That last post was whiny and inarticulate, so let me try again...

In Korea i feel nothing,
like when you kiss someone and it means nothing
Korea is kissing me
(or I'm kissing it)
and i feel nothing
and it makes me question love [of traveling].

There is i think a very strong connection between these two impossible mysteries of life - love and travel - but it feels like so much more has been written about the former than the later. Or more specifically, I've read about understanding love through its loss, but never about travel in the same way.

What does it mean to 'lose' Travel?
Will I chase Travel as the girlfriend you feel drifting away...
I have been infatuated with girls, only to discover at a kiss that my heart had decided otherwise. but travel has always been purer. Even the insects that tainted egypt did little to dampen the underlying impulse...

Meta-travel writing always seems to focus on the difference between the 'tourist' and the 'traveler'. (a Traveler moves because of passion towards uncomfortability and the Unknown, whereas a tourist moves to justify and reify his pre-existing beliefs, while Relaxing in the process.)

This is easy stuff, and makes for good back-patting and pedantics, but it strikes me as both condescending and juvenile. Like when you're 13 and the world is miserable except for you; because you and you alone know the true meaning of love: Surely those fat complacent yuppies down the street only think they know love - just as the cargo-shorts-wearing tourists only think they've seen Egypt.

But suddenly this all feels besides the point. In this congratulatory dualism each side is defined and appreciated as static and recognizable. (although admitedly it is congratulatory only to the intellecutal half.)
In Korea i am neither tourist nor traveler - I am not sheltered and insular, but nor am I challenged by the Other; the preconceptions I've had to re-exam are called forth by an emptiness that i recognize only through comparisons to other travel experiences; they are internal and epiphenominal.

Is there a dialectic approach to travel? I mean one that addresses the traveler as individual, and not in some Edward Said-ian cultural context? Will someone please write one for me?

loss of innocence?

I went to Geoje island this weekend...


um...
I am slightly overwhelmed by just how underwhelmed i am by korea, if that makes any sense at all. Objectively, it is beautiful. And not just run-of-the-mill beautiful, but actually pretty 'stunning.'
But it doesn't do it for me. I love traveling, but what korea has taught me is that i only love traveling under very specific conditions. From what i can gather, i must be either
a) impossibly lonely (oman)
b) impossibly broke (europe)
c) impossibly uncomfortable (egypt)

In Korea, i am none of these things, or at least not realistically any of these things.

So i'm going to quote a book i haven't read since 5th grade, but thanks to amazon, i was able to find instantly... (also, wtf is with having quotes from kids books in my head)

"But this isn't how it works," Brian said. "it isn't this smooth and easy. You don't just fly in and get set on a perfect lake and have all the food you want and have it all come this easy. It isn't real."
Derek leaned back, put his hands in back of his head, and looked at Brian.
"there's not a thing to make it rough... nothing wrong. In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong - going wrong. The plane didn't land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn't know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death an now we're out here going la-de-da, I've got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries."
'Tension." Derek said. "It lacks tension."

so this is obviously more dramatic than my situation, but it seems relevant to me...

whatever. here are some more pictures that feel like they were taken by someone else...

ack, i promised myself i would write at least every other day, but i have to go here with my boss for the weekend. I'm not really complaining, it looks beautiful.

so...
seeing how i have to give new korean students "english" names... should i start naming kids after...
a) childhood friends
b) peanuts characters
c) archie characters
d) something brilliant i haven't thought of.

I eagerly await your response, Alison, the sole commentator of my life.

culture is easier to talk about via music videos

This video is popular here.
(Although its a different sort of popular than in egypt, because i've never seen it on TV, only on phones and mp3 video players etc.)

First, "she was pretty."
I'm assuming this is a korean translating thing, because it happens all the time. For example,
Question: "How are you?"
Answer: "I was fine."
I don't know whether this a confusion about how to use the "be" verb, or whether they only describe people in past tense.

Second, the flasher. Apparently this is fairly common in Korea. I know this is anecdotal, but it's at least common enough that an 11 girl in my class was "so - so" after a flasher had been prowling her building all weekend. She was trying to explain to me what a flasher was when my boss walked in and started giggling and then faux flashed me with her coat. Everyone laughed.

