Category: Travels
My Conversation with the excellent Chris Arnade
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Chris discuss how Beijing and Shanghai reveal different forms of authoritarian control through urban design, why Seoul’s functional dysfunction makes it more appealing than Tokyo’s efficiency, favorite McDonald’s locations around the world, the dimensions for properly assessing a city’s walkability, what Chris packs for long urban jaunts, why he’s not interested in walking the countryside, what travel has taught him about people and culture, what makes the Faroe Islands and El Paso so special, where he has no desire to go, the good and bad of working on Wall Street, the role of pigeons and snapping turtles in his life, finding his 1,000 true fans on Substack, whether museums are interesting, what set him on this current journey, and more.
COWEN: That’s okay. What’s your nomination for the least walkable city?
ARNADE: Phoenix is pretty bad. In the rest of the world, what was the lowest ranked of mine?
COWEN: I think Dakar is your lowest ranked.
ARNADE: Dakar is low.
COWEN: I don’t find that so bad.
ARNADE: [laughs] It was partially the heat. Also, there was a safety issue, which is not actual violence. It’s just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly because when you’re in a neighborhood where they have a slum basically, where you’re one of few white people, it’s not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that there can be miscommunication, like, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” That can spiral out of control if you don’t speak the language. Dakar was really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.
COWEN: Why’s that? I’ve never been there.
ARNADE: Again, these are cities that are not meant to be walked. Locals don’t walk them. People would look at me like I’m crazy. Part of the reason, first of all, you can jump on a hack bus, so why would you walk? The boda-bodas, which are . . . you just jump on the back of a motorcycle, which I won’t do. I did it once, and I’m like, “I’m not doing this. This is a really dumb risk.”
COWEN: Yes, I wouldn’t do that.
ARNADE: I almost got killed the first time I did it, but they do it. Consequently, there’s no walking infrastructure and when you do walk, you’re at risk of being hit by a boda-boda. People will walk out of necessity but there’s just no infrastructure. Absolutely none. Then you can get hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or a motorcycle.
COWEN: Rio, for me, would be the least walkable. It’s very dangerous but on top of that, there are so many places where walks end. There’re mountains, there’re tunnels.
And this:
COWEN: What is it you think you learn least well traveling the way you do?
ARNADE: It’s interesting. I used to be a macro-type trader. I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I’ve gone in too blind. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political situation.
One of the things I’ve learned from my project is, most people don’t talk about politics. It’s because I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing and Shanghai — maybe it’s not the best example because people would say there’s a reason they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think that’s it.
COWEN: No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
ARNADE: Yes, 98 percent of the people aren’t political and they don’t talk about politics. I got beat up on social media when people were talking about, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to be elected. The world hates us.” No, they don’t. [laughs] When that person said that, I was actually in a bar in Kampala with a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. That was a rare political conversation. Most people don’t talk about politics.
In that sense, I could probably do more reading outside of the conversations about politics because I go to a lot of these countries, I don’t know what’s going on politically because people don’t talk about it.
COWEN: What other macro views of the world have you revised due to your walking, visiting, traveling? Obviously, particular views about any individual place, but on the whole, humanity.
And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s Substack, which covers his fascinating travels around the world.
Bordeaux observations
The central core is one of the most consistent eighteenth century cities you will find in Europe. Until the visit, my first there, I had not realized how much of the town’s growth came during that time, in part because of some special trade privileges, and in part because of the slave trade. Here is some 18th century economic history of Bordeaux. The central plazas and radiating streets are splendid, as is the large Girondins monument nearby.
The main museum is subpar, with some good Redons (he is from there), and the main church is pretty good but excelled by other locales. In this sense there is not much to do in Bordeaux. There is, however, some good modern and also brutalist architecture near and across the main river bank. Check out this bridge. I enjoyed these creations, as they injected some element of surprise into my visit.
You can still get an excellent meal at the nearby country chateaus, but if you just stop for normal French food in the town it is pretty mediocre, not better than say WDC. The classic French food traditions are moving more and more into corners of the country, and away from everyday life.
