Sunday, November 24, 2013

Twenty Five

5^2=25.
I like that equation, there's an odd symmetry about it. It's also my current age and a good one. I feel as if I'm still young, young enough to tell my age to both college students and mid professionals and not alienate either.

Recently is the first time I've felt old. Oddly it was the NBA draft that made me feel old. An ESPN Classic was run on the draft ten years ago, 2003.  As the special went over the Lebron Darko Carmelo Bosh Wade draft order, I remembered everything vividly. I remembered watching Lebron at St Vincent St Mary's in ESPN's first ever televised hs basketball game, then following the regular season with interest as the Cavaliers and Nuggets tanked it out. I remember watching Darko Milicic highlights, reading an ESPN the mag special about him on my flight to France, about how he did 100 push-ups and 200 sit-ups every night and I started doing more on that very trip. I remember watching Wade lead Marquette to the final 4, watching the confident quick point guard who could dunk in traffic pick up a rare tournament triple double. I remember knowing nothing about Bosh because his Georgia Tech team sucked. And of course I remember freshmen Carmelo, Hakim Warrick and Gerry McNamara winning the title.

That was all 10 years ago. The point is, it's a new experience for me, having this memory base that is both so detailed and from so long ago. It's the first time I feel like I could teach a history lesson based off I personal experience. And as a generation now enters high school without memories of 9/11, our experiences are only going to seem more historical from hereon out.

25 seems much different than 24. It seems an age relatable to both college kids and 30 year old professionals, neither too young to have adult conversations nor too old to discuss switching majors. It seems to hold more responsibility - it seems less an age where it is socially acceptable to go explore yourself and go backpacking. It's an age where many people graduate law school, or go to business school, or get their first promotion. Sure there are no set life paths and life is not a race, but life does have a progression, unpredictable though it may be. I have found that as I've aged, priorities, values and responsibilities have all evolved, and thus my whole decision making basis.

When I turned 25 the first thing my mom told me was that she got married at 25. This wasn't news to me, but it was still a jarring fact to internalize. I'm not getting married at 25. I don't think my mom's experiences in the late 70's is a benchmark for me, but part of the challenge I find now is having any benchmark or measuring stick. I'm at a place in my life where I don't quite see too many people in similar situations, with much of my peer group older than me, and so I'm entering uncharted waters largely unsure of where I am, where I can be, where I'm going and where I can go.  It's been a great thrill so far, but I am hoping the path becomes clearer as I venture further.

One of my mindsets when I moved to Hong Kong two years ago was to learn more about the world. I didn't know what that would exactly mean, but I figured it would involve a lot of traveling. I wanted to understand why taxi drivers in DC were often very well educated Africans, why young people get radicalized, how the people away from cities and technology see the world. I don't think I'm close to answering those questions, but I've learned so much more about the world just from absorbing what's around me and being curious. What would have surprised the me that came here two years ago would be how much my perspective has changed. I was very ideal and very proud when I got here, and there's no doubt that in the past 24 months I've become a lot more jaded and had many humbling and sobering (ironically) experiences. I had a conversation with a mirror when I had dinner with my friend who had just graduated Georgetown. I saw in her the exact same attitude and demeanor and optimism for breaking the bounds of society that I had held when I took my diploma without a real good idea of what I would do with it. We have been given so much, are so talented and willing to work so hard - what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing has gone wrong, in the grand scheme. There's just a lot less guarantees, and a lot more time required for real change to occur than I understood two years ago. Or perhaps I understood and just chose to believe it'd be different for me. I remember my mom telling me when I started at Arup that I should expect to stay there for at least two years. My feeling at the time was "don't be too sure" because man two years was a long time. Well it's been two years and I'm still here with no plans to leave. In an industry where buildings routinely take 5-10 years to go from concept to occupancy, 2 years isn't really very long.

To sum up my mindset coming in, and indeed my generation's mindset, this tumblr has really put my experiences in perspective: http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html It explains so much about our generation, the millenials who grew up in a very hopeful world where previous technological and social barriers routinely fell, how we want so much and thus often find ourselves so disappointed. It's very true, this blogpost really did speak to me, even if it did simplify everything into stick figures. It reinforced the lessons that I'd already been learning the hard way, of hard work and humbleness and lack of entitlement. Along the way I've picked up an edge that I would have previously called "jadedness." 

I've seen people get more excited by hope and the call for change, rather than change itself. I work in environmental sustainability, an industry or buzzword that came about entirely to address longterm problems. A direct consequence of this is that the impact of good work isn't easy to conceptualize in a human time frame.  It's hard to get excited about the well-maintained operation of a building or a society that gradually reduces its reliance on fossil fuels. The metrics of success have either not been well-defined or not well measured. Thus it's the rollouts of sexy new plans, schemes for a new technological rollouts, setting of ambitious carbon reduction figures that get the attention rather than the completed actions that are invisibly not hurting the environment (as much).  Two years has shown me how easy it is to talk about the great things we want to achieve, and how promises can be empty even if there is conviction in them when they are made.  This doesn't apply just to the environment. Think about the scenes from Tahrir Square in Cairo from January-February 2011. The mass demonstrations and popular uprising against Mubarak inspired so many all over, and the dramatic tears of joy shed over Mubarak's resignation was a generational moment of raw emotion associated with societal-altering events on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you had told those ecstatic Egyptians how little things would change and how they'd be right back at it with their next president, I'm not sure if their celebration would instantly deflate. A parallel exists in the United States. So much effort was exerted getting Barack Obama - "Change You Can Believe in" - elected in the President. His victory was equally emotional. Far less emotion has been spent on helping Obama accomplish all that change. We are so much more excited for hope, for the prospect of potential change in the future, than for the victories in a real world which does not clearly define victories. Yes We Can elect Barack Obama, but no we can't eliminate poverty, failures in the educational system, violence, racism, pollution, injustice and disease.

But this blog post shouldn't be a giant typhoon over our collective parade. I think I've made my point that my cynicism has grown since entering the work force. Fundamentally though, I don't think I've changed. I haven't wavered from wanting to make a difference in this world. I believe we can prevent catastrophic global climate change. In fact I don't think there's a choice. In a lesson I learned writing crossword puzzles in college, you have to believe there's a solution in order to find it. And to get this solution, it's going to take understanding a lot of very different but interconnected processes.

So back to understanding how the world works. I really feel that here I've come a long way. I think a lot more now about the lives that we lead and what makes them possible. I think about all the items around me and how they got there, from concept design to the materials behind them to the manufacturing to the shipping. I come from a decidedly not blue collar town, and here in the city of finance I still notice how much the world is driven by working class industry. I see how the factory workers that make leather in Vietnam, T-shirts in Bangladesh and just about everything in Guangdong are pushing the world economy. Through a combination of traveling, observing stories and great podcasting journalism, I understand much better how people are moving from village life, the backbone to their whole lifestyle for generations, to cities. The trip to Burma the spring of this year was great for me as I saw people with less wealth and more measurable problems than I'd ever seen before. I gained an image to reference when I next hear about rice paddies or remote Southeast Asian villages. A growing understanding of this world helps to complement the world of first world cities with which I'm already quite familiar.

Hong Kong is one such first world city, and it's a busy one at that. If it were a superhero, it's kryptonite would be its busyness, disguised as productivity and success. It's a city where everyone spends their short commutes engrossed in their smartphones, an unfortunate consequence of the incredible underground 3G coverage. I am fully aware that this infrastructure is double edged. It enables productivity and communication, but it takes away from the reflective time and makes days go by faster and less meaningfully, and even while I'm aware of this, I find myself trapped by the ease of it all. I play it off as me being extra productive, reading CNN or doing social tasks so that I can be more productive at the office or at home. But I'm not sure if these tasks are really freeing up my day, plus half the time I'm playing CandyCrush. Between a demanding job, a social life, an obsessive athletic hobby, family and a dozen books on my reading list, I'm struggling to figure out how to best organize my day to learn more about the world.
Perhaps I can spin that into the greatest blessing about being 25. I'm at an age where I've actually done some stuff and learned some stuff, but I'm far from being done. My habits are still evolving, my life views well-based but open to change. I have the excitement of not knowing what I'll be able to do, but I've eliminated the fear that I'll completely fall flat on my face on my own.

