Aaaahhhh. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It’s painful to know that HE will be in Amsterdam and Brussels the coming May and I am on the other side of the world. There will be Gulag Orchestra playing out loud my favorite songs, there will be those Elephant guns shooting with millions of brass melodies, there will be Sunday Smiles and Postcards from Italy. And I will not be there to sing along ….. “What melody will lead my Lover from his bed”. Anyways “The March of the Zapotec” the newest of Beirut is a FACT. They did not split. Zach is Zach again successfully recovered after his crisis last summer. I just don’t understand why there is nothing about the album on 3voo12 or Myspace?!!! Why are you torturing meeee!!!!
I have to see them live before I die! I have to immerse myself in this ingenuous oblivion called Beirut – hypnotized by this music, intoxicated by this voice. Sing for me “March of the Zapotec”!!! Sing for me in the following spring months as your ancenstor “The flying Club Cup” sang for me last seasons under rain and snow. Sad and joyous. I will catch up one day. He is still 22.
Could somebody tell Zach Condon that he is the bestest!
vrijdag 27 februari 2009
The end of poverty?
You have probably noticed that the majority of the clothes that we buy in those modern boutiques such as GAP, H&M, Zarra and the like were made in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, Bangladesh. I don’t know what kind of thoughts are being evoked by the etiquette on your new H&M shirt but I have always imagined thousands of impoverished women sitting in front of sewing machines. Treated like dogs. Paid less than enough to feed their numerous skinny children. Even though I have these thoughts every time I buy a product created by this booming garment industry, I normally burry them somewhere deep down this dusty basket case called consciousness and head for the counter. This is a term called a “compassion fatigue” (to put it simply: the Stress of Caring Too Much – no joking here this is a serious contemporary syndrome but I would dedicate a post to this curious phenomenon some other time). Interestingly, I came across a book that had a chapter on this very topic – poor Bangladeshi women working in the garment industry- and apparently I was right and I was wrong. Yes indeed –they are paid little; yes indeed – they are treated like dogs. But may be there is another side of the coin. If you have time and want to read something interesting from the catalogue of this big bad world of ours take a look at this excerpt.
Sachs, Jeffry. D, “The End of Poverty: Economic possibilities of our time”, Chapter 1: A global family portrait, page 26-30, Penguin Group Inc, New York, 2005
“Bangladesh was born in a war for independence against Pakistan in 1971. That year, it experienced massive famine and disarray, leading an official in Henry Kissinger's State Department to famously label it an "international basket case." Bangladesh today is far from a basket case. Per capita income has approximately doubled since independence. Life expectancy has risen from forty-four years to sixty-two years. The infant mortality rate (the number of children who die before their first birthday for every 1,000 born) has declined from 145 in 1970 to 48 in 2002. Bangladesh shows us that even in circumstances that seem the most hopeless there are ways forward if the right strategies are applied, and if the right combination of investments is made.
Still, Bangladesh is not out of the grip of extreme poverty. Although it has escaped the worst of the ravages of famine and disease in the past generation, it faces some profound challenges today. A few months after my visit to Malawi, I was up at dawn one morning in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to see a remarkable sight: thousands of people walking to work in long lines stretching from the outskirts of Dhaka and from some of its poorest
neighborhoods. Looking more closely, I noticed that these workers were almost all young women, perhaps between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. These are the workers of a burgeoning garment industry in Dhaka who cut, stitch, and package millions of pieces of apparel each month for shipment to the United States and Europe. Over the years, I have visited garment factories all over the developing world. I have grown familiar with the cavernous halls where hundreds of young women sit at sewing machines, and men at cutting tables, where the fabrics move along production lines and the familiar labels of GAP, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent, Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney, and others are attached as the clothing reaches the final stages of production. There is nothing glamorous about this work. The women often walk two hours each morning in long quiet files to get to work. Arriving at seven or seven-thirty, they may be in their seats for most of the following twelve hours. They often work with almost no break at all or perhaps a very short lunch break, with little chance to go to the lavatory. Leering bosses lean over them, posing a threat of sexual harassment. After a long, difficult, tedious day, the young women trudge back home, when they are again sometimes threatened with physical assault. These sweatshop jobs are the targets of public protest in developed countries; those protests have helped to improve the safety and quality of the working conditions. The rich-world protesters, however, should support increased numbers of such jobs, albeit under safer working conditions, by protesting the trade protectionism in their own countries that keeps out garment exports from countries such as Bangladesh. These young women already have a foothold in the modern economy that is a critical, measurable step up from the villages of Malawi (and more relevant for the women, a step up from the villages of Bangladesh where most of them were born). The sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty. They give lie to the Kissingerstate department's forecast that Bangladesh is condemned to extreme poverty.
