Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

In rural Tanzania, I ate the same lunch every workday when I went to the villages. It was a combination of rice, boiled beans, boil vegetables, and beef chunks stewed in tomato sauce. In this little local street-side eatery in the rural village where I went to work, this combo plate is the only thing on the menu. The young owner of the shop makes the exact same thing for lunch and dinner every day, day in and day out. Interestingly enough, her eatery is sustained by the same customers who work in the area, who come to eat the exact same thing, day in and day out.  I was one of them.

Not a single time that I entered or left Tanzania through its main international airport in Dar es Salaam was I able to go through its lines and paperwork without at least facing some sort of obstacles from immigration officials. On the way out, it ranges anywhere from "where were you this whole time?" to "why were you here so long?" On the way in, its always some sort of hassling for payments. "Where is your visa?!" "Is it a multiple entry visa?!" "Oh you live in Iringa, where is your residence permit?!" "No, no, you don't get the permit in Iringa, you get it right here in Dar! Because where is Dar? Dar is in Tanzania!" A few attempts at negating the reasoning of the border officials quite become the author getting screamed at by the said officials, always proud, always self-confident, and always picking out some holes in the paperwork that leads to extra payments.

Upon arriving at the Kigali Airport on his three-day trip in Rwanda, the author was greeted at the arrival gate of the beautifully constructed and maintained building by a young, uniformed taxi driver.  "Where would you like to go, sir?" the young man respectfully half-bowed and politely asked in fluent English .  The author, usually doubtful of airport taxi solicitors (too many bad memories of getting ripped off in Asia), was initially a bit hesitant to disclose his destination, but quickly relented when shown the car in the impressively well-organized rank of uniform and clean blue taxis.

「もし身近な場所でとんでもない悲劇が起こったら、皆さんはどう反応するんだろう？」著者は何となくこんなことを思いながら、6人の同僚と土曜日の晩御飯を食べていた。その料理はまさしくもアフリカにいる外国人らしい：パスタにサラダ、赤ワインとジュースを備え、締めはクッキーとアイスクリーム。もちろんすべてが手作り。まあ、単なる普段料理に使える食材や調味料が不足してるので、これはすでに驚くほどの豊富。7人はカジュアルな会話をしながら、食事を終わらせ、ポップコーンをつまみながら夜遅くまで映画鑑賞…

As part of his work in rural Tanzania, I attended weekly one-on-one classes to master the local lingua franca that is Swahili. Despite English being the working business language as well as the main language of instruction in local schools secondary and above, to work with people with less than adequate amount of formal education, like the farmers NGOs work with, being able to communicate and comprehend at least some of Swahili, as well as the local tribal language of Kihehe, is almost a requirement to succeed.

Near Iringa's dusty airstrip that sees one flight a day to Dar es Salaam, the villages of Nduli ward remain ironically isolated from the remainder of an otherwise NGO-saturated town. Village officials note that Nduli, despite being the gateway where practically every single NGO professional in Iringa launched their local careers, has not seen any NGO activity in years. And even in one instance where an NGO did show up, it was a small-time trial that never became something significant before its abrupt end.

Southeast Asia used to be (and in many ways still is) a playground for some of the largest developmental organizations in the world.  The fact that Asian Development Bank has its headquarters in the region, along with multiple offices of UNDP and aspiring smaller NGOs, says much about how modern developmental work has shaped Southeast Asian economies.  Indeed, the long presence of aid organizations here have contributed much to how people locally perceive themselves, seeing themselves often as the deservedly unfortunate individuals who should receive the constant developmental support they are receiving .

Back in the States, the Asians live with a widespread stereotype: they are the arch-typical white-collar professional set, with high salaries and stable careers but little creativity or adventurousness.  They are the doctors, the lawyers, and the engineers of America, acquiescing with parental pressures, displayed and strengthened at every opportunity possible , to pursue these subjects.  The results are an ethnic group that is almost homogeneously represented by meekness sprinkled with diligence, as they quietly toil day in and day out to further the ambitious goals of non-Asian leaders.

Perhaps it is not the specific attributes of certain individuals to feel tired out of the blue, for no reason in particular.  There was no exercise of any sort done recently, nor has there been any particular mental task that required so much thinking that it strains the body for just supplying oxygen to the brain.  A person can just sit there, surf the Internet, be completely passive for a couple of hours, and still manage to feel absolutely tired out in a short period of time.  It really makes the person think about exactly what is causing the energy drain.