Friday, September 6, 2013

SPO 2020 Olympics

One of my favorite affairs to blog about are the Summer Olympics, and one of my favorite posts of all times is this one analyzing the possible 2016 host cities http://cal337.blogspot.hk/2009/10/spo-2016-olympics.html. Well it's been four years and the IOC will select the 2020 host city in Buenos Aires on September 7. I've heard absolutely no buzz from the event this time around and I wonder if anyone cares. Well even if they don't, I do and I'm going to blog about it, mostly for the sake of tradition. In case you didn't know, and you probably didn't, the candidate host cities are Istanbul, Madrid and Tokyo.  Candidacies are declared years in advanced (Rome, Baku and Doha were rejected or pulled out) and as you'll see, each candidate city has seen developments since their original bids that will hurt them.

(See also http://cal337.blogspot.hk/2010/12/world-cup-bids.html for World Cup bids)

The factors that I'm interested in are not the same as the factors for IOC voters. I care about how cool the city is, how well prepared its infrastructure is to support the Olympics, how recently the city/country/region has hosted the Games, how novel it would be, how interesting it'd be to attend, how much it would help the city, how much the region loves sports etc. The IOC cares mostly about how much money that city government has used to bribe its voting members.  And to lesser extents infrastructure and government relations and financial windfall.  Here is how I would vote if I were an IOC member, but I'll conclude by telling you who will actually win.

3) Madrid
The Spanish capital bid for the 2012 and 2016 Games as well, where it finished 2nd to Rio de Janeiro. If you clicked on the first link above you'll have noticed that I ranked it last back then as well. I don't want to appear as a Madrid hater, but it's still a less exciting city for me than the other two.  In the last 4 years, the Spanish economy has really tanked, with national unemployment rate exceeding 27%, youth unemployment exceeding 50%, although you wouldn't be able to tell from the €100million transfer fee paid by Real Madrid for Gareth Bale.  The city of Madrid has debts of 7.4 billion, and its bid for the games was dubbed "The Hunger Games" in a Spanish left wing opinion piece. That said, the bid is remarkably frugal, offering a $5 billion Olympic Games. In comparison, some estimates put Beijing's spendings at over $40 billion for the 2008 Games. Previous experience has shown that the Summer Olympics do not make the city money in the short run, and probably don't in the long run either.  Sure, the Olympics bring in construction and speed up infrastructure development and may create jobs in the years leading up to the Games. It'll of course attract swarms of tourists (even after the Games). However, in Spain, it's not clear that more construction is a good thing. Sorry that was a low blow (or a high blow)?  


Madrid does have some world class facilities, including Real Madrid's home stadium Santiago Bernabéu.  It's a great sports country with the world's best football team (the national team). It's already got a great infrastructure and is a world class high speed rail hub, the recent train disaster not withstanding. As a tourist attraction, it's got a lot going for it as a beautiful city that lots of people love to visit (top 5 most visited city in Europe) and it's not an overcrowded behemoth. In terms of recent regional redundancy, Barcelona hosting the 1992 Games is probably largely irrelevant now, but Western Europe held the 2012 Olympics in London. For an Olympics that keeps trying to branch out, keeping the host cities Eurocentric goes against that philosophy. Still the biggest hurdle Madrid faces is the financial crisis. You can't have a city that takes on massive debt to host a sporting event, and you can't have swathes of homeless people bumming around during the Games.  Will the committee members think that the Spanish government can afford the Games? Will they think the Games can be a boon to the beleaguered economy?  Will the 3rd consecutive bid be a charm?

2) Tokyo
Tokyo also bid for the 2016 Games. Repeat bids historically help, as infrastructure gets laid out and plans get to become more detailed and refined. Tokyo is the only previous host in this competition, although the 1964 games are ancient history (Detroit was a candidate city that year, dear God). As the world's biggest city, they probably deserve to be a multiple host city, and they certainly have the infrastructure prepared including some stadiums built for co-hosting the 2002 World Cup. In fact, Tokyo is billing themselves as the safe choice. The Rio Games are behind in their preparation, as was London slightly and Athens majorly in 2004. Tokyo shouldn't have much trouble pulling together the funds and getting a precise, reliable Japanese-style Olympics. The real wild card is the Fukushima disaster, which puts radioactive leaks into the equation. Whether or not scientific evidence can prove that there will be no lingering effects by 2020, the conception out there is decidedly mixed.  Some athletes will be scared of competing in Japan and some committee members will reflect this in their vote. Beijing held the Games in 2008 and Pyeonchang of South Korea will hold the Winter Olympics in 2018, but that's really not too much exposure for the continent holding most of the world's population.

Will committee members put faith in the Japanese to put a reliable, successful Summer Olympics? Will Japanese ingenuity make these Games a very special affair? Or is the fear of radioactivity too much to overcome?

1) Istanbul
If you know me, you know that I like diversity and spreading these sort of events to parts of the world where it has never been before. It's no surprise that I'd rank Istanbul #1. However, I'm not alone with this mindset. The 2008 and 2016 Summer Olympics, 2014 Winter Olympics and 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cups are all spreading their events to uncharted territories. Istanbul would be remarkable mainly for bringing the Games to a Muslim-majority nation and a Middle Eastern nation for the first time. Turkey is an up and coming country with some similarities to China in 2001 (when the Beijing bid was won). Most excitingly, placing the Games in Istanbul would have the novelty of spreading events across Europe and Asia.  Istanbul previously bid for the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 Games and is very familiar to committee members. Can the IOC reject Istanbul again??

What's Istanbul's recent Achilles' heel (an ancient Achilles' heel perhaps being Achilles himself)? Well the conflict in Syria probably shouldn't be a factor by 2020, but it's definitely in people's minds right now and refugees from Syria have been spilling over into neighboring Turkey. God forbid there's conflict so far down the road, but I think there is a red line that you can't host the Olympics with a war raging nearby. Istanbul is also under question for its handling of protesters in its public park this past year. It's thus seen as the riskier host city with potentially great intriguing reward. I think it'd be awesome, it's an unbelievably beautiful and special city and would make for a memorable Olympics. Istanbul has hosted major sporting events before, including the 2010 FIBA World Championships, and it'll probably be up for the challenge as much as Rio de Janeiro is.  The Olympics would bring a crowning achievement and recognition to a city with storied history that much of the world needs to relearn. Bring the Games to the Bosphorus or you'll have a lot of people giving up on the IOC cold turkey.

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In addition to the host city, the IOC will vote to add one more sport. The main contenders are baseball/softball, squash and wrestling, 2 of which we're talking about re-adding. Wrestling was unjustly removed last year, a shocking victim of the Olympics cutting weight, because apparently some IOC members don't associate wrestling as one of the quintessential Olympic sports. Wrestling is international, with medalists from all sorts of countries including Kazakhstan, India, Japan, Cuba and Mongolia. It's difficult, impressive and athletic as hell, and it's not a bad sport to watch in person or on TV as long as the announcers are competent. Really I don't have much to add. Wrestling is a perfect Olympic sport, I wrestled in high school, and it better be added back to the 2020 Games.

The three cities involved are all awesome. I really believe these Games will be great to watch in any host city and I'd love to attend and eat tapas, kebabs or sushi. Tokyo however is an overwhelming favorite, and even though Madrid is catching up, expect to see the Games in Japan.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

No Lack of Backpacks to Track

So this was what riding on a motorcycle ride felt like. I was sitting behind a Burmese man whose name I couldn't really pronounce, cruising 50mph down a dirt road that doesn't show up on Googlemaps (I checked). Of the new experiences I was hoping to have on this vacation, a Hells Angel ride was not one of them. It would not be the most unexpected new experience though, but we'll get to that later.
We would later pass her

On Easter Sunday, we had taken the early bus from Bagan to Kalaw, which similar to our flight, was predominantly white tourists. We were very much traveling by the seat of our pants - Jackie was leaving Burma much sooner than I and her tight schedule motivated us to fit in as much adventure as we could in as little time as possible. We were hoping to hike from Kalaw to Inle Lake, a 2 or 3 day affair we'd read, and hopefully could start as soon as we hit the ground in Kalaw, despite not having made any bookings.  It was an improvisational type of trip which is the best kind of trip.