On one visit to Bangladesh, I picked up an English-language morning newspaper, where I found an extensive insert of interviews with young women working in the garment sector. These stories were poignant, fascinating, and eye-opening. One by one, they recounted the arduous hours, the lack of labor rights, and the harassment. What was most striking and unexpected about the stories was the repeated affirmation that this work was the greatest opportunity that these women could ever have imagined, and that their employment had changed their lives for the better. Nearly all of the women interviewed had grown up in the countryside, extraordinarily poor, illiterate and unschooled, and vulnerable to chronic hunger and hardship in a domineering, patriarchal society. Had they (and their forebearers of the 1970s and 1980s) stayed in the villages, they would have been forced into a marriage arranged by their fathers, and by seventeen or eighteen, forced to conceive a child. Their trek to the cities to take jobs has given these young women a chance for personal liberation of unprecedented dimension and opportunity. The Bangladeshi women told how they were able to save some small surplus from their meager pay, manage their own income, have their own rooms, choose when and whom to date and marry, choose to have children when they felt ready, and use their savings to improve their living conditions and especially to go back to school to enhance their literacy and job-market skills.
As hard as it is, this life is a step on the way to economic opportunity that was unimaginable in the countryside in generations past. Some rich-country protesters have argued that Dhaka's apparel firms should either pay far higher wage rates or be closed, but closing such factories as a result of wages forced above worker productivity would be little more than a ticket for these women back to rural misery. For these young women, these factories offer not only opportunities for personal
freedom, but also the first rung on the ladder of rising skills and income for themselves and, within a few years, for their children. Virtually every poor country that has developed successfully has gone through these first stages of industrialization. These Bangladeshi women share the experience of many generations of immigrants to New York City's garment district and a hundred other places where their migration to toil in garment factories was a step on the path to a future of urban affluence in succeeding generations. Not only is the garment sector fueling Bangladesh's economic growth of more than 5 percent per year in recent years, but it is also raisingthe consciousness and power of women in a society that was long brazenly biased against women's chances in life.
As part of a more general and dramatic process of change throughout Bangladeshi society, this change and others give Bangladesh the opportunity in the next few years to put itself on a secure path of long-term economic growth. The countryside that these women have left is also changing quickly, in part because of the income remittances and ideas that the young women send back to their rural communities, and in part because of the increased travel and temporary migration between rural and urban areas, as families diversify their economic bases between rural agriculture and urban manufacturers and services. In 2003, my colleagues at Columbia and I visited a village near Dhaka with one of the leaders of an inspiring nongovernmental organization, the Bangladeshi Rural Advancement Committee, now known universally as BRAC. There we met representatives from a village association, which BRAC had helped to organize, in which women living about an hour outside the city were engaged in small-scale commercial activities— food processing and trade—within the village and on the roads between the village and Dhaka itself. These women presented a picture of change every bit as dramatic as that of the burgeoning apparel sector.
Wearing beautiful saris, the women sat on the ground in six rows, each with six women, to greet us and answer questions. Each row represented a subgroup of the local "microfinance" unit. The woman in the front of the row was in charge of the borrowing of the whole group behindher. The group in each line was mutually responsible for repayments of the loans taken by any member within the line. BRAC and its famed counterpart, Grameen Bank, pioneered this kind of group lending, in which impoverished recipients (usually women) are given small loans of a few hundred dollars as working-capital for microbusiness activities. Such women were long considered unbankable, simply not creditworthy enough to bear the transaction costs to receive loans. Group lending changed the repayment dynamics: default rates are extremely low, and BRAC and Grameen have figured out how to keep other transaction costs to a minimum as well. Perhaps more amazing than the stories of how microfinance was fueling small-scale businesses were the women's attitudes to child rearing.
When Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and one of the world's leading experts on reproductive health, asked the women how many had five children, no hands went up. Four? Still no hands. Three? One nervous woman, looking around, reluctantly put her hand in the air. Two? About 40 percent of the women. One? Perhaps another 25 percent. None? The remainder of the women. Here was a group where the average number of children for these mothers was between one and two children. Rosenfield then asked them how many they wanted in total. He again started at five—no hands. Four? No hands. Three? No hands. Two? Almost all the hands went up. This social norm was new, a demonstration of a change of outlook and possibility so dramatic that Rosenfield dwelt on it throughout the rest of our visit. He had been visiting Bangladesh and other parts of Asia since the 1960s, and he remembered vividly the days when Bangladeshi rural women would typically have had six or seven children.
The jobs for women in the cities and in rural off-farm microenterprises; a new spirit of women's rights and independence and empowerment; dramatically reduced rates of child mortality; rising literacy of girls and young women; and, crucially, the availability of family planning and contraception have made all the difference for these women.
There is no single explanation for the dramatic, indeed historic, reduction in desired rates of fertility: it is the combination of new ideas, better public health for mothers and children, and improved economic opportunities for women. The reduced fertility rates, in turn, will fuel Bangladesh's rising incomes. With fewer children, a poor household can invest more in the health and education of each child, thereby equipping the next generation with the health, nutrition, and education that can lift Bangladesh's living standards in future years. Bangladesh has managed to place its foot on the first rung of the ladder of development, and has achieved economic growth and improvements of health and education partly through its own heroic efforts, partly through the ingenuity of NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank, and partly through investments that have been made, often at significant scale, by various donor governments that rightly viewed Bangladesh not as a hopeless basket case but as a country worthy of attention, care, and development assistance.”
