Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

All good things have to come to an end, and as I spend my final night here on the Continent awaiting my morning flight to London from Berlin, I still somehow lament the unlikely finale of a trip that was at the same time too long but also in a way a bit too short. Yes, I am ready to go back home, settle down, and get some studying done again, but the accumulation of the many experiences and stories of the road must still be regurgitated, digested, continually reflected, and if anything, requires further reinforcements to prove them to be generally valid rather than simple one-time exceptions. But before I go on, here is the final authoritative list of countries touched and visited on this trip out of London and terminating here in Berlin: (1) France, (2) Belgium, (3) the Netherlands, (4) Germany, (5) Denmark, (6) Norway, (7) Sweden, (8) Finland, (9) Estonia, (10) Latvia, (11) Lithuania, (12) Poland, (13) Ukraine, (14) Moldova, (15) Romania, (16) Bulgaria, (17)Turkey, (18) Greece, (19

The communist leaders of Eastern Europe had a knack for building monumental structures. From massive office and apartment towers in the style of “Soviet classical realism” to the various sculptures of brave World War II soldiers and anti-Nazi civilians commemorating communist heroism and victory, the architectural vestiges of communism are still very much visible across the East. Yet, in the anti-communist drives of the wildly capitalist post-Cold War atmosphere, many in the East have been busy tearing down these last remainders of their dark past. For some reason, East Berlin proves to be a startling exception to the trend. The communist victory monuments and showpiece TV towers have not only been maintained after the collapse of the East German regime, the government and the people of the united Federal Republic have come to embrace them as symbols of reunification. Unlike in the other parts of the East, the communist past have not been simply and completely denounced in the nega

The yellow faces come in many forms and many languages, but there is no doubt where they come from. The definite voices of spoken Chinese, Korean, and Japanese echoes through the major tourist sites of the Continent, even, in some broken, ill-pronounced forms, among the local tour guides and shop owners seeking to get some extra businesses from these arrivals from the other side of the world. And the Oriental hordes have made their presence felt. In sheer numbers, a crude observation show them to be just as numerous as, if not more than, visitors from other European countries, much more cheaply and easily reached from these destinations. And the willingness of the Asian hordes to spend and consume at these tourist destinations have completely beat out European tourists. The Asian tourists are snapping up expensive local produce, luxury brands (cheaper than their home countries), and pieces of kitschy souvenirs in quantities inconsistent with the state of the world economy. The Eur

The international traveler is often keen on comparing the prices of basic commodities among different countries, often as a simple-minded effort to gauge the local standard of living. Here in Europe, the same basic travel necessities a traveler comes across in different countries, such as a bottle of Coke, a kebab, or a bar of soap with the same brand name, happens to fluctuate enormously from country to country, even if the towns of different countries use the same currency and are literally less than an hour away from each other. Massive differences in prices between short physical distances are especially the case across the old “Iron Curtain” between the long capitalist Western Europe and the “transition economies” of the East. In one instance, the traveler snacks on a hot dog and a bottle of diet Coke first in Slovenia, costing him a total of 1.40 Euros. Then the traveler heads to Austria, a couple of hours to the north, and orders the same thing. He is shocked to find that th

The travel guide books tend to make it clear how difficult it is to travel, even in convenient and relatively safe continent that it Europe. “Even for 3 weeks, travel seems to become...work,” the books say simply. And after personal experiences doing exactly the many things the travel books recommend travelers to do, the travelers would unequivocally agree with the books’ sentiment. But amid the tiresomeness and desperations of continued travel, what becomes more important, upon retrospect, are things that the travelers seem to forget when they are on the road. (1) When the travelers are still energetic at the beginning of the trip, they tend to carefully track their spending and remember to budget for how much to spend every day and each destination. Three weeks later, that financial meticulousness goes out the window as fatigue sets in. The travelers would eat whatever whenever they want; they would stay in much nicer lodging because they cannot be bothered to seek out those che

Many non-Asians traveling through the less touristy parts of Asia often complains that they receive too much unpleasant and unwanted attention from the locals simply because of skin color. Of course, the source of the attention is justifiably obvious: the locals simply have not come across many foreigners before and are expressing their surprise/curiosity/”joy” of seeing foreigners in ways that the foreigners would consider them rather obnoxious. The Asian travelers, unfortunately, usually do not understand just how unpleasant it is to be on the receiving end of such unwanted attention against foreigners because they tend to always end up in places where Asians faces are common. In Asia, they can blend in as locals. In the West, they can be one of the millions of Asian immigrants. And in popular vacation destinations such as Athens and Istanbul, the foreign crowds, whether it be tourists or businessmen catering to the foreign crowds, are often predominantly Asian. Locals in these