The plan

Hey everyone,
This is the initial Aaron Abroad posting! There's a lot more below, but the basic idea is to keep everyone up to date on my post University of Richmond graduation plans: from a road trip to Louisiana (with Danka) to Philly (for the ASM National meeting) to Brazil (with my Howard Hughes Medical Institute/UR research grant) to Indonesia (with my Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship) to who knows where (with any coins I can find under the sofa), and finally back home for grad school. That’s the quick plan anyways.


For those interested, here’s a little more…

Since I'm going to be abroad a LOT for the next year +, I thought I would start up this blog to keep all of you up to date on everything (well most things) I've been doing. Also, I really don't know what to expect in the coming months (that's a big part of the draw), and I thought this blog would serve as a great way to record what I do and what I think of it.

For anyone who hasn't heard my current plan is to leave for Belo Horizonte (BH), Brazil on May 28. I'll be there performing research with Dr. Teixeira (http://www.hhminews.org/research/scholars/teixeira_bio.html) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (http://www.ufmg.br/english/). For the months of June and July, Dr. Teixeira has reserved me an on campus apartment (http://www.fump.ufmg.br/portalfump/modules/association/index.php?pagenum=16), and offered to out me up at her house outside of those times. I'll do research for 10 weeks which takes me to August 7. During that time I'm hoping I'll have an opportunity to take some weekend trips around BH, and hopefully at least one or two more extended trips to Rio or somewhere else.
After finishing research I'll take about a week to get down to Sao Paulo where I fly back to PDX on Aug 17 (get in on the 18th).
Then it's home for about 10 days, before heading off on the biggest adventure to date: Indonesia! I can't even begin to guess what all that will entail (hopefully the Fulbright people will get back to me soon!). The Fulbright ETA lasts for 9months, and then I'm planning on travelling SE Asia until I'm broke! More likely I'll be coming back to do the grad school application thing, or to keep the fam from killing me for being completely absent for two consecutive holiday seasons.

Wow, makes me excited just to think about it! Should be an interesting year and a half!