Camilo Ché

Nouakchott to Dakar

2012-01-16T20:23:00.002+02:00

My Mauritanian friend gives me some cash to catch a “sept-place” private taxi to the border with Senegal. I catch it somewhere in the outskirts of dusty Nouakchott and receive honest treatment from the taxi operators. It is not too far to the river Senegal and the border, and the scenery is already getting richer. Some brushes, even trees start lining the road and by the time I got off in the village of Rosso the desert was behind me.

I cross the river on the free ferry. On the other side, a group of locals jumps on me (the only white person) and tell me about taxi fares and that I have to provide a proof that I have enough cash to live in Senegal and that I have to come with them they know it better they’re local.
I say “no”. I know what I’m doing. And I walk on a few hundred meters, thinking how much I like just being alone walking along the road until after the stalls where people smile more and more, this is the main road to Dakar so I march on for two minutes then hear the roar of a good engine, I stick out my thumb – a black BMW stops, and the Mauritanian television producer gestures me in. He’s going straight to Dakar, of course, and I am welcome to join him. We talk about his work. He is going to Dakar to learn from Senegalese TV producers then apply it to the Mauritanian market.

Through the open window I hear birds and smell green again.

We passed St. Louis (he said I should visit it) and arrived in Dakar quite late. Before I could tell him anything, he had offered me his hotel room. That night I slept on my sleeping back rolled out in the corner of a hotel room in downtown Dakar, fully air-conditioned and immaculately clean.

The Next World War

2012-01-14T02:28:00.000+02:00

This rant sprouts from the documentary film "Supermarket Secrets", a strong piece of investigative journalism concerning the UK food retail industry that came out a few years ago. I watched it with disbelief and tears in my eyes, disgust, then anger. This poor little apple that is not perfectly symmetrical like the snobby faces of its sick consumers and the supermarketeers who rationalize their system by pointing at the "demand" of these consumers. This one misshapen apple, thrown to the pigs or left to rot while a billion people are starving, should enrage billions. And once they are enraged they might start to see that it is not only this apple. It's everything. The entire food production and the entire non-food production. Wasteful, environmentally disastrous, unsustainable, disgustingly "efficient". The whole system should be taken down. Not "dismantled" but blown up, carpet bombed, nuked into oblivion.

Two misshapen apples, courtesy of Africanseer.com

This is a somewhat emotional reaction.

What would that world war look like? Let's try and imagine. One fine day one of us consumers is indeed so appalled by the sight of an apple like this that in his mind, a tipping-point is reached. He declares war (let's assume it is a male consumer as they tend to be more easily enraged and have more aggression in their toolbox of conflict resolution). This apple, he feels, is reason enough for all-out war. No more questions, no more considerations. He reproduces the photograph of the little apple and distributes it to millions of people, who are all equally in dismay and desire to strike. The picture of the apple is forbidden by governments around the world but it's too late. Wikileaks and similar public services step in and it spreads like a wildfire. Soon, a billion people are mobilized and awaiting the command of our initial outraged consumer. And the command comes. Supermarket windows are smashed. Massive strikes, complete disruption of air traffic, power plants, mines, factories, dams, roads, trains, stores, military bases quickly ensues. The world economy grinds to a complete halt. The apple people have won, the system is down.

The initial outraged consumer, let's call him Adam, walks the scorched earth and sighs at the sight of the destruction. He doesn't feel as certain about the apple war as before. Was it the right thing to do? He feels a little bit guilty. Or had he been seduced by some dark force that had used the apple to spark his rage? He is confused and goes to the site where the supermarket once stood, the place where he had seen the misshapen apple being thrown away. Ironically, the name sign was among the few items not devoured by the fire and the looting. "Paradise Whole Foods Ltd." it read. Adam sits down next to it and...and...and...and let the poor feller just sit there dammit.

Commercial Break

2012-01-04T00:24:00.001+02:00

It's time for a short commercial break. Get comfortable in your chair and watch the wonderful products. Don't believe the communist propaganda that commercials are made to seduce people into buying stuff they don't need. Commercials are essential to life and without them even the most basic human functioning would be unthinkable, we would all live and die in caves, deprived of our basic human needs and desire. Without television commercials we would no longer experience desire, and become apathetic, defenseless against the threat of communism. Without radio advertisements we would stop to recognize our ability to be political beings. And without billboards and print media ads we would lose our sense of self. We have made it a number one priority to defend the right to make this society more livable which as per the above findings means turn this entire country into a canvas for commercials.

Just Do It: Commercials

I are organizing a contest to create the most powerful commercial for commercials. Can you come up with a catchy slogan? Here are some suggestions to get you started: "Commercials - I'm Loving It."; "Just Do It: Commercials."; "Beyond Commerce: Commercials".

Of course I hear you say "but if commercials are so essential then why do they need to be promoted?"

The fatal flaw of that question is that it assumes the basic sanity of present day human beings. Does the present day person have this sanity? Look around you. What do you see? People often blindly follow their biological urges, their unreflected appetite or unmediated sexual cravings. Some of them transport themselves in vehicles that are older than two years - or don't even roar. What do you think that would do to their self-confidence? Other people, who were clearly inspired by the absence of commercials, have been seen switching off life-supporting devices like light bulbs, space heaters, yes even air-conditioners. Others even, as one of our shocked reporters observed, walk - which is essentially the way animals move. And they call it "healthy". They'd walk straight into the abyss of communism and not even notice it. Still others drink water from the tap, maybe even slurping it like dogs do - do you think they would ever be able to build any sense of family values? Or did you know there are citizens who sleep without pills (the health risks of which have been clearly indicated in a wide range of different commercials and infotainment videos)?

Worse still, and I'm not making this up: there are humans (genetically shown to be indeed identical with homo sapiens sapiens) who still breath without a mask. Their insanity is complete, they are apathetic sociopaths stumbling down the tedious slope of their senseless lives, void of desire and humaneness, and endangering our brave new world of capitalism.

Ducks on Dawkins

2011-12-25T02:04:00.002+02:00

Our Reflection is sometimes quite astonishing.

I got carried away a bit by a series of "related videos" about Richard Dawkins and his quest to extirpate religion. His eloquence is mighty and delightful, and I do agree with most of his arguments. Of course science offers a far better explanation of natural phenomenons, and its supremacy in predicting the future is self-evident. With experiments that must be essentially replicable in the lab, and the continuous effort to identify and eradicate every bias, science is the best thing since sliced bread.

Religion, apart from standing in the way of the progress of science, has caused a lot of suffering by offering a rationale for righteousness, martyrdom, infanticide, genocide, and so on. Is all religion delusional?

I am a duck. I understand Dawkins and his crusade very well, and I feel for him. See, we have this quack in our mallard community that keeps preaching about our initial sin and how some broad-billed deity up there in the sky is controlling everything and that if only we believe in waddling Wotan everything is gonna be alright. That quack keeps talking about it so much that some of us have already migrated away. Anyway, if a duck dares to argue with him, that quack asks him if he knows what came first, the duck or the egg, and his critics normally are so abashed about the fact that they don't know the answer that they back down.

I am a Bucephela clangula, a cool duck you know. I'm from the Arctic, mate. That quack is telling us the ice melt is God's will and the punishment for our disbelief and unholy hollering. Rubbish. I'm a duck of science and I understand that much. Primitive humans are causing global warming. They have this tradition of feeling supreme, you know, so even mr. Dawkins thinks they can and should do away with religion fast, but that ain't gonna work. They should kinda slowly phase it out, and after a few generations they'll be just fine. Of course, there will always be some humans quacking about their discontent and projecting heavens and hells and purgatories. We have that here too. But you know, for some being delusional is better than facing the truth. The truth ain't all too downy, if you know what I mean.

Two Strangers

2011-12-15T21:36:00.000+02:00

How much peace is in an evening walk
of two near strangers at the bay
when they hold hands and gently talk
even if their peace - has gone away

How much truth lies there, for a little while
when of human needs the most divine
between a thoughtful nod and then a smile
is shared by eyes like yours and mine

The sea is whispering quietly below
her waves are pushing light shadows ashore
we inspired each other - and smiled even more
Our shadows, let's pick them up before we go
because the moonlight won't restore
those shadows and this instant, never more

Ugliness

2011-12-14T16:42:00.000+02:00

Is it ugly to snitch pictures from the web?

Beauty is not eternal, neither is it projected on a blank, neutral canvas by the mind of the visual, auditive or tactile beholder. It is an in-between: between the recognition of eternal abstract truths perfectly embodied in a work of art, and the unique creation of the one-time sublime by the conspiring individual minds of an artist and her admirer. Beauty is the entanglement of the spirit of abstract perfection and the spirit of the wondrous captivating singularity, one force in line with the universe, a total remembrance of the truth of being, the other force a violent forgetting and being overwhelmed by that which lays beyond our reach.

Pass on the salt, will you? We are painting here. Our topic is not an easy one, and many a philosopher has written large volumes on beauty, and greatly have they dissented. I trust a philosopher when I can agree with their aesthetic, and I think that is not unwise as our reflections on the beautiful are symptoms of the whole edifice of our thinking. But it is not beauty I am dealing with here. I felt the urge to write about ugliness, and more specifically about the ugly character.

What constitutes an ugly character? Let's see if we can agree on this. An ugly character is arrogant, high-nosed, and doesn't realize it. Ugly is egocentric, ignoring the needs of others that surround one. Ugly is greed and jealousy, lying and being short-tempered. The ugly character coincides partly with the traditional sinner, it is a bitter fatalist soul, possessed as it seems by some demon.

To learn about that demon, we can investigate how all the traits of ugliness are interrelated and form a cluster of ugliness that stains a mind.

I have a hypothesis that explains ugliness in terms that avoid cultural relativism. The premise is that every mind aspires to truth and beauty. What happens in the ugly character, according to this hypothesis, is that the in-between described above is distorted. The psychopathology of ugliness is what I call the sickness of wrong abstraction. The ugly abstracts and generalizes where a "normal" individual would be overwhelmed by singular beauty, and the ugly forgets everything in moments where that "normal" mind would gracefully generalize and be fulfilled with an enthralling sense of beauty. Thus, the ugly character is out of tune with the culture they live in because their existential quest has been annihilated by their society.

The ugly character's quest for beauty is grossly distorted and that aberration results in a disconnection with the consensually beautiful. The faculties to perceive beauty the way "normals" do have vanished from the ugly mind. This aberration is the root of all the ugliness, the greed, the lying, the selfishness, the cynicism, the yelling, the betraying, the murdering. It is essentially abstraction gone wrong that can make people ugly.

A corollary is that in contemplating beauty - together - beautiful characters could thrive.

"OMG!" look at these ads on Huffpost.

2011-12-06T18:34:00.001+02:00

Advertising on "Huffington Post", December 6th, 2011

The 99% are 1%. The majority of the people is not on the streets, but sits at home watching sit-coms. And that is not just some politician's quote.

What is the real sentiment of "the people"? To get a good indicator, we would have to assess their interests, their hopes, wishes, desires, fears, worries, their faith, habits, and hate. Where should we start?

The advertising industry itself ($400 billion USD as of 2011) has already done it better than we could. All we need to do is take a look at the sponsored links on websites (yes, those annoying messages we've trained ourselves to avoid looking at) because what the machines that put them there assume the average reader's interest is, is probably pretty close to what it actually is.

Take the Huff- and Puffington Post on an article about a Labrador saving two kittens left inside a bag of cat food on the road to die. The article itself gives readers what they need: courage is something cute that occurs in wild animals, not something serious we need to bother about in civilized homo sapiens.

The three advertisements underneath (and alongside!) this article represent the trias of sentiments that keeps our culture going, and keeps the "99%" from becoming the 99%. The normal, nonprotesting, average, matter-of-fact 99% are suckling the teat of Consumerism as long as they are made to sense:

Item 1) Vanity + Sense of Accomplishment. They need to feel good about themselves. They need keep going through cycles of worry and reward: worry if they look better than their peers or if they are still attractive, and reward for compliments they receive for their appearance, which they can perceive as an accomplishment precisely because it has vexed them for so long;
Item 2) Security + Sense of Being. They need to feel that "nothing" can happen and if "something" happens, that they are ensured in the best possible ways, so that "nothing" could make them more secured against "something" to happen. Their existential Self receives the Ultimate Consolation in the acknowledgement that they are as secure as they can Be. Their sense of fear (of the inevitable, of disease, loss, death) is systematically numbed.
Item 3) Getting rich + Sense of Potential. They need the big Belief in easy ways to get rich; not necessarily to pursue them but to make them feel that they could do so any moment, just not now. This nurtures their sense of potential, the idea that they could be "all the can be" some day in the future.

Similar ads showed up (and will keep showing up) on an article called "10 Most Generous Moments Of The Decade" and a piece about the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl.

The Huffington Post, or rather its advertising-centered business model, makes me feel ashamed about this culture. These ads are nurturing what prevents the "99%" from becoming the 99% - these ads are evil.

The way this commercial enterprise has been hailed as independent journalism, the way serious independent journalists write articles for this publication and have their words flanked by perverse advertisements, is saddening.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to look at Internet advertisements (and advertisements in general) with such eyes as they reveal more about the "spirit of the people" than any occupy spokesperson could.

End-Of-Line

2011-12-04T02:24:00.001+02:00

Istanbul, December 2011. After a really nice visit to Dutch poet Martijn Benders, who gave me two of his poetry books on the occasion, I decided to do one of the poems in English because I think it would be a good poetic anthem for the "occupy" movement. I take all the blows, of course.

* * *

End-Of-Line

The shutters are shining.
Knuckle white Christ in braille.
A neighbor to all. A city in ashes. An egg.

Whether metaphors are to be allowed after Nine Eleven.
Democracy needs a wheel clamp, freedom
is what penurious philosophers come up with. Wheels
do turn. Is war a continuation of the soul with different wheels?
Why is it that I am afraid of my keyboard?

A documentary on scary diseases on Discovery Channel,
rolls that don't look like rolls anymore after two weeks.
Vanity Rules. Cash flow flows. Weapons are getting bored.

We dread at the past through beauteous books.
We snitch if the neighbor is bitching.

I went to Bommel to see the skyscraper.
The Thing approached. I kicked threefold full throttle
but someone had built a bridge between the civilisations.

Quick announcement to a literary critic.
Go find a job, dickhead.

Happiness presents itself between the lines. End of Line!

(wonder which Dutch lines I distorted here? buy the original!)

The Enduring Fight Against Fire

2011-12-04T01:01:00.001+02:00

The next morning I wake up in an acclimatised room with a large tv-screen showing "France 24". Breakfast with papá. I spent the day in the house looming, large TV movies keeping a tired soul busy. We had Mauritanian Tajin, goat meat and liver served on a plate of rice and eaten in balls with your hands. A little girl comes into the room to bring me tea, smiled when I took the little glass then ran out of the room.

I don't feel awkward enjoying this incredible hospitality, or maybe a little bit. I'm actually the opposite of the tough independent traveler I want to be: I can't walk around alone here or it doesn't make sense since it's far away from everything and I don't have Oudaja to go anywhere. So I live with papá and his family for a few days. These were hot days and I apologize when their description here isn't as tangible as I want it to be.

We took the car through the network of dust roads of Nouakchott and arrive at another two-story building, big satellite dish on the roof. They bring me here for the wifi. In the middle of the room lay he on three pillows, white beard, a tunic wrapped around his bare chest and a stern look on his face. A bottle of water and two remote controls standing next to him. He nods when I enter the room and sit down on a couch.

Whose experience is this? A young philosopher sees an older man in some Muslim republic, like there are so many, and has his short-sighted associations. "He looks just like Socrates!" he yells in excitement blocking further details and crippling his youthful senses. Seeing Socrates then returning to the books. Perhaps a few details here and there, but the ability to see anything new? I mean we need these associations for our minds to be closed and also for our minds to be open. Couldn't resist speaking in riddles, excuse me for that.

I hope to do something back: translate some of their commercial communications into German and English. Papá owns a small company dealing in fire extinguishers and related safety equipment and their training, providing mostly international groups present in Nouakchott with their sécurité incendie. I think about slogans for their company "SIS" (sécurité incendie secourisme). What about "The Enduring Fight Against Fire" hinting the American fight against terror, or "Before calling SOS, try SIS".

The No-Man's land

2011-11-29T14:53:00.001+02:00

The no-man's land, a 3-mile strip of dusty desert between Morocco and Mauritania, was what I had expected. A potholed dust track lined with car wrecks, rusting refrigerators and computers piled up between the dry shrubs, and one scavenging species approaching every living thing that crossed: human beings. Some lead you to a dead-end where your car gets stuck then rob you, my driver says. I see a camp of thugs and rowdies but don't feel afraid. These are petty thiefs, not armed robbers. Arriving at the paved road on the Mauritanian end felt good. I got my stamp quickly but my driver was held up and we had to say goodbye.

It took me about twenty minutes to be picked up by two friendly Mauritanian men in a comfortable black car. The road to Nouakchott is good, and at sunset we pulled over for prayer in front of a roadside tent. As travelers, they combined several of the five daily prayers into this one just after sunset. Sitting next to them, head down to communicate respect while they were saying their prayers felt - pure.

Impression of the desert, with dromedars.

Sitting there, in the Mauritanian desert in the evening cool, the traveler's spirit came back to me. I understood this was a designated praying point consisting of a pitched tent and the availability of camel milk. Lakhlaf (whose name I remembered the second time because it sounds like "luck love") and the other man nicknamed "papá" sat down direction Mecca and said their prayers. I sat down cross-legged and listened to their calm and sincerely voiced "Allahu Akbar" and felt truly happy.

Why? What is my own religion? I let some desert sand run through my fingers. Nature, perhaps, feeling connected with mother earth.

A while later, we stopped for another pause at a roadside restaurant to have tea. On the pole next to the entrance a freshly cut off goat's head and a Tajin lid. They laid down on the plastic carpet and asked me to do the same. Goat served on a bed of rice - this would be my diet during my stay in this fascinating country.

We arrived in Nouakchott and drove straight to the house of monsieur "papa", where he introduced me to his younger brothers. I also saw some women (his wife, his daughter?) in the house but they were living in a different room and a different world just a few generations of emancipation away.

In a large spotless room, the only one in the house with air conditioning an a large flatscreen TV I could lay my head down.

Notes from Tanger

2011-11-25T13:00:00.001+02:00

After a wild and secret roadtrip from Berlin to Algeciras near the rock of Gibraltar, touching some of the most beautiful scenery and medieval towns Europe has to offer, we took a ferry to Morocco. That was three days ago, days I passed cherishing my status as new arrival on the African continent, adoring the life on the Avenue Mohammed VI here in Tanger. It has been a while that I had an urge to write, simply purely the raw experience pinched into a computer with my fingertips. The directness, unmediatedness of this fickle and formless material before our categorisations. Hearing the sound of the keystrokes as I play, once more, the role my love thinks suits me, here in the bustling and reputed port city where beat generation writers like Alan Ginsberg passed through or others like Paul Bowles lived long years, in this city sitting in the café Terminus de Nord because of its good café au lait, yes, I know writing will never betray me.

Just a street in the Medina.

Romanticist musings aside, there is work to do. What is the experience of chaotic Tanger for a white boy spoonfed with Calvinism? I was here four years ago, briefly as a tourist and then I felt Africa for the first time. Now, three days ago, arriving with my wife from the ferry in Tanger Med, I felt magnificent. We took a taxi for ten box but halfway to the city (a thirty minute ride) two strange man showed up doubling the price, adding the classic "per person". Annoyed and embarassed I didn't see it coming I threw open the door and shrieked "police" just to test it out and to teach the driver to be more honest. That driver mumbled angry Arabic phrases then raced back to the port - just in time for us to catch the free bus to the city center.

Fencing off the hawkers wasn't hard as I could deal them some proper Spanish and French vernacular. We decided to leave taxis alone for a while and hauled our luggage to the train station, an immaculous European style terminus amidst barely finished naked concrete apartments à vendre and a sad-looking themepark. A very well-mannered railway employee shared a piece of his pastry when he saw me and wrote down the names of some hotels. A comfortable taxiride away, it turned out, was the seaside avenue Mohammed VI, with enough hotels and bars to cater for the tourists. Following an old bearded, toothless man who hastily offered us to carry some of our luggage we arrived at a newly opened, clean and very affordable little hotel, with a friendly and trustworthy student at the counter.

We went out to have dinner that first night, and I felt very comfortable being here in this in-between world of a thousand wild odors and untamed faith.

