The following is a reproduction of the blog that I kept in Cambodia during Summer 2010.
Political: How to Save the World
8/8 Same Same (but Different): My First Taste of Corn
8/4 Food is Wonderful: Why I'm Vegetarian
Since I am about to get on a plane, I had a few last thoughts about my experiences in Cambodia. Some things I learned. Some things I wanted to share. These thoughts exist in four levels: technical, political, philosophical, and personal.
The most obvious part of my work with InSTEDD was programming. I made a Ruby on Rails service that makes it easy to run machine learning using things like Google Prediction. This will help InSTEDD's other projects if they want to use machine learning.
I'm not sure how big of an impact it will have. The people at Manas (an organization that helps out InSTEDD) said that they got a grant to do exactly what I was doing, so they'll be continuing my project after I leave, which means that the work I did will have some future use at a bare minimum, and organizations like Sahana have been asking for different types of machine learning, so I hope that it will help people. It's just still in its early stages.
The project taught me about a startup atmosphere. I had heard that working at a startup is more independent and that you'll be doing a bunch of different jobs (whatever needs to be done). That caught me a little off guard. I came in expecting a lot of support and a clear description of what I would be doing. Instead, I was presented with a mandate to make a machine learning service in Rails and was left to figure things out on my own, with some help from people around the office. I think that this would be fine if I were in my domain, but since I didn't come in with much web programming experience, any Rails experience, and I didn't have a clear idea of who would be using my product, I had a lot to figure out. On the one hand, I think I did figure it out. On the other hand, I don't think that I got as much done as I could have if I were working on an established project or had a more direct mentor.
It also taught me about Ruby on Rails and web programming, and about myself as a programmer. Web programming is a necessary skill, and Rails makes it easy to make small, quick, fast projects, which will be an asset for me in the future. I did learn, though, that I'm not completely language agnostic. I don't think that I would take a job programming in Rails. I really like C and C++ (and I think that I would be OK in Java or maybe Python). The things that trip some people up in lower level languages feel intuitive to me, and the levels of abstraction that make Rails Rails makes it feel unintuitive to me. Thankfully, even though Rails is increasing in popularity, C, C++, and Java each have about 30% of the market in terms of code (though my numbers may be a bit old and inaccurate), so my job prospects are pretty good.
The work also gave me an opportunity to do more with Linux and to see an office work atmosphere.
I think that the reason that InSTEDD wants to bring western students out to program in Cambodia is so that we can see an example of computer science benefitting people in the field and see an organizational structure that is dedicated to helping people in the field. Focus on the needs of the people, and make a program that satisfies those needs. Because there are people in need of help, and there are ways for computer scientists to help them.
I think that the most important part of my work, though, was interacting with the Cambodian programmers. They work really hard, and they're smart, but they mostly didn't have a formal computer science education. As a result, they know about programming, but they don't know the general principles underlying programming. I think that they still think of programming as associated with a particular language (so programming in C would be fundamentally different from programming in Ruby rather than just two different flavors of the same computer science). So I tried to work with them on some of the general principles.
I gave a few lectures on algorithms (Big O and algorithmic complexity, data structures, their implementations, and the runtime of various operations, recursion and functional programming). I gave one talk about public key cryptography. I talked with them about object oriented programming. I tried to focus more on the intuitions in each of these subjects rather than formal proofs. I think that, in general, it was pretty successful. They were eager to learn, and the day after each talk, they would still have a good grasp on the things that I talked about earlier. They also seemed to grasp the underlying ideas. I just wish that I had more time.
I also helped them with their English. They could all speak English, but they would still ask me for a hand when they were writing a formal letter or a speech introducing someone, or they would ask me to translate something when they were reading. I think that it can really help to have a native speaker on hand to ask questions (especially since some of their questions were about English words used in a programming context, which non-technical native English speakers wouldn't easily be able to answer). In Spanish class, I always felt nervous to talk or to ask random questions, whereas it felt a lot easier with the Spanish speakers in the office. I imagine that it was the same for them.
On the whole, I feel happy about my experience. Rails wasn't enjoyable, but it taught me a lot, I feel confident that computer science and public service are deeply connected, and I was able to teach people who were hungry for knowledge.
Free market economists like to talk about just how socialist the US is. Cambodia is, in many ways, planned by the free market (because the state has been slow to step in. Also, planning a country is extremely hard), and it made me realize some of the things that the US got right.
In the US, the state funds basic infrastructure. Streets, water and sanitation, and schools are a good example of this. In Cambodia, having decent roads between the major cities is a recent phenomenon. Universal public education deserves a special mention: in the US, your taxi driver can read a map. That may or may not be true for a tuk tuk driver in Cambodia.
Our markets also have some wonderful regulations. For instance, you must post ingredients on food, and all of those ingredients must be proven to be reasonably safe. Trademarks mean that I can't just copy the external wrappings of a product and make a cheap fake (the lack of strong trademark regulations is problematic in the case of pharmaceuticals).
In some places, they value equality. In the US, they value 'meritocracy' ("it only takes a dollar and a dream"), which I am quick to criticize because 'merit' is usually shorthand for 'luck' (were you born in a loving family with enough money to give you a good education?). I think that Cambodia is still searching for a value that its society will strive towards. In lieu of a value, the free market has stepped in.
This means that in Cambodia, the invisible hand controls some markets that I don't even think of as markets because the regulations in the US work so well. Take the example of scholarships. I think that the best model is the need based model that the rich private schools in the US have started adopting in the past few years. That model values equality: financial need should not be a barrier to education. There are also merit based scholarships. In fact, I'm competing for one right now. In theory, these would be awarded to the students that are the best in some group. In Cambodia, some scholarships are susceptible to bribery, and the free market decides how much the scholarship costs.
Some other domains in Cambodia where the free market features too prominently: the police (the Lonely Planet guide calls them the best police "that money can buy"), government property (the land on which universities or historic sites stand might be sold off. Did you ever wonder where the US embassy got its land from or what stood on that land before the US put up all of its stars and stripes?), jobs (pretty much the same story as scholarships), and permits and licenses (how much do you think a driver's license costs if you fail your test?).
Even though the pretense of meritocracy in the US is only a pretense (the dollar matters a little more than the dream), it is still a nice pretense to have.
A lot of good is happening in Cambodia. There are a lot of people working to make the world and Cambodia a better place. There are even a lot of good businesses. The government just needs to make sure that the work that they're doing is as effective as it could be. The hard part is that many of the needed regulations need to apply to the government itself as much as external organizations.
It seems like everyone is an expert on human nature. ["human nature"] has 9 million hits on Google (and that's a phrase!). Even ["humans are naturally"] gets almost 1 million hits, which is remarkable for a three word phrase. Compare that to 3 million for [biopower], half a million for [agricultural subsidies], or 40,000 for ["lesser jihad"].
Economists think that human nature is selfishness. Ironically, studies of economics students demonstrate that taking an economics course makes a person more selfish, indicating that selfishness is something learned, not something natural. People often think that humans who go into nonprofits are naturally good. When a person sees how nonprofits behave towards each other when competing for a small pot of money, that person might change their mind and think "nonprofit workers are just like the rest of us: nasty, brutish, and short" (I would never misquote a Leviathan!).
In science, if you want to establish truth about something, you come up with a theory and then come up with a study that could demonstrate your theory true or false (it's important that the study can disprove your theory). If you're saying that something is true, then all you need is one counterexample to disprove it.
Think about what that would mean for human nature. To say that something is human nature, you are saying that throughout history, all people in all cultures have a certain property. If they lack that property, then they lack something that is natural to being human. One counterexample would disprove it. One person who is human and who lacks that property would disprove it. If an entity lacks that property, they must be a part of a different species, godlike, or they cannot interact with the human community.
The first note is easily understandable. If I said that it is not human nature to be able to survive in a deep-water volcano, few people would disagree with me. Humans cannot breath under water, cannot stand temperatures that hot (or that cold), and cannot perform chemosynthesis necessary to get energy from the chemical vents. There are species that can, but we would not call them humans.
One of my old teachers made me realize the second note. If someone says "it's unnatural to be gay," then they are saying that humans are not naturally gay. Since gays are trivially not of a different species than other humans, they must have transcended human limitations in some way. If a person can violate human nature, then, by definition, they are superhuman. Just like I would be godlike if I could fly, perform photosynthesis, live in outer space, or travel faster than the speed of light, I would be godlike if I could violate a limitation that applied to all humans. Nature is extremely strong, so if a person can violate human nature, then that person is stronger than nature. The word typically reserved for entities that can violate natural laws is "god."
The third note recognizes that there are social elements associated with being human. In the spring 2010 verbose letter, I talk about Paul Chappell's argument that war is against human nature because it drives 98% of soldiers crazy and the other 2% are violent psychopaths. In order for his argument about human nature to be true, one would need to believe that the 2% lack something essential to the human experience. Certainly, people without the capacity to love other humans deserve our kindness and understanding, but might a missing capacity for love also be an essential missing piece?
So no, it is not human nature to be selfish. It is not human nature to be greedy. Neither is it human nature to care about your family or your country. There is nothing natural about good or evil, right or wrong, the Tao Te Ching, the Quran, the Talmud, the Bible, a Veda, a Sutra, or any economics textbook (the latter is the most dogmatic of the bunch). Since humans started farming, there isn't even anything natural about evolution: for the last few thousand years, we have moved beyond living or dying because of individual fitness.
A human is born with the possibility to do anything. A child might show duty to their family and pick on other kids. They might grow up to desire power, wealth, both, or neither, and at the same time be humble or boastful. A person might be loving or hateful, beautiful or ugly, smart or stupid, hard working or lazy, healthy or sickly, or anything else. Greed is human nature to the same extent as sharing because both are potentials for all humans and each will manifest in different circumstances in different societies in different ways. Put simply, human nature is potential.
