A Day in the Life of Chaos

When an American looks at Asia they often view the region as one big exotic place filled with people that look the same and are all sort of “Chinese.”  It is only after you live or travel here that you truly come to understand the tremendous variation between the region and its people. At times these ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious and political differences combine to make westerners seem as if they are the ones that are the same. The differences between a French, White American, German, English or Italian start to seem so small in the eyes of an Asian and we are typically racially grouped together in much the same way.  The Thais even have a word for it, Farang.  The term Farang envelopes all white skinned western folk and places them into a single class of foreigner. President Tran Dai Quang I recently completed my third trip to Vietnam, a region of the world I am still struggling to define.  The land is in a word fascinating.  It is an inconvenient land.  One tha

There are places in the world where beauty defies expectation.  Sometimes they are found unexpectedly in the smallest of things or the most unpredictable moments. When I awoke at 5:30 in the morning in my bed not far from the junction where northern Thailand, Laos and Burma meet I rolled over and looked out the window of my hotel room.  I was physically quite close to a place romantically and once nephariously called the Golden Triangle. It was place of lore, once known as the central hub of heroin trafficking across a remote section of South East Asia.  Now it was a region filled with economic development.  The jungle trails and combat fatigue clad mercenary armies have been replaced by casinos and Chinese tourists.  The men who once commanded heroin movement from their jungle bases now run multimillion dollar gambling empires.  The traffickers are still there, they are just woven into the fabric of economic development and their camouflaged clothing has been replaced by a veil o

I have been having an ongoing conversation with my father about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on around the nation and how they compare to the protests of the 60's.  I was born in the 60's, 1967 to be exact and less then a year later Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both dead.  I wish I could say I remember it but I believe I was likely more concerned with the flavor of my creamed spinach.  As a result in order to gain perspective I have turned to someone that was much more cognizant of the changes going on in the nation.  In an odd way, we tend to remember the period with some nostalgia yet my father reminds me that it was the seeming hopelessness of it all that drove both him and my mother independently of each other to migrate to Alaska. Bloody Sunday, Selma AL I wanted to know if the protests of the 60's as undefined and counter culture as they were, had an impact on public policy.  My father's conclusions were that they did and he listed a

The world is abuzz with high speed train travel.  Honestly it has been that way for the last 25 years but only recently with the rapid growth in China have some Americans begun to feel we are being left behind. Honestly it shouldn't just be a feeling, we are being left behind.  While the politicians bicker our aging infrastructure falls apart.  Our bridges fall down, our roads become bumpy.  Our sewer systems leak and our power generation becomes more and more 20th century. We always hear about China this and China that but the only contact that most American's have with China is shopping at Walmart.  We can't really conceive how different things could be.  When I visited my friend in China in 2011 I had a taste of things first hand.  Everywhere you look infrastructure is new.  While this is certainly not representative of all of China, industrial China is linking itself increasingly with modern road, rail and telecommunication networks.  South Korea has some of the great

Every culture must look odd to every other.  We all have our own ways of doing things and our own unique perspectives.  While at times odd, it is something that distinguishes one culture from another and makes the world seem a little less like Walmart. Some of the biggest contrast comes between the East and West.  Each civilization developed their own way of doing things and consequently can look quite bizarre to the other.  Of course I arrogantly speak these words from a Western perspective and the way I do things is obviously far superior putting me in a perfect position to judge. One well known example of cultural oddity is the Harajuku girl of Japan.  Immortalized by Gwen Steffani as the perfect combination of style and cuteness.  Or there is another variety that harbors an odd proclivity to walk around in public dressed as an animal.  I have even asked my Japanese friend Shinichi about them expecting to gain insight into some kind of ancient and profound ritual only to be tol

Something about traveling changes a person.  This is especially true when the traveling reaches beyond the boundaries of our own lands.  I think if one were to get mathematical about the whole thing the formula might read something like: Familiarity = Comfort Comfort = Complacency Complacency = Ignorance When we journey out of our comfort zone the results can be unpredictable at best.  Sometimes we reach a feeling of enlightenment, sometimes we become depressed.  Sometimes when we return to our normal state we find that what was once normal has changed. Many of the feelings confronted depend on how far from our comfort zone we journey.  Feelings about ourselves and our lives might vary little if we went abroad to Canada yet traveling to South East Asia, Africa or China can result in an enormous re-evaluation of who we are and where we fit into the world around us. A few days ago I returned from a trip to the Far East.  It was largely a family trip to the Philippines punctuate