(And still somewhere deep inside the above-mentioned basket case I know it all just stinks of hypocricy and desperation)
Sachs, Jeffry. D, “The End of Poverty: Economic possibilities of our time”, Chapter 1: A global family portrait, page 26-30, Penguin Group Inc, New York, 2005
“Bangladesh was born in a war for independence against Pakistan in 1971. That year, it experienced massive famine and disarray, leading an official in Henry Kissinger's State Department to famously label it an "international basket case." Bangladesh today is far from a basket case. Per capita income has approximately doubled since independence. Life expectancy has risen from forty-four years to sixty-two years. The infant mortality rate (the number of children who die before their first birthday for every 1,000 born) has declined from 145 in 1970 to 48 in 2002. Bangladesh shows us that even in circumstances that seem the most hopeless there are ways forward if the right strategies are applied, and if the right combination of investments is made.
Still, Bangladesh is not out of the grip of extreme poverty. Although it has escaped the worst of the ravages of famine and disease in the past generation, it faces some profound challenges today. A few months after my visit to Malawi, I was up at dawn one morning in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to see a remarkable sight: thousands of people walking to work in long lines stretching from the outskirts of Dhaka and from some of its poorest
neighborhoods. Looking more closely, I noticed that these workers were almost all young women, perhaps between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. These are the workers of a burgeoning garment industry in Dhaka who cut, stitch, and package millions of pieces of apparel each month for shipment to the United States and Europe. Over the years, I have visited garment factories all over the developing world. I have grown familiar with the cavernous halls where hundreds of young women sit at sewing machines, and men at cutting tables, where the fabrics move along production lines and the familiar labels of GAP, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent, Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney, and others are attached as the clothing reaches the final stages of production. There is nothing glamorous about this work. The women often walk two hours each morning in long quiet files to get to work. Arriving at seven or seven-thirty, they may be in their seats for most of the following twelve hours. They often work with almost no break at all or perhaps a very short lunch break, with little chance to go to the lavatory. Leering bosses lean over them, posing a threat of sexual harassment. After a long, difficult, tedious day, the young women trudge back home, when they are again sometimes threatened with physical assault. These sweatshop jobs are the targets of public protest in developed countries; those protests have helped to improve the safety and quality of the working conditions. The rich-world protesters, however, should support increased numbers of such jobs, albeit under safer working conditions, by protesting the trade protectionism in their own countries that keeps out garment exports from countries such as Bangladesh. These young women already have a foothold in the modern economy that is a critical, measurable step up from the villages of Malawi (and more relevant for the women, a step up from the villages of Bangladesh where most of them were born). The sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty. They give lie to the Kissingerstate department's forecast that Bangladesh is condemned to extreme poverty.
On one visit to Bangladesh, I picked up an English-language morning newspaper, where I found an extensive insert of interviews with young women working in the garment sector. These stories were poignant, fascinating, and eye-opening. One by one, they recounted the arduous hours, the lack of labor rights, and the harassment. What was most striking and unexpected about the stories was the repeated affirmation that this work was the greatest opportunity that these women could ever have imagined, and that their employment had changed their lives for the better. Nearly all of the women interviewed had grown up in the countryside, extraordinarily poor, illiterate and unschooled, and vulnerable to chronic hunger and hardship in a domineering, patriarchal society. Had they (and their forebearers of the 1970s and 1980s) stayed in the villages, they would have been forced into a marriage arranged by their fathers, and by seventeen or eighteen, forced to conceive a child. Their trek to the cities to take jobs has given these young women a chance for personal liberation of unprecedented dimension and opportunity. The Bangladeshi women told how they were able to save some small surplus from their meager pay, manage their own income, have their own rooms, choose when and whom to date and marry, choose to have children when they felt ready, and use their savings to improve their living conditions and especially to go back to school to enhance their literacy and job-market skills.
As hard as it is, this life is a step on the way to economic opportunity that was unimaginable in the countryside in generations past. Some rich-country protesters have argued that Dhaka's apparel firms should either pay far higher wage rates or be closed, but closing such factories as a result of wages forced above worker productivity would be little more than a ticket for these women back to rural misery. For these young women, these factories offer not only opportunities for personal
freedom, but also the first rung on the ladder of rising skills and income for themselves and, within a few years, for their children. Virtually every poor country that has developed successfully has gone through these first stages of industrialization. These Bangladeshi women share the experience of many generations of immigrants to New York City's garment district and a hundred other places where their migration to toil in garment factories was a step on the path to a future of urban affluence in succeeding generations. Not only is the garment sector fueling Bangladesh's economic growth of more than 5 percent per year in recent years, but it is also raisingthe consciousness and power of women in a society that was long brazenly biased against women's chances in life.
