Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

A few days ago, global tech news was suddenly taken over by the emergence of DeepSeek AI, a previously unknown Chinese startup that released an AI chatbot that claimed to have the capabilities of the best that the likes of OpenAI can offer, but developed with a fraction of the cost. The firms providing the tools to the global AI race, most notably semiconductor designer Nvidia, saw their share values tank in response, driven by investors fearing that future improvements in AI can be done without the constant increasing number and sophistication of chips and equipment that their producers previously claimed.

Milan is not a cheap city for tourists who want an "authentic" experience. The "Milanese" restaurants near the city's famed cathedral and canals exchange beautiful views, beautiful interiors, and beautiful food in exchange for small portions and prices that can easily hit 35-40 Euros for a moderately hungry person. In the well-trafficked old city, even a takeout sandwich can be as much as 9 Euros. With entrance fees, public transport, and hotels, a visitor can easily spend 200 Euros per day without tasting any proper luxury.

The streets of Kadikoy on the Asian side of Istanbul remind me of Europe. Its backstreets are flooded with the orange-ish streetlights common in Rome and Paris, with the stylish cobblestones and the tiny cars rambling by to match. Many residents dress no differently from their European counterparts, with stylish body-hugging jeans, shirts, and coats accentuating their figures. Many walk hand-in-hand with their spouses and significant others, and some engage in happy public displays of affection that find no equivalence in the Middle East or the Far East.

"Oh Riyadh is way less developed than Bahrain," the Chinese businessman sitting next to me on the Saudi-bound flight blurted out as soon as I asked him about his impressions of the Kingdom after living there for the past year. I was skeptical of his words. This is the country that global mass media have constantly reminded us of Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) is leading to a head rush of modernization, investing massive sums in infrastructure and public relations of a future tourism superpower. 

"You know, all the countries in the Gulf...they are very different!" Almost as soon as the taxi driver heard that I had just flown into Bahrain from Kuwait he began listing out the subtle nuances that distinguish his Arab petrostate from the neighboring ones. "In Kuwait, they have so much money...but the roads are no good," he pointed out as we drove on the smooth highway into the city. I had to agree, even though I had been in the island country for less than an hour. The spiffy international airport and roads in Bahrain were a far cry from the not-so-well-maintained counterparts in Kuwait.

"I cannot believe that people would keep all these ornaments at home for this time of the year." Until my wife uttered these words at the sight of the average Maltese residential area lit up in preparation for Christmas, I had never thought about the material side of the year-end holiday. Indeed, many houses are putting up more than cheap colorful lights. Many are putting up sculptures of Santa Claus, Baby Jesus, the nativity scene, and much else alongside a substantial tree so densely packed with ornaments that the green leaves are barely visible.

Spare a thought for American election pollsters. After predicting massive victories for the Democrats in the two previous presidential elections, they again forecasted a tight election with a lead for the Democrats led by Harris. As the votes are counted, they are again proven wrong. Rather than waiting for days for ballots to be counted and then recounted to ensure that slim margins of errors are minimized in tight races, a picture emerged of the Republicans taking a massive lead in places they should not be, most notably in Florida where Trump won by 13%.

By the standards of often blank-faced  Japanese politicians, the incoming prime minister Shigeru Ishiba is certainly charismatic. Years of going on TV shows and giving media interviews, not to mention running around rural Japan to shake hands with voters have given him a folksy, joke-filled talking style more reminiscent of George W. Bush than a Japanese bureaucrat in a suit. It is no wonder that he has earned the likes of the grassroots, while attracting skepticism among his fellow politicians, even within the same party. Being different does not help in the subdued one-party democracy that is Japan.

The 1960s and 1970s were the height of the decolonization movement. Centuries of European presence across the globe, particularly in Africa, disappeared in years. Sometimes it was the result of sheer violence, such as how the Algerian independence fighters took down an increasingly exasperated colonial French army and drove out millions of white residents fleeing in fear. But others, like Malta, simply saw the breakup of colonial empires as inevitable for the overstretched colonial powers, feigning allegiance to symbols of continued colonial rule in exchange for concrete progress toward self-governance.

There is a commonly served dish among Chinese restaurants in Malta that I have yet to see anywhere outside Europe. Called "crispy duck," it consists of deep-fried duck meat served with hoisin sauce, thin pancakes, and raw cucumber and onion strips. They are meant to be eaten like Peking duck, wrapping the meat with the vegetables in the pancakes, with some sauce sprinkled to give it a taste. Yet, the fact that deep frying and raw onions are involved in the process means that the result tastes quite different from Peking duck.