Minor Inconveniences

2011-11-20T15:00:00.001+02:00

Caravaggio - The Sacrifice of Isaac

Can we all contribute a little bit to make the world a better place? It sounds easy, and it feels good. There are thousands of web sites and campaigns clamoring people into donating a few percent of their wealth to the Good. There are even courageous politicians who dare to ask people to drive a little bit less in cars that are a little bit smaller. After reading these first three sentences, I am quite sure you felt these are the words of a cynic, am I right? You had this discomforting feeling that a disillusioned sore soul was sneering at you, someone who was once, in a former life, a hypermoralistic puritan. Am I right?

Have no fear. I'm not trying to "get to you" and make you feel guilty because you don't comply with my pompous über-moral. I just want to write something about minor inconveniences. How could we define them? "Inconvenient" means "not suited to our comfort", so how about "not completely suited to our comfort"? A fly that sits on your computer screen, not enough space in your refrigerator, a TV without a remote control, a room too cold to take off your sweater, a torch that has to be recharged, a shower that takes time to heat, sharing a room with someone else, sharing a car with someone else, or a less than perfect air conditioner. These might be examples of minor inconveniences, as opposed to major inconveniences like your car stolen, your house burned down or your loved ones lost. But it's a slippery slope, isn't it?

Do be afraid. With 7 billion people on the planet (and projected to grow to 9.2 billion by 2050, and 10 billion by the end of the century) all craving a convenient life with convenience products, all craving energy-guzzling plasma TVs, big cars, air conditioning, lots of meat and plastics, we are going to feel the consequences in our own generation, let alone the horror we bequeath to our grandchildren. Read the scientific reports, read the analysis of authors without vested corporate interests, and judge for yourself. The solution does not only consist of changing to renewable energy and phasing out the mining of new materials. Every expert will tell you that without some minor inconveniences on the consumer end, it can' be done.

Should we willingly accept minor inconveniences? Every inch we drive less, every degree we turn the thermostat up or down, every penny we invest in "renewables" is an invasion into our privacy, a gross insult to our very being and our "Way of Life".

Any intended inconvenience is, by definition, a self-sacrifice. It might sound impossible after the death of God in the 19th century and his burial in the bogs of last century's cruelty, but when I look at the numbers it is exactly what we need.

S E L F - S A C R I F I C E

Enjoy!

Humane Recycling

2011-11-17T04:51:00.000+02:00

We love recycling. We promote every transition of the prevalent system of exploitation and resource depletion to something more in harmony with the planet and her fragile cycles. Recycling is a new way of being, and well understood it is a truly sustainable way of living together with the landbase and ecosystems that support us. Understanding re-cycling well means to differ it from mere down-cycling or converting stuff into less valuable stuff somewhere down the energy chain.
It entails up-cycling and re-introducing old materials into the cycle. You've probably heard of the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by American architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart. The book came out a few years ago and much has changed since then. Recycling is more popular now than ever.

From a theoretical point of view, all materials are by definition recycled. It might take hundreds of millions of years, like in the case of the organic material buried in the ground eons ago and that we are more than half way sucking out of it as oil, the black gold that, as the deliberately obfuscating and intimidating slogan states "drives our economy". Other material, like freshwater, has shorter cycles, but sadly still not short enough for humankind that is so dramatically running out of water right now as a result of global warming and over pumping. Materials like bottles, napkins, plastic bags, batteries or tin cans are returned to nature and will decompose and re-enter her system over periods ranging from a few months for the napkins to a few thousand years for the batteries and bottles. Everything is by definition recycled (yes, there's an insight of Palinesque grandeur!) If only we wait long enough, we will get back all (petro-)organic materials we put in.

But we need our materials readily available now. I refuse to wait a few million years for my petrol to form, I want to pump baby, pump...

The paradox of running an economy of infinite growth on a finite planet have been spelled out enough to be absolutely sure that whoever refuses to understand it does so out of evil intend or sheer brainlessness. Or, perhaps, because they find something heart-warmingly consoling in the tags on Chinese baby toys reading "ALL NEW MATERIAL", something that makes them feel like they can escape the cycle and aspire to immortality. These poor individuals need to embrace recycling because everything is recycled - including themselves.

Humans are recycled as fertile soil in a graveyard or turned into ashes that serve a more symbolical than fertilizing purpose. Basically what happens six feet under in a graveyard is the same as what happens in landfills, however much we feel the need to deny it. If we would embrace recycling to an extent that is already happening in garbage recycling, and treat the deceased with the same loving respect as we treat tin cans, bottles, wood chips, corrugated cardboard, and polyester fiber, that would spark a little revolution.

Currently we limit the recycling of humans to hair (made into wigs), organs such as livers, kidneys, and hearts for transplant, and some scientifically interesting parts plastinated and downcycled for demonstration purposes. But we could use so much more. Skin could be tanned and made into very special purses. Bones would make good musical instruments, with intestines as perfect strings. And one day technology will have advanced so far that they can reassemble a human being from the parts. Yes, technology will have advanced so far that humans finally recognize our role in the cycles that constitute nature.

Animals.

2011-11-13T03:58:00.000+02:00

If there is any justice beyond human justice, the human race should be eliminated yesterday.

Picture of a symbolically tortured animal (homo sapiens "sapiens")

Animal welfare activists don't shy away from coining their message in radical slogans. We all know horror stories of illegal PETA activists setting fire to legitimate pork factories or chicken breeding facilities, and we shiver at the idea that such terrorists are allowed to publish their campaigns in our magazines. What are they fighting for, anyway? There is nothing remotely comparable to human desolation and misery hiding under a pig's hide, is there?
Compassion with animals is as ludicrous as compassion with a person on a photo, or a character in a fictitious movie. The screams of these beasts are mere mechanical noises like the cracking of a rock or the roar of a river; their gaze is but a numb reflection of the outer world; their heartbeat - meaningless pounding, functional only to the production of meat, leather and other "consumer goods".

Is that it? Is that an adequate statement of our relationship to animals, at least the ones we don't choose to be our mates and pets? It is clearly the implicit view of the vast majority of human societies that have existed on this planet. Sacredness of animals, as some religions have it, is either an application of the abstract principle of the sanctity of all life, or a corollary of a religious association with a deity.

Recently I read Jonathan Safran Foer's excellent 2009 book "Eating Animals". Based on three years of research, the famed New York writer blends the stories of slaughterhouse murder witnesses, PETA activists and small alternative family farmers with philosophical anthropological observations about how we remember and the role food (and hence, meat) plays in this. The pivotal question of his book, he says, is "Should we or should we not eat turkey at Thanksgiving?"

I am not going through the arguments pro and contra in this article. Everybody has to sort that out for themselves. You will have to go through unpleasant questions of what it means to be human, about the essence of suffering and pain, stewardship and responsibility. Read, watch, observe as many videos of factory farming (readily available on youtube) as you can digest and decide if you will digest the meat of these corporations. To give you a hint, look for "Smithfield", the #1 producer of pork in the US, chicken giant "Tyson foods" (a major supplier of KFC), Temple Grandin (non humans torturing and killing facilities corporation), or Gail Eisnitz's book "Slaughterhouse".

Safran Foer compares a complete vegan lifestyle with the idea of being a selective omnivore, because he used to be one of the latter. Of course, it is good to decide consistently not to eat any factory farmed meat while eating "responsible" meat, but is it a commendable attitude in the long run? I find this a difficult question, a strong test for philosophical pragmatism. Foer mentions a vegan who is building more humane slaughterhouses (that are inflicting less pain). If we offer a sustainable alternative to factory farming that doesn't torture, vivisect, force feed, brand, genetically manipulate into cripples, and deny basic "species-specific" needs to animals that surely is a good thing and helps consumers make the transition to eating better.

Eventually, with 7 billion people on the planet and counting (and more and more of them counting on a meat diet), it will be impossible to feed everyone a meat-rich diet without rendering the planet ultimately inhabitable. Already, meat production is contributing 40% more to global warming than all transportation combined. Vast areas of farmland are needed to produce food for the animals, and with depleting freshwater resources this amounts to sheer madness. If we are to survive and live long and happy lives as we have gotten used to, we need as humanity to lower meat consumption dramatically.

I beg you pardon for this frag-men-ted account of the topic. What have I just written? It has something to do with global warming, oh yeah, and there was some argument with pain did I miss that? He mentioned the word "slaughterhouse" somewhere, how unappetizing. What were the names of the culprit corporations again? And in the end it was all just philosophy, wasn't it?

I would much rather hit a hairy gorilla fist hard on your table and decree "Enough you damned fools!"

If you haven't seen the documentaries "We Feed the World", "Supermarket Secrets", or "Food, Inc." yet, I can recommend you to watch it and would be glad if this small article was helpful.

Fast Forward

2011-11-03T22:44:00.000+02:00

It's not something to say aloud, but I sometimes have a hidden desire to fast-forward history. I read a lot of projections and predictions about the future, some cynical, some knowledgeable, most admitting that we simply cannot know what is coming.

Except these few certainties like climate change, global competition for food and energy resources, and major economic crises.

Do you sometimes fantisize caressing then gently pushing a fast-forward-button, like the ones found on tape recorders, but instead of rewinding a magnetic medium holding a virtuoso Liszt recording it would unwind the future of our species and planet. You would just sit there in awe as all these events our meek and squeamisch leaders spell with their eloquence, as all these long overdue events just take place right before your eyes.

The disappearing of the Greenland ice sheet and the melting of the Tibetan plateau, the flooding of coastal regions from Lagos to Bangladesh, to Viet Nam, the extinction of ocean life, the increase in human population to 10 billion, the unprecedented deaths caused by famine, plagues, and war, ever-growing bandwidth and paradoxically, exclusivity of communication, the phasing out of the oil economy and the many scandals in its wake, the fate of religion, the advent of nuclear fusion, global terrorism responding to bizarre unequalities our corrupt politicians will continue to defend with bullshit dressed in honey, increased suicide rates as some people start to realize the "infinite growth" scam is no way out of the human condition, dying out of entire cities due to lack of drinking water, a strong and capable resistance movement much like during the 2nd world war, the use of a rogue nuclear device and consecutive annihilation of a subcontinent, the coming and going of guru's, prophets, and quacks, the re-invention of "work" and the return to a class or caste society.

You could see all this when you fast-forward to the end of the century, sitting behind your tape recorder letting your index finger play with the traces of dust on the <FF>-button while pushing it slowly. The number 2100 might be the end of your tape; it would stop with a characteristic jerk, so to speak...

We care to know - we care to know how it ended, and want to be around. Maybe that's what drives change: fear that we won't be around when the defining change will be made. I am tempted to end this piece with a moralistic remark or a quote of some admirable dead thinker. But we have enough of that already. I want to say that we don't need to be in a hurry, that we may take our time, leave some pivotal events to our grandchildren, leave some of the planet unexploited even unexplored, sit back and relax. I want to say all that without being - moralistic.

Pay Me Because You Like Me (not vice versa!)

2011-10-22T01:42:00.000+03:00

I will put a little image right next to this line, on which you can click if you want to express your appreciation with real money. Directly, without having to stop reading, going to the bank, opening another website, writing a check, or sending the maid for some loose change to give to the poor writer who's at your doorstep with his pamphlet. You can express your gratitude instantly.

At first sight the idea sounds charming to me, who not so secretly hopes to make a living from the fruits of his pen. But wait a minute. This transaction is a voluntary donation, you don't buy my writings - you get nothing in return except perhaps for your own satisfaction resulting from having supported something vague enough to make you feel philosophical.

I think I think this might be the way forward for our economy, or to use a less confusing phrase, for our way to split the cake. Buying digital products isn't going to last very long. Not only are they copied and distributed through clandestine networks faster than they can be protected, it also becomes less and less clear what the "object" is the buyer buys.

It's about the right to access or the right to reproduce. But information will be freed: wikipedia (and hundreds of other wikis and pedantic pedia's exist). Youtube shows how eager people are to share, and how the quality of what is shared surpasses everything you'd have to pay for (not to mention the xxx versions of youtube, responsible for a staggeringly high percentage of internet traffic showing the true exhibitionist nature of humankind).

People prefer sharing information. Messages appear on twitter, reliable and cheap, long before they hit major commercial news sites. With the internet culture, labor mechanization might have taken a decisive step towards reveiling its self-contradiction. Value (appreciation) won't come from more labor input, but from - less labor input. For the work ethos, the last expression maybe of the Christian soul, there will be the scrapyard of history.

Imagine a village community with a culture of cheerful sharing. There would be no place for a commercial mind trying to make money by selling any kind of information. The very fact that it is "paid" means it is undesirable.
Now as the "global village" is in the making we might be headed towards this. It is a long transformation because our solid twentieth-century ideology: It's no Good if it is for Free. Or: "Like Me Because You Pay Me".

This is the most important change on the internet and hence in our society. It's a slow progress and we won't notice it until we look back over our shoulders in 2025 and are astonished by the strange ideas of the early years of our millennium, the early years when economies tried to optimize production-consumption rather than appreciation-happiness.

By the way, this kind of auto-reflectivity is ubiquitous on the net and I don't like it all that much.

Hölderlin and Neil Young

2011-10-20T16:27:00.000+03:00

Dreams and dreamers are of all ages. They are standing on the strong shoulders of their culture and bury their gaze in the stars. Let's say that again because I like it. They are standing on the strong shoulders of their culture and bury their gaze in the stars.

Perhaps you decided to read this because the names in the title awaken mirthful associations. Well, I am not an expert on Hölderlin and Neil Young, but they have something in common. They wrote the most dreamy quotes I know.

"I am just a dreamer, and you are just a dream" sings Neil Young in Like a Hurricane 1977, to reverse this later on. Dreaming so strongly that we feel like we can live in our dreams. This is set in a crowded hazy bar somewhere in Canada, and the author is about to be getting blown away.

About 180 years earlier, in 1795, 25-year old Friedrich Hölderlin wrote
"If only we where here to dream a little while /
and then become the dream of someone else"

(o wenn wir auch nur darum da wären, um eine Weile zu träumen
und dann zum Traum eines andern zu werden)

The high-pitched surviving rockstar and Hegel's poetic classmate have something in common that I'd call high romanticism. They had very rich fantasies that accommodated for their dreams, that protected them.

We have a revolution going on, don't we? Are we dreaming, or are we just dreaming away?

The Club of Fifty-Six

2011-10-08T17:20:00.000+03:00

Some people die too young, they pass away much too early, before they have come to realize their full potential. For rock-stars, the viral age seems to be twenty-seven, age at which some of the most intensely expressive musicians died. We all remember Joplin, Cobain and Winehouse.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was a creative genius, and to his honor I decided to write this edition of my virtual musings, introducing the notion of the Club of Fifty-Six.
More than twice as much as 27, people who lived to age 56 might be expected to have made their marks. But they would have had a lot more to say. Listening to Steve's beautiful 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, it was clear what a loss his death is for the world. Like no other, he could convey wisdom and be a business leader at the same time.

Steve was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, and fought a seven year long battle, to step down as apple chairman only in August this year. His last public appearance, with a mild and cheerful speech while his body was clearly at its end, is engraved in our minds. Carrying on until the very end, to leave an incredibly inspiring heritage is something he shared with Beethoven, who also died at age 56, and famously composed his last Ode to Joy while already deaf. Also in the Club of Fifty-Six is Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest US presidents, and Linda McCartney who also lost the battle against cancer.

Alongside this article is the beginning of Beethoven's 5th, or the "Symphony of Destiny".

Non-destructive Travel

2011-09-24T20:30:00.000+03:00

There has been a lot of fuzz about our "carbon footprint" and most articles on non-destructive traveling start and end with quoting our unsustainably high carbon dioxide emissions on international flights. The obvious result of these well-intended pieces is that readers can't hear it any longer and lose interest in non-destructive travel altogether.

The climate isn't getting any cooler but our heads should. You should have a warm interest in leaving behind a healthier planet, or this article is not for you.
So, are you still with me? "Non-destructive travel" is about reducing the depletion of resources we leave in our wake as we live our lives. We all contribute our share to the trashing of this planet, the stripping of minerals, fossil fuels, groundwater, biodiversity, fresh air, glaciers, rainforests, fish, lakes, reefs, river deltas, peet swamps, tundras, everything we f*cking destroy. Watch the brilliant series "The Story of Stuff" on a small, energy-efficient screen for more.
- So non-destructive travel is refusing to continue this bullshit at least while you're out of your home.

We know there is a necessary transformation we have to make at home, but things aren't just so flexible there. The paperwork for your new solar panel is late, you can't afford replacing that old boiler, there's not enough cash in your clunker, using rainwater for the garden seems far-fetched, you have no idea where to dispose of your batteries, non-toxic detergent is too expensive, the kids keep nagging, and so on.

While traveling we have a unique chance to try out all this good stuff. We can start sharing a little, go to a less westernized hotel, experiment with vegetarian or vegan food, take a bus instead of a rental car, cook with a small stove, save water and drink from the source rather than a plastic bottle, or, heck, if we are intrepid adventurers we hitchhike, camp and couchsurf our way to everywhere, bathing in the river using a small piece of organic soap, eating raw food and telling folks we meet about this lifestyle that is a curiosity now, but a necessity tomorrow.

Chuckle over the irony here as I provide you with loads of "resources" to get you started on non-destructive travel:

Food
You should consume local food, preferably produce that needs little water and fertilizer. Avoid meat and processed food. Eat seasonal fruits and vegetables. Say no to herbicidal gene-crops, do eat fermented food. Prepare food in large quantities in advance to reduce energy consumption.
Here's a collaborative list of Organic Farmer's markets in Australia, Canada, South Africa, UK, US
See also http://www.ifoam.org/.

Here's a fun footprint/foodprint calculator, showing you how many acres it takes to support your lifestyle, and how many planets it would take if every human being would live your standard of living: http://www.footprintnetwork.org

Shelter
Couchsurfing all the way! For those worried about CS going corporate, check out the alternatives (bewelcome, hospitalityclub, wwoof, workaway etc). Spread the message of non-destructive traveling as you travel by convincing your hosts. Use blankets instead of room heating, sleep in one room and don't heat the other. Sit in shade and do not use air-con. Cook together.
For high-end travelers, research an eco-lodge and demand solid environmental impact data before spending the night there.
For low-end travelers, information about where it's safe to camp outside is easy to find, and a survival handbook on your e-reader (see below) can be very useful.

Move
Try to avoid flying. Long-distance buses are the champions of fossil fuel efficiency, and flexible to organize, but you can easily go beyond that.
Try joining as a crewmember on a yacht (google's a good resource) or start browsing "Couchsailing" (!)
Hitchhiking will never be the same with hitchwiki.org and hundreds of blogs by experienced hitch-hikers like
followtheroad.com. Blogs about bicycle trips crossing the Americas from Anchorage to Ushuaia or Africa from Cairo to Capetown, or Eurasia from Paris to Beijing are easy to find and provide a great resource, even if you only go part of the way.
Or just walk, here's the longest possible road to travel on foot: http://www.odysseyxxi.com/

Entertain
Buy an ebook-reader! Virtually everything published more than 70 years ago is freely at your disposal in PDF format through www.gutenberg.org. Also create wiki-books of open-source travel guidebooks like wikitravel.org. You have all the distraction you need, e-readers don't consume any paper and hardly any electricity, especially if you use a portable solar charger.
If carrying books: exchange, swap, share! It's a great way to connect and spread the vital message of non-destructive traveling.

Suggestions are welcome, and could you share this non-destructive post, please?

Daily Social Media Fairness Sessions!

2011-09-10T21:38:00.000+03:00

Imagine you're a wealthy shop owner and you hear about this "thing", this new technology that strongly amplifies every voice raised on it and thus promises to lure paying customers into your business. Wow, you think, I don't wanna miss this boat, and you ask how much it would cost. "It's free", some bearded hippies yawn at you and that makes you feel uncomfortable. You want a decent service from this "thing" and you will pay for it. "Alright", a trimmed hipster tells you, "here's the deal". And you sign a contract with the new "thing" which will boost your sales eventually.

The "thing" is of course the internet, and what we have to understand is that the already-powerful will benefit more from it than the barely visible "grass roots" initiatives, no matter if they are a roadside fruit stall or a community center. The tiny initiatives don't have a voice so there is nothing that can be amplified by our internet machine. Instead, we see Big Brands taking over this allegedly power-neutral web and benefit more from it than our beloved grassroots non-profits, even proportionally more.

The so-called "flatness of the world" proclaimed by Tom Friedman because he can travel anywhere on a whimp and marvel at multinational business deals, is a misleading metaphore at best. If we have something left in us that discounts the cynical "everything is fatally connected" and let the empathy with real people speak, then, o then... Then we should help the grassroots initiatives, the small rural hospitals, the women's cooperatives, the peace groups, the environmental protesters, the orphan homes, the community art - everything that isn't yet affected by the acid of hypercapitalist logic eating away its ties to land and life.

