Thailand

One goal I had with coming to Thailand was to see what all the fuss was about with
people who've come here reporting that it shouldn't be missed. So I'm here, finally
not-missing it, and . . . well it's a very pretty place. White sandy beaches are mildly
developed, providing a happy balance between seclusion and access to services and
activities. Addressing the fuss, I'm afraid I can provide no nutshell response on whether Thailand should or shouldn't be visited except through the anecdotes that follow. I will preface that Thailand's
seemingly magical effect on most visitors seems to have only mildly affected me. Like I told at least one person before I left, I'm a very bad tourist, so I can only enjoy
pure uninterrupted recreation and relaxation for so long, an inconvenient character flaw
in a place like this.

First, I completed my 18-meter depth dive certification in the waters off Ko Tao, which was so much fun! The water was as clear as any postcard picture you've seen of diving in a tropical resort region. The instructor, comfortable with my classmate's and my level of relaxation, took us into some narrow caves, making for a real lesson in buoyancy control

I've spent the past week and a half on Ko Pha-Ngan island off Thailand's east coast. My bungalow is very inexpensive, so I've spent a lot of time using it as a base to explore different parts of the island, finding beaches each with their own traveler culture. And that's the funny thing about much of Thailand that I've seen. The culture of common tourist locations is more driven by travelers than by locals. To hazard a guess, I imagine that in busy times the island's transient foreign population swells to at least match the local population in size. So touring here is like touring the populations of the developed countries, if vastly overrepresented by the British.

Ko Pha-Ngan's culture and economy is centered on the Full Moon event. Some would call this event a festival, others would call it a party, and still others would call it a 10,000 person beach rave complete with trance techno, florescent paint, drinks with dangerously unidentifiable ingredients, and more unabashed hedonists than you can shake
a glowstick at (and who could say if I wasn't one of them?). I could describe it as a one-night Burning Man minus the sense of responsibility to selves and environment. And the average age is about ten years younger than Burning Man's (the British pre-university gap year hordes strike again). If you don't know what Burning Man is, you'll have to do a few minutes of web searching to understand this as a reference point for the Full Moon Party. And if you're not familiar with what Gap Year is, well I think I'll touch on
it next post, or you can search on your own.

What follows is a moderately stream of conscious listing of things I've been up to around here. If you're looking for a post that is well tied together, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until I've exited the Thailand mindset. At least I didn't write in pidgin.

-I recently finished reading The Beach by Alex Garland, a book about backpackers finding a secret lagoon community in a nearby island to Ko Pha-Ngan. It follows the popular trouble-in-paradise plot line, except like Lord of the Flies, it's a real downer of a novel, so it's put me in a sour mood.

-I took a Thai cooking class, making coconut soup with chicken, Pad Thai,
green curry chicken, and for dessert, coconut-milk fried bananas. I served the
food to some Thai I live near, and they didn't retch, so I felt good.

-Unfortunately for a still growing tourism industry, the islands are floating liabilities
when it comes to the likelihood of many kinds of injuries. Roads are in deplorable condition, compounded by unfenced ditches by the roadsides, frequent rains, and drunken tourists on two wheels. On the flip side, wound dressing is big business so it’s justifiably pervasively advertised. Sometimes more frequently than I can believe, I see travelers with glass cuts from walking on the beach (even wearing sandals), motorcycle accidents, and rock cuts from vaulting between cliffs (under the influence of some narcotic). Also, in the local hot, moist climate, the threat of infection is always looming. For all this, unlike in India, I'm avoiding motorcycles like the plague here, which by no means absolves me from the odd cut or scrape. I've gone into my med kit at least twice as frequently as in India, though thankfully through much more mundane causes than described above.

-I'm trying to manually remove a virus from my laptop again. I first got rid of it while
I was in China, but it looks like it's been hibernating on my memory cards in the meantime. Here's hoping it's not on my phone's memory itself. Not a very good use of time in the islands, but I'm getting some work done as well on the computer so I need it clean. Otherwise my computer gets too hot, and risks getting damaged.

Now I'm itching to see a different part of Thailand. I'm planning my escape by air to the island of Phuket for more surf lessons, and then back to Bangkok with plenty of margin of time to fly for France.

China recap - and don't forget the subsequent recent post!

