February 16, 2024

The past few weeks

With a terrible sickness moving its way through my GCIL peers over the last few weeks, and a lot, good and bad, happening in Seattle since my last blog, it has been a strange few weeks.

To focus on the positive, despite a persistent cough that I have apparently been blissfully sleeping through each night, GCIL students are one by one returning to full health. I have been starting to enjoy running again, and the weather has been beautiful and warm, maybe even a little too warm. While I have been very busy with work for my organization, Sensing Local, and preparing drafts of our work for GCIL, I had a very fun weekend and have enjoyed spending lots of time with Aaliyah, Yak, and Lucy working on our projects. I also met a friendly dog named Ringi who lives in one of the apartments near the Sensing Local office.

Back in Seattle, some exciting things that happened include three of my friends’ birthdays, a win for the UW Women’s Rugby team, and my friend, Nicole, and sister, Ciara, finished 1st and 2nd respectively for their age group in a half marathon earlier this week. I was talking to my mom as Ciara ran across the finish line, apparently unaffected by her lack of training or the large chicken burrito she ate as a pre-race snack.

I don’t know how it has been for other teams, but for the Sensing Local team this week has been one of the busiest so far. We have been working on a presentation and a lake tool for Sensing Local and drafting a report of the work we did at Sensing Local and for our GCIL project. I have also been learning the joy of checking things off a checklist.

Today we headed to the office after breakfast, splitting up working on our tool, presentation, and GCIL draft report. We got yummy pizza from Brik Oven, and Aaliyah and I went for a post lunch sanity walk, finding a road lined with pretty murals. Heading back to UTC around 5:30 pm, we broke for a 3 (more like 4) hour break which I used to go run an unknown number of laps around Jayamahal park, test out the “walk like an Egyptian” milkshake at the local juice shop, and scrape the last of the potatoes out of the bowl at UTC for dinner. We reconvened at 8:30 pm to work on our Flipgrid and go over our GCIL draft.

Tomorrow we are hoping to conduct our first interviews with people in Bangalore about walkability before we get ready to head to Puducherry where I am looking forward to taking a surf lesson with other GCIL students.

By Fiona