TravelStream™ news feed for member tavini on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/tavini en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:34:47 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1199912880/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1199912880/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1199912880/tpod.html Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:34:47 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Chennai (Madras), India

The little town of Mamallapuram is the last stop of the Indian leg of our journey. We are flying out of Chennai airport on the 18th, but since Chennai has very little to offer a tourist besides the usual charms of a large Indian city (pollution, traffic and stress), we have decided to stay in this quiet corner. There's not a lot to do here normally, aside from seeing some 8 century Pallava ruins and walking down a beach which would be majestic if it was not littered with garbage. Fortunately for us it so happens that there is a month long dance festival ongoing right now, so we got to see some excellent Indian classical and folk dances in front of a stunning ancient sculpted backdrop. The rest of the time we spent it reading and trying to avoid shopkeepers intent on selling us sculptures with 1000% markup. Since this is our last stop, and we are frankly a bit tired of India, this would be the best time for some general thoughts on India and on our experience. Before coming here, we had spoken to tourists who went there and the opinions differed. We had heard many stereotypes, of which the most common were that India is a more spiritual society than the West, that people are poor but happy and that India will change you. Well, we can say that India indeed changed us, but not necessarily in the way we expected it. We have found India to be a land of amazing contrasts. Extreme poverty is side by side to great wealth. Walking down the street you can smell flowers or delicious food one moment and human excrement the next. The Taj Mahal, which we have found to be one of the most stunning architectural achievements in the world is smack in the middle of a huge shantytown straight out of a "help eradicate poverty" infomercial. The landscape is stunning, extremely diverse and hauntingly beautiful at times, but one sees garbage littered everywhere. There's just so many contrasts and assaults upon the senses, that one cannot spend the whole day walking through an Indian city: it's just too much. A couple of hours in Delhi can leave you exhausted. Certainly Indians live intensely, and every sense is pushed to its limit: their food is extremely flavourful, their clothes, houses, temples and rickhaws are exceedingly bright and colourful, the smells of all kinds are overpowering, Indian cities are at least 10 times louder than Western ones, and the mass of humanity everywhere makes your rub shoulders with more people in a day than you would in a week back home.  The good news about India is that the land was at one point, and certainly has the potential to be again a veritable garden of Eden. The Indian subcontinent has some of the most dramatic scenery on earth and more variety than one can imagine. Ecosystems range from tropical forests and coral reefs in the south, through savannahs, forests and deserts, all the way to arctic alpine wastelands in the Himalayas. Add to this over a billion people, over 400 languages, most of the world's major religions being represented and living side by side, 5000 years of history and India is arguably the most interesting place on Earth. The place is never boring, very intense and by our standards very cheap, so travelling here can be a lot of fun. That is of course seeing the glass half full. When one travels here, one learns to see the empty half as well, and that can be somewhat discouraging. Indians do indeed seem to be quite religious, but from conversations with locals and our own observations, we found less spirituality than we expected and instead a lot of emphasis instead on social conventions and rituals. In fact we think of Indian society to be even more materialistic than the West. Perhaps this perception is not helped by the fact that we as westerners, are on the fringes on Indian society and treated as such. Since the perception is that we are enormously rich, we are seen as walking dollar signs. Everyone wants a withdrawal from the bank of Rich Western Tourist: and one can expect to pay from 2 to 10 times the price for anything. It's not just a question of us not understanding the value of things here; Indians would very often rather pass up making a good profit such as a Westerner paying 2 times what an Indian would and not make a sale but rather wait for the next sucker who will pay 10 times what an Indian would. They don't even want your business if you expect to get an honest price. Well, we can't really complain too much: things are still cheap for us in this poor country and we can still live it up for not much money: probably this is a big reason why so many people love India. Then again, for the others on the fringes of Indian society things are much much worse. We have seen beggars being chased away with blows  because they were seen as a nuisance, and small puppies chained outside people's houses with dozens of open wounds which were obviosuly the result of being beaten. The Indians are supposed to regard all animals as sacred, but we have seen so much gratuitous violence against them that we felt sickened. These are problems which probably go back into the depths of history and they explain why so many Indian ideologies preach compassion - they must have arisen as a reaction to this marginalization of the untouchables, the poor and the animals. In general, India has developed a system which for the better or