Destination: Asia
To China’s Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant and Beyond
by Michael Yessis | 07.18.11 | 11:18 AM ET
More travel-related hilarity from David Sedaris in China, though it’s not for those without an adventurous palate. And if you do have an adventurous palate, Sedaris salutes you:
Another of the dishes that day consisted of rooster blood. I’d thought it would be liquid, like V8 juice, but when cooked it coagulated into little pads that had the consistency of tofu. “Not bad,” said the girl seated beside me, and I watched as she slid one into her mouth. Jill was American, a Peace Corps volunteer who’d come to Chengdu to teach English. “In Thailand last year? I ate dog face,” she told me.
“Just the face?”
“Well, head and face.” She was in a small village, part of a team returning abducted girls to their parents. To show their gratitude, the locals prepared a feast. Dog was considered good eating. The head was supposedly the best part, and rather than offend her hosts, Jill ate it.
This, for many, is flat-out evil but the rest of the world isn’t like America, where it’s become virtually impossible to throw a dinner party. One person doesn’t eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant, or can’t digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won’t touch it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching. Take that into consideration and it’s actually rather refreshing that a 22-year-old from the suburbs of Detroit will pick up her chopsticks and at least try the shar pei.
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Yahoo! BuzzMother Jones Goes to ‘Culture Training’ at an Indian Call Center
by Eva Holland | 07.15.11 | 10:02 AM ET
In the latest Mother Jones, Andrew Marantz has a fascinating story about his brief stint as a worker at a call center in India. Here’s Marantz on the mandatory “culture training” that workers undergo before they hit the switchboards:
Indian BPOs work with firms from dozens of countries, but most call-center jobs involve talking to Americans. New hires must be fluent in English, but many have never spoken to a foreigner. So to earn their headsets, they must complete classroom training lasting from one week to three months. First comes voice training, an attempt to “neutralize” pronunciation and diction by eliminating the round vowels of Indian English. Speaking Hindi on company premises is often a fireable offense.
Next is “culture training,” in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call “international culture”—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. “The most marketable skill in India today,” the Guardian wrote in 2003, “is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.”
(Via Where Am I Wearing)
The Partridge Family Meets Ken Kesey on the Grand Trunk Road
by Michael Yessis | 06.27.11 | 11:41 AM ET
James Parchman spent days on a Pakistani stretch of the fabled Grand Trunk Road, wowed by the ornate decorations he saw on so many passing vehicles. The “panorama of red, yellow and green, mixed with plastic whirligigs, polished mahogany doors and gleaming stainless steel cover plates,” he writes, is part pride of design, part advertising expense.
Durriya Kazi, an artist and teacher in Karachi, has long been a proponent of Pakistan’s folk art. She sees bus and truck decorating as an integral part of that tradition, noting the importance of distinguishing between sculpture as defined by the art gallery and the rich activity of actually making things that exists all over Pakistan.
In 2006, Ms. Kazi was instrumental in a program intended to spread Pakistan’s bus decoration skills to Melbourne, Australia, where a tram was transformed into a replica of a minibus used on Karachi’s W-11 route, resplendent in all its finery.
Another Pakistani with expertise in the subject is Prof. Jamal J. Elias of the University of Pennsylvania, the author of “On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity and Culture in Pakistan” (Oneworld, 2011). His book explores the tradition of Pakistani truck decoration, and looks into the “nature of response to religious imagery in popular Islamic culture.”
A terrific slideshow accompanies Parchman’s piece.
For another look at the Grand Trunk Road, check out Jeffrey Tayler’s five-part series, Cycling India’s Wildest Highway.
China Beyond its Borders
by Michael Yessis | 06.17.11 | 11:08 AM ET
Caught up with NPR’s series about the ways China is asserting itself throughout the world. It’s excellent. The latest piece looks at Italian response to the changing textile scene in Tuscany, “home to the largest concentration of Chinese residents in Europe.”
Sylvia Poggioli says:
On Via Pistoiese, shops are Chinese—hairdresser, hardware store and supermarket. There are few Italians. It’s 2 p.m. and all shops are open—there’s no time for siesta in Chinatown.
From Mandalay to Timbuktu: Great Names, Lousy Places
by Jim Benning | 06.09.11 | 12:31 PM ET
In an excerpt from his new book, “The Tao of Travel,” Paul Theroux recalls a number of places that just didn’t live up to the romance evoked by their names:
Mandalay: an enormous grid of dusty streets occupied by dispirited and oppressed Burmese, and policed by a military tyranny.
Tahiti: a mildewed island of surly colonials, exasperated French soldiers and indignant natives, with overpriced hotels, one of the world’s worst traffic problems and undrinkable water.
Timbuktu: dust, hideous hotels, unreliable transport, freeloaders, pestering people, garbage heaps everywhere, poisonous food.
I was always drawn to Kuala Lumpur because of its name. I loved just saying the words, and I loved the way they sounded. I loved the way they evoked lumpy koala bears, or something even more exotic that I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
When I finally went there, I was initially underwhelmed. The Petronas Towers are impressive, but they’re not lumpy koala bears. After exploring the city for a couple of days, however, getting lost in Indian neighborhoods with sari shops and aromatic cafes, and even spending a couple of hours in an elegant old theater watching a Bollywood movie I couldn’t understand, I decided Kuala Lumpur had its lumpy charms.
Ever gone to a place that didn’t live up to its great name? Or that did?