Typically I am surprised by how normal France feels. People want to say “The French this, the French that…” but to me they are fairly Americanized, often speak good English, and have few truly unique cultural habits these days. They also seem reasonably well adjusted, normal mostly in the good sense, and thus of course somewhat boring too.
Walking and driving through the less salubrious parts of town is a useful corrective, but I do not feel the place is falling apart. And the best estimates are that six to nine percent of the city is Muslim, hardly an overwhelming number.
I learned just before leaving that Kevin Bryan was in town too, here are his observations. Bordeaux is certainly worth visiting, but I also am not surprised it is the last major French city I have been to in my life.
Some northern parts of Spain
Salamanca still feels part of the orbit of Madrid, but León does not. Many of the faces are more Celtic, and the mood of the city can be drab in an eastern European way. Deindustrialization can be observed. It is a real city, not much dependent on tourism, though the cathedral is one of the most beautiful in Europe.
Santander, a beach town, was much nicer than expected. There is not much to do there, but it reminds me of how perhaps Nice might have been in 1974. Fully for tourists, but somehow not very touristy? And thus extremely pleasant and charming. Places like that barely exist any more. They are either quite obscure, such as Durango, Mexico, or they are overwhelmed by tourists. Seafood was excellent, and it is a much larger city than I was expecting. Nice promenades on the water.
Hondarribia is a Basque town and fishing village that feels like it should be its own country. The half-timbered homes and unusual colors set it apart from anywhere else in Europe I have been. Small, one day there is fine, but one of Europe’s best undervisited locales?
The convent where the Salamancans wrote their great works
Convent San Esteban. It is still there, you can just walk right in, though not between 2 and 4, when the guards have off. Arguably the Salamancans were the first mature economists, and the first decent monetary theorists, as well as being critically important for the foundations of international law, natural rights, and anti-slavery arguments. It is also difficult to find issues where they were truly bad.
You can just walk right in, and you should.
Avila, Spain
The town has amazing, quite intact walls from the 11th-14th centuries, and also three (!) of the most beautiful churches in Spain. It is only about ninety minutes from Madrid, yet I have not seen North American tourists here.
This morning it struck me to see a large number of Avila children reenacting the “lucha entre los christianos y los moros” [fight between the Christians and Moors] with toy swords and costumes, some of them dressed up like Saudis in their full garb. This made an impression on me because the Mexican village I used to visit, San Agustin Oapan, has a very similar fiesta, and here is the history of how the fiesta was transmitted, dating back to the 16th century. Even the dances and toy swords felt familiar to me. How many of them in Oapan even know what “the moros” are? I recall during my second visit to Oapan I was shocked to learn they did not know what China was, or that there was a Pope, even though they were Catholic. That all changed rapidly with the later arrival of satellite television of course.
In any case, Avila, along with the nearby Roman aquaducts of Segovia, is a much underrated visit, underrated at least in North America.
My days collecting Mexican art, part II
Recently I wrote about my quest to track down Mexican amate (bark paper) painter Juan Camilo Ayala, but there is another part to the early story, namely looking for his brother Marcial Camilo Ayala, also a painter.
Marcial no longer lived in Oapan, as he found village life intolerable. So he settled in Taxco (later Cuernavaca), and it was Juan Camilo who told me that when I showed up at his house in Oapan. Originally I was hoping to meet both brothers on that first trip.
When I arrived in Taxco on my next Mexico trip, I had the strategy of asking all tradionally-clothed women in the city center “do you know Marcial Camilo Ayala?” Far from being a needle in the haystack strategy, this yielded results within seconds. All of a sudden I was chatting with Marcial’s youngest daughter, Oliva. She in turn brought me down a steep cobblestone street to see Marcial, who was painting in a dark back room in Taxco. It all felt rather hopeless, at least at first.
