Was out sitting in the park this evening, watching the world go buy, when a man came up to me, offering these two amazingly cute puppies for sale. I thanked him, but told him I wasn't hungry.

I suppose one of the most irritating things about doing fieldwork is that the food is terrible. I am currently in a rented apartment, but as the gas isn't working I can't cook. Given that I was in a hotel for the first week this means that I haven't cooked anything since arriving here, apart from making the odd tomato and coriander salad (but that doesn't really count).

I have therefore had to live almost entirely on street food. Given that I am somewhat obsessed with things culinary, this has grown to be rather depressing. On the plus side, the combination of street food, a hot and sweaty climate and developing world hygiene means I am developing an immune system that could survive a plague epidemic. I would give a list of foodstuffs that I really want, alongside details of what I would do to obtain them, but it would be a thouroughly upsetting business.

As much as academics rant on about positionality, methodology and suchlike in research, surely it is the radically mundane things like wanting something that tastes of flavours other than salty grease that affects how you go about your work. I can predict that a constant theme of this blog in future months will be the way that research training tells you the obvious about positionality and the irrelevant about methodology, and how this is only exceeded by the way it ignores the everyday emotions of fieldwork.