I got used to the heat, but I still don't like it.
A lot of books put a big emphasis on heat. In Camus' The Stranger, the protagonist talks about the sun making him kill the Arab. In Seasons of Migration to the North, the heat is the symbol for the global south and the cold a symbol for the global north. The trick? Both are harsh. One day the sun might be wonderful, but the next it might drive you crazy.
The air is hot. It is usually calm; it's pacific (and Pacific). You can feel it. Getting used to it was one of the hardest things about coming to Cambodia. The heat makes the environment different in more ways than one. Regarding the homeless population, people say that it's still cold at night in California. It isn't really cold at night in Phnom Penh (literally speaking, of course. Figuratively, the chill is similar and more prevalent). Even when it's raining, it's still pretty warm.
At first, the heat felt like an invading external presence. I could tolerate it, but my body never wanted it. Even after I would get into an air conditioned space for a brief respite, the vestiges of heat lingering on me would leave me exhausted. My body slowed down. My mind slowed down.
The work culture is different here. At Stanford, I could pull off being always on. If people can do the same in Cambodia, I have no idea how.
Heat is natural comfort. Regardless of the nation, time, or place, if I am exhausted and tired, heat feels good. When tired at Stanford, I linger in bed, in the shower, and when washing my hands to feel the heat. In Cambodia, I have learned to breathe the heat in to warm me from the inside as well as the outside. But I don't think that it's me.
Cold means that warmth comes solely from bodies and minds. My body has to work to keep up, or I will freeze. Even then, I must use the products of human ingenuity: clothes, fire, walls. A lone cub in the north won't live. The cold will never stop me from fighting it. It will encourage my struggle.
You cannot struggle against the heat. If you do, then it has already bested you. When I say that I am used to the heat, I mean that I have learned that much. I have learned to breathe it in. But in its embrace, I am agitated. I can see its beauty, but I cannot appreciate it. In a land where the fire is all encompassing, I am still driven to melt the ice.
I guess what I'm saying is that, on the one hand, English is a universal language, but on the other hand, English is a universal language. Make sense? I function in a Khmer speaking society without functioning in a Khmer speaking society. I came in afraid of the stereotype of the ugly American. It turns out that it doesn't exist here. I didn't come in with a stereotype. Just me. Phnom Penh is a city like any other. But it is hot. And I can understand the heat. Even my skin can understand it now. It doesn't bother me. When I breathe it in, it isn't the same cold, comforting Pacific wind that I'm used to, but I pretend it is.
Being a native English speaker is a massive asset. Not having an accent (or, more precisely, having the universal American accent) is very helpful. I have met dozens of different English accents that are mutually unintelligible (that is, native Spanish speakers and native Khmer speakers have a hard time understanding one another even if both are relatively fluent in English), but I can understand most of them with only a little difficulty.
Knowing only one language, I can act as a translator between groups that don't understand each other.
In other news, my name (or something that sounds like it) means "30" in Khmer. Also, it means "three of a kind" in the context of a card game.
Being a computer scientist is also a massive asset. Every organization in the world needs one. Or several. Or many. Even the nonprofit that I volunteered with to build houses. The person who organized the trip handed me an 8GB jump drive at the end of the trip because her husband was trying to recruit me to his company.
While the highlight of the beach trip was the non-GMO corn discussed earlier (I also just tasted a real corn tortilla. It was so rich!), there were a few other notable experiences.
It was my first time wearing my backpack without a shirt on. The office went back to the hotel in two groups, and my group left earlier. The backpack was still in the car, and I wanted it when I arrived at the hotel, so I brought it with me. And, since I had just gotten out of the water at the beach, I was sandy. For some reason, I was more worried about my cheap shirt getting sandy than my awesome backpack.
Fireworks aren't just used for American 4th of July celebrations. At the night at the beach, people were walking around selling firework guns (and tons of people would buy them and shoot them off).
Imagine you had a bunch of fireworks -- simple stuff like ground blooms or crackling balls. Now imagine that you could shoot them up 20 feet into the air and that they would explode at precisely the correct moment. Now imagine that you had a gun that would automatically shoot them up every 2 seconds until you ran out of ammo. That's a firework gun.
Most of them were pretty reasonable. The one that was a little bit much to bear was the super crackling ball (my dad's favorite) gun. Every two seconds, there would be a massive crackling explosion in the sky that would continue exploding for about a second, as it was falling closer to the ground. Once or twice, one fell a little close for comfort.
Also, I learned that women swim with their shirts on because if they don't, they are labeled as a prostitute.
The swimming in general seemed a little more passive (ie, sitting down in the water and letting it flow over you) than in the US (splashing around, playing some water game).
A Cambodian American friend in the office has been taking me to a bunch of cultural events in Phnom Penh.
On 7/31, I went to a Cambodian Rock show. It was pretty cool. They put a Khmer spin on a western style. The music was pretty cool, though I think I would have gotten more out of it if I had understood the language.
The only annoying part was that there aren't any laws about smoking indoors in Cambodia, so bars (the show was at a bar) are very smoky.
On 8/3, I went to a show at the Japanese Cultural Center. The (Filipino) stars of a musical from last year were performing along with a Cambodian orchestra. They switched off between songs from Where Elephants Weep (a love story with themes tailored to contemporary Cambodia) and West Side Story.
The stars were so-so, but the music was amazing. Usually, non-verbal music doesn't move me, but I could really feel the orchestra. They had a few instruments that you usually don't hear, and they were incredibly skilled.
The show at the Japanese Cultural Center was the lead up to a week long series of events at a big theatre in the center of Cambodia for the Cambodian Youth Arts Festival. I was able to make the shows on 8/9 and 8/10.
I think that I would have really loved the shows if I could speak Khmer, but because I can't, they were a mixed bag. The music was all very good, and I could appreciate it, but about half of the time was plays in Khmer. There was a traditional play about a couple who starts the plays as birds but die a tragic death and are reincarnated for a long series of lives until they finally have a happy ending together. There was a play about relationship abuse and sexual trafficking. There was a wedding play. The people that I went with explained what was going on, so it was still a good way to understand a little more of the culture, but I missed out on a lot. In particular, it seemed like all of the plays had a good mix of humor (some slapstick, some witty) that I wish I had been able to appreciate.
It was nice to see them talking about relationship abuse, though.
Note: this is me venting about programming and isn't meant to be read by non-programmers. Well, it isn't really meant to be read by programmers either.
Ruby has a few nice features. Rails means that you can set up a dynamic website quickly. There are a few things that make collaboration easy (ie, rake tasks for installing dependencies and database independence).
Ok, now that we have the nice parts out of the way, I can get to my real feelings.
I'm not a fan of Ruby.
In a language, letters are constant. For instance, in English there are 26 letters. The words are also fairly stable. They might differ as the years go by, but if I read a book, the way that it uses its words will be pretty much the same as in any other book. The language is relatively static. Creativity comes from how people use the language much more than how they change it. We are no longer living in Shakespeare's time. Many of the 'new' words that we have now are just variations on old words (ie, email was once e-mail or electronic-mail), with a notable exception for cultural phenomenon or proper nouns that become words (ie, Google, Facebook, Frisbee, Bandaid). Even new words that are uniquely created aren't integrated into our lexicons until they become sufficiently popular. If I'm using a new word, I shouldn't expect someone else to understand me until the word gains recognition by the culture. This is particularly true of words that start out as scientific jargon and then come into everyday usage as time changes.
In the programming languages that I like, this is also true. The language itself is controlled, and the creativity comes with how you use the language, not from how you change the language. In C, if you know how to do basic math (including some binary math), function calls, and manipulate pointers, then you can understand what a C program does.
Ruby, however, had the great (sarcasm) idea of making some basic language features changeable (in fairness, C++ also has some of these flaws. Maybe I just don't see them used as much in C++ except when it really makes sense). For instance, brackets and equals signs can be used for any function. That means that I can have a "foo=(bar)" function, and then when I type "foo = 2", it will pass in 2 as an argument to the "foo=" function. "foo" isn't an l-value; it's the name of a function (oh yeah, because in addition to making everything a function, they made it so that you can't immediately identify something as a function by looking for parentheses because parentheses are optional. Just by looking at code, I don't know if I'm looking at a function or a variable).
This is fine in some cases. Normally, the idea of the language is to trick you into thinking that foo is an l-value, just one that you don't really know where it is, so even though it's tricking you, it behaves mostly as expected. Usually, also, it's used as a method within a class (ie, "my_object.foo = bar", so that you are tricked into thinking that you're actually modifying something like you would a struct in C rather than just passing an argument to a function), and there it usually behaves as expected.
This can trip you (you == me) up when you start believing the lies that the language tells you. Notably, Ruby can't tell whether foo = bar means that you want to create a variable named foo and assign bar to it or whether you want to pass bar to the foo= method. Earlier today, I wrote current_user = user. current_user= is a method. But Ruby didn't know that, so it allocated new space for the current_user variable. This would have normally been unexpected but have left my program running fine; creating a local variable that was assigned to the value that I wanted would have left me without any immediate bugs. However, current_user is also a method (not a variable) that I use in other parts of the function to get the current user. When I added the current_user= in to a block of code that was never getting executed, it changed the behavior of a different part of the program because now Ruby had to allocate space in the local scope for a variable called current_user, which meant that, in the other part of the code where there was no current_user variable but where I was calling the current_user method, I was getting nil values unexpectedly. Commenting out a line in a block of code that isn't being executed shouldn't change the behavior of my program!
