Hey all!

It's 100 degrees, 150% humidity, and I'm wearing pants. I also take a rickshaw to work everyday. And I am in LOVE with India!! I miss all of you :)

Hey all,

Brianne's great wikipedia research reminded me that one of my PMMP goals was to get a group wiki started. I know we were talking about setting up a system for our CHAC groups, but until that gets going, Maria showed me this wiki-building site: www.pbworks.com. It's great! And free! It's like building a google group with the options of embeddable source code. I've been furiously loading pages with all the maps, tables, and google forms I can get my hands on.

Hello friends,

After riding with Nick this past weekend, I was inspired to finally write a post! If you didn't know already, I am in Philly (once again) for the summer. Many exciting things have happened to me since our last encounter. Here is a brief timeline:

1. I went to Moab, Utah and Mesa Verde, Colorado.
Summary: Amazing, see pictures for details.





2. I also went to New York City two weekends ago. It was also another great time. The highlight of my trip was walking 30 miles. I basically walked from lower Manhattan to the top and back. It was pretty incredible walking through the different neighborhoods and seeing the cultural and socio-economic differences. Here is an example:





Not even a 100 block difference!


3.I came back to Philadelphia. I guess the only other exciting event was the Manayunk Bike Race. The 156-mile classic remains the longest running and most important single-day cycling road race in the United States. In summary, it was awesome. About 300,000 people came to line up along the streets of Manayunk, Lemon hill, and along the river (Kelly drive and West river are closed off). It is basically the spring fling of manayunk. My friend's aunt has a barber shop by the Wissahikon station for the R6. I spent my time there hanging out with retired and active police officers watching most of them get slightly or completely inebriated.


I am also training for the Philadelphia Insurance Triathlon. Hope to see you guys come and support me! I will be racing June 27th at 8:00 AM sharp.

See you soon,
Pete

Hello friends,

I know you have all been waiting anxiously by your computers for my first post from Cameroon. Well...The wait is finally over! I am writing from a cyber cafe near to where the volunteers share a house. We went to the graduation ceremony for the school yesterday and spent 4 hours listening and learning to the students as they went through each grade performing and presenting. It was long and tiring, but very worth it. Tonight if we have time we will update our blog http://upennuac.blogspot.com/ which I'm sure you will all follow enthusiastically. I hope everyone summer's are going well, and I hope I can talk to you guys soon! Talk to you all soon I hope.

Sam

Hmmm, that's weird, the bar with the "New Post" thing wasn't showing up on our blog. It's fixed now, but that was weird.

Anyway, now that my friends are back from their cruise that I wasn't invited on (it's actually okay since they took a Princess line, which apparently is filled with old people. I'm going on a Carnival one with young people in July!) we took a second mountain biking trip before I head back to Philly tomorrow. We decided to try a new place and settled on a dinky state park close to our houses. Little did we know, that dinky state park would whoop our asses.

Last time we went mountain biking we went to a large state park, with a few beautiful lakes, and lots of foot traffic. A well known state park, the place was well maintained with lots of people around. The biking was really scenic, the we'd got up huge hills to reach some opening in the trees which led to some view of the landscape or of the lakes. It was great.

This time, it was legit mountain biking. The hills only led to, well, more hills. We got really intune with nature as throughout our entire trip we saw nobody but ourselves. The trails were sometimes crazy, really bordering on more of a hiking trail, as there were so many (huge) rocks we were afraid we'd break all of our bones down some of those really steep hills before making it back. Oh, and there were like no trail markers. Thank goodness for the iPhone and its GPS, because for most of the time we were just plain lost in the middle of the woods. There were no clearings, just trees, EVERYWHERE.

In the process of being lost we stumbled into some other reservation, which apparently wasn't public, with signs all over saying telling us not to trespass for fear of arrest. It was actually really creepy, because someone over there built stone walls all over, for no forseeable reason. And again, we were all alone. We even stumbled upon an envelope enclosed in a zip-lock bag which was hanging from a tree. We were pretty afraid that we stumbled across a drug deal and that we'd find money in the envelope, but luckily it was just a riddle... Uhhh, that's not sketch.

