What do Brown students do after Brown? Well, empirically speaking, we either work for giant financial institutions attempting to become Peter from Office Space, or giant defense contractors building missiles to help protect our national interest, or giant law firms making sure that corporations at least pretend to care about market externalities, or perhaps teach poor kids in Watts. However, we are most likely to try to recreate Brown in Boston or New Haven in graduate school. Part of this process involves doing research in exotic places–Northern India and Tibet, island Southeast Asia, or coastal Africa. James is the third of our group to create a blog to discuss research and travel, this time from the very difficult research station of Mauritius. Yes, James, please do tell us how hard it is to avoid all those falling coconuts. Well, at least he shares our recent experiences with mosques and roosters.
Author: tompepinsky
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Selamat Tahun Baru Islam 1426 H!
So yes, today is the other lunar new year being celebrated in Indonesia this week, the Muslim one. 1426 years since Muhammad moved from Mecca to Medina (we have an explanation here). Today, of course, is also a national holiday, because we couldn’t have just one lunar new year this month, right? (It’s actually a coincidence that they fall so close together this year–Islamic New Year moves through the year with the rest of the months of the Islamic lunar calendar, while Chinese New Year always falls in January or February.)
This has not seemed to be a very exciting holiday so far. For the past two days, though, the mosque with the new loudspeaker has been blaring what sounds like Pakistani pop music and announcements about festivities for the past two days. It’s insanely loud inside, but somehow TP managed to sleep through about an hour’s worth yesterday morning even though it was loud enough to drown out the news on TV.
Tom Pepinsky 