A way to do this is to take the very cynical neoliberal propaganda of "leveling the playing field" seriously. We should leverage their voices in order to make them found by skilled idealists who can help. If we say "it's all about connections" we mean "it's all about power" - and without a fistful of it you don't exist. But if we stay determined even the powerless can be found. We just need to put them in a magic telephone book.

I mean our internet platform "kindmankind.net" and it's for that platform that I do a daily "Social Media Fairness Session". Because I think these sessions are worth your time this article is about them. So, how do I go about it? Let's say I want to list some grassroots initiatives in the country of Chad. Google is of course a handy tool but we all know it has some built-in bias that is detrimental to the grassroots, and it doesn't give us trusted results. So I choose couchsurfing.org to be my starting point. As pointed out on charitytravel.blogspot.com, where my journey started, the trusted profiles of couchsurfing can be of great value for small grassroots initiatives.

A careful keyword search yields a list of NGO directors, well-intended individuals and independent volunteers who might like to be listed on and found through our platform. So I write them a humble e-mail about it. Then I ask some users of flickr.com if we can use photos of little known countries like Chad. Perhaps there's even some group on facebook.com or linkedin.com, I'll contact them. Then I look at existing websites that are not open and use google to identify the grassroots stuff they are listing. They all receive an e-mail as well. Everything put together, we have a free and open map of the world (today including Chad) full of dots depicting fragile yet worthy contributions to a better world.

What do we do with this listing? This is the second phase of the Social Media Fairness Session, and consists of publishing to the social web (facebook, twitter, digg, del.icio.us, hellotxt, statusnet, skype, wikipedia, feedburner, twitterfeed, socialoomph, google+, buzz, idealist), and inspiring people to help where it's needed. It includes writing and translating articles about the concept, reformulating it in many ways so as to reach a diverse audience of potential enthusiasts who take this idea and add their own. It includes traveling ourselves and demonstrating the spirit, to practice what we preach. And it inevitably leads to getting a little bit crazy, in the end.

Towels and Hooks

2011-09-09T19:58:00.000+03:00

Two things are important in public toilets and similar confinements we find ourselves in for distinctively private affairs and these things are towels and hooks. Why write about them? What can we possibly gain from it? If you're not interested in towels and hooks, stop reading and enjoy your day. It's about metaphysics, perhaps. These things are so common that we don't perceive them as long as they're there. Their absence however, can cause some significant inconvenience.

Try using a public bathroom with a muddy floor and no hooks. Do you keep your overcoat on? Hold it in your hands? Do you put your briefcase on your knees, perhaps put it on the water reservoir? Or after you've washed your hands and there's nothing to dry them with, will you simply wipe them on your trousers, risking the frown of many onlookers once again in public? These are simple, everyday questions and we normally don't ponder them since towels and hooks are always available.

Does that make these questions metaphysical questions? Where exactly do they go beyond the practicality of proper hanging of our belongings and proper drying of our hands? Lies there a deeper meaning in the need for hooks and towels? The need to keep it dry and hang it high, the need to never completely be consumed by our surroundings, never to sink away in the foam of the nunc stans.

No. Hooks and towels are practical enough to evade these philosophizing descriptions. They are what they are: towels and hooks. I prefer cotton towels over paper towels and hand dryers for environmental reasons. As for hooks, sure a carved or turned wooden peg is ideal but sometimes a rusty nail can make us happy, too. Does the absurd loom in the unexplored perifery of our everyday experience?

Or should we cherish it there? The absurd fragility of us, temporary beings clinging to temporary objects with worries that we but express using a timeless grammar. Isn't it there, right at the point where we discern the absurdity in our everyday routine, that we learn that our grammar, too, is subject to the fragility that makes us who we are? Isn't it there that our empathy has a chance of becoming more than an instinct for group survival?

We need towels and hooks, and we need the occasional absence of towels and hooks more than ever.

Probability Practise, helping the Poor

2011-08-26T17:13:00.000+03:00

Can we help the poor simply by increasing the probability that a skillful independent helper or her organisation finds them?

William Easterly, the development economist and author of "The White Man's Burden" makes a famous distinction between "Planners" and "Searchers". The Planners have led most of the development efforts over the past 40 years - and failed on many occasions. We are going to make a similar distinction here in an attempt to explain how we think social media should work to support grass roots initiatives.

Organisations, institutions, associations, formal frameworks, companies, hierarchies, programs - they all have something in common. They want to - and need, for that matter - plan and monitor their activities, use official channels, be bureaucratic. Of course there are good reasons for this because ill-informed, ill-skilled, and even ill-intended individuals are roaming this world. So the only way to make sure we are working with professional, well-informed and trustworthy people is to plan everything carefully and leave nothing to chance.

But this would exclude fledgling initiatives, fragile ideas in the minds of a small group of slum dwellers, or excentric individuals. They dream about improving the lot of their communities, but they don't have any papers to show. They are the Searches of their world, and what could help them is individuals who meet them in private, get to like and trust them, and start supporting their Cause.

Our platform wants to help these Searchers at the very beginning of their endeavour, when their ideas and resources are still vulnerable and they could benefit most from external help, because they need moral support, experience, exposure, and trust. Using social media techniques, doing a background check is fairly easy and so is documenting trust. De facto, social media can overcome the hurdle that used to seperate the invisible, unofficial initiatives from the connected happy few.

These small (in the language of the West: promising) grass roots initiatives don't qualify for being at the receiving end of an official fund raising campaign. There won't be an NGO supporting them with a landrover, a university professor and some field workers to be permanently stationed "on the ground". There's no legal structure, no liability, no professional expertise - just chaos and need. The need of a computer to be fixed, a toilet to be built, a website to be translated, a sewing class to be started. But it will never happen: the paperwork would cost more than any NGO could account for.

But what about Chance Encounters? What about people who happen to be there where help is needed, people with skills who wouldn't mind making the world a bit better? People who like to help their neighbour more when that neighbour lives thousands of miles away and is actually in dire need of that help?

The idea is to increase the probability of an independent change maker encountering a needy cause that needs just what she can offer them. It's about nurses, plumbers, mechanics, IT-experts, lawyers, translators, economists, doctors, carpenters, organic farmers helping out where it is needed the most, and don't leave before the project is sustainable. It's about adventure travelers helping poor communities becoming sustainable and sensitizing their followers back home. It's about independent volunteers supporting causes less visible where they can really make a change.

This is probability practice: Increasing the chances of the least connected fledgling initiatives to be found by skilled independent people who like to help a distant neighbor and create a little hope for the world's silenced voices

Why I like cooking

2011-08-23T21:34:00.000+03:00

This is not a recipe blog. There are far more knowledgeable cooks maintaining interesting blogs like this one here.

Why, then, does this blog write about cooking? To be sure, I do love cooking for reasons other than the psychodairy this blog serves at times. The smell of fresh rhabarber, a good garlicky hummus, a Lao noodle soup, fried tofu, Korean kimchi, palak paneer... Being busy in a crowded kitchen cooking with friends, telling political jokes while cutting shalottes and dancing to the roaring sound of a blender - I like it a lot.

But it is the psychodairy I want to whip up a little here. When we do something, when we engage in any action, we can distinguish between the process and the result. When we write something, when we travel, paint, repair a bicycle, sew, drill, comb, brush, scratch, walk, meditate, breath, talk, and so on we can differentiate between the process itself and how it affects the status quo post. Now if we judge each other's activities (which is our normal mode of interaction), we intuitively want either

A) to demonstrate we can do the activity better, or
B) to demonstrate that we have very compelling reasons why we can't - so compelling that our inability becomes normative.

In order to show A) or B) we can refer to the process as well as the result, whichever supports our argument. If I want to show that you are a bad driver, for example, I can argue that the driver itself (the process) was too dangerous, uneconomical, or slow. But if this doesn't work, because I drive irresponsibly myself, I can refer to the result that you arrived later at the party. This practice mixes the activity and the result because it derives its arguments from both and hence achieves functional unification and blurring of the semantically important distinction.

This doesn't appear harmful at first sight. But if someone on whom rests bad prejudice want to accomplish something, he can be too easily denied because of the way he does things. People don't look plainly at the result because they have been preoccupied with establishing A) or B).

When we cook, the distinction between process and result becomes very clear. Someone can tell you that you have to cut your vegetables in a different way, that you have to lower the heat or boil the water first or cut the onions in finer dices, out of a sickening appetite for power, but he can't argue with the results. The freshly cooked food, waiting on our tables to be eaten, is the result of an action that is still relatively independent of the process leading towards it. Here is our opportunity to defy the madness of power-slaves telling us how to do anything we do. Here we don't have to waste any words on counterarguments but we let what we cooked speak for itself.

And a friend might be even interested in how we did it, so over dinner we share our ideas; A) and B) stand untouched with the table salt.

Bon appetit.

Imagine a Planet of the Apes

2011-08-22T01:10:00.000+03:00

The premisse is interesting and not so far-fetched as it was at the time of the original movie, given what our laboratories achieve. So I expected an engaging narrative around hyperintelligent apes demonstrating how to outsmart the humans by being incredibly cooperative. I expected a visionary tale of wisdom making us silent in the face of the idea of the apes surpassing us in the evolutionary race.

But they weren't more than a growling horde, really. It was like the movie showed that even sublime intelligence can't find a way to overthrow the system and that all protest is in vain.

The final key scene on the bridge was hardly inspiring. The apes climbing on the cables and taking the police by surprise, the mean ape that was treated with the more powerful brain regeneration drug was just plain stupid mean instead of dangerously, insidiously persuading the others. Imagine a genius dictator who has all the empathy it takes to win over everybody and exploits it to control all the others. They could have shown how the genius ape had to turn evil because his overabundant intelligence made the world and all its challenges, both social and theoretical, appear boring to him. The director could have explored sociopath character traits and focus more on the primate's interaction with each other. It would have been so fascinating to see how the apes operate on much higher levels of empathy and social intelligence, we could have been mesmerized by their mind-bogglingly subtle conflict resolution skills, and smiled at an occasional wink of irony to world leaders of human kind.

A lot has been written about Hollywood simplicity by Zizek and all that. I would just like to get the word out that they missed a chance for a great movie here.

Rabat Ville.

2011-08-19T17:22:00.000+03:00

Is there a way to express this unmediated experience? What we are looking for is a description of the places we visit "as they are" or at least as they appear to the newcomer. Playing ignorant, peeling off the layers of knowledge that have shaped our world. So I want to be able to describe the swelling crowd walking slowly on a big avenue here in Rabat, without knowing they came from the afternoon prayer. It was about one o'clock and the sight was magnificent. Uniformed men, businessmen, men with boots and men with sandals, some carrying a little carpet, parading back to work. I was the only one heading in the opposite direction, towards the Gare Rabat Ville to have an afternoon coffee and write these lines, and I had a peculiar feeling of unlawfulness as I walked up against the stream and smiled forth at everyone.

In the Kasbah of Tanger.

Even though these tales are not intended to behave like a guidebook, and I am embracing imperfectionism more than ever, some coordinates are needed to keep the reader's eye. Isn't this part of a "travel blog", an account of what I did, where I went, and how I felt in the process? One of the most rigid, hence boring, literary forms - and what is my sputtering protest against it? Does it make any difference being a protocynical countercultural literary snob guising as an adventure traveler embracing larger than life?

It is precisely because these lines don't need a reader, they are detached of pretensions feigning detachment even of intentions, that its author can breath in the moment. C'est maintenant: les sonnes, les couleurs.

We are going to live in Rabat for a month or two, or in a city within a one-hour radius (that includes Fes and Casablanca) - writing. And never will I sell my soul to the wish of the publisher (sell anything to anyone?) much rather I keep lacing the words into traces of the absurd, the enigmatic that is perhaps our only intimate connection.

Well done, boy. Où sont mes copains, Nietzsche, Dostojewski, les maîtres d'intensité dans l'écriture?

In favor of diversity, multifariousness, and heterogenity

2011-07-29T04:22:00.000+03:00

There is an old joke about a German, a Frenchman and an Englishman telling each other the word for butterfly in their native tongue. "Butterfly", the soft-spoken English gentleman whispers and you could almost hear the movement of a perfect specimen in his voice. "Papillon", murmurs the Frenchman, and his friends are enchanted by the word that mimics the essence of the beautiful insect so well. They both look at the German, who clears his throat and barks "Schmetterling", while slamming his fist on the table.

In fact, the word for "butterfly" is very diverse as they are native in so many regions and there are over 180,000 different butterfly species. And the word sounds beautiful indeed in most languages, from the Spanish "mariposa" to the Italian "farfalle" or the Korean "nabi" and the Dutch "vlinder", all words seem to adequately express the elegance of the butterfly.

Here you can see for yourself. I omitted the name of the language since it is irrelevant, it is the sound that matters (alphabets uncommon for the Western eye have been transliterated):

Dealan-dè Papallona Ya-k-é Titli Kupu-kupu Tximeleta Bebe Papalotl K'aalógii pumarina Talubang Motyle Bum ngày Paru-paro Cheshuekry´lye Alibangbang Påwion ttlfa Kipepeo Dagfjärilar tarralikitaaq Rhopalocera Papilio Kukupu Lepkék Lípalala Flinnerkene Metulji Perîdank Képinek al‘rby aabrit Pillpintu Drugiai Zvinsparni Szmaterloki Peteleškes Hevavâhkema Pilpintu Borboleta Dnevni metulji Fiðrildi Papiyon Bolboreta Petaloyda Sommerfugl Liblikalised Perhoset Panambi Leptiri Skoenlapper Pumarina

All these pretty denominations, all this verbal sophistication greatly enriches our world - I wouldn't want to live in a world where I would have to refer to these beautiful creatures as annoying flies that are attracted to butter, or "Schmetter", the root of the German Schmetterling.

Energy Saving - the Alaska Way

2011-07-12T01:14:00.001+03:00

produces heat (and light)

If you listen carefully you can hear some politicians murmuring about saving energy, suggesting we should ride our bikes more often, insulate our homes a bit, or unplug unused electronic equipment. Some brave public folks even go as far as invoking ideas that are anathema to consumer society, such as a slightly smaller refrigerator.

But all their solutions, even applied consequently across the population, will hardly have any discernable effect other than the sarcasm, bitterness, hypocrisy and guilt it would produce.

Let's assume for a moment that we CAN prevent the worst consequences of climate change, the sea level rising and massive species extinction. It won't be through petty measures. But who will take radical steps if their results are not even sure to prevent disaster and their neighbors are living like there is no tomorrow?

How can the urgency of the problem, from the perspective of the planet, be made visible? Imagine, for a second, that the price we pay for electricity is fair and is a measure for the amount of damage its generation from fossil fuels has inflicted on the environment. Now imagine this price to rise fivefold. How creative would our solutions to save energy be?

In Juneau, Alaska, a 2008 Avalanche shut down electricity generators and made the price of electricity actually increase fivefold. One resident asked for help on a website, and I browsed the advise she was given. It was amazing. This proves for once and for all what we are capable of if we understand the urgency of our problems. What follows is a compilation of the tips I found (and you can search the web for many more).

1. "Refrigerator: Unplug it and put your food outside on the porch if you have one. Spring weather in Alaska is likely to be cool enough to serve as an outdoor refrigerator. If you have a cooler, use that. If you’ve got stuff in the freezer, use it or sacrifice it. Keep your fridge and freezer 3/4 of the way full, it will work at it’s best this way. Add jugs of water if you need to do. Do not rely heavily on food that easily spoils, such as meat or eggs. Bread, apples, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, peanut butter, canned goods, dried beans or grains do not have to be refrigerated at all."

2. "You might consider going medieval and hanging heavy fabric on the outside walls to insulate them better (rugs, blankets). At night it’s definitely worth covering the windows however you can. Even the most energy-efficient window is much less well-insulated than an adequate wall. Personally, I’d also consider whether I could move my life into a single room temporarily (maybe sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen where the fridge used to be…), making it possible to shut off the heat and power in the rest of the apartment." This does not come from Sarah Palin.

3. Organize community meals. It was suggested people eat at their neighbor's place, and they return the favor the next day. "It takes no more energy to cook for ten than to cook for one."

4. Dress warm, use electric blankets instead of space heaters. Sounds logical, doesn't it?

5. Organize alternating sleepovers. Yes, we might incidentally turn into social beings again.

6. Eat a raw diet. This has proven to be healthy and consumes, well, virtually no cooking energy.

7. "Close all of your doors. It prevents drafts from circulating. If you need to use electronics use them all in the bedroom. The ambient heat from a desktop PC is pretty good. In reverse in summer: close the windows, blinds and curtains in the morning to keep the warm air out. Only use your oven to cook once a day and cook everything you need for the 3 meals. I do this at dinner – I cook breakfast (muffins, quick breads, etc) while dinner is cooking and they are ready for breakfast."

8. Use LED lightblulbs. They use only 10% of the energy a CFL uses. That is, if you don't need the heat a normal lightbulb would produce.

9. Consider cooking with your car’s engine. Apparently, there has been a cult book about this called Manifold Destiny, but truckers regularly use the heat of their engines to heat up a can of food.

10. "Keep the plug in the tub while taking a shower to save the hot water. Let the hot water warm the room. When the water is room temperature, drain it. Wasting hot water is literally energy down the drain." Did any energy conservation hipster mention that?

11. "You can even preheat your bed by putting a cast iron (type) pot with rice/pasta that’s been heated to a boil in it between layers of newspapers/towels tucked in your bed. The rice will cook without extra energy and you’ll have a warm bed!" Did we hear this from greenpeace?

12. "Use a humidifier or if you a really cheap hang up a moist towel. Better yet don’t use the dryer and hang your clothes in doors. Moist air can hold more heat than dry air." Did you know?

13. Wear socks, a hat, use a sleeping bag, and cuddle up together - and then turn the thermostat (the usage of a programmable thermostat can result in one of the most dramatic reductions) down a few degrees. It could be all so simple.

14. Washing. "Alternately, you could heat a pot of water on the stove or in the fireplace or on a grill and then have each person take sponge-baths with a washcloth alone with their pot of warm water. It’s what they did before water-heaters." Where did we come from?

Fleeing from North to South

2011-07-10T01:43:00.000+03:00

Boat refugees are a common phenomenon: Every few weeks the news of a vessel trying to make it to Italian or Canary shores reaches us northern Europeans. The direction of the refugees is always south to north (with the exception of Australia of course, that is dealing with desperate newcomers from the north).

Of course, the vast majority of refugees never make it to the Western world. Here is an article about the recent UNHCR report about refugees that shows the top five countries with most refugees per dollar GDP: Pakistan, DRC Congo, Kenya, Chad, Syria.

Refugees don't leave their birthplace easily they have suffered unimaginable economic hardship, a terrorizing regime, or the consequences of a devastating natural disaster.

Is it imaginable that a European-born caucasian white non-criminal well-educated male chooses to flee his country?

I was born in the Netherlands and carry a Dutch passport. I have married my South-Korean girlfriend and she would be entitled to stay in Holland for that reason (or for that matter, in any Schengen country) if I can show I can support her, which means I would need to prove earning a substantial salary (a lot more than we happily subsist on). This is, given the current labor market situation and my lack of work experience, an impossibility. There are further restrictions, such as a lengthy registration of the marriage certificate and enforced health insurance. A friendly Turkish-born lawyer has explained me these and other restrictions in a small room in one of Berlin's administrative buildings. That means I have to leave my birth ground (and the socio-economic bloc it is part of) if I want to stay with my wife. And believe me, I prefer my wife a thousand times over the protofascist polderland.

It is an unequal comparison: My suffering and feelings of injustice and abandonment by the Dutch state and by extension the European Union, are of laughable proportions compared to the human tragedies in less fortunate countries.

But this is a political statement: Can the northern rich countries' policies toward "strangers" (in Albert Camus' sense) become so appalling that its citizens decide to leave its territories? And in doing so, do these highly sensitive citizens have any persuasive power toward their peers or would they just be ignored as a curiosity in the margin? Do their actions show the absurdity then, of their godforsaken country's laws that in aiming at protection of its citizens tragically ostracizes its more world-open denizens, the ones who chose to marry someone from a far away country?

Review of 23 Things they don't tell you

2011-07-03T00:29:00.000+03:00

Last year, the Korean star economist and acclaimed "intellectual voice of the antiglobalisation movement" Chang Ha-Joon followed up on his best selling "Bad Samaritans" and "Kicking away the Ladder" with a smartly constructed volume named "23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism". Meanwhile, a German translation has been published with the word "Lies" in the title, and all newspapers that do economy have published a short review many months ago. So why another article now?

Because the book is the cleanest account of a self-aware infinite growth economy. Its pages breath remarkable clarity and precise examples to dismantle all of the twenty-three Things Chang takes on. It is a very good read if you are still not convinced that the system of "free market capitalism" is founded on myths, non-free markets, political influence and powerful cynicism, and is of course not free at all.

