Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Gone are the days when any analyst seeking to get a clear picture of Sino-Taiwanese relations would have to first look into the military aspect. Are the American aircraft carriers going to enter a war in case of mainland invasion, and how much advanced weaponry can the Taiwanese procure to deter the potential invasion, thankfully, are no longer the primary concerns when we address the future developments across the Taiwan Strait. Indeed, even as the PRC government continue to point thousands of missiles at the end, there has been more talks of non-violent means of resolving the decades-old "problem." And the Taiwanese presidential election results published yesterday indicates that on that aspect of toning down the traditional militant stance, both sides are increasingly converging toward a single view. The reelection of "moderate" (at least with regard to China relations) president Ma Ying-jeou shows that the the Taiwanese public, in their current economic inst

Around Day 27 of my 30-day, 30-country mega-trip across continental Europe , my usual (and often exclusive) source of self-expression, i.e. Facebook account, suddenly was suddenly disabled without prior notice or warning. After contacting the customer service personnel, the account was not reinstated until this morning, nearly a week later from the mysterious suspension. In the mean time, there was a frantic effort to set up and expand other SNS accounts to replace the inflows of readers entering this blog from Facebook. As much as the amazing power of the user-generated contents (UGC) in social networking is confirmed , the propagation of the UGC through cyberspace is by all means quite murky. One can share a link as many times as possible in as many places as possible to get maximum possible exposure of the link among the largest possible group of SNS users, but the fact the link pops up on the front page of everyone's favorite SNS all the time does not guarantee that the link

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