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June 10, 2007 In the evenings, I've enjoyed cooking for myself – for the first time! I'm surprised to realize that I quite enjoy doing my own grocery shopping and creating my own meals. This taste of grown-up ("grown-up") life is one of my favorite aspects of the summer. There are all different ways to see a country, I've come to realize. There's the whistle-stop tourist whirlwind, with a checklist of things to do and see. There's the purposeful seeking of off-the-beaten-path attractions, with perhaps more possibilities to uncover the underlying pulse of a place. There's couch-surfing with friends who are similarly temporary residents of the place, in which case you might sightsee together, or staying with friends who actually live and work there full-time. There's big-city hopping, village touring, backwoods bushwacking... And there's actually living there – doing weekly marketing, walking around the city without the tourist's jittery see-all do-all energy, getting to recognize faces, traffic patterns, routes, habits... and weather. At work, I've begun a couple of interesting assignments: outlining a human rights training course the Centre will run in Tipperary for the Gardai (An Garda Siochana, the national police); helping some of the staff prepare for the two summer schools that will run in the following weeks (one on the International Criminal Court, the other on minority rights, both of which will bring in academics, advocates, and students from all over the world); and outlining a proposal for collaboration between the Centre and the university's film school on a human rights-themed project. |
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