the worse worked for much of its history, a system based on the notion that everyone deserves his or her lot in life due to past actions. This system ensured social stability in a society which given the intensity and harshness of life here would have created overwhelming social pressures otherwise. Walking in an Indian crowd, one feels very calm, a sense that despite the chaos, there is an inherent order, and crime is rare. This is the great achievement of the Indian social order: maintaining relative peace and order in the most intense and stressful society on the face of the planet. Then again, the system always had problems and many of them got magnified with the coming of the modern age. Many social conventions which worked for better or worse back in the "good old days" of Indian history have catastrophic consequences nowadays when population has increased to the limit of what the environment can suport and when India has adopted outside technologies which were not designed to work within its system. Since 1947, India has adopted many new technologies (media and plastic especially), created its own massive bureaucracy and abolished the caste system. A lot of changes which create a lot of problems. A good example is the sickening pollution which has rendered Delhi's sky permanently opaque (you can barely see where the sun is because of the smog!), Indian streets, roads and beaches covered with garbage and sacred waterways such as the Ganges so polluted that there is no life in them except for bacteria. In the traditional Indian caste system, dealing with garbage and human waste was the exclusive domain of the untouchables. Most Indians would therefore throw garbage over their shoulder or defecate on the side of the road without a second thought. Most garbage was organic though so what the untouchables or the animals would not clean up, would end up decomposing, so there was a balance. Nowadays though, the population has increased dramatically, there is no more caste system and much of the garbage is non-degradable like plastics. The technology which results in the garbage was created in the west with the assumption of the existence of both a social ethic of garbage disposal and a system to dispose of it. However, people here just have no concept of disposing of their own garbage and the Indian bureaucracy is too underfunded and cumbersome to create an efficient waste disposal system on the western model, so the garbage just piles up. Everywhere! Another example are some of the social conventions present here. It is not polite to say no to someone for fear of dissapointing them. If you ask for directions you will usually get some pretty detailed ones, even when the person has absolutely no idea what you are looking for (and Indians get fooled by this too, not just westerners). If you ask an Indian whether he can get some task done he will usually say no problem, even if he has no idea how to do it. Many western companies investing in India have been promised the delivery of a service only to find out when they needed it that the Indians couldn't deliver it despite their promises. This creates a cycle in the economy where no one can be certain of any deadline if they are dependent upon someone else; everything slows down as a result. Indian organization in general is rather chaotic and things move slow and when one combines it with the vestiges of a massive bureaucratic system modeled in the 1960s upon the old Soviet Union, one gets a country where simple tasks spiral out into huge headaches. Sending a package requires several forms and several visits to the post office. Withdrawing money from an ATM once took us 4 hours.  The final example involves the social and sexual life of Indians. This is a society which traditionally based itself on arranged marriages at an early age. A brother could not marry until the elder brother did but given the stratified society, arranged marriages were somewhat easy to set up, so this was not much of a problem. With the abolition of the caste system, there is a new social mobility however, a new Indian dream propelling people. Education is becoming more and more important (hence young people stay in school much longer) and the marriage age has been raised. Urbanization and modernization has resulted in less children being born and people prefer boys, as they will take care of the elderly parents. There's a subsequent general lack of girls. This renders arranged marriages much more problematic. People are getting married later and sometimes not at all. An elder brother not getting married is catastrophic for the whole family, as the younger brothers cannot get married either, and sex outside of marriage is seen as deeply immoral. In every city we saw droves of single young men who can't marry, taking comfort in each other's company and holding hands, as they eye western women with a desperation which can only derive from extreme sexual frustration. Young couples have to go to great lengths to hide just to be able to kiss. Indeed surprisingly for a society which gave the world the Kama Sutra and erotic sculptures, we have met quite a few  Indians who struck us as very frustrated sexually. Not to say that all Indians are this way, but enough of them to give more than one westerner  this impression.For a country which sees itself as a leader in technology and a future superpower capable of taking on the United States or China, India has some massive challenges ahead of it. Sure, some places like Bangalore and Mumbai have become major business and research centers, but the people involved are a minuscule proportion of the population and a large chunk of what is the educated elite. Future growth involves raising the education level of a country where a large proportion of the population is iliterate and expanding the middle