Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 1

On August 8, 2023August 8, 2023 By Faine GreenwoodIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I want to tell you a real bummer of a story about Facebook.

The kind of no-fun, downer tale that Alex Mosseri, the head of Threads, Meta’s new social media service, said he doesn’t want his website to support.

I arrived in Myanmar for the first time in November 2012, the same week that the country’s very first ATMs that worked with international credit cards went online. The humble money machine’s arrival was a big deal, one of the clearest signs yet that the oppressive, isolationist military junta that had run the country from 1962 all the way up to 2011 was truly gone. An indicator that Myanmar was entering a new, much more outwardly-focused, era.

*_{19th street in Yangon in 2013, photo by me}*

With the fall of the junta came an even bigger deal: the arrival of the relatively free Internet in Myanmar, liberated from the ultra-restrictive controls that the old regime had placed on its citizen’s access to international information. Before, the few bloggers that had managed to skirt the controls and write online, like poet and activist Nay Phone Latt, were met with prison sentences, fines, and violence.

Now, Nay Phone Latt was free, Internet cafes were doing a booming business, and there was even talk of the imminent arrival of publicly-available mobile data. And most exciting of all, people across Myanmar were setting up their very first Facebook accounts.

I’d come to Myanmar to write about the rise of the Internet, as part of my then-regular beat on tech in Southeast Asia – a subject I’d grown fascinated by ever since I started my first reporting job out of college at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. It was an opportune time for that kind of thing.

The Arab Spring, and the way in which its fearless millennial-aged leaders had organized on social media platforms that their authoritarian overlords understood poorly, had ushered in a wave of global optimism about how Facebook and Twitter could, just perhaps, usher in a new era of democracy and empathetic communication, build a perfect framework for a Marketplace of Ideas (and do it all while making a shit-ton of money).

According to some pundits, Mark Zuckerberg might just, in his weird nerd way, heal the world.

While I was more skeptical than most about if the ascendance of social media was a good thing or not, it was very clear to me that it was important – and so I’d begun my reporting career looking at what Cambodians were doing online, how they were using Facebook to politically organize against their own repressive government, to meet one another, to reach out to a broader technological world. I’d connected with a Myanmar NGO dedicated to digital inclusion, and through them, I got a chance to meet and interview a number of brilliant and extremely online Burmese people, all of them brimming with long-suppressed, almost giddy, optimism about their country’s technological future.

It was hard for me not to share their enthusiasm, their massive relief at finally getting out from under the jackboot of a military regime that had tried to lock them away from the rest of their world for as long as they could remember. I came away from speaking with them with a warm, happy feeling about how online communication maybe, just maybe, really did have the power to unfuck the world.

I’d also come to Myanmar because of Barack Obama.

The US had sent then-secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Myanmar on a diplomatic visit in late 2011, restored full diplomatic relations with Myanmar in January 2012, and had begun to roll back long-standing economic sanctions. This extended process of thawing the ice cube was set to culminate with the first-ever trip to Myanmar by a US President, who would meet with both President Thein Sein and the recently-freed and globally iconic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, to congratulate them on their achievements and to implore them to keep up the good work.

On the day of the President’s arrival, I walked towards the university auditorium where he was set to speak through the streets of Yangon, which were lined with excited and intensely curious Burmese people, many of whom were wearing t-shirts with Obama’s face on them, who were waving little paper American flags (sold by enterprising street vendors).

We all watched the massive US motorcade roll by, the President’s enormous black monolith of a car smack-dab in the center of it, and people cheered and shouted and waved, and shook my hand as the nearest American who could be congratulated.

*_{another one of my 2012 photos – the President in Yangon}*

Once there, I managed to talk my way into the official White House press pool, and I was able to join the great scrum of jostling foreign correspondents on the balcony of the auditorium as Obama, Clinton, and Suu Kyi embraced each other and spoke to the audience about the rise of a new relationship, a new era. For onlookers, it was easy to get seduced by how picture-perfect it all was, to believe that Myanmar was on the up-and-up, that both the government and its people were headed towards a freer, wealthier future.

But it was not that simple. Nothing ever is.

Prior to my first visit, in June 2012, people form the Rakhine Buddhist ethnic group and Muslims from the long-persecuted Rohingya ethnic minority, up in Myanmar’s north, had begun fighting with one another, in the latest outburst of tensions that had been flaring up on and off for generations. Myanmar state security forces headed to the scene at President Thein Sein’s request and promptly started making things even worse – rounding up Rohingya (long denied citizenship by the Burmese state) en masse, raiding their villages, raping them, killing them.

After a few months of relative peace, the violence escalated once again in October, right before both I and the President arrived in Myanmar. By then, at least 80 were dead, and it was estimated that somewhere in the ballpark of 100,000 people, almost all Rohingya, had been displaced, burned out of their homes and villages, forced into squalid and desperate refugee camps.

While United Nations experts raised the alarm in Geneva and Human Rights Watch released satellite imagery showing hundreds of burned buildings in Rohingya villages, most global onlookers seemed to regard the violence and the fire as one of those things: regrettable, but not unexpected, and certainly not so awful that it was worth torching newly-established relations ever.

Obama explicitly mentioned the Rohingya situation while speaking at the University of Yangon, calling upon Myanmar to “stop incitement and to stop violence.” For his part, President Thein Sein – who’d said just a few short months ago that his country didn’t want the Rohingya, and that it’d be best if they were resettled in any country willing to take them – publicly agreed to eleven US-defined human rights commitments, from “taking decisive action in Rakhine” to permitting aid workers to enter certain conflict-wracked areas. Messy. Imperfect. But, from the perspective of the US, good enough for now.

*_{temple in Yangon in 2012. photo by me.}*

After I got back from that first trip to Yangon, I kept following the Rohingya clashes in Myanmar on the news, watching with growing trepidation as the situation grew ever more terrible, as the deaths piled up, and as ever more Muslims were forced to flee into newly-established and massively growing refugee camps over the border in Bangladesh. I also watched as this growing darkness was reflected on the Internet – indeed, intensified by it, the online world and the offline world becoming ever more enmeshed, interlocked, impossible to tell apart.

As far as many newly online people around the world were concerned in the early 2010s, Facebook was the Internet: the single, centralized portal through which they interacted with the rest of the planet, where everything online that bore the slightest relevance to their lives took place. They were part of a millions-strong captive audience, and Facebook had realized that if they played their cards right, if they hurried the process along, they could keep all these people safely locked up in their own custom-designed, eminently profitable enclosures. And they could mask their ambitions by claiming that all they really wanted to do was help people gain economically-vital access to the Internet.

