Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The conditions on the Lviv-Kiev overnight “express” train are quite shocking. As the steam engine slowly pulled into the Lviv station to pick up passengers, what greeted us behind the already seemingly two-decade-old engine was a series of green-painted metal box carriages, the design of which has not changed at all since the Soviets standardized them, eh, more than half a century ago. The carriages can be described in one word: rusty. Rust covered the creaky doors and the metal stairs leading up to them. The inside was not much better. The curtain had 20-year-old (beer?) stains, only to be “outshined” by the 40-year-old rusty rods that are barely keeping the curtains in their proper positions. As the train slowly chugged out of Lviv station, one can hear the wooden frames of sleeping berths and windowsills making creaking noises the whole night, as if they are going to fall apart any minute. Passengers necessarily make their own beds with given sheets and beddings, while conduc

Hearing about Kim Jong Il passing away almost immediately after a visit to the remaining Soviet architectures (with their red star decorations intact) on the streets of Vilnius and taking a clunking ride on the old Soviet era train carriages of the Warsaw-Krakow “Intercity Express,” was by all means, a surreal experience. Combined with reviews of some video footages of surprisingly genuine-looking mass mourning (more like mass crying) sessions in Pyongyang, and it seems like we are back at the old Second World. Indeed, even as the Baltic states and Poland, former bastion of Stalinist communism, transformed themselves into orderly capitalist economies and took up the membership (and the principles) of the EU, the physical and emotional signs of the socio-economic order that ruled the land barely twenty years ago are still very much deeply rooted and difficult to eradicate. Like their parents and grandparents, people here still emerge from their old Soviet concrete apartment blocks to

Whenever I am on the road, I have the tendency to let the adventurous and curious side get the best of me. Whenever I see a local restaurant, I go in to try out what the locals have for supper. Whenever I see a little alleyway leading down to a slightly run-down residential neighborhood, I take it to try to get the glimpse of local living conditions. And whenever locals try to have a genuine conversation with me, in however broken English, I respond positively by engaging them in their talks. Furthermore, I do understand that as one of the few Asian and American travelers out here in the relatively unpopular destinations of Eastern Europe, I do have the responsibility of representing Asians and Americans in a positive way through politeness, friendliness, and good-heartedness. The last, in my opinion, is especially important because there is an inherent need for foreign tourists to counteract the negative images represented by their national governments’ various actions. The local

In a little backpackers pub in Riga, Latvia three Belgian lawyers on a weekend trip gave me a brief lecture on their view of their country’s future over a glass of locally brewed Cesu beer. When I questioned them a bit regarding the potential of the country splitting in half, the discussion got a little sentimental. The three, all from Flanders, blamed the French-speakers from hijacking Brussels, the officially bilingual capital. Especially, they noted the influx of immigrants from Francophone Africa. They say that the increase of immigrants is leading to creation of new French-speaking suburbs of Brussels outside the Brussels Capital Region, in the surrounding Flemish territories. Traditionally Dutch-speaking towns and neighborhoods are becoming more and more Francophone, spurring a movement in French-speaking Walloonia to seek greater “coalition” with the capital, much to the anger of the Flemish. The Flemish resentment is further bolstered by the transfer of wealth, through soc

A young muscular Caucasian man tried their hardest to communicate to the staff at the ticket sales counter with his broken English. He was trying to confirm his bus going home from London's Victoria Coach Terminal to his home in Romania. It was his first time returning home from England for Christmas, and he was frantically asking me directions to his boarding gate as he dragged his massive bags across the crowded station. For millions like him, working on the other side of Europe for a higher wage, even as manual laborer (e.g. this Romanian is a construction worker), was made possible by the Europe cutting down border controls and treating other EU citizens as equals in every EU member state. A British citizen would remark that a presence of people like the young Romanian here is a reason for depressed wages, as the Eastern Europeans are willing to work harder for fewer pounds than the British. And with a few observations on the road, the traveler can confidently say that the