class which is currently very small. These changes will take generations, a time which India may not have given the growing environmental catastrophe and the possible social upheavals awaiting it in the medium future. Add to this the fact that India has no fossil fuels and an infrastructure which is almost hopelessly behind other countries we've seen like Mexico, Turkey and yes even Egypt. Power failures are frequent, even in major cities like Delhi and Bangalore; the road system is so so bad that reaching 50km/h is a blinding speed, and the rail system hasn't changed much since the British. I have little faith in India's ability to overcome all these problems in the next few generations. With its population growth out of control, a collapsing environment and a frustrated empoverished young generation with big dreams, it's difficult to fathom just how things will progress here, but I shudder to think of possible outcomes if India does not get a handle on its problems soon. At its best, India could be a paradise of lovely landscapes, good life, a rich culture and an example of religious tolerance. At its worst though, India could be an overcrowded, empoverished, polluted seething cauldron of humanity, where every ill coming out of Pandora's box rears its ugly head. May it be that hope, the last thing in the box will manifest itself though and that in the next few generations India will become closer to the best it can be rather than the worst.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1242930360/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1242930360/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1242930360/tpod.html Tue, 19 May 2009 17:33:57 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

So what happens when the world tour finally ends? The first week after we stepped off the plane felt like a cross between getting off a rollercoaster, and what Frodo felt like when he came home at the end of Lord of the Rings. On the one hand, after a year of always looking forward to today, you finally realize what you did yesterday. We have been filled with a sort of ecstatic joy in disbelief at all the experiences we've had and all the things we have seen. Every obstacle in the distance seems small after such a trip; Canada seems to us so quiet and easy that we have to hold back from laughing out loud. On the other hand, this was also an opportunity for us to understand how much we've changed. Family and friends are the same yet we find them different, and we realize it's because we have changed. We try to explain our experiences and our changes in worldview, but we find that the words ring hollow and that people don't really understand what we are trying to tell them. We now realize that we are set apart from everyone else in a subtle yet undeniable way. How do you pick up the pieces of a life you left behind and try to make it fit again with your new you? It is not an easy matter and there's no one we know who can tell us how.But do we regret it? No, not for a second. This past year we really felt that we lived; not gone through the motions of living like so many amongst us. Gradually we threw away the timidity that compels one to plan exhaustively and deters people from taking risks. We started to live in the moment, in the day, while always thinking about that larger picture of life. We understand what we feel are essential truths about life in an intuitive fashion: we acquired this intuition by experience and these truths would probably seem like platitudes and cliches to someone lacking that experience. I will only mention one of those cliches that stands out: life is indeed a journey. Tomorrow is never quite what you would expect so there's no use in fretting and stressing ourselves out about what lies around the corner. The world is indeed amazing, and every experience whether good or bad has something to teach us. It is such a welcome freedom to simply enjoy the journey and try to make the best of it. Those stresses about work, money, family that consume so many of us are simply challenges that make the journey more interesting: focusing on them is like only remembering the breaks in the path while walking through the forest.But enough about us; what do we think about the world? We should mention that we've only seen a minuscule portion of it: 1-200 cities out of millions, a thin sample of places arrayed in a few strategic points of the global village, itself just a small though growing geographical slice of our great Earth. And out of that small geographical slice we've met an even tinier slice of people: those in the tourism industry, who are seldom representative of the larger population and who in fact are sometimes the worst of the lot. But though the number of places we've seen and the number of people we've met is minuscule, the beauty of tourism is that you get to do something out of the ordinary. We've had the incredible good luck of seeing many of the greatest cultural expressions of human history, from the Taj Mahal to the Vatican; as well as some of the most beautiful places on Earth, from the Himalayas to the beaches of Thailand and the outdoor cathedrals of nature in the Danube Delta or Cappadocia. Thus while the quantity was small, the quality was high. Same goes for people: we've met some of the best and some of the worst. We've learned a lot in a short amount of time and our vision of Earth will never be the same.So what is it? We think that everyone on earth lives on a certain plane of existence: some higher, but most on lower levels. At the lower levels, concerns are about the simple problems of existence and so they are universal: what will we eat tomorrow? will I be loved? how do I acquire more power? We often saw t-shirts when backpacking with the slogan: "Same, same but different" and it is so true: from Marrakech to Chicago (the long way around) most people live in a world filled with these concerns and it is only the details that are different (what kind of food we eat; where we meet friends and lovers; do we work for the village big cahuna or for a corporate CEO?). But then again, there are those amongst us who realize that there's more to life and we start living on a different level: allegiance to the clan becomes nationalism, nationalism becomes humanism and concern for the economy becomes concern for the environment. It may sound presumptuous but we find that backpackers generally live on a higher level: a thin elite of romantics scattered around the world. The great ideas of the future may indeed come about in the backpacker ghetto of Khao San in Bangkok, or in the lodges of Nepal or the coffeshops of Amsterdam. Time will tell. But it is not only backpackers that live as a majority on these higher levels. We found that whole countries seem to work in a different way which is consistent with a majority of people living on a higher level: a level where the concern becomes increasingly more for others than for oneself. We loved the Netherlands and Japan: two examples of places where people are considerate and much more aware of the need for tolerance and environmental awareness than in other places. Some countries have a wealth built in their societies: a wealth of good morals and solid relationships, a wealth of education and the right attitude to work; a wealth separate from the material one. We thus loved not just Holland and Japan, but also Nepal and Mexico or Turkey and many places in India. On the other hand, we've seen the reverse take place as well: a vicious cycle in the society where only a few have benefitted and where people lack confidence in a system that fails them. These are the places where one sees a dog-eat -dog world, where everyone only thinks of themselves and their families, and where hard work is much less a guarantee of success than is the abandonment of one's scruples. We've seen this so often in tourist areas, and sometimes in whole countries from Morocco and Egypt to China, but also in more familiar areas like the inner-city of Chicago.There are clouds on the horizon. Our current industrial society has spread out to the farthest corners of the Earth and into the deep reaches of the human soul. The limits to its expansion have been visible to us throughout our trip. The lands of countries like Egypt, India and China are overexploited and the population continues to grow, fuelled by an economic system which favours growth, and by attempts to solve problems which only created bigger ones in the process. In rich countries, the challenge is visible in the hearts of people, reduced to consumers and workers and closing the doors of their soul by retreating away from the onslaught of the media. We think that the current financial crisis is just a warning of things to come. We live in interesting times (that's a Confucian curse, btw). A travel blog may seem like no place to play Cassandra, but then again, this is the magic of our times: the very system which created the problems created a lot of solutions in the process. The internet enables us to howl away in cyberspace about what we've seen and so here it goes:To anyone reading this then: the time to change is now. The challenges are many, but the opportunity immense. The refrain is familiar and most just tune it out, but every change, no matter how small can help turn the tide. Thank you everyone for reading our blog this past year!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1240768740/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1240768740/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1240768740/tpod.html Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:05:08 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo is one of those Alpha world cities: huge in cultural and economic reach, cosmopolitan and varied, exciting and a magnet for globetrotters. Compared to the other Alpha cities though (New York, London and Paris), Tokyo has relatively few sights  though and is quite a bit less cosmopolitan. One can still see expats but the vast majority of people here are local Japanese. Largely destroyed by the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo has retained few historical sights and it makes up for that with its modern happening appeal. The city is quite heterogenous, which is to be expected for the largest city in the world (35 million including its satellites!), and each neighborhood has its own particular flair and character. Though we found that most of the downtown is somewhat similar: narrow buildings with 3-6 stories squuezed toghether around the occasional shopping arcade or skyscraper. Buildings are narrow because property prices have historically been so high, but they are not overly big for fear of earthquakes. The tallest building in the city is an anorexic Japanese version of the Eiffel Tower: taller and much skinnier than the original and painted a bright red. We wandered around the various neighborhoods, and sampled the aspects of the Japanese life which we have already had become accustomed to: outlandish fashion alongside serious businessmen, shopping arcades littered with pachinko parlors and lots of restaurants (quite affordable even to our wallets used to sparingly dishing out rupees and baht). The sushi in Japan by the way, can be divine!Anything we would have to say about Tokyo would equally apply to Japan, so I would first invite everyone who hasn't done so to read our entry on Kyoto where we discussed our impressions at some length, and which impressions we still hold. In addition, we feel that Japan is definitely a country which we would return to. It is a kind of parallel universe for developed countries, still