I’d already been seeing the darkness in Cambodia, where reporters had started to notice an alarming up-tick in violent, intense rhetoric against the Vietnamese minority in Khmer Facebook groups in the run-up to the 2013 elections, as the CNRP opposition party accused them of secretly wanting to take over Cambodia again. And now I was hearing about how Facebook was even worse in Myanmar, as more and more of the nation got online for the very first time: how Buddhist firebrand monks were using the platform to whip newly-online people into paroxysms of anger about the prospect of Muslims taking over their land. Outnumbering them.

But still, reasonable people had reasonable questions about the causality of it all. Was there a truly direct connection between the violence against Rohingyas and the nastiness on Facebook? Were enough people in Myanmar even online that it’d actually make a difference? Was the way people used Mark Zuckerberg’s platform really, ethically speaking, Mark Zuckerberg’s fault?

I spent the spring of 2013 mulling over these questions, rooting around in the nastier recesses of politically-minded Facebook groups, reading through the then-nascent literature on how social media could, just perhaps, drive social progress in ways that didn’t help bring about yet more Arab Springs and bust open secret torture prisons.

In June, I got the chance to go back to Yangon. I’d be writing about the nation’s first-ever Internet Freedom Forum, a gathering dedicated to helping Myanmar’s people take advantage of the new, liberated Internet. Nay Phone Latt spoke at the conference, and so did a number of the other brilliant young Burmese tech enthusiasts I’d met before. The mood was still buoyantly optimistic as we circulated from one Post-It note-filled brainstorming session to the next, as we drank tea, discussed Internet freedom regulations and online privacy.

And yet, I could detect a slight edge in the air, a certain trepidation that had grown, mutated into new forms, in the few months since I’d been away. People knew that the country’s fate still remained very much in doubt, and they knew the turn to democracy could evaporate just as quickly as it had come about. At night, I’d walk back to my hotel room through the silent, dark streets of Yangon – a city that was still figuring out what it wanted to do about night life – and sometimes stray dogs would tail me home, lean, rangy beasts with a worrisome, predatory alertness, much more so than I remembered seeing in the local curs in India and in Cambodia.

*_{vendor in Yangon in 2013 selling/promoting 969 Movement materials, a nationalist, anti-Muslim movement led by extremist monk Ashin Wirathu. photo by me.}*

During the conference, we talked about how hateful talk about the Rohingya was starting to pop up on Facebook, about how it was casting an ominous shadow over the good things about helping more people get online. Hopefully, it’d stay relatively isolated, and people could be taught to use and to read social media in more critical, careful ways. Hopefully, the whole thing would represent a nasty but not-unexpected blip on the road towards the Internet helping Myanmar build a better, freer society.

Hopefully.

And then, near the end of my visit, I had an honest-to-god Thomas Friedman moment. In a taxi cab.

The driver was a charming young Burmese man who spoke good English, and we chatted about the usual things for a bit: the weather (sticky), how I liked Yangon (quite a bit, hungry dogs aside), and my opinion on Burmese food (I’m a fan).

Then he asked me what I was in town for, and I told him that I’d come to write about the Internet. “Oh, yes, I’ve got a Facebook account now,” he said, with great enthusiasm. “It is very interesting. Learning a lot. I didn’t know about all the bad things the Bengalis had been doing.”

“Bad things?” I asked, though I knew what he was going to say next.

“Killing Buddhists, stealing their land. There’s pictures on Facebook. Everyone knows they’re terrorists,” he replied.

“Oh, fuck,” I thought.

I was going to write “you know what happened next.” But as I watched social media discourse about the launch of Threads this summer, I realized that a lot of you – good, smart, reasonably well-informed people – don’t know what happened in Myanmar after 2013. Or the role Facebook played.

So, here’s a brief summary.

Internet access ripped across Myanmar after 2013, and so did smartphones, which often came conveniently pre-loaded with the Facebook app. In 2016, Facebook even partnered with Myanmar’s government to launch two products that let people use basic versions of Facebook without having to pay for data: millions of people signed on, eager to talk to their friends and read the news for free on a platform that most assumed was perfectly trustworthy. They also used Facebook to talk about the Rohingya – and there was a lot to talk about, as the violence kept getting worse, as over a hundred thousand Rohingya were pushed into refugee camps.

In August 2017, a Rohingya armed group attacked military targets and killed civilians in Rakhine state: Myanmar’s security forces responded with total warfare. Soldiers massacred thousands of unarmed people, raped women, and burned down hundreds of villages. Children were incinerated inside their own homes.

*_{scene from one of the enormous refugee camps in Bangladesh. Credit: UN Women/Allison Joyce.}*

Over 730,000 Rohingya fled across the border into Bangladesh, forced to take up residence in overcrowded refugee camps where they still wait in limbo to this day, subject to the often unsympathetic, cruel whims of the Bangladeshi government. Hundreds of thousands more remained trapped unhappily in Myanmar, existing without rights and as a hated, hunted underclass. Experts started to apply terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” to the Rohingya killings, and few bothered to argue.

The few who did included Aung Sang Suu Kyi, the erstwhile human rights hero that I’d seen Obama shake hands with just a few years before. After becoming the de facto head of government in 2015, Suu Kyi started to vocally defend the military’s actions against people she deemed to be Muslim terrorists. She was still grumbling about unjust disinformation when she was brought before the Hague in 2019 to defend Myanmar against charges of genocide, praising the same military that kept her under house arrest for over a decade.

Yet Suu Kyi’s willingness to defend mass murder wasn’t enough to keep her in power.

In February 2021, the military decided that this political liberalization business had gone too far: it reverted to tradition, launching a coup against the government, invalidating the 2020 election, and arresting Aung San Suu Kyi and other officials on highly-suspect allegations of fraud. The military swiftly locked down Internet access, restricted aid worker freedom of movement, and viciously attacked protesters.

In response, both existing ethnic militias and newly formed ones fought just as ferociously back, creating a brutal civil war that’s still happening today. Nor have things improved for the Rohingya, who still languish in dangerous camps, who are still deprived of rights by governments in both Myanmar and in Bangladesh. Who still drown by the hundreds in overladen boats headed for places where they might, just might, find dignified work.

As this last dismal decade in Myanmar unfolded, one thing has become exceedingly clear: Facebook, in its rush to massively profit from getting an entire country on the Internet in just a few short years, played a key role in the country’s slide into hell. During that blood-soaked period from 2016 to 2018, website’s attention-hunting algorithms pumped vast amounts of ferocious anti-Rohingya content into the feeds of millions of Myanmar Facebook users, and the site failed over and over to counter dangerous hate speech, ignoring pleas from local activists, including some people I knew.

