After my last post there was a short exchange in the comments about how where you live has an effect on how you live and what you can do. While I am the first to recognize that much of what shapes your outlook on life comes with you as mental traits that can be changed in one location just as easy as in any other, I also feel very strongly that opportunities and life style can be strongly shaped by where you choose to live. My thesis is that what I am currently doing, or have been doing could not have been done if I had stayed in the States. I figured I'd make this into a full post because I realized I've never really fully explained much of the differences clearly and have only alluded to them in ways that someone who has never been to Asia might miss. So my response in this way also isn't fully aimed at Rob, who will undoubtedly already be familiar with some of the things I go over, but instead I'm turning it over to a more general accounting to readers in the west who have only some or little experience in the east.
Below are the relevant parts of the previous discussion;
Robert Hartman: Great post, but I tend to think circumstances are a lot like zip codes... I've had a lot of friends move to lots of different places over the past few years, pursuing a lot of different dreams and most seem to be discovering that, "Wherever you go, there you are."
Brian Smith: No doubt that you take yourself with you wherever you go, but to ignore the difference in opportunities that exist in some places over others is to turn a blind eye to the reality of vastly different terrain, economic, cultural, and weather differences. I simply couldn't do the things I'm currently doing in the US, I wouldn't have the time that I have, and the costs are much higher. Ultimately different environments allow for different living habits. Now had I not made a drastic move and just went to some other spot in the US, then I would agree, not enough of a difference to really change the circumstances of what your doing.
Robert Hartman: I don't claim that changing your circumstances can't positively or negatively impact your life. We should all exert all our effort to live the life we want to live... but ultimately if you are satisfied with whatever life you end up with that is a product of how you approach it, regardless of circumstance. In my limited understanding of buddhism, that seems to be a central theme.
One man's exotic locale is just someone else's backyard. I'm glad you are happy where you are, I really am, I'm just saying that if you are willing to put up with a stale fridge and lack of hot water for extra time in the day, you can pretty much do that anywhere.
I work all day with people who made the opposite migration and they see the opportunities in exactly the opposite way. I think there is a grass is always greener element here. Knowing you can always return home and be living in the world's upper middle class within 6 months is very different than having that door permanently closed to you.
Again, I'm not criticizing you personally, I'm just saying that opportunity looks very different depending on where you come from.
Ok, so where to start. First I want to be clear that I agree with almost everything Rob said in the last post, well at least in the first and the last paragraph and I essentially take issue with the two in the center. The issues I want to cover here are costs, opportunities, and finally the education/learning/social aspects of living abroad and how these vary widely from just migrating within the first world and varies considerably from staying within your home country.
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Monday, August 16, 2010
Enlightened Salsa
So it looks like I will be trying to sell some Salsa at the farmers market. Over the last two weeks I have been a salsa making fool, and have settled on five different types that I am very happy with. I actually had a mango salsa that I really liked, but mangoes seem to be going out of season, so I won't be making it. How much of this stuff I can sell on a given weekend is up in the air, I have no idea. Where I will store it all, given the size of our refrigerator is also a point that I will need to consider. I'm going to go into the first weekend with low expectations and a fairly limited amount of product and see how it does I think.
This is the label for the standard chunky garden style salsa. Kim put together the picture for me, and I did the colors and writing. There was some discussion about whether it might be offensive to have the Buddha in a sombrero, but I think it's clear from the tag lines that it's all meant in good fun. If this kind of thing bothers you, most likely you need thicker skin, and besides Buddhism teaches to let such trivial things go anyway.
As to the salsa itself, this one is a fresh garden salsa with tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, all mixed up with some lemon juice and a splash of tequila. I'm thinking of starting this one at 200 Rs which is a good deal I think considering that crappy Old El Paso sells in the stores here for 280 RS, and I think it's only 350ML and my bottles are 500.
This is essentially a bruschetta mix with the addition of capers, Greek olives, and sun-dried tomatoes. I eat this stuff at least once a week on my own as it is. Goes great on bread and with various cheeses. Serve with some red wine and you can almost forget that you're in Kathmandu. As the capers and olives are not local and the sun dried tomatoes are a little pricier than the other vegies I'm going to be selling this stuff for around 300 Rs a bottle, which is rather good considering the ingredients I think.
I love this salsa. I had never thought of using pomegranate in salsa before, but I figured I would give it a try since you can get them year round in Kathmandu. I threw it together with some other Persian inspired ingredients and the result is quite tasty in my opinion. The pomegranate is just subtly sweet and the mix of the mint and saffron along with it makes for a really different flavor. Despite the different flavor undertones it is still definitely salsa, and still goes great on tortilla chips. This one also has some pricier ingredients, so I'm pricing this one at 300 Rs a jar as well.