Now, it was my fault for not realizing that Ruby was lying to me about current_user = being an assignment operation, but it's hard to not believe the lies that Ruby and Rails tell because they're everywhere. In Rails, they try to make coding easier by including external files by default so that you don't have to. This translates to using a lot of code that you see no reference to in the file.
In the defense of Ruby, it does have a strict naming system for different variable types, so it is obvious to veteran Ruby coders that they are really dealing with a function call rather than with a variable assignment, and it would be nice if other languages enforced stylistic conventions so that code looked similar.
I guess that Ruby would work well if all of the abstractions provided were really black boxes with well defined input and well defined output. But that has not been the case with any of the libraries that I have used (except the built in ones -- the Ruby built ins are wonderful). I had to look at the source code of every one of them to figure out why I was getting some bizarre bug. This is because the documentation is usually incomplete. For instance, on the question of what type of variable I pass in or what type it returns to me. The documentation might say "pass in the request." Do they mean the body of the request? Do they mean a signed request? Do they mean some request object defined in their library? Do they mean some other request object?
Often, the most commonly used part of a library will have some documentation. Often, that will be the only documentation. This is especially annoying when that documentation says "returns a Foo object" or "for use with the bar method" and neither Foo nor bar have any documentation. It's also common for a library's documentation to say "works with all of the options from the Bar library" and for the Bar library not to have any documentation on its options because the method that Foo used was internal to Bar rather than one of the main methods.
I guess when you're getting code that other people wrote from free repositories online, you can't expect them to write a perfect documentation. But that's why it's important to have code that is more structured. If I see an array in C or Java, I know exactly what it is, what it holds, what I can do with it, and how to give it to another function that needs it. I can see the type, and I can easily learn about any variable with a known type. I don't need to look at the source code of the function that gave me the array to figure any of that out. In Ruby, if I see an array, I can hope that it has a certain set of behaviors, but that is really just a hope: you can modify built in classes as much as you want to do whatever you want, so the foo array might not be very similar to the bar array. And most objects aren't just vanilla, but rather are classes with a bunch of methods that you probably shouldn't use and one or two poorly documented methods that you should.
In programming, you aren't typing that much. Most of your time is spent looking at code for bugs or looking at other people's code to understand it. Thus, I find it problematic that one of the major selling points of Ruby and higher level languages is that you don't have to type as much. They make the easy part of programming easier and, in the process, make the hard part of programming harder.
As Nick Parlante says, for small, independent, quick projects, scripting languages can be, but if you want to work with other people or work on big projects, then languages like Java are much nicer.
In Cambodia, there is a phenomenon of many things that are 'Same Same (but Different).' Something is Same Same if it is an imitation that, on the outside, is a good replica of some brand but, on the inside, it is different. For instance, I could get a pair of Same Same Birkenstocks for about 3 dollars. If you looked at my feet, you would think that I was wearing Birkenstocks. They have the same imprints on them; the soles look the same; everything looks like the real deal. But if you care about substance rather than just style, then it's different. Same Same soles are soft rather than hard, so they won't last. The body isn't the same corky substance, so it doesn't mold to and support each individual foot. In short, they're bad shoes.
My office took a vacation to the beach. We were originally going to an island, but the weather didn't agree with our plans. Also, I think the ocean gave me a fever (let's hope it's a light one). However, one thing made it all worth it. I had my first taste of corn.
In the US, we're taught to think that the yellow genetically modified stuff that they sell in stores is corn. I have talked before about how much of the corn in Cambodia is the same GMO variety that comes from the US and about how the GMO stuff is worse than corn, but I never realized just how bad GMO 'corn' is.
If I said that I was having a Coke for dinner, it would seem ridiculous because it's just sugar and water. Well, that's what GMO 'corn' is. The skin of each kernel tastes sweet, and there's some water inside. That isn't corn. It's Same Same corn. It looks like corn -- when I first saw the cobs, I thought that it was GMO corn from the US. But the substance of it is different. It is stylish enough to fool consumers into eating it, but it isn't food. It's an imitation.
Some of the properties of GMO corn: it is high in calories and low in nutrition; it is hard to raise in climates like Cambodia that are flooded half the year, in drought the other half, and sporadically windy; it uses a lot of water, so it has high weight (and, thus, can be sold for more money).
The corn that I ate was real. The kernels had meat rather than just water. It was sticky. It stuck to your teeth because there was something there. It didn't taste like sugar. It tasted wholesome. I tasted corn for the first time, and it was good.
Westerners are very hit-or-miss. On the one hand, there is the Whole Foods crowd that could give me their favorite tempeh recipe if I met them on the street. The rest seem affronted when they learn that I'm a vegetarian. Some people act as if I must have some mental deficiency to forsake meat. Others as if I just violated a taboo or called them a dirty name. The people in Cambodia just act like it's exotic. Since it isn't a part of their culture and, thus, is exotic, I think that that's the correct response to have.
When people ask me why I'm vegetarian, I give the concise answer, "animals, environment, and health." Concise may seem unlike me, but even I can be concise when I'm asked a question on a daily basis. Living in another country has given me two additional reasons: I like to think, and I like food.
This blog post serves two purposes. The first is my love poem to food because being vegetarian has made me love all parts of all food. The second is because I am annoyed. If you dislike the angry vegetarian, then you are the ones who made us. Acting affronted is not the correct response. I am a vegetarian because I love food and because it's good for the world. If you have important reasons to eat meat, and if you feel comfortable talking about the process that brought that meat to your plate while you're eating it, then come back to me. Until then, I expect respect.
In modern society, we learn to turn our brains off. If one thing characterizes me, it is that I don't turn my brain off. When I was a kid, I couldn't get to sleep at night because I couldn't stop thinking. The only difference now is that I work, thinking, from when I wake to when I sleep, so I don't spend several hours every day functionally asleep in front of the TV, and by night time, I'm exhausted enough to sleep. Some people try to derive their morality from their emotions. I derive my morality from thinking too much. My self criticism and self development from thinking too much. The idea of turning my brain off disgusts me to my core.
One of the foods that they have in Cambodia is fertilized eggs. You can get the unborn chicks at pretty much any level of growth. The other night, a friend (a Khmer-American) was eating one, but she didn't want to talk about it. If I couldn't talk about the production of the food that I was eating, I wouldn't feel right. Some people talk about voting with your dollars, but voting with your mouth is also important.
Dr. Larry Brilliant says that the most intimate exchange of bodily fluids is eating (have I brought that up in every verbose letter since I heard it?). If we can't speak at that most intimate of moments, then something is very wrong. I would think that a relationship would have to be pretty dysfunctional or, at least, out of my realm of imagination, if one partner couldn't say "I love you" to another in an intimate relationship (the first such relationship that comes to mind is Buffy and Spike's). Eating is sexual.
In my last letter, I mentioned that I want to feel proud in the clothes that I wear. I want to be able to think about the people who made them, about the materials that they're made of, about the message that they bear, and be proud. I don't want to have to turn my brain off. That would be as disgusting as being proud of supporting sweatshop labor. The same goes for food. I want to be able to think about the organic farming, the small and local farmers, the indigenous seeds, and the traditional recipes. I want to feel proud that all of that is now a part of me; that it and I are now indistinguishable; that, in that most intimate of moments, it is now inside me. So I don't believe in turning my brain off for polite dinner time conversation. I believe in experiencing the totality of a meal. If it's in your mouth, at least let it be on the tip of your tongue; how else could you taste it? Taste is totality.
And I don't want to shy away from that totality. I want to embrace it as a part of who I am. They say that blood is thicker than water, and that is true, for though the bonds between family members may bend or break, the kale that I ate at lunch will forever help me bind hemoglobin, letting me breath in and out, because you really are what you eat. I may be the intellectual brainchild of my mother and father's DNA, but the mass production of that code is the beans and rice in my mother's womb. Food is family.
As a vegetarian, there are still questions that go through my mind about my food, just like even when you don't buy from a sweatshop there are still questions about labor. But at least my family is not a species mutated in a lab with gene splicing and fed hormones and antibiotics so that I don't die from living in my own feces in one small cage for my entire life only to be killed by someone who never sees my face for they could not do their job if they saw those thousands of faces only to be ground together with my brethren from a dozen other countries prepared in a secret formula derived by food scientists to make me addictive transported thanks to a war for oil served by someone who hates their job to someone who is overweight and isn't even satisfied punctuated only by the grind of machinery and machinelike people. I am not good enough that my food gives me peace, but it lets me sleep at night without having to turn off my brain.
I love food. I have gradually crossed foods off of my list of things that I don't like. The only real food still on that list is squash, and if that's prepared well (pumpkin pie, I'm talking about you), I still like it. If you serve it to me on a plate and tell me that it's vegetarian, chances are extremely high that I will not only eat it, but actually like and appreciate it (though obviously, if something is poorly prepared, any food can disgust me).
Growing up, I was a picky eater. My dad cooked chicken for me every day for several years because it was the only thing that I would eat. I would even describe myself as a picky eater because everyone in my family and most of my adult role models would eat anything. Now that I'm not a picky eater, I have discovered that my former self wasn't that picky by today's standards. It's remarkable how many people won't eat anything that's the least bit out of their comfort zone! I didn't notice it so much in the US because Stanford is such a cosmopolitan place that people can pretty much eat whatever they want and it's not as if they're making a conscious choice to avoid the vast majority of food in the world. In Cambodia, some of the westerners that I have met are crippled by the food choices. I'm a vegetarian living a country where people don't even know what vegetarianism is, and I'm loving the food! In an earlier blog post, I mention that to truly appreciate a culture, you need repetition. That is true, and eating chicken on a near-daily basis for about six years did give me a certain appreciation. However, the appreciation of repetition is not an excuse for closing yourself off to the world. Walking a mile in one person's shoes doesn't prevent you from appreciating the aroma of another person's shoes.
