Borderland Edition

Воистину воскрес!

Have a Happy Easter.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Life has been quite busy lately as I’ve embarked on a new adventure. This time I decided to stay in-country for the journey. After visiting Washington DC in February, I decided that I wanted to move here to restart life in America after Peace Corps. DC is an exciting place with lots of interesting opportunities. I started work two weeks ago at a non-profit organizations that works to find practical ways to protect the earth and improve people’s lives around the globe by providing information and proposals for development. I’m currently working on a project that involves designing a map-based web application to view funding allocation to third-world countries in Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus as well as allowing user-defined scenarios to display how modifications in the funding allocations would change specific situations. For me, it’s a cool confluence of using technology to make an impact on policy and people’s understanding of the world.

This summer I’m thinking of registering for an intensive political Russian course at John Hopkins University. It’ll be pretty sweet - three hours of class, four nights a week, for eight weeks. In addition to giving me a chance to continue studying Russian, I’ll get a feel of my capacity for hardcore studying and time management required of pursuing a Master’s degree.

So, yes, exciting things are on the horizon. The cherry blossoms are about to bloom beneath the watchful eyes of Mr. Lincoln and the long winter is finally coming to a close.

Reading about the great adventures of the famous English explorer Francis Younghusband as I sat on a delayed Frontier airlines flight from Denver to Washington DC, the pilot comes on the radio to announce the cause of the delay. It’s truly laughable, the flight can’t leave the gate at DIA not because of weather or mechanical problems, but because of two missing Safety Information Cards. You know, those goofy cartoon drawings that tell you how to kiss your ass goodbye in case of a water landing.

Forty minutes later the missing cards have yet to arrive and FAA regulations require that each seat holds one of these magical cards, even if no one is occupying the seat. Since the aircraft is new there happened to be no extra cards sitting around the airport. Finally someone on the staff comes to the rescue with a brilliant idea. If a couple of the seats are ‘disabled’ then they wouldn’t count as a seat requiring a safety information card. Apparently these cards are so magically that it’s safer to break the plane than fly without them in every (operational) seat pocket. Awesome! I can no longer comment on the seeming silly aspects of Ukrainian culture.

So the pilot ordered a couple of the seats to be ‘disabled’ by the mechanics and we were on our way, almost two hours late. To make up for the inconvenience, Frontier graciously turns on the DirectTV channels free of charge for the entire flight. As if two hours of my life are equivalent to three hours of free TV…