hey muzungu

So far I have been on a plane with a broken engine and had to turn back to Schiphol, traveled to Entebbe the next day, spent the evening and night drinking beer in the garden bar of my hosts, went to the local market where a live chicken was selected, butchered and prepared (I played no part!), and tried to get over a culture shock. It seems you can’t really prepare yourself for Africa.

The people are very kind, both my Dutch hosts, their expat friends and the Ugandans I have so far talked to. The country is exceedingly beautiful, and very very poor. The contrast between the cozy expat life here and the lives of Kampala locals just a few streets away is harsh.

I wrote a very long text in my Finnish blog and am now kind of out of words. So you’ll get some hipshots from the nearby market and a promise for more details later.

Welcome!

Welcome to the 2008-09 diary of Tuuli Saarikoski Fvt 2R, a photo student far from home!

Finding your way will hopefully prove to be easy. You can read the blog chronologically and in publishing order; most recent things are here first and then in the bottom of each page there is a link called “Previous” which will take you back in time. Or you can use categories to browse posts about different subjects; clicking on Photography, for example, will show you all my posts under that category. You can also use Tags to find even more detailed categorizations. The frame you see in the right hand side has a so-called “tag cloud” which shows you different tags. The larger the tag name, the more it contains posts. As you can see, Photography is definitely the largest tag, followed by Politics and Photojournalism. In a way, the tag cloud, besides helping with navigation, shows you which things and issues have interested me most…

I would recommend looking through the diary first chronologically. As this is a blog, it also has the possibility of commenting. Comments are welcome in all posts. Besides diary posts, there is a conclusion and an explanation about my methods of keeping this diary. Just follow the links and you’ll get right to them.

This will stay as the first post on the top page until the diary project has been evaluated. After that, the blog will continue!