This was the hardest one to make. Anyone can throw together a super hot salsa, the trick is to over ride the hotness with enough flavor so that people who like spicy food will continue to eat it despite the burn going down (and most likely coming out!). To accomplish this I grilled about half the peppers and blended them in with the liquid component, giving the salsa not only a great texture but also a flavor that over rides that bitter taste you can get if you just rely on hot peppers for lots of spice. Although this label says 3 different hot peppers, I have in fact changed it to 4 and made the flavor a little better. While it isn't the hottest salsa I've ever had or made, it is definitely spicy. This was Kim's favorite. I should be selling this one for 250 Rs.
I had no idea how this was going to come out when I first thought of it, but I'm really happy with the result. Although just as spicy as most of the other salsa's the mint cucumber and lime combine to make a very cool and refreshing summery kind of salsa. A few other ingredients in the sauce give it a distinct Thai flavor. I really want to try and find some wanton chips to serve it with, but I haven't had any luck finding any as of yet.
So if you are in Kathmandu next Saturday feel free to stop by the 1905 farmer's market and try some salsa!
Friday, August 13, 2010
Buddhism & Greek Philosophy
Many people who travel to Kathmandu at least have a passing curiosity in the Buddhism that they encounter here. My first trip here in 2002 was my first real exposure to it, following up on the month I had spent looking at Buddhist temples in Thailand. My view of Buddhism then was rather clouded by what I had learned about it via Hollywood and New Age garbage. As someone whose two least favorite actors include Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Gere their speaking up for it didn't increase my interest any. On top of all of that the pop-culture fetish in the US with Buddhism and especially phony causes like Beastie Boys and the whole Free Tibet thing did nothing more to kindle my interest. In fact all of this worked to create a bias in me that would keep me from seeing Buddhism as it should be seen, on its own terms as a serious philosophy.
My trips through Buddhist countries in Asia did very little to change my opinion either. To an outsider, the forms of cultural Buddhism that are practiced through Asia can seem rather odd. Be it offerings of beer and whiskey to divine protectors, or the thousands of divine entities that are present in Tibetan Buddhism all of this works against seeing Buddhism as a rational philosophy of life, at least it does to me. Touts and hawkers in the tourist districts of these countries don't help any either as they try and "sell" Buddhism through the trinkets that western patrons will buy, be it prayer wheels, crystals, thanka paintings, beads, even whole monk outfits. Some of this can be relevant to philosophical Buddhism, like the thanka paintings, and some can be nonsense, such as the crystals. More importantly though, because tourists regions sell what westerns want to buy, the things that they already think Buddhism consists of, your view of it is unlikely to change passing through these regions.
So strangely my introduction to Buddhism came to me through the Greeks. I have a long standing interest in Alexander the Great, as is evident in some previous posts. That interest lead me to study what happened to the far Eastern Greek Kingdoms after his death, especially the regions of Bactria (present day Afghanistan) and Greek India (essentially modern Pakistan). Many people are unaware that the Greeks and Greek influence would have a major role in this region for about the next three hundred plus years. These years include the rise of the Indian King Ashoka who is credited with being one of the greatest Buddhist proselytizers, as well as the fall of the Maurya dynasty only fifty years later to the Sungas. In fact many beleive that the Greek conquest of India that happened under the Bactrian King Demetrius and later Menander (Who is featured as King Malinda in the Buddhist Malinda Panha) were done on the grounds of defending Buddhists from their new Hindu rulers.
Anyway the mix is not only historically interesting (at least to me) but it also allowed for the transmission of ideas to flow even more readily than they did before between east and west. Historical texts are very clear that many Greek settlers in this region converted to Buddhism, and some texts suggest that the Greeks sent many ethnic Greek Buddhist monks to Sri Lanka and others as far north as the Tarim Basin. No doubt some also traveled back to the Mediterranean to Anatolia, Greece, and Egypt.
It was while reading about some of these transactions that I came across text that showed philosophical Buddhism to be the serious work that it really is. I began to see that there were very strong connections between what it prescribed as a way of dealing with the world around us, and what the Greek stoics taught. In the most basic sense both philosophies teach that since we can not always change the world around us, we must change what we can, which is our opinion and perception of a thing. Both the Greeks and the Buddhists saw that we are not offended by a thing if we remove from ourselves the sense of offence. This got me interested enough to do a good amount of reading to see where Buddhism stands on its own. My misconceptions of Buddhism were plentiful, and this post is long enough without going into full detail.