As part of a more general and dramatic process of change throughout Bangladeshi society, this change and others give Bangladesh the opportunity in the next few years to put itself on a secure path of long-term economic growth. The countryside that these women have left is also changing quickly, in part because of the income remittances and ideas that the young women send back to their rural communities, and in part because of the increased travel and temporary migration between rural and urban areas, as families diversify their economic bases between rural agriculture and urban manufacturers and services. In 2003, my colleagues at Columbia and I visited a village near Dhaka with one of the leaders of an inspiring nongovernmental organization, the Bangladeshi Rural Advancement Committee, now known universally as BRAC. There we met representatives from a village association, which BRAC had helped to organize, in which women living about an hour outside the city were engaged in small-scale commercial activities— food processing and trade—within the village and on the roads between the village and Dhaka itself. These women presented a picture of change every bit as dramatic as that of the burgeoning apparel sector.
Wearing beautiful saris, the women sat on the ground in six rows, each with six women, to greet us and answer questions. Each row represented a subgroup of the local "microfinance" unit. The woman in the front of the row was in charge of the borrowing of the whole group behindher. The group in each line was mutually responsible for repayments of the loans taken by any member within the line. BRAC and its famed counterpart, Grameen Bank, pioneered this kind of group lending, in which impoverished recipients (usually women) are given small loans of a few hundred dollars as working-capital for microbusiness activities. Such women were long considered unbankable, simply not creditworthy enough to bear the transaction costs to receive loans. Group lending changed the repayment dynamics: default rates are extremely low, and BRAC and Grameen have figured out how to keep other transaction costs to a minimum as well. Perhaps more amazing than the stories of how microfinance was fueling small-scale businesses were the women's attitudes to child rearing.
When Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and one of the world's leading experts on reproductive health, asked the women how many had five children, no hands went up. Four? Still no hands. Three? One nervous woman, looking around, reluctantly put her hand in the air. Two? About 40 percent of the women. One? Perhaps another 25 percent. None? The remainder of the women. Here was a group where the average number of children for these mothers was between one and two children. Rosenfield then asked them how many they wanted in total. He again started at five—no hands. Four? No hands. Three? No hands. Two? Almost all the hands went up. This social norm was new, a demonstration of a change of outlook and possibility so dramatic that Rosenfield dwelt on it throughout the rest of our visit. He had been visiting Bangladesh and other parts of Asia since the 1960s, and he remembered vividly the days when Bangladeshi rural women would typically have had six or seven children.
The jobs for women in the cities and in rural off-farm microenterprises; a new spirit of women's rights and independence and empowerment; dramatically reduced rates of child mortality; rising literacy of girls and young women; and, crucially, the availability of family planning and contraception have made all the difference for these women.
There is no single explanation for the dramatic, indeed historic, reduction in desired rates of fertility: it is the combination of new ideas, better public health for mothers and children, and improved economic opportunities for women. The reduced fertility rates, in turn, will fuel Bangladesh's rising incomes. With fewer children, a poor household can invest more in the health and education of each child, thereby equipping the next generation with the health, nutrition, and education that can lift Bangladesh's living standards in future years. Bangladesh has managed to place its foot on the first rung of the ladder of development, and has achieved economic growth and improvements of health and education partly through its own heroic efforts, partly through the ingenuity of NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank, and partly through investments that have been made, often at significant scale, by various donor governments that rightly viewed Bangladesh not as a hopeless basket case but as a country worthy of attention, care, and development assistance.”
(And still somewhere deep inside the above-mentioned basket case I know it all just stinks of hypocricy and desperation)
donderdag 26 februari 2009
Standing next to me
When I found out that Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys and Miles Kane from The Rascals joined forces to create the “The Age of The Understatement” it was like a dream-come-true.
