so everyone is coming to HOPE Ukraine.  They have as much business as they can handle, and more.  And because the grivna is worth less, they can lend out in higher amounts.  Since Kiva has a $1200 per entrepreneur loan cap, back in October no Kiva clients could borrow more than 6,060 grivnas.  Today that $1200 loan cap is worth 11,340 grivnas - so they can service clients who have a greater range of financial need.  And they can use the extra income they're generating on all these new loans to pay that $14 on Tanya's loan.    

Microfinance institutions in these circumstances begin to seem, if not recession-proof, at least recession resistant.  Even as the value of their loan portfolio declines on international markets, the volume of loans they service can increase, because traditional banks tighten their lending habits.  This is particularly true for loan-only microfinance banks like HOPE Ukraine.  Because they don't take deposits, only give out loans, they did not have money sitting idly in their coffers to be used for foreign investments.  They stayed out of the mortgage-backed securities and the short selling, and were thus insulated from many of the shocks that traditional financial institutions suffered.    

Conditions on the ground, particularly for the poor, are still harsh and uncertain.  Unemployment is skyrocketing, inflation is at 25% and rising, and the government is deadlocked in political infighting.  Tanya, and everyone else in Ukraine, may or may not have hot water, or a job, or a savings account tomorrow.   But despite the gloom and instability, and in some cases because of it, Kiva's field partners are standing strong.

(Cross posted to the Kiva Fellows Blog.)