Finally, i think it's pretty great that hot asian school girls are apparently not an 'exotic fetish,'
since this video was made for purely domestic consumption. (Unless of course they've internalized the exoticism that the West created, in which case its FUCKED UP)

On a related note, god bless youtube.




(did you know they use the english words for gay and lesbian here?)

(Burj)eois Modernity

I don't know if it counts considering my duress mixed with secular exodus-ism and nostalgia, but flying into Dubai airport was the closest I've ever had to a religious experience.
This was pretty much entirely thanks to seeing the new burj dubai.
(not to be confused with the original burj, which apparently they are now calling the 'mini burj.' - Burj just means tower)



Seriously, it's even more mind boggling in person. I have always had a thing for tall buildings, and i couldn't be happier that they're cool again.

On a related note, could this commercial for the new burj be any more phallic?

oh, darwin

Darwin's first journal entry with a sketch of evolution has the words "i think" sprawled across the top. I have nothing to say except that this makes me happy.

Children on a trampoline

Happy Saturday

dalki=desire

"These standard advertised wares - toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters - were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom."
- Sinclair Lewis (From Babbitt, 1922)

...and yet...

I can only assume that when God sat down to draw the world, he did it with a Dalki pencil case set. What else can be said?
I've read (somewhere) that consumer culture can be traced to our evolutionary need to hunt and gather...

But what about this desire to organize?

I want everything i own to be Dalki brand. I want a Dalki lifestyle with Dalki underwear and Dalki sheets and toothpaste and Dalki cookie cutters so my sandwich's can be Dalki-shaped too.

I don't know where this comes from... or where it fits with all the other things that i think make me happy. Would a perfect life be a dalki backpack with a dalki sleeping bag and dalki hightops on a desert path in Kazakhstan? Or are these desires mutually exclusive?
Can I coat myself in the thinnest layer of dalki - an insecticide mist of order to mediate my response to things i both hate and crave?

remembering egypt

I think i'm starting to forget the Egyptian color palette.
This picture is from a sunday morning that the president came to Alexandria. The police officers placed every 15 or so feet along the road stayed there all day. They stretched in both directions till eternity. Click the picture for a bigger size.


Also, i think Facebook degrades the quality of the photos when you upload them, so this one's a repeat:

what would freud think? (part 1)

hungover and incompatably brained

I saw this over at one of my favorite blogs, the washington monthly. At first, i could only get it to go clockwise. For like 5 minutes. Then i changed it to counterclockwise, but i couldn't change it back. Now its back to clockwise. I should probably go get some breakfast. This is more stress than i need on a sunday morning.

kitsch----->irony------> the universality of humor?

This advertisement from Egyptian tv doesn't really need to be translated. It is exactly what you think it is. The fat guy is a "boredom fighter" for the Egyptian equivalent of MTV called Melody Hits, but he's ready to quit because of the disrespect he gets from professors and parents. The woman is begging him to keep working, "if not for me, than for your son."


Yes, this ad is great. But its infinitely greater for being completely unique within the Egyptian cultural context. Egyptian mainstream humor is usually more like this:


(i saw this movie twice at full volume on the most painful bus trip of my entire life)

I guess, in keeping with my thesis of the Narcissim of Small Differences, i shouldn't be so hard on it. There are plenty of American movies that are just as painful. But it is not an exaggeration to say that i have never seen an Egyptian film where less than 80 percent of the lines were shouted full blast.

So what place does american style humor have in Egyptian society? Melody hits has recently started an ad campaign with videos like this:

First, the mother smacking her son on the back of the neck is classic: the quintessential egyptian attack.

But beyond that, there's a lot at work here: Juxtaposing egyptian traditionalism (fat kids, dirty streets, and traditional clothes are ubiquitous in the ad campaign) with American sex music video's has to be some sort of commentary...

The cynic in me sees these ads as geared towards a strata of society that -from my experience - has a universal desire to leave egypt. In two months of asking twenty-something English students about there dreams, i got 'leave egypt' about 95 percent of the time.

(a rebutal might be 'well duh, that's why they're taking english classes,' but everyone from this income level is taking english classes, so there.)

These ads highlight exactly what westernized egyptians hate about egypt - and then poke fun at them. They entrench egyptian ideas about a split between unattainable 'westernism' and inescapable 'egyptianism.'