clinging on to its traditions which are so different from western ones, and having advanced in somewhat different areas than the West. Whereas the West is goal oriented and lets the quest for immediate gain overshadow long term priorities, Japan has traditionally focused more on building social bonds and cohesion. As a result, it is more relaxed, safer and less hectic than the west. Which is not to say that life is easier: social pressures seem enormous and Japanese people work a lot. The population density is very high, so status symbols are displayed in clothing, technology and personal  accessories. In addition, Japanese culture has at its base the Chinese confucian ideals which aside from stressing relationships and continuity, allow for room for personal improvement in the continuous perfection of everyday tasks. This is my view as to why Japan is so succesful at perfecting but relatively poor at innovation. Anyway, all this creates a society where appearance and everyday actions are very important. Everything has to be done right and nowhere is that more evident than in the care which the Japanese exhibit in the appearance of their persons and their households. The Japanese culture has thus become very visual: it appears that there is little accident that Japan has been the first and most succesful country in adopting the technological and many of the architectural and artistic ideas of the West. After all, the West is also very visual and transmission of information in our society occurs via visual means (print, television, ads, etc.), so the fit is natural. Japan has taken all of these mediums and applied its own twist on it, giving rise to such unique visual forms as manga, outlandish television shows, and blinding ads. The conservative tendency derived from confucianism exhibited by all East Asian countries we've seen, allows Japan to cling on to its traditions, but tradition clashes with the western style march towards modernity, giving rise to uniquely Japanese problems. Nowhere in the world as far as we have been able to tell, are individuals so introverted. The twin pressures of traditional conformity and modern consumerism have caused the average Japanese to retreat into oneself, into hobbies and crafts, imaginary worlds and the new phenomenon of the virtual social medium. At rush hour in the busy Tokyo metro, the only sounds one hears are the ticking of the train passing over the rails and the clicking of busy fingers over the keys of cell phones, mp3 players (derived from the walkman which was invented here) or portable game players. A whole immense crowd of people curteous to each other but each of them lost in their own private world.... The contradictions are everywhere: you can set your clock on the trains' arrival time, but the address system dates back to the Middle Ages and is simply put absurd and byzantine. We've seen women in their kimonos talking on cutting edge cellphones; the country is lickably clean yet there's never any garbage cans in sight; the list goes on and on.Japan is a fascinating land: overcrowded yet green, a land of relative social harmony yet one of hidden personal turmoil, extremely modern yet staunchly traditional and it makes one go " Wow, why can't we do that?" one moment and "Well that's really impractical, isn't it?", the next. It is definitely worth another visit.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238934300/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238934300/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238934300/tpod.html Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:51:32 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Jinan, Shandong, China

Coming soon
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Osaka, Kinki, Japan

After China, Osaka felt awesome. There's no other way to describe it: it was so well organized, so clean and so quiet and the people felt so helpful and friendly. In many ways an antithesis of big Chinese cities, who are chaotic, dirty, loud and where people are often boorish. We stayed in a business hotel which was very cheap being next to a men's shelter, but the bums instead of seeming threatening, seemed quiet, peaceful and sometimes very even friendly. We visited Osaka castle and got a taste of medieval Japan which was all the more enhanced by the unexpected surprise of a free guided tour by a retired volunteer, who was 70 but looked to be 50, who told us he just wanted to extend Japanese hospitality to foreigners. After all our experinces in Asia, we kept on waiting for a "catch" that never came: the man was honest and our visit was very enjoyable. Osaka as a city is not very special but it is pleasant as far as big cities go. Downtown is a real riot at night and great for people-watching: especially the shopping arcades where Japanese young people strut along in their favourite outfits. We've seen the most outlandish costumes, straight out of a manga comic. The fashion here is completely different from the west: Japanese girls often wear impossibly high heels and very short skirts, while guys display huge manes of died hair, tight jeans and huge curved shoes that look like a cross between cowboy boots and Middle-Eastern slippers. For those of you familiar with Japanese animation, you might be surprised to know that they are not completely fictional: some Japanese people really do look like the life version of that. Then again, this is probably a young people's reaction to the formalism of the real world: Japanese businessmen and women all seem to wear the same suit uniforms. We should add here, that aside from us loving Japan so far, we don't even find it all that expensive. In fact, if one is careful, one can travel for quite a bit less than in Europe. We managed to go for a few days on $120 a day for the two of us! 
