In short, the last two weeks in Oman have been wonderful, interesting and fun, regardless the lack of comfort and hygiene (and even of sanitary water whatsoever during the last four days), Tom’s severe viral illness which made us visit a local Baghdad-like hospital and my day of food-caused cholera and typhus (a.k.a. traveller’s sickness). The latter can be easily overcome in a nice and clean western house, but being in a village with a temporary lack of water kind of obliged me to break my 500m sprinting record eacht time to the nearest 50cm high bush in the desert, if you see what I mean. Anyway, as I said, apart from that the last two weeks have been wonderful, interesting and fun!
What has been far less fun: my Stereo-II (satellite earth observation) project proposal got turned down… Since this was the only option for me to obtain independent funding and more adequate supervisors for my preferred PhD subject, I actually can’t see what to do in the future right now… I still know what to do during the current academic year: I have to supervise an MSc dissertation and I can work on at least three publications resulting from all the previous sampling campaigns, but I can only hope time will tell what to do after that. I’ve considered lots of options, varying from working as a marine ecologist in a commercial environmental impact assessment in Oman to starting something completely different, but of course it’s a way too early to make decisions. Let’s say I’ve got about 6 months to talk to some people and to explore various alternative routes.
To be continued… next season?