All of the preceding text was to get to one of the books I just recently read which is one of the better I have read in a long time; Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. Now I was vaguely familiar with Greek Pyrrhonist philosophy, but I had always thought it was very similar to the other schools of Greek Skepticism. The excerpts I had seen were from Sextus Empiricus and usually his arguments against the dogmatic beliefs of the stoics. Although i am often a fan of much in stoic thought, the line of attack from Sextus was usually demolishing some part of their line of thinking that I was also not a fan of, such as their teleological outlook or some other claim about nature.
This book shows clearly why Pyrrhonism is not just another branch of Academic Skepticism and instead expounded a philosophy that does not infer the negative from those things we deduce that can not currently be known but instead advises a suspension in judgement about all things non-evident. The parallels with early Buddhism are quite striking, and one could easily view Pyrrhonism as an adaptation of a western form of Buddhism. As someone who has always struggled with epistemology in philosophy as the more problematic field that derailed just about any philosophical endeavor, section three of this book on things evident and non-evident was a real joy to read, and gave me one of those rare "aha!" moments that make the world seem just a little more clearer.
As a quick example, in the west when we experience an apple, we take it that underneath all of our perceptions is a form that actually is an apple. It is from this form that exists in the "real" world that the "real" apple transmits to us the look, touch, taste, and sound (if you tap it) and smell of an apple. The Pyrrhonists (and Buddhists alike) do not assume that there is anything beyond experience itself, that what we experience as an apple is merely a bundle of sensations that are consistently correlated, there is nothing in anyone of them that dictates to the others a sense of "appleness". Put another way if you were blind, you could not infer a visual apple from a tactile, or audible apple. Basically there is no common quality that one can observe in which all these modes of sensation adhere, no underlying substance or form.
Another book that has made it on to my reading list because of this book is Buddhism Without Belief, which seems to be very much in line with Pyrrhonist thinking. Although this will have to wait until I finish A New Stoicism which at this point I unfortunately can not recommend all that highly. While it is a well argued book the author has a way of making even interesting topics excruciatingly boring. It's written in a format that is the result of a terrible habit of spending too much time talking and debating with people only in academia.
My trips through Buddhist countries in Asia did very little to change my opinion either. To an outsider, the forms of cultural Buddhism that are practiced through Asia can seem rather odd. Be it offerings of beer and whiskey to divine protectors, or the thousands of divine entities that are present in Tibetan Buddhism all of this works against seeing Buddhism as a rational philosophy of life, at least it does to me. Touts and hawkers in the tourist districts of these countries don't help any either as they try and "sell" Buddhism through the trinkets that western patrons will buy, be it prayer wheels, crystals, thanka paintings, beads, even whole monk outfits. Some of this can be relevant to philosophical Buddhism, like the thanka paintings, and some can be nonsense, such as the crystals. More importantly though, because tourists regions sell what westerns want to buy, the things that they already think Buddhism consists of, your view of it is unlikely to change passing through these regions.
So strangely my introduction to Buddhism came to me through the Greeks. I have a long standing interest in Alexander the Great, as is evident in some previous posts. That interest lead me to study what happened to the far Eastern Greek Kingdoms after his death, especially the regions of Bactria (present day Afghanistan) and Greek India (essentially modern Pakistan). Many people are unaware that the Greeks and Greek influence would have a major role in this region for about the next three hundred plus years. These years include the rise of the Indian King Ashoka who is credited with being one of the greatest Buddhist proselytizers, as well as the fall of the Maurya dynasty only fifty years later to the Sungas. In fact many beleive that the Greek conquest of India that happened under the Bactrian King Demetrius and later Menander (Who is featured as King Malinda in the Buddhist Malinda Panha) were done on the grounds of defending Buddhists from their new Hindu rulers.
Anyway the mix is not only historically interesting (at least to me) but it also allowed for the transmission of ideas to flow even more readily than they did before between east and west. Historical texts are very clear that many Greek settlers in this region converted to Buddhism, and some texts suggest that the Greeks sent many ethnic Greek Buddhist monks to Sri Lanka and others as far north as the Tarim Basin. No doubt some also traveled back to the Mediterranean to Anatolia, Greece, and Egypt.
It was while reading about some of these transactions that I came across text that showed philosophical Buddhism to be the serious work that it really is. I began to see that there were very strong connections between what it prescribed as a way of dealing with the world around us, and what the Greek stoics taught. In the most basic sense both philosophies teach that since we can not always change the world around us, we must change what we can, which is our opinion and perception of a thing. Both the Greeks and the Buddhists saw that we are not offended by a thing if we remove from ourselves the sense of offence. This got me interested enough to do a good amount of reading to see where Buddhism stands on its own. My misconceptions of Buddhism were plentiful, and this post is long enough without going into full detail.
