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preamble - 4 june, prague, czech. LOG3 is a long time coming. i'd gotten out of the habit of writing things up. the pace of travel, dealing with different currencies every few days, increasing workload and illness of one sort or another. work had become increasingly demanding so much of my writing and thinking time had become soley devoted to it. i'd also been ill at least four times. in bangkok, jakarta and manila i'd had a reacurring stomach problem. through china i was getting more and more exhausted and eventually caught a flu. afterwards i was pretty much out of action for close to a fortnight. now i'm in prague eating assorted cheeses, breads, drinking up the local red and beers. i must be getting better :) so, LOG3 is pretty much a collection of notes on the last few weeks in asia. nothing detailed. i do want to mention a few things in summary. end of april i did manage to find some interesting places in bangkok. though not until my last night there. i'd stumbled on this funky street with stalls and bars and cafes open till all hours. about 10pm i was poking the camera in and around the place and got to talking to a sidewalk jeweler. it was there that someone called out my name. i turned round and there was richard conrad from byron bay staring me in the face. we couldn't believe it! he started raving to me about problems he was having with his modem in japan! sheesh! the net just wouldn't let up. one night in jakarta i was invited out to a jazz club to see indonesia's hottest guitarist. he played new orlean's style trad. he even played american military tunes. boring! he and his band of fine musicians spent most the entire evening playing requests. even more boring! i was suprised to see the walled city in manila almost completely restored since the last time i was there (2 years ago). the tourists are coming. in fact, the tourists are coming all over asia. theres no stopping them. they're in prague as well. hordes of them. you can't hear czech in the streets. only germans and americans. the ancient cultures from east to west seem to be sold, turned into zoos in the name of free market. tuesday may 10, forgettable hotel - jakarta, indonesia its my brother's birthday and theres not a whole lot i've got to say about jakarta. its rapidly aproaching singapore status. an architect i spoke to admired singapore's "attitude" to development. but when i reminded him that singapore is really just a big city he went quiet. i met so many people who talked about various countries in asia wanting to adopt the singapore model. singapore "works" (and i use that word loosely) cause it ain't got a provinces, 100's of islands and the huge populations odfso many asia countries. it IS just a big city afterall. having just come from countries such as cambodia, vietnam and thailand where street trade is still a functioning economy i was shocked by the paucity of it in jakarta. the few street vendors that remain push drab trollys. there weren't any of the brightly painted stalls, trollys, carts here. all the colour seemed to have been scrubbed away. they were as dull as the cement being poured over every inch of the city. the beggars were still there, mostly amputees. they would lay themselves amongst the traffic, on median strips and at traffic lights trying to gain attention. many could've done with crutches, wheel-chairs, prosthetics etc. no one i asked knew if there was any government assistance available to these people. while jakarta's wealth grows to ridiculous proportions those that are unable to survive as expected are reduced to poverty. you couldn't tell if anyone within in all the air-con, tinted windowed cars in jakarta took any notice of the crumpled, filthy, bleeding beggars. all too easy to ignore the flesh the street still carries. my room in the police run hotel stank. really!!! it hadn't been used in ages. and hadn't been cleaned either. had to get things repaired like the hot water and air con and lights. they ran a vacume cleaner over the carpet but left the bathroom in a totally unsavoury state. the contradictions begin behind the flash facades. you only have to step outside of jakarta to discover indonesia's still a developing country. you could be forgiven for forgetting when surrounded by outrageously dominant (and ugly) architecture and the pace of growth evidant in the rate at which concrete is being poured in jakarta. hmmm, actually i didn't get to see much more of jakarta. got sick. but i did get to visit the palatial offices of indosat. they're using micro-wave links to wire up the 1000s of islands that make up indonesia. they're dynamic, enterprising but rigid on pricing. they knew very little about email. may 11, better hotel, makati - manila, philippines the nets following me. on the flight into manila there was a young couple behind me having an intense discussion about transfer protocols, packets and fibre networks. once off the flight i was amazed by the number of people carrying laptops. whats going on? one person after another had these things slung over their shoulders. oh, when first leaving australia i was sat next to an executive from british telecomm with whom i had a long and exciting talk about public access networks