Among the Things are the insanely high managerial pays that are, contrary to mainstream thought, not only not justified but even counter-productive. There is the non-sustainability of an 800% financial sector (the Iceland bubble), the fact that protecting "infant industries" is what made rich countries wealthy, the fact that state intervention ("picking the winners") can be successful as in the case of POSCO steal and other major Korean companies. There is the fact that countries with more social security (Scandinavia) also have a higher per capita GDP and living standard than the US. There is the Thing that the so-called service economy is always supported by a strong material foundation. Or the fact that shareholder value maximization of big firms is NOT always the best thing that can happen to a country. Or that our post-communist economies are still planned. Or equality of opportunity is not always fair. These and all the other Things make reading this book a cathartic experience, if you will.

One thing...

Chang's book is also a very good read if you are questioning the infinite growth paradigm. Throughout the book I kept wondering when Chang would finally address this issue. Although he points out the discrepancies related to the insane growth rate of the financial sector, with its packaging and other nifty abstractions - the fundamental fallacy of infinite growth on a finite planet is structurally ignored in this book.

Instead, Chang reminds us of the importance of material production (and hence consumerism), calling the "post-material" economy a myth and pointing out that presumably post-industrial countries like Singapore and Switzerland both have a GDP-share of industrial production among the highest in the world.

The growth must go on, and in order to make the international game fairer we have to re-invent the rules so that they are consistent with economic history and human wellbeing. That seems to be the message of this book. For the least, we need to add the planetary restrictions (See Tim Jackson's best selling "Prosperity without Growth").

But precisely because he sees so sharply that material production growth would be essential for economies like Ghana to mimic to some extend the Asian Tiger's success story and increase global fairness, Chang finds himself confronted with a new conumdrum: The impossibility of infinite production (or productivity) growth. Let's hope he will use his brilliant analytic mind to address this problem head-on in his next book. I suggest that he calls it "23 theoretical Ladders we have to kick away if we want to Survive as a Species".

P.S. If you want me to write a review about "Prosperity without Growth" for you, please mention it in your comment. I have read it and can give you a condensed to-the-point summary.

P.P.S. If you want to read "23 Things" I'd gladly share my copy with you.

Fight the System for a Moulded Bell Pepper

2011-07-01T10:11:00.000+03:00

Today, in the supermarket, my conscious was brutally raped.

I had intended to buy a trio of red-yellow-green bell peppers and had laid the colorful things, wrapped in crackling plastic, on the belt.
The evil cashier glanced briefly at it as it was conveyed toward her, then resolutely grabbed it and tossed it in a little recycle bin at the corner of her cubicle.
"You don't wanna have that. It has mould on it."
-"Well I don't mind..."
"No we can't sell it. You can get another one if you like."
-"Well no, I don't want the other customers to wait for me..."
"Okay then, I'll take it out."
-"But I'd gladly buy it as it is..."

She didn't even listen to me! Now I want you, dear reader, to feel and share that blind aggression toward a system of ignorance, mindless rules, emotionless machinelike workers, insane consumerism, exploitation of the planet and militant protection of "free trade".
I want you to make a fist and hit it on the next nearest thing about the system that you encounter. Hit it in the air - hard. In the air? Yes, in the air - because there is no culprit. The system is delusional, dissoluted, distributed. It's not the silly cashier - her evil is sadly banal. It's not the gently boldening manager of LIDL - his evil doesn't spring from his soul. It's not the filthy rich owners of the supermarket chain, nor the government official that has a tête-à-tête with him. It's everybody and nobody. It's air.

But, great lord, let us still fight the system. Let us not intellectually suffocate our anger, but share it with each other. Let us all stand up for all the moulded Bell Peppers that our so senselessly thrown out of the system. Don´t you think it´s not a big deal - you weren´t there.

I will think of anger strategies, I will think of ways to take down the evil system that has disrespected the moulded Bell Pepper. A cavalcade of the Absurd, hitting the system hard at its weakest points is what you can expect.
Together we will undermine its last putrid mechanisms of justification. Beware - I will be back.

A response to Zeitgeist 2011

2011-06-21T04:08:00.000+03:00

The makers of this year's Zeitgeist documentary didn't do a bad job. They delivered a well-organised and consistent narrative about the capitalist system, as usual paying special attention to its psycho-political roots and consequences.

The opening part shows some knowledgeable social scientists explaining the psychopathological base of consumerism and aggression, and is nice to watch. The movie continues explaining the common sense logic of the impossibility to run an economy addicted to infinite growth on a finite planet.
They present the important (and much too unknown to the general public) concepts of intrinsic and planned obsolescence, the necessary inefficiency constituting our lifecycle productivism-consumerism society.
They have Michael Ruppert, whose brilliant role as a narrator in the documentary "Collapse" made me a big fan, explaining the ultimate failure of growth-capitalism as a result of the scarcity of that all-important natural resource: oil.

Zeitgeist then starts with a clean slate and does some problem solving. The result is a network of sterile, round-shaped cities with life-supporting functions aligned in rings around a central educational dome. The movie carefully explains how a resource control system blends with a production system and a distribution system - on a global scale. It would be our only chance as a species in the long run. But wait a minute, doesn't that sound familiar?
This was intended: The movie shows a booing audience comparing the universal technocratic proposal to Stalin-style communism and discarding it without further consideration. It makes for a strong effect and certainly some consumers of this movie would per persuaded by this rhetorical stunt.

These kind of perfect cities scare the shit out of me, not because they have anything to do with communism (they don't), not because they seem so idealistic and unattainable, but because they dangerously oversimplify human need. Humans are the plasma that moves around these perfected cyber-cities, plugged into a system that feeds them with calories, education and leisure time. A handful of volunteers takes care of the maintenance, but apart from that nothing has to be done.
Now it might be possible that this all-equal world without work, money, necessities of life will become an option for humans, but that should be very seriously researched. You can't assume that humans will automatically satisfy all their mental needs if you put them in a system of almost completely mechanized universal ilfe support. What about their sense of purpose, of achievement? In spite of the movie's healthy scientific start, mental needs seem to be reduced to "love, companionship, positive attention" and the like. But you can't discard achievement, competition, and pride overnight.

I am not saying that such a city is per se impossible. As we are moving into an era where the essence of our species becomes fluid, we should be prepared for even bolder propositions. But it can never be presupposed. The alternative to capitalism shouldn't turn a blind eye to human's need for a sense of achievement or even competition, the way capitalism turns a blind eye to human's need for not-for-profit collaboration and sharing. An honest, scientific account of our mental needs could have improved this Zeitgeist.

That said, I recommend this film, along with "Collapse" mentioned earlier. But an alternative to the centrally planned world of perfectibilitas (an insurmountable perfect state could show as dangerous as the delusive infinite growth paradigm) shown here deserves some attention too. What about a world with show, deliberate population decline? A world in which production of new consumer (and hence producer) goods becomes virtually superfluous because the spell of obsolescence has been broken and upcycling becomes a way of life? A world in which people have a true, respected choice to be something else than mainstream - regardless of that being our current sick consumerist rat-race or a futurist technocratic amusement park world.

A sample meditation

2011-06-21T00:13:00.000+03:00

I found this prepared on my computer today. Could you help me explain what it means?

meditation

You see the elements of your memory tumbling down in front of you, in a great column of swirling hot air. You can recognize people, scenes, ideas that have been important to you.See them all fall down. Seperate yourself from them all.
You are tumbling with them because you must be. No grip.
You see them moving upwards again: the smiling, loving faces, memories, ideas, all you ever lived for.Upwards or downwards movement makes no difference.

Money should have a flavor

2011-06-15T01:12:00.001+03:00

How to start a contempary reflection about money, a reflection that should both instruct and entertain because it is bound to the format of a blog post, because it will live as an entry among millions on an internet website with a narrow time window of readership that extends not much further than two weeks after its dates of publication? How to write a reflection about money in such a volatile and futile medium like a public digital diary?

Thank you for recognizing the analogy between writing and money here, whose ultramodern dematerialisations we consider in what follows. Jawohl!
There is no need to write yet another meditation about the crisis. That has been done and the public seems to understand bloody well what a bursting bubble is, and how packaging derivatives options high gain total super performance low risk high leverage financial products are the tools of the ugly kind of greed we only tolerate because it is the stuff the very system is made of. Oogh. Such meditations are obsolete the minute after they are written down. What we need is something else.

When we are "spending money" what we perform should be understood as a redistribution of power. Let's assume designating and justifying power is the prime function of money (we can't develop that in this small space). When we buy a product we acknowledge its producer and supply chain by means of a monetary transaction. We confess our needs, that is our lack of power, and recognize the superior power of the product. Then we use our symbolic power (our money) to balance the bill. So far so good.

Power is erratic and auratic. If we observe systems of power, be it a boyscout group, a freemasons society, a fire department, or the international monetary fund, we find that power is exerted in certain well-understood forms. The power of one boyscout over another is of another quality than the power of Strauss-Kahn had over his subordinates. From this, it appears logical to think that this quality of power needs to be reflected in money, somehow. Money should have a flavor, it should be defined as currency for one specific system of power. Society as a whole (that's the premisse I allow myself because I'm blogging) is not one clearly defined power system but a diffuse conglomerate of systems, all working at their own pace and interacting in their own ways.

We could have food-money, communication-money, shelter-money, cultural-money, yes political-money, or various kinds of currencies for specific aspects of society, aspects that we don't want to depend on each other because we want them to be stable. There won't be problem exchanging these different currencies, the crux is that they should never be produced ad libitum like our current money is printed for us triggered only by short-term macro-economic observations, not long-term vision.

Thus I conclude my blog-post about money. The thought presented here might have been too dense, akin to a black hole - it won't reflect anything if you try to shine a light on it. Or does it?

Elevator Training

2011-04-05T16:53:00.001+03:00

This is not about the intellectual skills needed for being transported in an elevator. If you are reading this at your workplace it is likely that you have successfully concluded an elevator journey this morning. This is about what could have happened during that short vertical journey. It is about reaping the benefits from that forty-second-upheaval to your workplace.

The elevator has gravitational benefits that can greatly enhance the efficiency of physical exercise. If you have ever tried to squat down in an elevator you know what I mean. During deceleration you get a perfect workout. And since the duration of that workout is capped by the number of floors you travel, sweat won't be too much of a problem for other elevator users. Besides squating there's stretching, tiptoeing, and leaning, which can all, if conducted with some care, benefit our physical condition while sparing our fellow passengers from the side-effects of our upheaval.

But physical exercise is not the only operation with prospective return of investment in the field of personal elevation. There's also a mental exercise: intentionally push the button for a couple of floors too few or too many, and observe if you still remember that if the elevator halts. You might need some practice, but it can greatly enhance your alertness. And there's an IQ exercise: try to reconstruct the elevator's algorithm from its stopping behavior (as it might upset other users, don't request too many stops). More commonly practiced is a communication exercise that has already made school as the famous elevator-pitch. And finally there's a role-playing exercise that can draw on movies like Silence of the Lambs or The Departed. But that is not recommended to novice elevator users.

The elevator can quite obviously serve as pars pro toto for the rest of society, with all her upward-pushing and sky-rocketing metaphors. We leave it as an exercise to the reader to extend the spirit here portrayed to other domains, such as airports, libraries, sidewalks, supermarket lanes, traffic jams, public transportation, and - the workplace itself.

The Art is to Mean it. Not just to Say it.

2011-03-22T10:57:00.000+02:00

One of the craftsmen whom we first expect self-reflection from (apart from the philosopher, of course), is the poet. We would like to read a theoretical, tangible account of their motivation to write and why they think poetry matters.
Since my poetic aspirations were not all nipped in the bud by the frown that ends our adolescence, I too should write a modest ars poetica. So here it is.

Take the famous thousands of chimpanzees hammering incessantly on as many typewriters and producing Shakespeare after a few quadrillion years. Or a more realistic example, your five year old nephew scribbling half a dozen words on a piece of paper that you subsequently decide to recognize as the work of a genius. Or more practically: we could program computers to toss together words with a calculated poetic aura in a way that would fit their mathematical vectors to produce magical poetry. "Sordid" and "excellence" would end up in conjunction (as in the famous poem by Emily Dickinson) because their association vectors are perpendicular and combination would, according to calculations, yield a new rich field of synthetic meaning.

Why is this so wrong? Why can computers never be smart enough? Because it is not about being smart. The art of poetry is not just to say some things and remain silent about others (although it is a sine qua non) but to mean certain things strongly. But that, of course, is not measurable. The five-year-old who scribbled his "brilliant" lines but doesn't mean anything by it, is, like the chimpanzees, not a poet. A real poet means what he spells out in words, he means it in a way at least slightly ahead of how his audience means it. The audience trusts that he does mean it and that there is a horizon of meaning opened up by the poet's lines, and the reader can follow calmly in his wake.

So, a poet has to learn to mean stronger, not just to write stronger. How can he or she achieve that? In brief. I hinted trust. Creating a poetic lifestyle, integrating other artforms like music and painting, and every once in a while, try if the working of his words can stand the comparison to old wine.

The Real Stuff!

2011-03-16T08:16:00.000+02:00

In our fast-paced modern world, everybody needs to "get stuff done", with that "stuff" most seldom referring to physical matter. We mean assignments, schedules, tasks, templates, revisions, writings, programs, sequences and we ensure ourselves that these "stuffs" are real by describing them consistently with tangible metaphors. We grasp them, wrap our heads around them, we get hold of them, get in touch about them and so on.

It is interesting to observe how these metaphores function to construct what is "real" in our heads. Real is not the stuff that lies scattered alongside our highways but the stuff that we think we have to get done. We encourage and ensure each other about the high level of "realness" of this stuff.

But what about the real "real" stuff, the trees, boulders, butterflies? Are we no longer accepting them as real? Of course we still do. All we are observing is the use of tangible metaphores for "formal" phenomena, notably the interaction between members of our own species. And this has a sincere impact on how we experience the material realness of the outer world. If we are pre-occupied with the "stuff" we have to get done, the material world has to prove its realness by lending itself to our formal and functional descriptions, not by being logically prior to it as a materialistic worldview holds it. Note that I am not discussing the validity of worldviews, but the psychological consequences of the army of metaphors (grâce à Nietzsche) we use with regards to the "stuff" we have to get done. Matter is degraded to the mere stratum of that stuff. Of course it remains real, but the reason why we agree to say that it is real is that we realize it can interact with our own high-level layer of realness - the stuff we have to get done. It is a very subtle difference, but it has huge consequences for the metaphysics of our age.

I apologize for the density of above speculations and promise to "get real" next time.

How to be successful. New Quick, and Easy Method: Avoid That Zero.

2011-03-12T10:40:00.000+02:00

So that did catch your attention? I sincerely hope I can deliver, and that you will not gain nothing of this.

I am aware that with this article I place my humble feet in the footsteps of some giants of the self-help and life-coaching genre. This article will inevitably be conceived as a contribution to a system of thought where titles like "How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Easy Steps" or "Life Lessons from a $$$ entrepreneur" are considered to be the highlights. How I feel about this? Don't worry, I"m okay, and still have most of my hair.

I don't want to instruct you how to become successful. It is obvious that "success" is a relative concept hence it is an analytic, a priori truth that it goes at the expence of others (some others, somewhere). But I do want to say something about discipline and how to organize your daily tasks. I don't believe in taking the stance of a professor bloaking down upon you. I want to make you smile.

So what is this secret recipe I am circumscribing and inflating here with the hot air of suspense? "Avoid All References to Zero". What does that even mean? The zero is an invention of sorts, and as a cultural technique certainly on a par with wheel and fire. It gave us an infinitely more powerful mathematics that played a crucial role in almost every modern invention. So what can be so bad about the zero?

The beauty of the zero (or, more precisely the zero-element in our calculus) is that we can multiply it with whatever we want - the result remains still zero. Even if we multiply it with infinity? Double uncountable complex superinducent infinity con panna? Yes, even then. In everyday life, the zero is an easy abstraction from reality to express our emotions, rather than an adequate description of reality. "I have nothing to do". "I don't have any money." "I don't have time." "I never walk." "This leads nowhere." "I haven't got a clue." In all these cases, that is not literally true. We always(!) have one thing or another to do, most of us have at least a few coins or a wristwatch they could sell, we have a few minutes free for ourselves each day, and so on. It is a convenient way to express an emotion without sounding emotional.

What is bad about it? Easy enough: We can't take these statements as starting points because we can multply it as much as we want - they still remain Zero. The single most important tip to gain discipline, gain control over your life, tackle those annoying daily tasks, and yes, become a happier human being, is avoiding all references to zero. So every time you hear yourself making such a reference, correct it and describe your predicament in objective terms, such as "I have twenty-three dollars in my bank account" or "I work out only two minutes a day when I walk the stairs." Often these references are hidden because they are the result of life-long habits. You will have to dig them up. Once you made this clear to yourself, you will be able to start applying arithmetics to your habits because you quantified them. Tomorrow, you can work out three or four minutes, next week, you will earn forty-five dollars, and so on.

I could give more examples and explanations, but thank god I don't have to reach the other shiny cover of my "Mr. Hero don't know no Zero" paperback.

Free like a Tiger

2011-03-09T13:02:00.000+02:00

grrr!

Freedom is a very popular concept in philosophy, and the question about the essence of freedom has divided philosophers in many camps while the variety of different answers has been at the heart of different views of science, religion, ethics, and nature itself. The question is still pondered in faculties (and canteens) around the world, with brain researchers, having made mindboggling progress, asserting they have already found the ultimate answer.

I have written a dissertation about freedom and responsibility, yet I have no clue about freedom. I simply fail to grasp the philosophical concept of a generic definition of freedom. What do we have? Imagine a large sociological research project with abundant result in the form of recounts of actual, lived "freedom" - well, what the interviewed people think they think it's freedom. All the data in the world won't be enough to formulate a generic definition of freedom. The famous absence of a private language in philosophy implies that the private language of our mind is not translatable into the public language of words, precisely because it doesn't exist.

So what if we take a modest position, looking at natural objects and considering their freedom? A tree is freer than a rock because it interacts with it surroundings; a fish is freer than a tree because it also has locomotion; and so forth. Why don't we understand freedom simply as the ability to move within certain "rooms" (space, sensomotorical experience, time, monetary possibilities, the internet, minds, the scale of power). Locomotive freedom is the main metaphor for this, and the main flaw as any philosopher would immediately attest.

A little complication comes to mind. How can we decide if someone is free to locomote, when that person doesn't locomote but merely understands her own potential movement? A neurochemical test of that understanding seems a bit far-fetched and doesn't improve our understanding of freedom. Sidetrack: What have we got so far? Is a helicopter freer than an airplane? But they don't have minds. So it's all in our heads, and the locomotion metaphor is dead. You can be free with Sartre in a prison cell. Or is it about a balance of potential and actual, enacted freedom? But can such a balance be expressed in language? What is the language of freedom?

And what about the freedom of the tiger? What is his take on freedom?

grrrr.

The Virtues of a Virtual Office

2011-03-08T07:22:00.000+02:00

The Virtues of a Virtual Office

It's all about efficiency. Gathering a group of people in an office building to carry out their work, essentially manipulation and dissemination of information has certain benefits. The office gives them a sense of team-spirit, it is easy to cooperate and allocate the right person to the right task. The office is, to quote the infamous Michael Scott of Scranton, "like a family". This efficiency of a well-run office might still be unbeatable in certain fields, yet in the context of international cooperation, specialized knowledge work, and all-encompassing social media, it just can't beat the virtual crowd.

My office is a coffeeshop, or rather a cluster of coffeeshops somewhere thirty kilometers south of Seoul. I enjoy a speedy megabit internet connection which enables me to do web development, translations, transcriptions, blogging, and send out a constant stream of competitive job applications, skype calls as well as reseach for my non-profit smart-tech/arts project . Working hours are 11am - 2am, with breaks in between. The arabica is very good and easily fuels a full day of work.

The only downside is probably the repetitive music that hardly ever changes but I have learned to ignore that. Can you compare the overhead costs of a heated office workplace - even a minimized cubicle - with my overhead: occupying a seat in the café when and only when others are available for more zealous cafeine consumers. Point in case: my overhead is zero, my net footprint is limited to the electricity consumption of a small laptop, an equal share in the coffee and information supply chain, the CO2 my body produces during the five minute walk here, and the water I use to flush the urinoir during a leaking break.

Now compare this to the footprint of the average office worker - I don't need to compile that list. The virtual office is more compatitive than ever and as it gains popularity and recognition it will become the standard. Traditional offices simply won't be able to compete.

