Crash

My worst nightmare might actually be coming true... that is that all my photos from my five months abroad may be lost. My portable hard-drive seems to have frozen along with my laptop; the good news is that I at least backed up all my photos from India and most from China. The bad news is I don't have any backed up from South Africa. The good news is that it is a portable hard-drive, so if it doesn't un-freeze there's a chance the photos can be rescued. Incidentally, the hard-drive crashed as I was transferring all the photos to a more secure 500 GB, external hard-drive I just got.

I need a functioning, fast computer.

For the record, I am indeed home, but I am sifting through almost two thousand new messages, old mail, getting tested for TB, and re-packing for New York on Saturday. My computer is having issues (crashing randomly) so I may be slow in responding to emails, blogging, and getting around to the thousands of photos I took (I think the last count was about 9,250 photos). This means not only will I be slow in posting pictures on my blog, but processing these thousands of photos for my fellow IHP students.

Oh yes, one last thing. I got to add one more country to my list of countries visited on this trip. I'm still highly jealous of Laura, David and Bazazi for going to Lesotho and pony-trekking (this was my dream BEFORE the entire program began, and one of the main reasons I decided to spend an extra week in Africa), but I suppose France, Greece, and Turkey made up for it. And, I was able to jump through British Airway's bureaucratic hoops and check all my baggage back to Boston, which ultimately meant I could go into London and walk around for a couple hours during my nine hours in transit. I took out ten pounds (around $20 USD) at Barclays, Bank of America's British partner, and spent it very wisely:
6.70 pounds for an all-day London metro pass
2.25 pounds for a McDonald's cheeseburger happy meal (you learn to be calorie-efficient/cost-effective when travelling on a budget).
65 cents on a grape-drink.
I got to see quite a lot of London in those couple hours; my favorite parts included the free "Photographer's Gallery" which had an exhibit on Found photographs (of "Found" magazine fame), and talking with the anti-war protesters who've been camping outside of Parliament for six years. Pictures will come (I know I keep saying that, but they will.).

Yesterday, Turkey. Today, Paris. Tomorrow, Home.

I'm finally going home to Concord, Massachusetts tomorrow. I'll be there for less than a week and then I'm moving to New York for two months. Pictures will come, at some point.

İn İstanbul (yes, the İ İs dotted)

Allow me to excercise all the new letters the Turkish Roman alphabet has afforded me:
Şş
Ğğ
Üü
Çç
Öö
İi
Iı
Yeah, I thınk that ıs ıt, unfortunately I cannot fınd many of the normal punctuatıon and letters so I am not goıng to use contractıons and sound hıdeously formal (hats off to you, Ellen).

İstanbul. More later. You do not get a real entry now, suffice ıt to say that ıt ıs a bıg bıg cıty that for some reason remınds me of Beıjıng.

Fire Chicken

The Lonely Planet guidebook for iStanbul says that the word "Turkey" probably comes from Chinese, who apparently referred to "them" as "Tu Kues" (with an umlaut over the U). The word for the animal "turkey," in Chinese, translates to "Fire Chicken."

-Apparently buses in Turkey are really nice. I keep thinking about the buses in Chile, i.e., with waiters and attendants, who give you blankets and tea and breakfast on the bus. We'll see.

-There's a lot of interesting stuff in Turkey, biblical things, religious things. I don't think I'll be able to see the whirling dervishes.

-Flipped through the Istanbul guidebook and it seemed like it could have been describing Beijing. Huge migrant population, not much green space, old political and cultural capital of an empire, and so on.

-There are Chinese clothing stores in several of the Greek islands. I think we saw at least three clothing outlets, selling Chinese imports and owned by Chinese people, in Samos.

-Ferry schedules changed, and last night we took a ferry from Mykonos at midnight that arrived in Samos at 6:15 in the morning.

-One new Turkish Lira is equivalent to 1,000,000, that's right, one million, old Turkish Lira.

-Off to the Fire Chicken in about an hour!

... I briefly convince Annalisa that the Mediterranean is freshwater.

Off to Turkey in two days. Next stop: Samos island.

greek roundup

So: I'm not going to make you jealous quite yet of where I've been recently, i.e., no photos for now (I don't have my USB cable on me).
But, here's a quick roundup of what comes to mind:

-Vietnamese restaurant in Paris is cheap, and delicious. The Pho reminds me of the Vietnamese restaurant in Middletown Connecticut where I go to university.
-Met up with Sunny, one of the program participants while in Paris, if only for a few hours.
-Chinese men and women peddle "traditional Chinese massages" on the beaches of Santorini and Naxos, both Greek Cycladic islands in the Aegean Sea.
-I continue to slap myself for not trying the Chinese food in South Africa; we went to a Chinese restaurant in Santorini called "China H Kina." The owners were from Hong Kong, and the last page in the menu said "For Chinese People" in Chinese (and not in English or Greek), for no apparent reason. As far as I could tell, the Chinese menu consisted of simple things like noodles with fatty chicken/beef meat on the bone. Interesting.
-Naxos is beautiful. Really beautiful. Apparently they don't ride as many Vespas as I thought they did in Greece, but they are quite plentiful in Paris.
-Am reading "Red Dust" by Ma Jian, an "On the Road" (Kerouac) taking place in China in the early to mid-eighties. Highly recommended.
-Read "Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee, a South African author. I got the book at the airport in Cape Town and the book has perpetuated my fascination with South Africa. I find myself talking about South Africa a lot.
-Greece is far more "developed" (I quote this because I've realized that development is highly subjective) than I remember it being when I came seven years ago.