When we reached Kalaw, any worry I had at booking a hiking tour was instantly acquiesced by the group of tour promoters swarming our arrival.  Kalaw's main industry clearly was hiking to Inle Lake. We were led to a hostel while trying to figure out scheduling. It was around 4pm and they told us it was too late to embark on the hike - we looked at a bunch of maps of the routes and nothing would work. When I offered to say we could hike fast and sleep on the road, the hostel runner Robin laughed and brought up snakes. Robin suggested hopping on for a motorcycle ride to the last checkpoint, and then doing a 1 day hike and reach Inle by the following evening. So we met our drivers, divided 3 helmets among the 4 of us (guess who didn't get one), "checked in" our larger bags to magically reappear when we reached Inle. I took my valuables with me.

Robin for the record was one of many very very interesting people we'd meet on this leg of the journey. Robin's family were all descended from Punjabi Sikh Indians, but he was 3rd generation Burmese. He spoke Punjabi, Hindi, Burmese, Nepali and English (semi-fluently) and "some of the hill tribe dialects." He had a large family with 3 boys and they were all helping to run the hostel and tour business. They seemed to be doing well but he had never left the country. He said that when he was younger he had really wanted to see the world, but now he says running this hostel, the world comes to him. People from all over the world stay there, and he reads CNN, so he feels he has a pretty good beat on the world. He probably had a point, but I still hope he gets to travel.

So there we are on our motorbikes, cruising down some very rural areas. The landscape was beautiful with low flowing mountains and vegetation that flushed the tan brown and green parts of the color palette. On one occasion I saw what looked like a controlled forest fire. The ride was different than I expected - there were side handles, so I didn't have to clutch the strange old Burmese driver for dear life. With the milder weather of higher altitude and the bike speeding through the breeze, thermal comfort was ideal.

The ride was about an hour and a half, but it didn't feel like real time. I felt suspended along the space time continuum, with unfamiliar scenery flying by me. The motors were loud enough that I felt alone - despite the three people with me, I felt like they couldn't intrude into my moments, that I had all the serenity I needed.

The road twisted and turned and rose through several mountaintops, before the drivers slowed without warning and pulled in front of a monastery.

We met lots of European backpackers on our trip. There was the Dutch girl who only just graduated high school and was backpacking before studying medicine, the Danish couple who had one year left of graduate school, and the German guy who might just have been unemployed. There were lots of similarities to their stories and all of them had been on the road for several months and to several Southeast Asian countries - no backpacker starts in Myanmar. We had only scratched the surface of bizarre characters. At Kalaw we met Frank the French engineer, who had done projects all over the world and been to China 7 times, including months of wandering through Sichuan and Yunnan, and even more unbelievably only knew a few words of Chinese.  He also talked about his Cambodian girlfriend, who he met while he was alone and bored at a bar there. His girlfriend was a waitress at the bar and equally bored - and then he pulled out his ringed hand and told us they were engaged.  They'd only been dating for a year, with much of that time long distance, but he said that her family wants her to get married soon and "some compromises have to be made." I'm not sure if the word compromise has different connotations in French, or really if the concept of marriage is completely different to this guy, but I found the whole story a bit absurd.

Our guide, who arrived with two hikers, was named Sunny and also a cool character. He was also a 3rd generation inhabitant of Myanmar, with his roots in Nepal. He mentioned wanting to visit there sometime though he didn't have a passport and it was very difficult to obtain one, and also spoke about a year working in Bangkok previously. Those two stories didn't make sense to me until he told about his journey to the border and the three stages of bribes he needed to cross the border, on what was a well-established illegal migration route supplying Thailand with many laborers and domestic workers. He had worked at a tailor shop for a Chinese merchant, met a Nepalese-Burmese girl who became his girlfriend and had overall a positive experience in Bangkok, although he did mention being extremely lonely and sad at the start.  He had come back after a year because his father wanted him back, I forget the reason exactly, and started leading these hikes. He looked young but I assumed he was in his mid 20's - I was shocked to learn he was 19. I'm still not used to dealing with people younger than me, particularly people I hire (sounds strange to type that), but I shouldn't have been so surprised. We met so many teenagers and even pre-teens working in the tourism industry that I wonder what the nation-wide high school graduation rate is.  Sunny did graduate from high school, at the age of 16. He had some strong opinions of politics, partially shaped by his experiences in Bangkok and his interactions with tourists. He was critical of Bangkok's culture-less expansion that hadn't particularly helped the poor, and was hopeful that Myanmar would "open up, but not so fast." It would "make the poor people only sad."

And then there was Michael. Michael had grown up in the deep south during the height of segregation (but had made a pact at the age of 6 to not speak with a Southern twang, and didn't). He graduated from UNC in 1968 as an ROTC and was soon piloting planes in the Vietnam War. He worked with Continental Airlines after the war and the company was bought by United after 5 years. He was laid off, but his retirement package was insanely generous, and he's flown free on United since and 10% on most other airlines. 10%, not 10% off. So he's been retired for a while and basically been traveling nonstop. He met his French girlfriend Claire in the Gaza Strip (an underrated single's hotspot) where they were both protesting on behalf of the Free Palestine movement (which he got involved with in part because of the injustice he saw under Jim Crowe laws). They said they met in December, and since they were rather advanced in age I figured they meant December 1979, but no, they meant last December. Michael was full of stories, but I'll remember him for the story he added to our trip.

The monastery was devoid of electricity except for a few solar powered light bulbs, my first encounter with renewable energy used for off grid supply. The shower was hand pumped by a smiling novice monk into a bucket and used behind concrete walls about shoulder high. Lucky we hadn't hiked and didn't need a shower. The rest of the group were exhausted, especially Michael and Claire, and they gritted through the shower/bathe/bucket pour.

Darkness quickly settled and we ha a candlelight dinner with Michael, Claire and Sunny. A cook had driven along for the tour and prepared a very nice simple meal, pleasing to both the palate and the digestive system. Michael and Claire retired early due to their fatiguing hike, and Jackie and I chattered on with Sunny for another hour or two. This was when we learned about his experiences in Bangkok, his political views, his schooling, his family and the surprising fact that he has Facebook (about 1% of Myanmar has access to the internet - even Mongolia has 20%). We met the female guide leading the other group, who was also Nepalese Burmese.  I forget her name but she had been friends with Sunny since childhood and like so much of Asia had gotten interested in Korean dramas. She subsequently studied Korean in university and occasionally guides to Korean tourists. When we finally decided to let Sunny a rest, we strolled into the monastery. Cots had been laid out onto the floor and split among thin curtain dividers. Each divider probably held about eight cots and there were around eight dividers. Since only two small groups were on this hike, Jackie and I had our own divider to ourselves - or so we thought. 

I had just brushed and tiptoed in when I heard some rhythmic heavy breathing. The breathing crescendoed slightly and became distinctly audible, and was soon accompanied by the sound of bodies rolling on the cots. I looked up at Jackie, who was completely still and intently listening. Is this really happening? Is this what I think it is? I whispered to Jackie. She responded with a nod and a smile. Who do you think it is? I asked. As the couple next to us made themselves more known, the paper thin dividers suddenly seemed so inadequate. We heard enough of the male voice to deduce that we were likely a few feet away from Michael, who I guess did have a generous retirement package that allowed him to be a frequent rider. The couple was definitely trying to keep quiet - but not nearly enough. The identities were secured for me when after a rather subdued finale, I heard a woman with a strong French accent say, "I thought you were tired. You found your second wind!" My immediate thoughts were 1) I did not need to know that 2) "second wind" is a really impressive colloquial phrase for a foreign English speaker to know.