The Foodprint of Broccoli

2011-03-05T15:34:00.001+02:00

best eaten raw to prevent
cancer and save the climate

Not only Cassandra's heirs are predicting serious disaster if mankind's consuming power keeps growing the way it does. It is commonplace that this planet we call ours cannot keep up with the rate we are using her resources. The 21th century consumer simply uses more of the natural resources than can be replenished in time for the next generation.

Everything we do takes energy and most of that energy is provided by fossil fuels. I want to focus on one aspect that is at the core of our lives: food. In the last decades, a lot of studies have been conducted about the carbon footprint of our foodstuffs: the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted for the production, transportation, storage and preparation of one kilogram of food. A common misunderstanding is that shipping would constitute the majority of the carbon footprint, leading to the concept of "Food Miles". As Budiansky pointed out in an opinion piece he wrote in the New York Times September 2010, the real energy guzzling takes place within households. Fridges, food processors, and driving to the supermarkt contribute more to the negative carbon balance of our daily food than storage, transportation and production (perhaps with the exception of greenhouse vegetables and tropical fruits shipped in dedicated cargo planes).

In the US, a 2008 study by researchers Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that the final transport of food from producer to market (the ‘food miles’) accounts for only 4 per cent of the total emissions from food- But overall, this estimate increased to 11 per cent of total food-related emissions when the researchers accounted for transport

The exact numbers don't matter much to turn people into conscious consumers. What does matter is their awareness of unsustainability and more importantly, the fact that unsustainability is not cool. What could such energy awareness look like? The average consumer will of course choose the product with the smaller footprint - given all other factors like quality, appearance, price, associations are the same. The reason is easy to understand: The smaller footprint adds value to the product, namely the infinitesimal but existing value of moral superiority of that product over the other one. I think we have to multiply this infinitesimal factor through public communication and massive awareness creation that will be strong enough to turn it into a financial incentive (because people who buy greenhouse fruits will be excluded from rotaries, for example).

Once the public awareness takes off, making energy calculations will be more respected and taken seriously. How much fossil fuel was burned to create (and transport) the fertilizer? What about the irrigation system? And how far away is the broccoli farm? What kind of insecticides were used? What about the alternative of low-pillage agriculture? What about the nitrogen balance? When we buy it and drive home with our groceries, how much diesel oil are we burning per kg of broccoli? What is the overall energy use and toxic output resulting from the production of this broccoli coral?

It is fun to make these kind of calculations and high school kids should be encouraged to do so. They will grow environmentally conscious in the process.

What is needed is a comprehensive, honest, and transparent list of greenhouse gas and toxic emissions in the overall process of producing our foodstuffs and getting them on our plates and palates.

Resources:
http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/15516IIED.pdf
http://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/dspace/bitstream/10182/248/1/aeru_rr_299.pdf

US related:
http://www.ecocentricblog.org/2010/09/14/our-energy-gulping-industrial-food-system-revealed-in-eight-bullet-points/

Er, why I am not a tweeter-er

2011-02-27T09:52:00.000+02:00

A new bird, revolutionary chirping?

These days I - like most of us - make extensive use of social media to broadcast bold opinions, heartfelt compassion or stark disappointment, but unlike an apparent majority I don't opt for the tool twitter. That is, besides the automated "tweets" that my blogs, facebook pages, and community website spawn 24-7 automatically anyway, I don't follow anyone nor do I care who follows me. But since the service is so immensely popular (and since I am a philosopher) I feel I have to explain why I am not a tweeter-er.

The basic idea of twitter is, it seems to me, rendering a real-time overview of a user's favorite group's current status updates. This group is entirely configurable by the user and hence can contain celebrities, colleagues, classmates, or strangers. Twitter technology ensures the fast and near real-time delivery of all their status updates on the user's screen, thus generating some sort of live journal. At first sight, this sounds exciting, but when I tried it myself I couldn't really see how this would give me the information I need at the time when I need it. After following some interesting personalities, friends and acqaintances, my screen was cluttered with ultrashort messages that invariably included abbreviated URLs linking to the promoted blogs, webshops, articles or who knows what. I understand this is a logical result of the dictum of brevity that made twitter famous, but it is extremely unaesthetic, confusing and detrimental to my informational appetite. I wouldn't go to elk.ci/9fdkj6i to read an article. But there are technical workarounds for this (for example, caching frequently read news sites and blog names and displaying that instead of the shortened URLs).

We could ask more fundamental questions about the unforeseen abundance of information. Does the time we need information really coincide with the time that it comes into being? Or arent' many "tweets" better suitable for daily digests? And how can that be sorted out? Is the 21th century information consumer really a semantical zombie and entirely passive with regards to his intake of news? Does she really swallow anything she "follows"? Or does she really not care about all the clutter on her screen, awaiting that one interesting tweet to click on?

The problem with sorting out tweets is of course that they lack semantics. There are a few promising and straightforward ways to organize tweets (except from time of course), notably keywording and geotagging, but I think that a useful information service would require more than simply presenting everything that has been said on a certain topic on a certain date in a certain place.

What is needed is a seamless re-adaption to traditional media, that is: hierarchical, imposed, old world production of information. One way of making twitter hierarchical is taking into account the author's twitter "mass", which is simply her amount of followers. In an ideal world, this would work and over time create a totally free and democratical information culture. But I think the reality looks a bit different as "twitter power" does not depend on real power. If, during a revolution, I want to keep abreast of what the leaders of the day say but don't know their name, I want twitter to present me "tweets from people with real power". I want to read the tweets of the wartime generals as well as the revolutionary leaders rather than the sarcastic but popular observers or web savvy entrepreneurs. I want verified tweets presented in a clean newspaper-like way, organized by keyword or printed on a map. AND THEN I can switch to "full information democracy" mode and ponder the differences!

This way, full transparency and participatory news creation can emancipate a handy handheld gadget to the nexus of our political self-perception. Discrepancies with the "twitter realm" will almost flawlessly denote a lack of substantial democracy and constitute a call for action.

The challenge all Social Media face in the upcoming decade is to bridge the gap between the real world out there and its virtual recreation that is rapidly gaining influence.

A real-time news service by and for the people, unabridged and uncensored. Hierarchy? To succeed in becoming the twenty-tens' people's news digest, twitter will have to reintegrate with traditional media other than merely commenting and replicating them ("tweet this"). Twitter should be the next generation Huffington post, and the main challenge is to combine a meaningful, hierarchically structured news reporting with the exciting zero-threshold policy of twitter publishing.

February 13. Damn you so much, consumerism.

2011-02-13T11:11:00.003+02:00

There are still moments that we can have revelations. Seldom do they occur but all the more meaningful is the trace they leave behind in our minds. It is so powerful because of it makes us feel related to the very essence of being more than anything else, albeit in a negative way. The kind of revelations I so vaguely refer to here are the hypercriticisms of modern life, stating that at its very core is falsehood. These hypercriticisms allow us to demonize the entire social structure that embeds us from the perspective of a u-topia that is created in the process.
Thus reads the auto-critique of my heart-felt critique of consumerism. O, how much I detest this monster, this...but what is it? Consumption as the new religion, the faith that the act of consuming gives us something? No. There is no need for faith, or any other big stories. Consumerism means instant satisfaction, reduction of the arc to length zero, and can only carry total dullness in its wake.

And yet, a highly abstract critique like the one we are "in" here, cannot adequatly describe the symptoms, it can only detect inconsistencies in their common interpretation. For me, consumerism means passiveness, the opposite of creativity, the opposite of schöpferische Tätigkeit (death). But matters are too complicated: the consumer doesn't exist, it is only a statistical mean, a set of numbers that never buy anything. At our very best, we can diagnostize the culture of consumerism and say we dislike it and why. And our intellectual conclusion, Adorned with the ashes of our bustling ideas will be: "and precisely in its ultimate fulfillment as individuals is it that they will cease to exist as individuals; their critical potential will be defused by their very state of being."

February 7. Start Making sense O blind poet

2011-02-07T15:44:00.000+02:00

Imagine a crowded market, piles of vegetables, leeks, turnips, potatoes, onions everywhere, a meager dog with a fishbone in its mouths slips under a shaggy table. The sharp smell of overripe pineapples blends with the dustclouds between the stalls. Coarse voices reiterate their merchandize and their mantras feel comforting. An old hunchback offers dried fruits out of a braided basket. You are walking there, in that market, enjoying the clamor as you stroll past the stalls indulged in a pensive mood. Then you hear a strangely familiar high-pitched voice offering a somewhat odd product. You listen again and the voice repeats "the grammar of embarrassment". Of all the merchandize piled up here, that really strikes you like something special and you walk into the direction of the voice. The siren keeps repeating her remarkable offer as you are peeking behind turnips in the shape of elephants and big bottles of vinegar, but you can't find her. You follow dancing shadows that disappear when you reach them. You stand still for a moment and hear the voice resonate in your head. What could it mean?

The internet is only for the promotion of ideas, views, news, propaganda, projects, narratives. It is in itself a publicity machine

February 6. The Virtual Foodchain of Value Creation

2011-02-06T13:43:00.001+02:00

This is a tricky one. Have you just read the title of this post? It has been designed to captivate your attention and hence to captivate some of your time, some of your thoughts, some of your being. It has its own minute place in what it denotes: the foodchain of value creation. Now what do I mean by that (adding an introductory sentence like a puff of cool air) I want to say it raw uncompromised, like the hundreds of thousands of thousands of protesters on the Tahrir square as romanticologic analysts love to understand them. Raw.

This chain is the near perfect synthesis of the simple and the complex. Nothing is more simple to understand than a pyramid (so to speak) of labourers and businesspeople contracting them to work for them to produce stuff for a higher level and everybody is handing over the value he produces to whoever it is that is above him in exchange for futile security and a berth here below the moon. And the top of that imaginary pyramid of value creation does not exist, all there is is the chimera of a money printing machine or bars of gold in a very thick walled safe somewhere. Now at the same time the foodchain I am trying to depict is one of the most complicated things. Its parts and participants can move up and down freely, have their liberty to pursue happiness, can interact with each other in all kinds of ways - the system is not rigid hence immune to structural criticisms.

I did some work recently that spurred my chaotic mind to pen this. I had to transcribe everyday phrases from people living in the Dutch society that I had left for stylized ideological reasons. All I had to do was writing the words they say and they were about consuming and also about anal sex. I felt terrible and yet in the unique position of experiencing first-hand what I mean by the foodchain. Okay, what is going on is this a company wants to make a product that recognizes voice commands to make the empty lives of the consuming organisms more convenient. The company hires a professional linguist and a system designer. They write their program then feed it with sample voices for which they hire speakers one notch down the foodchain pretty people that get paid quite well for pronouncing everyday speech samples (the fact that it is about everyday speech certainly lends an extra dimension to this). Then at some point they decide the speech samples need to be transcribed and they purchase transcriptions at a specialized US company, TransPerfect. That company charges them a rate of say 200 dollars per spoken hour, 40% of which they actually pay the transcriber that does this work at the very low end of the foodchain. That's me. Prostituting the only capability that you don't need a f*cking diploma for in this wretched world: the mother tongue. So I completed this work (took a vow it be the last time) and handed the generated value upwards in the foodchain. It will be of little use (even with little technical understanding of the matter of language recognition I can figure that out) but that's not the point. The point is the company will start selling their product, probably baked in little nifty devices and will start to make profit. Now it can be a public or a private company; in both cases it is exposed to enormous pressures. The pension-fund-shareholder suits need to beat the competition or the owner's yacht needs to be overhauled. Everybody has its place in the foodchain and the proverbial Eagle or Tiger (or homo sapiens) doesn't exist. Too bad.

Now you've read this you think a bit shallow a waste of time why did I... you see? But it is just the introduction to a metaphore; in fact when we speak of Value Creation more things are involved than money making. There is a fundamental difference between human beings and robots. Humans need reasons why they do something, and not something else and in our complex world with its plethora of choises this factor becomes à la fois more visible and more invisible. What I mean is this. Because there are so many choices we are used to embracing almost anything as a reason why we should choose something instead of something else. These flimsy reasons are backed by a few Big Reasons provided by religion and adorable infant smiles and our contruct is ready. But for some heathens of the leading consumerist culture 't is not enough and will never be. We need a reason that is at least as good as the fundamental reason that serves at the very root of the value-chain, or we refuse to be a part of it. As long as we have a choice, we will choose whichever option has the profoundest reason.

Writing philosophical analyses. I should get paid for this. Or not? What is it that people should get paid for? Only for making living more convenient, only only only -

February 1. Brief summary of a time seemingly lost

2011-02-03T11:59:00.000+02:00

The timespan between the loss of my glasses in Kuala Lumpur and the now is a virtual vacuum. I don't have the time to write a detailed document about it. The reader could look at charitytravel.blogspot.com and transsiberian.kindmankind.net. Surely, there have been a few noteworthy anecdotes and I will intertwine them with my future writing here. Australia, New Zealand were interesting in the winter; I was happy to be there as a tourist rather than a cheap laborer reaping the fruits from the trees down under. South America has been good to us too. Miami was crazy, presentation in New York interesting. Back in Europe the wedding op my brother in a castle, a presentation at a school in Amsterdam, then living in the woods south of Berlin for three months before taking the train - out of adventurous and environmental considerations - all the way through Russia towards South Korea. Of course, we supported some Causes related to the Baikal Lake and needy families in Ekaterinburg. We were very happy with a presentation in Khabarovsk before we embarked our final trip to South Korea. That's it. Now we're here, working on the virtual side of things, crafting a project proposal for that future project we so badly want to realize and trying to generate the income to subsist. Wish us luck.

The watercloset is one of the most disgusting inventions. Using large amounts of drinking water to dispose of our body waste, water that elsewhere in the world is a resource they fight over. The wc system is unnecessary complicated too. Try to avoid the watercloset. Where will you live? And listen to the only argument left, involving sanitation: anything less boisterous and bold than a wc would inevitably leave harmful germs within the boundaries of o

Publish Post

ur living realm, like in the times of the Black Death.

July 1. Still in Malaysia.

2010-10-01T03:36:00.000+03:00

Summer is well underway and we crash into a Malaysian July, about to leave the northern hemisphere and turn things around. My memory of this day is faded, but I think we have visited an huge cave complex, photographed the golden statue with restless pigeons swarming around it. And the stray monkeys clambering on the stairs and swinging their way between the lenses that try to capture them, especially the ones that carry a baby. Inside the cave it is dripping and humid. Yes, that must have been it: a visit to the Batu caves just outside Kuala Lumpur. Or did we visit the informal school for Myanmar refugees. That is an interesting story as well. The Malaysian government is not doing enough to support them, and even with UN refugee status, their lives are far from easy. We support a privite initiative by an amazing young woman with bright sapphire eyes. It's either of these two things, or both, that I have done on august first.

June 30. Forest Voices.

2010-07-22T11:55:00.000+03:00

Remember the day I shouted to the man, whose lean and clean English intimidated me so much, because I mistakenly thought I had lost the ticket and he wouldn't let me on the bus? It happened yesterday, it happened through my conscious mind, it keeps happening as temper is hard to overcome.

Meeting and dinner with Noah and Michael. We have a good conversation and I come up with the jolly idea to call my brother Caspar, who is a forest ecologist working in Sarawak. Since Noah is documenting indigenous knowledge of the people in Sarawak, I thought it would be a great idea to hook them up. I pull in my legs and listen to the skype conversation where Noah and my brother drop insider terms and I feel proud in a strange but pleasant way.

June 29. Supporting Causes in Malaysia

2010-07-22T11:54:00.001+03:00

I want to support something in Malaysia, my hands always start itching after a few days of idling. I don't want to dive into the psychological complexities underlying my passion to help where help is needed, and I leave that to the "Nachwelt", the judging generations after we have all perished. So where to look? We have our friends here, and they know of an event called "Green Drinks" we decide to attend. It is a meeting for professionals working in ecology and environment related organisations that takes place in a restaurant in the Petronas twin towers. We arrive early enough to chat with the organizer who is setting up a video screen to show a movie called "what rainforest" about the large-scale logging in Sarawak and how local commnities protest in vain.
We are encouraged to be "American" and approach people with a big smile and a stack of business cards. I walk around a little and shake hands with a German man who was just explaining the world cup to his Malaysian friends. I have to introduce our concept in two minutes but he seems to get it and like it. I decide to give his contacts to my brother.

Meanwhile, Yeon is talking to Noah, an American ecologist/anthropolist and the man behind "Forest Voices", a project documenting the local knowledge of the people in the rainforest. We have an interesting conversation and decide to support them.
After the green people, we meet a friend of a volunteer we know from Cambodia (follow me) who is working here with Myanmar refugees. We promise to look into it - who knows it becomes a cause too.

June 28. Glasses are stolen.

2010-07-22T11:53:00.000+03:00

My glasses are stolen. This is the right moment. Yes, it is, yes. It is the last item that I carry from the past. How much can I give in to my tendency to dramatize the event, to clay it with fatty fingers and make it into something with some sort of celestial essence. Right. In German a philosopher criticizing another philosopher would call it "hochstilisieren". It happens after a nice football game between Argentina and Mexico, which we view on a big screen. But the mirthful nightly public viewing event quickly turns into a dark pit for thieves.

It is a long day. On our way to the mall, the "built-up" one, I pick up a pair of strong slippers that look like Kenyattas since I don't want to step into a dirty abuser's needle and die. What is a "built-up" place? We have had a lot of discussions about that starring me beating about the bush, reluctant to admit I mean Starbucks-Dubai Mall-Coffee Bean-Free wifi-Hilton lobby-shiny marble-steel 'n glass kind of built-up. I am trying other adjectives to express my wish to sit down in a clean Westernized place every now and then, like "glossy", "shiny", "polished", "Dubaiesk".

In the Mall I find three months worth of contact lenses and very friendly staff explaining Astigmatism and Myopia, oxygen level and moisture, changed my dollars, and give me free cleansing fluid. I bow. We walk through the mall and sit down for a while in a coffee place to bring the first hours of dizziness behind me.
After that, we find a small hotel and with Yeon's friend Mark. We have a nice streetside dinner together and meet some passionate Malaysians and a lovely French girl. Having introduced myself as Dutch, that is "Oranje", we inevitably go and watch the game that is on. I can't remember the opponent but the game was a bit boring and the outcome made everybody shruck despite the fact Holland made it further in the competition.

June 27. K.L.

2010-07-22T11:52:00.000+03:00

We don't get up too early, and stretch the morning. You know what I mean, just being without pretentions.

In the afternoon, we attempt to hitchhike towards Kuala Lumpur, and our first few lifts are easy. They take us to the right gas station where we could try to get a lift.

A nice muslim man, highschool biology teacher, offers us a ride to the bus station and to purchase our bus tickets. I am overwhelmed but don't turn down such a friendly offer, feeling that giving him the opportunity to help has some intrinsic value as well, plus I would reciprocate by diverging the equivalent amount into the charity travel budget. The man, who was together with his sun, has a gentle smile and and kind, funny eyes. At the bus station, where he shows us our bus, we thank him and give him my namecard. I hope he contacts us. The busride was convenient as the bus leaves with empty seats allowing me to stretch out and doze off.
The first glance of KL is as surreal as I have expected. Big concrete structures made shiny and transparent as usual contrasting to whatever profit-generating dodgy businesses house inside them. We walk around with tired eyes and when we are about to take a taxi to take us to a safe hotel, we arrive at a big field where two public viewing screens are reiterating the games already played in the world cup. Argentina-Mexico was on at 2:30 so we decided to stay up...

June 26. Buddha.

2010-07-22T11:50:00.000+03:00

After a long night of dreaming, we have a light breakfast together consisting of fruit and a puree of green vegetables, along with cashew nuts. and raw cookies that haven't been warmer than about 45 degrees. I like it, I like the inventiveness of it, even though I am not a vegan or raw food adept. The dishes are very delicious and nutricious. Perhaps they don't make you jump and dance and attack as quick as a carnivorous reptile, but that't the whole point of it. Without eating chemicals, salty cooked food, msg, caffeine, our minds will get a lot more peaceful.

We want to take a look around, to get a better impression of Malaysia, and we walk off in the sweltering heat. We try to reach one of the rock formations that are scattered around the valley, but a man on a motorbike comes to call us back. Humans, I think, humans are more likely to mean bad news than good news. We go back to the man road and walk to the other side of the river, where we finally reach a rock formation and see some monkeys swinging on the roots of the overhanging trees. A little bit further is a huge golden Buddha statue guarding a cave with an altar inside. The site is interesting, and its low-key appearance (no signs, no tourists) create the illusion of discovery in my mind.

June 25. Follow the Road.

