During long vacations, I most likely am visiting family.  When I'm taking a short break from work, I like to read, watch a movie or two at home, and take strolls.  I also enjoy music tremendously, and I consider myself a serious hobbyist in piano.  I took performance lessons for cumulative 9 years: 5 years of initial training as a middle schooler, 2 years of more serious lessons at Mount Holyoke, and another 2 during my last years as a grad student at Cornell.  I now don't maintain a daily practice schedule like I did when I was a student.  Instead, I spend more time listening to recordings and I try to squeeze in practice sessions whenever I can.  One special topic about piano performance that I am very interested in is practice-related injuries, which I started to learn about after I suffered a hand injury from overstretching in 2021.  I got into and greatly admire the work of Pianists for Alternatively Sized Keyboards [PASK] —Please do check out their amazing work! —and I'm currently saving up for a baby grand with a modified smaller keyboard, with the hope that smaller keyboards will have become more accepted and cheaper before I will reach my savings goal.  

I once was a tireless and enterprising traveler.  I traveled extensively (and on a very low budget) in my home country, in the States, and in continental Europe.  One of my fondest travel memories was traveling in and around Germany—I was an exchange student at the University of Mannheim in spring 2012—with people offering rides for a charge who I found on ride-sharing websites.  These rides took me to Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Paris, Prague, and Vienna.  Many of my fellow riders—other passengers as well as the car owners themselves—had fascinating stories and knowledge of their local life that they were only too happy to share, and I loved hearing them in that super short period of time we got to spend together.  After graduating from college my desire to travel drastically declined, and I no longer use my vacation time to leisure-travel, preferring instead to do the things that I do when I'm not doing linguistics, which are by all means not new interests anyway, as they were also things that I did when I wasn't doing linguistics.