I saw Michael outside the monastery at 7am the next morning. Unbelievably, his first words to me were "How did you sleep?"  "Fine. Yourself?" His response, I swear, was nothing more than a knowing smile. I hung my head in amazement and walked away. I resolved never to repeat what Michael and Claire did, and certainly not on Easter Sunday in a Buddhist Monastery.



Friday, July 26, 2013

Lucky Money

I had failed to fully describe the touristy market mob scene that were set up outside the major temples. The merchants were aggressive and span the range spectrum, including ten year olds like Jackie's BFF, whom I took on his word that he was in school but on summer break. They peddled scarves and trinkets and George Orwell's book Burmese Days, which I almost bought for two bucks. ""Four thousand Kyat!" a woman shouted while waving a bundle of necklaces in front of me. "four bucks, lucky money!"

"There's no lucky money. Money is money," I replied. I took a legitimate look at all the wares but they were mostly crap - nothing gets made here anyway in an ancient capital and modern day tourist town. We'd be better off shopping in Inle Lake where there was established culture. I did buy a bamboo box for my mom, shaving nearly half the starting price down. I later learned I didn't bargain nearly hard enough. The starting bids and bartering strategies I had developed in China needed some tweaking here, and it wasn't uncommon to buy a product at a tenth of the starting price.
From South Sudan to central Myanmar
One man outside the Dhammanyangyi Temple was very different. He approached us with a book full of money and asked us where we were from, and instantly we put our guard up. He'd have to go through a stubborn wall to get at our Hong Kong but US but kinda Hong Kong before that origins. But the man then opened us his book and showed us all these bills he had collected from all sorts of currencies - there were British pounds, Japanese yen, a US $2 bill, Indian rupees, Russian ruples, South African Rand. Then there was currency from Mozambique, Rhodesia (former Zimbabwe), Mongolia, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Japanese occupied Burma. I couldn't figure out which bill I was most impressed by. Even more amazingly, he had nothing from Hong Kong. I had already switched to a trip-specific wallet, but Jackie donated a plastic 10HKD bill for his cause. The man didn't try to sell us anything - we had come across an honest good-natured collector.

After the donkey cart trip to our hotel at the tip of New Bagan
You're not supposed to climb like this
, an instant nap and a dive in the pool, I set out for my first bike ride in months. Our hotel rented us two bikes for 1500 Kyat each. "What time do we need to return them?" "Ten." "Ten? What if we're late?" "Actually, no matter. Put here when you get back." My fears of a tourist industry out to milk foreigners for all they were worth we're unfounded. This bike rate would have only gone an hour on Capital Bikeshare. With my camera bumping around loosely in my lower pocket, I jumped on and took those glorious first pedals after months of absence from two wheeled transit. The reddish dirt was soft and hard to ride on, but the dirt roads were better packed and featured only the occasional car or motorcycle. Riding in the temperate heat, so far away from the urbanity that has enveloped my entire life in Asia, without another tourist in sight, was an incredibly liberating feeling. We pulled off the side of the road at the first semi-large stupa we saw, checking out small golden Buddhist statues behind locked doors in complete isolation. We passed by the Bagan Archaeological Museum after closing hours, and another medium sized temple with a small tourist market assembled in front. We were on the road towards Shwesandaw Temple which we heard was the place to go for sunset when we came across another cool looking temple, with a tall round golden spire. We swerved off the road again and dropped off our bikes at the edge of a large empty courtyard. It was a bit eerie standing there alone, with neatly lined square tiles with small square planted saplings strewn across. A large cocktail party could be held here, in the shadow of the grand temple. I glanced back at our abandoned bikes and wondered if we should keep a closer eye on them. A second thought about our isolation and the kindness of the people in this country persuaded me not to.

Maybe Obama was here?
We walked pass a landscaped sign in Burmese, or perhaps Pali, presumably describing the temple. Inside we were surprised to discover a father, mother and young son, purveying over a table with a dozen drawings laid out on the floor. I immediately felt bad for them, thinking that there couldn't be nearly enough traffic here for this family to make money. The father spoke English well and unlocked a door to the rooftop, and told us that when Obama had come to Bagan in November, he had gone to three temples. The other two were the big ones (Ananda was one of them), but this was the third. I've done my googling but I can't verify this fact, nor can I even remember the name of this wayside temple, but at the time it felt very cool walking up the same stairs that the President himself might have walked up. The setting sun gave the stones on the rooftop a very reddish hue, and I currently long for the undisturbed view I saw there. We saw Shwesandaw in the distance, visibly swarming with tourists. I thought for a moment about staying here for sunset - the view was nice and the peace great. But we were in the mood for company and weren't scared by the crowd. I might have done some illegal climbing on the walls, which is sheepishly one of my favorite ruins activity, and I wondered what it'd be like growing up as a kid in these parts, climbing temples instead of trees. The temple I was sitting on was quite marvelous - in any other part of the world, it'd never be this empty. But here in the ocean of temples, it is just a small fish.

Tourists swarming the temple
We ventured back down to the family custodians of this temple, and I had to swallow hard while rebuffing the father's attempts to sell pictures. Our bike ride towards Shwesandaw saw more and more traffic until we arrived in a large bay of parked buses and bikes and horse drawn carriages. A pair of massive Korean buses with correspondingly massive amount of Korean tourists caught my eye. We left our bikes in a pile of other unguarded rentals and ventured past a bustling marketplace. This temple was tall, and the staircase went straight up the middle of the sides like Chichen Itza in Mexico, not swirling up the interior like in previous temples. They got steeper towards the higher levels, and at one point I got stuck behind some struggling elderly French tourists and had time to snap this photo.

French tourists are le tired
We ran into Chris and Tara at the top podium, which was a lovely semisurprise. The sunset itself was a semidisappointment as the hazy orange orb disappeared behind clouds and buses and no one was quite sure when it really set. The international mass of tourists grumbled and descended down the temple steps, carefully, and in the hubbub of souvenir sales and motors starting, we made plans to venture to Be Kind To Animals The Moon.  This ungrammatical capitalized word group is the most popular restaurant as recommended by the Lonely Planet, and we had been captivated by the guidebook's restaurant review and the bizarre name. We definitely had the name right, the drivers knew where we were talking about. Chris and Tara took a horse carriage, and we followed behind on our bikes to downtown Bagan.  Turns out there really isn't a downtown Bagan - there is no quaint village square , green or main street like I had imagined, or even a tourist friendly congregation of restaurants and bars. There weren't even many public lights. There was one strip with a handful of restaurants and an art gallery, and this strip apparently had the name Be Kind to Animals.  The Moon was the name of our restaurant, standing front and center in the little strip, with a sign saying Recommended by Your Guide (Lonely Planet). Be Kind to Animals Yar Pyi stood on the other side of the the dusty dirt road, with a sign saying "Lonely Planet might not talk about us (yet) but lovely people do! Check out their testimonials! The Yar Pyi family say we are the most delicious." That sign did its accomplished goal and tugged at my heart strings. The economic implications of making it into the Lonely Planet, a black box of a process that seemed as likely to be fair as it was to be arbitrary, struck me. But we had talked about the Moon so much that we couldn't change our minds, and off we went to the mainstream tourist restaurant and not the hipster family owned one.  The restaurant was vegetarian, which was fine because I never found good meat in Myanmar period, and interesting dishes like banana pancakes with syrup (more like a crepe), pumpkin curry and chapati made for perhaps the best dinner of our trip.

It was well into the night though when we finished, and a long ride home on unfamiliar roads in total darkness was now unavoidable. Not gonna lie, I was hoping there'd be another horse cabbie we could follow as it was a little daunting at the start to imagine biking on very unfamiliar roads in a very isolated very foreign place. But the directions were simple, there were only a few main roads and our inn was off one of them. As we passed by silent dark temples dimly and eerily lit by sparsely spaced out streetlights, I wondered if this was the environment with which tomb raiders broke into the temples and stole valuables. I had always wondered when the pyramids of Egypt had been robbed - did the same phenomenon occur here?  We turned onto our main road and spent a long time on it - much longer than I remembered going out on, and for a second I wondered if we were terribly terribly lost. Would we have to sleep on the side of the road? Were there Burmese pythons around? My legs were getting tired and my brain was racing towards more and more terrifying consequences. When the Kaday Aung Inn sign appeared, I'm not sure I'd ever been happier to see a sign the meaning of which I had no idea.