2010-07-22T11:49:00.000+03:00

We take a taxi to the old bus station, and a bus to Bercham. The description our fellow travelers have given us is precise, I mean we can count the gas stations exactly as pointed out in their email and get off at the Petronas, from where a healthy little walk (on yellow-duck.tumblr.com you might find another adjective for this, but here I am supposed to celebrate my subjectivism).
So we walk on to the house where Katja and Augustas live and we receive a warm welcome.

June 24. Ipoh.

2010-07-22T11:44:00.001+03:00

The morning train to Ipoh has all conveniences we need, and lacks the freezing AC we don't need. The delay is only one hour, after which the train rolls to the border for another hour idling, degorging its passengers that need to do their paperwork. In our case that consists of a simple stamp, a welcoming smile, and a routine glance at our pickles and medication bag.

Ipoh's central railway station is quiet at night, and it is easy to find helpful people. In our case, a British man who was based here as a soldier five decades ago, explains us where we can find a more suitable neighbourhood to spend the night. We share a taxi and say goodbye at a 24-hour restaurant, where we watch a worldcup game, and countless repetitions thereof.

We will meet two big time travelers tomorrow, and I am looking forward to it.

June 23. Lobbying for a good cause.

2010-07-22T11:43:00.000+03:00

We wait in the lobby of the Hilton hotel for her. It is a landmark here in Hua Hin and we figured a suitable place for a meetup. We have a look around and see the tourists munching, swimming, relaxing, reading, drinking - this is many people's idea of paradise. We could have jumped in the pool with them, who cares "hotel guests only". When she shows up, we are cheerful. Meredith is very friendly. We have a good talk about the possible cooperation of couchsurfing and volunteering platforms, and we learn that it is important that couchsurfing remains independent, and won't easily affiliate with other platforms. I understand and know what to do to spread our concept. Thanks Meredith!
I pick up Hornby's "Juliet naked", because I know Hornby and the praise on the cover seems genuine. It's an okay book if you like romanticising about forgotten eighties rock stars.

We catch the overnight train to Hat Yai, the infamous border town near Malaysia. The AC in our compartment is freezing cold, as if the villain in a James Bond movie has opened a critical valve full throttle. I crawl in my sleeping back and give Yeon the jacket, and dream away.

June 22. Earth Day.

2010-07-22T11:42:00.000+03:00

It's Earth Day and we decide Charity Travel should do someting about it. So we go planting mangroves with the Freeland foundation! Freeland is an organization that fights trafficking of animals and humans, and is active in national parks in Thailand. It is a great experience to travel to the school with the enormous name by taxi. We lose the way twice and get a bit stressful when we traverse the coastal wetlands on our way. When we finally get there, the instruction session is halfway: a teacher tells the story of the precious mud coast and the function of the mangroves we'll plant on it. Then he demonstrates on one sapling how to put it in the mud with our hand or feet.

We all go out to the actual mangrove field and the organizers have arranged for three wheelbarrows of saplings. We dip into the lukewarm water and wade to the places where we want to plant the trees. We hand each other the young trees and I put a few dozen of them in the mud using my toes to push the roots in. It's an interesting experience, even though it only takes 40 minutes and could be done more efficiently. But that is not the point. We are served lunch, a delicious buffet of vegetalbles, tofu, shrimps and other seafood. After lunch, we move back to the city and make a modest donation to Freeland, which pleases them greatly to my delight. Their actions are normally sponsored by corporations and they don't seem to be used to private donors.

It is late at night and it has started raining heavily. We don't know where we are anymore.

Our desire not to be here wins over my conceived virtuous parsimony and we take a taxi to the bus station. Everything is so simple of you have cash in your pocket. I brood on that trivial observation as - no, not as, I hate as, as purports detachment and cynicism - while our taxi's windshield wipers struggle with the pouring downfall. At the station everything is straightforward, we buy tickets, have a quick noodle soup with fishballs, and board the bus that brings us to Hua Hin, where we will arrive in the middle of the night.

There are still some guesthouses open. A local, room-to-rent place is cheap enough and we don't really care, we just want to sleep.

June 21. Recording...

2010-07-22T11:34:00.000+03:00

We check in a real hotel because we have a mission: recording a demo video for a TED-talk. I am applying to hold a 18-minute TED presentation with an independent TED event in Perth, Australia, and they requested a demo video. Putting away my self pride, that would have me waiting for them to follow me with a camera or put a mic under my nose, I take that video very seriously. Against the backgdrop of a mid-range hotel, decorated with schoolbook pictures and Thai words, I go through the presentation three times, improving slightly with each try. Yeon records everything and I upload it early in the morning, to be scrutinized by the people in Perth. It has taken us the evening and most of the night, the upload happens early in the morning.

Leisure is a swimming pool, and the idea is brilliant: overlooking the rooftops in the vicinity of the infamous sin street of Bangkok, a swimming pool. We jump in, together with our inflatable duck.

June 20. Family!

2010-07-22T11:30:00.000+03:00

We have agreed to meet my cousin Ingeborg and her daughter Alycia, whom I meet for the first time. She is a very cute and precocious child of one year and a few months.

We need to record a video tomorrow, but lack the equipment. A taxi brings us to a massive electronics mall, where we browse some shops and ask personnel about rental services for projectors and video cameras. In vain, of course, they are just retailers and don't really understand the question. I give up the idea to record with a real video camera and decide to record with the camera. At least for the sound we buy an extra microphone - of cheap Chinese quality - that will enable me to play with something during the presentation and cover up my jitters.

We stay a second night in our tiny guesthouse, because we don't bother changing and we like the lady downstairs who handed us the key.

June 19. Bangkok. The finger.

2010-07-22T11:28:00.000+03:00

Our bus to Bangkok includes pick-up service and friendly caring drivers - and a bunch of complaining tourists. I can't stand a group of British partygirls and the attitude they display. Anyway, the bus is fast and after a few hours and stopovers we arrive at the Thai border, the crossing of which is free and easy. I would like to see the roundabout where they change the "rule of the road" and traffic coming from Cambodia, which drives right, changes to the left on Thai streets. Since we walk across the border and I remember my wish only later, I miss that magic roundabout. Ah, I can still dream about it. The highway in Thailand seems polished and takes us in a whim to the capital, near the infamous Khaosan road.
It is that road that is my first real impression of the land of smiles. Abundant merchandise on
They are selling fake ID-cards, I distinguish driver's licenses, German student cards,
The hawkers refuse me taking a picture
"Are you ashamed of your merchandise?" I ask
-"Go away!" one of the men shouts, "no photo"
"This is a public place as far as I know, and I take a photo if I like." I say, mounting my camera again. The men seem furious and I am afraid they might fall upon me to deprive me of my precious digital imagery device. A man shows me the finger. So I scurry off towards Yeon, who is waiting for me twenty meters down the road Welcome to Thailand.

We are looking for a guesthouse in this area, and on our quest walk into a small backstreet lodging that we expect to be sober and smartly priced. In the darkened lobby I see two older caucasian men browsing date-a-young-asian-woman websites, on our way to see a room a greepy looking middle-aged Westerner comes down the stairs and I signal Yeon "let's go". On our way out I catch the grey stare of yet another creep. It can be my impression, but the scenario fits to what everybody knows about Bangkok, its vivid prostitution. I want to beat child molesters up with a spikey baseball bat, I want to frame them and turn them over to the police, I want to cook them on a slow fire.
All that has to wait because we still have to find our guesthouse. We end up in a modest place, in a tiny room, and go down to the tourist tumble again to enjoy the internet.
close our eyes soon after checking in.

June 18. Angkor Wat.

2010-07-22T11:26:00.000+03:00

We take a very early bus to Siem Reap because we are ready for a little tourist break and Angkor Wat is not the worst backdrop for a short timeout. I doze off on the bus and hardly notice how the bus makes a grand detour around one of the largest lakes of southeast Asia. Arrival in Siem Reap is surreal as expected. The road is flanked with expensive hotels, especially Korean entrepreneurs seem to have the edge here. It goes on for miles, then we pass something that could be the town itself, and we end up at a dusty bus station where we inquire for ongoing transportation to Bangkok, but to no avail. I feel itchy and don't really care about the Wat anymore. Nevertheless, being here I want at least to check out the town and the offers of the offical bus companies, so we agree on taking a motorbike back to the tourist area. It's a bit of a scary ride clinging to all our luggage. In town we quickly find a tourist agency and I like the older man serving us. He sells us bus tickets for Bangkok tomorrow and a tuktuk driver who will take us to some temples today.
The driver is very kind and professional, taking us to the entrance point where we can purchase our entrance tickets, and suggesting us in which order we best enjoy the Wat delights. We go for the large [[]] first and walk around the big limestone structure that is filled with earth as I learn from an explanatory plaque. Without the many tourist walking around I would feel lost inside the magnificent structure.

We find an affordable guesthouse and spend the night writing our blogs and watching football. Germany showed a meager performance.

June 17. Shelved up. Or so.

2010-07-22T11:25:00.000+03:00

I finish that darn bookshelf and Saveth, who has been reluctant and at first seems to be a little bit flustered by my insistency, is happy with the result. After changing the hanging method as I had insisted, we finally manage to hang the bookshelf where we want it to be and start putting the books on it. They are dug out of a huge blue travel bag that stands in the corner accumulating layers of dust. Genie would have time to label the books so that KNGO could lend them to children and increase the popularity of reading in the community.

Also, Yeon completes the painting of the walls, and we take some nice shots posing in front of them. I hope they will have the intended effect of making the center look more interesting both to sponsoring visitors and the children who come here to learn computer and English skills.

It have been two highly effective days, and we plan to do more for Saveth and his NGO from the road, making sure his presentation on the internet is decent and he attracts the volunteers he needs.
We say goodbye to Saveth, who takes us to Battambang with his tuktuk, and Genie, who will volunteer one more week at KNGO. At Battambang we have to spend another night at a guesthouse, since the busses to Siem Reap, a place whereupon I insisted in order to take in an experience so many people have told me should not be missed: we will visit Ankor Wat.

June 16. Working Day.

2010-07-22T11:24:00.000+03:00

This is a working day. We take the tuk-tuk to town and go shopping. I buy all kind of stationary for KNGO, ranging from a soccer ball to a few hundred notebooks, pens, bilingual storybooks to paint supplies and buckets. It is easy to find and we are quick and efficient, I like that so much. Who says things can't be done fast? True, assessment studies are important, but they are no alibi to procrastinate; mid-term evaluations are good but shouldn't impede the impetus of change.

Yeon starts painting a mural on the front wall of center while I have a go at a first attempt to construct a bookshelf. I measure and saw and hammer and make a little mistake but I won't give up. Tomorrow, I promise when I go to bed, there will be a bookshelf and all those dusty book donations will come to life.

June 15. Battambang

2010-07-22T11:23:00.000+03:00

We arrive in Battambang in the morning, where Sun Saveth picks us up with his tuktuk. He has told us that his ngo (and his family) is poor. In order to make money, he has become a tuktuk-driver. We hope to be able to support him making his small ngo sustainable. Saveth has arranged accomodation for us in a house that is being taken care of by his parents. The owner is in the US, we hear, but he can be wherever he wants to be - the house is really nice and I enjoy the homestay.

There is a newborn baby in the house, whose smallness and fragility makes me feel how precious life is, and how gifted we all are by the fact thaat we exist. IEUHEW, that sounds priestly, I know to many readers that sounds like anastalsis but they should wash their throats. Who can be helped anyway?

We meet Genie from San Franciso, the volunteer working at the center. She is going to evaluate the volunteer English teachers and facilitate them to share their experience and improve their classes. Over lunch, that is served by Saveth's wife at the porch of the center, we discuss our possible contributions to KNGO. My mind drifts to many things we have seen and could be introduced here and we make a plan. There is not much time as we feel the gap to our next flight closing, but we are commited to make the most of it.

June 14. Happy.

2010-07-16T14:02:00.001+03:00

The time at SSF is wonderful. I feel happy. I would like to work for such an organization when I am big. But will they let me? Ah, will they? They want me to have a diploma. Did napoleon have a diploma? I am so happy here.
We go to the marketplace again to buy some supplies and I see an icebreaker. That would be a nice present if you want to break the ice, I think. We take pictures at the market. Happy.

I learn a lot at SSF.

We have to move on, and decide to sleep early - Vichetr will bring us to Phnom Phen tomorrow morning.

June 13.

2010-07-16T13:30:00.001+03:00

The guesthouse is comfortable, and we got a good night's rest. The following morning we show up at the foundation and organize a paper maché workshop with the children. This time, there are no disasters and the little ones show their amazing creativity again.

In the afternoon, we visit several of the villages that SSF supports. They are doing poverty alleviation by sustainable donations. In our case, then we decide to donate cows to poor families, that means that the families are supervised and won't sell the cows off to fulfill immediate desires. The concept has proven to be efficient and is so convincing that we decide to make a larger donation than usual. Yes it feels good: due to my money three families, a dozen people or more, would potentially be lifted out of poverty, the children woould have a future and education instead of falling prey to the ruthless traffickers.

The worldcup has started and we watch some soccer games at night, back at the guesthouse.

June 12. SSF my love.

2010-07-16T11:26:00.000+03:00

We get up, move towards the river, order breakfast, buy bus tickets to Kampong Speu, where the foundation we are working with is located, and wait for our pickup service. The jolly, chubby man selling me these tickets has acquired a comfortable space with a view in the citadelle of my memory. Kampong Speu is just about 50 kilometers down the road, but speeding is not an option here even the tarmac is tempting the traffic is tough.
We jump off the bus where instructed and call Shannon, a volunteer working for SSF picks us up on a bicycle. The Sao Sary Foundation (SSF) is located behind the market, about ten minutes walk from the bus stop. SSF's mission is to prevent child trafficking by alleviating poverty in five rural villages. Their concept works really well, and many children can go to school thanks to the support of the foundation. We meet Vichetr Uon, the director, who will become a friend of mine, and have good conversations about SSF and what we could do here.

And we can do something straight away! Overcoming my remaining shyness I suggest we could do our workshop (or simply: playing hour) with the kids and yes it is possible. We have just arrived here but the kids are enthousiastic and there is no better way to introduce ourselves. We start off with some stretching and yoga exercises, then we jump and do some freestyle aerobics. Hopping on one leg, laying the other leg on your knee, then getting as low and possible followed by a full turn is hilarious and I am proud to have invented it. After the jumping, we do some children games,
After the warming up, we introduce some pantomime to them. The virtual balloon, along with the virtual needle, are great assets . The children at SSF are very creative and when we ask them to imitate certain jobs or animals, they do so with great inventiveness.
It is a beautiful day, and we discuss current issues with Vichetr and the volunteers as they use to do. This is a good place.

June 11. On to Cambodia. A one-liner.

2010-07-16T10:20:00.001+03:00

We take a bus to Cambodia in the early afternoon, leaving me just enough time to enjoy a last cinnamon frappucino or whatever it was. Bus service is up to international standards, it's just another boring ride with some waiting at the border but no major difficulties. Yeon get her 25 dollar visa at the border and we can continue to Phnom Phen, where we arrive after dawn and decide to look for a guesthouse after taking in our first Cambodian share of internet and caffeinated hot drinks. Someone at a fully booked guesthouse brings us to a befriended lodging where we get an affordable room in a building with a lot of nice stairs.

June 8-10. Calm days in a vibrant city.

2010-07-16T09:31:00.000+03:00

We will be back! Mrs. Chinh has given us the address of a school that we visit today.

We take a taxi there, and as the driver was a little challenged by the address on the paper we handed to him, we could enjoy a fair bit of the backstreets of district four, HCMC.

The school is small and underfunded. We shake hands with the headmistress, introduce ourselves and ask what we can do. She has thought of something and explains us: they want to reuse the schoolbooks (they are allowed too by the ministry) and have to clean them up. We agree to work on this and we carry stacks of stained secondary grade English textbooks into the classroom in order to go through them with a strong eraser and ink killing pen. It is a lenghty job, but we enjoy it, chatting with the director meanwhile and suggesting to expand the little school library. This will be my alibi to sneak out with her and get one million worth of books. Yeon agrees to stay at the school and erase the drawings, exclamations, and ticked boxes from a few dozen more textbooks.
The director takes me on her motorbike to the area where all the bookshops are. We visit three of them, and get a pile of bilingual storybooks,, five dictionaries, several smaller textbooks, a copy of an Austen novel, and more. The books are presented to the other staff and they seem happy with them. Even though it is just a donation, I feel like we have really done something here.

We are hosted by a wonderful German lady, Marianne, who is teaching German to expatriate children here in HCMC. On the first night, she takes us to a very nice restaurant and we have a good time. Her hospitality has no limits: we feel at home as soon as we get there because she is so kind.

We visit a dance show the next day, in the city's main concert hall, that resembles a similar venue in Berlin or Paris to such an extend that really amazes me. The dance itself, a modern piece about attachment and detachment, isn't that inspiring but that doesn't matter.

Three muslim girls from Indonesia arrive at Marianne's place. It is their first time to travel abroad, and they look very excited. We get along well the house is a merry place now what do we do on the tenth? I don't know and owe you this one. Maybe it is the tenth that we eat out at a nightmarket, ordering some simple streetfood, or maybe it is today that we hang out in a coffee place working on our corner of the internet, or it is the day when I venture out to get a takeaway coffee and a loaf of bread, returning with only the former in ridiculous quantities to compensate for the absence of the latter, or maybe the tenth is when we decide not to visit the war musuem with the American tank and heavy artillery in the garden, or it is when I read a bit in a praised German novel about Alexander von Humboldt, or ...

June 7. SSC Scholarship programme.

2010-07-16T09:11:00.000+03:00

At the Saigon Children's Charity Kimberly takes time for us and we have an interesting meeting discussing spontaneous volunteering. I am proud that they have arranged to meet in the conference room with us! Feeling some bit important - we are all human.

They have a scholarship program supporting children of poor families with basic need packages and school supplies. The program is well thought trough. For example, they don't give money to the families because it would often fflow into the alcohol budget of the father. I like the program and suggest we support three secondary grade children through this program. Charity Travel made easy! This way we don't have to contribute our experience, the program is almost as good as it can be and all we have to do is donate to it. The person in charge of the scholarship program gives us fact sheets about three secondary grade children. Our participation would ensure to stay in school this year, and hopefully get a better chance than their parents have had.
I mention them to Jean-Michel, who is coming to Cambodia for possible cooperation and feel a networker. That is very addictive, mind you. Before you know you want to connect everybody with everybody, exponentally many links buzzing in my head feeling their potential second-grade connections going out like hundreds of invisible threads and they all have connections too. Danger is that the feeling is mere hyperness and the temperament isn't controlled by concrete, reflected upon thick real-life experience but by abstract mental schemes taking us away from the source of compassion, understanding, love, humanity and towards the preposterous installation of the pure in heavens above, the freaking trinities and divinities and Gödelian metaspheres.

June 6. We didn't Miss Saigon.

2010-07-12T09:55:00.001+03:00

Forget to tell you we took an overnight train last night. This time, we arrive in Ho Chi Minh city, formerly known as Saigon, and I insist on walking a bit first, before we realize that we are lost and take a taxi to the Gecko bar, a place in the center where there would be a couchsurfing event that night. Yeon recognizes where we are and after a short walk we start to connect with this city. We land in The Coffee Bean where we pass the whole morning having breakfast and working on our computers. When I feel like my ears are steaming like my amygdala intended to make another Latte Macchiato, I know it's time to go. Fortunately, we have found our Cause on the map, and also have an idea where to look for accomodation.
And so we walk on to the office of Saigon Children's Charity, not realizing that it's a Sunday. We are surprised by heavy rain once again, but we make it. We can come back on Monday. Our sunday ends with a walk through HCMC, and we find a backstreet guesthouse with a very friendly owner. Clean sheets and a hot shower do good after so many overnight trains.

June 5. Three lakes.

2010-07-12T09:54:00.000+03:00

As our original motorcycle fails to start, we are offered another one and go for a ride to the waterfall with the three lakes, a famous guidebook hotspot of the area and something we just feel like doing today.

The road! I have never been a roady [often masculine, s.one who loves the road], but we have this wonderful experience on this quiet coastal highway in central Vietnam...

We take a wonderful dip in the third lake, next to a natural pool where a group of loud Vietnamese is bathing. This is our little paradise today, Adam and Eve it...

We are surprised by the rain and head back. We find shelter on the porch of the tourist information center and the drizzle has entirely stopped by the time we get back on our motorbike and swing along the same coastal highway again. Lunch is delicious. A plate of fresh crabs, sold by the kilo!

June 4. Nha Trang's godly seafood.