When I ate meat, I didn't appreciate the diversity of foods because I didn't appreciate food. I ate food, and there were some foods that I preferred over others, but I wouldn't say that I loved food. If you eat meat, you don't need to appreciate food. You can just appreciate the taste of meat. I don't think that it's possible to appreciate food if you can neither cook nor eat a vegetarian meal. Obviously, if you're a decent chef, you appreciate food, and probably to a greater extent than me, but then you also know how to make vegetarian food. I have had more good eating experiences in the few years since I have given up meat than in the first 16 or so years of my life because then I didn't appreciate the experience of eating. I can't recall a single meal from the time that I ate meat that I would have described as "wonderful," but I could go on and on about the food at the Bellagio (I did eat there for 3 or 4 hours. Twice). Just since June, I've probably had 3 or 4 meals that were amazing. The mushrooms at Tamarine; the spinach at Blue Pumpkin; the cheeses at Comme àa Maison. I appreciated each of those more than I did any food in my entire life before I became vegetarian. It's not that meat eaters are doomed to never appreciate food, but, for me, meat made it easy to get in a rut. I think it was Chomsky that said that limitations are necessary for creativity.
If there is a certain food that you don't like, you are unreasonably limiting your experiences. In fifth grade, my teacher brought in different foods for us to try, and to this day I can talk about the frog and the rattlesnake that I ate. You don't need to have Rocky Mountain Oysters to experience the world, but you should have a good reason for rejecting a class of food. That doesn't mean that you have to like veggies as much as meat (I liked the rattlesnake; the snail made me puke. I'm still better for having eaten it), but it does mean that you should respect them. It's like cultures. Foods are intricately tied to cultures. Not every part of every culture has to be your favorite, but unless you have a moral issue (and not just a cultural taboo) with an aspect of a culture, you should appreciate the uniqueness, history, and people involved in that particular part of that culture. You should probably prefer a well prepared vegetarian dish over a poorly prepared meat dish. You should probably prefer the good aspects of a foreign culture over the bad parts of your own culture.
Part of the problem is addiction. The goal of a food scientist at a fast food place is not to make food tasty or healthy. Their goal is to make food addictive. Fast food eaters have the same behaviors as addicts. They even experience withdrawal when separated from frequent consumption of their fast food chain. When a person is constantly in a drugged state, it's no wonder that they can't appreciate non-addictive foods. I have heard that going off of high fructose corn syrup, while much harder than going off meat, will also make you appreciate food more.
If you only eat meat, then you don't appreciate meat. I never appreciated meat when it was the only thing that I ate. When I started eating tofu, beans, and rice, I also gained a newfound appreciation for fish. It's been 3 or 4 years since I've eaten meat and around 9 years since I've eaten red meat or pork. But you have never appreciated bacon until you have made baconlike tofu.
It also goes for simple foods. I love rice. I love that they appreciate rice in Cambodia. I can appreciate the different varieties and preparations that go into making rice. I can appreciate how it complements different foods and drinks. Why would someone feel limited by eating rice every day?
Being vegetarian made me realize that food is wonderful.
In case you are still wondering about my original reasons, here is why being vegetarian is good for animals, the environment, and your health:
Animals aren't treated very well in cultures that eat them. If they aren't free range, they probably don't have a much better life than veal. You've probably seen the cages in which they are transported on highways. Imagine living your whole life in one of those. Factory farms (also called "concentrated animal feeding operations" by people who don't want to think it) are particularly brutal, and again, unless you buy free range and only eat at restaurants that advertises free range, chances are good that you're eating an animal from a factory farm. See the movie "Food Inc." There are almost 7 billion humans living on Earth. More than 10 times as many animals are killed on a yearly basis for human consumption.
The meat industry is not environmentally friendly. If you never again drove a car or rode in a plane, it would have less of an impact on global warming than if you cut meat out of your diet (check out the UN Food and Agriculture report at http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM). Meat is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Less than industry, but more than transportation. Because demand for meat is on the rise thanks to rising wealth in the developing world, rainforests are cut down so that cows can graze. They eat a bunch of food and drink a bunch of water (so eating meat is poor energy policy also). Their urine and feces (responsible for methane and nitrous oxide, which are gazillions times worse than CO2) and the dumpings from the factory farms then pollutes the local water supply. After being killed, they're put on a plane halfway across the world and served to your plate. After mentioning that I rode the train home from school, someone once told me that they feel hypocritical calling themselves environmentalist because they took the plane home for the holidays; why don't people have similar thoughts about their eating habits?
No, I don't feel hungry all the time. No, I don't have any dietary problems. No, I don't have a hard time getting enough protein. First, being vegetarian made me appreciate food and diversified my diet. As a kid, chicken and fish were the only things that I ate. Now, I eat everything except for meat. Diversity is good if you care about getting vitamins and minerals, being able to eat outside of your narrow environment, and not getting fat after your metabolism slows down. Second, my food never makes me unhealthy. Meat eaters have to worry about things like mad cow disease turning their brains into mush (they also are the cause of thing like bird flu and pig flu, but for some reason people often don't make the connection between disease outbreaks and buying meat that was produced in conditions that diseases love) and getting sick from undercooked food. They also have to worry about the grossness of bloody food. Before becoming vegetarian, I was disgusted by undercooked chicken (which meant I didn't eat it, so I didn't get any protein) and occasionally puked after eating improperly stored or prepared meat. Since becoming vegetarian, food hasn't made me sick, and I haven't had to turn my food away. Obviously, there are pathogens that live on veggies, but pathogens are generally very specialized creatures, and it's very hard to specialize both for humans and for cauliflower. Third, eating meats will often give you weird chemicals. A lot of animals are fed growth hormone and antibiotics. When you eat their meat, you are eating their growth hormone and antibiotics. There are also plenty of natural chemicals that other animals use to regulate their own bodies that I wouldn't want in my body. Forth, giving up meat made me feel leaps and bounds more energetic. In my biology class, I learned that when animal proteins go into your stomach, it isn't just a matter of re-routing them to the part of your body that needs that protein. Our stomachs break the proteins down into amino acids and then rebuild them. If you eat beans and rice, your body gets all of the amino acids that it needs, but it doesn't have to wear itself out. Dairy products still make me feel tired whenever I eat them.
Yes, I am vegetarian. Yes, I have given it more thought than I ever did to eating meat, and I would feel hypocritical if I couldn't think about what I was putting in my mouth. Yes, I do love food, and I love it a lot more than I ever loved meat. No, that does not make me a second class citizen.
EDIT: To clarify, very little of this is a critique of meat or meat eating. It is a critique of an industrialized meat eating culture. To the hunters and the farmers and the free range eaters and the people for whom experiencing food is experiencing culture (you all know who you are): kudos.
Some things that I've learned:
There's no practical reason for electrical outlets to be different from place to place. In Cambodia, they have universal outlets. You can plug anything into them (the only exception: some of their outlets are universal non-grounded outlets, so they only have two prongs). The reason that the sockets are different country by country is economic. Exporters can easily price discriminate between countries if a consumer can't import a product from another country because they use different electrical outlets. Yet another way for corporations to dodge the invisible hand.
Jewish vegetarian engineers in Cambodia are apparently fairly common: there are at least two of us. I stumbled upon the blog adamincambodia.blogspot.com. I think that he is already back in Canada, though. And he knew Khmer much better than me.
Health:
In the month that I have been in Cambodia, I have been nearly unscathed. I haven't had any diarrhea or other stomach problems, I haven't gotten a fever, I haven't gotten any fungus, and overall, I have been completely healthy.
The one exception: early on, I ate some American potato chips, and one of them stabbed the inside of my mouth, giving me a sore for about a week.
Events:
I haven't been doing a ton of stuff aside from the touristy things already mentioned.
I got a traditional Khmer massage.
There are some pretty cool events at the China House. They had a Spanish movie playing a few weeks ago (I think the movie thing is a weekly occurrence). They had a jazz band playing. The events are all free. They also have a pretty good restaurant upstairs.
I went to dinner with one of the people from the office. A lot of socializing seems to happen around meal times. In Cambodia, meal times seem much more relaxed than America. Less rushed.
I've been to the markets and some nonprofit stores.
I've spent a lot of my time keeping up on my commitments back home like debate coaching and directing Hackathon.
Culture:
When I first came to Cambodia, I expected that there would be cultural differences that I would have to adjust to. Instead, I only found differences in mannerisms. That is, people do things differently, but I wouldn't find it strange if people in the US acted similarly, and the culture wouldn't have to change much if there was mass adoption of the mannerism.
For instance, in the markets, you can barter. Some westerners react to this as "they're trying to rip you off -- and they will if you let them!" I think that lonely planet put it well: "Remember back home, we pay astronomical sums for items, especially clothes, that have been made in poorer countries for next to nothing, and we don't even get the chance to bargain for them, just the opportunity to contribute to a corporate director's retirement fund." Something similar to bartering is necessary, and in the US, we have supposedly replaced it with the free market and 'competition,' which means that instead of bartering, we throw everyone to the wolves, leaving half of the people get ripped off and half of the businesses to go bankrupt (of course, in the case of undifferentiated commodities, it works pretty well. It only works less well when corporations can dodge the invisible hand through things like advertisements, the network effect, and monopolistic practices -- like most noncommodity industries -- that it works imperfectly). Each way has its merits. They can and do coexist. Once you get used to either, it's not too weird.