All of the preceding text was to get to one of the books I just recently read which is one of the better I have read in a long time; Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. Now I was vaguely familiar with Greek Pyrrhonist philosophy, but I had always thought it was very similar to the other schools of Greek Skepticism. The excerpts I had seen were from Sextus Empiricus and usually his arguments against the dogmatic beliefs of the stoics. Although i am often a fan of much in stoic thought, the line of attack from Sextus was usually demolishing some part of their line of thinking that I was also not a fan of, such as their teleological outlook or some other claim about nature.
This book shows clearly why Pyrrhonism is not just another branch of Academic Skepticism and instead expounded a philosophy that does not infer the negative from those things we deduce that can not currently be known but instead advises a suspension in judgement about all things non-evident. The parallels with early Buddhism are quite striking, and one could easily view Pyrrhonism as an adaptation of a western form of Buddhism. As someone who has always struggled with epistemology in philosophy as the more problematic field that derailed just about any philosophical endeavor, section three of this book on things evident and non-evident was a real joy to read, and gave me one of those rare "aha!" moments that make the world seem just a little more clearer.
As a quick example, in the west when we experience an apple, we take it that underneath all of our perceptions is a form that actually is an apple. It is from this form that exists in the "real" world that the "real" apple transmits to us the look, touch, taste, and sound (if you tap it) and smell of an apple. The Pyrrhonists (and Buddhists alike) do not assume that there is anything beyond experience itself, that what we experience as an apple is merely a bundle of sensations that are consistently correlated, there is nothing in anyone of them that dictates to the others a sense of "appleness". Put another way if you were blind, you could not infer a visual apple from a tactile, or audible apple. Basically there is no common quality that one can observe in which all these modes of sensation adhere, no underlying substance or form.
Another book that has made it on to my reading list because of this book is Buddhism Without Belief, which seems to be very much in line with Pyrrhonist thinking. Although this will have to wait until I finish A New Stoicism which at this point I unfortunately can not recommend all that highly. While it is a well argued book the author has a way of making even interesting topics excruciatingly boring. It's written in a format that is the result of a terrible habit of spending too much time talking and debating with people only in academia.
Monday, April 19, 2010
33
I'm going to warn you now, that this will be a long post, consisting of things that I think will mostly only be interesting to me. Today I turn 33 years old, while it is no great event, there was a time when I dreaded what my life might be like at this age. I have always been interested in philosophy, science and religion from the time I was very young, and heading into my twentieth birthday I had developed what I thought was a consistent belief structure that was for all intents and purposes like the Deism that was popular in the mid eighteenth century. I was never a bible thumper, but I did have a very deep belief in God and in those years it had increasingly played a large role in my life.
Then the cracks started to appear, and never shy of asking more questions and looking at things more objectively, it became increasingly evident that any religious trappings I still held in my beliefs could no longer be reasonably argued for, and thus I became an agnostic. It was a shift that at the time seemed really dramatic to me. The biggest change was I really just couldn't see what purpose was in life if there was not a grand scheme, and for some reason it occurred to me that because of this my life would be boring and ordinary. I remember walking across a field running through the words to the Smashing Pumpkins' song 33, and thinking that the everyday lyrics to that song would be my boring life when I turned 33.
Then the cracks started to appear, and never shy of asking more questions and looking at things more objectively, it became increasingly evident that any religious trappings I still held in my beliefs could no longer be reasonably argued for, and thus I became an agnostic. It was a shift that at the time seemed really dramatic to me. The biggest change was I really just couldn't see what purpose was in life if there was not a grand scheme, and for some reason it occurred to me that because of this my life would be boring and ordinary. I remember walking across a field running through the words to the Smashing Pumpkins' song 33, and thinking that the everyday lyrics to that song would be my boring life when I turned 33.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
A Flaming Disaster Isn't The Worst That Can Happen
Sometimes we go through life and we really don't pay it much attention. You go to work, you eat meals, chat with friends, complain about that pebble in your shoe. Once in a while you do some things that really make you realize how little opportunity there is to get out there and really take part in life, you do have a finite number of years after all. Sometimes when we don't pay attention you end up just pissing precious time away.
I spent my 25th birthday sailing down the Nile River on a boat with a bunch of people from around the world that prior to that ride I had never met. We were getting toward the end of a ten month trip that Kim and had spent travelling around the world. Our past travels had brought us through the south pacific, over NZ and OZ over through Indonesia and up the Thai Peninsula, over to Nepal down through India and over to Egypt. After my birthday we would go on to Jordan, Turkey and Greece, and after a brief stint in the states we would spend over three weeks in Peru. Ever since this trip I have without pause listed it as the best thing I ever did with my life.
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