One of the common refrain for first-time visitors in Japan is that the country lives in the future. An example frequently cited for futuristic modernity is the prevalence of the ubiquity of the heated, bidet-enabled, remote-controlled toilet seat in Japanese restrooms. Even in personal anecdotes, I have heard too often why the piece of technology is not found outside Japan anywhere except in high-end hotels, even though the technology behind it is by no means cutting edge and the price of the product by no means prohibitively expensive even if subjected to export tariffs.

Finding myself on the streets of Shanghai for the first time since 2017 , I was rather surprised by the vibrancy with which the street life returned to the megacity. With major international news outlets covering the popping of the real estate bubble, the high unemployment rates among the youth, and stagnant wages, it is easy to come to the conclusion that people are less willing to spend the decreasing salaries from increasingly precarious jobs. Yet, despite the anecdotal and statistical evidence that would discourage such development, the streets are seeing more and more shops competing for customers.

I grew up not so wealthy. Being not wealthy usually means that when inconvenience strikes, "let's buy something" is not a viable solution. When shoelaces snap, a piece of string would do well as a replacement. When soy sauce is gone, salt is just fine as an alternative. When the curtain or the windowsill is broken? A piece of cloth would do well to cover up the gaping holes. While my conditions were not often bad enough to resort to such, a mentality emerges: if an inconvenience appears, the priority is to find a workaround with existing resources.

People get old. Old people's mental processing power and ability to react quickly to new information are weaker than those of younger people. These are plain biological facts that govern the human body. Absent radical scientific breakthroughs that allow people to retain their brainpower and youth through chemical and biological enhancements, these facts will befall everyone, including the most powerful and important individuals in the world. A more efficient world requires that some older people retire from their positions and let more mentally qualified youths take over.

Malta's infrastructure is bursting at the seams. An island of narrow streets is now having to handle ever-increasing inflows of foreign tourists enjoying summer holidays and foreign workers lured by the growing economy. The quaint two-lane "highways" crisscrossing the island are now frequently home to snaking traffic jams, with motorists having nowhere to escape amidst the lack of alternative thoroughfares in densely populated towns and rugged rocky terrains of the mountainous interior. As the economy and population continue to grow, Malta will see more frustrations on the road.

There are many good ways to remember and share the memories of a trip. Plenty of people take pictures of sights and food, many others record videos of the sounds, the people, and their reactions, and a few, like yours truly, write down thoughts and reflections in prose. But these remembrances cannot fully do justice to how wonderful or awful a trip was. For all the audiovisual and mental recollections that can be registered and replayed, the tastes and smells of the place cannot. Plenty of storytellers try to do their best job to verbalize the olfactory and gustatory; none can beat the real thing.

Twitter (or X, as people are still trying to get used to the new name) is known for its spontaneous outbursts and text-based real-time updates to live events. The fact that it is so short, so easy to type up, and so ingrained into the culture of a community consisting of millions of equally impulsive tweeters ensures that those who have something that they have in their minds would want to record those thoughts and broadcast them into the community. Getting others to agree or denounce your impulses before you forget them yourself has proven to be quite an adrenaline rush for some.

The central bus stop at the little town of Marsalforn was inundated with a sense of impatience. The dozens of people gathering in the little square could not stop staring at the road leading to the bus stop, as if a more intense stare could get the bus to show up faster. On the mobile app of Malta Public Transport, the bus was shown as a mere 4 minutes away, but with one bus coming every 30 minutes or so, everyone was getting visibly jittery as to whether the small bus could fit everyone in the bumpy journey to the central bus terminal in Victoria, the capital of Gozo Island, only some 6km away. 

Few can argue with the natural beauty surrounding the Popeye Village. The theme park is situated in its own little cove, surrounded by jagged cliffs reflecting the warm afternoon sun into the pristinely clear seawater below. Its remote location, distance from major population centers on the island, the lack of regular public transport connection, and the inconvenient fact of having to pay an entrance fee to enter the theme park, all contribute to the pleasant lack of boorish sun-bathing tourists that have inundated similarly beautiful locations all over Malta.

The little community library in the Maltese town of Mosta was, well, little. But in a small room with perhaps five shelves, a service counter, and a table, every corner was filled with books, many of them quite worn out. The main focus, as is the case for libraries elsewhere , is books that children can read. Picture books, novels, and non-fiction imparting writing skills and knowledge on young adults make up, at a quick glance, more than half of the collection. As adults turn to the internet for their readings, it is clearly the kids without their own digital devices that still carry around paperbacks and hardcovers.