Or food. It's a little bit more difficult being vegetarian in Cambodia than in the US, but in the cities, most places have some vegetarian option. The primary difference between here and the states is that I don't speak Khmer whereas I do speak English. In the US, I can say "I don't eat meat," explain that that includes fish, pigs, birds, and anything other animals that they can think of, and ask if they can make one of their dishes with tofu (though such an explanation isn't necessary in vegetarian friendly places like Eugene or the Bay Area). Even though many travelers complain that there aren't any vegetarian options, whenever I'm eating with a local, they can get me a great vegetarian dish (albeit, it might not be on the menu).
The people are pretty much the same. As the narrator in "Seasons of Migration to the North" said to his village of people in the Sudan about the people in the UK, "just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak" (3). In addition, just like people in the US, Cambodians have cell phones and are bad with technology; they have corrupt people throughout the government, corporations, and nonprofits; they have people working to make a living; they have people in every sector working with pure hearts to make the world a better place; they have elections which may be contested, but are accepted enough to have a stable state and rule of law; they need better public transportation, public infrastructure, public education, and public healthcare; they suffer for ridiculous standards of beauty; they have patriarchal gender norms; they don't always get along with their neighboring countries; they are a service economy; they have traffic accidents and diseases; they have works of art; they tend to get up earlier than I, a college student, would like to; and the similarities go on. While each of these qualities may differ in degree, the society overall isn't too different.
There are some differences. Thanks to the Khmer Rouge and the US (we had a secret bombing campaign there during the war in Vietnam, remember?), they are war torn, which means that they have things like unexploded land mines (FYI - the US still hasn't signed the landmine ban) that leave civilians without limbs; the people are poorer and less educated; English is their second language rather than their first; they are Buddhist rather than Christian; much of their business and economic growth comes from foreigners rather than locals; labor is cheap, and capital is expensive.
Part of this is because of globalization. Now, anyone with a bank and a thin piece of plastic can get money in any city in the world. Anyone with money can get a cell phone, internet, and all of the comforts that they are used to at home. People wear the same clothes and buy the same trinkets made by the same companies. People eat the same species of genetically modified corn (the yellow one with little nutritional value that can't grow outside of greenhouses. Check out Winona LaDuke's website at honorearth.org for more about this).
I'm not opposed to any of that on principle. If western culture makes people happy, then that's good. I'm concerned, though, because the west has been digging the world into a lot of holes that might be hard to get out of. I guess that I used to have the idea that there were other ways of living where people thought differently and that one of those different paradigms would have a way out of some of our problems. I had the idea that we could fix the world's problems by changing the culture, that diversity is a good thing and a diverse set of cultures would leave room for one that could fix our mess.
Instead, I am realizing that the same forces that have been incrementally reforming western culture are the ones in which we must put our hopes, dreams, and endeavors. This is it; now let's make the best of it.
From 7/11 to 7/18, I took a vacation with Pillows for Peace. With them, I
-saw Tuol Sleng (a genocide museum) and the killing fields
-went to Battambang and Koh Kralor to build 10 houses for people who saved money through the Tabitha program
-did temple hopping at Siem Reap
Tabitha, the nonprofit, helps people save money. It starts out with $0.25 per week. After 10 weeks, they have enough to buy chicks. When a chick grows up to a chicken, they can sell it for more than 10 times the price of the chick because there's a rising trend of rich Cambodians wanting organic free range chickens. After that, they can get things like seeds, fertilizer, a well, or a house.
Tabitha also makes some silk crafts, hiring women with HIV. That's one of their main sources of income. They use that to pay interest on the people's savings (they pay 10% every 10 weeks, and they keep the money in safes rather than putting it in a bank, so the interest that they pay out has to come from external sources).
Most of the people on the trip were Mormon. I think that I identify more with the Khmer people that I have interacted with than them. It's true that the Pillows for Peace group's backgrounds were fairly similar to mine -- similar socioeconomic status and education -- but with the people in my office, I only see differences in mannerisms; with the Pillows for Peace group, I could really see a different culture.
There were, of course, differences within the group. There was an older couple that had a background in physics and architecture (the husband was a Fulbright scholar), was familiar with computers and programming (they did some programming back in the old days with vacuum tubes!), believed in science, and had similar political beliefs to me. I didn't feel a cultural difference with them. Similarly, the experiences that I will outline don't apply to the entire group.
The only negative was the heterosexism. I heard some "that's so gay." One person also told a joke in the form of: "whenever <innocent thing happens>, <bad thing happens>": "whenever there's an awkward silence, a gay baby is born." It was hard to speak out. Normally, I only have to interject against the way that people speak, but I felt like in these instances, I would have to tackle a deep seeded cultural issue.
There were some practices that were just different. There was one couple that wasn't much older than me but that was already married, and I think that they hadn't even met each other a few months before they got married. Most people, if they hadn't already gone on a mission, had someone in their family on a mission. Whenever anyone got sick, the first thing that they would do would be to gather around to give a very formal blessing (about half of the group got sick at some time in the week long trip. Thankfully, I have been completely healthy in the month that I've been here).
It's not necessarily worse, but they come from a different culture than me.
The house building was rewarding, but I feel like it was more for us than them. They were much better than us at making houses (or all of us that I saw), and I think that they might end up repairing our bent nails later on. Many of them couldn't speak English, so we didn't get to talk with them. On the other hand, three of the people on the trip were Khmer but raised in the US, and it was their first time seeing their grandparents.
The people who went on the house building trip fundraised $960 for each of the houses. Since I knew almost nothing about the program before volunteering, I didn't know that most people fundraised, and I just donated out of pocket. We also got our name on a plaque outside of the house. Mine reads "In Memory of Nadja Kuller."
The Lonely Planet guide for Cambodia says, "Marijuana is not legal" but "is traditionally used in some Khmer food, so it will be around." However, I had never actually seen any. On the trip, we went to a restaurant called "The Smokin' Pot" that had "Happy Chicken Soup," the soup "which is cooked with happy herbs or Mariwana."
One of the things that has surprised me during my stay in Cambodia is that I am much more culinarily cosmopolitan than many other people. I'm vegetarian, but compared to many other people, I will eat anything, and I have eaten a lot. For instance, it seemed like most of the people in the group had never seen a Thai Iced Tea before. It's weird because in the US, I always feel so uncultured.
Siem Reap was ok. On the plus side, the temples were good to see, and our tour guide for the temples was very cool. However, it was also very tourist centered, expensive, and it felt less like a city than Phnom Penh. In cities, there is an air of stuff happening. I think I'm a city boy.
Temples: the highlights were Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Bayon. We also went to Banteay Srei and one or two others.
On the way to Angkor Wat, Siya, the tour guide showed us some natural features. There was a plant that has spread out leaves but, when touched, the leaves hide away. One of the people in our group referred to it as a 'touch me not'. I don't remember the name that Siya gave to them. He also showed us a millipede. When disturbed, they curl up into a big ball. On the way to Ta Prohm, he showed us that the large mounds of dirt were termite nests.
When we got to Angkor Wat, we went to the very top (Siya had us enter through the back so that we didn't have to wait in a long line to go up top). They had just opened it a few months ago. The steps to get up were fairly narrow. Outside one of the windows, you could see a big yellow baloon. Apparently, you can get a hot air balloon ride. When we left later that night, I saw the massive balloon when it was parked. The view of the trees from the top was very nice.
One of the most significant features of Angkor Wat is all of the headless statues. After the temple was rediscovered, people would cut the heads off of statues to sell for thousands of dollars. There was also graffiti on some of the walls. Eventually, UNESCO stepped in and put a stop to it.
Some of the cultural features: there is a large wall with the Ramayana story on it, there are Apsara Dancers on the walls (they can bend their hands backwards), and there is some Ancient Sanskrit writing.
The engineering was amazing. They had a human-made moat. They had a drainage system throughout the entire temple so that in the heavy rains it wouldn't flood. I guess you don't make the biggest temple in the world without being pretty smart. This goes on today: once I get my pictures up, you'll see big green tents around some parts of Angkor Wat that are currently being restored.
In the past, it was used by monks, and you could always hear one group or another chanting. Historically, there was also a big library with different levels to go on depending on the level of understanding of the monk. Now, the monks have a small, modern building outside Angkor Wat, and Angkor Wat is purely a cultural site.
When we left (through the front), we saw the stereotypical Angkor Wat sight with the reflection of the temple in the moat. It was pretty nice. The clouds were nice too. Siya also showed us a bullet hole in a stone column near the entrance.
Two mornings later, we came back for the sunrise over Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, the clouds disagreed with our plans, so we didn't see too much sun until it was already bright out. I did see lots of annoying tourists, though.
Ta Prohm is the temple featured in Tomb Raider. Siya always hears people calling it the Angelina Jolie temple. He only speaks English and Khmer (I think), but when tourists of other languages come to the temple, he can still pick up the words "Angelina Jolie." If I were religious, I would think of that as western culture desecrating a holy place. Since I'm not, I just think of it as sad.
The best feature of Ta Prohm was the trees. Banyan trees can grow anywhere. A seed might fall on one of the temple's walls, and a tree would start growing there. It would grow slowly because it couldn't dig its roots into earth to get water. But the roots would grow downwards and, eventually, they would reach the ground and the tree would start growing very quickly. One member of my group commented: "it's a temple to Shiva, the destroyer, and the trees are destroying the temple!" That tree is Tetrameles nudiflora (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrameles_nudiflora). There are also banyans (strangler figs) which grow around other trees, strangling them.
The Bayon temple was discovered by a couple in love that got lost and separated in the forest. Then, they found each other at the temple, which is full of smiling faces. Siya knew all of the cool photo ops -- where to stand so that it would look like you were kissing or rubbing noses with one of the faces, where to stand for a group photo, where the face would be framed or in a line, etc. He was really good with a camera (he immediately knew how to use each person in the group's camera. It took me a few minutes to figure out where my zoom was.), and he was eager to take pictures.