Marcial and Juan were quite different. Marcial is by far the most intellectual person from Oapan, as he could speak at high levels about Picasso and Rousseau, Zapata and land reform, Nahuatl poetry, and the late string quartets of Beethoven (alas he passed away almost ten years ago). Juan cannot meaningfully read or write, but he is a corn farmer who knows everything about the rain. Marcial typically is considered the strongest painter from Oapan, and multiple times he had traveled abroad for exhibits of his work.
I now had two reasons to go to the region, namely Juan and Marcial. And so I became patrons of them both, and now have dozens of works from each of them, including some very large six foot by eight foot creations. I kept on returning to Guerrero, and would spend some time in Oapan with Juan and his family, and some time with Marcial, either in Taxco or Cuernavaca, typically talking about ideas and art. I finally started to learn proper Spanish from all the required back and forth.
In my time in Oapan I enjoyed the stars at night, the fiestas and processions, the long hours sitting around talking and joking with Juan’s family, and of course the food. The musty blue corn tortillas are to die for. If you want some fresh fish, great, but they have to go down to the river and catch it for you. The bean tamales and moles with pepitas are incredible. I once commissioned a barbecue meal, $80 for a full goat, cooked underground overnight, as from prehispanic barbeque traditions. Most meals did not involve meat, however, other than the staple of eggs.
Yet life in Oapan is not easy, not even for the visitor. There was no flush toilet or shower. The “bed” was a hard slab, and the evening temperatures inside the room exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The roosters crow at 4 a.m., and then everyone is awake. You can leave, but within the Oapan of that time, dollars could not buy you conveniences. There is an ever-present risk of dengue and sometimes malaria as well.
I got to know the four main amate painting villages (Ameyaltepec, Xalitla, and Maxela are the others), and met virtually all the living amate painters of note. I visited the renowned Alfonso Lorenzo Santos, both chained to the wall in his home in Ameyaltepec and also in the mental hospital in Cuernavaca. (Alfonso was later profiled in The Wall Street Journal, and for that journalist, Bob Davis, I served as Mexico guide and translator.) Occasionally, when looking for new amates, I had to throw rocks at the wild dogs to make my way to the homes on the edge of town.
Over the course of about a dozen years of visits, I built up what is the world’s largest and I would say best amate collection, with hundreds of quite distinct works. I also managed to buy an important early private collection, from the 1980s, with more than two hundred paintings. For years I tracked all the amate painting listings on eBay, snagging many a bargain. Later I served as (unpaid) amate painting consultant to the Smithsonian, when they set up the American Indian museum now on the mall. I am pleased that the assemblage of these works is preserving a significant cultural episode and tradition in Mexican history.
I also collected a good deal of village ceramics, still done with red clay using pre-conquest methods, noting that not all of them made it home intact. The Spanish word “burbuja” — bubble wrap — remains prominent in my mind and vocabulary. Ideally, I would like to do a major “air lift” of traditional pottery out of Oapan, but these days the drug gangs are a major obstacle.
Buying art works from Juan and Marcial also evolved into charity, and I developed my thoughts on direct cash transfers. I wrote those up on MR long ago, and I am pleased to report they had some influence in inspiring the non-profit Give Directly.
Eventually I wrote a whole book on the economy and polity of Oapan, and on the lives of the amate painters. It was published with the University of Michigan Press under the title Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of the Mexican Amate Painters. It has sold the least well of any of my books, by far, but it is one of my favorites and it is quite unlike all the others.
Over the years, there was one amate painter whose works I never tracked down, namely Jesus Corpos Aliberto. Marcial had told me he heard a rumor that Jesus Corpos was living in a dumpy hotel in the middle of Mexico City, Hotel Buenos Aires. I found my way to the hotel, and yes Jesus was there with a big stack of brilliant amates he was looking to sell. They let him stay there in a smelly back room. Sadly he was insane, and would sell the amates only for millions of pesos. During yet my next trip to Mexico City, I returned but the hotel was gone altogether, eliminated by gentrification. I had no remaining links to Corpos. At that point, and following the passing of Marcial, and the aging of the other main amate painters, that part of my life largely was over. And so my story with amate painting ends with the same basic obstacle it started with: a stubborn refusing to sell me something, thwarted markets in everything.
