PSA’s through cell-phone texting in China

This summer while visiting China I rented a cell phone (through yoyoor.com, excellent service btw). Almost immediately I began to get text messages in Chinese, which I assumed were advertising and spam–based on my minimal vocab of Chinese characters. But one day, I was on a plane to Beijing with a Chinese-speaking friend. When we landed we both received text messages on our phones at the same moment. My friend looked at his message and turned to me, waving his phone, “Welcome to Beijing!” I showed him my phone, “what does it say?!” The same exact message. All of my American sensibilities about privacy and personal space shuddered. Not only do “they” know where we are, and that we just arrived in a new city, but they were letting us know about it.

A few weeks later in Beijing, a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square “incident”, an American friend of mine who teaches at Tsinghua University told me that the day before the anniversary her students received text messages wishing them luck on their exams and telling them to “be good.” Clearly this message was targeted–only students received it–and was intended to influence public behavior through broadcast. Creepy.

Indeed, using text messaging to send out broadcast messages like this seems to be the norm in China. Just today I read about a text message the police in Urumqi sent out to the city’s citizens, warning them about recent attacks with syringe needles.

Really, this makes perfect sense. If you have a population that don’t all have TV, or radios, or access to the Internet, and a high penetration for cell phones, it is the perfect medium for broadcast. (Of course it helps that the government owns all the cell phone companies in the nation.) And yet to Westerners, getting direct text messages to our cell phones seems like an invasion. Our cell phones are so personal and intimate that getting messages from our government, uninvited, seems too personal. And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if this begins to happen eventually in the West too. It will just take some time for us to get used to it.

NYT Reverses Paper-to-Web Workflow

Today, I was a little blown away by the Frugal Traveler‘s article in the Sunday New York Times about ways to use new technologies to keep in touch with friends and family by voice while on the road. The content of the article was great.

But that’s not what struck me.  What struck me was a departure from the traditional print-to-web order of publishing an article–this article, Calling Home for Even Less, was originally published as a blog post by Matt Gros on the NYT Web site on August 18, where it has garnered 69 comments to date. In the analog version of the story, which landed on my doorstep this morning, the article was re-published in an abridged form along with a note that the “full” article can be found on the NYT web site. And that’s not all. A selection of the comments left on the blog were published in the paper edition alongside the article.

Shazam! Web publishing now drives print in newspapers. See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?

fanfou, twitter, blogs, nciku.com, and google translator working together

I am leaving or China in 5 days and thought I would check to see how possible it would be to post to Twitter from China. I will be renting a cell phone, but text messages to the US are expensive, and texting to Twitter from China means sending an SMS to the U.K. A quick google search turned up this very helpful workaround from Pandapassport: sign up for Fanfou.com, China’s version of Twitter, then send the feed to Twitter using Twitterfeed. Nifty. But fanfou is all in Chinese! I managed to sign up for fanfou (jolifanta’s fanfou page) by deciphering some basic Chinese. Fanfou’s UI is exactly like Twitter, so I could pretty much guess what the text was based on placement on Twitter. I had some help in this with nciku.com, my favorite online Chinese dictionary, which lets you DRAW the characters! You just need a basic knowledge of stroke order rules and voila, you can look up any word without knowing those pesky radicals.

Signing up for twitterfeed was easy in comparison (although I have yet to see my fanfou upodate appear in my Twitter feed…crossing my fingers). Next problem–how to verify my Chinese phone for fanfou?? Crap, my Chinese isn’t good enough to tackle this: despite the photos, I have no idea what this is saying. It is way too much for nciku translation, one character at a time. So I tried Google agian. I googled the url for this page and in google search results hit “translate” – voila! “No plug rice blog!” Well, yeah, it’s not the perfect translation, but it was enough for me to get the gist. And I could even navigate within the translator to other pages, where I found the SMS phone number that I will (hopefully) be able to use to send updates to fanfou. Phew…we’ll find out in a few days if all this works.

On Publishing Travel Photos and Stories for Posterity

I returned from my trip to Ethiopia on June 15. Six weeks later I have shared the photos and stories with many people and in many formats! I decided to take the time to be really organized and comb carefully through all of my photos (1,000+) to choose the best, and to place them in order and caption them to re-tell the story of my trip, my thoughts, experiences, and recollections. (See the highlights of my Ethiopia trip here.) After going on a number of trips over the past 3 years, I have learned that if I don’t do this right away, it just doesn’t happen. And then all my memories slowly slip away. I look at the photos 3 years later and wonder what I was thinking when I took them. So this time, I had a really strong sense of “it’s now or never” driving me to organize, annotate, and share. And having the ability to post everything online and share with friends across the globe was a great motivator too. There’s a real sense here of not just creating a record of my traveling experiences for me and my friends, but of contributing to a larger education (in the West) about the country and history of Ethiopia, as well as about the joy of travel.