Pico Iyer: The Japanese ‘Have More Resolve and Fortitude Than Almost Anyone I’ve Seen’
by Jim Benning | 03.15.11 | 12:38 PM ET
Like everyone, I’ve been horrified by the news out of Japan following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant explosions. Among other things, I’ve been wondering how author and World Hum contributor Pico Iyer is doing, and whether he has been home in Japan or traveling as the disaster unfolds.
I just heard from him via email:
By curious chance, and with rare good timing, I actually flew out of Japan last Thursday night, hours before the earth began to move, and so I’m just sitting in placid Santa Barbara now, where nothing seems to move at all. But everyone I know in Japan sounds fine, and is going about her life as usual, for now at least a safe distance from all the horror.
He added:
Let’s hope the Japanese, who have more resolve and fortitude than almost anyone I’ve seen, can put their land together again very soon.
Let’s hope.
Our Own Apocalypse Now
by Haley Sweetland Edwards | 03.07.11 | 1:08 PM ET
From a football stadium in Seattle to a sweaty nightclub in Saigon, Haley Sweetland Edwards wrestles with the f*cked up magic of war
Wired’s Kevin Kelly: Travel as ‘Higher Education’
by Eva Holland | 02.23.11 | 11:41 AM ET
Chris Mitchell interviewed Kelly, who’s taken a break from writing bestsellers about technology to release a travel photography book. The book, Asia Grace, compiles photos from Kelly’s travels through Asia as a young backpacker in the 1970s. Here’s the Wired co-founder on those early travels:
I had hoped to work for National Geographic. I even called up one photo editor there and told him where I was going, looking for an assignment, but of course, they did not work that way… My travels never “paid” for themselves in any economic way, but I never really tried very hard to do so. I think of them more like my higher education. And for the amount of time I spent there, and what I learned, it was the cheapest education ever.
How to Drink Like a Japanese Salaryman
by Amy McKeever | 02.09.11 | 1:52 PM ET
Amy McKeever explains how to navigate an epic night of beer, yakitori and "nomunication"
A Very Different Take on Nepal
by Jim Benning | 01.20.11 | 12:29 PM ET
Writes Andrew Hyde:
A deep depression hit me about an hour into my visit to Nepal and lasted for the first two weeks. Nepal, as a travel destination, is nothing short of raved about. “The Himalayan Mountains are majestic and the people are the nicest in the world!” was a common travel tidbit I heard. What I found was a developing nation with deep problems becoming worse by the month with tourism hastening the poisoning of the well. The pollution is the worst I have ever seen. Air, land, sound and water, nothing is spared the careless trash.
The Peace Corps Volunteer Inspired by Angelina Jolie
by Jim Benning | 01.19.11 | 2:01 PM ET
Sean Smith is leaving his job as a writer at Entertainment Weekly to join the Peace Corps. Why?
As he writes in The Daily Beast, he was tiring of his job covering the entertainment industry when he traveled to India to interview Angelina Jolie.
A reported 43 percent of Mumbai’s 18 million people live in slums, and the depth of poverty is soul-sickening. By the time I met with Jolie, I felt raw and rattled, and I was eager to learn how she coped with this kind of suffering in her role as a U.N. ambassador. She said it was painful, yes, but it wasn’t debilitating because she was active. Her work was bringing attention to crises in the world. “If I couldn’t do that, I don’t know how I’d be around it, because I’d feel helpless,” she told me as we drove through the city. “You know, we all go through stages in our life where we feel lost, and I think it all comes down to having a sense of purpose. When I was famous for just being an actress, my life felt very shallow. Then when I became a mom and started working with the U.N., I was happy. I could die and feel that I’d done the right things with my life. It’s as simple as that.”
As a rule, I don’t ask celebrities for advice about anything, save hotels and restaurants, and I didn’t exactly race home and quit my job. But Jolie’s insight stuck with me, and over the next few years, as my ambivalence about my career deepened, I realized that she had provided me with an answer. I had absolute freedom. If I was willing to make a few sacrifices, I could find my sense of purpose and engage myself in work that would feel meaningful to me and be helpful to others.
The Sexual Lives of Sri Lankans
by Hannah Tennant-Moore | 12.17.10 | 1:56 PM ET
After a month of catcalls and groping, Hannah Tennant-Moore wonders what she's doing alone with a masseur
New Travel Book: ‘The Minaret of Djam’ by Freya Stark
by Eva Holland | 11.30.10 | 4:26 PM ET
The 1970 hardcover of this Freya Stark classic has been out of print for some time, but a new paperback edition is set to hit bookstores on Dec. 21.
The book recounts Stark’s journey in search of Afghanistan’s Minaret of Jam; the 12th-century relic is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, though at the time Stark visited, it was a recently re-discovered archaeological find. The publisher’s description notes that “Djam is, even today, one of the most inaccessible and remote places in Afghanistan. When Freya Stark traveled there, few people in the world had ever laid eyes on it or managed to reach the desolate valley in which it lies.”
Three of Stark’s books appeared on our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time.
A Welcome Rooftop in the Heart of Pakistan
by Joshua Berman | 11.30.10 | 11:33 AM ET
Joshua Berman Joshua Berman discovers a backpacker haven in Lahore where tales are spun, friends are made and plans are changed
World Travel Watch: Hundreds Killed in Phnom Penh Stampede, Dutch ‘Coffee Shops’ Closing to Tourists
by Larry Habegger | 11.24.10 | 12:03 PM ET
Larry Habegger rounds up global travel news