Category: Travels

There are more small things to notice here than anywhere else.  People elevate their cameras on long fishing poles to get better shots in a crowd.  The water container has a separate compartment so that, when you pour, the ice cubes do not spill into your drink.  Or you may wonder: why did I have to order my food by paying into a vending machine?  None of the faucets works in an intuitive manner for me.

I hadn’t been to Tokyo since 1992.  What was once futuristic has now become retro and it has made the city more charming and ultimately more convincing. 

Even with the weak dollar it isn’t that expensive here.  Hotels are cheaper than in NYC — not to mention Europe — and you can eat a great meal for $10 or less if you frequent neighborhood restaurants.  At the fish market world class sushi costs about as much as mediocre sushi in the American suburbs.  I have also ventured into the horrors of real Japanese food, including The Creamy Sauce and Worcestershire sauce.  It’s not all hamachi and gyoza, believe me.

Come mid-May, Yana, Natasha and I have time to do three things in Japan.  Tokyo and Kyoto are on the agenda for sure.  What should the third visit be?  Preferably it should not be too far from the rest.  Afterwards, I am going to Nagasaki for sure, so no need to recommend that.

Here are my tips for how to survive a trip to or from NYC’s LaGuardia airport, always a daunting experience.  You will notice the piece is on Mark Bittman’s new New York Times food blog, which you should be reading anyway.  Don’t forget these words of mine:

Just think how much you are saving: what’s really scarce in life is your time and the mere willingness to get up and go. Just do it.

Elsewhere in the world of food blogging, there is a new blog on the economics of food and wine.

That’s in Norway and if you live there you don’t even have to worry about oil prices going up; fortunately I’ve been paying off the mortgage rather than buying new stocks (though JPMorgan is up), so maybe I can visit.  Here are other memorable photos, albeit not of Alesund.

Suppose you want every day to be a holiday.  To fulfill your dream you can travel around the world.  You can take up to a 3-day holiday, like Japan’s 3-day New Year, but not the 12 days of Christmas.  You can also count Sunday or equivalent day of rest as a holiday.  Can it be done?  What is the longest holiday stretch possible? 

One Cuban young woman complains to another. "He lied to me! He told me
that he was a luggage handler! It turns out, he’s nothing but a
neurosurgeon!"

Explanation here.

I could use a more explicit three-letter word in the post title but I fear the software censors employed by our federal government will again block this web site from its bureaucratic readers.  On this topic, I was quite taken by this passage:

"Ingrid," I commented, "If you really think she [the Haitian woman who was propositioned for money] needs a choice then I suggest you give her one.  Why don’t you offer to pay her thirty dollars not to come to my hotel room, but to go back to her son and cigarette stand?"

That is from Naked in Haiti: A…Morality Tale About Tourists, Prostitutes and Politicians, by Dan King.  This book has received very little notice but it’s a more interesting look at human commodification than anything you’ll find coming out of Harvard or Princeton.  I can only say that the author really seems to know what he is talking about, if you get my drift.  This work would not have been approved at university institutional review boards.  It’s also one of the best books on "life on the ground" in Haiti, at least provided you can tolerate the author’s numerous salacious yet nonetheless totally anti-erotic descriptions of his activities.

The author goes to Haiti, of course, not for the art, but because he wants to buy from women who are not (otherwise) "selling."  Of course that means that the level of poverty is quite desperate, as in Cuba, where the same phenomenon is common.  And often the women sell to benefit their children or parents, not themselves; surely some percentage of them are disgusted by what they end up doing.

If you’re wondering about my point of view on the whole question, I am sufficiently Paretian that I don’t find the exchange aspect of the relationship, or the passing of money, objectionable per se.  (Assuming, of course, that neither age nor coercion is a concern, and often both are.)  But it is still better, on the buying side, not to do it.  Once you are aware of the kind of human stories behind the other side of the market, I would think it is hard to maintain an unflagging interest in the proceedings at hand.  Nor do I think it would improve what happens in your life next.  Yes the transaction does benefit the seller in many cases, but apply the Modigliani-Miller theorem and rebundle your action into a different blend of charity and erotic self-satisfaction, all toward The Greater Good.

Or so I think.  If you offer your thoughts, please be polite in your rhetoric.

I thank an anonymous MR reader for the pointer to the book.

Nude flights, there is more information here.  It’s from Erfurt to the Baltic and it costs about $800.  The plane seats 55 people.  You can book here.

Thanks to Robert Anderson for the pointer.

Justin Yifu Lin, apparently soon to be named the World Bank’s chief economist, has one of the strangest CVs you could imagine.  Lin was born in Taiwan but in 1979 while serving in the Taiwanese army he defected to China by swimming from the island of Kinmen in Taiwan to Xiamen in China.  Embarrassed by the defection of a rising star, the Taiwanese army listed him as missing.  Lin left behind a wife and children who (it seems) didn’t know what had happened to him.

Lin rose quickly in China receiving a Master’s degree in Marxist political economy from Peking University in 1982 and in 1986 a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago

(!).  According to the Taipei Times, Lin’s wife learned that Lin was alive while he was in the United States and they were reunited in the U.S. where she also earned a graduate degree before both returned to China.  Lin has since become a well-published economist.

I see movie.

Addendum: Tyler also covers this further below.

This is enough to get a boy really excited.  My favorites are Millau, Rotterdam, and Oresund.

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.