So...I realize I haven't blogged in a very long time. Not since immediately after returning to America.
What can I say? There haven't been a whole lot of interesting things happeneing around here and, let's face it, I haven't had the endless hours in front of a computer screen that I was forced to enjoy during my traineeship in Beijing. These have made for all too convenient excuses not to update this baby.
But no longer, comrades! Allow me to reintroduce my blog.
While this weblog will still attempt to Let us Get Radical, it will no longer, alas, concern my travels and travails in China. That chapter of my life has sadly come to a close. But, dear friends, let us not despair. For life goes on and its high time that we got back on our grind.
In that spirit, let me present you with the program for this evening. We'll start out with a brief account of what I've been up to these past six weeks, gracefully segway into a few observations I've recently made about the world and wrap it all up with link or two.
There are really only two significant thing that have/are happening in my life since returning from Beijing. The first, present continuous thing is my internship this summer. For the past six weeks or so (in fact since the day right after I got back to Chicago) I've been downtown at the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Office of Trade and Investment. While this mouthfull of an internship does, albeit, sound more impressive than it truly is it has none the less been quite rewarding. Most of my daily 'duties' involve your standard intern assignments such as doing research, data entry and stuffing envelopes. There are, however, two bright sides to this.
One is that the research and data I've been working with have to do with some pretty interesting stuff. The mission of the IDCEO OTI is to help small businesses in Illinois find new markets and partners overseas, a task they're normally not able to complete without having the bigger budgets of large multi-nationals. Additionally, our foreign trade offices (10 located around the world: Toronto, Mexico City, Brussels, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Johanesburg, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and New Delhi) work with the home office in Chicago to attract foreign direct investment to the great state of Illinois. Knowing that I'm interested in China, they've partnered me with their managing director for East Asia meaning I've gotten read up a lot on which businesses and which industries in Illinois are doing business in Asia, China in particular.
The other, brighter, side is that I've been able to do a good deal of networking as well. For example: A few weeks ago our office welcomed a trade delegation lead by a senior diplomat from the UAE embassy to the US and I was fortunate enough to be allowed to sit in on their meeting. The meeting itself was fairly interesting, if only to see first had how this sort of this works. It was all rather political, with lots of good will exchanged on both sides and only the vaguest of committments made by either party with assurances that follow up conversations would take place in the near future.
The most worthwhile part however was getting to meet the other members of her delegation. The principle guy was the director of the Harbour group, which I was to find out later is a really big PR and lobbying firm in Washington that, I assume, has been hired by the Emirati government to promote US-UAE bilateral relations.
Now before I go any further, there is one thing we should discuss about the Emirates. It is a country of about 4.5m people only 15% of whom are Emirati nationals. They rely heavily on a large expat community for everything from laundry services to financial services. This being the case, all the delegates really made an effort to speak with me and the other interns, even going as far as telling us that if we wanted to work in the Emirates they would see that it happened.
Anyway, got the guys card and emailed him the next week. I got a reply in less than 24 hours telling me to contact him again in the fall and he'd set me up with a summer position, either in the UAE or Washington, next year. So, suffice it to say, hopefully I'll be writing you all from a beach in Dubai next summer.
The other significant thing to happen so far was that I turned 21! For those international readers, this is significant because I am now allowed to legally purchase and consume alcohol. Under any normal circumstances, this is a rite of passage just as meaningful as the 18th birthday (when one can vote and buy pornagraphy). However, as I had just returned from a country where the concept of underage drinking doesn't really exist not more than one month prior, the day understandably lost some of luster. It dropping on a Tuesday didn't help much either.
But, I did my duty and celebrated in the classic fashion to the best of my ability - by drinking of course. I was only to rustle up one home boy, but we did our duty for god and country getting quite slurry oh two dollar bottles of MGD before mounting our bikes for the ride home (drunk driving is for suckers).
I even got a pretty good haul as far as presents go. A nice bottle of scotch which I'm nipping on as we speak, some clippers to keep my hair (or beard, god forbid) looking nice and short, and, amazingly, and iPod that my sister accidentally stole (long story). So all in all it was a good birthday by any account.
Well for those of you who may have forgotten over the past six weeks of my absense, you've once again probably bitten of more than you planned on chewing in reading my blog. Thus, I'll leave it here for now and pick up with part two next which will, I assure you, be in a timely fashion.