As I was arriving in Hong Kong they were only just running news
stories of protests by parents of students killed in the Sichuan
earthquake. Apparently many of the schools that fell were the only
structures in their respective areas to suffer such catastrophic
damage. Since schools are the kinds of things that get built en masse
via government contract, it immediately pointed to the potential for
corruption in the construction planning process.
It bothered me in the wake of the earthquake that the news coverage
focused only on the heroic efforts of rescuers, and not on critical
questions such as why the building codes weren't up to the task of
withstanding a high magnitude earthquake such as many important
structures in San Francisco are designed to handle. A semi-analogous
US disaster in recent memory was Hurricane Katrina. There was much
more anger as to why the levees didn't hold water through the storm
than similar coverage for the China quake. To get an idea of how the
Chinese media responded to the disaster, consider this: Imagine if for
one night s

hortly after Hurricane Katrina, a PBS-on-steroids goverment
television network wiped away all other broadcasted programming in
favor of airing the same telethon benefit event identically on all
channels, where the theme of the event was an emphatically displayed
and repeatedly exclaimed, 'I am American!', presented amid
sensational images of the disaster and rescue attempts. This the
evening of the day that every car driver in every US city was required
to simultaneously stop completely while maintaining a constant honk on
their horn for three minutes straight in memory of the disaster. To me
this sounds fanciful, or just plain strange, but it's what took place
in China after the earthquake.
Turns out, as Western papers reported, local Chinese media
establishments were being instructed by the government's media arm not
to air coverage critical of why buildings weren't constructed to
withstand earthquakes. Instead, only themes promoting unity got
through.

In Thailand

Hong Kong from the Peak tram
At two am this morning I arrived in Thailand after about a week in
Hong Kong and Shenzhen. A friend from school put me up and helped me
sample expat life in the Asian business hub. Most expats I met must
have been spending every other week in a different East or Southeast
Asian city on work.
One of HK's first tourist stops is a mountain sitting on top of the
city's downtown called the Peak: take San Francisco's Telegraph Hill,
make it three times as tall and wide, and relocate it to the middle of
downtown at Powell and Market streets, and you get the idea of how
closely HK's developed areas have had to squeeze against and around
it's sharp geographic features. Walking around the Peak I could get
the lay of the land. I think Hong Kong's most recognizable features
are its ubiquitous residential towers which for their narrow girth
look unnaturally tall.
I arrived in Thailand early this morning. I'm on a bus now making my
way to one of Thailand's islands. I'm gratified to have made good on
a recent friend's advice to 'get out of Bangkok as soon as possible'.
For a while it seemed like I was going to be stuck in an urban
backpacker district that looks like the first stop in Southeast Asia
for every British gap year student looking for quick and dirty
partying on arrival. For the next week I'm taking a diving course in
Ko Tao, finishing it in plenty of time to reach the storied full moon
festival in Ko Pha Ngan. Everyone I've ever met while traveling has
always had only glowing things to say about Thailand, so I decided to
invest all of my three weeks before France in this country,
particularly around its islands. In the interest of moving around
like a true backpacker, I've left all of my business and metropolitan
clothing behind in a hotel's left luggage area. Everything except . .
. my laptop. One must have principles after all.

Bliss in Beijing

Note: Just got lucky with this shot! At the cafe at the bottom of the Yuan Guang 100 apartments in ChaoYang district.
I am on a train in the Beijing railway station, at the beginning of a
twenty three hour journey from the capital to Shenzhen, Hong Kong's
manufacturing hub. It's my last stop before reaching HK. The train,
by the way, is very plush, considering I booked the lowest class.
Compared to Indian trains' jail-cell sleeper class, I feel like I'm at
the Hilton for how clean and comfortable it is . . . Maybe I'm getting
soft these days.
I'm sad to be leaving Beijing. Like anyone I get addicted to routine
all too easily: get up, eat cereal, hit the starbucks on the way to
the four hour morning class, one hour lunch of gai-fan (deliciously
cheap meat- and vegetable-covered steamed rice) , then one hour of
private tutoring before either returning home to take a much-needed
nap or else linguistically force-feed myself by bargaining the
afternoon away in a knock-off goods market. (jia-de meaning 'fake' is
important vocabulary to know in these situations, although at the end
of the day neither vendor nor customer have any illusion about the
authenticity of the goods. Authenticity matters little here - if
knock-off goods do the job, then they're goods, regardless of what
brand has been slapped on them). Speaking of routine, seeing the same
students and teachers every day for a month definitely caused me to
form attachments, so leaving some of those behind made me feel kind of
down.
Beijing is a great city. It has so much energy running up to the
Olympics. There's a sense of anxiousness about the event and wanting
to present Beijing's image on the right foot that permeates
everywhere. I feel fortunate to have been here during precisely this
time.
On the other hand, I can anticipate sensing the opposite feeling in
people when the Games are through, something like, 'the party's over,
now what do we do?'. Also, between the Games and the sensationally
televised government's response to the quake, locals will be so hiked
up on national pride by August 8th that I'm afraid they'll have
withdrawal symptoms come September!