2010-07-12T09:53:00.000+03:00

In Nha Trang our day starts with a coffee in a friendly bar opposite the train station. We have seen a few western tourists getting off the train here indicating that this town is indeed one of the major tourist attractions of Vietnam. We want to hang out here and take a short break. In the internet we look up a map of the town and soon realize that we can walk to where the action is. So we do, and drop our backpacks on the fourth floor of a guesthouse that also rent motorbikes. We rent a motorbike and ride it to the hospital in order to remove Yeon's stitches. We pay about one dollar to the friendly staff in the hospital. Then we mount our moto again and continue towards the flashy cablecar connecting the mainland with a resort island. We do not take that cablecar, but decide to ride back to the beach. It starts to rain, an annoying drizzle that takes the pleasure of our ride, and we go back into town, to the sheraton. In the hotel we use the bathroom and ask the friendly clerk about good seafood restaurants. Bingo! He points it out on the map and we ride to a local restaurant tucked away in the curve of a small street.
And they do serve delicious seafood. We have a plate of shells and it is godly.

June 3. For stories about Hue, not here.

2010-07-12T08:04:00.001+03:00

We visit the old city of Hue. Since this is a typical torist attraction and unlikely to generate any other story that what you will find by looking for Hue, I will pragmatically change the subject.

And why not? He has been lecturing about reality and related concepts for over fifteen years now. What withheld him from jumping on Gaya's tempting offer to travel to Africa together, have a lot of sex and use their fortune to give the poorest, most miserable creatures, the shadow creatures as he called them? He couldn't shoot back immediately, with the precision and hostile contempt he had a decade ago.
"Do you even know what a mortgage costs these days?" leaving the conclusion of involuntary sedentariness to her. Or
"I on the other hand, do have a job." could silence half a generation. Or

"I am not a professional", his personal favorite.
He turned away his eyeballs and thought of all those excuses. They had lost their glory, they seemed bleak voiceless birds to him now. He turned his eyeballs the other way, peeped through the eyelashes. What if
"Okay I'll go." It seemed to short, to surreal. After all, he had lectured about reality and related concepts. He looked at her, she had taken a waiting position and a glass of water he had forgotten to offer her.
"Well?" she cut the silence in a gentle way, as if she wanted the shreds to be salonfähig. He sighed, obviously, and then blurted out

We board the train to Nha Trang with just enough snacks to keep us going.

June 2. It's good to be neurotic.

2010-07-12T08:03:00.000+03:00

The bus is not allowed to cross the border. We have already crossed though and begin to miss our luggage that we have left in the vehicle. After two hours, passengers get impatient and some attempt to walk back. I suspect the bus driver to have betrayed us and to be selling the contents of our backpacks to dodgy dealers by now. I inhale and exhale until I can't stand it and my neurotic self takes over. I march back into Laos, leaving my passport with some friendly border guards. I quickly find the bus which is occupied by several passengers with their feet up and cigarettes fuming. My look grimly skims their faces as I wade to the back of the bus to get our belongings. Everything is there. I start walking back. With two and a half backpacks my payload looks pretty serious and I am saluted accordingly by the oncoming banana merchants. Freed from the bus, we start looking for alternative transportation and we find a family that is kind enough to make some money off of us by transporting us to Hue along with their household.

Hue, once the capital of Vietnam, tourist town where they are preparing a wonderful show, we have arrived at the right time. We find accomodation in the google hotel, a sterile guesthouse with friendly staff. We walk to the train station and buy our tickets to Nha trang, then have two glasses of sugar cane juice each before we go back to sleep.

June 1. Stay another day...

2010-07-12T08:00:00.001+03:00

On our extra day we visit Peuan Mit again, have a nice cup of coffee there and I donate what is left in kip to their program. That is a no-brainer for travelers, of course. Whatever you have left IS part of your budget so don't come with "I don't have money" it won't work not with me.

We also stop by at bigbrothermouse (remember, that project with the a-hole in Luang Prabang), a beautiful initiative carried out by a harsh antisocial expat living in Luang Prabang by the name of Sascha Alyson. I visited him at his office there and instead of a warm welcome (I wanted to donate 250$ to his project) he told me I could look at the website. Later, more people confirmed that this man behaved oddly, and I was relieved. At least it wasn't me. But having experienced it perfide owner, I wasn't going to avoid his interesting initiative, increasing literacy in rural Laos by installing libaries in village schools. I went in and put our suggestion in the suggestion box. "Work together with 1kgmore". Would Sascha Alyson be thankful? A propos, you can visit their website www.bigbrothermouse.com, it really IS a great initiative!

At five pm there's a bus to Hue in Vietnam. We would love to visit Savannaketh on the way, but time decides against it. A thoughtful end to this post, combining literate trash and philosophical sprinkle: It's us who decide against it not Chronos, it's priority not the pendulum.

May 31. Worst War crimes ever?

2010-07-12T07:59:00.000+03:00

Cornflakes and coffee, and it's already ten. Lazy bastards, you think. Where's the early morning gymnastics, the 2-mile-walk, the 150 pushups and the rigor-vigor?

Anyway, we visit COPE today and have a good look at the museum that displays handmade prostheses, we are talking about wooden leg, cast iron pparts nailed together with rusty nails, old bottles turned into a cast and wooden sticks. There was a man who used his homemade leg for thirty years before he received a real fitting prosthesis from COPE. They have a huge mirror with a leg in front of it where you can lean on with your knee, looking at yourself as a cripple. This makes us realize the dramatic changes in self-perception (and self-confidence) people have when the lose a leg overnight. Also on display are 'bombies', the contents of a clusterbomb that disperse over a huge area. And the big fife hundred pounders. More than 500,000 missions were flown during those eight miserable years of warcrime. It still outrages me, I mean the US should pay 100,000,000,000,000 to Laos for a start and then apologize every single minute for what they have done. Unlike in Vietnam, fighter pilots could just dispose their load at wish and did so to get rid of the frustrating restrictions in Vietnam. They bombed everything that moved. And now, thirty years later, millions of deadly bombies are scattered along the Ho Chi Minh trail and in other large areas of the country. Some areas are so saturated that in every village you find someone missing a leg - or a close relative. We also watch a video about clearing the UXO's, starring a former Australian soldier who teaches a team of locals how to deal with the rusty old bombs.

Their donating concept is brilliant: you can donate a leg for 50 dollars. It cost 50 dollars to produce a leg prosthesis. We donate four legs and a "brick in the wall", another great fundraising technique. They have a wall with virtual (plastic) bricks with the logos of sponsors on them. We have learned a lot and are happy when we return to the city.

We have to return the motorbike, and we bring our luggag to the center. We have to move on once again, and so we buy a bus ticket to Vietnam, but then I realize my visa is only valid from June 2nd, so we change the date. We have to stay another day, and we follow the book. There is a guidebook "stay another day" an every visitor to Laos should use it!

May 30. Volleyball in rural Laos.

2010-07-12T07:57:00.000+03:00

It is so nice to have 100cc of boiling hot metal shafts between my legs, that I decide to rent a motorbike in the afternoon and tour around Vientiane. We take the main highway north (direction Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang) with the option of taking a dirttrack to a beautiful waterfall. An option that we miss, since we take another sideroad and reach some villages where they are not accustomed to foreigners visiting. We decide to stop at some point and play volleyball with a group of youth. We are all laughing, having a great time.

At 8pm we meet Ly and a couple from New Zealand at the central fountain, the most obvious meetingplace in town. Chris and Marieke have interesting travel stories to share, and are very interested in our concepts and the tips we could give about volunteering and money-making your way around Europe and Korea. They return the favor by pointing out some terrific places on NZ north island. All this is done against the backdrop of the wooden patio of our restaurant, and we are immersed in the fresh air and mellow silence of backstreet Vientiane. It is a memorable evening - this is what memories are made of.
We zoom back to Ly's place on our hired motorbike and sleep well.

May 29. Borrowing vintage bike.

2010-07-12T07:55:00.002+03:00

Shaun, a friendly Australian guy living here offers us his little vintage motorbike in the morning, and we gladly accept that enhancement of our mobility.

We will be taking that green bike to the friendship bridge and back today. Not that there's much to see - the friendship bridge is essentialy a concrete corridor secured by grim fences - but the ride was nice. It is also a tribute to Dennis Hopper. I read today that he died and recall the easy rider sentiment, even though I've never known it myself. On the way back from the friendship bridge we take a different route and almost get lost in the outskirts of Vientiane, until we decide to follow the flow of traffic and are finally able to identify some buildings. Blabla. It was a nice ride. The color of the bike was green, and also white.

May 28. What is ten dollars?

2010-07-12T07:55:00.000+03:00

We have a brunch with a German lady, Dagmar, who tells us her compelling story: she is editing and publishing an autobiographical book about a Lao monk. It's what keeps her here, and what keeps us listening. It is really nice and I hope she will publish the book.

I pick up my Vietnamese visa and with it rush to the Cambodian embassy. It is extremely hot today, especially for a stamp collector. At the Cambodian embassy they tell me to come back on Monday because they are only doing express service today. I can wait and want to save those ten dollars. Ten dollars! Imagine what zou can do with it. Beautiful afternoons in posh grand cafés with wifi, 10kg of rice for an orphan home, hundreds of minutes of international phone calls over skype, enough white paint for a large wall, tools for a street shoe polisher, essential medication for a week for a refugee, a busticket from Nairobi to Kisumu, two soccer balls for a children's center...

The photos shows Lao whiskey!

May 27. COPE-ing with UXOs

2010-07-12T07:44:00.000+03:00

Our arrival in Vientiane should be different than Vientiane, I think, and stick obstinately to my idee fixe when we arrive at the bus station. NO tuktuk, we are FINE, we know our way around. We walk a couple of miles and indeed, reach central Vientiane and lose about an hour. We make ourselves comfortable in one of the affordable hotels alongside the Mekong river, freshen up, and I head out to the Vietnamese embassy for a visa. I hitch a ride with a very coooollll German guz in a Landrover, gee ce type a traversé le monde entier! He has been everywhere and Laos was a stopover for him to arrange visas for Russia, Mongolia, and Kasachstan. He has been on his way for two years doing what? Filming a documentary that he is trying to seell to German media houses. The truck plus equipment cost a fortune. Anyway, he kindly gives me a ride to the embassy since he knows where "they all are". The American embassy I had just seen must have been a fata morgana, I learn from him. I take things for granted when they come from experienced people. So we chat and chat and finally get to the Cambodia embassy. The Vietnamese embassy was nowhere near there, and in fact I had been right in the beginning. Here I am, a guy who has navigated the whole wide freakin' world can't find his way around in the quiet, orderly town of Vientiane... I stick out my thumb and hitch a ride to the real Vietnamese embassy, where I can buy the relevant sticker in my passport for 50 dollars.

I also visit "COPE", an NGO supporting people with disabilities, in particular victims of unexploded ordnance (UXO) that outrages me and every other human mind who knows about this. Their exhibition is really well done and very informative. I decide to support it and will return on Monday with Yeon.

At night, we go to a presentation about the role of women in Laos. It is what I have expected, and I enjoy it. What else? I brushed my teeth, washed my hands, and we stay at a little hostel facing the Mekong. Whatever! Vientiane is really calm and laid-back.

28
We have a brunch with a German lady, Dagmar, who tells us her compelling story: she is editing and publishing an autobiographical book about a Lao monk. It's what keeps her here, and what keeps us listening. It is really nice and I hope she will publish the book.

May 26. A very nice man.. not!

2010-07-12T07:43:00.000+03:00

Rather than niceness, it are the events of flat bluntness that stick to a traveler's memory. I have this experience this morning at "bigbrothermouse". This is a small ngo aiming to increase literacy in rural Laos by publishing and distributing bilingual children's books. It is and remains a wonderful concept, and so we visit their main office in Luang Prabang (they are also represented in Vientiane). A modest house not far from the main tourist street serves as the nerve center of bigbrothermouse, and the owner, the infamous Mr. Alyson, lives here. I walk up to the counter with Yeon and introduce ourselves and our project. We are asked to wait at a long table, where a few foreign volunteers (an Australian girl I believe) read English books together with local kids. After a while, Mr. Alyson comes down and we introduce ourselves to him. Conversation goes something like this:
"We are charity travel, and supporting charitable causses in every town we travel to.."
-"What are ya doing here?"
"We would like to support your bigbrothermouse foundation with a donation of about 300 dollars."
-"And..? What do you want from me?"
"Perhaps you could tell us if there are any book parties scheduled so that we could chip in?"
-"That information is all on the internet."
"I've seen the website, it is very nice!"
-"All the information you need is on the internet. I AM NOT GOING TO SPELL OUT OUR WEBSITE FOR YOU."

He literally said that, and walked off. Here is someone who wants to support your charity and you don't even take one minute to tell them if you have current projects.. The guy has mental problems, I conclude, and sadly this is confirmed later when we talk to a friendly German expat in Vientiane. It serves very adequately for my personal anger management program, as I teach myself not to get back to Mr. Alyson, not to punch him in the nose or write him nasty emails. Rather than that, I stick to my initial judgement that his project is a genuine good cause, and call people to ignore Mr. Alyson's crappy rudeness and take bigbrothermouse at face value.

After the visit, in which I thus saved myself 250 bucks, we walk around to experience the strange, surreal atmosphere of this tourist enclave. It is nice, even though we miss the famous temples, the elephant rides, the whitewater rafting, the tubing, and the drinking sprees.

We book the overnight bus to Vientiane, and wrap up our day with an afternoon stroll.

May 25. Hey. Pssst. Motorbike?

2010-07-12T07:41:00.001+03:00

Countless curves await us on the eight-hour busride to Luang Prabang. The scenery is pretty as we expected, and makes up for our diet of dry cookies and sodas. I remember having a can of beer during the break, but apart from that, don't expect any events from the busride.
Arriving at Luang Prabang comes with the expected dose of tourist stress.
"Hey, pssst. Motorbike? Tuktuk?"
-"No thank you..."
"Which hotel where ya staying sir? I bring u there very cheeeeep."
-"No, we're fine..."

"Motorbike?"
I am stubborn and Yeon has to persuade me to hop on a tuktuk to move towards the heart of this touristic mecca. There are tourists everywhere and handicraft markets as far as you can see. We stroll around the night market where handicraft and textiles are displayed in such abundance that a naive visitor might doubt Laos' poverty. I don't buy anything here, probably because I feel a bit overwhelmed by all the carvings and batiks.

We stay in a backstreet guesthouse, in (vain?) attempt to support a struggling Lao family rather than an expat nouveau-riche. The staff of the obviously family-owned business is very friendly; the boy who shows us our room is preparing for some school exams.

May 24. Of motorbikes and hospitals.

2010-07-11T21:16:00.000+03:00

We almost miss our morning ride to Namtha. I have the bus tickets and the bus (there are only a few daily) stops at Bryan and Leila's house early. We rush to the streets and take our seats in the crammed minibus. Quick handshakes and best-of-luck constitute our goodbye to these wonderful people. I want to move on to Luang Prabang, but overestimated the bus frequency on the tourist trail. We stay in another guesthouse and book tickets for tomorrow.

Today, we rent a motorbike with the innocent intention to do some sightseeing here in Luang Namtha. We ride around and quickly find out that there are not so many roads we could travel on. In a silent backstreet, Yeon tries the motorbike but unfortunately operates it with the wrong reflex, making the Honda leap forward in first gear and then throw her on the asphalt. It's a flesh wound, and she's bleeding a lot. A woman sees us and takes Yeon to the hospital, giving me the opportunity to follow her on the motorbike - a stressful yet effective way to get to know a vehicle. I still prefer those Honda bikes if I rent a light motorcycle. Anyway, we rushed through the quiet streets of Luang Namtha towards the small local hospital with Yeon holding her arm tight to stop the bleeding.
At the hospital we can explain ourselves and a young doctor will stitch the wound. When I walk to the paying counter I suddenly see a familiar face: Bryan is here. They came to the hospital too for an x-ray, and the unfortunate conclusion was that the wrist was broken, and the couple would travel to Bangkok for decent treatment. Such a coincidence! When I leave that hospital, I am full of mirth.
With Yeon's wound stitched, the bike brought back, we steal into one of the wifi-enabled restaurants and indulge in the internet.

May 23. Easy bashing German state aid.

2010-07-11T20:26:00.000+03:00

We have a delicious noodle soup for breakfast in a place that looks like what you would expect of a Lao eatery: the wooden terrace was built in the field, and farmers are ploughing in sight. This valley has always played an important cultural role as many different hilltribes interact here. Even today, local schoolchildren belong to numerous different tribes and they have to learn Lao in order to receive an education. And then there's English, perhaps the most important of their subjects since it enables them to communicate with the world.
Our day gets along calmly, I live the Lao rhythm now and enjoy it. I don't even remember the deeds I might or might not have done, the ride to the market, the afternoon nap, the rearranging of the center's bookshelves.

We have dinner with a German couple, and I seize the opportunity to talk German again. The man gives a sceptical account of German state-organized development aid in this region. The GTZ (for technological cooperation worldwide) paid millions for a rubber plantation to create jobs for poor Laotians, while Chinese entrepeneurs came in later, invested some money and set up a more profitable plantation without any aid money. They installed electricity and the result was Lao people flaunting their laziness watching bootlegged Thai sex movies. The efficiency of those aid millions is very low, not to say that it's counter-productive. I've heard similar stories about the GTZ and the DED many times, and I think some of it must be true. I'll try to get hold of them back home although I heard they are a select and conceited club. Anyway, I crafted my own concept of doing something good, and yes it IS a delight that I am not dependent on proto-cynical overly bureaucratic government services for that.
We talk about our donation to the butterfly children and the school before we all go to bed. We need some rest am I writing this boring diary about a terrific time I can't believe it... so rest because we will leave early tomorrow. We got our call to move on, towards Luang Prabang and Vientiane, following the common trail to save time. So what, everybody does this. Read everybody's blog. Anyway, to get some words in, the butterfly center in Muang Sing we supported is really nice and quite unique. You don't want to know how much trouble the US couple had to get their allowance to live there. So it is really great that they aren't retiring Thailand-style but empowering the local community and enabling many of the kids to go to college. It would be nice when everybody would do that, wouldn't it?

May 22. Paper mash.

2010-07-11T20:03:00.000+03:00

The accident could have been avoided. It was my idea to do paper maché, and I feel a little bit guilty about it. The kids gather at the porch as usual and when we let them storming in they are enthousiastic as always. Yeon prepares a bowl of glue and we start dipping little pieces of paper into it. We are going to make little monsters or dragons - the kids' fantasy has free reign in this domain. They glue and paste and fumble to their hearts' content when suddenly our hostess Leila slips and falls headlong on the floor. It takes a while before I realize what happened; then there is ice and we arrange to go to the hospital asap. The nearest medical service is provided in Luang Namtha, almost two hours by bus, and if it turns out to be broken, she'd have to travel to Bangkok to have it casted. Meanwhile, the children have made an enormous mess of the paper that sticks to every other stalk of grass. We slowly clean it up and tell the children to get back for the night event: a movie.

At night, we show the movie Ice Age again (the perfect children's movie, enjoyed through Charity Travel by hundreds of kids in Palestine, Kenya, Mozambique, India, Cambodia), projecting it on the ceiling with our little gadget. The kids lie on the floor watching and giggling - they love it. I realize that Bryan and Leila are doing good work here supporting these children with scholarships and a possibly much brighter future. After the movie the kids go home and I crawl under the mosquitonet too.

May 21. Jump around.

2010-07-11T19:36:00.000+03:00

We have found a beautiful place. We stay under the mosquito net long this morning, before enjoying an extended breakfast, as far as the reconstruction goes. The house is really quite, despite the main road that crosses the fertile valley and should connect to China and Thailand. The local market in Luang Namtha does offer products from those countries because the cargo drivers aren't allowed to enter each other's countries, we are told. Our bedroom is next to the community room, where the children come after school, almost every day, to receive additional training (computer, English) and hang out. It means a lot to them, and we love how the project is organized by Bryan and Leila. Yeon has a call to order the shelves and does so most impressively.
Children are already waiting at the little porch in front of the house, and when we come out they almost jump on us. What have we got?

From earier occassions we remember a few games and activities we decide we can do here too. To our initial surprise, it all goes very well: the kids are concentrated and like the yoga exercises, aerobic jumping and head-and-tail snake game that we improvise. We have done some shopping earlier and give them a soccer- and a volleyball. In the course of the session we learn a lot from the children we can take with us on our travels and apply in other places.
At night, we see a Californian high school's performance of the musical Les misérables on DVD, an astonishing achievement I think, (and a great way to introduce adolescents to art, I can't help myself thinking). My mind drifts off to what we are planning for the future: a mobile (puppet)theater traveling to remote villages in the poorest part of the world, performing for marginalized kids while introducing basic services to their communities. But that's another story. I sleep well that night, happy about being in Laos where finding a charitable cause is a lot easier than in China.

