Beach bums

The title of this entry is slightly incorrect as last Sunday Vaughan and I did NOT lazy about on the sand sipping cocktails & rubbing sunscreen on each others backs (hm, sounds like fun though!), but instead biked 11km around several Fukuoka beaches. Getting active on the weekend feels good these days, it's a welcome relief from being glued to my desk during the week. Yep, the Glamorous Life of a student :-)! I can't complain though because I am absolutely fasinated by my first Masters paper, Development Studies. Frequent bursts of 'Aha!' have accompanied my reading of textbooks & research notes, as if I'm finally getting the point. That point being how the powerstructure of the globe anno 2006 -basically Western hegemony- greatly influences decisions on environment, trade, development aid and the overall well-being of the so-called 'Third World'. Amazing how everything seems to be interconnected: colonialism & the supremacy of the World Bank, poverty & Southern environmental degradation, foreign debt & financial crises, agricultural subsidies & protectionism, ..., it's all linked and very often it's got grubby Western fingerprints on it. Does this mean I'm turning into an anti-globalist?? Nope, but my newfound insights certainly make me look at the world with different eyes... Anyway, fear not that I'll be filling this blog with random musings and naive rants, I'll try and keep my enthusiasm to myself! (Apologies by the way to all the friends here who I've bombarded with development facts over the past month...).