dinsdag 24 februari 2009
Battles
Our guns
we shot them in the things we said
ah we didn't need no bullets
cos we rely on some words instead
kill someone in argument
outwit them with our brains
and we'd kill ourselves laughing
at the funny things we'd say
And bombs
we had them saved for special times
when the crew would call a shakedown
we break down a party landmine
women that so sexy
they explode us with their looks
ah we blowing up some speakers
jumping round till the ground shook
And battles
they happened in these dancehalls
see we'd rather fight with music
choosing one the rhythm war
battle at these shakedowns
and we battle at these gigs
we do battle in our bedrooms
made some sweet love to the beat
Then our allies grew
wherever we would roam
see whenever we're together
any stranger feel at home
in a way we are an army
but this army not destruct
no instead we're doing simple things
good loving find it run amuck
This be a declaration
written about my friends
it's engraved into this song
so they know I'm not forgetting them
see maybe if the world contained
more people like these
then the news would not be telling me
about all that warfare endlessly
("The Chariot" by The Cat Empire)
we shot them in the things we said
ah we didn't need no bullets
cos we rely on some words instead
kill someone in argument
outwit them with our brains
and we'd kill ourselves laughing
at the funny things we'd say
And bombs
we had them saved for special times
when the crew would call a shakedown
we break down a party landmine
women that so sexy
they explode us with their looks
ah we blowing up some speakers
jumping round till the ground shook
And battles
they happened in these dancehalls
see we'd rather fight with music
choosing one the rhythm war
battle at these shakedowns
and we battle at these gigs
we do battle in our bedrooms
made some sweet love to the beat
Then our allies grew
wherever we would roam
see whenever we're together
any stranger feel at home
in a way we are an army
but this army not destruct
no instead we're doing simple things
good loving find it run amuck
This be a declaration
written about my friends
it's engraved into this song
so they know I'm not forgetting them
see maybe if the world contained
more people like these
then the news would not be telling me
about all that warfare endlessly
("The Chariot" by The Cat Empire)
maandag 23 februari 2009
La Esquina
is the first single from Panamericana kindly presented to us by the German-Argentinean Frederico Aubele. Hm...somewhere out there is a big, dangerous and seducing city called Buenos Aires. A blend of music, races, styles. The descendent of European families escaping from their mid-20th-century governments. Someday… I want to be walking down its streets, among its blue, green, yellow and red houses. Wasting my time in a pub, drinking, listening to nu-jazzy tango. Not too different from now though. (:-D)
zondag 22 februari 2009
Earthlings
I have never had a pet.
I have never been a vegetarian though.
I have never had real leather clothes.
I have never liked the circus and the zoo.
I will never support experiments and research on animals.
This documentary made me reflect on how I perceive animals - as a mere renewable, unquestionable source of food, clothes and companion -and not as fellow earthlings. Something somewhere went terribly wrong with us. Our intelligence, dominance, achievements. Our ambitions, values, dreams, reality. They all doomed us to be “the most detestable of all species”, “the only kind that will inflict pain for sport”. I don’t know if this movie will have the same effect on you but please, please watch it!!! I am also not sure if I could possibly become totally vegetarian as I always supported the view that we are carnivorous and meat is a healthy and indispensable part of our diet. But how healthy could be flesh stuffed with fear, horror, pain and more pain while is being slaughtered alive? Are there really laws and regulations on how meat is produced? Are there really complied to and who takes care of that?
May be I am just traumatized by the movie. May be it’s a manipulative campaign by some kind of sneaky corporate mission. May be, may be…. I don’t know. But I will try to do some research on the topic and be less ignorant. I hope it’s possible.
“As long as there are slaughter houses, there will be battlefields” Leo Tolstoy
woensdag 18 februari 2009
Into the dark
Last night while completely immersed into the new season of Scrubs (:-D)I could not help but recognize the voice of Benjamin Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie at the end of episode two. A song I have not heard before and one I just really liked. A bit sad but death is part of us and consciously or not we are all scared of the thought that we are here – pulsing and alive, lovers and fighters- and one day, may be next day we will be gone. Into the dark.
But fear is not the heart of love. Love is the heart of everything. Cheesy or not- it's up to you friends of mine. Love you!
If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs
In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
"Son fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back
You and me have seen everything to see
From Bangkok to Calgary
And the soles of your shoes are all worn down
The time for sleep is now
It's nothing to cry about
'cause we'll hold each other soon
In the blackest of rooms
But fear is not the heart of love. Love is the heart of everything. Cheesy or not- it's up to you friends of mine. Love you!
If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs
In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
"Son fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back
You and me have seen everything to see
From Bangkok to Calgary
And the soles of your shoes are all worn down
The time for sleep is now
It's nothing to cry about
'cause we'll hold each other soon
In the blackest of rooms
dinsdag 17 februari 2009
Meet the Rainforest
And yes finally Kamie has started work. I almost felt bad practicing so much of what I actually have to study. But these glorious times will be slowly substituted by critical evaluations, seminars, sustainability and all that the tourism industry should be and is not. With a shirt and a skirt, smart as hell, I entered for the first time the white building of one of those organizations that are actually doing something to preserve the biodiversity of the planet, prevent pollution and deforestation, teach businesses how to reduce their waste and be more sustainable and less harmful to the local culture and the environment. Teach consumers how to be responsible and become part of this global movement. And I am part of that as well. Such peaceful atmosphere at the workplace – flowers everywhere (it’s the Rainforest Alliance anyways), maps and pictures of wild animals, beaches and indigenous communities on the walls. Friendly, international colleagues. I was also able to meet big bad boss Ronald Sanabria who is cited in half of our text books on sustainability. Well Ronald is everything but big and bad. Smiling brightly as the morning sun he is extremely easy-going and pleasant to talk to. My Castillano accent amuses everyone, we drink mate with Silvia (my supervisor) in her office while she is showing me on the map all the places the RA is working with. Litters of mate, talk and talk until it’s already time for a meeting and Kamie goes home with a USB full of information on every country in Central America, environmental data, tourism and sustainability, sustainability and tourism. I don’t know what came first anymore.
Найлонови торбиииички!!!!
Like my good friend Andrea used to say : Mi bolsa de exprerincia esta creciendo!