As comparatively new players on the African continent, Chinese companies often face uphill battles against much more entrenched European and American competitors.  With their strong advantages of extensiveness in local resource ownership, social networks with influential local leaders, and brand recognition among the common populace, Western firms use their long-established traditional presence and trust to secure large segments of the African market.  The lack of such long history has forced Chinese firms, many of which largely unknown to Africans, to undertake a brazenly risky approach in doing business on the continent to compete with the West.

"Since the regular room is booked out, we will move you into a two-bedroom suite for your stay," the receptionist casually mentioned upon the author's check-in.  The author, for his business trip this time in the Philippines, was placed into a gigantic service residence unit.  Wowed by the sheet size of the bedrooms, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom...the author was just giving himself a tour of the place when he noticed a little dark alley on the side of the kitchen, away from the bedrooms and the main door.

In the past, this blog has been unequivocal about criticizing the downsides of a particular company called Rocket Internet .  It that process, it has accumulated feedback based on derision and ridicule, most of which by different employees of the company who find themselves, in one way or the other, compatible with everything  that the company seem to represent.  This blog very much continues to stand by those comments made by the previous posts, but does concede that it has lacked the positive coverage that prompted its author to remain (and come back) for quite a long time so far.

In economics, there is something called "Dutch Disease."  It is an idea that a commodity boom lead to a huge surge in inward investment and the resulting increase in demand of the local currency makes the currency so expensive that it practically kills off all other industries that depend on international markets for survival.  The death of other exporting industries than set off a chain of destruction that wreck havoc on the entire economic system, to the point that only the commodity-producers and their related industries survive as viable portions of the economy.

Two years ago, this blog touched upon the then-quite-new idea of the Single's Day as new haven for Chinese online consumerism .  Some two years later, this "holiday" manufactured by the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has not only remained strong and growing as the world's largest annual event of online sales, but has also begun to spread its idea to the non-Chinese world.  Out here in the depth of Southeast Asia, ecommerce firms such as Lazada has latched on to the idea, and now, trying to run with it in a decidedly unfamiliar environment for Single's Day adherents.

On this very day a full three years ago, the author was penning a blog post in his room in San Diego , listing down some of the resolutions for the upcoming year as he prepared himself for the year ahead in London for his grad school life in the LSE.  It was a time of disappointment, after discovering the toughness of being the common white-collar worker in Japan and an English teacher in Korea.  It was a time of dismay, facing a prospect of pushing ahead in a completely different direction again as the world of business is replaced once again by the world of academia in a faraway place.

It's funny how some perks of a job can simultaneously be seen as a "curse" or a "blessing" depending on the situation.  When one does not have the perk and watch others get it, jealousy lead to office politics, further leading to conflicts that erupt in ways that send some people resigning from the company.  But once one gets one's hands on that supposedly highly desirable perk, one somehow finds out that the perk is, well, not so desirable, especially when the perk catches one completely mentally unprepared.  One begins to wonder why the perk was so fought over in the first place.

Once upon a time not that long ago, inserting the "social aspect" to the fast-growing industry of online shopping was considered a no-brainer.  Integrate the likes of Facebook and Twitter functions to product pages on ecommerce outlets, and the words of the mouth from one's friends and families, increasingly merging into one biggest online networking presence , will as a collective provide the necessary persuasion to get potential online shoppers to click on those "check-out" buttons.  After all, just as people take friends to go with them on trips to brick-and-mortar retail outlets, they also should for their online counterparts.

For those people who are following Taiwanese politics at the moment, the past few days have been a bonanza.  An ambiguous announcement by the ruling Ma Ying-jeou administration that the ongoing ratification process for a second-stage free trade agreement with China will somehow bypass the normal legislative process has triggered a severe backlash from Taipei's student community.  In response to the legislature's meek non-response to executive intentions from the presidency, the students have surrounded, stormed, and occupied the legislature, starting a sit-in protest that is now entering its sixth day with no stop in sight.

One of the biggest, most luxurious, and most famous departure stores in Taipei is beyond just a building with expensive brand-name shops.  It is actually a complex of FOUR buildings, each of which 7-8 storied and all of them connected via pedestrian-only bridges on the ground level, and sky bridges on the 4th floor.  From restaurants to food courts, cosmetics to clothing lines, activity halls to nearby movie theaters, the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi seem to contain everything a shopper would ever want in order to while away a lazy weekend.

Having had (and from what it is looks like, still having) many opportunities to live different countries where standards of living vis-a-vis their relative costs varies dramatically, the author has come to realize that the common perception that more developed countries = more expensive actually is just a misconception.  The belief that better the standard of living, the more it costs, from a comparative global perspective, seem to have little factual basis on the ground to support it.  The author's latest physical move help further validate the theory.