and this is how I found out I was going to be traveling around the world

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Aliza. I am twenty-two years old. I hail from New York City. My favorite time of day is the late afternoon and if I could bring two CDs to a deserted island, they would be Al Green's Greatest Hits and Brian Eno's Music for Airports.

Here is a story. One day last March, I found myself in the Schlesinger Library in Boston with my friends Woody and Avi. The Schlesinger Library is a special collections library at Harvard University. It has a bunch of really rare, really expensive books, and it's a silent library, so when you're looking at the collection, you can't make a lot of noise. Avi, Woody and I were there looking at one of the craziest cookbooks I've ever seen -- a cookbook of molecular gastronomy creations from El Bulli, a restaurant in Spain run by the famous experimental chef Ferran Adrià.

The three of us were there looking pictures of food I'd never even dreamed could exist, raviolli made from pea juice, tiny caviar pellets made from fruity cocktail alcohol, ice cream made from wasabi. And then Woody pointed to a clock. It was five minutes noon, and it was the day that I was going to find out whether or not I had gotten the Watson fellowship, $25,000 to travel around the world and pursue a passion. I applied in November, and was waiting four months to find out the results. I had five minutes.

Woody, and Avi and I went out to the lobby, opened my laptop, connected to the internet. And there was an email in my inbox. I opened it, and everyone in the completely silent library turned to look at where all of the noisiness was coming from.

And so here I am. It's about a month into this crazy year of adventure, a year to travel and do independent research. I'm spending the next year researching community radio broadcasters around the world, doing oral history interviews with DJs, journalists, pirate radio programmers, in seven different countries. It's a year of solo travel, so I'll be traveling alone, and I can't go back to the U.S. for one whole year. Here's the description of the project, you'll have to scroll down.

And so here I am, in Cochrane Alberta, taking a few days to breathe from the last month of travel and start this blog, chronicle some of these adventures and keep in contact with folks from back home & those I meet along the way. Hopefully, I'll be doing a podcast too, so stay tuned.

Here is a picture of my parents and me at the front door of the apartment I grew up in (with all of my stuff):

And here is a picture of my best friend Sara & me with a naf-naf (a flame-fanner for campfires, courtesy of Aida, Nero, Roei and Alone):



And here is a picture of my grandmother (Granna) discovering her inner speed demon:




with love from across the airwaves,
Aliza