When I was waiting for yet another bus, I met a Swiss woman who had been working for the government coordinating the incoming refugees from Yugoslavia during the war. When i said taht I'd been in Geneva and Kosovo, she asked if I'd gone to any of those "wild NGO parties." I didn't know what she was talking about, and after she foudn out taht I'd been visiting someone who was from there she said "...well, you know, NGOs can be good and all...but there are more than 270 of them in Bosnia. All I can say is that there are a lot of people who have nothing but good deeds to profess who have made a lot of money off of that war." One guy who'd been working for the Quaker officein Geneva had turned down far better paying jobs in the interest of working for that office. When it turned out that his daughter needed a very expensive heart surgery, he felt as though his disregard for money had translated into neglect for his family. It's awful; I really think that our physical and educational wellbeing should not be dependent on our parents' unfaltering drive to make money.

My aunts and uncles all share a house on the Chesapeake that they all inherited from my grandfather. It was built in the 1920's and had faucets and door handles over which I was irrationally sentimental. It was quaint and simple, with a few pieces of decidedly un-groovy 1970's furniture, tacky fish napkin rings, and sea-related romance novels. This afternoon I got my brief on the silent yet costly war being waged over the house's interior: sweat equity to make it comfortable vs. allegiance to Williams & Sonoma to make it impressive to judgemental visitors. I am impossible to consult in these battles because I obviously don't have a good sense of which color schemes are important in life--if the upholstery were up to me I would surely disgrace to the family name.

My feelings about the excesses of the States are about the same as before. I personally think that too much cynical energy (my own included) has been devoted to bemoaning the obnoxious lifestyles of the upper middle class on the behalf of the "less fortunate." A lot of people would consider themselves "more fortunate" to not own a ride-on lawnmower. Yes, certain things are important (health care, for example), but beyond a certain minimum, inequality isn't such a big deal. The way I see it, there is a double sided myth about money and how much it makes your life more satisfying. Those of us who have it have been told over and over how fortunate we are to have all this stuff, so we think that them foreigners must have it pretty rough. The truth is, the quality of happiness on the other side of the income fence is about the same, but those people have heard this same myth, so those who ar leading more or less fulfilling lives believe that they're missing out on something fantastic.

I said something [stupid] to this effect in Quaker meeting this morning, and an old guy came up to me and said "You know, whether your rich or poor, it's always nice to have a little money" and cackled and hobbled off to the apple juice.

I hung out with a few of my favorite antique hippies: one was a concientious objector during World War II and the other went to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee back in the day. Not that those are the only reasons they are cool. When I say I'm graduating soon people start giving me contact information, and career advice. These two had assured me of their connections far and wide with NGOs, but later at a dinner party someone else was telling me I ought to shoot for T. Rowe Price or Google because they have rad company trips to the waterpark.

Cowabunga?

Actually the thing that's been bothering me is how much it is necessary to drive a car. Dependence on fossil fuel is another bullet on the list of crap wrong with the world that we Americans consider worth lamenting in newspaper columns but too overwhelming to actually make a difference. Climate change has rocketed to the top of my list of priorities, and it is bothering me that carbon emissions are neither a forethought nor an afterthought in any of the decisions we make about where to buy a house, where to get groceries, which car to drive, or even whether or not to include a bike lane on a road. It's true, our landscape leaves us with very few options and we are obliged to drive, but it seems like that has led us to shrug helplessly and step on the gas. Personally I'm scared shitless, and I'm glad I'll be working at this bike coop to at least sooth my guilt.

I started volunteering at Baltimore's bike coooperative, and that place has me thinking that this city has a community strong enough and quirky enough that I could really love living here. I guess I, like many human beings, live for the shit that never

Home! In Baltimore! According to the normal study abroad doctrine I'm supposed to be culture-shocked or depressed or something, but that seems to be a disease for sissies whose only cure is a sound slap in the face. I am drinking my favorite juice, my "little" 200-pound brother is playing video games, there are begonias in full bloom on the front porch and I slept in my own bed. So nice. My folks are good folk.