_{Screen cap from 8/7/2023 of an inflammatory Wirathu interview that’s still publicly visible on Facebook.}

Despite Facebook’s claims that it had cracked down on hate speech, in 2020, researchers found Facebook was still promoting anti-Rohingya hate videos from Ashin Wirathu, the extremist monk they’d supposedly banned years before. (Just now, it took me approximately 5 seconds to find an anti-Muslim 2020 interview with Ashin Wirathu, with English subtitles, still up and visible on a Facebook page run by Indian Hindu nationalists – and I wasn’t even asked to log in).

When the military launched its 2021 coup, Facebook promised, like always, that it would take action to reduce the reach of pro-junta posts. But researchers found that the constantly-churning algorithm continued to promote posts advocating for violence anyway.

As I write this, Facebook remains wildly popular in Myanmar today, persisting despite the military’s occasional, doomed attempts to ban it in retribution for attempting to ban them – measures which people relatively easily get around with VPNs. The site’s filters still consistently fail to catch ads promoting virulent-anti Rohingya hate-speech, and activists are regularly imprisoned by the junta for their anti-government Facebook posts. In Myanmar, as in much of the rest of the world, Facebook has accumulated a power center of its own, wound itself around the very idea of modern, connected life itself.

Nor can Zuckerberg claim it was a mistake, a misunderstanding. Throughout this entire dark period, Facebook knew what it was doing.

*_{mark zuckerberg at a 2018 keynote about fighting fake news, and we all know how well that went.}*

In 2018, an independent report commissioned by the company itself concluded that the website had helped fuel genocide, and the company agreed with its findings, said it was hiring more Burmese speaking moderators, that it was “looking into” creating a human rights policy. (It only got around to actually doing this in 2021).

The company’s statements on the matter remained bloodless, at a distance: the closest show of actual human emotion came from Adam Mosseri, the current Threads chief and Facebook’s then VP of product management. “Connecting the world isn’t always going to be a good thing,” he conceded on a Slate podcast. “We’re trying to take the issue seriously, but we lose some sleep over this.”

Mark Zuckerberg himself acknowledged, in a 2018 interview with Ezra Klein, that his company’s penchant for encouraging genocide was “a real issue” that “we’re paying a lot of attention to.”It was familiar Zuckerberg line. A chunk of bloody meat tossed to the press and to the public, a bribe that could get away with being bereft of actual content, actual human sentiment.

In another, even more illuminating, 2018 interview with Recode, Zuckerberg said that he felt “fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world.”

To drive the point home, he added this: “A lot of the most sensitive issues that we faced today are conflicts between our real values, right? Freedom of speech and hate speech and offensive content…. Where is the line, right? And the reality is that different people are drawn to different places, we serve people in a lot of countries around the world, and a lot of different opinions on that.”

In these words, Zuckerberg expressed his most fundamental perspective, the belief system that has shielded him with remarkable effectiveness from the public anger that he deserves. (He would go on to use almost the exact same phrasing to defend his soft-gloved treatment of Donald Trump in 2020 and 2021).

It’s phrasing that acknowledges the existence of ethical issues with tech, while deftly absolving the person who created these issues in the first place from responsibility for cleaning things up. It’s a message that Facebook is inevitable, inescapable, that humanity will simply have to adapt to its presence.

And it’s a message that allows Zuck to publicly pretend that he’s simply too humble to feel OK with making decisions for other people, even as he works hard, right out in the open, to herd an entire species into his immensely profitable, walled-garden of a website.

As I write this in 2023, Facebook, or Meta, if we’re going to politely go along with another one of the company’s great squid-ink moves, claims they’re still Working on The Myanmar Problem. I’m sure company spokespeople would agree, if I asked them, that they’re Very Apologetic and that they absolutely still Need to Do Better.

That’s what Meta always says, after every single damning revelation, after every single time they’re entirely and unequivocally caught doing something wildly immoral.

Zuckerberg and his company have learned this is really all they need to do, that there is little appetite among the truly powerful for holding them accountable. That the lawsuits filed against them by groups like the Rohingya, like the Ethiopians impacted by the war in Tigray, will almost inevitably fail.

But, no, I don’t blame anyone for not knowing about all this, about what Facebook helped enable in Myanmar, about what it did in Ethiopia, and in Kenya, and in India and South Sudan and in the United States, and a lot of other places besides.

After all, there are way fewer full-time journalists writing about these things than there used to be. Including me.

Enter the Pivot to Video.

How Drones can Protect Indigenous Land Rights – Latest for Slate

On July 17, 2015 By Faine GreenwoodIn aid, drones, southeast asia, TechnologyLeave a comment

The countryside in Flores. Which is not Borneo, but I like the picture.

Drones to the Rescue: how unmanned aerial vehicles can help indigenous people protect their land – Slate

My latest on Future Tense, documenting how inexpensive UAVs can help indigenous people (and other people without much access to resources) document where they live and what they own. From an interview with Irendra Radjawali, a fascinating Indonesian geographer who begun pioneering this kind of work with the Dayaks of Borneo, with some inroads into Papua and Bali. It’s really cool stuff.

I think this is going to be a particularly important usage of drones, and I hope to do more writing and research on that potential in the near future.

“Last Christmas” or Cambodia’s Inexplicable Favorite Christmas Song

On December 24, 2014 By Faine GreenwoodIn CambodiaLeave a comment

It’s the holidays, and I want to talk to you about a very, very annoying Christmas song, one that nevertheless has a special, perverse place in my heart thanks to my time in Cambodia.

It’s called “Last Christmas,” and was created by those British songster scamps “Wham,” who you’ve probably never heard of outside of the context of awkward oldies stations if you’re under 30. Watch the hilariously dated video, which features people with big hair and even bigger beaver-fur bonnets (I guess that’s what they are) cavorting in the snow. There is infidelity and lots of glaring and confusingly rosy tans. It is a poem to 1985, which is, admittedly, a year I didn’t even exist in.

If you’ve spent any time in Cambodia, you probably have a slightly uncomfortable memory linked to Wham’s “Last Christmas.” The song may be a slightly embarrassing relic of the Time of Neon-Colored Windbreakers in the US, but in Cambodia, it remains a beloved holiday favorite. And you remember hearing it, at some moment when you didn’t expect it. Probably a moment that caused you bit of retroactive shame.

That’s because “Last Christmas” is everywhere, and it’s essentially impossible to escape during Christmas – especially if you spend a lot of time hanging out at bars. (Which, if you’re an expat, you almost certainly do). You’re ordering your fourth drink or so on the holiday, you maybe didn’t call everyone you should have called, your life choices are shown to you in stark relief – were these the right tones? And then on comes “Last Christmas.” End scene.

