Europe

The rest of the year will be as exciting as always! As I said just a post ago, I’m now in London and for a week more I’ll stay here, culturally my favorite city in the world. The next week I’ll move to Oxford—I’ve often fantasized about living in a university town, this is the university town. In both cities I’ll stay in great rented rooms (cheaper and better than hostels, of which I’ve seen more than my life’s share already)!

By late August I’ll fly to Hong Kong for a few days, the world’s first Special Economic Zone, Friedman’s miracle of capitalism. Then off to Singapore for a month, where I’ll meet her and we’ll stay in a beautiful rented room better than most hotels, a great find. In 1960 S’pore was as wealthy per person as Mexico, 3 decades later it was 4 times wealthier and still is—it’ll be fascinating to witness one of the world’s most succesful countries. Then off to Bangkok for a month, living cheaply, coding lots, and eating delicious Thai food every single meal!

Then 1.5 months to Chiba: Japan again! To live with her, finally learn Japanese (I can’t say I lived in Japan for 7.5 months and still suck so much at it), and perhaps try my hand at the Japanese job market once more. I’ve missed her far too much.

Finally back to Mexico in time for the holidays.

Wish me luck!

I lived for 3 months in Spain. I shared a room with 3 other people in a nice, simple flat in the northeast of Madrid. Less than 10 minutes away walking was a big mall with a cheap hypermarket, my gym, and the local public library. I was very happy.

Exactly!

That picture above is from a Japanese upscale convenience store. Yup, the Japanese have so refined the convenience store concept, called combinis in Japan, that they even have upscale ones. The sheer density and quality of combinis throughout Japan just boggles the mind. Did you know Seven Eleven is, since 1991, a Japanese company? And, at least in Japan, it’s the Toyota of convenience stores, of which there are many brands.

Compare with Europe, where, as far as I can tell, they simply don’t have the concept of convenience stores. Here in Spain they only have ugly, pricey, mom & pop dry good stores, called “Chinos” because they’re mostly run by Chinese.

Mexico itself has lots of convenience stores, better than the ones in the States I’d say, and there’s some interesting innovation going on of micro-supermarkets specialized in groceries, or pharmacies that are convenience stores too.

That’s the kind of thing that fascinates me when I travel, the kind of thing you don’t notice until you live with it, and that you never read about anywhere. The kind of mundane things that really change your day to day life, instead of the one-off, impressive, touristy things that you just see and its over.

I’m a strange kind of traveller, like a very slow kind of tourist, a be-ist! I prefer to stay at places for months and not focus on them much, just let them gradually reveal themselves. I like keeping place in the background, how it makes the fringes of my life (like city walking, shopping, eating, bookstore browsing, the new media…) interesting and new. But for the core of my life I really am very happy making stuff, it’s the thing I want to do most. Intensive travelling, where the place (and its people) are the very focus of your life is not that appealing to me, it’s too distracting.

I’m going to Lift France 09 tomorrow! Since a big part of my motivation for going was its focus on networking, since they encourage you to fill a profile on their site and over half of the >550 participants actually do it, and since the theme this year is “A hands on future”, I decided to do a quick re-interface their list of participants, which was too unwieldy for me.

Check it out at http://elzr.com/lift

The present’s already hard to believe. It’s the most hopeful of times, the most dreadful of times.

On one hand, the Pirate Party —a left/right-bloc-independent party pursuing “the reform of laws regarding copyright and patents, the right to privacy, both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state administration.”^WP— wins an astonishing 7.1% of Swedish votes and gets a seat in the European Parliament.
On the other hand, in less than a month, China will start forcing PC manufacturers to include censoring software —ridiculously named Green Dam Youth Escort— on every computer’s hard drive.

I went to Lisbon because I got hostel stranded for the weekend in Spain: all the hostels in Madrid and Barcelona were booked and hotels were so expensive that it was cheaper, and more interesting, for me to take a night bus to Lisbon. Of Lisbon I knew close to nothing.

I arrived at downtown just as the sun was coming out, groggy from barely catching a wink, without a reservation because the hostel aggregators showed there were rooms aplenty (were I not recklessness I would not have gotten stranded in the first place). I decided, at a whim, to follow the first pair of backpackers that I saw. Which I did, and ended up at the other bus station.