We left Bagan early the next morning on a bus, having spent approximately 24 hours in this wondrous place. A lot of people have expressed surprise at the short duration of our stay and we could have easily spent another two days there, but to be honest at the time I didn't feel any regret leaving so quickly. We'd seen a lot of temples and I wasn't super excited to see a few hundred more. There were probably a lot of unique ones I missed out on and more Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider jokes to meet. Certainly Bagan was one of the most unique places I've ever visited, with the same ancient abandoned architecture as Machu Picchu without as much the geographic remoteness, a bit like the Great Wall but the ruins fell less organized and more organic spread out.  

Up next: the characters you meet on the road to Inle Lake...

Monday, June 10, 2013

And So It Bagan

A woman tapped me on the shoulder. I opened one eyebrow and raised it quizzically. "Are you flying Air Mandalay? The flight is boarding now," she said in a polite British accent. I quickly got myself together, thanked nameless British woman, and shook Jackie awake. I never fully figured out how the woman had guessed our flight.  I took out my phone - it was 6:30am, and we'd been at the airport for over an hour. It seems all the flights out of Yangon took place at the crack of dawn, when the airfield wasn't quite yet an oven, and checking in we found ourselves behind several flights from the likes of Air Bagan, Asian Wings, and Myanmar Air, to the likes of Heho, Naypyidaw, and Thandwe. I was still clutching a styrofoam box with half a piece of toast, the legacy of an English breakfast our Yangon hotel staff had kindly prepared for us at 4 in the morning. We groggily made our way to the plane, and found that it was thin - the thinnest plane I can remember boarding. There were two seats on each side of the aisle, and not a lot of legroom or baggage space. I sat down and acted like I'd been here before, but I closed my eyes and secretly hoped this vessel was airworthy enough to do its job like every other flight I've ever boarded. It swayed and rattled a bit during the short flight, but it did its job.

Upon landing in Nyaung U, the whole flight boarded a bus that literally drove 60 yards before stopping 10 yards shy of the single-room airport. Maybe someone will explain to me that there's some regulation that prevents an airplane from deplaning and making its passengers walk 70 yards, and therefor forces them to load and unload from a bus, but until I get that explanation, I'm going to mock the system. We took a taxi straight from the airport to the grandest of the Bagan temples, Ananda Temple. We had decided against dropping off our luggage at the hotel and lose precious morning time, as we needed to see some sights before the oppressive heat.  As of yet, the 9am sun was quite bearable. Ananda was large enough to be difficult to visually grasp up close. Its stone was naturally white, but streaked black with time. Taking off our sandals, we noticed four large openings on each side of the square base. The tile floors reminded me of Arabic geometric patterns, though the historicity of that possible link eluded me. Four enormous gold Buddha statues, definitely not of Arabic origin, stood in the terminus of each entrance. I wondered if we should have done some more research, and briefly thought about inquiring for an audio guide, but decided we were budget travelers, and I would revel in the mystery. I had seen a lot of Buddhas touring Asia.  There were often 3 Buddhas, one each for the past present and future. What did four symbolize? Was Buddhism in Burma (Theravada?) different from Buddhism in China? I stared into the golden Buddha's face - he seemed to be staring right in front of him, at his nose? at his clasped hands? He didn't seem to care that I was there. I wondered briefly how many visitors he had seen over the years. Was he amazed at all the westerners that were now coming in? Probably not, we were all from this world...

I really had to step back from the temple to get some understanding of what this temple looked like. The architecture was very marvelous, with smaller temple forms protruding from the base up and up. At this point I remembered I had my disc with me and took it out for some photo ops. The outcome was the shot you see above, as well as some guy from Ohio asking if we wanted to toss for a bit.

Off to the side of the temple, a room full of painted murals told a story from the Buddhist scriptures, just like stained glass windows in a church. This story was very bloody though and involved mermaids and dark demons, people getting cut up or boiled alive. I was mesmerized and scared and utterly confused. I hadn't studied Buddhism enough to have ever seen dark stories such as this.

We weren't quite sure what to do after we were finished with Ananda, but it was still morning and I saw an open plane ahead of us and some large temples in the distance, and the urge to explore by foot overtook me. My gym bag bouncing behind me, we walked and were passed by a handful of tour buses. At first, I thought the tourists inside must be Japanese, because the tour bus had Japanese in it, but at a closer glance they did not appear to be. I realized that the cars themselves were Japanese - in fact, Burma is a huge market for second hand Japanese cars. The Japanese words for exit, which I could read, is still visible.  We passed by crumbling orange brick stupas, the base of the structures still flat and solid - perhaps partially restored or perhaps well built to withstand the centuries. Some stupas were more intact and fairly intricate, their spires reaching 20-30 feet, but completely ignored in the vicinity of greater temples. We walked into the clearing around the large temple we had aimed for and saw a miniature market set up. Miniature soccer balls woven out of some material somewhere between wood and bamboo caught my eye.

Jackie's BFF
This temple was not for walking inside, but for walking up, with it's higher floors selfings replicating miniature forms creating sizable land. A little kid pressed us to buy his postcards, and then followed us and played tour guide. Jackie took an instant liking to him, and asked him ridiculous questions like "What's your favorite temple here? Where do you think I'm from?" The steps up to the landings were through a dark narrow tower, and the climb through the steep ancient steps invoked my memories of the Great Wall and Machu Picchu. At the top landing, Jackie got a picture with our young tour guide and told him they were BFFs. "BFFs?" the kid asked? "Best friends forever. Don't you ever forget."

While centering the camera, I only now begun to realize the real marvel of Bagan. The flat plain stretched on interminably and as far as I could see was consistently speckled with temples and stupas amidst the trees. I couldn't count the number of spires I felt pointing to the heavens. It was hard to make out any particular temple details, but the whole scene, it's eerie grandeur, was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. The former glory of the Bagan empire was on display before me - a dynastic people who somehow built all these structures in this oppressively hot plain. And if I pretended that this was how it had really looked like, that the restoration process had been done accurately and sensibly, then the ancient pride of the Bamar people was undisturbed by their modern counterparts. No real sizable modern developments have taken hold in the former capital, destroyed by Mongol troops. The small farming villages have been removed or relocated and replaced with tourist towns. Fortunately tourist infrastructure was relatively low - I estimated that there could have been ten times as many tourists there before it would feel uncomfortably crowded. As I looked out on the impressive landscape I wondered if this scene would stay for the rest of my lifetime. What had it looked like in it's prime? What were people's real lives really like? Surely there were many non-temple structures missing in this picture, wooden houses and markets long eroded into the dust.


We found a donkey-drawn carriage driver, and though he had passengers, he called his "cousin" and a young man came riding in 10 minutes later. He spoke English quite well, but in an absurdly robotic way. We asked him touristy questions and he answered in a tour guide way, clearly having memorized pure passages of tour books with little intonation, soon putting Jackie off to sleep. I learned from him that the grand temples were built by kings and powerful people, but even normal families constructed their own stupas. Multiple generations of the Bagan empire witnessed style shifts in the architecture, and inspired the much later pagodas in Yangon. He had scripted answers for his favorite temple (I think it was Ananda) and for where else we should go (he took us to Dhammayangyi, the largest temple by area).

The donkey carriage had a driver's seat and a small cushion seat, which Jackie had taken and used as a bed. I had an awkward seat sitting perpendicular to the driver, on the other side of the donkey. We went through small paths through the dry brush, where I discovered cacti existed in Asia. Passing by another dozen stupas, we made it onto a main paved road. Here  as cars and motorcycles flew past us, our plodding pace seemed more obvious and the sun nearing its noon zenith and becoming less and less bearable. We began to see more and more villagers, and I asked our guide/driver if there was a "downtown" - there wasn't really. The villagers seemed oblivious to the UNESCO World Heritage site they lived next to - from my view wedged between a donkey, a robotic driverguide and a makeshift carriage hammock, their lives seemed incredibly ordinary. Part of this scene could have taken place in any small town in America - part of it absolutely could not.

