The afternoon rains arrived about 3pm today, and loud claps of thunder are breaking through the sky. Today was quite hot even in the morning, with the sun and the heat beating straight into my "terrace" room which not shielded from the weather. The school feeding project demands normally about 2-3 months of preparation to get to the final submission stage. When I arrived here on 6 July, nothing had been started and thus I was expected to condense 2 months of work into about 15 days. Fine. Now, a hot opportunity has come up in East Timor and the region [View Full Entry]

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Today, the heat has reached the maximum of the trip.....by 8am, it was burning into my room..... I had a kind of expat meltdown, first with the internet not working at the office nor the hotel, all the internet cafes don't have air conditioning, the wireless on my laptop had been disabled after trekking across town to find a cafe that had it, then the heat and the lack of air conditioning, but I tried to hold my spoiled side at bay. We went to the Russian Market today with Susan and her kids, which was amazing. Any movie you can [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday, I had to meet with the partner in Kampong Cham which was a really beautiful town along the Mekong River. All the French colonial architecture, wide boulevards, and pleasantly calm streets somehow free of the millions of mopeds that every other city seems to have. The drive there was out of some National Geographic show with water buffalo and cows working the fields, farmers hunched over rice paddies, and low flat lands of rice paddies extending onto the horizon with only a few palm trees to dot the landscape. But after the meetings, I went to visit two of the [View Full Entry]

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Phnom Penh This is somehow what I remembered when I first started in this line of work and somehow I recognize that it's something I have been missing in the posh places where I have been over the last few years in the Europe-Middle East region. Phnom Penh reminds me alot of Africa. On the drive in from the airport, you pass block after block of low-rise, cheaply constructed buildings with pharmacies, auto repair, and dental clinics on the ground level fancy institutes and governmental buildings with weeds growing around their broken fences people who stare into your car as you [View Full Entry]

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So am I an expat who has become jaded and seeks out only the creature comforts from home? Today, I had sushi lunch in fresh restaurant, did a Bikram Yoga class (and sweated about a liter) from some Canadian girl who is travelling all around Indonesia giving Bikram Yoga classes, then to one hour foot reflexology, and then a dip in the rooftop pool. Yes, it's too posh. But sometimes a working boy needs to readjust, clear his head, and heal the damage from sitting at a computer. [View Full Entry]

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Jakarta, Day Two So the city grows on you in a way. After months in Lebanon, thank God some place is still cheap. Posh sushi dinner: $10. Indonesian lunch: $1. The city is like a stain which has spread densely in all directions with no plans, no destinations. There are barely no sidewalks so just to walk down the street is almost impossible with nowhere to walk, and motos and cars buzzing past you. But the food is great and cheap, the people are very friendly, and it's a charm that grows on you. The most quirky thing so far is [View Full Entry]

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Take Los Angeles, add a few million cars, add a few million more people, make it poorer, add some tropical trees and there you are. Is this the future of the world? Huge cities with no character, spreading out for miles with super highways, car exhaust, shopping malls with KFC and Zara outlets in each one, architecture that could be transplanted anywhere and look as if it belonged? I think of Lagos, Johannesburg, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Houston, and you see the same thing except the language changes, the people's bodies change, the food changes only somewhat......but it is as if you [View Full Entry]

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