Anyway, we're glad to be alive and out of there. We spent a good 2 hours lost in the woods, and are pretty tired from walking half of it since the trails were treacherous. Aaaand, we want to go back there next chance we get!

EDIT: Shoot, I always forget something! So pretty early on, KRad, the most experienced mountain biker out of the three of us, was leading the way quite well. And then he came across our first really steep rocky hill. And then he went down it... tumbling literally head over heels with his bike. He was alright, but it was hilarious because he literally did a flip. Thank goodness for helmets!

Exciting things happen when you're a work-study at Civic House over the summer. You search for lost documents on the G-drive. You find brownies in the fridge. You get to run errands all over campus.

And sometimes you find that the organization you've been working with for a year and a half is actually the name of an ancient Mayan rain god. Yep, Chac/Chaac/Chaahk is a rain deity whose "lightning axe [...] strikes the clouds and produces thunder and rain," according to Wikipedia. I actually found it because I was being lazy and googled CHAC to get to the website. Thirteen million other websites popped up, so I scanned through the first page to just see what other things could possibly be named CHAC, and voilà!

Here's the first site I saw: Gods from Mayan Mythology... CHAC.

And here's the Wikipedia article corroborating the story.

We clearly have some untapped power here.

Hi kids!

I hope everyone's having a wonderful summer wherever they may be. This has been a crazy last two weeks so I'll briefly summarize:

After moving out of Penn, I went down to DC with my mom to try and find housing for the summer. I had emailed a bunch of students via criag's list and had arranged to see two apartments. One guy I emailed, David, was in Cairo for the past semester and first part of summer so he emailed me back and said his roommate Neil would contact me. Long story short, Neil happens to be the best friend of the president of my sorority and I'm now living there. It's a great house if anyone wants to come to DC for the weekend with plenty of space: you'd be more than welcome! Things on the DC schedule so far- explore M street, visit every single one of the free smithsonian museum, go to I <3 the 80's nights in a park close by georgetown on friday nights where they show free 80s movies, free sangria every friday evening in the National Gallery of Art Sculture Gallery, and BBQ Battle, a Saturday where a couple of streets are closed off and you can sample all this amazing food and there's tons of street music and dancing...I'll let you know how I do on accomplishing all of this!

I started my summer job this past week which was INCREDIBLE. Wasn't sure I was going to like it- I'm interning on the hill with Congresswoman Nita Lowey and I've never really done politics before. But it's great. I basically do ANYTHING that needs to be done which includes answering phones and talking to constitutents and running things places via the underground subway system that connects the house office buildings to the captiol. I've talked to plenty of crazy people over the phone (some were very adement, for example, that people should be allowed to carry concealed weapons in national parks, a bill that's being debated this summer). And when Nita calls and us lowely interns don't recognize her voice and ask who it is we get the resopnse- "Itssssssss Niiiiita!" However, I think it's better than my intern friend whos congressman calls almost every day and asks if the congressman is in. When she says no, he replies "of course not, that's me!" Apparently it will continue until she can recognize him by voice.

Anyway, moving on to more chac interesting things, on Friday I got to put together a binder that was going to the House Appropriations committee on global aid. It included all of the requests that my (liberal) Congresswoman wanted for aid to other countries and grants to organizations that contribute to helping out the global world. That was my favorite task so far.

Also, even cooler, if anyone wants to come to DC on CHAC business, the National Building Museum is having an exhibit called Green Community that runs through October 25th. The first part profiles communities from Greensburg Kansas to Mendoza ARgentina and Masdar City, Abu Dhabi. Each, they site as an example of sustainable planning policy, design and technology in different ways. The second part looks at technologies like edible landscaping, solar power capture and water recycling. The thing I like though is that they incorporate past, more "traditional" ways to create sustainable communities as well like growing local produce and walking to work.

CHAC tracker love and hopes for a fun summer,
Laura