Asian Opportunity

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.

Technology & Travel

My first big trip was back in 1999, it was a 2 and a half month backpacking trip around Europe. back then there wasn't much in the way of communicating with people back home. Internet cafes though were just becoming common and it was definitely nice to be able to send some e-mails back home in order to let everyone know where you were and that things were going well. I suppose you also had phones, but calls overseas were quite expensive and I have always traveled as a budget traveler even when I've had plenty of money...it's the only way I know to travel.

Fast forward to 2001/2002 and Kim and I are traveling fully around the planet for about 9 months or so. The internet has become a much more communal resource that even my parents are using quite often at this point. Digital cameras are also now commonly available allowing us to share our adventures with people back home in pictures and not just words. Another big development was the proto-blog sites, ones that allowed us to put up stories and post our pictures and our friends to post comments or messages to us as we traveled. All of this really made it easy to stay in touch with family and friends as we moved from one region to another.

Remembering 9/11

So today is the 9th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the US back in 2001. It may seem like an odd post to talk about, considering this is a blog about Nepal, but there is a connection. Like everyone else in the U.S. I remember what I was doing that day, and it's possible I may have been one of the last people to know what was going on. At the time I was working for a company that arranged wholesale car rental services to Americans that traveled to Europe. I was part of our crew that was on shift to work European time, which meant late nights. I went to bed at about 7:30 AM that morning, and no one bothered to wake me up, until Kim stopped by sometime around 1:30 in the afternoon.

On September 9th I had just booked a package of ten flights that would take us around the world, the list of countries on that itinerary included; Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Nepal, India, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Turkey, and Greece before flying back to the US via Switzerland. Kim and I had been planning the trip for about a year at that point, and I had even moved into some dingy basement apartment and sold my car to raise cash for the trip.

Of course I wasn't even thinking about this as the events of that day unfolded. I went with Kim over to her Dad's house to watch TV, as I didn't have one at the time. That night was supposed to be my day off, but with air traffic shut down I knew we would have lots of stranded customers so I offered to go in to work. I arrived and spoke with some other people in management that had talked to the president of the company earlier, there was something like 2 million dollars worth of cancelled trips. That night I took a lot of calls from Americans stuck in Europe that not only wanted to sort out their car rental, most were just wanting to talk with someone back in the States, there were lots of rumors at that point still, and a lot of uneasy people not only at home but stuck abroad as well.

Our departure date was set for October 12th out of Boston's Logan Airport. It turned out that two of the conspirators, including Mohammad Atta had flown out of my home town of Portland Maine, and then one of the flights that hit the towers originated from Boston. This was a bit creepy, and made many people in our family uncomfortable about us traveling. After the initial shock of the event subsided a bit, there was still a lot of uncertainty, as everyone knew the world was about to change, but nobody knew exactly how. After a short discussion Kim and I decided that we would indeed go ahead with our travel plans, to the dismay of some people in our family. My dad, who was a chief in the fire department, just assumed I wouldn't be going.

There was also another thing that made people uneasy; we were passing through a number of Muslim countries, or countries like India who many thought could quickly become in conflict with Pakistan along with the US over what took place. To be somewhat fair to those concerns at least 4 places that we visited during our trip were the target of terrorist attacks in the years following our visit; Bali's Kuta Beach, Mumbai (you can see our hostel in some of the pictures of the 2003 bombing images), Dahab on Egypt's Sinai peninsula and Istanbul Turkey. We decided though that though these kind of events tend to turn countries and people inward, this was not the time or the solution to this kind of event.

The events of 9/11 colored so much of that trip. Tourism dropped plunged world wide that year, and every where we went we were some of the only tourists, and almost always the only Americans. Because of this many of the guest house and people that worked in tourism gave you a little extra attention, and when the fact that we were American came up it always got condolences passed on to us. I even remember a man in Fiji who couldn't speak English, he just mimed with his hands, one vertical and one horizontal, having the horizontal hand crash into the vertical one and topple it over. After this he hung his head and shook it to show sadness. There were also the uneasy moments, which were much less frequent, like seeing an Osama Bin Laden silhouette sticker on a pick up truck in Malaysia or a picture of OBL imposed on the burning towers on the shirt of some kid in southern Thailand.

The most memorable moment though was when we arrived in Jordan and went to our hotel in Wadi Musa we sat down to have tea with the hotel owner and some of his family as well as our fellow travelers. When the subject of our nationalities came up it went around in a circle; British, Argentina, and then us the two Americans. Upon hearing this one of the men at the table stood up reached across the table and kissed our foreheads saying, "Thank God you people are traveling again! We have all been so afraid that you all thought we were like Bin Laden." This happened in less dramatic fashion constantly. People everywhere are just people, with essentially the same aspirations and wants in life. People completely filled with hatred for other people are fortunately  a rare breed world wide it seemed.

That is the thing about actually traveling to places, is that you get to actually meet and talk to people and form informed opinions about places and the people there without relying on the distorted images that are fed to us through major media groups. While 9/11 was indeed a great tragedy, a greater one was that in the end, America has turned inward and we gave up some of the freedom that defined us as a country in order to achieve an illusion of safety. It has reinforced the notion that everything beyond the edges of the first world are scary and full of people that hate us "because we're free". A quick trip around the world and a little interaction with the vast majority of people out there will reveal that most people are just like us, and it's not such a scary place after all.

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.