I've come to the conclusion that if Dubai impresses you, there must be something fundamentally wrong with you. I find it tedious even to write about the place, as it feels like everything worth mentioning has been already uttered ad nauseum. The way I see it, Dubai is a haven for the ambitious, the haughty, the pretentious, and the plain desperate. Maybe it makes people feel posh by association to prance about in its ridiculous shopping malls. Everything's fake, thus it attracts the fakest of the fake. The city is like a perverted Disneyland, just that it's not mice and ducks that are worshipped, but locust capitalism itself. Just imagine if the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Nepalis who do all the work around there went on strike for a week. Dubai would implode. Façades ... read more

Via Praha, I make my way northwards, to Trutnov. I arrive after five hours on three different trains, walk to my guesthouse, and learn that the room I booked has been given to someone else. Unfortunately, I don't have any written booking confirmation, as I only called them up and reserved a room using a mixture of English, German and Russian. The lady at the reception nervously makes a lot of phone calls and checks the internet for a place to stay for that sad-looking creature sitting in front of her, who doesn't even understand her language. After maybe half an hour, she finally succeeds in this task and drives me to a place out of town, which actually seems to be closer to the Battlefield, Obscene Extreme's traditional venue. For an acceptable price, I get ... read more

After having visited Prague a few times already, but really not that much more in Czech Republic, I decided to branch out a little this time. First stop is Plzeň, the home of Pilsner beer. On the train ride to Prague I find a pretty good conversation partner in Gary, an Australian Indian from Melbourne. We chat about the finer (ha!) details of Australian culture and he provides me with some insight about what kinds of shit he has to take as an Australian with his background. Quite interesting, as so far, I hadn't heard the Australian Indian perspective firsthand. I change trains in Prague and hop on the train to Plzeň, where I arrive one and a half hours later. My host Rufina picks me up from the train station. She's Belarussian and in Plzeň ... read more

3am is never a good time to arrive, least of all at a place you've never been to before. Hong Kong's not that bad in that regard: at least there are no touts vying for my tourist dollar, and it feels pretty safe. I take the fast train from the airport to the Central train station on Hong Kong Island. The hard part is trying to orientate myself once I'm out of the station. A maze of barriers, high curbs and stairs awaits me, which is not fun to undertake with too much luggage. As it's the middle of the night, the escalators don't work. Eventually, I manage to cross the very busy street via a pedestrian bridge and find the right bus stop on the other side. When the bus finally arrives, I try to ... read more

With my internship in full swing, I'm a little too busy, which means I can't embark on as many excursions around Taipei as I would like to. Kind of...unusual for me. I wouldn't have thought that teaching can be that strenuous. No, wait, that was a lie, actually I pretty much expected it to be that way. Tuesday's the worst, where I got three classes with only a short lunch break in between, and afterwards I feel like a bag of dicks. By the way, please spare me the smart arse-comments in the vein of "You think that's a lot? Well, I have five classes each and every day, 365-82, and you don't see me complaining!". For a teaching noob like me it's tough enough standing in front of 40+ students, let alone performing well and ... read more