I cannot adequately explain why “Last Christmas” has permeated so deeply into the Khmer consciousness, and I’ve never heard an entirely adequate explanation from a Cambodian person. There are even Khmer covers, with impressively high production values and videos that feature great bales of probably dangerously chemical fake snow. I have been told the sickness has permeated into Vietnam.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not actually Christmas, I should add. If you’re in Cambodia, “Last Christmas” will make its inevitable, ambiguous appearance regardless of the season, or in fact, even the time of day. It’s kind of like the gentle to-and-fro of the tide. Accept it, or go mad.

I’ve noticed the closer it gets to 3:00 AM, the more likely people are to dance very badly to “Last Christmas.” It’s a regular fixture on the essentially immobile playlist at Howie’s Bar on Street 51 in Phnom Penh. If it goes on the playlist, I will probably have to go home and cry.

Since, I am a bit sentimental about “Last Christmas,” as objectively terrible and dated as it is, despite the number of times I’m heard it in the middle of August. I’m back in the states this Christmas, and whenever the song comes back on, I’m filled with nostalgia for the Cambodia version of the holiday season. The elaborate displays at the Nagaworld Casino, with Vietnamese and Chinese tourists in business suits snapping appreciative photos.

Slightly sloppy but endlessly good natured holiday parties. Cambodian parents buying tiny-sized Santa suits to torment their children with. The occasional burst of fake snow emanating from a friendly-minded bank.

Fake trees on the back of tuk-tuks. Being wished “Happy Merry Christmas” all the time, said as a single phrase. Delightfully warm weather on Christmas Day, and maybe a trip to the beach. And of course, finding yourself at a particularly disreputable hostess bar at 4:00 AM, filled with some combination of affection for humanity and mild, nagging self-questioning. But you’re pretty happy anyway.

If anything fosters an entirely appropriate sense of affinity for your fellow man despite it all, it’s an expat Christmas.

Suck on, “Last Christmas.” Suck on.

Happy Merry Christmas.

PS: here’s a link to my Christmas in Cambodia photoblog from back in 2010.

Some Things I Approve Of in Chiang Mai – Sausage, Khao Soi, Night Markets

On November 3, 2014 By Faine GreenwoodIn thailand, TravelLeave a comment

Khao Soi

Khao soi is my favorite noodle dish in Asia, and that’s really saying quite a lot, considering the dizzying biodiversity of noodle soups in this region of the world. Thought to be of Burmese origin, the dish has been modified in Northern Thailand, and is, I think, superior to the original.

The essential deal here is a combo of spicy and richly flavored coconut milk broth flavored with a pungent curry paste, tender chicken or pork, chewy yellow noodles, and a topping of crispy deep fried noodles, sometimes substituted with fried pork skins. With a bowl of khao soi, you’re also given pickled cabbage, raw shallot, lime juice, and usually additional chili paste, which can be applied to taste.

The final result, with plenty of lime juice and supplemental chili in my case, is among the more sublime lunch specialties in the world – a perfect mix of spicy, sweet, tangy, and crunchy. I’ve found myself managing to work in two bowls of the stuff a day in khao soi country, especially as every restaurant seems to make it in a slightly different way. Chicken is usually the more common variety on offer, especially as it’s considered a Muslim-influenced dish, but I’m partial to the pork version when I can get it. Sometimes, chunks of blood are also thrown into the broth as well, especially up near Chiang Rai. You are welcome to quietly pick them out.

Hunting good khao soi is a pleasant endeavor, but I can suggest a little cafe right off the city wall with excellent khao soi. I didn’t get the name, but you’ll see it on the left if you are headed towards Arak Road Lane 5 on the main Arak Road (on the side of the city walls), right after you pass Sinharat Road Lane 2. Here’s a Google Maps link to the approximate location.

I came upon the place after unsuccessfully hunting another khao soi joint, and was glad I gave it a whirl: deliciously flavored, thick broth, and pork chunks as well as meatballs in the soup. I believe I *maybe* paid the equivalent of $3.

Saturday Night Market

Chiang Mai is home to a number of well-known universities, and with higher education, comes hipster kids with weird aesthetics and a burning desire for pocket money. This means that while the Saturday Night Market on Wualai Road (near the Chiang Mai Gate) does contain the usual assortment of generic Thai crapola – wooden frogs, obscene key-chains, those horrid elephant pants – there’s also a pleasing variety of interesting stuff, produced by young, local artists.

I usually come away from here with a pleasant selection of eccentric, cheap things. This time, it was a tote bag with watercolor paintings of fish on it and the word “Mackerel,” as well as a large sticker of a tiger’s head with “FUCK COMIC SANS” written on it. It’s the vastest night market I’ve ever run across in Asia, bustling along until well after 10:30 PM, and walkable for what seems like almost a mile. Tentacles of night time commerce spread off into the side streets from the main event, prompting pleasant wandering out of the heat of the day.

Soup seller at the Saturday Night Market.

The Saturday Night Market also has a nice selection of food stalls, with authentic Thai specialties and not-so-authentic, as well as buskers and performances. The vibe of the event is perhaps its biggest selling point, with a particular, local energy that is quite fun to jump into as a visitor. Finally, there’s spectacular people-watching — well, if you like seeing backpackers clash with Thai hipsters, annoyed looking elderly food sellers, and befuddled looking middle-aged Aussies in singlets. And of course you like that, everyone with any taste likes that.

chiang mai sausages better — Died and found myself alighting in Pork Heaven.

A Dizzying Array of Delicious Pork Products

chiang mai pork rinds — Thai pork rinds.

My family hails from the Southern United States, a part of the world with a deep, spiritual relationship with eating pigs. Northern Thailand shares this intense porcine affinity with Appalachia, and Chiang Mai’s food markets offer a delightful array of pork products, all at highly reasonable prices and with intense flavoring.

A particular standout is sai ua or Northern Thai sausage, produced with a combination of minced pork, curry paste, herbs, and Thai spices. The end result is a delightfully fresh and unexpected snack that is likely unlike anything you’ve tasted before, at least if you hail from the West. Sai ua is usually sold in long links, and is typically eaten plain, although some clever person needs to take this Thai hot dog concept to the slavering, food-truck besotted masses of Silicon Valley or Portland.

Yet another delightful Northern sausage product is fermented pork sausage (sai krok Isan), which is made with a combination of pork and rice – for you Louisiana people, it’s essentially Thai boudin with a tangy, funky additional kick from the fermentation process. It’s completely addictive and I find it very difficult to step away from stalls that sell it, usually packed into small balls that can easily be scooped up with a cabbage leaf and a fresh, incendiary green chili.

Also worth seeking out are meaty pork rinds, which are of course nothing more or less than deep-fried pork skin. Much of the world seems to find the idea of merrily consuming fried pig epidermis to be deeply disturbing, but both my noble Southern ancestors and the people of Northern Thailand consider them to be a marvelous delicacy, perfect with a beer or three. Not all pork rinds are created equal – some are fresher and meatier than others, while some feature a nice dusting of spicy chili – so it’s worth experimenting from Chiang Mai’s sundry meat-selling ladies. If I can, I like to toss them with some vinegar-based hot sauce, in the finest New Orleans style, but they’re quite delectable without.

