February 2012
9 posts
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First real photos! (mostly of lanterns)
I finally took out my big camera! Here’s a few shots to start with:
This is where I’m staying until I find my own place. Needless to say, my own place won’t be quite this fancy, so I’m enjoying the luxury while it lasts.
This is in “Central Park,” one of the big residential compounds in the Central Business District (CBD). A lot of the richer kind of...
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Forgiveness and reconciliation
I think my first couple of posts about my new Chinese life did not seem the cheeriest, but let me assure you, Bejing and I are quickly falling in love (to be fair, I’m not sure how Beijing feels about me. But it hasn’t tried to kill me in the past two days or so, which I take as a good sign).
The weekend was good for forgiveness and reconciliation. After my last unfortunate attempt, I...
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Things that are not surprising: Chinese is really...
Of course I expected that sitting down and trying to learn how to write Chinese characters would be hard. Of course I know that it’s not like Italian and Portuguese where you sort of fake your way through the whole thing and it all works out. I knew those things, which is why this may be my most unoriginal statement of all time, but let me just say it again, guys: Chinese is really...
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WatchRush hour in Beijing is a terrifying experience.
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Not my cup of tea.
While trying to calm myself down, I made the firm decision to tell no one about this. I rationalized it as a way of protecting those who care about me, of not giving them reasons to worry. Lies to myself, of course, I was just trying to spare me the humiliation. But I guess if I’m going to do this blog thing, I might as well do it honestly, I might as well tell the unflattering stuff too, if I...
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Ni hao! (There goes about 50% of my Chinese vocab)
This is the beginning of Day Three in Beijing, and I feel like I have lived at least two or three months in the past 60 hours. Trying to decide what to write about is hard, since arriving in a new place means noticing and remembering details that go usually ignored in a world of routine and familiarity. From the sticker on your shampoo to the shape of light switches in every room, everything is...
January 2012
1 post
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All kinds of reptiles
Allons! we must not stop here! However sweet these laid-up stores—however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here; However shelter’d this port, and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here; However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us, we are permitted to receive it but a little while.
Walt Whitman, The Song of the Open Road
After what turned out to be a...
December 2011
1 post
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On the march against FARC
Pretty sure this was the hardest picture I’ve ever had to take.
This past Tuesday I was part of a “march against FARC,” a hastily organized protest in reaction to FARC’s execution of four Colombian soldiers during a failed rescue operation.* The soldiers had been captive in the jungle for nearly fourteen years and were found dead next to their chains, shot to the head. I joined thousands...
November 2011
4 posts
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Free Harvard from the Occupiers
This is probably the kind of thing that would have started a flame war over the Pfoho email list when I was at Harvard, but since I did the grown up thing and unsubscribed when I graduated (sigh), I’m going to complain to the empty silence of the Internet.
Since Wednesday night, a tent city has been set up in the middle of Harvard Yard, as protesters sympathetic to the Occupy movement gathered...
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October 2011
4 posts
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“can we leave the contact information with each other. cauze i like u and wanna...”
– Chinese student that reminds me that I’ll love China
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September 2011
7 posts
Confession of a phony: I like museum gift shops more than I like museums.
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Barcelona
Handwritten “bye bye Spain” sign hanging from a window in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter.
In the days after deciding that Barcelona was the next stop in my little Euro trip (mostly because I had the offer of a free couch to sleep on and it lay on the way to Madrid) I consciously decided not to Google it. By now I’ve figured out that the main attractions of a city will usually fight...
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Magical realism is not a literary style
I have this pet theory that literary critics (or at least high school English teachers, which is where I heard it from) have it all wrong about ‘magical realism’. When they read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, they call it his “literary style,” but they just haven’t been to Colombia. That’s actually our special brand of reality, and Gabo is just doing a...
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WatchI have been horrible at updating from Barcelona, so here is a short and poorly made video of the Magic Fountain of Montjuic to make me feel better about not posting. This was definitely worth seeing!
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“O todos somos moros, o todos somos cristianos”
– Historically relevant idioms, from Spain. “either we’re all Moors, or we’re all Christian” meaning something along the lines of “let’s plan and get our act together”
August 2011
16 posts
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à bientôt, Paris
It’s funny, the way we travel now. Most of the time, we go to places we have seen in movies and pictures, or at the very least read all about in a travel guide. There are, in theory, not many surprises, and few places are more predictable than Paris. I knew exactly what monuments I would see in this city, the names of the neighborhoods were familiar, and I could already imagine the smell of...
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A different face of Paris
I am staying at a friend’s apartment in the 18eme Arrondisement, one of the areas of Paris with the greatest concentration of immigrants. Today, the Hindu community celebrated the festival of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of prosperity and good fortune.
I had a dot drawn on my forehead with an orange unguent held in a coconut shell, I bought a garland of jasmine buds for my hair, and I...
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She's laughing at us
And this is what trying to take a look at the Mona Lisa looks like:
I was, of course, one of the hundreds of people using elbows and teeth to try to take a closer look. Yet 99% of us would not have glance twice if she weren’t the famous Mona Lisa. But why is she famous to begin with? Who decided this?
I honestly had more fun looking at the people trying to look at— no, take a...
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Travel makes you open minded
I had this idea that traveling to faraway lands would open me up to the exotic customs of other people. Well, so far, it seems to have made me accept things a little closer to home: I now love McDonalds.
Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved hating on the golden arches as much as your average North-Eastern-private-school-educated, liberal-until-I-make-money snob. You’d think that...
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Life update
“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (like Oscar Wilde, he seems to write in little quotable snippets.)
The next year or two are going to be a lot of new things for me, and since I am absolutely horrible at keeping in touch...
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On being situationally American
One of the unexpected surprises of traveling so far away from home (homes?) for the first time, was the sudden boost in exoticism. Being Colombian in the States is old news. Everyone has a Colombian ex-boyfriend or a completely originally and hilarious joke about Pablo Escobar and snorting cocaine (NOT). But here, on those occasions that I don’t decide to let people think I’m American...
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“El Tiempo: “Why does [former Colombian President Álvaro] Uribe have the idea,...”
– Uribe vs. Santos watch: Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos reveals to El Tiempo’s Yamid Amat his mantra for managing relations with his increasingly pugnacious predecessor, the more conservative Álvaro Uribe. (via adam-wola)
I was so wrong about Santos. Now he even appears to have a sense of...
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