Category: Travels

I’ve been in San Agustin Oapan, so I haven’t been able to answer emails or read your blog or for that matter read MR.  In the two years since my last visit, I noticed or heard of the following changes:

1. There are now ten Mormons in town, whereas previously there had been two.

2. Immediately upon arrival, I saw two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on doors.

3. About half the teenage girls wear jeans rather than traditional dress; two years ago the percentage of girls with jeans was zero.

4. There was no rain this summer and hardly any corn was harvested.  Forty years ago this would have meant starvation but now it is a mere fluctuation in real incomes.  People buy more food from stores, albeit at higher expense.  By the way, this is one reason why the Oapan corn farmers do not seem worried about the importation of U.S. corn under NAFTA.

5. There is a construction boom and arguably a housing bubble, financed by what can only be called subprime loans.

6. The municipal building has a new foundation made out of cement; previously the foundation of the municipal building was an old Aztec pyramid.  There is no remaining sign of the pyramid.

7. The town was celebrating the change in the "fiscál," an office very roughly analogous to our secretary of the treasury.  The celebration consists of a procession of fifty old women and a few old men carrying around a large plastic statue of a saint on their shoulders, singing traditional songs and carrying candles, with various peso bills stapled to the saint.

8. Thirty-five years ago the trip down to the main road involved an arduous climb and then descent, usually with burro, lasting six to eight hours.  Ten years ago the trip down to the main road involved a slow four hour drive (but only 25 km) on a dirt road.  Come February, when the paving of the road is finished, it will be a 70-minute drive to the nearest Wal-Mart.

In 2005, the two state airlines – Mexicana and Aeroméxico – were hived off for privatisation and permits were granted for five new low-cost carriers. The following year, the number of air passengers grew by almost 12 per cent, more than in all the previous five years combined.  Flights from Mexico City to Cancún now can be had for less than $100. Previously it had been cheaper to fly to Cancún from New York.

The bad news is…

…huge swathes of the economy – beer, oil, soft drinks, cement, television, electricity and telephony to name a few – are still dominated by one or at most two big companies.

Legally protected companies for the most part, I might add.  If you are listing the major problems of Mexico, we have:

1. Drug trade and corruption and crime, all rolled into one big package.

2. Bad educational system for most of the country, and bad cultural norms for education.  Most people are literate but you don’t see many people reading.

3. State-sponsored monopolies.

Going back to the bright side, the numbers of the Mexican middle class continue to grow, grow, and grow.  The shopping malls in Puebla and Veracruz are excellent, and they are not just for a fair-skinned minority elite.  They are packed with middle class people, shopping, and turning Mexico into a middle class country.  It really is happening, and I see it more and more each time I visit.

Jeff, a Facebook friend, wrote on my Wall:

Which five German books should I read, before I return to Amerika [my translation]?

He seems to read German.  I will recommend: Goethe’s Faust, Rilke’s Duino Elegies or Sonnets to Orpheus, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Franz Kafka short stories (don’t forget "Ein Landarzt,"), and Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.  Non-fiction does seem to count for the query, although it would not crack my list of top five.  Schopenhauer tempts as well.  Do you have better ideas for him?

The LATimes has a blog, The Homicide Report, that covers murders in LA.  Here is one entry:

Timothy Johnson, 37, a black man, was shot multiple times at 939 E.
92nd Street in Watts at about 3:23 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 25, and died at
the scene. Police officers had received a "shots fired" call and found
him. He had been visiting friends in the area.

He had gone to a party that night, then had stopped on his way home
to socialize with friends outside. His shooters came by walking or
driving. He was hit multiple times. When officers arrived, he was
alone, dead on the ground, and the people who had been outside with him
had disappeared. A pit-bull puppy chained in the yard was curled on his
body.

The comments begin as you might expect from families and friends.

… The life of an African American Man in LA has proven to be a fight
till the death. I am struggling now as I sit here looking at your
picture. All the years we spent growing up together, supporting each
other and just loving one another. I Love you!! You were my cousin by
birth but my brother at heart.