Isaan Food

It’s tragic, but the Isaan food typical of Northern Thailand and adjoining regions of Laos is very little known outside of Southeast Asia. True: it’s spicy and often features ingredients that can charitably be described as eccentric, but I’m very partial to its freshness and unabashedly pungent nature. Pungent, rustic-style fish sauce, chili, pickles all sorts, fresh herbs, sticky rice, and smoky flavors are all typical of Isaan food, as well as “jungle” curries more reliant on herbs than they are on rich coconut milk and large quantities of meat.

If you’ve had and enjoyed tangy, eye-bleedingly spicy papaya salad (som tum) before, you’ve had a bit of exposure to Isaan food. In the Lao and Northern style, it’s made with more fish sauce and chili than the versions you’ll find in the South. It’s been written that Isaan food is so aggressively flavored in an effort to make residents of the traditionally poor region be content with padding their meals out primarily with sticky rice. It sounds legitimate enough, especially when one takes into account the fact that sticky rice has a habit of expanding in one’s stomach.

Pleasingly, Chiang Mai is a great, central place to sample good Isaan food in all its variety, and there’s tons of restaurants to choose from. Some places may bill themselves as Lanna or Northern Thai in lieu of Isaan, but there’s considerable overlap in style between them.

Nam phrik (Thai dip or "salsa) with tomato and eggplant. — Nam phrik (Thai dip or “salsa) with tomato and eggplant.

Considering that most Isaan restaurants are fluorescent lit mom-and-pop affairs – which is fine, but sometimes you’re perversely interested in a hint of ambiance, or at least clean tables – I was particularly impressed with the contemporary design of Tong Tem Toh, a Northern Thai restaurant located close to Chiang Mai University.

Up the almost painfully hip 11 Nimman Haeminda Soi 13, it’s popular with young Thais, and has an extensive menu of dishes that are distinctly hard to find elsewhere – though in the evening, there’s plenty of charcoal grilled meats on offer for those in your group with cowardly palates. Always be sure to emphasize that you want your food spicy when dining as a Westerner in Isaan establishments,, as Thais, usually correctly, assume that foreigners can’t hang.

I’m fascinated by the array of nam phrik (Thai “dip” or “salsa”) specialties available in the North, which are a handy answer to Mexican-style salsa bars. Here, we enjoyed a bowl of nam phrik ong, which is best described as Thai bolognese: minced pork, tomato, and smoky chili, served with fresh vegetables for dipping and scooping. It was entirely addictive and I’m learning to make it. The menu also has nam phrik num, a green Thai “salsa” made with roasted green chiles that would fit in beautifully on any given enchilada.

issan bamboo shoots — Bamboo shoots in coconut milk with pork.

We also tried fresh, herbaceous tamarind leaf salad with a fish sauce dressing and a liberal topping of pork rinds, as well as bamboo shoots cooked pork and a little bit of coconut milk and chili (which could have been a little warmer). Joining these dishes was a tasty serving of egg, rice, and pork sausage (jeen som mok kai) with peanuts and fresh garlic on the side, as well as a tasty version of sai ua with lots of pungent flavor.

Best of all was the Northern style pork belly curry, with big chunks of tender, fatty pork in a complex, smoky-tasting sauce, with peanuts and tamarind juice and a bit of coconut milk. We offset everything with little balls of sticky rice from nice woven bamboo containers, and a hefty quantity of Chang beer.

Anti-Vietnam Protests in Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Oct 6th

On October 6, 2014 By Faine GreenwoodIn Cambodia, photography, politics, southeast asiaLeave a comment

Protests against a Vietnamese officials statement about the historical ownership of Kampuchea Krom – what is now Southern Vietnam – continued into a third day on Monday, as members of various groups allied against the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia gathered outside the Vietnamese Embassy on Monivong Boulevard.

By my estimation, around 100 people were at the Embassy by 11:00 AM, and I was told that other activists had convened at the French Embassy and at the National Assembly – I’d appreciate it if someone could verify that for me.

Monks pose with an image of Kampuchea Krom hero Son Kuy.

Many monks had turned out to support the nationalist cause, and they had brought sundry burnable items with them. First to go was a flag, set ablaze to shouts denigrating the “Youn,” a term for the Vietnamese many feel is pejorative. (One of the monks told the Phnom Penh Post that the flag burning, while effectively symbolic, was also rather expensive).

People smiled and laughed as the flag burned, snapping photos with their mobile phones and tablets. The monks added a rather showman-like element to the burnings, posing dramatically for the cameras, and shouting their complaints about the Vietnamese and their spokesman’s statements about Kampuchea Krom into a large white microphone.

As the day wore on – punctuated with occasionally bouts of heavy rain – the monks brought out a sheaf of conical hats, meant to represent Vietnam, and proceeded to write upon then destroy them. “This blood is black blood” read the hats, which were alternately sat upon, spat on, and crushed beneath the sandaled, sticker-adorned feet of the activists present.

A young boy shouts his anger at the Vietnamese into a loudspeaker.

I chatted with a few of the activists who were present there, including 26-year-old aluminum factory worker Rakin Sok, who told me he works in South Korea and recently returned to participate in the protests. “Cambodia is not a free country – it’s Communist like Iran or China,” he said, noting that the government prioritizes benefits for foreigners (such as the Vietnamese) over those doled out to its own people.

“If we don’t have negotiations, we will burn the Embassy,” 45-year-old retiree Pearun Nuon told me, taking a harder tack that has been stated publicly before by the activists. “All Cambodian people, they don’t like Vietnamese people, you know – they’re thieves, they stole my country, they stole my land.”

Stamping upon a conical hat, a serious insult in Khmer culture.

There is, perhaps, some precedent here: in 2003, the Thai Embassy in Cambodia was sacked and partially burned, after a Khmer newspaper claimed that a Thai actress said Angkor Wat historically belonged to Thailand.

Nuon told me that there are “now around 4 million Vietnamese” illegally living in Cambodia, and expressed his desire that the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party take power in the next national election. “I hope some future new government will send them back to their country,” he said.

Chantou, a 29-year-old local government volunteer for the Chankarmon district, claimed that the Vietnamese largely control the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and by proxy, Prime Minister Hun Sen. “Ho Chi Minh always tried to drive away the government of Vietnam, to get Cambodia to belong to Vietnam,” he said.

While he believes that the Vietnamese enjoy special privileges, he prefers that the problem be brought to the Hague, rather than violently dealt with. A new government might help accomplish that, he said, albeit with the people’s consent. “Sam Rainsy has lots of promise, but if he doesn’t follow that promise, the people will protest, and Mr Sam Rainsy will stop his powers.”