Havingagoodtime
A long story
Havingagoodtime is the answer to the question “Why hasn’t Kamie started the internship yet?” Blame it on the rum, the hotness, the color of the skin around me. Blame it on the Rainforest Alliance that has been too busy lately thus leaving me no other choice but havingagoodtime. A week ago I got an e-mail from them informing me that my supervisors will be out of office and out of town for a week due to seminars (which already sounds promising as I will be part of these seminars quite soon) So little Kamie had another week off in Costa Rica. One too many.
Ida and I decided to get away for a few days just to change the climate as San Jose was too god damn cold with its 25 degrees. In search for sunnier spots down the coast we took the deadly 7 hour bus to Santa Teresa, on the not-so-far-located-on-the-map Nicoya peninsula. The Pacific coast. My first one.
Seven hours sounds like pretty long and boring trip, right? Well, it was until we got to the mountains and the bus started swinging. Leeeeeffft. Riiiighhhhttt. Sorry, guys you are not allowed to sleep anymore! Not in Costa Rica – quickly stick your noses on the window pane and look. Look and absorb. Cause you’ve never seen anything like it. Mountain tops dressed in greenness. All-embracing steam. Backpackers-free zone. Then suddenly we stopped in front at a harbor. A quite cute little village harbor. The initial feeling of confusion grew into panic when the majority of the bus finally figured out that we have to get out. The panic quickly became anarchy as tourists wanted to know when and how are we going to continue. Bags, hands, red sun-burned cheeks, blue Scandinavian eyes looking for answers. Only the Ticos stood in silence mockingly watching this episode, while a few of them told me that we, the bus and the luggage will be transported to the other side of the peninsula by ferry. Its always easier when you know Spanish. And what a ferry, my friends! ....A huge boat on three levels transporting everything- animals, agricultural machines, local families, lonely-planet-ers and us - out 60 seat bus. The view was definitely worth it.
Arriving in Santa Teresa at 21:00 was anything but exciting. Especially as we found ourselves in the middle of a loooooong unpaved dusty road (it was not too hard to figure out that it is the only one in the village). Tired as dogs we had to face the fact that the high season had left no beds available for the two intruders. The last and only salvation from sleeping on the beach was Tranquillo Backpackers Hostel. On the way we stopped at an Israeli restaurant, had some humus and Maccabee beers. Not surprisingly, the only language was Hebrew (somebody somewhere told me that in Central America there are tree tourism season –High season, Low season and Israeli season (:D). Good times, my dears, Tico times.
So, after filling up ourselves with some quality middle east food and drinks we finally got to Tranquillo and guess what – no beds left! Thank God the good Argentinean guy at the reception agreed to locate us in one of the reserved rooms. Got my bed sheets, touched the pillow and fell into sweet tropical dreams. Well, not as tranquil in the end as the real tropical biodiversity of this lovely eco-lodge was shamelessly stinging, biting and blood-sucking me all night long. A real orgy. The sun came and with it a day and night of constant havingagoodtime.
There was a beach wide and sandy, trapped between the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the dry rainforest. I stood there speechless, miniscule and imprisoned by my civilized nature, wondering why have we lost connection to our real home? Why are we destroying it? How could we kill beauty so magnetic? Life seemed so much simpler in a second. Just looking, I was so overwhelmed that I did not even want to take pictures. The surfers were filming their not so great at the moment achievements. The crabs were extremely shy hiding in the rocks all day – did not want to me meet the only Bulgarian in Santa Teresa. Big mistake!!! We overdosed with vitamin D and called it a day.
Beach house party in a small Costa Rican village. How about that? A great deal of the small- and big-scale house parties that I have visited during the last 2 years should be ashamed and head for the corner to ponder over their bad behavior. It started slowly with a few Cuba Libres (“ I just can’t get enough” ) a big bon fire on the beach and a few scattered Ticos. In an hour I had the feeling that the whole current population of the village – both locals and tourists – appeared from all sides. The DJ assumed The Position and the night begun. As for me, I let my delinquent habits to lead my way. As usual they knew what they were doing.
Pura Vida
Havingagoodtime is the answer to the question “Why hasn’t Kamie started the internship yet?” Blame it on the rum, the hotness, the color of the skin around me. Blame it on the Rainforest Alliance that has been too busy lately thus leaving me no other choice but havingagoodtime. A week ago I got an e-mail from them informing me that my supervisors will be out of office and out of town for a week due to seminars (which already sounds promising as I will be part of these seminars quite soon) So little Kamie had another week off in Costa Rica. One too many.
Ida and I decided to get away for a few days just to change the climate as San Jose was too god damn cold with its 25 degrees. In search for sunnier spots down the coast we took the deadly 7 hour bus to Santa Teresa, on the not-so-far-located-on-the-map Nicoya peninsula. The Pacific coast. My first one.