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241892660/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241892660/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241892660/tpod.html Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:33:08 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Nara, Japan

Nara is one of the loveliest cities we've seen on our travels. Once the imperial capital of Japan, Nara is nowadays a compact quiet and quaint town. A large park covers almost a quarter of the city, and within it one can visit a series of temples and shrines which are just wonderful. We visited the world's largest wooden building: a lovely temple housing an enormous statue of Buddha. Also memorable was a pathway through an old shady forest lined on both sides with ancient looking stone lanterns and leading up on the slope of a hill to several Shinto shrines: gracious wooden arches painted in bright reds and oranges and dedicated to the spirits of the forest. The Japanese sense of esthetics combines architecture and nature, much like the Chinese one, but with an emphasis on nature and living things rather than rock and water like in China, Altogether it creates a magical experience all the more enhanced by get this: deer! That's right - hundreds of deer inhabit the park and roam freely amongst the temples and the shrines; they fearlessly approach humans who often feed them. One of the days we were here it was Earth Day, a bright and warm sunny day, and we could think of no better place to spend it than in a place where people of all ages mingled peacefully with deer, in a setting where forests of ancient trees are dotted with flowering cherry trees and where gracious temples are outlined delicately on the edge of ponds filled with fish and waterfowl. It looked like some sort of future Utopia, if only for a few brief moments. It was an experience we will not soon forget.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241633400/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241633400/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241633400/tpod.html Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:22:42 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Kyoto, Japan

Kyoto is the cultural heart of Japan. A nice city, though not as pleasant in our opinion as Nara, Kyoto is packed to the gills with temples, palaces, shrines and with Japanese ladies in kimonos scampering along traditional looking streets. One can easily get temple overload here, as after a while even the most die-hard Japanophile will start to find the temples looking all the same. We are staying in a hostel that has an industrial feel to it, complete with airport style announcements. This would be a good place to mention the peculiarities of Japanese accomodation, for example shared baths where people of the same gender have to take their showers and baths together (soaping yourself up in a room with several naked Japanese talking merrily while scrubbing each other's backs is a novel experience!). Other novelties, like sleeping on futons spread out on tatami mats on the floor, and having to constantly change slippers when going to the bathroom are easier to adapt to. Overall, we find that we still like Japan very much, though the initial feeling of excitement is subsiding and we are noticing the problems of Japan, along with all the wonderful things it has to offer. Altogether, Japan would be a much better place if it had half the population. Everything feels cramped, even for us who are now used to high population densities. The country seems to have a lot of elderly people, who have a lot of facilities available to them. The disabled also seem well taken care of: for example on most sidewalks and in the metro one can see bands with ridges on the sidewalk for use by the blind. The Japanese seem to spend an extraordinary amount of time being considerate to other people, which makes a visitor feel just wonderful; however we think that this leaves little room for them to be considerate to themselves. The average Japanese person must feel a lot of social pressure, and many aspects of the Japanese culture seem to reflect this. The world of manga is indicative of the fantasy worlds in which many of them find an escape. The cities we've seen are liberally littered with pachinko parlors: a type of gambling which allows for Japanese of all social strata to space out in front of a machine for hours on end. And finally, there's the pornography: we've never seen a country where it is so prominently displayed in convenience stores and bookstores. The Japanese society seems quite advanced overall, but life for the average person cannot be easy; and that goes even more so for women, who must feel even more pressure with less escape valves than men. Japanese society feels very segregated and women must spend a lot of time keeping up appearances. We have never seen a country where women and girls are always so well dressed and fashionable. Wonderful for the visitor, especially the young male ;)  , but it is so for the women themselves? Anyway, we'll talk more about this once we are set to leave.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238521020/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238521020/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238521020/tpod.html Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:52:42 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Beijing, China

