On Sunday, I went to Best Buy and drooled over cameras for a few hours. Called my mom and asked her to look up each one on CNet. Drove around and pondered the cost/benefit.

Yesterday, on my first day of work I took my existing camera out with me and photographed my walk to work and my leisurely stroll around Harvard Square afterward.

The rest are here.

The Global Voices Summit, as you know, is over. Everyone (except perhaps Oso) has packed up and gone home, taking souvenirs, new friendships, and ideas with them.

Personally, as always, I’ve had a hard time adapting to being back home. As I mentioned before, every time I travel, be it 100 miles or 1,000 or more, my wanderlust grows. My inability to adapt this time, however, has yielded an unexpected side effect - I haven’t been able to stop writing since I got home. Much of it is GV-related, some of it freelance, some of it so personal I have yet to figure out who to send it to via e-mail.

To me, the most amazing thing to come from the GV Summit is new ideas. During small group sessions, many of us discussed new ideas for GV: a new style guide, author recruitment, and coverage of as-yet-uncovered countries and territories. This last idea proved to be quite important amongst my colleagues, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting down with (or, rather, excitedly jumping around the room with) Yazan Badran and Renata Avila to plan coverage of the Western Sahara.

Now, this idea didn’t come about overnight - for months, perhaps even a year, I’ve received comments from Moroccans, Sahrawis and friends of the region asking why GV ignores the Western Sahara. Now, ignores is perhaps the wrong word…Global Voices does its best to cover every country around the world (note: except the US/Western Europe, which are only covered occasionally) on a regular basis and all authors are volunteers, so when a country is left out, it’s for lack of time, resources, and manpower. That said, I’d always wanted to cover this region, but was never sure how to go about it.

And that’s where the Summit comes in…an incredibly, impressively global exchange of ideas has just occurred. GV’s first Western Sahara post (thanks to Yazan) is live on the site, and I woke up to over 100 e-mails, sending the idea vibes back and forth across the Atlantic and Pacific.

I am truly amazed with what we can accomplish when we put our heads and hearts together. Sounds trite, perhaps, but never before have I felt so full of this particular brand of energy (certainly not the brand that gets me outside, but the weather’s crappy, so forgive me) and never before have I realized that now, it is impossible to look away. Whereas before I could go about my insulated life, working my previous (I reiterate: lovely but unrelated) job, drinking my $3 Starbucks and talking the talk, I can do so no longer.

Pull me up.

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Many other GVers have blogged on this topic. A sampling:
Rebecca MacKinnon
Ljubisa Bojic
Cristina Quisbert
Ethan Zuckerman

In the interest in keeping things light, I will share a photo with you:

Dear friends, as much as I loved Budapest, I admit - I didn’t love the food. Sure, it was nice to be able to eat fresh tomatoes with abandon, and you know my love for European cheeses (and then there was Soproni, though that hardly counts as a foodstuff), but being faced with the selection day in and day out of salad with duck, smoked fish, and cucumber salad (and let’s not forget fruit soup - which was surprisingly not that bad) can make a girl drop a few pounds! (5 in my case)

So you see, for my first meal back in Boston, I present you with…Sabatino’s tortellini chicken with pesto, a weekly favorite:

I arrived at Ferihegy Airport early this morning, took a few photos, eased through customs (the security guard asked, “any liquids? change? keys? guns?” with a smile), got on the plane and proceeded to choke back tears: for what, I don’t know. Perhaps it was the severe lack of sleep I’ve sustained for the [...]

I’ve always said that the hardest part of growing up is leaving friends behind - or, in my circle, leaving friends all over the world, so to speak. In this particular instance, the Global Voices Summit, I found it particularly hard to “leave behind” the wonderful new friends I’ve made. As I sat [...]

Best part of the Summit - Neha Viswanathan taught us Bollywood dance moves (ask me about the “screw-in-a-lighbulb-and-pet-the-dog”) this morning to the tune of this:

The GV Summit is amazing for a number of reasons - the connections we make, the names put to faces, and of course, the sessions. Session 3 today, “When Biases Meet Biases,” China was the hot topic - namely, Tibet and the difference of opinion between the Western media and Chinese media of all [...]

That’s just a tiny modification to the title of my post on the GV Summit site. Day One was quite awesome, despite the fact that I, as per usual, lost the ability to pay attention near the end of the day. Unfortunately, I was right up front, so I couldn’t just potter off [...]

GV Summit is featured on the EJC’s front page! When I clicked the link, this photo from last night’s dinner showed up: That’s me with Nasser Wedaddy of HAMSA. He also randomly happens to live two blocks from me! Unfortunately, two other photos of me are also on there, with me making my [...]

An article on the GV Summit has just been posted on The Economist’s website. The article focuses on GV Advocacy issues, Internet filtering, and politics.