and packet switching. the latter topic wasn't so stimulating but it was interesting to hear how much hope BT was placing on its rescue by extensivly developing its packet services. and it turns out BT are major sponsors of the developing countries component of the Internet Conference this june. may 12, dark-time ugh! i'm sick. just got back from a jazz club where they didn't play any jazz. but i did get to catch up with a friend whom i'd met last time i was in manila. i downed a magaritta whilst my stomach play-acted an espresso machine. theres a pool here so i've managed to get in a few early morning laps. actually, swimming here is a bit disconcerting as the pool is next to the hotel resturant. as people take their breakfast they seem to have nothing better to look at then me snort and wheez my may up and down and up and down and breathless. may 13, 6pm, beverly hills deli its becoming harder to find asia. harder to focus in on textures unique to the various cultures one knows are there. i think my personal mission to something of the encroachment of technology on asia is quickly failing. one needn't go any further than singapore. being confined pretty much to CBDs they now blur into each other. capitalism pours concrete over culture then drags whats left from out of its rubble to the city fringes, to the slums where a third world still exists. its there that the impact of nylon, dallas, CNN and milo is best articulated. each of the cities i've been to thus far - hanoi, ho chi minh city, phnom penh, bangkok, jakarta and singapore - could soon become pressed plastic replicas of the west, the US in particular. some may not like the american's but they sure want to look like them. take a look at the beverly hills deli, just round the corner from the new orlean's hotel, up the road from burger king not far from KFC's and closer still to the open air catholic church where a woman recites a prayer alongside a taped sermon in a thick american english accent thats amplified throughout greenhills shopping centre, and pounding the glass i'm safely sat behind. i walked hard to find a cafe. this was the best i could do. geared for fast food, high turnover trade i rebelled by sitting on a glass of wine for an hour. the waiters were definatly nervous about me cause they wouldn't stop asking if there was anything else i wanted. taking a look around this cafe you'll see that its adorned with typical hollywood kitsch: paintings of fabulous stars such as bogart, monroe, flynne and john wayne. milan kundera said in 'the unbearable lightness of being', "in the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme." these people truely love the states. perhaps so much their logic, or rather their identity is blinded by their passion for it. may 14, late, xiyuan hotel - beijing, china oh my god, i'm in china! w o a h ! i'm spinning out on some kind of euphoria. but wait a minute. whats this? UNYSIS, IBM and Salem!!! from the airport to the hotel the first billboards i see...america is here! damn!! i was hoping to see advertising i couldn't read therefore to me it wouldn't look like advertising so i'd not get so hung up about it. on the air china flight to beijing it seemed that everyone sat round me had a laptop running. one guy was playing tetrus, another solitare. i wasn't sure what the others were doing. i was updating a spreadsheet. something is definatly going here. is this a peek at the global village, or the global market place? may 14, later still its my sister's 30th birthday. i can imagine a raucous night being had in hobart. egads! theres 11 million people in beijing city. yet, for some reason it reminds me of canberra. i'm sat up in a 22nd floor room overlooking the city. an expensive room but i'd got it for US$40 a night. apparently its a VIP rate set aside for guests of the Chinese government. gulp!!! i checked in and found this cute piece waiting for me:
COMPUTER VIRUSES RAMPANT IN ASIA
(Wall Street Journal 4/29/94 A11) may 15, 10:30pm - big day out! still sick, but now excrutiatingly homesick as well. for a couple of weeks now i've dreamt so much about my parents, and my brothers and sisters. i rarely ever dream of them. morale is slipping a bit too. we should be taking a break from it now. by the time we get to singapore we'd have been on the road 45 days straight. burnout i'm afraid my be on the back of this golden tiger. and if not burnout then perhaps severe MSG overdose. damn hard to get any food without it. harder still is trying to explain what it is to locals who don't know it as MSG. online i find some solice in my onroad companions. theres been lisa winter, david's nerlich, cox and blair, susan farrell, nilefa oszoy, eli wong, ian peter, pang, param, oysim ochin, rob garnsey, robyn ord, and henry "hank" bull who've been here for me everytime. and of course you've all been tremendous morale boosters as isolation seems to be something i've had to deal with here more and more. (incidently, both henry bull and david blair aren't recipiants of LOG). okay, thats it for the open heart surgery... after wanting to see the great wall since seeing photos of it in a readers digest magazine about 20 years ago i'd finally got to fulfill my childhood dream. but what a let down. the great wall was