Eighteen-year-old Em Chhuna told me he’d come to demand an apology from Vietnamese officials, claiming that the government is “under the slavery of the Vietnamese.”

“Last year I read a book by William Shawcross,” he said. “Even my King, Hun Sen, and others, they vote for Vietnam. Everything is prepared by Vietnam. I absolutely want Vietnam to leave Cambodia.”

Chhuna lamented that his neighborhood along the Tonle Sap in Phnom Penh was being taken over by the Vietnamese, but said he would be willing to accept a small number of Vietnamese immigrants if they arrived legally.

What does he think of these protest tactics? “It could become a violent demonstration,” he told me.

“Are you OK with violence?” I asked him.

“Maybe,” he said, with a thoughtful look.

Flying a Drone at Olympic Stadium – Cambodia

On October 4, 2014 By Faine GreenwoodIn Cambodia, dronesLeave a comment

Phnom Penh’s Olympic stadium is saddled with a bit of a misnomer. Begun in 1963, the earthworks-heavy structure was crafted by revered Khmer architect Vann Molyvann, and was originally intended to host the 1963 Southeast Asian Peninsular Games. Politics got in the way, but the stadium and its 50,000 person capacity persist to this day.

Probably the most colorful incident in its history took place in 1965, when the now deceased King Norodom Sihanouk offered up the place for the FIFA World Cup.

The reason? North Korea, to the shock of everyone, faced Australia in a qualifier, and few countries were diplomatically suitable to receive the DPRK delegation. Sihanouk, a long time friend of North Korea, proved to be a handy go-between. Olympic Stadium hosted the matches in November of 1965, and in incidents that should prove rather awkward for Australian national pride, the DPRK won them both.

Some of its history is rather more dark. Prior to the Khmer Rouge invasion and during the troubled Lon Nol period, it served as a refugee camp and field hospital (per the records I’ve dug up), providing some measure of shelter to the thousands upon thousands of refugees who streamed into Phnom Penh from the countryside during this period. Upon the Khmer Rouge take-over of the city on April 17th of 1975, numerous military officers were taken to the stadium to be publicly executed.

Nowadays, the stadium is a pleasant spot in the center of the city that is particular favored by local Cambodians in curious spandex get-ups, footballers of various nationalities, and kids playing pick-up games. I admit I’d never been there before I got my Phantom 2, driving by it constantly but never managing to carve out the time or motivation to hop off the bike and have a look. Now, I’ve got a certain new-found appreciation for one of Phnom Penh’s architectural landmarks.

I shot (most) of these images during Pchum Ben, when the city was pleasingly quiet and empty as a result of the extended religious holiday. If you’re keen to do the same with your own UAV, it’s responsible to shoot at a time when the stadium is relatively empty. The security guards seemed profoundly disinterested in what I was up to, but I’d keep an eye out. It was also surprisingly windy around the stadium in late September, but once I was above 20 feet or so, it slackened a bit and the UAV proved easy to control.

Why I Hate Backpackers: An Illustrated Guide

On September 23, 2014 By Faine GreenwoodIn Cambodia, comics, southeast asia, Travel, writing32 Comments

I am regularly asked by acquaintances and friends why I hate backpackers. They are used to seeing my anti-backpacker screeds on Twitter or when they meet me at the bar, ready with my latest story about those horrible people who wear elephant-patterned pants and talk incessantly about spirituality. They conclude the obvious: I loathe backpackers and if I do not wish harm upon them, I do at least wish acute bedbugs.

Allow me to be honest: I don’t really HATE backpackers. Hate is a strong and meaningful word, a phrase that should properly be reserved for things that warrant it – such as, say, ISIS, neo-Nazis, and people who walk a bit too slowly on sidewalks. I would rescue a drowning backpacker. I would save a backpacker from feral dogs. I might give a backpacker marginally accurate driving directions. (I would not lend a backpacker money).

While I do not actually hate them, per-say, I do find them obnoxious, and that is really the root of all the effort I exert on mocking them, and why most expats I associate with share the same low opinion of their ilk.

For, picture this common scenario: you are over the age of 22 and a person of moderate aesthetic expectations residing in Southeast Asia. You spend time and money journeying to a supposedly bucolic island in the middle of nowhere, and on that glorious white sand, you find a pack of American frat-boys drinking Smirnoff Ice and hooting at one another. You are displeased. You thought you left this behind.

Someone proceeds to mock you for asking them to turn down the repetitive dubstep music. They are all doing shrooms and making out with each other and they are not even sharing their beer. Your displeasure turns to raw, vicious hatred.

The list of grievances – beyond this oft-repeated scenario – goes on. Backpackers show up at bars with acoustic guitars in the angelic hope of being scouted for “talent.” Backpackers will occasionally grow emotional for no particularly good reason and read you their poetry, which is inevitably heavily inspired by both Bukowski and that Kings of Leon song that really touched their hearts back in high school. Backpackers noisily demand that they be able to enjoy the trappings of home, from Family Guy reruns to chilled Snickers bars, wherever they noisily alight – cackling and domineering, like a flock of shitting starlings. Backpackers smell funny. Backpackers have better iPhones than you.

I could continue in this fashion, but it wouldn’t be very interesting. So, I thought I would explain with the assistance of some illustrations why I think backpackers blow, and maybe even offer some explanations for why I – and so many other expats – feel this way. (Hint: it comes down to self-loathing, kind of).

BACKPACKERS ARE THE WORLD’S LEAST OPPRESSED PEOPLE

Backpackers make for convenient targets because they are roughly the exact opposite of an oppressed group, the antipode of the world’s wretched, starving, and afraid. This makes them convenient: it’s true that making fun of disabled people, impoverished women, or the gravely mentally ill is cruel sport that is justifiably condemned by everyone with a conscience.

But backpackers are by definition among the planet’s most fortunate people. Unlike most everyone else, they are able to spend a good portion of the most productive and physically fit bits of their lives knocking around the world and doing inordinate quantities of shrooms.

Most are either attending a nice university or will soon head off to do so after gaining “life experience.” Most have nice families who care about them and wish they would get on Skype more often. Most will walk into decent jobs that appreciate how “worldly” they are after they finish contracting skin cancer in Sri Lanka.

All this makes them delightfully guilt-free targets — the Diet Coke and rice cakes of cruel humor. Mocking a backpacker does not harm them beyond the occasional bad feeling, but brings great pleasure to bitter expats undergoing existential crisis. Further, most backpackers are completely disinterested in the opinion of weird expats wearing business clothes in the first place.

Everyone (kind of) wins.