Banteay Srei was the favorite temple of some of the veterans in the group. Apparently, when she first started coming to Cambodia, when the Khmer Rouge were still active, they used the temples as a camp site. The agreement was that they got it during the night and the tourism industry got it during the day. In the early morning, you could see warm fire pits where they had made breakfast.
The temple is made with pink/red stone, and the designs are intricate (and 3d), so people think that it was made by women. I'm not sure if there's more to that theory or not.
Since my dad told me to ride an elephant, I also went on an elephant ride. It was an interesting experience to have, but it probably wasn't worth supporting an institution where elephants are held in captivity for the sake of tourists.
Rant on Photos: what is the point of taking picturesque photos? I can understand the desire to take photos with yourself in them to send to family and friends or to remember that you went some place. But why take 'perfect' photos of the sights? If people want to capture the moment, then they would include the power lines, the construction, the balloons, and the other tourists. If people want something pretty, then there are better photos (taken by more qualified photographers with more expensive cameras) of the same exact sites easily available online (unless it's an obscure or unique site or you're a good photographer). In other words, many of my photos are just wasted space.
I guess I don't really understand the whole 'tourism' thing. It seems like the model for tourism is going to a place for a few days, seeing the sites (which, beautiful as they may be, won't take my breath away) and eating the food (which isn't too different from food in the US), and leaving. What is left out is getting to know the culture, the people, and the daily lifestyle (most locals who aren't tour guides don't go temple hopping every day). I would rather know people than sites. A relationship is more important than a photo.
In other words, getting to know Siya was more important than seeing some pretty sculptures. He moved to Siem Reap from the countryside and taught himself English using YouTube. Now, he volunteers by teaching English at high schools. He's good at English, too -- he knew enough to make clever jokes (someone in the group asked him "are there any monkeys here?" and he responded "they live with the monks"), to make fun of our mannerisms, and to tell the difference between the many different dialects of English. He's trying to get the money to bring his mother to the city, so he has been working as a tour guide basically every day for the past three years. He has a Facebook. He's teaching himself web programming so that, later, he can start his own business (I gave him my email in case he needs help). I'm glad that I met him.
That's why I'm glad that I'm staying for a few months. I have the chance to get to know the people in my office and get to know the city. Learning a culture isn't about unique experiences; it's about repetition. Trying a style of food once won't make you appreciate it as much as eating it for a month. The same goes for the heat, the rains, the smells, the traffic, and the lifestyle in general. The model for cultural understanding should be walking a mile in someone else's shoes, not a few steps. The alternative is summed up in Fight Club: when you're a tourist, everything is single serving, like on an airplane. Single serving food; single serving drinks; single serving friends.
I also think that the long term model is less likely to produce the 'Ugly American' as the single serving model. I think that an 'Ugly American' is someone who sees a different mannerism (that is, an insignificant difference) in another culture and thinks that that difference is worse. For instance, many westerners are off put by Cambodia because people aggressively try to sell things to westerners, so when a westerner walks down the street, they are asked if they want a tuk tuk ride by someone on every block. In the US, we only have people trying to sell us stuff by advertising on TV, in magazines, in the paper, on the internet, on the clothes that we wear, on billboards, on radio, in stores, and on our doorsteps, so it seems weird that someone would advertise their own services that we might need in a location where we might need them. Given more time, it's easier to see the similarities and to see that it's just a bunch of people trying to make a living by doing something that works (advertising themselves).
Ary, one of my coworkers from Argentina, was going to Vietnam for the weekend (7/2-7/4) and invited me to come along. A friend that he met at the ICT (it seems like noone knows exactly what it stands for, but it has something to do with information technology) camp in Thailand was going to show him around, and she said that he could bring a friend.
On Friday afternoon, we left by bus. We wanted to leave in the evening, but apparently, there aren't any busses that go between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh city after 3pm (that also put a kink in our plans for Sunday, since we needed to leave to get back to work on Monday).
It started raining exactly as we headed out the door. Even though it was only about a block before we found a tuk tuk, we were soaked. Thankfully, I brought extra footwear, and my amazing backpack appears immune to water. Being wet made the bus ride cold, though, because it was air conditioned rather than being as warm as outside.
The bus ride was about 7 hours. I did some reading. Ary and I talked some. Ary also recently got an Android phone, so we messed around with it briefly. He had an NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis emulator on it, so we shared some games from our childhoods.
Two annoying things about the bus ride. First, the bus driver honked the horn at least once per minute both on the way there and on the way back. Second, I'm not sure that the bus driver understands speed bumps in the same way that I do. I came to this realization when I was suspended in the air a few inches above my seat for about a second.
I was surprised when I discovered that the bus goes over a ferry. We stopped to wait for the ferry, but noone told me that's what we were doing, so I just assumed that it was a lunch break (I was hungry). Then I saw the water.\
Going across the border was easy. Before the trip, I had to get a rushed visa (meaning $60 rather than $40) because I didn't know that I was going until about a day before I left, but when we crossed the border, we just showed them our passports and put our bags through an airport-like conveyer belt. On the way back to Cambodia, it was even easier. I gave them money for the visa when I got on the bus, and they pretty much took care of everything.
Ho Chi Minh was very different from Phnom Penh.
The food is much cheaper. I got a good meal on the streets for 25 cents (though, unlike in Phnom Penh, they don't accept US currency) for a meal, and in a fairly good restaurant, we had entrees, two rounds of drinks, and desert for less than $5 each. I was also pleased to discover cinnamon ice cream! People have ridiculed me for saying that cinnamon on ice cream would be good, but now I have seen proof that I am not the only one who appreciates cinnamon in all things.
There is also more begging and more poverty. I commented that in Phnom Penh, I think that the kids are in school during the day and that there wasn't much more begging than in the US because everyone is working in the streets. In Ho Chi Minh, there were hungry kids on every block. When I would buy a meal for one, 5 more would show up. Thankfully, it the food prices are cheap. That really put things into perspective: one Jamba Juice is $5, which could feed 20 hungry kids. It's a different feeling from donating to a nonprofit. I can say with complete certainty that my money was not spent on administrative fees or fundraising and that there are now kids with food in their stomachs. While it may be less emphatic than personally donating food, most of the good nonprofits (ie, ones verified by external agencies) have similar success, with less than 10% spent on administrative fees and all of the rest going to high impact initiatives. In other words, it's good to see where my money is going.
The city felt more western than Phnom Penh. Most of Vietnam is rural, but Ho Chi Minh looks like any other city that I've been to. In other words, next to the hungry kids are fancy stores and new shopping malls. The one difference that it has from US cities is that motorcycle is the primary means of transportation rather than car. The traffic flows the same as it does in the US, though -- it's very ordered and fast rather than organic and slow like in Cambodia. Also unlike Phnom Penh, everything has a price tag, even in the markets. There wasn't much room for bartering.
Ary's friend read my palm. Apparently:
-I have a long lifeline. I'll be at least 80 years old.
-I'll be weak when I get older. I thought I was weak now?
-I'll have a good mind forever
-I have no enemies, and I have many supporters in everything that I do
-I will be happily married with two kids and a good sex life
-I'm very bad with money. It will slip through my fingers. I'm not frugal at all.
Touristy Things:
I saw the War Remnants Museum. It had stuff from Vietnam's war with the US. It was eye opening. I knew that the US did horrible things, but in school, I always learned the "war is hell" point of view from a US perspective. It's very different from seeing a room full of pictures of kids that grow up, to this day, with birth defects because of the toxins that we used, to see families burned by napalm, and to see some the instruments of torture that the US used on the Vietnamese. One example was Tiger Cages, small rooms with no ceiling so that US soldiers could pour boiling water on the prisoners. Another was tiny barbed wire cages that would have prisoners crammed into them. That's in addition to the means of torture that you might imagine -- stuff with hammers, nails, putting saltc in the wounds, canes...
I visited the royal palace. The basement had a bomb shelter. The top floors had a room for gambling and the roof had a dance floor.
I went to a pagoda. The monks there dressed in brown rather than orange (like in Phnom Penh). There were stands with sand to put burning incense in and to make a sort of wish. The temple inside had the pictures of people who wanted to have their ashes reside there. There was a group of school children playing some games outside. It was a nice place. I also learned that, despite the Buddhist presence, most people in the country are atheist.
When we went to the mall to get some snacks for the bus ride back, we ran into a father and some young kids who knew magic tricks. They were pretty good.
Our last stop on the way out was the water puppet show, a traditional Vietnamese performance. The only show that we could make was the 2pm one and our bus was at 3, so we only saw the first half of it, but it was fun. They had a bunch of funny scenes with animals coming out from nowhere. I hear that you can check it out on youtube, also.
On Saturday, 6/26, I went to the National Museum and the Royal Palace.
The museum was very cool. Most of it was Buddhist and Hindu stonework. There was also some more recent historical artifacts from the French colonial period. One of the differences between the national museum and museums that I had seen before was that there was a lot more repetition. Rather than seeing 100 different paintings, no two of which look alike, I would enter a room with 100 different Buddhas. Perhaps it reflects different cultural values: in the west, everyone wants to be unique, so we value distinct pieces of art, whereas here there is more acceptance of the community's values, so the focus is on deeply understanding and perfecting those values.
The tour guide also refreshed some concepts about Buddhism and Hinduism that I hadn't thought much about since taking Values and Beliefs in my sophomore year of high school.
The Royal Palace was less interesting. Much of it was fenced off. The focus was more on larger structures rather than small crafts and statues. The structures themselves were very interesting. There was still a theme of repetition -- there was one structure that was at each corner of the main compound.