What can I say? There haven't been a whole lot of interesting things happeneing around here and, let's face it, I haven't had the endless hours in front of a computer screen that I was forced to enjoy during my traineeship in Beijing. These have made for all too convenient excuses not to update this baby.
But no longer, comrades! Allow me to reintroduce my blog.
While this weblog will still attempt to Let us Get Radical, it will no longer, alas, concern my travels and travails in China. That chapter of my life has sadly come to a close. But, dear friends, let us not despair. For life goes on and its high time that we got back on our grind.
In that spirit, let me present you with the program for this evening. We'll start out with a brief account of what I've been up to these past six weeks, gracefully segway into a few observations I've recently made about the world and wrap it all up with link or two.
There are really only two significant thing that have/are happening in my life since returning from Beijing. The first, present continuous thing is my internship this summer. For the past six weeks or so (in fact since the day right after I got back to Chicago) I've been downtown at the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Office of Trade and Investment. While this mouthfull of an internship does, albeit, sound more impressive than it truly is it has none the less been quite rewarding. Most of my daily 'duties' involve your standard intern assignments such as doing research, data entry and stuffing envelopes. There are, however, two bright sides to this.
One is that the research and data I've been working with have to do with some pretty interesting stuff. The mission of the IDCEO OTI is to help small businesses in Illinois find new markets and partners overseas, a task they're normally not able to complete without having the bigger budgets of large multi-nationals. Additionally, our foreign trade offices (10 located around the world: Toronto, Mexico City, Brussels, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Johanesburg, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and New Delhi) work with the home office in Chicago to attract foreign direct investment to the great state of Illinois. Knowing that I'm interested in China, they've partnered me with their managing director for East Asia meaning I've gotten read up a lot on which businesses and which industries in Illinois are doing business in Asia, China in particular.
The other, brighter, side is that I've been able to do a good deal of networking as well. For example: A few weeks ago our office welcomed a trade delegation lead by a senior diplomat from the UAE embassy to the US and I was fortunate enough to be allowed to sit in on their meeting. The meeting itself was fairly interesting, if only to see first had how this sort of this works. It was all rather political, with lots of good will exchanged on both sides and only the vaguest of committments made by either party with assurances that follow up conversations would take place in the near future.
The most worthwhile part however was getting to meet the other members of her delegation. The principle guy was the director of the Harbour group, which I was to find out later is a really big PR and lobbying firm in Washington that, I assume, has been hired by the Emirati government to promote US-UAE bilateral relations.
Now before I go any further, there is one thing we should discuss about the Emirates. It is a country of about 4.5m people only 15% of whom are Emirati nationals. They rely heavily on a large expat community for everything from laundry services to financial services. This being the case, all the delegates really made an effort to speak with me and the other interns, even going as far as telling us that if we wanted to work in the Emirates they would see that it happened.
Anyway, got the guys card and emailed him the next week. I got a reply in less than 24 hours telling me to contact him again in the fall and he'd set me up with a summer position, either in the UAE or Washington, next year. So, suffice it to say, hopefully I'll be writing you all from a beach in Dubai next summer.
The other significant thing to happen so far was that I turned 21! For those international readers, this is significant because I am now allowed to legally purchase and consume alcohol. Under any normal circumstances, this is a rite of passage just as meaningful as the 18th birthday (when one can vote and buy pornagraphy). However, as I had just returned from a country where the concept of underage drinking doesn't really exist not more than one month prior, the day understandably lost some of luster. It dropping on a Tuesday didn't help much either.
But, I did my duty and celebrated in the classic fashion to the best of my ability - by drinking of course. I was only to rustle up one home boy, but we did our duty for god and country getting quite slurry oh two dollar bottles of MGD before mounting our bikes for the ride home (drunk driving is for suckers).
I even got a pretty good haul as far as presents go. A nice bottle of scotch which I'm nipping on as we speak, some clippers to keep my hair (or beard, god forbid) looking nice and short, and, amazingly, and iPod that my sister accidentally stole (long story). So all in all it was a good birthday by any account.
Well for those of you who may have forgotten over the past six weeks of my absense, you've once again probably bitten of more than you planned on chewing in reading my blog. Thus, I'll leave it here for now and pick up with part two next which will, I assure you, be in a timely fashion.
1 Comments:
Has it really been 6 weeks??
Also, did you mean to write this: "you've once again probably bitten of more than you planned on chewing in reading my bike"
reading your bike??
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