Edited to account for my own dickishness

Ok, so I figured I should maybe say something about, you know, my work here, lest everyone back home (Vancouver & M. Manila) becomes convinced that all I do is flit about and, I don't know, gallivant or something of that sort.

This is a research internship, so obviously that means a great bulk of my time is spent online, trawling the interwebs for "free" articles and sources because this university doesn't seem to have any viable subscriptions to academic journals and databases. I found this tragic (and a little alarming) at first, but I think I've gotten the hang of sifting through the muck of PR rhetoric that seems to be the defining province of such articles. My topic is on the role of financial institutions (focus on banks) in the furtherance of the environmental movement (focus on climate change mitigation) in Central and Eastern Europe. Now, I wasn't exactly very keen to start working on this. They initially let me read up on my own a bit so I could maybe choose my own topic, and I was leaning towards something along the lines of the politicization of the green movement, maybe doing a comparative study of the situations in Canada and Central and Eastern Europe. But, it was all for naught. My supervisor listened to my pitch with impenetrable patience and summarily said: No thanks, what we really want you to do is this. This took 3-4 weeks. Seriously.

In any case, I started working on it, all the while mourning the disuse of my cherished minor in Sociology (and, really, the entire focus of my major in Economics). I mean, I spent my undergraduate years resolutely evading the cloying advances of financial, monetary, whatever economics, and here I am... in Hungary, doing a research project on climate change and the financial services industry. It's kind of demeaning.

So I was off to a slow and ignominious start, staring dejectedly at my laptop's pristine screen (checking Facebook every five minutes and spending more time on MSN and YM than I have in the past 2 years probably), attending weekly lectures (most probably just so the room won't look very empty -- Erasmus students... they really don't do much, here anyway), and having random consultation meetings once in a while. But, as I've immersed myself more in the (skewed, self-gratifying, self-congratulating) literature, I've actually started to enjoy myself. Sure, I sneer at the text once in a while, mostly because I am secretly Marxist, and something inside me dies a little when I read about the different ways the profit motive (and its equally nefarious siblings: commodification and needless market creation) is set on purloining the self-righteous thunder of the environmental movement. (What's next? Puppies and kittens? Dammit.)

But, yeah. I've started to have fun with it... in a perverse, self-defeating kind of way, I suppose. It helps that, while this is a great opportunity to develop skills and experience and references or whatever, I recognize that the job is really only secondary to what I want to achieve here.

But, that's an entirely different story.