I guess to start off where I left off before,I took the overnight bus back to Istanbul and rode around on the $2 public ferry all around the Bosphorus. That city is so hip--they've created clubs in the middle of the water, little islands with pools and dance floors and restaurants for the ultra-elite. There was no bus straight from Istanbul to Prishtina, so I took a far more circuitous route that took three days. On the overnight bus from Istanbul to Sofia, Bulgaria, I sat next to an Australian film student who had been teaching English in Poland for a few months. Apparently in Poland almost all of the films are dubbed by the same actor who speaks in a complete monotone and never changes the pitch of his voice between men and women. When he said he played the banjo, I figured that we would probably get married. The process of crossing the border took from midnight until 4:15 AM, involving a lot of getting on the bus, getting off the bus, unpacking our luggage for inspection, re-packing our luggage for inspection, turning in passports, answering questions, blah blah blah. We were the only non-natives on the bus, and people kept demanding our passports for things. As it turns out, twice they were just other passengers using our passports to buy two extra quota's worth of the duty-free cigarettes available at the border, and forced us to lug around about eighty packs of cigarettes until the border police were gone. We spent quite awhile in dimly lit warehouse, standing by our luggage with no bus. There were a few animal cadavers in the corners and mice would scramble in and out between the bags if people were carrying food. When we finally made it to Sofia, I couldn't decipher the Cyrillic alphabet to find the next bus, so Australian guy and I ended up passing out in the garden of a hostel(an old commy building that had been "renovated" by a bunch of art students) until they gave us beds. In the mean time, I met two more Norwegians (Norwegians really are God's most hilarious gift to humanity) and a Mexican literature teacher/director, and I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to marry all of them. After we'd met up with a couple of extremely vulgar British primary school teachers, we all headed out to display our backpackers' chic in the hottest dance spots in town. It was difficult for us to distinguish which were respectable joints and which weren't because of the way women were dressed nearly everywhere. Sofia itself is difficult to describe...it's as though someone had re-done "Pleasantville" in cement Soviet architecture, and peppered around a few mosques and statues for a touch of culture. I dunno, I was just passing through.

On the next bus I met a couple of Brits who were wandering around looking for a place to open up a hostel. I gave them my guidebook, and they were so grateful that they saved me after our bus broke down and I was stranded with no place to stay. The next day one of their friends, a Spanish guy who worked at the embassy in Sofia, came to Prishtina with me and followed me and Bardhi and Joe around for a day. He was so fascinated with everything, questioned every phone number area code and ice cream flavor as some sort of hidden political or historical message. I still think that the ability to be fascinated is one of the most desirable ualities you can find in people.

I'm in Bardhi's Prishtina apartment in Kosova. Prishtina is so hip, it ought to be named Poshtina, and I feel like I am here just to make everyone else look even better. Bardhi's song-writer friend Joe, a Mormon from Utah, is caterwauling from the next room. We have all been doing very little since we arrived, eating plenty of chocolate with unfamiliar labels that have dots over the vowels, passing judgement on every soul who is unfortunate enough to amble past our balcony. Personally I think life is pretty good.

They say that Kosovars are among the most optimistic people in the world. Around the city you can see the evolution of people's attitudes towards the future, ranging from ambitious construction projects that ache with potential, to train tracks tied down by weeds, to freshly-fenced in gardens at the embassies on the hill, to a church boarded up with a welcoming display of barbed wire around the doors, to a gallery full of smiling clay-covered people washing in and out of the doors. Everyone, though, is pissed about how many promises of independence have been broken over the past ten years. It isn't easy to stay positive for such a long time, and the energy to protest is gradually stagnating as every ultimatum is violated and as every deadline passes.

Bardhi is brilliant. It's so affirming to see the people you knew were going somewhere in another place. His friends are hilarious and have tolerated our stuttering attempts at Albanian proverbs. A couple of them put Joe on the radio the other night, and had me tell stale jokes in an incomprehensible Southern accent. I don't think I was funny, but they say I was funny "for a girl." Bah! "Te ha dreqi! May the devil eat it!"

Why aren't girls funny?

Admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.

It's been a long way coming here. I'm sure no one reads this anymore. I'm always surprised when people have. THANK YOU, DEDICATED READERS! While I was in Geneva, I met a nice guy from Seattle who was biking his way across Switzerland on his way to the tomato festival in Spain. He stuck around until my program ended, but life is life and his plans to come to Eastern Europe with me were defeated by logistics--which as it turns out was decidedly for the best. In Geneva, my friend Ali and I had planned on hiking for a few days, but her budding romance with an Indian guy from the Center for Disarmament steered us in the direction of a couple of barbecues and a reggae festival in the neighborhood. His friends were interesting, intelligent, multi-lingual, good-looking, and fun--as the Geneva crowd is rumored to be. The nice thing was that they were also very open and welcomed us into their folds right off the bat--I found myself rocketing past the Jet d'Eau in a grocery cart as we searched for space in a public park to pitch a tent. Nikhil graciously allowed us to set up camp in his basement, and we ended up staying a long while...his mother is gracefully inspiring. His father works for the UN Office of Telecommunications, and he had really provocative to say about the media and the US's control over the internet as he barbecued us Grade-A Organic pork. He spent some time making documentaries--one of them, called "Sacred and Profane," was about how someone painted a stretch of the Himalayas green after the forest had died--because the president was due to fly his plane over. My father, coincidentally, has also made a documentary called "Sacred and Profane," but I don't know what it was about. I am starting to think that, if I really get my priorities straight, I'll be going full-steam doing something about global warming. We all ought to...Kosova has no snow for the kids to sled anymore, and not enough water in the summer to keep the parks anything but yellow-brown. It rained a lot on the night of the reggae festival. Someone brought out a giant tarp into the crowd, and Michel and I ended up crunched into a an accidental mosh pit underneath pulsating plastic. We hung out with some professional festival-goers who had a generator, huge sound system, and the works connected to their two VW buses and circus-sized tent until the first bus back into town at sunrise.

