Best Christmas Present I Could Ask For!

Suddenly everything is coming together and time seems to have rapidly sped up...in the past 2 days...

On Thursday I spent the afternoon running around the city for attempt number 3 at renewing my passport. After getting all the proper paperwork together and all the necessary signatures signed, I headed back to the passport office and took advantage of the winter rush extended hours. When I got there I was the only person waiting for service. Still, 2 different people got up to the counter before I did (go figure).

But, the 3rd time was the charm. I have successfully submitted my renewal papers and should have my new passport in early January. Unfortunately, because of the itty bitty damage that was on it, I don't get my old one back. I was feeling pretty down about that when I left there. Even the commissioner guys noticed that I was looking pretty upset as I left.

I got home and was trying to let go of this whole no getting my passport back thing and noticed I had some new email. I open my inbox and this is what I see:

Congratulations you are being offered scholarships at La Trobe University‏

Note how that says scholarships, plural? Oh yeah! I got both of the coveted scholarships! One is for tuition, the other is for housing. This is, by far, the greatest news I have gotten all year. I no longer have to stress out about how I'm going to manage to afford living in Australia.

Now, it's not really a lot of money that I get for housing. It's definitely enough to live comfortably, but basically. I'll still be applying for student loans to help cover off those additional costs. I don't know if I'll work while I'm over there or not. I'm only allowed to work 8 hours a week, so, we'll see when I get down there.

I'm super excited now. Everything is coming together, quickly. It's a huge relief to know I'll be okay for money and now I've started scouring the internet for potential 1 bedroom apartments within walking distance of my campus, which is downtown.

So, to celebrate the good news, I quit my job. I'll be finished with ATB as of the first week of January. That feels surreal. I have been itching to move on from there for a long time now, and was not expecting to be able to leave so quickly. I think it's good that I'm leaving now, even though my department is now up the proverbial creek without a paddle. If I had stayed on longer though, knowing that I didn't have to be there, I would not be a very positive employee.

Speaking of things happening quickly, at the beginning of the month I decided to order my new laptop because the customer reviews were all saying it took about 6 weeks to deliver. I guess they've got production in overhaul for Christmas though, because not even 24 hours later I had the accessories I'd ordered, and a week after placing my order I was staring at my new, beautiful, lightweight, fast, and incredibly pimped out laptop.

And I haven't even opened my Christmas presents yet!

It's Official!

Dear Ms Joni,

I am pleased to advise that your application for higher degree candidature at La Trobe University has been successful.


HOORAY!

So there it is, I am officially moving to Australia to do my Ph.D. As it stands right now, my commencement date is Feb. 25 2008, but that is not the most realistic date. More likely I will be starting in early March. What will determine this is whether or not I get scholarships, and if I do get scholarships, what kind and for how much. The other factor is how quickly, once the financial stuff has been sorted out, I will be able to get my visa and all that other practical stuff sorted out. That I don't find out until mid-January.

In the mean time, there's at least a couple of things that I can do to start preparing so that come mid-January I'm not scrabbling around like a crazy person. Okay, well that part will be unavoidable I'm hoping to lessen the severaty of it. One thing I can start doing are going through all my stuff and deciding what I'm putting in storage, what I'm going to try to pack, what I will ship out, and what can stay right where it is. This, it turns out, is an incredibly unpleasant thing to do for someone who's a bit of a pack rat. It's a lot like chopping an onion. I'm peeling back, starting with the stuff I know I have no use for and making my way towards the stuff I have more sentimental attachments to.

The second thing is getting a new passport issued. This has also turned out to be no walk in the park. On my first trip to the passport office I was informed that my passport is damaged and that I will now have to jump through several more hoops before I can have a new one issued. Time, fortunately, is on my side. Because on my second trip to the passport office I was told that what I thought was a valid birth certificate, since it says right on it that it's a valid legal document, was not, in fact, a valid birth certificate. I have no idea what I've done with my birth certificate so now I'm going to have to have a new one issued. (Unless it should miraculously reappear within the next week.) I'll also have to redo my passport form. Fortunately the very secure government website has saved my previous form, so that part won't be too difficult.

Right now things are moving along slowly, but once Christmas is over it's going to be crunch time! It's incredibly exciting and terrifying at the same time. I'll be gone for 4 years, and that's a pretty darn big commitment to make!

New York, New York!

I went to New York City with my good friend Jeff from Ottawa for about 5 days. Here's the breakdown of what we did. (Pictures will be added online soon.)

Thursday October 4
After about 12 hours in transit I arrive at LaGaurdia and meet up with Jeff. We go and get checked into our hotel, which is awesome despite the small room and shared bathroom. We freashen up, go for a quick dinner, walk around the city and discover how close we are to Time Square (totally within walking distance, but far enough away so as not to be caught up in the madness) and have drinks in various bars that I now have little recollection of.

Friday October 5
We go out for breakfast, get free coffee and paparrazzi'd by some promo photographer for TV guide. We take a bus tour of uptown Manhattan. We end up at the bar in the Waldorf Astoria where we are asked to give our 2 cents to a Fox News financial show called Happy Hour (air date was Oct 15, but we both forgot about it and missed it). We go to the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), the only museum we were really willing to stomach. We meet up with Jeff's friend Olivia and have dinner at one of the 2 restaurants beside our hotel that are open until 3am and go for drinks at a bit of a dingy bar, which I quite enjoyed. We then stayed out until around 2am sitting in a corporate park chatting the night away.