Travel bleg for Avila, Salamanca, Segovia, and other smaller places nearby
Your suggestions are most welcome, thank you!
My 1979 trip to Oxford and London
In my recent post on my Freiburg year abroad, I mentioned that my first time leaving the country was a trip to England. Somehow I was accepted into a multi-week economics course at Oxford. Of course it was not the real Oxford, just some program for foreigners held on Oxford campus.
I didn’t much care for Oxford, and I suppose I still do not. It struck the 17-year-old Tyler as rather backward and ancien regime. Everything seemed so old and static, and also slightly rundown. I walked around plenty, I did go punting, and I also got drunk for the first time in my life (out of three times total?). I enjoyed only the first three of those experiences.
My fondest memories are walking across town, through a residential neighborhood, to a very good fish and chips place. I sat on the curb and ate out of the newspaper wrapper. That was pretty divine, keeping in mind I come from Kearny, NJ, where fish and chips was a major Scots-Irish “thing” until recently (the town is now Latino and Lusaphone).
I realized quickly that I knew a lot of economics — almost everything presented in the lectures bored me.
What did influence me was hearing and meeting Madsen Pirie, who of course is still around. Here was an actual logical positivist! That shocked me. At age seventeen, logical positivists were to me boogeymen who had been refuted by Karl Popper and Brand Blanshard. But all of a sudden, there was one right in front of me, bowtie and all. The biggest thing I learned from Madsen is that behind each view is a human being who has counterarguments. That may sound deeply stupid, but so many of our most important learnings take that form, namely emotionally internalizing something that ought to be obvious, and thus developing better habits of thought. Anyway, Madsen’s lectures at least were fun, even if the content was familiar to me. I recall also David O’Mahoney, of University College Cork, giving a good talk on competition and cooperation.
One weekend a few of us decided to take the train up to Edinburgh, egads what a debacle that was. Somehow we ended up sleeping in a boxcar with a bunch of soldiers around us (how did that happen!? I have no idea). It was freezing cold the whole time, even though this was August. And the train kept on stopping, maybe the trip took eight or nine hours and had neigh a smooth moment.
Edinburgh was cold too, and I was not prepared for that. Somehow I ended up walking around in a bathrobe, if only not to freeze. I recall seeing monuments to Hume and Smith, being satisfied, and wanting to turn around and go back. Just as I do not recall how I ended up in the boxcar with the soldiers, I also do not recall how I was wearing a robe in Scotland.
The last week of the trip I spent in London. As I have narrated in the opening chapter of my GOAT book, my main activity was to walk across town to the British Library and read old pamphlets in the history of economic thought. That was wonderful.
I quite enjoyed 1979 London, which I much preferred to Oxford. For one thing, it had great music shops, including for sheet music. Most of all, I soaked up the “rude boy” atmosphere of the city and its slight tinge of danger. I was an avid Clash fan, and this was before they sold out with their London Calling album. The whole Clash worldview was laid out in front of me, and I kept on thinking of “Safe European Home” and other early classics. Piccadilly was a great place to hang out to imbibe that mood, which in retrospect seems remarkable.
I walked, walked, and walked more. Hardly any of the city seemed well-off, and it was very definitely an English city, unlike today.
I was staying in a hostel, and three or so nights before I was due to fly home, someone broke into the collective room and stole a lot of money. I didn’t have much left, and didn’t think I could get a money transfer quickly. So for a few days I bought and lived off Wonder bread, and scavenged abandoned fruit from dumpster bins. I also found a chess tournament (how??), and played some speed chess with people who in turn bought me a meal.
That all seemed like an appropriate way to end the trip.
At the time, and given my interests, England seemed unambiguously inferior to The American Way Of Life. The grit of London appealed to me, but I had my own version of that back home in NYC and New Jersey.
And so I flew home, and made no immediate plans to travel abroad again.
It was not until I started listening to Beethoven, and reading German romantic poetry, that that was to change.