Beijing was our last stop in China and it proved to be an interesting and illuminating conclusion to our trip in this giant country. We did the obligatory tourist stuff, and a fair bit of thinking about the society, this being in many ways the showcase of the modern face of China. To begin with we were both looking forward to visiting the Forbidden City, which in many ways we found to be representative of Chinese society over the past 2000 years. It is massive and in many ways little more than a giant fortress, with the emperor and his closest company occupying a relatively minuscule area at the furthest back of the compound, isolated from the rest of government, let alone the rest of the country by massive walls and a series of giant gates. The whole place is designed to make one feel small and insignificant. Undoubtedly, a petty mandarin would have felt awe while walking through the giant hard stone courtyards, each one of which could have easily contained severeal tens of thousands of people, and through the overly ornate massive gates. As a westerner with a historical vision though, one realizes that for the time that it was built, the place lacks imagination. Our general sense about Chinese history based as much on historical readings as well as on our observations on Chinese architecture, art, society and alphabet is that China had reached a high level of cultural development about 2200 years ago. This development had been fostered by competing Chinese states and competing ideologies which fostered innovation but also warfare and instability. To solve these latter problems, the first few Chinese emperors, after unifying the country adopted a series of laws and helped crystallize an attitude which remains to this day. The Chinese society sacrificed innovation for the sake of stability, and adopted a strict Confucian set of rules and social pressures. The level of civilization that had been attained then was judged to be more than adequate, and so innovation in any areas was deliberately stifled by stressing tradition and perfection in every action over achieving goals and innovation. To this day, the governing rules in Chinese society stress a strict observation of authority and especially keeping up appearances. Actually getting something done is less important than doing it in the proper traditional way. New ideas and ways of doing things are not appreciated. Sure, some will say: but I thoguht the Chinese were way ahead of us: they came up with paper, the compass and gunpowder! Maybe, but for a country that big over the course of more than a millenia and a half it's actually very little. In Chinese art for the past 2 millenia, the same subjects and methods of execution appear over and over with scarcely any exceptions. Buildings, whether they be from the 8th or from the 19th century look pretty much the same. We hear a lot in the west about the supposed stability of Chinese society and how much calmer they are than us, but in our opinion this calm is only a mask. Every person is supposed to obey the same rules followed for millenia by everyone else, that center on respect and obeisance. Respect that is for family and authority, but not necessarily for anyone else. The rudeness with which the Chinese treat each other in a public setting, say in the metro or in a lineup is shocking to a Westerner. We got the feeling that under the calm surface of every Chinese person we met was a smoldering cauldron of resentment. The surface is all that matters though: losing face is central to the Chinese psyche, and all conflict management centers around it. It's a long discussion, but for westerners some of the approaches seem bizzare: completely shutting down or running away from a conflict! Asking questions is rare, as it entails showing one's ignorance and hence losing face: this probably greatly hinders the learning process.The other facet of the weight of history on China is a feeling of superiority on everyone else - the barbarians!- combined with a sense of disbelief that some of the barbarians - the westerners - could actually excel at some things better than them. China was long a fortress of civilization epitomized vividly by the Forbidden Palace and the Great Wall, which we visited at Mutainyu (see photos). More importantly for the modern world, its current Great Wall is its writing. Complex, cumbersome amd in our view enormously impractical, the alphabet takes 7 years to learn the basics of and isolates other cultures from China very thoroughly. The burden of the alphabet learning process, combined with their reluctance to ask questions, means that literacy is difficult to spread and that Chinese students have to work very hard to learn the same amount that their Western counterparts do; it also means a lack of a social life during school, with all the psychological problems which this entails later on in life. We think therefore that even today, the Chinese