Watching this commercial in a koshery joint next to a 10 year old and his veiled mother was awkward, but i can't imagine what either of them must think about it.

Yeah. There's more in my head to be said about this, but
not now i guess.

What's the fun of travel without weird cultural differences?

I have nothing to say about this, but i think its pretty cool.

In korea I am a year older, because everyone is born 1 year old.* This is, supposedly, because they count the gestational period in the womb as a year. Alone, this is just sort of unusual, BUT...

while they do celebrate their actual birthday's, they don't consider themselves to be a year older on that date. Everyone turns a year older on the same day - the lunar new year. Therefore, conceivably, if you were born the day before the lunar new year, you would be a 2 year old the second day you were alive.

Moira says - and i think this makes a lot of sense - that because Korea is a super Confucian country, and age is so important here, this makes things a lot simpler. If you were older than someone half the year, but the same age the other half, then your cultural relationship to them would be in constant flux. Big brother would become friend, and then go back to being big brother, and thats just confusing.
In this system, your relationships are set.
As usual though, wikipedia does a better job explaining it than i do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning

*It's 3 in the morning, but still, i should know this= Is it "1 year old" or "1 years old"? Dammit.

quotes

i think i have a fairly good memory for quotes, but it's mixed with a helpless system of filing that leaves a trail of highlighted text and little more.

A (twice) relevant example would be the scene in "Franny and Zooey" where Zooey goes into Buddy and Seymour's old room, and sees the neatly compiled list of quotes that covers the back of the door. The list goes all the way down to the floor, and you could tell that the bottom ones were added while one of the boys lay on his belly. -I always wanted this to be me. - Anyway, I can remember the summery of this quotation; but i have no way to access it in its literary realness.

So i've decided i'm going to start posting quotes here so i won't forget them.
This, by the way, was prompted by the discovery that when i enter a quotation mark into google, my autofinish comes up with this:

"Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present."

A quote that is apparently by Cyril Connolly, and which i have no recollection of reading or subsequently googling. It seems pretty high school yearbook-ish anyway.

So lets start with my perennial favorite, recently recalled:

"Quick as thought he snatched a knife from Hook's belt and was about to drive it home, when he saw that he was higher up the rock that his foe. It would not have been fighting fair. He gave the pirate a hand to help him up.

It was then that Hook bit him.

Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest."

-j.m. Barrie

kitch/nostalgia

I'm not a huge fan of American kitsch, but it has an appeal that i think i understand...
it's like the consumer culture equivalent to taking your new girlfriend to the same restaurant that you met your old girlfriend at. It messes with continuity and uniqueness in a way that is somehow simultaneously comforting and perversely thrilling.
It takes generally accepted ideas of 'old fashioned' and by trivializing (and often sexualizing) them it validates the fact that we've changed while also erasing the need to remember/forget that we have. or something.

What i don't understand is when other cultures appropriate American kitsch as a non-referential aesthetic form.
The photo on the right is from a box of corona chocolates i bought in Egypt. While i suppose there's a possibility that they actually have been using the box design since the 50's, (they do still have fido dido on the 7ups) it seems more likely that it's some bizarro world attempt to imitate American kitsch culture. But why?

I dunno... it just strikes me as perverse to sell chocolates using a throwback white american child to a country that has no cultural appreciation of irony, nor (understandably) the information to appreciate this manifestation of it.

It also takes the kitsch selling point ("life was simple in the past, buy this chocolate to recapture the simple pleasures of eating chocolate as kid... oh + Irony") and reduces it to pure imagery (a white kid is eating this chocolate.) And that is kind of fucked up.

So... fast forward a month to Korea, where there is a home decorating store a block from my house exclusively selling 50's style americana embroidered pillows and the like. There's also a 50's era faux car advertisement that says "way my woody!" (referring to the woody wagon) and a rustic crate filled with billy idol vinyls. Huh? What's the appeal? Afterall, no one here knows enough English to understand the literal meaning of the car ad, let alone its double entendre-atic brilliance. And even if someone did understand these things, it would still be nothing more than vulgarly pointless without the cultural cues and references that locate it as kitsch.
Where the hell does this stuff come from?
any ideas?
anyone?

so this is boredom...