Soon, I am off to Turkey. This journey ends when I return to Concord, Massachusetts on June 12th, but it also continues when I spend two months in New York City starting June 18th.

in Paris

It's nice to see the brighter side of colonialism, to see some Global North after all this Global South stuff. In all seriousness, Paris, in a word, is pleasant. As David (my roommate from India) put it, Europe is just so "tastefully done." I'm not snapping as many pictures as I did in South Africa or India, and I don't want to include any pictures of the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower, but hopefully some will appear at some point.

Done with the program, now onto the unknown

Well, I've actually just come back from a week long road-trip along the coast of South Africa. A couple of us bungee-jumped off the highest/longest bungee-jump in the world, which I think was 216 m. I didn't-- I never even considered it because I couldn't afford it. We stopped at a couple places along the way, including this awesome castle that this German guy built a couple years ago in the countryside.

Eventually, we made it to near Port Saint Johns, on the "Wild Coast" (a region along the Eastern coast of South Africa that is relatively undeveloped). We stayed at a guesthouse on the Indian Ocean without electricity or running water-- "off the grid." The owner caught his own rainwater for drinking, used gray water for everything else, and dug dry toilets. For three long lazy days, we hiked to a shipwreck, sat around with cows on a deserted beach, played around in tidal pools, had candlelight dinners, and all that other good stuff. The owner trained as a chef in Europe and made delicious seafood pizza, too.

I haven't said too much recently about the program I was on, "Health and Community," which ended exactly a week ago. I'm not going to say much now either, because summarizing is boring and I want to reflect before I say much more. Hopefully, when I get my act together, I'll show some pictures and add a few words.

Cape Point, Cape of Good Hope, Penguins, Apartheid

This is Cape Point, the "most southwesterly" point in Africa. A lot of people wrongly assume its the lowest point in South Africa, but that is Cape Agulhas (I think thats Portuguese for "Needles," just a guess though). Its beautiful and there's water on both sides of this peninsula. It takes about an hour and a half from Cape TOwn's city center.




This is Cape of Good Hope. It's about an hour and a half walk from Cape Point; both are on the same peninsula.


This is my host father cutting a cricket bat for his youngest son, Mayeer. They are "Cape Malays," who are mostly originally from Indonesia. They are Muslim, and think they are probably originally from India. He does look really Indian, and they feed us lots of neo-Indian food.


Boulders (Point? Town? Beach?) in Simons Town, between Cape Town and Cape Point. Its famous for its African penguins. They used to be called Jackass penguins, because of their donkey-like braying mating call. Apparently someone decided that a species of penguins in South America also had a donkey-like bray, so the Jackass penguins of South Africa are now merely African penguins. They're pretty funny to watch. You could walk up just a few feet, sometimes less than a foot of some of them nesting. This one gave me a look.







This is an underexposed picture of the Bo Kaap, the area where I'm staying.

Ok, I've been meaning to talk about apartheid, because it's something I really didn't understand before coming here (and to a large extent, still don't understand). So when the Nationalist Party was voted in in 1948, they basically started putting into legislation a set of laws similar to the Jim Crow laws in the South-- segregating races in South Africa. The Nationalist Party was composed completely of whites, and as far as I can tell, Afrikaaners, whites that originated from the Netherlands. Blacks were prevented from voting of course (for if they could vote, they would vote out the Nationalist party-- Blacks compose about 80% of the population). Blacks were also forced into townships, like Zwelethemba (see previous entry), which were basically shantytowns outside of major towns/cities. The City of Cape Town was thus almost completely white, and "Coloureds" (not Black or White, this included the Cape Malay population from Indonesia and South Asia) were forced into segregated districts such as Bo Kaapand Coloured townships, not too different from the Black townships. Bo Kaap is a Muslim neighborhood in the hills overlooking the city, separated from the center where whites were allowed. Whites were allowed to live in the city and suburbs. By separating these different non-white populations, the NP created a system in which there was little solidarity among these oppressed groups.
Even today, many "Blacks" and "Coloureds" and "Whites" hold resentment against other racial groups. Conquer and Divide, just like the British in India. Even today, with the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, the effects of segregating populations is still felt in all parts of South Africa.


Your humble correspondent,