What does 'mouth mouth mouth mouth mouth' mean?

Well my historically trusty laptop has given up the ghost for the time
being. I'm posting from my phone, so my posts will be a little more
rough until I can get the computer fixed. Just another week and a half
in Beijing, then time for Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Feeling
particularly cut off from the world outside China these days - somehow
the powers that be decided that a good tribute to the earthquake
victims would be to cut off all foreign television programming for
three days. (to be fair, this was an extremely grave event - the
ever increasing official death toll numbers speak for themselves, and
unfortunately a lot of sad, gruesome, and heartstring tugging
anecdotes have emerged from the event. It's been unpleasant going
about 'business as usual' in the city feeling unable to do anything
about something happening not to far away apart from the odd donation)
So don't be afraid to send a message my way so i feel in touch. By
the way, one benefit to posting via phone is easy access to a chinese
script interface - 我想学习汉语在北京! Two points to the first person with a
translation. If you only see a bunch of squares, don't sweat it,
your browser doesn't support chinese. Or, maybe i just felt like
writing the character for 'mouth' several times.

Retrospective: Elephant vs. Dragon in a Developing World Free-for-All

I decided there was enough temporal distance between me and the subcontinent to post a little retrospective in light of what I’m seeing in China. Also it gives me the opportunity to blow the electronic dust off some photos to post. To kick things off, I hereby curse so many newspapers in the media back home for using the phrase “developing countries such as India and China” (I found 40,000 instances of the phrase in the English-language web on Google) . The phrase isn’t inaccurate, but the proximity of the two names in the sentence makes me imagine that the countries are in similar states of development. This is very very far from the reality that I got to sample.

I’ll talk about what I’ve observed about development and my thoughts comparing the two countries - I’ll leave it to others to debate whether and how development should take place in any country. Let me post a caveat before going further – in India I saw large cities, tiny towns, and the more easily reached of non-agrarian villages situated along my journey’s path. In China however, I’ve only seen its two most important metropolises, its favorite domestic vacation destination city, and what suburbia I could make out over the course of a two hour train ride, all in the months preceding the Olympics. Leading up to the Games, the government has made it its utmost priority to look good in front of the world, and, stoked or not with nationalism by the powers that be, the public imagination is completely consumed by this international spectacle. I frequently hear the phrase, “Will it be ready?” referring to the tying up and spit-polishing of construction in Beijing and environs. In other words, I’m seeing China firmly stomp its best foot forward, without sight of the rest of the beast.

To the photos. The first picture showing an oxcart with an om symbol, is probably the clearest one I have to illustrate the chaos and ramshackle feel of an Indian market street in just one shot. It’s from Bombay. Calcutta’s streets were actually much more chaotic with bootstrap commerce and myriad transportation means, but alas, no photos, since it was always so dark while I was in the middle of it. The one shown suffices to give an idea.

The second shot is a street in central Calcutta. The road’s been torn up to be repaved. When it’s finished with paving, it will probably look like those sections that weren’t torn up, and overall won’t be up to a good standard. Old bricks are used for filler. Neighborhood locals, as likely children as adults, do the work.

The third shot is from Kerala, still my favorite state (you think I'm excluding American states, don't you ;) ). Depending on your standards, these people aren’t poor. They are working to enable their livelihood, and they have no need or desire to ask you for money. But they probably can't afford quality goods and services.

The last (and unfortunately blurry) Indian shot is from along the beach in Chennai. Most Tamil girls in the city also wear saris everywhere.

To the China shots next.

First: Here go the Shanghai skyscrapers, taken from the Pearl Tower.

Second: This is a Shanghai street bordered by a mix of local Shanghainese, domestic tourists, and some international tourists.

Third: This is an Audi parked outside of Beihai park next to the Beijing's Forbidden City. It’s license plate has four “8”s on it which is why I took the photo. Mandarin for 8 is ‘ba’, rhyming with 'fa', one word for money. Therefore 8 is lucky, making phone numbers, addresses, and yes, license plates with 8 in them desirable and expensive. The souped up Audi probably ran upwards of $60,000 USD. For it’s lucky number 8’s, one local put the license plate cost at $125,000 USD. Unlike my Keralan friend on the canal banks, the owner of this vehicle did not present him/herself to be pictured. He or she could probably afford quality goods and services.

