Don't Mess With Texas... or Russia

Something they don't tell you when you receive the Watson Fellowship is that the journey begins long before your feet leave American soil. It might go back as far as August of the previous year when you start putting together your application, but it certainly begins on March 15th when your class of fellows is announced. Amongst the madness of senior year thesis writing, finals, research projects, graduation plans, and other responsibilities it is not difficult to miss this fact (even while you are continuing Watson preparations)... and so now I am in Texas. Before I get into that, however, I suppose it might be good to introduce what this blog is about and why I will be traveling around the world for a year.

The kind of thing that keeps dedicated seniors busy beyond graduation - campus glass recycling

The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship is an annual award offered to college graduates from a small list of undergraduate institutions. After undertaking a rigorous application and interview process, forty applicants are selected and offered financial and administrative support (though the relationship with the TJW Foundation goes deeper than this) for "a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel -- in international settings new to them -- to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community." [as described on the Watson website]

 By some form of grace I was selected to join the 2012-2013 Class of Watson Fellows. In the earliest stages of the application process, the fellows designed personally significant projects to be carried out if they received the award and it is with these projects that they undertake the Watson year.

My project shares the name of this blog and its aim is for me to travel to places engaged in traditional and "natural" beekeeping practices (many of which have been diminished greatly by modern technologies and industrial pressures) to engage with people and cultures that are maintaining and elaborating on the wisdom of the past. Moreover, I will only be visiting places where honey bees are native. Believe it or not, places like the Americas, Australia, and a good chunk of Asia are not in the native range of honey bees, so, having only seen them as an introduced species in the U.S., I am interested to see how things work in the environments where they are found naturally.
 
Using a blog is a new experience for me and I hope that it will be a useful resource for friends and family who wish to hear and see the kinds of things I get up to in the next year. I will not be traveling with a computer so posts may be sporadic at times, but I intend to keep this page updated as I am able to.

Anyway, as I was saying about Texas... I am currently in Austin waiting for a Russian tourist visa to be processed. Last week I was vacationing with my aunt and my mom in Pensacola, Florida when I decided to sit down and double-check some of my budget calculations and official documents (I had already had some tickets change due to unforeseen rescheduling events by transport companies and I wanted to make sure the rest of my things were in line). Many of my visa situations were already squared away (UK, Tanzania, Egypt, the Schengen countries) and others I knew I would have to wait to get (Russia and China)... so I thought. I had read from multiple sources of the three-month prior limitation for obtaining visas in these countries but a new source, and admittedly the most authoritative for my purposes (the US Department of State), informed me that I would be unable to get these visas from outside the United States! This is really not the kind of news one wants to get only a few weeks before departing for a year-long excursion (with a fellowship restriction that specifically forbids a return to the United States).

So, I booked a Greyhound ticket for the last day of our trip from Pensacola to Houston to acquire the visas in person. China and Russia both have notoriously cumbersome visa process, so it seemed best to be there in case of complications. I stayed in a cool hostel in Houston for the weekend as I waited for the consulates to open and made a lot of progress with visas and with overall trip planning. It turns out I don't need the Chinese visa yet, my Russian tourist visa is pending, and I picked up a 5-year tourist visa to India for good measure. Disaster averted, for the most part.

Hosteling International - Morty Rich Hostel - Houston, Texas

In the hostel I met a lot of interesting tourists from overseas. One of which was a German girl who had just finished visiting New Zealand and Australia and wanted to see Texas before she went home. She even had a Lonely Planet: Texas guidebook to direct her travels. There was also a serendipitous moment where a Canadian wanted to catch a baseball game, but I didn't think I had time and didn't want to buy a ticket. When a lawyer came into the hostel and dropped off four top dollar tickets because he couldn't use them, I took it as a divine suggestion and went to Minute Maid Park to see the Astros.

Now, as I write, I am in Austin staying with a friend while waiting to hear back on the Russian visa. There is a $1 Greyhound Express service that runs a direct route between Houston and Austin, so it wasn't a hard decision to make.

Leather seats on the Greyhound Express from Houston to Austin

Well, that will do it for my first blog post. I am sorry if it is a little longer than you might have preferred, but there was a lot to say. As I said before, I'll do my best to keep everyone updated as the year progresses.