Seven hours sounds like pretty long and boring trip, right? Well, it was until we got to the mountains and the bus started swinging. Leeeeeffft. Riiiighhhhttt. Sorry, guys you are not allowed to sleep anymore! Not in Costa Rica – quickly stick your noses on the window pane and look. Look and absorb. Cause you’ve never seen anything like it. Mountain tops dressed in greenness. All-embracing steam. Backpackers-free zone. Then suddenly we stopped in front at a harbor. A quite cute little village harbor. The initial feeling of confusion grew into panic when the majority of the bus finally figured out that we have to get out. The panic quickly became anarchy as tourists wanted to know when and how are we going to continue. Bags, hands, red sun-burned cheeks, blue Scandinavian eyes looking for answers. Only the Ticos stood in silence mockingly watching this episode, while a few of them told me that we, the bus and the luggage will be transported to the other side of the peninsula by ferry. Its always easier when you know Spanish. And what a ferry, my friends! ....A huge boat on three levels transporting everything- animals, agricultural machines, local families, lonely-planet-ers and us - out 60 seat bus. The view was definitely worth it.
Arriving in Santa Teresa at 21:00 was anything but exciting. Especially as we found ourselves in the middle of a loooooong unpaved dusty road (it was not too hard to figure out that it is the only one in the village). Tired as dogs we had to face the fact that the high season had left no beds available for the two intruders. The last and only salvation from sleeping on the beach was Tranquillo Backpackers Hostel. On the way we stopped at an Israeli restaurant, had some humus and Maccabee beers. Not surprisingly, the only language was Hebrew (somebody somewhere told me that in Central America there are tree tourism season –High season, Low season and Israeli season (:D). Good times, my dears, Tico times.
So, after filling up ourselves with some quality middle east food and drinks we finally got to Tranquillo and guess what – no beds left! Thank God the good Argentinean guy at the reception agreed to locate us in one of the reserved rooms. Got my bed sheets, touched the pillow and fell into sweet tropical dreams. Well, not as tranquil in the end as the real tropical biodiversity of this lovely eco-lodge was shamelessly stinging, biting and blood-sucking me all night long. A real orgy. The sun came and with it a day and night of constant havingagoodtime.
There was a beach wide and sandy, trapped between the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the dry rainforest. I stood there speechless, miniscule and imprisoned by my civilized nature, wondering why have we lost connection to our real home? Why are we destroying it? How could we kill beauty so magnetic? Life seemed so much simpler in a second. Just looking, I was so overwhelmed that I did not even want to take pictures. The surfers were filming their not so great at the moment achievements. The crabs were extremely shy hiding in the rocks all day – did not want to me meet the only Bulgarian in Santa Teresa. Big mistake!!! We overdosed with vitamin D and called it a day.
Beach house party in a small Costa Rican village. How about that? A great deal of the small- and big-scale house parties that I have visited during the last 2 years should be ashamed and head for the corner to ponder over their bad behavior. It started slowly with a few Cuba Libres (“ I just can’t get enough” ) a big bon fire on the beach and a few scattered Ticos. In an hour I had the feeling that the whole current population of the village – both locals and tourists – appeared from all sides. The DJ assumed The Position and the night begun. As for me, I let my delinquent habits to lead my way. As usual they knew what they were doing.
Pura Vida
donderdag 12 februari 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
What can I say about this movie? Danny Boyle. Amazing story. India’s children. India’s hearths and minds. Just watch it.
woensdag 11 februari 2009
She'd go let it out
Is it any wonder why princes & kings
Are clowns that caper in their sawdust rings
And ordinary people that are like you and me
We're the keepers of their destiny
A bit of of my favourite old school tunes :).
Are clowns that caper in their sawdust rings
And ordinary people that are like you and me
We're the keepers of their destiny
A bit of of my favourite old school tunes :).
dinsdag 10 februari 2009
maandag 9 februari 2009
He: sunlight
Skin so soft. Skin so smooth. Its color is of milk with cocoa. Its smell is of warm summer rain and sunlight. A skin created to be touched, smelled and kissed. Nakedness so apt to embrace the sand and sun. Mellowness so lovely in the water. And those huge eyes – greener than anything I’ve seen before- as green as the grass in June and much more that that. There is a word for women that expresses extreme physical attractiveness in terms of facial and bodily symmetry, loveliness, magnetism, charm. Beautiful. But if a boy has that skin, those eyes, these features, that mixture of colors all over his almost inhuman creature – what is he then? I remember having a discussion with a friend about this word. We could not find it. And yet its impersonation stands in front of my eyes – vibrant and alive. When I look at this face, I see hundreds of races and civilizations. Black, white, yellow, red. They were brought together to create this boy whose skin color is so .. impossible to define, whose eyes are so incredibly magnetic, whose hair is dark, curly and reflecting all the rays of light that cannot help but touch it. And when he smiles as if the whole beauty, richness and genetic wisdom of the universe smiles at you . You cannot resist and you have to smile back.
Created in the melting pot of races. TM.
Created in the melting pot of races. TM.
Impress me, impress me more !
