Sabbatical begins....

I'm entering the blog-o-sphere.

As of last Saturday, I’m on sabbatical from my faculty position at Colorado State University for a semester, which leads into the summer months when I typically have fewer responsibilities around campus anyway. So voila, it amounts to an 8-month getaway from the regular work routine.
 
Though this sabbatical just started on December 15, I started slipping into sabbatical a few months ago. The more I responded to various requests to commit to something that would carry on after December 15 with regrets that I couldn't commit, the more I was able to say it without any hint of apology. In fact, I think initially my response to those moments sounded something like“I’m really sorry but I’ll be on sabbatical” but by the end, I think it came acrossmore as “F-off, I’ll be on sabbatical.”

That lastline reminds me that I need to create some blog warnings and expectations.

· Sometimes I will swear or I will say or imply something that is equally uncharming. I do not underestimate the power of profanity to make a point.

· I have no idea what my level of commitment will be to this. Our blog relationship will have its ups and downs. Sometimes I won’t know why I continue to be involved and you won’t know why you continue reading. You might get hurt, I might get hurt, and there will no mixed tape to fix it.

· Some of you are too young to know what a mixed tape is and its historical role inrepairing adolescent relationships. You can’t set an iPod playlist on someone’s front seat and watch from a crouched position nearby when they got into their car to see the reaction, and for that, I would argue that you post Gen X-ersm issed out. That’s love. You know what else is love? Sleeping on a lawn chair overnight in front of the Tacoma Dome ticket office for a Madonna ticket. Wait, how do we get on this topic? See the next line.

· Sometimes I lose focus. And not just when I’m writing. This happens in class, too, and students exploit it when they figure it out. We watched Eddie Murray’s “My Girl Wants to Party All the Time” video two weeks ago, and a month ago I had a white-board full of numbers explaining the national debt and the fiscal cliff. For those who don’t know me, I teach natural resources. Side note: if you doubt your dance abilities, watch that video and you'll think you're super hip.

So what’s the reason for the blog? I have some plans for this sabbatical: travel plans, project plans, and plans to average 7 hours of sleep again. A few people suggested the blog as a way to follow what I’m up to and where I’m going, which creates some pressure to keep it interesting. It won’t all be about travel and professional pursuits, though.  I enjoy the blog-style of free writing, which rarely comes up for me since my primary writing duties are typically relegated to the sterile and technical world of academic journals, or letters of recommendation comprised of recycled parts of old letters of recommendation from students who remind me of each other. I don’t know that I’ll have anything profound or informative to say, and you might just end up with an affirmation that I can’t focus on one thing for very long. But I will share insights, observations and knowledge about what is crossing my mind or my path during some of these sabbatical adventures. It will be about the places that I visit during the next 8 months, and it will likely have some opinions about what’s going on with humanityand the role of reasonable and collaborative thinking and problem-solving on our planet.

So let’s get this started. Here's a visual aid to help with the following text.
 

It’s nearly midnight in Thessolinki, Greece which is close to where the brown, minty green and yellow areas converge on the map. I have spent the past four nights in four different countries, and that sentence makes me feel like a whore. The first night in Turkey was unplanned when I ended up in Istanbul, Turkey, and I will squarely place the blame for that on Turkish Airlines. But I find stories about the stresses of travel to be uninteresting so I won’t include mine here. Travel is a voluntary behavior, and if I’m in the fortunate position to travel than I should keep perspective and not bitch about a cancelled flight or a Turkish Airlines employee who ironically had the phrase “customer service" in her title of "customer service agent.”  But I WILL complain about the gigantic bummer that we arrived to the hotel in Istanbul at 11pm and left at 4:30am. Cruel because Istanbul is a GREAT city and I didn’t get to revisit any of it. Go there someday if you have the chance.  It’s a culture of Europe, Asia and Northern Africa all wrapped into one, with Christians, Muslims and Jews living together in a region of the world where in other countries, people lose their lives for belonging to one of those religions.

Second night was in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro which is one of the former states of Yugoslavia before the awful war and subsequent break-up of the country in the early 1990s. This was my second trip to the tiny country of 600,000. On my trip in September, I met the prime minister who casually walkedinto our meeting. I thought he was just some late-comer with nicer clothes thanthe rest of us. No secret service, no stressed-out personal assistants at hisside keeping track of time.  It made the statement pretty clear that Montenegro doesn't get too worked up about much.  And there's a lot of wealthy Russians running around here building up huge resorts on the coast.

Third night was in Albania. My apologies to Albania. It was only about two weeks before I departed that I was asked to come here, and it’s just not a country I had ever made a commitment to as far as learning basics such as its location, language and so on. Consequently, during the two weeks before I left I misspoke a few times. I told my brother I was going to Algeria and a few days before I left I received an email from a colleague who signed off with “Good luck in Armenia" because I probably told her that's where I was going. Despite my confusion, I can confidently say that I’m 95% sure I was in Albania.

I had one of the best meal experiences of my life in Albania. From what I could tell, Albania is divided between the top 1% and the remaining 99%. As a former communist country, that 99% seems to have what they need though not a lot more.  During our time there, we were treated like the Top 1%.  Some of you know of my increasing obsession with food, food experiences, food presentations, etc., and this place put me in a place of food nirvana.  Five courses of beautifully prepared courses, with a lot of Mediterranean influence: olives, eggplant, feta, pistachios, apricots, all in some state of puree, sautee, etc.... And Italy is just across the Adriatic, and the influence is apparent. And what I mean by that is the wine flowed, and flowed, and flowed. If wine is gonna flow in the abundance that it did, you can serve me just about anything and I'll be happy.  Except the blackbird. There was blackbird on the menu.  Two people ordered it, and I quietly hummed "Bye Bye Blackbird" to myself as they ate.

Tonight is the last night, and I’m in Greece. It’s definitely Greece.

Here are the nuts and bolts of why I’min the Balkan region of the world. There’s a few big lakes around here: Lake Skadar and Lake Prespa, specifically. Both are sizable (between 300-400 square kilometers; Tahoe is about 500 to give you a reference point) and have a lot to do with providing drinking water, wildlife habitat, jobs for fishermen and soon. And both straddle the borders of at least two countries (Lake Skadar: Montenegro, and either Albaniam, Armenia or Algeria; and for Lake Prespa, it’s Greece, Macedonia and also one of the “A” countries). So things get complicated pretty quick for figuring out how the lakes can meet a lot of demands. A number of the countries in this part of the world haven't had independence for very long -- Montenegro gained independence from Serbia in 2006 -- and there's not a lot of capacity within the country on how to do some large scale conservation planning.

Fortunately, there’s money available from a the world's larger conservation organization to encourage countries around here to collaborate and figure out how they’re gonna protect threatened species, such as Mr. Curly Pelican (see photo below). For countries that have their eyes on joining the EU – as Montenegro and Albania do (Greece already belongs) -- those monsieurs and lasses at the EU require that countries have written plans to protect their biodiversity “hot spots” (both lakes are considered hotspots) if they want to join the club. So here we are in Stage 1 of this process: help figure out what they need to do, to be followed at some point by developing a proposal to help address those needs.

Curly pelican: 

Curly from the three stooges (no relation):

It turns out blogging takes a while, and it’s threatening my 7-hours-of-sleep goal for tonight. In our next episode, I intend to share with you my conversation with a colleague who I sat with on the 11-hour journey from Lake Skadar to LakePrespa, and his experiences during the break-up of Yugoslavia. Over and out here on Sabbatical, Day 5.