Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Not a single time that I entered or left Tanzania through its main international airport in Dar es Salaam was I able to go through its lines and paperwork without at least facing some sort of obstacles from immigration officials. On the way out, it ranges anywhere from "where were you this whole time?" to "why were you here so long?" On the way in, its always some sort of hassling for payments. "Where is your visa?!" "Is it a multiple entry visa?!" "Oh you live in Iringa, where is your residence permit?!" "No, no, you don't get the permit in Iringa, you get it right here in Dar! Because where is Dar? Dar is in Tanzania!" A few attempts at negating the reasoning of the border officials quite become the author getting screamed at by the said officials, always proud, always self-confident, and always picking out some holes in the paperwork that leads to extra payments.

Before December arrived, the author heard from multiple sources of the supposed madness of a lengthy Christmas season in this piece of African outback.  There will be non-stop Christmas music blasting from every home from December to February, they said.  All the bus tickets will be much more expensive because everyone will be traveling home, they said.  And the whole country will all the sudden become a much more festive place, they said.  Exaggeration, without a doubt, but even taken with a grain of salt, such words can be credited for heightened excitements in some boredom.

In multiple occasions on this blog, the author mentioned how he misses the convenience store culture that is prevalent in many parts of urban East and Southeast Asia .  The ability to walk out to the streets from one's residence or office for five minutes, and find food, drinks, basic medicine, and other daily needs just seem so fitting to a city of the future where dependency on automobiles for personal transport is drastically reduced.  Naturally he thinks that dense cities with pedestrian-friendly blocks of dense street-level shops surrounded by high-rise residential buildings is fitting with that future.

In rural Tanzania, there is one thing that is often noticeable in any market area. Next to the usual arrays of vegetable stalls are sections devoted to colorful clothes, some hanging, some in big piles on spread-out sheets on the ground. The clothes are almost exclusively foreign in nature, easily identified with their Korean lettering, Chinese characters, European logos, and even American flags. Yet most show little sign of wear-and-tear, no doubt due to careful selection, cleaning, and ironing. At the equivalent of a couple of USD per shirt, they make for an affordable supply for locals.

When the author was growing up as a secondary school student in the US, a favorite conversation topic among his Asian-American group of friends was the perceived "weirdness" of their respective Asian families.  The concrete example of "strange" were mostly bouts of what can be termed social aloofness, with awkward gift-giving during holidays, awkward presence and absence of affection, and even more awkward get-together of friends and families .  The comparisons were always with non-Asian families, were social occasions, to the Asian kids, seems always so smoothly conducted.

Another week, another news of terrorism wrecking havoc .  This time the setting is a high-end hotel frequented by high-flying foreigners in Bamako, the capital of recently politically unstable Mali.  The gunmen shot past the armed guards and front barricades of the building, taking over the building and picking off more than a dozen of foreign guests before being killed in a counter-assault by Malian and French commandos.  With the world still so focused on the aftermath of the Paris attacks, comparatively less attention has been given to Bamako, but for this attack can be more significant.

There is no doubt that the terrorist attacks in Paris is unfortunate, and it is perfectly justified that traditional media are filled with news of latest developments and social networks are filled with messages of condolences.  Killing of innocents are morally and legally wrong and deserve to be condemned.  But the label "terrorism," after years of its continued threat to the Western world , should be more or less learned by now.  The very purpose is to generate attention through fear, with collateral damage to innocents as a tool.