Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

On the overnight bus from Chisinau to Bucharest, the traveler started talking to a Romanian who went to visit (unsuccessfully) his love interest in Moldova. Quickly, revealing his frustration that the girl's father was against his (second) meetup with the girl, he went on a tirade against the Moldovans, who he describes as "pretty empty in the head because they are still communist over there." He went on to describe Moldova as a country "that has nothing positive except beautiful women." Yes, he is a little bit biased with heightened emotional tensions, but his sentiment, at least here in Romania, is surprisingly common. To be specific, it is a sentiment of "we" against "them," a wholehearted attempt for locals here to separate themselves from the other former Soviet bloc countries up north, even though technically, Romanians and Moldovans practically share the same language, culture, and are of the same genetic makeup. Part of the sentim

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