BACKPACKERS ARE HAVING WAY MORE FUN THAN US

Backpackers exist at an absolutely infuriating distance from real life, a division that often manages to annoy the piss out of locals and expatriates alike. Locals are often merely scraping by in their native country, subject to the whims of corrupt governments and poorly-planned economies. Expats usually are at least making a good faith effort at sustaining themselves in their new country (with varying degrees of success), and are subject to the usual concerns of paying their rent and soliciting paying work.

Into this situation, then, the backpacker saunters onto the stage with savings, a trust fund, or seriously poorly-advised credit decisions, and then proceeds to do nothing whatsoever but chill and eat marijuana-infused pizza.

At the same time, everyone else is selling fruit, closing real-estate deals, teaching English, driving tuk tuks, or analyzing political affairs — all pursuits a lot less fun than doing body shots off of mysterious but sexy Australians.

This can do nothing but breed a certain amount of resentment among people who are incapable of fucking off for two months to cover themselves in glow paint and drink buckets full of questionable liquor. Angry muttering ensures.

Backpackers, it’s true, do have their uses, as anyone who runs a business that caters to the drunk and stupid backpacker market will tell you. Purveyors of fine happy truffles or pizza, ladies who sell cans of Coca-Cola at Angkor Wat, the guy who does thousands of “tribal” tattoos each week: they acknowledge the economic usefulness of backpackers, but they’re probably not overwhelmed with love for them, either.

Expats aren’t often economically dependent on the backpacker market but will usually (under duress) cede one use for backpackers and their obnoxiously free-spirited ways: they are convenient if you find yourself lonely and questioning your existence at the dance club at two in the morning. And they don’t know any of your friends.

BACKPACKERS ARE CHEAP BASTARDS

Despite their obviously blessed position in life, backpackers are cheap bastards. Young Breeze may reside in a mansion in Malibu during her summer holidays, but while vacationing in Vietnam, she turns into a merciless penny-pincher – arguing virulently with aged women attempting to mark up cans of Coca-Cola by 50 cents in front of tourist attractions. They will always take the cheapest bus, even it has been known for decades that said bus is run by a professional thievery cartel and occasionally plummets off of cliffs. Hotel rooms filled with cockroaches, festooned with poorly-concealed blood stains, and set directly over a low-end strip club? No problem – it cost $3 less than the other place.

Backpackers are regularly seen savagely chiseling people over tourist trinkets, t-shirts, and things that have very visible price tags stuck to them. Some will even attempt to bargain with the wait staff at restaurants, apparently unaware that that is not actually a thing that happens. They will occasionally attempt to whittle down the price of a $5 souvenir t-shirt while at the same time texting on their latest-model iPhone.

Backpackers are also known for walking out on hotel tabs, absconding with random items in guesthouses and restaurants, stealing the toilet paper, and attempting to “borrow” $20 from you because they just haven’t quite been able to to get their mothers to Western Union them spending money yet. (Do not lend them $20. It is a trap).

They find their cheapness to be a point of pride, and will express both awe and derision if you mention spending more than $6 on basically anything. It usually goes like this: “You spent $12 on a three-course French meal, with wine? Ugh, are you insane? I just eat canned tuna for every meal, man.”

Despite their relentless bargaining, backpackers are more than willing to spend the average annual salary of a Cambodian farmer on liquor during their adventures through Southeast Asia. Pointing out this logical inconsistency only annoys and occasionally enrages them.

BULLSHIT SPIRITUALISM

Backpackers are founts of bullshit spiritualism, a habit most likely directly resulted to the fact that they’re not actually worrying about making a living and thus are filled with a sense of serenity and happiness. This curious, opiate-effect of word travel is well known: many young people in Asia have informed all their friends on Facebook and thus the world that they are traveling to the Mysterious Orient to Find Themselves.

That’s fine to a point, I suppose, but the problem comes when you’re just trying to have a casual chat at the bar and someone wants to rave at you about how awesome Jack Kerouac is, or how that time they did pyschedelic drugs on the beach with roughly 15,000 students at Leeds University really saved their life man, or how they’re totally going to become a Buddhist monk next month, really. (I also believe that the movie “Into the Wild” – the point of which everyone seems to miss – ought to be banned with extreme prejudice).

This fondness for silly manifestations of spirituality is often wildly inflicted on the locals, who are dubbed “deep” and “so beautiful” by moon-bat travelers — who seem unable to appreciate that the locals are actually just fellow human beings trying to live their lives like anyone else, instead of exotic zoo animals with funny accents.

This grows especially ridiculous in Cambodia with its attendant Khmer Rouge history, where backpackers seem to feel the need to wax lyrical about how Khmer people “smile all the time, despite all the loss they’ve suffered.”

You are expected to nod and agree with the profound depth of this statement, as you are expected to smile and nod at all statements made by a backpacker with the faintest whiff of spiritual depth. Claiming you in fact think these observations about the solemn oneness of the universe (or whatever) are hilariously stupid will be greeted with mute incomprehension.

OH JUST A LITTLE SELF LOATHING

I freely admit that my public emissions of hatred towards backpackers are deeply rooted in self-loathing. I suspect this is not uncommon, and is part of the reason why backpackers are treated with such keen hatred by the expat community in most places.

The fact is that I often find it hard to figure out what differentiates me from them.

I mean, look: the below illustration is a typical backpacker.

And this is me definitely NOT being a backpacker. Somehow.

I think I’m not alone in my near-biweekly identity crisis. Most expats with functioning consciences are keenly aware of being interlopers in a foreign land, and we are also aware that in terms of both our appearance and our bank accounts, we are often rather hard to tell apart from the backpacking brethren.

Local people add to this sense of insecurity, scrutinizing us with amusement and saying “Oh, you LIVE here!” when you say something halting in the local language or express some vague knowledge of local geography.

I am often very afraid that someone in Cambodia will insist that I do NOT live here – and indeed, it has been a while since I really have. If I do not live there, where exactly do I live? Does that mean I’m just a backpacker who regularly showers and on very rare occasions collects a paycheck?

How terrifying.

I take out this insecurity and lack of confidence in my social position on a convenient target: backpackers. Sure, I might be inept and suck at the language, but I’m not wandering around monasteries with my be-furred nipples hanging out of an Angkor Beer shirt. Nor am I haggling with an old woman over 50 cents.

I have fallen, perhaps, but they have fallen so much farther and don’t even *know* about it.

This helps me sleep at night.

This is why I hate backpackers.

Why You Should Pay Attention to Political Unrest in Thailand – UN Dispatch

On May 15, 2014 By Faine GreenwoodIn politics, southeast asia, thailand, un dispatchLeave a comment

Thailand Has Ousted Its Prime Minister – Here’s Why You Should Care

It’s over: Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra has finally been ousted by a Thai court after a contentious and occasionally bloody political standoff that has dragged on since last summer. In office since the summer of 2011, Shinawatra rode the Thai political tiger for as long as she could — but was eventually brought down by allegations that she transferred a bureaucrat illegally for her own political ends.