May 20. Butterfly children.

2010-07-11T19:32:00.000+03:00

The bus to Muang Sing leaves early in the morning, and after a nearly two hour ride through the staggering subtropical beauty of a national park, the road winds down into the big valley of Muang Sing. This region has the most different ethnicities of Laos, and is currently being discovered by travelers and nonprofits alike. We jump off the bus at the gas station and walk back until we see a friendly man waving at us.

It's Brian, who runs a children's center here in Muang Sing together with his wife, the pediatrician Leila. We are invited and over lunch introduce our project. We learn that Leila has traveled extinsively through Laos visiting hospitals and education pediatricians. It is really great

Leila has prepared several delicacies and we have dinner together.

We watch the movie "Shine" about the genius pianist David Helfgott together and marveled at the performance of the lead actor, which had earned him an Oscar back in the days when Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were still together. The making and breaking of a musical genius briliantly portrayed, thanks to the superb supporting role of Armin Müller-Stahl who plays the part of the tyrannic father. At some points, the movie comes dangerously close to the usual genius-clichés, but the acting could just compensate for that.

We are offered our own room and sleep comfortably under a large mosquito net. Such a good life.

May 19. Lao mores.

2010-06-28T08:17:00.001+03:00

We cross the border without any difficulties. The Chinese authorities stamp exit in my passport and we walk to the Lao side, a shack with a line of waiting tourists in front of it. I study the government poster of do's and don'ts in Laos, learn about the status of the monks, the sad occurences of child prostitution and the absolute faux-pas of putting your feet higher than your head or anyone's head. The poster has distracted me from the task at hand, and the officer calls me. A passport photo and 37 dollars please, and there is your sticker. I shuffle on and cash in some more official nods and smiles - I am in Lao DPR.
A short attempt to hitchhike and the quick realization that busfares are dirt cheap here. We get to Luang Namtha, where we contact our first cause in Lao from a nice coffee house.
The food they serve is too salty, but the hypertension somehow keeps us glued to our machines and dawn is setting in when we decide to spend one night in Luang Namtha first.

There are plenty of cheap guesthouses in this town, that seems to emulate the tourist paradise of Luang Prabang eight shaky bus-hours to the south. We pick one at random and enjoy too much luxury for too little again. Our prospect for tomorrow is good: we will finally be able to support a cause with our hands. I dream of that.

May 18. Crossing into Laos.

2010-06-28T07:02:00.000+03:00

We get up early to take what will be our penultimate Chinese bus to Mengla. It's still a long ride down, but when we finally reach the border town of Mohan, and are in sight of the border post, we high-five like two Elvisses leaving the building. However, the border is "closed" after five o'clock, and we cannot possibly exit China.
"This is a free country" I want to shout in the smooth face of the composed soldier, but I realize that is an odd thing to say here, so I return his nod, and utter instead:
"When can we go to Laos then?"
-"Tomorrow eight o'clock."
"Thanks" I mumble while, at the same time, simultaneously, walking off.

That means we have to stay a final night in Yunnan, as a sacrifice to China. The guesthouse is nice though and accepts dollars (I have changed our remaining yuan in Lao kip already). A quiet night between clean white sheets and I bid farewell to China.

I think about human rights violation at the border. We should be allowed to leave any time we like, no country can play hotel California on its visitors. Maybe the excuse is that the other side, Laos, doesn't have the capacity to let people in outside office hours. Failing to let people enter your country is not a violation of their right to free movement, as is denying them exit. Anyway, I feel this last night in China as if I am in prison, but it's a rather nice prison with color tv. We have some local supper before we nestle in the white sheets of our last Chinese guesthouse.

A system could bio-engineer its users for reasons of efficiency. Why taking the long detour of Pavloving children with certain patented fats and amino acids, msg, cheesy proteins and sugar if you can manufacture them with a craving for those things that garantee the optimum of your profit? It's just a matter of switching some genes here and there, and instead of the need to venture aggresively into new markets, your system could count on a stable market share.

May 17. Ordinary day.

2010-06-28T07:00:00.000+03:00

Early morning we move to yet another town called Jinchang. We hope to get back to the main trail heading south towards the Laos-border. The road is beautiful again, and induces appetite for more.

We try to hitchhike here, but my stuck-out thumb is either not understood or all the drivers on the supposed main royal highway to China were locals who wouldn't get a mile away from their domiciles. A big Lao truck's roaring engine sparks some home, but the driver gestures that he is traveling in the opposite direction. Car after car passes, but the ones that stop are clandestine taxi drivers asking ridiculous rates to get to the bordertown. The sun sets slowly and I lower my thumb. We are stuck and in need of a guesthouse.

May 16. Oh those rice terraces...

2010-06-27T13:37:00.000+03:00

Windows of Yuanyang is a community shop selling handicraft run by the large Christian NGO World Vision. They cannot accept donations of any kind, because of the system the big host ngo imposes on them. I perfectly understand the need to eredicate corruption, but I simply can't deny that I feel the unnecessary burden of bureauracy resting upon my shoulders. Here we are, a small informal ngo, just willing to support one poor family with a scholarship or a means of income generation, and we are being denied. There are not even forms to fill out, no way to cooperate, even though the women at the handicraft shop are very helpful and friendly. The are just not allowed their independence, because World Vision deems it more transparent and effective when all vital decisions are made from behind a desk.
We walk around the pretty town of Yuanyang and have breakfast amidst a group of age Frenchmen. I walk off to the market and take some photos of merchants and children - this place is teeming with life. Since we can't really support the organization actively, we end up buying some of their handicrafts (I try to insist on paying more, but they have to give back the exact change). We bridge a few lazy hours in the small coffee room above the handicraft shop. I have already bought us onward bus tickets.

Then we continue to Lushun. It will take us a few more hours and from the window of our bus we get a glance of the brilliant rice terraces. I understand why people travel here "just" to take photos. We shoot a few, not entirely satisfactory, but hey, we also bought a pack of postcards with really pretty views of that rice paddies.

The guesthouse in Lushun gives us a nice treatment. Very good value you get in southern China. Living like a god in China, it could become a proverb some day.

May 15. Oversleepernight bus.

2010-06-27T13:07:00.000+03:00

We still try to do something here in Kunming, but things don't get easier overnight. Sadly, the experience of organizations hanging up the phone, or offices hidden in some impossible to find backstreet remains associated to China non-governmental organizations. But of course! The government is doing everything here. We've learned that in Chengdu and wonder what we are doing here.
We have a last straw: the "windows on Yuanyang", a beautiful destination for travellers and photographers in a quest to capture one of the most stunning agricultural sights: the ricefields around the hill village of Yuan yang. Now this is supposed to be a small organization that helps needy families and enables their children proper education to get out of the circle of poverty.

We check out and drag our backpacks through the heat. A last minute arrangement blesses us with the company of another CS member who joins us for lunch and tells us about his volunteering experience. It's a nice exchange and the highlight of the day; we have to take an urban bus, wait at a pole for another one to get to the south bus station.

The bus station is huge, and a friendly English speaking woman helps us to locate our sleeper bus to Yuanyang. This is the first time for me to be in a bus with berths rather than seats. There is not much space to get cosy, but the road is fine and we arrive without bruises.

May 14. They have moved three years ago.

2010-06-06T07:14:00.000+03:00

The guidebooks are right: Kunming is the most relaxed metropolis in China. We hope to encounter better luck in finding small-scale charities here, and gahter a list of phone numbers and addresses. After a while we manage to make an appointment with an ecological ngo called greenwatershed, and we figure out that it is actually just across the street from where we are living. But first we have breakfast in a very place, and we order some dishes by pointing at them, a task not too easy because we had to make clear exactly which dish we desired without dipping our finger in another guest's bowl. We ended up eating something very bitter and greasy, along with a bowl of sweet doughnuts that were big enough to point at on the other customer's table. Despite the unusual taste I eat up and feel strong enough to tackle our task.
With the help of a local, we find the correct building and walk up seven floors to the roof, where we see a little office. We ask the few curious Chinese about greenwatershed, and they think for a while. Then the answer comes:
"They have moved three years ago..."

-"Three years... and where are they now?"
"In another building, about twenty minutes by bus."
It is darn hot and we don't feel like pursueing this any further (why don't they care about publishing the correct address on these websites, 3 years after moving? I think, do they have a PR person?), so we hop on a bus that takes us to the Hump hostel. We check in and it's business as usual. We are surrounded by cheerful backpacking youth and a friendly bearded Californian coin collector with a consistently mellow appearance. We tell him about our concept and he seems to like it.
Is it impossible to find a supportable ngo here, are is it just us having bad luck? I call PEAC, a very promising initiative fighting pesticide use in China, and they hang up on me - several times. Some other foundations cannot be reached either, and we end up walking around Kunming.

May 13. Kunming spirit.

2010-06-05T15:38:00.000+03:00

Kunming is just another metropole, yet decidedly less intense and crowded than Chengdu and, from what we've heard, Chongqing. We do what we are good at and sit down in a dark coffee place, waiting for our couchsurfing host, slurping black coffee as we bend over our tiny computer screens.

Julia, our host, works for a small ngo established by a German with strong ideals, but for the moment they have run out of projects. She really helps us in finding an alternative ngo that let us support them hands-on, and she comes up with a number of interesting alternatives. PEAC, an ngo that aims to abolish pesticide use in agriculture doesn't pick up the phone. It's a pity because they seem very promising.
We have dinner together in a crowded place with a very low ceiling. The food tastes really delicious. And then we went home. And then we did sleepy-sleepy. Okay, I know what you think, where has the spirit gone? This guy is enjoying himself in Kunming and so what? You're right, a little more of that vibrant straight from the spinal chord writing would do good. Or at least an impressionist description of the park we visit, with lely-covered ponds and people to stroll between them. You could rent a duckwaggon to wheel and waddle your way through the winding park roads. About the diligent butterflies roaming the flowerbeds and the shining pagoda replicas crammed with merchandise. I take a picture of three women on a bench and like the composition, not the technique though. I would have loved to shoot this one with a very serious lense.

May 12. We live in a beautiful cartoon.

2010-05-24T20:55:00.000+03:00

I buy train tickets, then ride the tricycle to a village, a couple of miles north of Lijang. The thing has only one gear, but works well. It is tough to ride uphill, wind from the front, Yeon in the back, but also great fun. In the village, we can't find anyone in need of a trike, and decide to wheel back into town.

Back in town, we donate our vehicle to a merchant who has come to sell berries with only a wreckages of a little bicycle. This gift will make her happy, we think, and as these things go, our own happiness is instantaneous when I hand over the keys to the merchant to the amazement - and amusement - of the bystanders.

The sleeper train between Lijang and Kunming is a new model and gives us a good night's rest. Just before bording something funny happens. We have forgotten our snacks in the taxi and Yeon runs the reclaim the peanuts that are ours. She did, however, overlook the low iron chain separating parking lots and stumbled over it. Her tumble was so cartoon-like funny that she laughed for hours after the fact. I love her for that.

May 11. The TRIKE.

2010-05-24T20:47:00.001+03:00

Lijang offers what we need the next morning. We walk to a grand hotel and feel grand as well, when several employees do their best not only to seat us and offer us a Western breakfast, but also to call a taxis that can take us to a tricycle store. We use their internet for several hours, and look for couchsurfing contacts in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodja, Thailand, Malaysia, and Bali, do our correspondence and leave the place with red eyes eager to DO something.

But what good can we do without ngo's, without language, on a limited budget? I decide to make a dream come true. I always wanted to buy a tricycle (a 3-wheeled cycle-cart for adults), use it to cycle around the countryside and enjoy the view, and then - donating it to someone who needs it. It can considerably enhance the livelihood of an empoverished merchant, let's not forget that. And we don't need to be all professional and statistical all the time. There is no harm in giving a gift to the right people. Yeah, right. But how to find them? Here is how we did it.

It was a great experience and I feel the concept has potential. Why don't you buy your gear and gadgets locally and turn it into a sustainable gift to render your goodbye to a country that has grown dear to you, huh?

May 10. Very scenic busride.

2010-05-24T20:43:00.000+03:00

The busride through the countryside of southern Sichuan and northern Yunnan, connecting Xichang and Lijang via the Lugu Hu lake, is long but extremely scenic. It takes from 7:40 in the morning until about 10pm to cover the distance of about 300 miles through beautiful hills, mountain passes, and alongside the majestic Lugu Hu. Sitting in a not too spacious bus almost from dusk till dawn would be nobody's favorite passtime - unless the scenery is really splendid. And believe me, part of the way that is the case here. The road winds around green hills practically all the time, allowing us passengers to stun at one of China's most impressive lakes.
Something happened on the way and we stop near a mountain pass at a little village. We get off the bus and wave at the locals. Some of them are waving back, others are too busy carrying a young pick into the barn where it might await, well, we all know. I try to ask the policeman what has happened and slam my fists together with an inquiering expression, to indicate a frontal collision. He nods and I confidently turn to Yeon, "there has been an accident."

Our involuntary break doesn't last long, and the rest of the way to Lijang we don't experience any difficulties. The town itself is nice and only two hundred meters walking suffice to end up in just the right family-run guesthouse for as little as 40 yuan (even though the sign said 280). I love com...nism.

May 9. Xichang.

2010-05-24T20:41:00.000+03:00

We are stuck in Xichang and tackle a rainy afternoon writing in a strange upper class restaurant, taking in only one shared latte for economical reasons. It's a strange place and we can imagine many a Chinese businessman coming here to show off his spendthrift to the members of his class. It stops raining later so we walk a few blocks up to a restaurant I have seen earlier, when I went to the bank. The place offers some nice dishes that we order by pointing at pictures (that did, alas, not include dumplings).
We stay in a local guesthouse with a stubborn lock on our door and a smelly lukewarm shared shower, but the family who runs the place makes up for everything, as always.

May 8. Summit Superlatives.

2010-05-23T18:16:00.000+03:00

We take the stairs.
Mount Emei treats us well. We intend to get up early and have breakfast with the monks, but I overhear the six am alarm and we don't make it to the porridge. We take in some breadlike buns and eggs salty like they were boiled in the Dead Sea. And then we take a bus all the way up the mountain. It would have been a twelve hour hike, according to Patrick the Local, but we don't have shoes nor shins to do that. There is a National Park entrance fee that accepts student cards (150/80 yuan per person as I write) but the summit, in good weather, is worth it. We are dropped of at a huge parking lot at 2400 meters (!), from where a stairs leads up to the cablecar station. This stairs is crowded and full of stalls offering local handicraft. We follow the crowd up, and see a man being carried up. The smiling man is young and totally healthy and plays with his camera while hoisted up by two sturdy carriers. There is a porter service that can take you all the way to the top for 280 yuan. A climb of more than 600 meters!
At the cablecar station we decide to continue walking, hoping the crowds would disappear on the more difficult path to the summit. There are indeed notably fewer people when we continue walking the stairs all the way up. It takes us good two hours to reach the summit. We have a few stops on the way and a cup of noodles. The full length of the two-hour 600 meter altitude hike is a concrete stairs. Mt. Emei, considered China's no. 1 mountain, surely is a world wonder of tourism. It's nice though, the stairs mean that you don't need special footwear.

When we arrive at the summit, we gaze at the giant golden Buddha statue which is the most magnificent I've seen (and I've seen a few). He (lord Buddha) sits comfortably on the highest peak overlooking the celestial landscape of clouds with the lesser peaks peeking through after the fog has cleared in daily recurrence. The statue has multiple heads and elephants everywhere. Inside is a place of worship with recesses for various Buddhist saints. We pray, loosely.

The fog is dissolving, leaving us and a horde of Chinese visitors awestruck as we gaze over the layers of clouds in the distance. This place is supposed to be especially nice at sunrise, and we have met brave visitors coming down while we were our way up, that must have enjoyed just that. The cablecar charges a little too much, so we decide to walk back. Another cup of noodles keeps us going, we take the busride back, get our luggage, and take a taxi to town. Patrick the Local helps us in the process and takes us to a very nice local restaurant. Good to know, otherwise we would have ended up in the Teddybear. And we all know what that means.
The sleeper train to Xichang is very comfortable; the "hard sleeper" class is all you need. Just make sure you hike long enough and have a beer or two, and a good night's sleep is garantueed.

May 7. Templestay.

2010-05-23T18:14:00.000+03:00

I first heard of the concept of templestay on a visit to Korea in 2005, and found the concept tempting ever since. I had never actually done it though, allowing it to grow into something very romantic in my mind. In wooden barracks I would sleep, in between monks in orange robes who would wake me up at 5 am to take a cold shower and meditate. There would be six hours of mandatory meditation every day, and no word should leave my lips. They would shave my head and initiate me with ceremonial ointments and acupuncture. There would be no sound after sunset, and vegan food. We would nod at each other and they would teach me how to carve highlights of the scripture. We would mount a holy summit every week and bring sacrifices to a Buddha throned in thin mountain air. I will end up sleeping in a temple complex today, but it will be a little different.

We are still in Chengdu. There are a number of ways to order breakfast in China. If you speak Chinese, just tell the waiter what you want to order. If you can only read, but not speak, just point at the menu and you'll get the right thing. If you can neihter read nor speak Chinese, take a pencil, hold it between thumb and index finger about 40 centimeters above the table, and move the menu sheet back and forth underneath it. Then drop the pencil onto the sheet and order the dish that has been marked by the dot. We try this in a local restaurant on the top floor of a mall in southern Chengdu and it gives us some plates of delicious dumplings and tasteless glutinous rice-soup.

After the random breakfast we take the bus to Emei, a pictoresque little hillside village and your perfect location to start a beautiful hike through gorgeous gorges up to the Golden Summit. The few people that live there will gladly direct you to the beginning of the ascend, a narrow abandoned path that curls its way up the magnificent spine. Come and be the first one to admire this natural splendour!

After a two-hour bus ride, we arrive in the megacity of Emei, where we feel a bit lost at first. Hitching a ride to the "entry" of the mountain seems not an option, but taxis are glad to take us. The base of the mountain is packed with shops, hotels, bars, and tourist buses. There is an open-air museum about the history of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism in China which we enjoy before walking to the Baoguo monastery. Patrick the Local has spotted me in the crowd and wants to give us some suggestions. Here's a guy that just wants to help out, no strings attached. He tells us he is a tourist guide and you can find him in the Lonely Planet. Why don't you guys stay in the monastery? Yes, why not? We follow him, pay for a simple but convenient room (the only inconvenience is the awkward lack of privacy that comes the lack of curtains), and prepare for dinner with the monks and other visitors. The staple is a bowl of rice and a plate of maize and green vegetables, not salty, not spicy, low in proteins and fat. I kind of like it and think of how much our diet influences our behaviour, and all those studies they are conducting about it and how a fastfood diet can ruin young lives. This food really keeps you calm, but you have to get used to it. I believe we find ourselves behind a spicy plate of chicken the next day, after climbing that mountain.

At night, we have a strange cup of tea in the restaurant street at the base of the mountain, that is now lit like a christmas lunapark with thousands of colored lights. We decide to go up Mt. Emei tomorrow.

May 6. Quake Relieve and One kg more

2010-05-23T18:12:00.002+03:00

We are still in Chengdu, but we don't want to leave without a Cause for our project. And that is where Peter Coff comes in. He explains us a lot about his Hong Kong based NGO Sichuan Quake Relief and we decide to wire our donation to him. He has gone through all the paperwork and it is still hard to get through all the checkpoints to reach the disaster zone, a trip he undertakes nearly every weekend. I respect him a lot. We tell our story and earn recognizing nods. We will write a short article about Quake Relief and showcase it as one of the ngo's in China that are "supporter friendly".

At night we meet Asgeir and two Chinese women working for ngo's to do some more networking. We have worked here all day and went out only for a quick noodle soup in a local restaurant. They tell us about the popular Chinese grassroots ngo "1kg more", simply encouraging (Chinese) travelers to take schoolbooks on their travels and hand them out to needy rural schools. The concept is working successfully for a couple of years already. A strong point is the low overhead: the organization consists essentially of the website, maintained by volunteers. Travelers read about rural schools and contact them individually. Given the fact that most airlines allow for thirty kg of check-in luggage, travelers could freight serious aid packages and on a minor detour from their sunny holiday destination, distribute it to the needy.
Asgeir, a Norwegian anthropologist on a quest to get to know all those interesting travelers, tells us a lot about South Asia and Bali, where he has been earlier. He lives in the other free room in Dhane's apartment and we have made friends with him the other day. We exchange travel tips and I must have seemed a bit conceited as I revealed entripid travelers' insider knowledge about Lapland, a Russian visa, Belarus bureaucracy, Kiev, Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, the Transsiberian, the Baltics, the Crimea. Well, the atmosphere is very nice and we take smiling pictures.