Saturday October 6
Bus tours continue: this time we do about half the downtown tour and the whole Brooklyn tour. We both were quite positively surprised by Brooklyn. We discover that we can use the washrooms at any hotel, a discovery we made a great deal of use out of for the rest of the trip. That evening we meet up with Jeff's friend Raj and his roommate Jeff and went for sushi and copius (and I mean copius) amounts of beer. Somehow Raj talks us into walking from the bar, which was one street away from the street our hotel was on, all the way up to Penn Station, which was a little under 20 blocks. I get kicked out of the public washroom at Penn Station by the police, who I then yell at. After sneaking into the bathroom at a bar in the Pennsylvania hotel, we take the subway back to the hotel, have dinner at the French restaurant beside our hotel (where, according to Jeff, the waiters were faking their french), and get in around 4am.

Sunday October 7
We sleep in and then head out to Harlem to have "breakfast". We go to a chicken and waffle place that was quite good, and don't actually eat until after 3pm. We head out to Canal street where I bargain on the prices of knock off designer purses. I also purchase 3 pairs of shoes, but they weren't knock offs. I love my new shoes. That night we head to the Village and have dinner and a pitcher of daquiris at a Mexican restaurant. We bar hop and chat with a friendly bartender about Thanksgiving in our different countries and I get to see the birth place of the gay rights movement. Then we end up going to a kitchy bar full of various holiday decorations to watch a jazz/blues band play. Again we stumble into our hotel room around 4am.

Funny story. On the subway on the way to the Village a guy got on, sat down, and looped his duffle bag handles around his foot, so that he could sleep without worrying about his bag being stolen. When we get back on the subway to go back to our hotel, the same guy is sitting there, bag looped around his feet, sleeping.

Monday October 8
Columbus Day, which, apparently, isn't quite as fake of a holiday as I thought it would be. We decide to have a fancy breakfast (by which normal people would mean lunch) and end up sipping champagne and eatting fancy cheeses and other delicacies in Bryant Park. We make an unsuccessful trip to Macy's and I start to feel like death from too much sun, walking, and dehydration. We stop into the Hyatt bar to lift our spirits. They had a silk couch that I could have slept on. Also, we were the least fake/pretencious people in the place. That night we go see Rent on Broadway, which I quite enjoyed. Afterwards we had Thai food and went for drinks, at a bar called "Social", which was the name of the bar where Jeff and I became friends back in Ottawa. This Social's logo was "enter as strangers, leave as friends" so it was oddly suiting even though our original Social was a very different bar from this one.

Tuesday October 9
Departure day. Only, my flight leaves a good 6 hours or so after Jeff's, so we part ways, thinking we'll see each other later that evening as I am scheduled to fly through Ottawa. I am determined to have better shopping luck and walk up to Bloomingdale's. My luck there could have been better, but I do not leave empty handed. Then I spend a good chunk of time trying to locate a specific store, which was well worth the hunt in the end. They provided me excellent customer service, taking care of my shopping needs without pushing me to make purchases I wasn't really looking to make.

Now, the story of my departure from NYC. Basically, I wait an hour for my shuttle to show up, it doesn't show. I call, they say it's not going to show and to take a cab. The hotel calls me a driver, whom I forgot to get a reciept from so I can't bug the shuttle company to reimburse me. Go to check into my flight only to find that it's been cancelled, due to weather, and that my new flight leaves from a different airport tomorrow morning. I'd also like to point out that Air Canada did not make any attempts to contact me to inform me of this, so it's a good thing they didn't book me on a flight it would not have been possible to catch. I am able to find a room at a hotel near the LaGuardia airport (though I'm flying out of JFK now I am not fussy as there seems to be next to no rooms available).

So I spend the night at a Marriot branch hotel and had fun with the young men working at the front counter for a bit (I was getting a kick out of listening to them talk to each other and other employees versus talking to customers. Ah, the fake phone voice/mannerism, I know it too well.) I don't really sleep at this hotel, but I do have a comfy king size bed to roll around in. The next morning (5:30am) my, get this, limo shows up to take me to JFK. I did not realize I was being booked a limo, so that was kind of cool. The driver was pissed when I paid on Visa. It was like a weird flashback to whenever I'd try to pay on Visa in Peru, but I made it clear it was that or no payment at all. After that it was smooth sailing. I had good seats on the plane and a direct flight, so only 5 hours, and the customs guy was nice and apathetic about his job so I didn't have to try and convince anyone I hadn't gone on a crazy shopping spree (really, it wasn't crazy, it was pretty controlled).

Bonus Stuff
- We were never back at the hotel before 1am
- We were never sober when we came in for the night, although we weren't always trashed either
- The Marriot in Time Square has really soft toliet paper
- New Yorkers are surprisingly polite
- If I ever move to NYC, I would likely choose to live in Brooklyn

Introduction

Hi Everyone!

As many of you will know, when I move or go on a big trip I normally send out email updates. Well, I got tired of doing that and decided instead to start a blog about the various goings on in my life where people are free to check in and read up on what's happening, and I don't have to fill up people's inboxes.

So basically this blog will chronicle my travels, and the big thing that's happening in my life right now, which is my preparations to move to Melbourne, Australia to go to grad school. (Which is still not official, I should know for sure by early December.)

There is a link to my Flickr account, where I will continue to post pictures from my various travels. Right now you can see pictures from my trip to Peru this summer on there, and I will eventually get my New York City pictures up there as well. They are organized into albums to make it easier to view.

I'm not going to go into details about my Peru trip in this blog though. Basically, I presented a paper at the 6th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Sex and Culture in Society, in Lima, Peru. Then after the conference I went to Cusco and Machu Picchu.

I will be posting about my trip to New York City in my next entry.

Please feel free to share the link to this blog with anyone you think might be interested. This is a public blog, so anyone is welcome to read it and comment on it.

Cheers!
Joni