Love Kim

Posted by: Khaleelah Muhammad | November 28, 2007 at 04:50 PM

but then a darker story is revealed:

To all the people speaking glowing words about this man … im sure
some of you know and for those that dont, this man was a killer and it
was known by LAPD that he has blood on his hands. Trust me he got what
he deserved and what i prayed for. He now has to meet GOD face to face
and face the people that HE has killed

Posted by: Satisfyied Person | November 29, 2007 at 11:03 AM

Many entries excerpted in the LATimes can be found here, all of the comments (start at the bottom and work up) are here.

Most of all this is a town of baked sweets, they use sugar and milk as well as in Calcutta.  Sweet milky creme thingies with walnuts, camotes, amaranth with honey, flan, fried coconut cookies, fresh potato chips with tamarind and chili and many other delights.  There is a whole book Dulceria in Puebla, they weren’t kidding.  Mole poblano almost seems like an afterthought.  The produce is also superb; I never had tasted real cucumber before today.  The city is much more beautiful than I had expected and Arabic influences are seen all over, there is even Jerusalem Tortilleria and Beyrut Tacos to add to your dining delights, not to mention the Arabic influence on the baking and of course the architecture.  I used to tell people I don’t like sweet things, but due to globalization that fiction is becoming increasing difficult to maintain.

The second part of our Mexico trip will be to Veracruz.  Again your suggestions are most welcome…

Yes, everything, drive your friend (or enemy) crazy with obscure postcards:

You are bidding on a
rare chance to traumatize a treasured friend or relative with baffling,
mind-numbing, mystery correspondence from abroad.

Here is the arrangement:

I
will be spending the Christmas holiday in Poland in a tiny village that
has one church with no bell because angry Germans stole it. Aside from
vodka, there is not a lot for me to do.

During the course of my holiday I will send three postcards to one person of your choosing.

These postcards will be rant-ravingly insane, yet they will be peppered with unmistakable personal details about the addressee. Details you will provide me.

The postcards will not be coherently signed, leaving your mark confused, guessing wildly, crying out in anguish.

"How do I know this person? And how does he know I had a ferret named Goliath?"

Your
beloved friend or relative will try in vain to figure out who it is.
Best of all, it can’t possibly be you because you’ll have the perfect
alibi: you’re not in Poland. You’re home, wherever that is, doing
whatever it is you do when not driving your friends loopy with
international prankery.

Your target will rack their brains in the shower. At dinner. During long drives. At work. On the golf course.

"Who did I tell about the time I got fired by a note on my chair?" they’ll ponder,  "And where the hell is Szczeczinek?"

But wait, there’s more.

To
add to the sheer confusion and genuine discomfort, one missive will be
on an original promotional postcard announcing the 1995 television
premiere of Central Park West on CBS.

Another will be a postcard celebrating Atlanta’s disastrous hosting of the 1996 summer Olympic games.

Your mark will be at a complete loss, desperate for answers, debating contacting people he or she hasn’t talked to in years.

"I
know this will sound weird," they’ll say, "but by any chance were you
in Eastern Europe ranting about cantaloupe… twelve years ago… right
before some show with Mariel Hemingway debuted?"

When you decide
to end the torment is completely up to you. If you can, I recommend
owning up on 1 April 2008 – giving you nearly half a year of joy and a
George Clooney-esque level of prankage. If you can’t hold it in that
long, I totally understand.

Here is the ebay link, so far there are 35 bids, and thanks to George Whitfield for the pointer.

I’ll be there for Christmas, with Yana and Natasha, please help me improve the quality of our experience.  You all know how fond I am of Mexico, and you can leave your suggestions in the comments…

The best food is cooked in people’s homes, sold on the highways, or
on the beach.  I recommend grilled corn on the cob with chile and lime,
baleadas, which are fresh corn tortillas stuffed with beans and
sometimes cheese or avocado or pork, any tamales, and of course
seafood, most of all the conch ceviche (I did dare to eat it, in a
small village), and the Garifuna seafood dishes and soups cooked in
coconut milk.  Honduras is not known as a food country but that is because North American visitors take their meals in restaurants.

It is said that Honduras is too poor to afford its own oligarchy,
and the infrastructure here is poor, even by Central American
standards.  The rate of AIDS is supposed to be very high.