My wallet was stolen in Geneva, above-mentioned friend from Seattle bailed me out, and I made it to Stefano's house in Milan. It was great to see him again--it made it feel like we were old friends and that it wasn't all that unlikely that we'll see eachother again someday. We had cheese and peach ice tea on Montevecchio, watermelon at a stand illegally established on a road median, and then he showed me his age-old hang out spot. The first generation pub, the "Honky Tonky," was shut down by the local muncipality after repeated noise complaints, the last of which was delivered by the police during a toga party to a very naked owner. The governments decision to shut down its successor, the "Train Blues" (as goes the song), for the same reason, was met by a protest in front of city hall and a party with free beer in the middle of the intersection in front of the bar. Stefano is set to work at the third venue, somewhat less creatively christened the 'Saloon.'It's so good to see him jostling all of his pre-school friends--some people manage to bloom where they're planted. Green with envy! Bardhi, after all these years, says he thought I didn't have much in common with my friends in high school. ???WHAT???MY WORLD IS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN!!!#$%@((*7!!!

Istanbul (NOT CONSTANTINOPLE) was everything that I had hoped--last year I even made a website about it for Lanegran's class. I am wincing as I type the address: http://www.macalester.edu/geography/courses/geog261/lvrobson/index.htm
On my first night there, after a nice, cheap rooftop sunset dinner an Australian doctor girl and I were invited to mix with the Turkish gay scene by two very stylish middle-aged men and a throng of open-minded straight couples. They took us out seafood at a pricey joint, where they paid a gypsy band to play old dirges to which they could wail along...the more portly of the two guys tossed money around like confetti, and stuffed 20 Euro notes up the bell of the clarinet. Afterwards they took us to the famed Reina club under the bridge across the Bosphorus, complete with hot-pink chandalieres and jet-set crowd standing around like so much furniture. Rumor has it that Paris Hilton was there a few weeks ago. Rumor also has it that they paid something like $90 for each of us to go in because we were dressed in our Backpacker's Best (artfully stained jeans and classily-casual flip flops). We took a cab home. The other party was pulled over by the police for their creative driving, but they let him off because 'his computer was broken,' probably because he dropped a fistful of money on it. To top it all off, while we were eating a peacful dinner out the next night, in wandered Portly Gay Man #1 with his wife. Bam!

I also managed to befriend a few of the employees at a local cafe (the kind of people who do nothing but befriend strangers all day long, so it wasn't really me who did the befriending) and spent a long time talking about how to find direction in life. I suspect that my fate will be simlar to theirs. We gathered wisdom from a tattooed man of about fifty with breezy blonde hair. As it turned out, he actually is the father of one of my friends from Macalester who just finished up a Watson studying refugee camps all around the world this year. His approval of his daughter wandering the globe, the fact that he'd "gotten caught up" in Istanbul for the last three months, his presence of mind and easy friendships all made me feel better about the way that I've been living my life as yet.

Danielle, the Aussie doctor, told me that it took her far too long to realize that there are so many different ways that people exist in life that it's impossible to say that any of them are wrong. It doesn't sound very profound, but for those of us in our early twenties who are soon expected to act our age, and know what to do, how to pay our taxes, how to separate lights from darks, to save for retirement and pay off loans...this idea that short of prostitution and heroine addiction, it isn't all that necessary to stay within the nine-to-five lines--this idea is seductive.

I saw Irmak and Duyguu in Izmir...Lovely lovelies. We lazed around and watched the sun set over the sea. It was amazing to see all of the places they'd been talking about for such a long time, and to ask people what they thought about the military and the coup and the president handing out doorless refrigerators promising them doors upon his election. Irmak, me, Bardhi, Bardhi's Mormon friend from Utah--it is incredible that we come from such radically different places and still manage to see eye-to-eye. Irmak took me to see the ruins that they had uncovered while digging the city's metro. A security guard there, armed with his trusty stick to chase off the teenagers huffing gasoline, escorted us around and explained the underground housing system they had going on there. The entrance was a few boards placed precariously across a ditch behind a car wash, but it worthy of being a tourist attraction.

MORE COMING SOON