My first trip to Haiti
This was in 1994, right after the Aristide regime was restored by Clinton. I had traveled a good deal by that time, mostly in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia. But I had never been anywhere truly dangerous. It seemed impossible to visit such places. It is not that I did any serious risk calculation, rather the option simply was not part of my mental toolkit.
But somehow I started thinking about visiting Haiti. It seemed like it would be the most dangerous place I could possibly choose. I had this recurring mental image that I could not even set out on the street without someone coming along and cutting off one of my arms with a machete.
And so I bought my ticket. I suppose I viewed this as a kind of challenge. I also knew that if it went OK, I would end up going to a lot of other places as well.
Not long before the trip, I was on the phone with my friend Christopher Weber, the renowned investor, writer, and Offenbach scholar. I mentioned I was going and next thing you know Chris, being a “bounder of adventure,” was coming along with me.
I arrived in Haiti first. As I walked into the baggage and pick-up area of the airport (lovely live compa music), some men immediately grabbed my bags and took them from me. “Uh-oh.” In fact they brought them to the cab and wanted a tip, and they didn’t want anyone else carrying my bags first. High-trust oases in low-trust countries remains a very interesting topic to me, to this day.
I stayed in Pétion-Ville, the wealthier “suburb” of Port-au-Prince, known for its restaurants and nightlife, and I loved the place. The food, music, and art were all amazing, and they were everywhere. You could find interesting artwork on many of the street corners and for very low prices. A known artist might be selling a work for $200. I bought a political satire piece by Maxan Jean-Louis entitled “Aristide’s Wedding,” showing his semi-forced alliance with the United States military. I also bought “Soccer Angels” by the great Jean-Baptiste Jean, and a Claude d’Ambreville painting of women with basket on their heads, now a Haitian standard. That set me off buying art.
The architecture was amazing — think a more elaborate New Orleans style — but very badly ailing, you could even say collapsing.
My favorite dishes were the “combie hash,” the Dinde (a small turkey, best I have had), and the seafood mixing French and Caribbean influences. The tender conch (lambi) is arguably the Haitian national dish. The rice and beans cooked in mushroom juice was another delight, totally new to me. At the time it was obviously the best food in the Caribbean.
My arms remained intact, and walking around Petitionville required some basic caution but did not feel dangerous. Furthermore, the population at that time was hopeful for the future, so it felt very good to be there. The storytellers communicated an appropriate sense of drama.
After a day of walking around, Chris and I rented a car, which was in retrospect an unsound thing to do. We drove to Moulin Sur Mer, a “resort” on the ocean, originally an 18th century sugar plantation. Only a few other people were staying there and one of them appeared to be a Dominican drug lord family. Inside one of the buildings was a list of all the Haitian presidents, and at times the rate is about one leader per year — “model this.” I recalled Hegel’s adage that governments based on voodoo religion were bound to be unstable.
The water was lovely, but the drive to and from Moulin Sur Mer was not uneventful. On the way back, at a service station, a man pulled a submachine gun on Chris and asked for a rather favorable exchange rate on our gasoline purchase. Another man ran at the car and tried to jump on the roof as we drove past. I still am not sure whether he wanted to commandeer the vehicle or simply was looking for a free bus ride (Haitians frequently ride on the tops of their buses).
In any case we pressed on, and it didn’t all seem that dangerous after all. I went away vowing to return, and indeed over the years I was to make four more trips to Haiti, as it became one of my favorite countries. The next time I went I met Selden and Carole Rodman in the line boarding the flight from Miami, and that was to change my life yet again…
Walking around Frankfurt
I am here only briefly, and earlier I had visited the city perhaps seven or eight times, typically when passing through. But not within the last twenty years. My main impressions are thus:
1. The city itself has not radically changed in quite a while. Everything seemed familiar, and the types of stores were pretty familiar too.
2. The people walking around Frankfurt are very different. During an early evening walk, it seemed that perhaps 30-40% of the people I saw would classify as “potentially objectionable immigrants,” at least by the standards of anti-immigrant Germans. In earlier times perhaps this would have been five percent?