Up next - night time biking and Be Nice to Animals The Moon.



Friday, May 10, 2013

Crab Rangoon

On Good Friday, we flew Air Asia from Hong Kong via Kuala Lumpur (with a night stay) to Yangon. The unexpected brief bonus trip to KL was fun, an odd second world acclimatization to what would follow. Soon enough we found ourselves on a 6am flight from KL's Lower Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT), definitely the worst airport I've ever been to, to the mysterious land.  With a time zone set an hour and a half behind Hong Kong, we arrived in Yangon still in the early morning. Our initial impression was that this airport was actually pretty decent - Jackie and I exchanged glances wondering if we were in the right place. A crush of excited Burmese people, faced pressed up against the window, awaited us on our exit from the restricted area as we tried to navigate our way to the Air Mandalay offices. Priority #1 was to pick up our flight tickets within the country.

This might be a good time to explain that Myanmar is still not very well connected with the world. One bank has recently begun accepting foreign ATM cards, allowing tourists to withdraw money. Other than that, we have to bring our own US cash, and they have to be pristine.  I was warned multiple times about the authorities rejecting bills with slight marks and visible folds.  Myanmar has done its own thing for so long, closing itself off from foreign investment and intervention, and while the forces of globalization are interminable and making its impact felt, there are still some realities in Burma that present unique challenges to travelers. Domestic airlines in Myanmar have joined the worldwide web, but haven't quite gotten the e-commerce part setup yet. "Online booking" is little more than an internet promise that you will pickup your tickets and pay in cash in Yangon. Policy was to pick up tickets 3 days in advance, but since we had a flight the day after arriving in Burma, I had to make special arrangements to pay everything there. The offices were in the domestic terminal, and so we had to walk out of the international terminal, down a street about 500 yards and into a much dumpier looking building.  Success - they took our cash and gave us our tickets.  Stepping out for a taxi, we were bombarded by offers for rides. It was going to be one of these trips, where an imbalance between the economic wealth of tourists and the local tourism industry created large desperate frenzies of hustlers trying to sell you something. We found a nice taxi driver who spoke decent English. He asked if this was our first trip to Myanmar, told us that his mother was Indian and his father Bamar (the Burmese-speaking majority) and asked us if we wanted to see Aung San Suu Kyi's house. We told him that we greatly admired her but we could see her house another time. Suddenly he stopped on the side of the road. This is her house, he explained pointing to a large gate with a picture of her father, the assassinated General Aung San.

Dirt road near our hotel
We settled in our hotel, way on the east end of Yangon. Despite the intense sun, we decided to set out on foot and see what was in our neighborhood.  Though this area was definitely still part of the capital city, only 40 blocks from downtown, the roads were already unpaved dirt. It took me 10 minutes to realize I needed to get over pointing out visible poverty whenever I saw it. We walked by grease-stained mechanics laboring over truck-sized tires, road sized restaurants with dirty umbrellas and cheap plastic stools and a storefront filled with young women packaging bundles of paper. Like Manhattan, downtown Yangon has numbered streets streets, increasing from east to west (our hotel was on 63rd). Unlike Manhattan, there are few street signs, so we had a difficult time figuring out whether we'd reached the low 50s, where we were told we could find mohinga, the fish soup noodles that defines the region's cuisine. Jackie and I had agreed that we would not eat street food in Burma, because really, our trip was too short to spend it all on a toilet (or squat hole). Yet minutes later after sorting out our various options, we found ourselves basically eating at a Burmese Dai Pai Dong, or open air street restaurant. An hour later at Bogyoke Market, we sampled some glutinous buns which really could have been cooked everywhere. I clenched my stomach, stayed vigilant for any ominous internal bubbling, and hoped for the best.  The boy waiter who served us the mohinga might have been 13, and it took us about 5 tries to understand him asking "egg?" The soup that came was flavorful, but the noodles quite thin and the whole dish generally featured less ingredients than we were used to.

Thus began a slow hypothesis that we'd confirm throughout the week - Burmese food isn't very good.  If you know Southeast Asia even slightly, this should come as a surprise. As I'll get more into later, Burma is a diverse region, variously meshing into India, China, Thailand and Malaysia, all countries of culinary renown. Multicultural hotspots like Malaysia and Singapore tend to be food heavens. If we were expecting Burma to be the same, we were a little forewarned by this passage from The Lonely Planet by local writer Ma Thanegi:
Myanmar cuisine does not use coconut, green chillies or sugar like in Thailand. It is neither as delicate as the steamed dishes of China nor as fiercely hot as Sichuan cuisine. It does not use as many aromatic spices as India.
That's a lot of "nots" associated with Myanmar cuisine. To be fair, I would enjoy the Shan noodles I'd find several times, and the simple salads were fresh and delectable.  But coming from a food-obsessed city like Hong Kong, where people vacation just to eat and you're expected to bring back goodies from trips, it was hard to not be disappointed with the options available.  Even the Indian and Chinese food I had, bland Biryani and almost American-style stir-fry, were unremarkable. When I thought about it more though, high quality food certainly has a lot of unnecessary and expensive garnishes that we shouldn't expect or complain about in Myanmar.

Walking around downtown Yangon, there were far less beautiful white colonial buildings than I had imagined. Wikipedia had told me Yangon had the most of those in Asia.  It took me a while to realize that the decaying, moldy and greying 4 storey apartments in front of me were the colonial buildings, and they had not gone well-maintained since independence. It saddened me to think that, while I'd love to criticize colonialism any chance I got, in at least this one way, Rangoon might have been nicer than modern day Yangon. The city also wasn't as crazy as I expected. Coming from the states, some of the stuff I've seen in China, like a kid throwing a baby bird in the air or women fighting over shopping carts, struck me as crazy. Yangon was pretty ordered - peddlers didn't overly pester us, monks walked around unnoticed and people just went about their ordinary lives. Perhaps the craziest thing I saw was a person with a beaver tail for a head of hair.

We walked all the way to Lucky Seven tea shop, a much ballyhooed part of our Lonely Planet guide. I examined the tiny squat bathroom and decided I was not risking tea, which in hindsight was unfortunate. Jackie had mohinga again and claimed it was better here.

Making our way to Shwedagon Pagoda, we hit up our first photogenic tourist site. Though the pagoda is huge and visible from several main streets, centered at a gigantic traffic circle, the site was so large that walking in, we weren't really able to see it. There are four large stair entrances at each cardinal direction, leading to a complex of temples and shrines centered around the enormous gilded pagoda. Standing there in the late afternoon sun, its glory and dominance did set in and I was awed by a heritage wonder as I'd only been a handful of times before. It was large, it was beautiful, it was ornately decorated, and simultaneously fit in perfectly and didn't fit in at all into this city. It fit in because essentially the city has grown around Shwedagon in the last 1000 years, looking up to and up with the pagoda. It didn't fit in because it was spotless and pure in a country with many scars and problems. We lounged around with other tourists, all of us barefoot, through sunset and into the night and thought about all the kings and queens who had knelt before or contributed gold.