Yingluck is now the latest political casualty in the ongoing battle between “red shirt” supporters of the Pheu Thai party and her exiled brother, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and the “yellow shirts,” who largely are composed of Bangkok residents and wealthier, urban Thais.

Already removed from power, her troubles don’t end there: she was indicted by Thailand’s anti-graft body over a rice subsidy scheme, and may be impeached by the Senate if found guilty.

Manila and Intramuros

On July 11, 2013 By Faine GreenwoodIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The Philippines is looked over.

The visitor to the Philippines from the US is confronted with a large archipelago full of people who are very much aware of your homeland, who you yourself remain distinctly unaware of. All Californians grew up with Filipinos at school and in the neighborhood, but somehow we still looked through the reality of their place of origin.

Filipino restaurants didn’t dot the neighborhood, the local community college was unlikely to offer Tagalog lessons, and no one (other than Filipinos) spoke of saving up their money for that dream trip to Manila. Thailand and Vietnam seemed more real: even history books restricted the Philippines to a curious footnote in the remarkable career of MacArthur, or a paragraph or two about the Marcos regime, and Imelda’s fondness for footwear.

It is the overlooked Southeast Asian nation to the north, unless you’re a scuba diver: a long-term expat friend observed to me that he suspects the bulk of visitors are Hong Kong residents desperate to escape their peninsula for a long weekend. And there, Manila is only a brief plane ride away.

It is blighted perhaps but not all of it is blighted. In the rare event of seeing an image of Manila in the Western media, it is inevitable that a dump be portrayed. Perhaps a correspondent will be standing atop this remarkable monument to filth, looking concerned and talking about the Plight Of The Poor.

Manila’s not-so-poor warrant not a mention, and the decline of the corrupted but very interesting Marcoses has rendered even the elite unimportant. “There’s no there there,” one imagines Gertrude Stein observing of the place, circa 2013.

But Manila also possesses skyscrapers – great canyons of them, a skyline “that encircles you” as my friend observed — and universities with mowed grass, and an old Spanish center, and suburbs with single-family houses and a profusion of joggers. Also there are mallls, malls that would fit into Iowa City, with everyone nipping in for Taco Bell and the latest sale on Vons sneakers, and walking down long marbled corridors of entirely American-origin shops, with not a single hint that you are in fact in Asia.

A hefty percentage of the crowd is wearing a shirt with a NFL team logo on it, or the American flag, and even the children are outfitted in Adidas.

The entire city strikes me as some parallel American re-imagining in some ways. In some ways, it makes me feel embarrassed. We – nationally, in nationalist terms – did not do well by this country.

I decided to visit Intramuros because I am fond of Spanish colonial architecture, and also because I tend to feel that a good way to begin understanding what a city is all about is backtracking to where it first started from.

Manila was Intramuros and Intramuros was Manila before the slow progression of the city across the face of southern Luzon: here was the first Spanish feint into building their Ever Loyal City, populated by religious men, traders, and the local “Negritos” (as the locals, who were presumably both small and dark, were unkindly dubbed).

The sameness of the Spanish colonial experiment is remarkable to me, and it is also comforting, as someone who has spent a hefty percentage of my life residing within various bits of the former Iberian empire. The same cobblestone streets and high ceilings; the same growths of palm trees and yellow-washed walls, and courtyards with austere fountains in them, the same brown signs and road-side lanterns.

A stroll through Intramuros was very much akin to a stroll through the French Quarter (first built by the Spanish) or Ybor City in Tampa: I was disappointed to find that no one had thought to set up a shop producing hand-rolled cigars, though tobacco is not a primary Philippine export.

The San Agustin church in Intramuros was buit in 1589 and is one of the only structures still standing after the bombardment of the old city by WWII: it is an interesting mental exercise to stand here, and note that this church predates the oldest standing structures of the Spanish colonial experiment in New Mexico. The church itself is violently Iberian: a stone Roman Catholic edifice dotted with fading tapestries, chipped wooden sculptures of Christ and the disciples, and lightly-flickering candles. I was in Southeast Asia, but I was most reminded of my 2009 visit to Spanish Toledo: it was an entirely new form of exoticism.

San Agustin is also known as the wedding capital of the city, and for good reason: there was one going on the morning I was there. I spied upon the extremely long ceremony from behind a grate and from the balcony where the antique pipe organ sits: I never did manage to see The Kiss The Bride Part, and indeed, found it difficult to determine exactly when the ceremony ended. Thus is my knowledge of Catholic weddings.

I headed for lunch at the Ristorante Delle Mitre, acros the street from San Agustin. The restaurant is themed in a fashion that can only be described as “bishop,” with an extensive Philippine – Western menu where most of the dishes are named after either saints or former bishops.

Nuns in red and white habits circulate the place and man the kitchen, and the entire ambience is exactly that of a Cuban cafe in Tampa or in Miami. I ordered seafood chowder and an enormous pork knuckle in tomato sauce with plantains and was deeply satisfied. They brought me San Miguel in a frosted mug the size of my head, with lime in it. I did not try the cafe con leche: for a nation that grows excellent coffee, the coffee that is actually served in the Philippines is an exercise in disappointment.

I left the church and walked a block off Intramuros, the street beside the Manila House Museum, and you are back in the Phillipines: I walked down a Sunday street populated by people sitting about doing nothing in particular, as befits the Sabbath, listening to music and eating deep-fried bananas. “Hey girl!” a middle-aged man in a tank top said to me, waving from the corner.

I waved back. Waving back is a good idea here.

War correspondents of legend and song unveil memorial in Phnom Penh, Cambodia – GlobalPost

On February 7, 2013 By Faine GreenwoodIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Many of the most prominent surviving correspondents who covered Cambodia’s civil war gathered in Phnom Penh on Wednesday for the unveiling of a memorial to the “at least” 37 journalists who perished on Cambodian soil between 1970 and 1975.

Buddhist monks performed religious rites and Cambodian information minister Khieu Kanharith arrived to help inaugurate the black stone memorial, which bore the names of correspondents killed in the field.

Read more from GlobalPost: Record number of journalists killed worldwide in 2012

Chhang Song, a former information minister under the deposed 1970s Cambodian leader Lon Nol, was also on hand to speak at the ceremony, as the “old hacks,” as some of them called each other, gathered to remember their fallen.

“Thirty-seven have died, but they have not died in my heart,” Song, who is now wheelchair-bound, said of the deceased correspondents.

“I have carried the names, the faces, the words of these people who died for their profession.”