This trip was also unusual because of my family connection to the country. Soon after I returned back to L.A., I gave a pecha kucha slideshow (20 slides, 20 seconds each) presentation about my trip and my dad’s life living there, in which I reconstructed some of his photos from the early 60s. That, in turn, inspired me to re-create the slideshow on Flickr. And then from there, I decided to create a book, which I published myself on Lulu.com, based on the pecha kucha: Connecting to History in Ethiopia, A Travel Reconstruction.

Retracing My Dad’s Steps in Ethiopia

On my recent trip to Ethiopia I took along with me some copies of the photos my dad took while he lived there in 1962-64. Dad lived in Addis and among his photographs were some images of the neighborhood he lived in. I got him to show me on a map before hand, and in Addis I set off on a quest to find the same locations and document them again. It’s really amazing how little things have changed there. The trees are bigger, and some short walls have been made taller, but that’s about it.

Below, left, is an image from 1964 of the walkway/alley leading to the house my dad lived in with his roommate, Charlie, seen in the photo. Access to the house (the one with the chimney) and its yard was through the gate behind Charlie. On the right, I am standing in front of the same gate in 2008 (less than 2 weeks ago). The same gate is there–they just added wood to the top section and painted it green.

Below are two images of the street leading up to this alleyway, at the top of the “70 steps”. The top image is from ca. 1964 (Dad’s camera had a much nicer lens on it than my little Cannon digital Elph), the bottom one from today. You can see the same stone wall to the right (extended upwards today), and even the same green shack on the right of the telephone pole (also the same!).

“History” in Ethiopia

One thing that is very clear to me as I travel in Ethiopia is that the people here have a very strong sense of being a part of ‘history’. And it’s a long, long history. From pre-biblical times, their kings ruled the entire area of Sudan, Yemen, parts of Somalia and present day Ethiopia and Eritrea. They also claim to be one of the first Christianized cultures and have a Holy Land pedigree, as their first king, Menelik I was the son of King Solomon; his mother the Queen of Sheba. Menelik is said to have brought the Ark of the Covenant to Axum from Israel, (along with thousands of Jews, whose mixed decendents are now called the fallasha), which still rests in a secret chapel in Axum to this day, and is seen only by one monk, chosen to guard it with his life.

The land is full of reminders of thousands of years of powerful kingdoms — ruins litter the land in the far north, from the Axumite stele and palaces in the north from the pre-Christian era, to the rock-hewn churches in Tigrai and around Lalibela from the 6th through the 13th (?) centuries, and the castles built by Fasilides in the 17th century. More recently, they are the only African nation to have resisted European colonization (despite a brief occupation by Italy, which is still evident in some of the food, architecture, and pasta on most menus that serve foreign (farengi) food). I get the sense that during the rule of the last king, Haile Selassie, Ethiopia saw many improvements and began to be modernized. Much of the modern architecture we’ve seen in cities was clearly built in the 60s and early 70s. One gets the sense that after Selassie was overthrown in 1974, and a Communist government called “the Derg’ took over (until 1991), things went downhill fast and are not really recovering very well.

That these histories are Ethiopia’s is not in dispute. But the specifics of the histories–how they play out over time and the details of why and how, are not clear at all. We have been hearing contradictory stories continually. The Ethiopian version of the history sometimes is doubted by European scholars. When I listen to Ethiopians tell their story, it is clear that they have a very strong faith about and certainty about their version, which has been passed down from generation to generation, and is often tinged with Christian prophecy. The most famous of these is the story of the Queen of Sheba and the ark of the covenant. Is the real ark in Axum? Did the Axumite kings bring Christianity to the horn of Africa peacefully, willingly abandoning their pagan beliefs? In Axum, we saw so many ruins built by unquestionably powerful cultures. But many of  the sites are un-excavated, or only partially investigated. Scholars have been slow to spend time here to explore the history of this land, which I think must have rivaled that of the greatest cultures of Europe and the Middle East. I suppose there will be some more unfolding of the story in the future….

