Three months left

On April 1 I left New Zealand (did I say I went to New Zealand? I went to New Zealand for a brief and glorious two and a half weeks.) for Taiwan. April 1 marks the nine month mark of my fellowship, and also means I have three months remaining. It also means I have to send a "quarterly progress report" as required by the fellowship, which is a sort of informal report on how I'm doing, one of the few concrete requirements of the fellowship.

After writing my report, I began to realize why I was having some difficulty with photography when I got to Australia. I spent most of my time in Sydney, which has a huge Asian community. Up until Australia, I spent most of my time in cities with a proportionally smaller Chinese community; although the Australian census doesn't collect statistics on ethnicity, Sydney has a huge Chinese population, and Mandarin and Cantonese are together the most widely spoken second language. Now that I am in Asia, I will continue going to countries with even higher proportions of ethnic Chinese people (Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam are obvious examples) -- countries where the influence of the Chinese is even stronger. And the Chinese food will be better.

The way I'd approached photographing "the Chinese diaspora" up until Australia had largely been to focus on the Chinese immigrant experience, which meant documenting a minority ethnic group in a very different cultural environment. Now, however, I can't really do that. Simply put, the Chinese are everywhere!!

In other news, I've been taking some photos of beautiful light.

Sunrise on an alpine meadow in the Dart Valley, New Zealand


Rainforest in Australia

In Sydney's Chinatown:


Some pretty spectacular light in Chinatown: simultaneous heavy rain and sunshine (didn't see any rainbows, though). That's Sydney's monorail in the second photo.

And just some pretty things:
Some beach area on Australia's east coast


Cascade Saddle, New Zealand.

Kea, the notorious alpine bird in New Zealand. Because of visitors feeding the kea, they are quite curious and can get aggressive and will start picking at anything of human origin. Like the camera. weeeth theeer POINTY beeeeeks.

Australia

Apologies to my loyal readers for going AWOL on my blog. I am in fact still in Sydney, Australia. Sydney is a good city, but it's so much like an American city, that I feel it's almost under-stimulating.

Australia is considered the fourth most developed nation on the UN's Human Development Index. The index, like most aggregrate measures of something quite subjective and complex, has its obvious flaws, but its a pretty good yardstick that actually takes into account a host of other development factors besides GDP per capita -- such as infant mortality, education, literacy, income inequality, and gender equality.

It may come as a surprise to some U.S. Americans that we are only number 15 on the list (our Canadian neighbors beat Australia to #3; Iceland is #1 and Norway #2). The main thing worth pointing out there is that even though the U.S. has a massive economy and is a very wealthy nation, we've got quite a few problems ourselves (and that's excluding the financial crisis).

Anyways, I am very impressed with Australia. The quality of life here is very good. Even the "rough" suburbs of Sydney are nothing in comparison with some parts of the U.S. or the UK. Maybe I should start telling Chinese immigrants to go there instead of America ... yes, even in Australia, Chinese immigrants still say, "America is better, isn't it?"

So even though looking into Sydney's Chinese community isn't as interesting as, say, Ethiopia's, I've become interested with Sydney's multicultural mix that (almost) rivals New York's.
Those that know me well know I have a fascination with films dealing with social integration into "first world" societies -- films like "La Haine" (French), "Made in Britain" (UK), the similarly titled "This is England" (UK). I don't know what it is that I like about these films, perhaps it's that they depict a dark side of society in the popular media (On the other hand, I had little interest in studying these things in college, and would still not bother studying them).

I just saw this new indie Australian film called "The Combination" about Lebanese immigrants in Sydney's suburb of Parramatta, just one town over from where I am staying, West Ryde. The film was a bit too dramatic for my taste, and I'd prefer it without a completely predictable romance, but I liked it nonetheless. It paints a pretty bleak picture of race relations in suburban Sydney, making clear that Australia isn't all a bed of roses for immigrants. It made it seem like Australia is going in the direction of the U.S., a more xenophobic, less tolerant nationalistic place that has somehow forgotten that it is a country of immigrants. The film is set against the Cronulla riots, a series of xenophobic riots (and counter-riots) back in 2005. Incidentally, I had just visited Cronulla a day before watching "The Combination," oblivious to this dark shadow that loomed over the pretty beaches of this lovely wealthy suburb. And I didn't even know about the movie until it was featured in the news; apparently, there were riots at some of theaters and they had to close them down. It's kind of sad to realize that it isn't just the stuff of movies.

Finally, while hiking two days ago, I saw a python on the trail. It was big.

From Addis to Sydney

I didn't say I was in Australia. I'm in Australia, have been here for a couple days now, hence the posting on the blog thing. Internet was abominable in Ethiopia; it took me six minutes to load my Gmail inbox in basic HTML mode, and that was when internet was actually working. Blogspot was blocked there, and incidentally, the government also blocked Skype, which they apparently see as a threat to their monopoly on telecommunications (this isn't unique to Ethiopia; I met two journalists from Abu Dhabi in the UAE who said Blogspot and Skype were also blocked there... only they had fast internet connections).

The Ethiopians wouldn't let me go without one final waltz at the airport. We had a power cut at Addis Ababa airport, which I suppose is entirely normal given the frequent power cuts, but you'd think they would at least have a decent generator for the airport. The security guy at the gate took my wallet, rifling through my bills to see how much money I had, and then declaring that I was taking too much Ethiopian money (about $12 USD) out of the country. Capital flight is a very scary thing for an impoverished country, and he asked why I hadn't changed my money at the bank. I told him I would gladly change my money, if there were a bank, but for whatever reason there was no bank at the departure gates.

Actually, I could have changed my money with the sketchy waiter at the airport cafe who offered to give me bad black market exchange rates. Ethiopia overvalues its own currency at about 11.20 birr to the US dollar, whereas a "free" rate of exchange might be closer to about 15 birr. Obviously, this spells black market doom and gloom, but thanks to the large Ethiopian military state, they've shut down most black market operations. The problem is when you try to change your birr back into dollars (or other foreign currency). Reportedly, the maximum you can change is about $100 USD; the government is extremely piggish with its foreign currency, and it also realizes that if if they honor their 11.20 birr/dollar rate, they're getting screwed. In the end, I ended up donating my $12 USD in Ethiopian birr to UNICEF on the plane to Australia.

Oh, but the waltz didn't end there: the little shuttle bus that brought us to our plane took us to the wrong plane at first. So when we were allowed onto a plane, I was seriously worried that I was getting onto the wrong plane, or perhaps my bags were getting on the wrong plane. Alas, all turned out well, and I found my bags and myself in Australia.

I was expecting to come to a land filled with criminals in Australia, and contemplated extending my contract with my hired gunman in Ethiopia (more on this later). I was of course worried that his aging rifle would be no use in the lawless streets of Sydney, and would have preferred a submachine gun or an AK-47 like the other gunmen had. Surprisingly, Australia is not in fact overrun by convicts, and I found the streets surprisingly safe. Sydney actually seems like a very American city, sprawling suburbs, front lawns, big cars. I suppose the one thing that sets it apart, other than the funny accents and the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road, is that the Aussies have somehow worked out a functioning public transportation system to navigate all the suburbs surrounding Sydney, and the city rail is fast, efficient, clean, and relatively cheap.