not so great. in fact it seemed merely to be a platform for tourists get pictures of themselves in front of other tourists in front of other tourists in front of something 5700 kilometres long, that had taken one million people to build over thirty years commencing in 721 BC. certainly well before america was invented! the place was swarming with tourists. i couldn't believe what i was seeing. i hiked a fair way up it wanting to press myself against the stone someplace and just sink into history. no chance. this wasn't a place for stopping. if you did you'd be sure to encounter someone protesting your precense in their shot! i must say that despite the snap-happy hoardes the wall was bloody impressive. i was told that it had been built by a labour force donated to the emperor. each family had to give up at least three of their strongest men. many of them died at the wall and their remains were added to the mortar. prior to the wall we visited the ming tombs. these were part of an underground palace built in 1609. again, the tourist crush made it impossible make any sense of the place. once having walked down seemingly endless stairs it was a rush to get back up. it was so damn crowded i felt like pressed salami (china's heavily oiled, salty and MSG'd food had already made itself quite at home in my perculating stomach). earlier this evening, just as the sun was going down i went to tiananmen square. i kept looking at the dark grey pavement blocks as i walked slowly from one end to the next. at every extensive series of cracks i saw tanks, fire, bodies and blood.
x||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||x - The People have lost the confidence of the - - Government. The Government has decided to - - dissolve the People and appoint another one. - - Bertold Brecht - x||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||x all i could hear were my own footsteps. when i did look up i saw kites in the air. children running about lovers hand in hand. families out for dusk in tiananmen square flanked by grand symbols of authority and power. i sat down at a flower bed and shared a cigarette (in solidarity) with jagdish. ahead of us was the summer palace with mao's plump face hung above the entrance all lit up like a god. to our left was the people's parliment, a monument to grey marble. behind stood mao's tomb and to our left the offices of the peoples republic of china. these impressive structures dominated everything! we were sat at a flower bed amidst the structures silently pressing power out onto the square. theres no denying it. this is the most powerful government in the world today. i'm a tiny man with tiny thoughts. talking about tiananmen square to our colleagues in china wasn't easy. when i finally managed to find safe haven to do so i was told that what had occured in tiananmen square was insignificant too the bloodshed that was the transpire in the the remainder of beijing's streets. my confidant told me quietly and confidently that in the course of history chinese have had to endure far greater catastrophes in the name of change. change will come, he insisted. but not for at least another one hundred years. it says something of a people steeped in 5000 years of history to know and accept the process of change in such terms. we've come to expect change to occur, even demand it, withing days, weeks, a few months. but a century? thats unheard of. may 16, 8.20pm, revolving resturant, xiyuan hotel i'm feeling better. i took myself out and upstairs to dinner to celebrate. "sir, fish special. shrimp, turtle...all swim in water now". er, no thanks. theres a strange sense of vertigo when spinning at snails pace atop the 26floor of one of beijings most prestigous hotels knowing that all around you, as far as the eye can see 14 million people are going about their business. strange. reminds me of the gravitron in sydney's defunk luna park. pa, or vuttie (pronounced futtie), as i called him then took me there one time. i must've been 9. the gravitrol was a large cylinder lined with rubber. people would press themselves against sides of the cylinder as it spun. it'd spin very fast. the floor would drop away and you'd be stuck there able to move you're body into shapes and everything. i threw up. needless to say the gravitron did to my spew what it did for everyone else. it stuck to the sides but not without gushing across onto a woman screaming next to me. vuttie looked pale from the observation deck. i was taken straight home. things have changed. the gravitrons' gone and i'm getting a round the blook tour of beijing whilst dining. and i plan to keep my food down. besides, theres no ferry floss on this round-a-bout. this mornings workshop sprouted some interesting information. heres an extract for a paper i'm writing to present at the INET conference in prague. Lets start with the bad news first. I'll give you some examples of situations we encountered that would provide you with an indication of the diversity of constraints imposed on potential users and network developers. China.Two exceptional impediments to networking both locally and internationally. access, and regulatory processes. (1) Access A number of funding agencies have provided computers for research purposes to 100s