One prominent sight was the temple of the Jade Buddha. This part of the Royal Palace was similar to the National Museum. There were a lot of artifacts, and at the center of the room was a large jade Buddha. It's interesting to think that a leader valued for a rejection of the material world and extravagancies would have a jade statue made in his figure (not to mention the gold and silver figures all surrounding the jade).
Interestingly enough, this was the first day that I experienced Cambodia's monsoons. As soon as we entered the palace and got under cover, it started raining. As an Oregonian, I always make fun of Californians when they say that it's raining, but this was real rain. After a few seconds in it, there would not be any dry spots on you.
Unlike in Oregon or California, when you are soaking wet, you still feel warm. Thus, it's not too annoying to get soaking wet, as long as your shoes can take it.
Work:
Most people arrive between 8 and 10 and leave between 4 and 7. I arrive at 9ish and leave a little after 6.
We usually take long lunches at a local eatery.
The environment is very relaxed and social. I think that that is the biggest difference in my work habits between Stanford and here. At Stanford, I'm always overwhelmed with the number of things that I have to finish by the next day, so when I work, I am very focused, efficient, and fast. Last term, I finished most of my CS110 assignments in one ten-hour sitting, with one or two half-hour meal breaks. When doing those assignments, I would have little contact with the outside world, but I would get done two weeks of work. At the InSTEDD office, I work with others rather than alone, and we share our experiences. It's a job, but it's also a cultural exchange and a learning experience, and it's a job where I help others and others help me.
Before I started working, I was asked to estimate how long it would take to finish the first part of my project. My estimate was a few days, and my boss said that he thought the estimate was off. Based on my experience in the first week, I think that if programming were the only thing that I did, it wouldn't have been too hard to finish in a few days, but since there's more to working than just programming, I'll finish in the coming week.
I still feel slow, but the people I'm working with say that I'm coming along very quickly.
The content of my work is making a machine learning (artificial intelligence) service in Ruby on Rails. The cause for the service is so that InSTEDD's other projects can have easy access to machine learning without having to reinvent the wheel every time. For instance, SeenTags, which 'tags' text messages based on previous examples (for instance, if I give Seen Tags the text message "cases:10, disease:malaria " followed by the text message "5 cholera", it will tag it as "cases:8, disease:cholera") had to make its own machine learning solution rather than just getting its data in the correct format and sending it off to another machine learning service.
Rather than writing all of the machine learning algorithms myself, I'm making the service plug in to external services (ie, Google Prediction, Open Calais, Tag This). The brunt of my work is figuring out how to accept data in a range of formats (so that the client service that wants machine learning doesn't have to do any conversion) and get everything in the correct format for the external services while making sure that my code is modular enough that it can easily be extended as new external machine learning services become available.
Ruby on Rails is a web programming language that is currently all the rage. Ruby is the language itself, and Rails automates some common tasks and makes everything work in a standard format. It was harder for me to get the hang of than other languages that I have tried. I think that part of it is that, in an effort to automate and standardize everything, it hides the underlying architecture from the programmer, and the way that I understand things best is by looking at the underlying architecture (which is why I like lower level languages like C and C++ a lot -- everything is exposed). I do think that, once I understand it a little better, it will make web programming tasks very quick and collaboration very easy.
InSTEDD:
InSTEDD (InSTEDD.org; it used to stand for International System for Total Early Disease Detection, but now it stands for Innovative Support To Emergencies, Diseases, and Disasters) solves the information problems of the public health world.
One challenge is identifying disease outbreaks. In the US, we're used to every hospital having an internet connection and quickly reporting any outbreaks to the CDC. Globally, that isn't the case. There may not be one central agency to take in reports, and there might not be an infrastructure for the people on the front lines to report to an agency if one exists.
Riff is a technology that tries to identify disease outbreaks without any central agency. It was inspired by GPHIN (Global Public Health Information Network), the technology that caught SARS and helped prevent it from becoming a pandemic. It scrapes news articles online to figure out where the outbreaks are and what disease they are.
When nonprofits are working somewhere without a stable telecommunications infrastructure, GeoChat steps in. Some areas lack the infrastructure because they are underdeveloped; some areas are conflict ridden, so nonprofits can't freely use the infrastructure; some areas had the infrastructure recently destroyed by a disaster. GeoChat lets people working for public health communicate to each other by any means available. If SMS is the only thing that works, you can send a text to one number and it will be relayed to your whole organization. If you have access to the internet, you can visualize everyone's location and see their messages coming in.
One thing that they're working on now is how to get reports from people who probably don't speak English, who don't have computers, and who don't live somewhere with a very good telecommunications infrastructure -- InSTEDD makes the work that Google does seem easy. In other words, public health agencies need data in computers, but it's hard to get the data from the people into the computers. Their latest technological solution to this problem is a wheel. No, not the millennia-old version: a reporting wheel. There will be a front cover with instructions in their native language; they turn the wheel until it displays the desired word (ie, "malaria" or "5 cases"); they call a phone number; they input the numbers that the wheel displays. They make it easy to design a wheel of your own and print it out, and after you print it out, everything is analog. Thus, it's easy for any nonprofit in the world to use it to help with their reports, and it can be used practically anywhere in the world.
Because InSTEDD is one of the leaders in solving the information problems associated with disease and disaster response, they often work with the UN or in international projects like the Haiti earthquake response. In short, they're a very cool group of people, and it's an honor to work with them.
The Airplanes:
My journey began on Friday, 6/18 at 10am at EUG. There, I discovered that fog in SFO delayed my first flight by 2 hours, and there weren't any flights to Asia after about 1pm. Weird. They suggested that I still fly to SFO today because there might also be bad fog in SFO the next day. I flew.
Thankfully, Nick, my roommate who lives in San Mateo, was gracious enough to pick me up for the day. It was nice to spend some time with him. We also celebrated his brother's 16th birthday and played some games.
The next day, the first leg of my journey was undoing yesterday's work: apparently, all of the SFO flights were full, so they flew me to Seattle before resuming everything.
Then, I flew to NRT (Narita airport in Tokyo). I watched "How to Train Your Dragon," "Alice in Wonderland" (no 3d glasses in the airplane), and "Wall-e." Once in Japan, I was greeted with a meal voucher: apparently, United is experimenting with how much they can delay people without annoying them. I'm not kidding. The meal voucher described how United was pleased to accommodate me because they were experimenting with "United controllable delays." Oh well. I had some good udon noodles and did some reading.
Then I went to BKK (Bangkok airport). They had free wifi, but I couldn't find anywhere to plug in my laptop (I think the plugs work without an adapter, but I couldn't find any plugs). They also had some free internet terminals. They keys on them, however, were very weird -- sometimes they would double-send a key, and sometimes they wouldn't send a key at all. Originally, I was planning on going to the airport hotel, but because my NRT to BKK flight was delayed, I would have only been able to get a few hours of sleep in the hotel, and I would have had to go through customs. Because this leg of the journey was on Bangkok Air rather than United, I didn't have my boarding pass, so an hour before the flight left (when Bangkok Air people first showed up), they printed me out a pseudo boarding pass -- it was just a sheet of paper with my flight info on it and my seat number hand written rather than a normal boarding pass. Also, United never gave them my checked luggage.
Finally, on Monday, 6/20, I arrived at PNH, Phnom Penh International Airport. I paid the visa fee, filed the lost bag paperwork, and met up with Martin who got a Tuk Tuk with me to my apartment.
Adjusting:
It is hot in Cambodia. I don't think it has been cooler than 30C, and apparently it has been very 'cool' since I arrived. Thankfully, every indoor space has industrial grade air conditioners. I still get very hot whenever I step outside. And, with the humidity, I feel wet the second I step outside also.
The heat is tiring (literally, not figuratively). It could just be the jet lag, but after I get back from work, I'm ready to sleep by around 10pm.
The apartment has two rooms, a living room, a kitchen, and two bathrooms. It has lots of fancy furniture, a TV (trying to change the channel from the TV itself doesn't work very well -- the channel down button changes the volume, and the channel up button randomly does channel up or channel down. Thankfully, I don't watch TV), beds, closets, and an air conditioner. I'm pretty satisfied with it. The one thing that it lacks is internet. There's a paid wifi network, but the links seem to be broken. I have a 3G modem for if I ever need to use the internet, but 1MB costs 10 cents, so I try to prepare myself for offline computing while at the apartment. They did say that they were installing internet there, though, so in a few weeks, I should be able to plug in. EDIT: I recently invested in a SIM chip from Smart, which had a package deal of $10 for 1GB. The coverage isn't amazing at the apartment, so I get something up to ~3 times dial up but less reliable.
I'm located by the Orussey Market and the Olympic Stadium.
Speaking of phones: I'm using Martin's old one (he recently got an Android phone). I picked up a Mobitel SIM chip with $5 on it, which will probably last me at least half of my stay. I think that all of the phone plans are prepaid -- it's a much nicer system for people like me who don't spend all of their waking minutes on the phone. I think that on AT&T, I have several thousand rollover minutes, and I bought the cheapest plan. It's also nice because if you only want to use a little bit of a data plan, you can just use it; you don't need to
There's a phone store on every street with SIM chips and phones. Apparently, phones are a status symbol, so people will buy fancy phones even though they don't do anything aside from talk on them (apparently, the mentality that causes people to buy iPhones in the US also causes people to splurge on phones elsewhere).