knowledge, education and social system is not set up to create well adjusted individuals who dispose of critical thinking and can innovate easily. Instead it mostly creates repressed beings who constantly feel the burden of society on them and the injustice of life. On the other hand, from a national perspective, it creates a society which is easy to control. No wonder communism and authoritarianism found a home here! Even today's system, while capitalist, is obviously highly bureaucratic and authoritarian. This also explains why the Chinese are so good at copying while they have so few new original products.But while the tradtional pressures which have torn apart the political system won't interfere with the current government, there is a big problem in China and nowhere is that more obvious than in Beijing. The cowboy capitalism of the past two decades has turned China into a global player and has brought prosperity to hundreds of millions of Chinese. But at what price success? Beijing is the most polluted city in the world: after 3 days we had sore throats and were coughing up some mysterious black gunk. The air is visibly hazy everywhere and one can smell the pollution on the air. In modern China, don't breathe the air, don't drink the water and don't eat the food! But that's okay, Nike shoes are cheap and pirated videos even cheaper. This is a common problem across most Chinese cities we visited and it's starting to be a major problem for its citizens. The millions of factories which churn out cheap products fueling western consumerism have brought China to the brink of environmental collapse. But the government has staked its existence and sold out its communist ideology on the promise of delivering prosperity to its citizens. So now to paraphrase Milton Friedman, China is like the movie Speed, but worse: it must run along at a high speed of development, like the bus who cannot go below 50 mph, but has to change its economic engine in the process! Can it be done? If this was the United States, I would say that the hope lies with the innovative and dynamic spirit of its citizens, but as I said before, we don't see the Chinese system as being set up for inovation, so the bus may well blow up! If it does, it will take out the whole neighborhood, probably meaning the West as well, so for anyone political out there: the West will need to be the innovator that China needs. If some sort of cooperation does not happen, or if the Chinese system does not open up (which for the society would take generations anyway), then we will have the unfortunate privilege of witnessing a crisis which makes the current one look like a cocktail party.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241007120/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241007120/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1241007120/tpod.html Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:22:14 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

Suzhou is the first city in China which we genuinely liked and found magical. Well, of course that's after a very interesting morning we had and is worth relating in detail. To begin with, our ride here from Hangzhou was supposed to be a brief 2 hour bus snoozer, but which turned into a 5 hour circus of confusion. Somewhere along the way, on an off-ramp, the bus came to a halt and we could see a comotion outside. Several of the passengers and the bus driver came out of the bus and started a fist-fight with the driver of a car which was stopped quite close to the bus. We don't know why it happened (maybe someone cut someone else off?), but it lasted several rounds, with the car driver shaking his fist and yelling, and with several people coming and punching and kicking him on at least 3 separate occasions that we could see, before the police came. The bus eventually lumbered on to a closed-off road and there we waited for another hour or so for the police to come again (for questioning?) and for another bus to come and pick up the passengers. Upon arrival in Suzhou, we were stuck in the bus for another 45 minutes, before the bus company gave us a partial refund. Of course we had no idea what was going on the whole time, since no one spoke English. Eventually we found a hostel and being quite famished we went in the first restaurant we saw. We ordered some soups which when they came, bore absolutely no resemblance to the pictures on which basis we had ordered; so we had to eat some enigmatic stuff including a mystery meat in which I found a freshwater pearl! I still have no idea to this day what it was.I had written quite a bit more, but the  computers decided that I had too much fun writing it, so I lost all that funny stuff. So expect more stuff in a while. Ta ta!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238175300/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238175300/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/tavini/2/1238175300/tpod.html Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:08:38 -0400 Ginny and Tavi's escape from the cubicle

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Shanghai, China

Coming soon
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