Unemployed Fulbright Alum

As of today, I am no longer a Fulbright grantee. I am, instead, an unemployed Fulbright alumnus. And, well--so far so good.

I am in Australia now, discovering just how much English I've forgotten over the year (example from 10 minutes ago: "doved?" "diven?" *pause to think* WOW okay "dived"), and meeting scads of people from everywhere from the Netherlands to Germany to Belgium to Sweden to the UK...pretty much getting a full-on European tour just by staying in my hostel and talking to people, really. And, so far, my experiment in solo travel has been absolutely lovely--wonderful roommates, wonderful dive class, wonderful blessings coming my way, ranging from having simply wonderful dorm-mates and a great hostel to getting an AMAZING deal on a dive class/trip--I was given a 300-dollar full-day upgrade for free.

One unfortunate downside of blogging, I've come to realize, is that when I write everything that happens to me, I have no new stories to tell people when they ask me how (insert place/event/"life" here) has been. So that, combined with the fact that I don't have a converter to charge my computer here, and that I'll soon be on a dive boat with no Internet access anyway, means I won't be posting every detail of my trip. Besides, my grant is over! I don't remember when I made the decision to post daily, and I definitely never said when that little experiment in prolific writing will end; it would seem logical to be done now that my grant is. But I think I'll keep pegging away at it, probably, until I come home. And I'll be home soon enough (whether "home" in this instance means Taiwan or USA, both are true), and when you ask me now I'll have fresh tales to tell!

In the meantime, this is more of an explanatory post than anything else. I'm going to try to set up postings for the next few days which will publish at a pre-determined time, so I can stick to this one-a-day format until I'm back in the States, but don't expect too much from them. Or from me--after all, I'm now just an unemployed hostel rat chilling out in Australia.