We met up with Chris and Tara later, a married American couple in the Hong Kong ultimate scene who we had semi-coordinated this trip with (leaving them to presume incorrectly that we were also a couple).  We laughed at our mutual American humor as we wandered through the deserted dark streets towards the river. Yangon is not a city of nightlife and it seems most of the inhabitants have a 9 oclock bedtime or a Junta-imposed curfew. The riverfront was also surprisingly barren - I had never been to a major city with a river that hadn't taken advantage of the river. I mean there are cities in New Jersey that have nice river fronts. But here we had reached the river and all we found were some scary stray dogs, some industrial docks, and one restaurant that seemed semi-promising.  We got a few beers there and got kicked out at 11. It was ok, we had a 6am flight to Bagan the next morning anyway.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Burmese Phase

Aung San Suu Kyi probably entered my consciousness the same way she entered many people not familiar with Burma. I was way too young in 1991 when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia but she came into the mainstream Western news sometime in 2009-2010 up and til her release from house arrest in November 2010.  I must have clicked on an article about her, been confused by what I read and looked her up on Wikipedia, ultimately discovering an absolutely fascinating life story.  I didn't know much about Burma or Myanmar, except that it often showed up on lists with the likes of Iran, North Korea, or Afghanistan, whether the list was toughest places for an American to visit or countries with the worst human rights abuses or least freedom of press.  But part of her was relatable - married an Englishman, lived a scholarly suburban lifestyle as a mom in Oxford.  Then suddenly overnight she became a high profile opposition leader in a large developing country, a shining hope for millions of people and a huge threat for a repressive authoritarian government. The more I read, the more inspired I became by this woman, and I ended up buying her book Freedom for Fear. I read Aung San Suu Kyi describing the history of her country, the political struggles, the fear that keeps government from serving their people and the fear that keeps people from fighting back.

I read much of that book on the D6 bus, coming home from night classes in DC. Burma was far, far, far from a relevant, reachable place in my mind. Even when I moved to Asia, I was interested in seeing Japan, Singapore, Vietnam.  Burma/Myanmar still seemed far, difficult, a place that a young American boy really shouldn't go. It was talking with friends much more well-traveled than me that I realized these notions of "inaccessible" places were nothing more than self-imposed notions. One of my friends here visited Myanmar in 1996 - another one watched his Pittsburgh Steelers win the Super Bowl in the early hours in a hotel in central Myanmar.  And then suddenly sweeping changes happened to the government in Myanmar and everyone started going. Between the time I planned my trip and actually went, a half dozen people I knew made the same trip.

Even so, I had no idea what to expect.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Sustainability

So I work in "Sustainability" now.  I put that word in quotes because it didn't take long while working in this industry to realize that many of my peers hate the "S-word" and consider it a misleading buzzword. It also didn't take me too long to realize that many of my coworkers doing the same job as me might not identify as working in Sustainability.  Also during my short tenure, my team changed its name from Building Physics to Building Sustainability, to capitalize on this buzz.

Here are some quick numbers behind why I wanted to join this field:
-China emitted over 9.7 billion tons of CO2 in 2011
-The US emits over 5.4 billion tons of CO2 in 2011
-The world emitted around 33 billion tons of CO2 in 2011 (all data from EDGAR)
-The UNEP predicts that 44 gigatons of CO2 by 2020 will lead to our world increasing by 2 degrees celsius from a pre-industrial level. We are currently on target for 58 gigatons.  The 2 degree mark is one that many models predicts will render life on earth unlivable
-The breakdown of end-use energy is approximately 37% industry, 20% transportation, residential and services 36%
-Coal is the most common energy source
-16.1% of the world energy consumption now comes from renewable sources. An additional 2.7% comes from nuclear energy.

However, over 12% of that comes from biofuels in some way and 3.3% comes from Hydropower. Biofuels are technically zero carbon because when they are consumed for electricity, the carbon they emit is equivalent to the carbon they absorbed during their life. However, according to jobsandenergy.com, "The biomass-is-carbon-neutral story line put forward in the early 1990’s has been superseded by more recent science that recognizes that mature, intact forests sequester carbon more effectively than cut-over areas. When a tree’s carbon is released into the atmosphere in a single pulse, it contributes to climate change much more than woodland timber rotting slowly over decades."  For biofuels like corn, they can be used more efficiently as food rather than energy.  Hydropower is zero-carbon, but it's obviously a limited commodity and has potentially devastating environmental issues.  The renewable sources that come with the least baggage seem to be solar (heat and electricity), wind, geothermal (heat and electricity) and perhaps ocean tidal energy. These sources have some flexibility in their placement and create clean energy with minimal adverse impact to environmental or human activity. Still, they do have their own drawbacks and are dependent on resources beyond our control such as the weather and need to be placed in areas where these resources are high. None of these technologies are yet economically competitive with fossil fuel.  Lastly, nuclear energy is essentially zero carbon and very powerful, but obviously has its own dangerous consequences and are being phased out of Japan and Germany.

When I look at this current situation of global energy, I do get scared.  I don't know what will happen in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. I worry that the planet will not be so enjoyable during my later life, much less for future generations. We really don't know for sure, as this has never before happened in human history, and the globe is so complicated that the best of models need to be taken with an ocean's worth of salt.  Not everyone believes in global warming, and even I'm willing to say there is a slight chance that the climate change we have observed is not anthropogenic. Slight. Even still, as someone who has lived in China, it's very very obvious to me the terrible deleterious effect that air pollution can have, and my experiences in Beijing are a main reason why I decided to enter this field.

To be sure, plenty is being done and plenty of incredible advancement has been made. At my job, there are plenty of developers who want to create energy efficient buildings and no shortage of projects that are pursuing LEED or other Green Building Certificates. The market is going in that direction on its own. There are large scale projects that seek to create more energy efficient districts and cities, built around mass transit, wind corridors and green space. District cooling/heating technology is improving, where local power plants are used to supply power with minimal loss to the district, and the waste heat that is a necessary byproduct of the generation process is used to provide heating (or cooling in a different process). Similarly, combined cogeneration plants are producing electricity more efficiently.  People are working on improving the grid itself, making it more efficient and less susceptible to peaks and troughs of the human behavior cycle. Car companies are working furiously to produce more fuel efficient cars, including electric cars, driven strongly by consumer demand. There are more and more energy efficient appliances. And renewable energy is growing just about everywhere.  Yes I have noticed that the world at large is more energy conscious, less wasteful and more concerned about the environment.

But when I think of what is left to be done, I get even more overwhelmed.  The world is growing, and energy demand is growing even faster. China is already the largest energy user in the world, but its per capita use is about 40% that of the US.  As rural dwellers rapidly move to the cities and the standard of living improves, the per capita energy demand will increase. At a presentation at work, I saw data on Hong Kong's energy situation. In many ways, Hong Kong is a model city with its very efficient public transportation. However buildings use a ton of energy. I noticed that even if all future buildings in the city use 50% less energy than current ones (an impossibly ambitious number), AND all current buildings are retrofitted to use 25% less energy, the entire island would need to be covered in solar panels to reach a zero carbon figure. It made me realize that though we can put a lot of effort and ingenuity into what we do, we can only do so much.  And energy is such a complicated global political issue, with far reaching security, economic and environmental consequences that very often there are multiple competing factions over any new developmental.

So what needs to change? I think first we need to reduce demand. The cleanest energy is the energy you don't use. I believe that we need to change our culture towards energy consumption and that not enough impetus is given in this regard. You can design an energy efficient building with plenty of natural sunlight and natural ventilation, but if people leave the lights on and run the air conditioning all night, it won't be so energy efficient. Energy data can also do wonders - I do strongly believe that if we were all aware every minute of how much energy we were consuming, most of us would change our habits so that we could see those numbers go down. So that would help. But a bigger question is whether we're willing to give up some of our comforts. 60 years ago almost nobody in the tropics had air conditioning - is that something we can or want to go back too? Will we be willing to give up driving?

There needs to be a drastic increase in renewable energy production and perhaps an even more dramatic advancement in renewable technologies.  Geothermal and tidal energy are relatively new and untapped and potentially limitless sources. Solar and wind have been around for a while but are still improving, and our mapping of solar irradiation and wind patterns make it easier to predict the performance of individual units and help plan projects better. Perhaps the most important driver for these technologies is reducing their cost and making them competitive with fossil fuel energy. If solar panels can be produced cheaply (and cleanly) and the price for solar energy drops and the price for fossil fuel energy rises, the free market forces may allow the solar industry to boom. However, though the I think the scarcity of oil and gas will reemerge as a key issue this coming decade, coal is extremely plentiful.  It appears that government policies will need to be around forever to encourage renewable energy investment and use and discourage dirty coal.