Do keep in mind my time and location may have embodied selection biases in favor of seeing more immigrants.
The evidence I can find does show that Frankfurt has the highest crime rate in Germany, although perhaps much of that standing comes from the presence of the financial district and the city being such a transport and convention hub, rather than from the immigrants per se.
In any case, if you wish to understand the popularity of AfD — which now seems to be Germany’s #2 political party — I suggest you take a walk around Frankfurt. I didn’t even go near the train station.
3. It is also striking to me, in a limited number of service sector encounters, that the immigrants with jobs have a “hessisch” accent and Germanic mannerisms. Of course there is selection going on here too, but this does show some degree of assimilation. I do not know what percentage of them are assimilating in this fashion, but it seems to be rising. Earlier, immigrants in German service sector jobs more likely seemed “right off the boat.”
4. Frankfurt in 1984 seemed to be on a rough wealth parity with the United States. But now it seems decidedly poorer, and I am not referring to the immigrants, rather the rate of progress on the upside seems pretty low. It just doesn’t feel like a “Luxus-Stadt.”
5. Lots of merchants still encourage you to pay with cash.
El Salvador notes
Here are a few observations from the trip:
1. El Salvador does truly seem safe, arguably “Canada safe” or maybe safer yet.
2. Hardly ever have I had quicker and more convenient airport and entry procedures.
3. Hardly any tourists are there, unless you count returning El Salvadorans from the United States.
4. For a small country, always visit the #2 city, in this case Santa Ana. There is nothing to do there, but that is part of the point. You can stroll through the local Walmart.
5. Mostly you should eat pupusas in less formal settings. The basic corn, beans, and cheese products of the country are excellent, though they get worse the nicer the restaurant.
6. There is one exception to #5: go eat at El XoLo, it is one of the best meals I have had in years. The squash dishes and the cochinita were best, and you get a fun look at the El Salvadoran elite.
7. You can go to lovely ocean spots and no one will be there.
8. I visited the colonial city of Suchitoto again, after a nine (?) year absence. It had perhaps 10x the amount of commerce as last time.
9. El Rosario, the brutalist church, is one of the great landmarks of the New World.
10. The gifted Chinese library in San Salvador is hilarious, here is some photos.
11. Measured gdp growth in El Salvador is a disappointment. But consumption seems to be growing rapidly, both in the numbers and what one sees on the ground. Which series matters more? This is a common paradox in development economics.
12. Taking 3-4 day trips in groups of five or six is very much underrated. Hope you can organize your own outings!
13. People love it when you tell them you are from Virginia.
14. I may consider “future of safety” issues in more detail in a later post.
15. Overall, I would encourage you to go, go, go. From Washington, D.C. it is a simple, direct four hour flight — isn’t that closer than Denver? What are you waiting for?
El Salvador bleg
Santa Ana, and also San Salvador — what do you all recommend? I thank you all in advance for the sage counsel.
The Turku food hall
This is perhaps my favorite food hall. Dating from 1896, the basic building is notable, the displays are lovely and suitably Nordic, and for lunch you can try a wide variety of cuisines, including excellent Mexican food, a rarity in Europe. (They told me they buy their tortillas from other Mexicans in Czechia.) From separate stalls I bought some salami and also black bread, and both were as good as any I have tried, ever.
Many food halls are overrated. They create an illusion of plenitude, while not offering many items you actually wish to buy and consume. The Turku food hall, however, is a real winner.
Overall, Turku felt more Swedish and also more stylish than Helsinki. The Swedish name for the city — Åbo — you see all over, and one of the universities still teaches in Swedish. It is much more of a college town. That said, at population 202,000 it is slower and there is much less to do there. You can see some of Alvar Aalto’s early buildings.
I was told that 77 Mexicans live in Turku.
Helsinki notes
Most of all, I like the city for its visual complexity, and for its recurring architectural surprises. It is the best Art Nouveau city in the world, with only Brussels as a rival, and also a top tier modernist city. Public buildings are excellent, and unlike in Stockholm you are never quite sure what is coming next.