The First Day:
At my insistence (Martin suggested that I rest), I went in to InSTEDD's office on the first day. Also at my insistence, we walked there (I wanted to learn how to get there). It's a fairly straight shot: I just have to go south to Sihanouk street, go East until I get past the independence monument, and then go into the Phnom Penh Center. The entire high tech sector is in the Phnom Penh Center: Chris, from the UK, came to Cambodia 7 years ago, got married, made his own tech startup, and then tried to build up the tech sector in Cambodia by starting social businesses (social meaning for-good), encouraging Cambodian businesses, and teaching them about programming methodology.
Throughout the day, I suffered from jet lag. Perhaps I should have relaxed. By the next day, I was mostly fine.
I met everyone. They're all very friendly. Everyone speaks English (probably a little better than I speak Spanish). Two people from Argentina and one who went to school in Cuba speak fluent Spanish. Everyone except for me and the Argentineans speaks fluent Khmer. Every day, there is an exchange of languages (teaching a few words of Spanish or Khmer).
I can do little in Khmer other than navigate and say "yes" and "no," but my Spanish is getting a lot better. Two things help. First, I can passively listen to Spanish conversations and ask about words to learn. Second, I understand grammar a lot better now than when I was taking Spanish classes, so when I identify "lo" as a direct object pronoun, "se" or "le" as an indirect object pronoun and "équot; as a subject pronoun, the distinction makes sense.
The office has drinks, water, air conditioning, some programming books, and occasionally fruit. There is a ton of very good fruit that I have never had before (ie, Dragonfruit, which is like a black and white Kiwi), and all of the restaurants have good fruit drinks.
The Streets:
There are plenty of differences between Cambodia and the US, but the one that has been most apparent to me in Phnom Penh is the traffic.
Their conventions are similar to those in the US - travel on the right side of the road, stop at red lights - but in Phnom Penh, they are more conventions than laws. Thus, it is common to see vehicles going two ways down any road (though most will go one way).
The reason that this can happen is that most people drive motorcycles rather than cars. There are still plenty of cars (mostly reserved for wealthier people), but there are many times more motorcycles. Transportation for people without vehicles is not taxis, but on the back of a motorcycle or in a Tuk Tuk (a motorcycle that has a cabin in the back).
There also isn't much parking infrastructure. In some of the larger roads, there will be one or two lanes that are completely occupied with parked cars (I'm not sure how people get their cars out when they're completely surrounded by other cars). Most sidewalks have parked cars on them.
Everyone (pedestrians included) needs to keep their wits about them at all times. That means looking in all directions at all times. Crossing the street as a pedestrian involves walking slowly (so that motorcycles and cars can avoid you easily) across the road while cars and motorcycles are coming at you (and possible from the other direction too) and waiting for gaps to appear so that you can continue walking. Think Frogger.
It was surprisingly easy to get used to. And now I feel like I could navigate a city in the US blind (in fact, many people do navigate cities in the US blind).
The saving graces of Phnom Penh traffic: people drive slowly, and people use their blinkers. Because of that, I think that I see more accidents in a given period of time in the US than in Phnom Penh.
Navigating the streets is a mixed bag. Their street numbering system, unlike the US system, is sane. In the US, a city might have north/south streets numbered and east/west streets named. If I don't already know the entirety of a city, seeing a named street won't tell me how to get to another named street. Names are not ordered. In Phnom Penh, north/south and east/west streets are both numbered. As you go west or south, the number increases. East/west streets are even numbers and north/south streets are odd numbers. A numbered street can also be associated with a name (so you can still honor parts of your culture using streets), but every street has a number, so orienting yourself in the city is much easier. However, there aren't street signs on the corner of every street. They are present on most major streets, and many houses and businesses compensate for the lack of street signs by posting the street number with their address.
Addresses are the downside. Just like the US doesn't have a complete street numbering system, Phnom Penh doesn't have a house numbering system. Every house will have an address, but they are assigned ad-hoc. That means that addresses don't act as unique identifiers for houses and don't contain metadata about the location of houses. Take, for example, the address "323 N 8th St" in the US. That address is a unique identifier for a house: there will not be two houses that are "323 N 8th St." That address is at the opposite side of the street from "322 N 8th St." That address is near "322 N 8th St." That address is between "321 N 8th St" and "325 N 8th St." The address is also 3 streets away from the 0 street in the east/west streets. That's a lot of metadata stored in one address. Phnom Penh addresses have none of that metadata. Addresses are not necessarily unique. Addresses do not indicate one side of a street, what street the address is on (ie, many addresses are between 0 and 100 rather than going up by 100 at every street), or how far along in a street the address is (that is, addresses are not necessarily in increasing order).
If only the two systems combined.
I got moderately well acquainted with the streets by getting lost on my second day. The first day, I walked to work and back with Martin. The second day, because Martin gave me his phone but hadn't get given me his charger, I didn't have a way to call him to meet up or to ask for directions. It was a fairly straight shot to work, so I felt fine, but I still managed to take a wrong turn. Walking out of my apartment, I'm going east. I thought that walking out of my apartment, I was going south. Thus, when I turned left on the first major street, I was going north on Monivong rather than east on Sihanouk.
After about 2km, I realized that I should have arrived already and that I was seeing lots of landmarks that I didn't remember. I didn't want to call a Tuk Tuk because I likely wouldn't be able to communicate to the driver where the building was, and they would probably not let me know that they didn't know where the building was. I knew that the office was by the Independence Monument, but "Independence Monument" doesn't translate well into Khmer, and the people that I asked didn't speak very good English. Thankfully, I realized that it would be easy to orient myself if I could find Sihanouk street, and "Sihanouk" does translate well.
I ended up getting to work about an hour after I had planned arriving. The office has a relaxed environment, though, so as long as I'm putting in some hours, the exact time that I arrive isn't a big deal.
One thing that I notice when going around the streets is people's dress habits. Most people dress the same as me for the climate: a t shirt, shorts, and sandals. There are a few noticeable differences.
First, there is a significant number of people who wear pseudo-surgical masks (those things that go over a surgeon's mouth so that he or she doesn't breath out any particulates when someone is getting cut up and is without the protection that skin normally provides). I think that they're worn as a personal health precaution. If you aren't breathing in other people's particulates, then you won't get respiratory diseases from others (like SARS or Bird Flu). Now, though, those diseases aren't very prevalent, and most of the masks aren't surgical quality, so they would only reduce exposure. EDIT: alternately, I have heard that they are fairly common in Asia out of politeness and to reduce the spread of more common diseases like the flu.
Second, some people wear long sleeves despite the heat. I hear that this is because light skin is supposed to be a sign of beauty, so people want to minimize exposure to the sun. EDIT: alternately, a sign of wealth, since poor people tend to work out in the sun.
Third, monks have a distinctive look. They all wear orange robes, and sometimes they use yellowish umbrellas. They have shaved heads. They're also usually some of the only people that you see walking -- everyone else is on a motorcycle or bike or in a car. I don't think there's a rule against them taking motorcycles because I have seen a bunch riding as passengers.
It's also hard to miss the economic difference. I feel like the amount of people begging for money in Phnem Penh is about the same as in the US, but the amount of people trying to make a living in the streets is much higher. There will be someone offering a Tuk Tuk ride on every block. There is a security person of some sort on every block. Some are police, some seem to be privately hired. The most common thing I see them doing is helping people park on the sidewalk (or helping to stop the traffic while someone gets out of their parking place). Off of the main streets, there are also people building things of all sorts, and it's common to see someone doing some soldering. In the US, we have public and private infrastructure -- what economists call 'capital' -- and we hide away all of our workers inside offices. In Phnom Penh, you can see labor happening.
Despite the harsh economic situation, the next generation is looking bright. I don't see many kids on the streets during the day, and I do at night. During the day, they're in school.
Day Two:
My luggage came in on the second night. The airport gave me a call, said that it came in on Bangkok Air's night flight. They had someone deliver it to my apartment. The security was pretty good. The person had me fill out my passport information and had me bring a copy of the form that I got at the airport before he would give me my bag. It was nice to have a change of clothes.
I also checked out Lucky Market. It's a western style supermarket that's between my apartment and work. They're pretty much the same as a western supermarket.
One of the differences is the brands. They have most of the western brands, but they also have lots of imitation brands. They have Pringles, but they also have Ligos. They have Lays, but they also have Mr. Potato. They have Frosted Flakes, but they also have Larry's Arctic Flakes. The imitation brands are usually about half the price of the western brands, and their ingredients are also healthier: nothing that I can't pronounce, and usually only three or four ingredients. I wish they had an imitation Sun Chips -- they only have the real things.
The prices are also much more variable. Stuff that is uncharacteristic of the area and not easily packaged, shipped, and stored -- ice cream and cheese -- are about double what they would be in the US (though there are also generic brands that are pretty reasonable). Western brand name stuff is between half and full price of what it would be in the US. Stuff from the area (or easily produced in the area) is at most half of what it would be in the US. For instance, Dragonfruit and Passionfruit are very cheap, as is French bread (as a former French colony, they have a lot of French bread. A decent sized and good quality baguette costs about $0.60)
Their donuts are a little bit lacking. In the US, donuts have tons of frosting and sugar and sprinkles on top of them. The donuts in Lucky Market seem much more sparing with their toppings. Then again, I haven't actually tasted any of them.
Day Three:
Having my luggage was a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I have a change of clothes. On the other hand, I have my Birkenstocks. Apparently, they are too big for me when I'm not wearing socks. Thus, when I wore them to work, I had a few sores, and I limped around all day.
Thankfully, one of my coworkers offered me a ride home, so I didn't have to walk back in the sandals. In case you hadn't guessed from reading this far, his mode of transportation was a motorcycle. It was a little bit terrifying, but everything was fine. And I doubt that it's any more dangerous than walking.
When, in the future, I wore them with socks, they were perfectly comfortable.