Last: A deliberately preserved Beijing hutong neighborhood. A really typical hutong should come off as a little bit slummy, but some, especially in central Beijing, perpetuate centuries-old historical traditions especially in architecture, and are themselves tourist attractions.

(I wonder if in future decades some of the bigger slums in India will be preserved and become tourist attractions like in Beijing. Dharavi slum in Bombay already hosts off-beat tours (development tourism). Except that the streets there still stink of human waste, and it’s really not intended as a tourist attraction that some people have as their chosen occupation to beat burlap bags containing scraped-off paint chips into a powder so they can be recycled into paint).

I’ll let the photos provide the study in contrasts for the most part. Let me speak to the potential for editorial bias. Far afield of major cities, and especially outside eastern China, I probably could take photos better resembling the first Indian shot suggesting street chaos, the third shot representing otherwise solvent people who lead a simpler lifestyle, and the last Indian shot representing the perpetuation of tradition irrespective of inconveniences incurred. But taking the reverse approach I promise there are no huge skyscrapers in Bombay, Chennai, or Kolkata. Newly-fabled Bangalore has only two real *highrises* in this IT powerhouse’s downtown, and no metro. (I challenge readers to do an image search for skyscraper plus any of these cities and see what comes up).

Referring to the third photo from each country, I freely admit deliberate, gross and profane editorial bias in juxtaposing the two. I really wanted the contrast.

I also promise that most cities in India will not soon have streets as clean or orderly as those of its neighbor’s to the East. Check out the third, fairly mundane China shot. The hordes of people packed on either side of the street, by Bombay standards, should have long since crowded onto the asphalt to make a traffic-pedestrian curry masala. Moreover the cars stay in their lanes, a practice which avoids gridlock and accidents.

This comparison is as much an indictment of government practice as it is of collective will. India teems with universally cursed yet universally tolerated corruption that the public actively participates in to accomplish much of their mundane legal needs (bribes for stamps on important documents, bribes for paying property tax). When streets are torn up to be repaved, it’s a local politician serving a powerfully large albeit poor constituency, who facilitated the construction contract at their behest. The same street could have been similarly torn up less than two years prior. Also, enforcement of quaint concepts such as traffic laws is a joke, certainly nothing that a palm padded with rupee notes couldn't handle.

The norms of daily life in the bigger cities cause anything that’s publicly owned or publicly shared to quickly become either a waste receptacle or a sitting duck for decay. By contrast, the insides of homes and businesses are strikingly well cared for. Therefore, all this isn't to say I didn't enjoy my time there, actually, I loved most of the conscious hours I spent there for the sense of discovery they afforded. And Kerala . . . ah

PS Need to remind especially to new folks to the blog, this is an *anonymous* blog, so please consider comments accordingly.

Now that's a stadium!

(reposted unmodified)

I've arrived in Beijing and I've begun taking a one month intensive Mandarin language course that I signed up for while in India. It's nice also to be able to settle down for a little while as a change from moving from place to place every two or three days. Some friends in Beijing set up an apartment for me before I arrived. I am for a long time in their debt. Attached you can see pictures of the place. I'm particularly proud of the kitchen, pictured. It's simple, I know, but I've cooked a lot since I arrived, so I've enjoyed just having the facilities for it. The building shown is one of the iconic structures that represent "The New Beijing" . This one is the Olympic stadium shaped like a bird's nest, definitely an architectural wonder. Because of security surrounding the Olympic construction site, it was hard to get a clear shot. I managed to find a hotel near the grounds, the far side of which had a clear shot of the structure.
Mandarin is a very very very difficult language to learn. Gone are the friendly cognates, pronunciation, tonality, and alphabet of more easily accessed languages such as French and Spanish. Learning this is like starting *completely* from scratch. In a (successful) effort to keep ourselves entertained and motivated, I organized a private lesson among my fellow students with my tutor to learn some of the more colorful Mandarin turns-of-phrase, not to mention useful sentences for the more, er, practical situations of daily (and evening-ly) life here. There was a lot of beer involved in the lesson.
Beijing is a huge city, development is everywhere. The capital has its towers and architectural wonders, but compared to Shanghai it has traded off such a large volume of towers for sprawling yet still somehow tasteful apartment blocks.