Battery technology also really needs to develop. The ability to capture energy and save it for later consumption without too much loss is crucial to a sustainable world.  The question with solar and wind energy is always, "What happens during a cloudy day? What happens when there's no wind?" The ability to save energy for rainy days is a necessary development to parallel the growth of solar technology. It's also a technology that plays an important role in smart grid models (where energy users can store electricity when they aren't using it, then feed it back to the grid when there's a demand) and for electric cars. More efficient transmission is also vital, so that we can carry electricity from windy and sunny areas to less exciting climate zones.

Who are the biggest drivers here? During my time at Arup, I've been trying to figure that out. From this post, it should be obvious that this is an immense undertaking.  Fundamentally, it seems that we are currently most reliant on scientists.  My company doesn't develop any low energy appliances or solar panels, but as these products come out we pay attention and incorporate them into our design. It's still people in the laboratory that need to make magic happen.  Government of course plays its part in funding the engineers and scientists, and creating the appropriate policies to regulate carbon and encourage green growth.  It will have to play an even greater part in auditing buildings and forcing underachievers to get retrofitted, and in creating large scale eco-city projects.

We also need outside the box answers. I think there could be more human-generated energy going into the grid, such as capturing the energy from revolving doors. Office dwellers could carry weights at the bottom of the lift, take it up to their floors and then drop the weights down some sort of slide, where their energy could be captured. Gym goers could have their elliptical and biking work captured and sent into the grid, or at the least to power their machine.  And then there's this bike designed to clean the air in Beijing. Maybe none of this sounds like a lot but it seems like we need to look at every possible opportunity to be nicer to this planet.

The sad thing is that if we succeed - if we successfully pull off the largest international engineering-social-political-technological-environmental transformative effort ever and dramatically alter the course of human behavior, no one will really know. We aren't too sure about the real consequences of all this carbon in the air, of the broad effects of global warming - we even have people who argue against anthropogenic global warming.  The 2 degrees celsius limit is a fairly arbitrary limit that is now being ignored because we're going to blow by it.  But if we pull off a miracle and stop global warming short of this limit, the end result will be a world similar to how it is now.  Nothing will change.  There won't be blue skies and birds chirping every day. The people who questioned the seriousness of climate change will say "I told you nothing would happen" and the people passionate about sustainability can only trust that we've averted something disastrous and that we will continue to do so for generations.  There won't be a "We Saved the World Party", though that would be awesome.  The best we can hope for is approval from future historians. They will either look back on our era as the people who screwed up the earth for them, or the ones who banded together for something very large and changed human history.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Guns, Germs and Zeal


Ever since the penny dropped on me sometime during the initial weeks of this blog that perspectives are so influenced by culture, I've tried to really understand different cultures and the way they shape thought. I’ve tried to see the reasoning behind all actions that seem foreign or obviously flawed to me.  Some of these are simpler and more innocuous than others, like understanding why the Irish would bother learning the Irish language or why some Chinese people prefer squat toilets over Western toilets and why Slumdog Millionaire didn’t do well in India.  Others were profound, like realizing that the Chinese government believes its acting for the good of the people in its forceful censorship. Or that many white people feel that they're not more racially discriminated against than minorities. Sometimes trying to understand other beliefs and actions brings me to eat whale in Japan, shark fin in Hong Kong or bulldoze my way into a subway car in Mainland China. I would like to believe that every culture is good in its own merits but surely that's not a free pass to do what you like and chalk it up to culture. But where to draw the line? Is it killing whales? Is it refusing education to girls? Do cockfights have cultural merit? Dogfights? Gladiator fights? How long until we bring up the Nazis?

It’s very sad but the school shooting in Sandy Hook, CT has brought the issue of gun control to the forefront of the national debate.  I was in China without internet access when the event happened and I returned home to see all the tragic news and a newsfeed full of gun control advocacy.  There are articles out since like this
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-do-we-have-the-courage-to-stop-this.html?_r=0 and http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/bracing-political-reality-of-gun-control.html.  And even this
Even Nate Silver jumped in on the action with this http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/in-gun-ownership-statistics-partisan-divide-is-sharp/?hp where I learned that as an Asian democrat, it’s no surprise that I’m not into guns, because only 5% of that demographic owns guns.  (On a sidenote, this number may be more surprising than it first seems after I think of all the Asian-owned convenience or liquor stores in dodgier DC neighborhoods, some of which the cashiers operate behind bulletproof glass)

The backlash I've seen since the incident is tons and tons of my liberal friends questioning the gun culture and laws in our country and offering up all these articles and proof of the danger of guns.  And living abroad in a place where guns are just about non-existent - well that has only crystallized my belief on the evils of guns. The US is #1 in the world in gun ownership per capita by a large margin, with 88 guns per 100 people.  Serbia is #2 with 58, and China has just under 5.  Not surprisingly, the US also has an absurd homicide rate by firearm for a first world country, though it's considerably better than countries like Honduras and El Salvador and South Africa.  I think when most people see statistics like this, they conclude that the US should follow patterns of gun ownership like the UK, Australia and Japan and voila, far less people die. You simply see examples of other countries doing it right.  And when you look at the history of gun ownership in America, and the whole militia movement and the passing of the 2nd Amendment, and you put it in context with today, it makes very little sense.  Any objective observer would look at the role of guns in America today and think that this is not the best way to go about it.

But there are a lot of non-objective observers in America.  And when you see how passionate some people, like Alex Jones and the NRA, defend their right to own guns, all of my cultural instincts now make me pause and ask why. What goes on in the minds of these people? Why are guns so important to their culture? To me, laws are very limited.  I know that there may be a legislative answer here, but the real problem is not our gun laws but our gun culture, and the only real way to solve our gun problem is to change our gun culture.

Gun-rights advocates really think this is a part of liberty. We are a country founded on liberty, we dedicated an entire statue to it. Don't ask what we need guns for, we just want them and it's not your business to tell us not to.  There are plenty of foods that are terrible for you but they're still legal.  They're fun to shoot and important for hunting.  Other people passionately believe in using them for safety. If you get surrounded by a gang, brandishing out a pistol might be the only way to escape. It might be a way to ward off a burglar. If you trust yourself, you know that you will never use it for ill.

Let's say you grew up with a gun hanging in your house.  You've been taught since young how to handle the gun responsibly, how to shoot, how to keep it safe, and it's just something that's always been in your life. Maybe you like to go hunting, maybe you don't. Maybe you fantasize about shooting down bad guys, maybe you don't.  And maybe you're from a small town, and you see all these people from big cities on TV who don't know how to handle a gun saying that they should take away your guns. That mentality can really put you off.  If you're already mistrustful of government, which you associate with these big city people, to begin with, and are not swayed by their arguments of how they do it in foreign countries, you're going to cling to those guns. I'm not talking about crazies like Alex Jones who dig through history to find appropriate examples to defend his fanatical agendas, but ordinary Americans who just kinda don't think their guns are any of Americans business.  It's not as backwards a mentality as sometimes we on the left make it out to be.

So what can we do? Can we change this culture? Can we convince people that a gunless America is a better America? Maybe not.  Definitely not soon. Definitely not before tens of thousands of lives will be ended by bullets. But do we have to change that culture? Absolutely. And will it make a difference? Absolutely. Just like non-violent protests in the 1960s changed Civil Rights in America forever, open and understanding dialogue can change the gun culture in the US starting in the 2010s.  While the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, that was only a law and the movement for racial tolerance and equality is still very much ongoing. Change like that doesn't happen fast, but it clearly does and has happened. To convince Americans that we don't need guns, that fewer guns will result in less senseless tragedy and more general safety, we need to approach this issue in much the same nonviolent way that the civil rights activists did.  We can't attack the NRA as murderers or stereotype these gun people as backwards hicks.  Instead we need to convince them to treat this issue with open eyes.  We need movies that positively portray life in gunless nations, instead of senseless shooting scenes. People can only truly change when they don't feel threatened, and change they can. I no longer use "gay" as a slur, no longer judge mainland Chinese as rude people, and long learned never to joke about rape.  People can change if you let them.