Culture shock No 1 : In Costa Rica when you want to rent a flat you are invited to an "interview" and you have to present a letter of recommendation written by a friend, family member, teacher, employer. This letter has to guarantee that you are a responsible and respectful person (???!!!). Its all fine but what kind of guarantee is a letter written from my boss in the Netherlands (who probably does not give a flying fart about my flat in CR, right) or by my parent in Bulgaria (!?!?!). As for the interview - invite me for a drink people, we will probably get to know each other faster and differences / similarities will quickly become obvious :)).
Culture shock No 2: I don't know if this is true for the whole country but in San Jose it makes me smile every day. So, you probably know those street stands where you can buy everything from condoms and snacks to T-shirts (even illegal substances sometimes). Well in this lovely Central American capital these stands are equipped with TV sets. All of them. "So what?" you'd say. Well, when you see a 60 year old lady who could barely speak and walk but has a TV in her kiosk and is watching American sit coms at 16:00 p.m. then you will probably have a laugh too. I have not had he chance to take a picture of these curious places but as soon as I start feeling local enough I will give you this chance.
Culture shock No 3: Streets in San Jose don’t have names. Horizontal streets have odd number and vertical have even numbers. Instead people use all kind of landmarks and weird (to me) explanations. So basically, when you ask for an address you get the following response:
" Go up Avenida 3, turn right at the butcher’s shop, walk 300 meters and you will see a parking lot, cross the parking lot and walk for 5 minutes direction north, turn left at the traffic light and walk straight, my house is the second to right".
"And which number is your flat?" - ask I totally confused.
"Just take the key under the cactus in front, unlock the door and go to the back yard. Knock on my window - is the second yellow one counting from the left"
"Fair enough" and where is the closest tree so I could hang myself -says Kamie while preparing the loop with her belt. :)
Culture shock No 2: I don't know if this is true for the whole country but in San Jose it makes me smile every day. So, you probably know those street stands where you can buy everything from condoms and snacks to T-shirts (even illegal substances sometimes). Well in this lovely Central American capital these stands are equipped with TV sets. All of them. "So what?" you'd say. Well, when you see a 60 year old lady who could barely speak and walk but has a TV in her kiosk and is watching American sit coms at 16:00 p.m. then you will probably have a laugh too. I have not had he chance to take a picture of these curious places but as soon as I start feeling local enough I will give you this chance.
Culture shock No 3: Streets in San Jose don’t have names. Horizontal streets have odd number and vertical have even numbers. Instead people use all kind of landmarks and weird (to me) explanations. So basically, when you ask for an address you get the following response:
" Go up Avenida 3, turn right at the butcher’s shop, walk 300 meters and you will see a parking lot, cross the parking lot and walk for 5 minutes direction north, turn left at the traffic light and walk straight, my house is the second to right".
"And which number is your flat?" - ask I totally confused.
"Just take the key under the cactus in front, unlock the door and go to the back yard. Knock on my window - is the second yellow one counting from the left"
"Fair enough" and where is the closest tree so I could hang myself -says Kamie while preparing the loop with her belt. :)
woensdag 4 februari 2009
Maya
They are everywhere. When you walk down the steets of Tulum. When you buy icecream in Guatemala. When you wait for the bus. Their smiling faces greet you from cars, houses, supermarkets. It seemed so strange to me at the begining that these bold faces that used to belong to one of the mightiest civilizations that ever dwelled this planet now use cell phones, wear high heels and have commercial businesses. What the hell did I expect to see, right?- naked indigenous peoples that have 18 months a year with 20 days each. Well, no Kam, if you ask a Maya what day is today they will look at their Gregorian Calendar and say "It's Tuesday my friend,February 2009". :). However, there is something about their faces. The lost glory. The heirs of time. They look at us -stupid tourists with digital cameras - and smile carelessly, mockingly, patiently. This is their land and they know it. While being among them for 2 weeks I remembered an excerpt from one of my favourite books "On the road" by J. Kerouac. Sal Paradise's thoughts as he is passing throught the streets of Mexico- somehow very similar to my own :
"The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellaheen Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya…to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore – they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.' And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment."
"The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellaheen Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya…to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore – they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.' And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment."
Coconut is wet
So much tropical rain in the last 24 hours that I lost my ability to speak. Just sit and listen to the mighty nature. When its raining like that you cannot even hear the people speaking. I am in a hostel again in Puerto Viejo - the Eastern (Carribean ) coast of Coast Rica. After 4 days of laziness in Backpackers Hostel in San Jose I decided to make a move to the sunny coast in search for better skies. Well, better skies were not what I actually found. A downpour from la boca del cielo. As if the whole sky has opened up. Its not like a normal rain even - no drops, no softness. This tropical rain is like a curtain that covers everything around. But we do not seem to suit the landscape - we are out of place, unwanted, aliens. We cannot break the pact that has existed from the begining of time - sky, rain, rainforest, soil. And so it covers us- our voices, our faces and the only ones speaking are the singing hands of the sky.
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