of institutions in China. Most are under lock and key. Computers tend to be centralised. Researchers have limited access or none at all with computers ending up on only the most privileged of desks. Local area networks are only available to the highest level of professors. those doing research cannot get access to these networks. Chinapac, the local packet carrier, seems to issue accounts to only those it wants to. Some users are by-passing Chinapac all together and going international via Osaka, Japan and Hong Kong. There is now a link to Stanford University via Beijing but again access is limited but due to regulations. Cristina Vasconi in a recent trip to China discovered the following regulations which we had confirmed time and time again. (2) Regulations Regulations signed by the Premier Li Peng on February 18, 94 put computer information networks under the supervision of the Ministry of Public Security. They read: "The goal of computer network security work is to protect such important areas of as national affairs, economic and defense construction and advanced scientific technology." "Any organization or individual may not use computer information systems to engage in activities which go against the national or collective interests or violate the legal rights of citizens." These regulations require:
There is also talk of all data destined to leave the country via international gateways having to pass through Chinese Customs! In a tiny office somewhere a group of Chinese Custom's officers will go slowly mad trying to monitor ever byte going off-shore. To add to this we dined with people building China's national financial and foreign trade networks. We got to talking about public access networking. They said, "We're building a national public access network." This sounds good, we thought. "Everyone will be able to use it to deposit and withdraw money from. Its called, Golden Card. Theres also Golden Bridge, Golden Gateway and Golden Duty. We have nice names for networks in China." computers are expensive here. approx 20 000 yen for a 386. roughly US$2000. customs charge a huge levy on computers so people seek them abroad. the people who came to todays workshop all said that networking was very important for china but basic computer knowledge was poor. that it was in most instances too soon for networking as there would be so few people able to use it. getting handles on current s/ware, chinese character implementation and finding enough phones are present priority needs. may 18, another marble hotel, nanjing we're eating big. the chinese aren't shy about food. it just keeps coming. one plate after another. these are a generous lot. just so i wouldn't forget i made a list of five feature meals all had in nanjing. lets start with this evenings gastronomical fair. starters:
main:
drink:
during this meal we talked with our hosts about religion. we were told that there are "three [priniciple] religions in china: buddhism, christianism and muslim. but, most of the time theres no religion at all." may 19 i woke early. i'm 32. there are 30 million people living in poverty in china. the young look towards america. traditionally birthdays are celebrated by eating noodles. noodles are symbolic of longevity. but more and more the young want cake. one person remarked that many asia countries are experiencing a form of "mental rape". the hotel staff suprised me with a cake. there was a knock on the door. i opened it and two women sang happy birthday and handed me a cake with so much cream on it my arteries hardened merely at the sight of it. i was taken to the wild horse resturant for lunch by my new nanjing friends from the science and technology commission. main:
drink:
the best thing about my birthday in nanjing was receiving this message from akira, my daughter via nilufa:
> Happy Birthday dad. > I love you! > How are you? > What is your favorit T.V. show?! > From Akira XXXX > P.S. Will you send me a letter? may 20 todays lunch consisted of: main:
drink:
after a rest we headed for an early dinner at the hotel. we were guests of the technology commission. they'd invited a number of dignitaries. we weren't warned. i wore my bright leafy green shirt and a hat thinking we'd be with our funky young friends. it turned out just fine. i think they getting to expect "eccentric" consultants from the west. this dinner was by far the most extravagent. starters:
main:
may 21, dizzy in nanjing lunch was my last big meal before i got sick and spent the entire duration of my stay in kunming in bed. main
drink
postscript china was like 1950. i know its a strange thing to say, but to me everyone and everything in the three cities i visited seemed to come straight out of the 50's. you'd be hard pressed to see anyone wearing a pair of jeans. most of my clothes are made in china but bought in australia. i'd hoped to find some cheap. but cotton was nowhere to be found. nylon was in. every clothing store looked like Best and Less throwbacks. perhaps all the 100% cotton garments are made soley for the west and all the nylon gets imported from the west. in some ways another example of the east going west as the west goes east. muss es sein? zweifellos, ess muss sein! |
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