..........Chicago...Berkeley...Delhi....Cairo
June ......80............70..........101........93
July .......84............70............94........93
Wowza. Those are averages! So apparently India is hot. And you can't drink the water. And I'm supposed to avoid ice. Terrrrrrrific.
I'm a little worried about the heat. BBC has a little column titled "discomfort from heat and humidity" for India. The June and July listings say "extreme." And I have 154 anti-malarial pills I'm supposed to be taking, but if I'm in India in June (and I will be), and the average daily high is 101, that means some days it'll be what, 110? Will the pills melt? I'm kinda serious.
In other news, I officially left my job at UChicago, and have moved out of 915 Lytle, where Cam has upgraded roommates from Jake-the-friend to Leah-the-fiancee. So I'm now unemployed and living with my parents, but shhhhhh.
I've decided to attend UW-Seattle. Here's the line I'm using to answer the standard question: "I want to study how smaller evolutionary units combine to form larger units. Like: how do your individual cells cooperate to form you?" The research goes by a bunch of names: evolutionary game theory, network theory, levels of selection theory, evolution of cooperation, etc. A couple neat snippets, if you're interested:
Gaia hypothesis - as David Grinspoon put it: "life doesn't happen on a planet, it happens to a planet."
iterated prisoner's dilemma - defection is always better than cooperation, and yet...
viruses show tragedy of the commons - not just ivory tower nonsense, this stuff is for real
Also, I like squirrels. Especially squirrels who like me because I have bread.
Animals love you if you feed them. It's always a little knock to the ego to go into Shedd's Caribbean Reef for maintenance (when you don't have a food bucket); none of the animals pay any attention to you. All along, it's not me they've loved! Those callous fishies, so capricious with my tender heart...
2 comments:
When it's that hot in India you will drink loads of water. I drank 1.5 liters with each meal and I was in the South in Feb, which wasn't too hot. You can buy water from a cooler or nice freezing cold soft drinks in glass bottles. I drank the ice in India but I had been away 6 months already and my stomach was tougher than normal.
After a few days super hot will become your normal body temperature and it won't be as bad as you think. When there's no air con to remind your body of the heat you'll adjust. And you'll learn the wonders of the shade and hats!
I know I'll adjust, but I also bet I end up high-tailing out of Delhi to somewhere a little higher/cooler. Madhu (on BootsnAll) was terrific on naming some summer respites: anywhere near Nepal (Darjeeling in particular) and Lonavala and Mahabaleshwar near Mumbai.
Of course, hopefully my locales won't be too dictated by weather, but we'll see. Then one day I'll be the one giving advice on someone else's RTW plans!
Thanks for your comments.
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