The Finns are amazing at building out lovely, cozy rooms. In a used bookstore you might find a room for sitting on a comfortable chair and reading. It will look and feel perfect. I even saw one men’s room with this flavor, and yes it had a comfy chair.
It is striking, and instructive, that the Japanese have such a strong presence in tourism in Finland. Their groups dominate visits to the underground rock church, for instance. Japan and Finland both have something inscrutable in common? And they both share an obsession with design and with small detail.
One nice thing about Helsinki is you can find a good restaurant in almost any part of town. Unlike say Paris, New York, or London, they do not have “dining deserts” where tasty places are absent for reasons of rent or zoning. Similarly, Helsinki also has a very high quality of small shop, in areas such as jewelry, used clothing, and design. Again, as with the restaurants, you can find these in almost any part of town. Helsinki has avoided the trap of looking and feeling like the other global cities, as the price-rent gradients simply are not that oppressive.
Along related lines, you will see non-white immigrants in great numbers in the center of town. In Stockholm, in contrast, non-white immigrants are priced out of the center to a considerable degree, though of course you can see them working in service jobs there,
The spaces in the new public library are remarkably inviting for sitting and reading. The interior is also an example of an institution that has leapt into being retro, without ever having managed to be fashionable in the interim (the opposite of mobile money in Kenya leapfrogging more antiquated money and banking institutions). In an act of supreme wisdom, they have stacked the library with “technology,” most of all 3-D printers and advanced sewing machines. It now looks quaint and charming, much like the older buildings around town. It is the smart phones that hold the attention of the library visitors, even in this relatively reading-sympathetic culture.
In Nordic countries, Thai food usually is better than Chinese. Georgian food is something you also might try in Helsinki. Salmon soup is good, but you don’t need to have it more than once. The whitefish and small river fish I enjoyed.
The Finns are interesting to speak to, especially about Finland. One woman said (paraphrased): “We can talk to each other for hours, and still not understand, so how do you expect the immigrants to understand us?” Multiple meanings can be assigned to that remark.
Another said something like: “No, the Finns are not the happiest people in the world. Once foreigners stop asking us how happy we are, we go back to complaining at each other about everything.” Was she complaining about that?
Everywhere you go, you see Finns doing things with each other.
In my view, Helsinki is one of Europe’s great cities, information-rich and out of the ordinary. It should be noted, however, that hardly anyone else agrees with this assessment, least of all the residents here.
Why you should visit Cape Town, South Africa
First, it is one of the most beautiful cities and surrounding environs. I would put it on a par with Vancouver and Hong Kong and Wellington, New Zealand. Perhaps it is closest to Wellington.
Second, it is far safer than I was expecting. Throughout the week, I never once experienced angst, and that included walks at night and a visit to a township. Certainly there are dangerous places around, but you can do a whole, fulfilling trip without them. I felt safer than in NW Washington, DC.
Third, the flight wasn’t nearly as bad as I had thought. I am used to very long flights to Asia that leave at 11 a.m., wihch is suboptimal for me. The flights DC to Cape Town — both ways direct I might add — left early evening. So you read for a few hours, sleep for seven hours, and then read for a few hours again. Then you arrive. I’ve experienced more painful flights going to the West Coast from Dulles. It never felt like 15 hours, nor the 14 hours coming back.
Fourth, it is inexpensive.
Fifth, the people are very friendly.
Sixth, during my trip the weather was excellent. Some rain, but mostly during my other commitments. It was in the 65 to 70 degree range, and sunny, most of the time I was going around.
I don’t have much to add to the tips in the guidebooks, and from MR readers. But definitely take a day tour by car down to the bottom of the Cape, and see where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. Along the way, without much trying, you likely will see ostriches, baboons, and many penguins, in addition to various exotic African birds.
South Africa is one of those countries that has no other country like it. That means you can learn more by going there. That means you should go there. Q.E.D.