Grad School and Southeast Asia

I've finally decided on a grad school! This fall I will be a graduate anthropology student at the University of Illinois at Chicago!

You know, I must say that this is all a HUGE relief, knowing where I'm going to be for the next however many years of my life. Far better than not knowing, I can assure you. And now I'm just really excited for summer digs and fall classes and life away from Canton and St. Lawrence. Not that SLU is bad or anything, but I feel like I've already graduated in my head and I just want to move on with my academic career.

So I'm going to UIC. Now I just need to figure out the logistics of living in Chicago and finding a place to stay and sorting all that out. That's going to be interesting being that I won't be here much of the summer...

Speaking of Southeast Asia, I think I'm going to have about a week between the end of the dig in the Philippines and the beginning of the dig in Cambodia. At first, I thought I would just fly to Cambodia and stay in Siem Reap for a week, but I just bought the first ever Lonely Planet Guide "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring" (mostly because the bookstore didn't have a guide for the Philippines and I needed one for both the Philippines and Cambodia and because Southeast Asia on a budget was probably a good thing to have). They recently updated the guide to apply to the 21st century and I just spent several hours figuring out that I could travel from the Philippines to Laos, then take buses and trains through Sukothai and Ayuthaya in Thailand, and then cross the border into Cambodia and get to Siem Reap before the Cambodia dig starts. So I could actually hit about four countries this summer and see some really amazing sites before returning to the US in August. No guarantees, I only thought of it this morning, but I can definitely afford it and people backpack through these areas quite a bit. They're all pretty common places for tourists to go, so I don't think there would be much of an issue... It's certainly an interesting thought, and I'm going to keep thinking about it...