Walking on Rocks in Ethiopia

We just left Lalibela, home of sacred monolithic rock-hewn churches, which were pretty stunning. While we were in the area we went on a trek through the neighborung villages of Meket, which are in the highlands south of Lalibella. We walked and walked for 3 days, mostly on rocks! We walked along cliff edges, overlooking the lowland valley below us. Villages were perched on the sides of the sloping hills we looked down on. we’d hear people communicating from village to village by shouting up the hills, across the valleys, down the gulches. Aside from this and the occasional sound of a generator for a stone mill, we heard nothing else of humans. We also walked across the fields, which are being planted now, in waiting for the rains, which have basically already started. The fields have rocks all over. It’s amazing that things grow there. Our guide said they have no choice. They need to grow crops wherever they can. We walked on the rocks (my ankles are kind of sore) and we stayed in treaditional tukuls on the cliffs. It was pretty amazing. Photos to come…

Ethiopia–adventures on arrival

I just arrived in Adis Abiba, Ethiopia about 36 hours ago. I am staying at a very non-touristy place with a friend of mine who is involved in a training workwhop for NGOs. So I am having a very un-typical introduction to the country since I am in an enclave with internet access, constant electricity (though not constant water – it gets turned on 3x a day for 2 hours), a cafeteria, and a security force. Indeed, this may be my only blog post from Ethiopia – I have heard there is little internet service elsewhere, and where there is an internet cafe, it’s very expensive and the connections are very slow. And given my cash situation, I think I may just forego the cost. You see, I came to Ethiopia with my money in a miture of $USD in cash and traveler’s checks; mostly traveler’s checks. (Ethiopia doesn’t have any international ATMs, apparently, though it seems this may be changing. There is supposed to be one in the Sheraton Hotel here in Addis, and I saw some postings online about a few appearing here and there in random bank branches of this one bank.) So, I arrive in the airport, and expect to cash in some traveler’s checks. No. Cash only. This is not what I read, so I was confused, and changed $50 cash. Then yesterday my friend tried to change her checks too and the bank here told her no, that can’t change them. Furthermore, no banks in Ethiopia are accepting them right now! We can’t get a straight answer about why this is the case. So…I have less than half the cash available for exchange that I anticipated needing for my trip! We’re going to the Sheraton today to see if we can use their ATM, or if they will cash traveler’s checks. Fingers crossed.

Last night we went out to dinner at a traditional restaurant, with music, and singing and dancing. It was really good, except that afterwards we discovered that one of the dishes was raw beef! I had been warned about this dish, kifto special, and was told not to eat it. So we spent a good amount of time trying to figure out if we had eaten it. Basially, it doesn’t look raw in the way I’d expected it to – it doesn’t look like sushi, for example; it looks like ground beef. I took a few photos, but it was very dark and even my flash didn’t really capture the atmosphere. (The connection is so slow here anyway that it takes 5 minutes to upload one photo. So I posted a few to my flickr.) I tried to get photos of the dancers but they were moving so fast they are a bit of a blur, which actualy does get across some of the atmosphere. The object of the dances we saw seemed to be to make your shoulders and arms appear as if they are not connected to your body. The dancers would isolate their trunk while shuddering and flicking their shoulders, arms, and even legs. Pretty impressive.

Hiking in the Alps

Today I went for a hike in the Alps. It was so idyllic. We saw wildflowers, which apparently don’t show their faces very often. It looked just like the cover of a box of museli cereal.

The flowers don’t come across in these photos. But there’s a huge patch of purple flowers in the left middle ground of this photo!

This is an ‘enzian’ flower – apparently a characteristic flower of the Alps, which is very rare.

Lago Maggiore, Italy

Lago Maggiore is one of many finger-like lakes in northern Italy, close to the Swiss border and the Alps. Right next door is the more famous Lake Como. I stayed in Stresa, on Maggiore with my family last week and it was a great little place to hang out. There’s plenty of things to do, such as stroll the lakeside, trekking from village to village in the area, drive to more small lakes, and ride the ferries to visit the small islands in the lake. There are three near Stresa–Isola Bella, Isola Pescatore, and Isola Madre. Isola Bella and Isola Madre are owned by the Borromeo family, who built castles, one Baroque, and one more English in style on each island with huge gardens. The Isola Pescatori is more plebian; it’s where the fishermen lived.

We also visited two street markets. One was in Luino. This market is very big and apparently people from all over the area, including Switzerland, descend on the little town for this market. Most of it is cheap shoes, leather goods, and clothes. But my sister and I walked to the back of the market and found the food stalls! Pretty spectacular. Saucisson!