Natasha and I debated whether the upscale shopping mall in San Pedro
Sula — CityMall — seemed so U.S.-American because a) Honduras is
becoming so Americanized, or b) American shopping malls now attract so
many Latinos; that discussion is ongoing.  We also seem to export gang criminality to Honduras, which is no longer a fully safe
country.  Overall Honduras gets high marks on friendliness (especially
if you aren’t mugged; we weren’t), and on capturing the old feel of
Central America and the Caribbean, but there are few sights of the
traditional kind.  The country is recommended for the experienced traveler
looking for a change of pace, and luxury living at bargain prices, but
most people should try Costa Rica or Panama first.

Tela was a lovely beach community, if you are on the north Honduran
coast visit a Garifuna village and make sure you eat a home-cooked meal under the palm leaves.  Every
journey has an emotional and narrative center at its core and that was
it for us.  The way the kids play almost naked in the dirt you can see
why the rate of dengue fever is so high.

Skipping through the blogosphere (when I could connect) I saw horrified reactions to my anthropological suggestion, especially from Felix Salmon and Kevin Drum
plus many MR commentators.  Apparently I hit a nerve.  Contrary to their summaries, I am not saying that
anthropology is required for good commentary, rather than commentary
should disclose how much anthropology went into it.  Can that be so
wrong?

And here’s Michael Blowhard on Kindle.  Craig Newmark linked to this good post on the economics of the writer’s strike, see also here.  Who knows what else I missed?

How expensive is it to visit Tokyo these days?  I understand PPP indices and know all the tales of $200 melons and beef protectionism.  But how much does the place actually cost?  When I visited in 1992 I stayed in a small but comfortable business hotel, traveled by public transportation, ate sushi, and had a relatively cheap trip.  Is that old mental picture of mine now a delusion?  Should I instead focus my travel attention on the worst currency manipulators?

"What’s the main thing one learns visiting Asia?"  That’s the first question that comes to my mind when reading Megan McArdle’s travel thoughts from Vietnam (one example here, note it is my stupid question, not hers, another more humorous example here).  Almost every word in the question is stupid — "main"?, "thing"? — or it is easy to point out that Asia is a huge, diverse and many-splendored place.

We nonetheless do most of our thinking in terms of stupid questions, whether we like it or not.  It is important to turn stupid questions to our advantage, because in fact that is the main thing we’ve got.  While visiting Asia I have learned:

1. Population density really can simply crush the environment, and such density is a more common state of mankind than even a New Jersey boy might imagine,

2. Asians are in general far, far friendlier in their home environs, which is perhaps a question of emotional security,

3. It is possible to have billions of people, and massive stretches of land, both urban and rural, with virtually no major problems of street crime (what is in fact the most dangerous Asian country to wander around in?), and

4. A mere collective act of will could make the food better in many, many (non-Asian) countries.

I might have read these points in books, but I would not have learned them had I not been to Asia and asked myself some stupid questions.  Most of all I’m impressed by just how much population density matters.

In Zurich almost everything is closed on Sundays, even my hotel restaurant.  There is one massive underground shopping mall clustered at the railway station, where for obvious reasons ("travelers") there is a Sunday shopping exemption.  I believe this is by far the largest mall in Zurich and of course it was open.  The ugliness of the mall, and the inconvenience of the low ceilings, illustrates just how much Sunday shopping is worth.  (That is why one of the world’s wealthiest cities, and a pretty one at that, has such a monstrosity for shopping.)  Small entrepreneurs cannot compete with this (chain-laden) mall on Sundays, so I wonder if the hours restriction even favors small business on net.  The legal restrictions on outworking the competition also help explain why immigrants to Switzerland don’t move up the economic ladder as well as many American immigrants do.

Free Swiss shopping, free it now.

The Nepali Times in Kathmandu recommends Marginal Revolution.

Markets in everything: a bus trip from London to Sydney.  That’s 12 weeks, in case you are wondering.

Thanks to Jose for the pointer.

1. Calypso song about a Vermont native: "Guests of Rudy Vallee", and of course Vallee was a central figure behind the popularization of calypso in the United States.

2. Philosopher: John Dewey.  I can’t actually stand to read him, but if you recast everything he said, you can come up with some profound positions.

3. Undeserving Nobel Laureate: Pearl Buck.

4. Man with an iron rail through his brain: Phineas Gage.

5. Composer: Carl Ruggles – his 16-minute Sun Treader is one of the most underappreciated pieces of great American music.

That’s all I can think of right now.  I’m headed up to Middlebury for a day and a bit, as guest of David Colander.