Travels in the Riel World

Former President Bill Clinton has outlined goals and progress of the Clinton Global Initiative, which will hold its second annual conference in September.  For more information on the initiative, you can go here.  Or, check out a news report from last year’s gathering of 800 world leaders.

Rolling Stone, which jumped into the China market this past month with a bang, may never get to publish a second issue in the country.  According to the LA Times, the magazine has run afoul of government regulations.

Articles in the first Chinese edition of Rolling Stone about a rock star associated with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and a blogger who wrote about her sex life pushed the limits of what is permissible.  But the case appears to be more about a clash between the magazine’s brash business strategy and regulators keen to show who is boss.

The problem may be that Rolling Stone moved too fast and didn’t pay enough attention to Chinese ways.  As the Times notes:

China often depends on a patina of legality that allows companies or individuals to get things done while ensuring that those in power don’t lose face. Push things too far, however, and you risk a backlash.

“It’s my duty to give my children an interesting childhood.”

So says Tahir Shah, a British writer who moved his wife and two children to Morocco, renovated a 10-bedroom mansion, began a new life, and then wrote a book (The Caliph’s House) about the whole experience.  The New York Times profiled Shah and his new home.

Home is now Dar Khalifa, a walled villa whose rooftop terraces offer not only a cinematic view of the Atlantic Ocean but also the dispiriting sprawl of tin-roofed shacks and fly-blown garbage heaps that is the standard-issue landscape of Morocco’s slums. This dramatically different new life is the alternately comical and alarming subject of Mr. Shah’s 10th book, The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca, published by Bantam in February.

It goes without saying that immigrants are central to the U.S. identity.  But that doesn’t mean that Americans have always agreed about the issue of immigration.  Far from it. Descendants of the early U.S. settlers struggled to assimilate the southern and eastern Europeans that came after them, such as the Italians and the Poles.  Today, those immigrant groups are equally worried about the current influx of Latin Americans and, to a lesser degree, Asians.  Today’s New York Times has a fascinating look at the immigration issue that is currently roiling national politics.

The Senate Republicans who voted on Monday to legalize the nation’s illegal immigrants look at the waves of immigration reshaping this country and see a powerful work force, millions of potential voters and future Americans.

The House Republicans who backed tough border security legislation in December look at the same group of people and see a flood of invaders and lawbreakers who threaten national security and American jobs and culture.

The question of how to cope with the 11 million illegal immigrants believed to be living here - whether to integrate them, ignore them or try to send them home somehow - is a question gripping many ordinary citizens, religious leaders, state legislators and policy makers in the White House. And in their bitter, fractious debate, Republicans in Congress are reflecting what some describe as the nation’s struggle to define itself.

The immigration issue is no longer a uniquely American topic.  Interestingly, the Times is also running an article about a similar struggle in Europe (this article is focused particularly on Germany) over how to integrate new immigrants, mainly Muslims, into their societies.

The Chinese government exerts quite a bit of control over the internet, but it’s inevitable (isn’t it?) that the technology will still greatly impact that society over time.  An article in the LA Times points out one example of the internet’s power.

…in today’s China, the freedom to speak one’s mind is increasing, especially in cyberspace. More than 110 million Chinese surf the Internet, and an estimated 20 million have become registered bloggers, said Fang Xingdong, founder and chief executive of Beijing-based Boke.com, which boasts 8 million bloggers since it went online in 2002.

A story in the Christian Science Monitor looks at efforts by Turkey to bridge the dialogue gap between Islam and the West.

Newsweek International reports on how African women are reshaping the continent.

Nice trio of travel articles in the Sunday Washington Post about the Balkan countries of Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro…

But as striking as the panoramas are in this part of the world, there’s something deeper than aesthetics going on. Here, in the overlooked southeastern corner of Europe that once stood for brutal warfare but is now a savagely beautiful vacation land, there’s also the sensation of teetering on the brink. This is where worlds meet or, more accurately, collide — in nearly every sense and with intense passion: East and West, North and South, Christianity and Islam, Europe and the Mediterranean.

The need for cross-cultural understanding and competence in the business world is evidently a global issue.

This article in an Indian technology magazine discusses the need to take culture into account when interviewing prospective job candidates:

In the globalised business of technology, Indian firms need the creativity and dynamism of a culturally diverse staff in critical positions. The only way to achieve this is to ensure that right candidates are not being improperly rejected due to cross-cultural misperceptions.

Meanwhile, the very same issue was being discussed at a seminar hosted by a Canadian college:

Cultural differences often result in the rejection of candidates for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job. … Laroche said culturally diverse people operate in the workplace based on different assumptions and follow different paths to reach similar objectives. This is particularly true during the recruitment process. Culturally different candidates try to communicate their ability to do the job in many ways that are often misinterpreted by Canadian recruiters.

Hines Ward, a star receiver with the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers, talks with Newsweek about embracing the Korean side of his identity.

Some of the very best travel writing on the internet is found at World Hum.  If you want to indulge in a little armchair traveling, take some time to wander through the site’s “dispatches” archive of travel stories.  The latest entry recounts some of David Farley’s experiences with eating in Rome.

One of the nice things that has happened on the internet in recent years is the explosion of travel writing at sites like BootsnAll.  Not all of the writing is great, but it’s still refreshing to read individual travel tales and to get away from the formulaic style seen in too many newspaper travel sections these days - went here, did this, stayed at this hotel, ate this meal, blah blah blah.  Yes, but what did you experience, what did you learn?

So, another of my goals for this blog is to point out travel writing sites and articles, particularly as they relate to individuals learning about the world.  Here, then, is a recent BootsnAll article by Melissa Lambert about the experience she and her husband had volunteering at an orphanage in Mozambique.

My husband and I have spent three of the first four months of our marriage here in Africa, watching each other in a wide variety of unexpected situations. He has seen me angry; I have seen him sad. We stay up at night talking about what we want to teach in our own future family. The second time we went to the infant orphanage, I knew I had made a good choice. I was helping dress slippery babies, their skin still glistening with silver bathwater, when my husband crept away. After a few minutes, I followed him and peeked around the door into the nursery. He was holding one of the smaller, sicker babies against his chest, humming and dancing some kind of a boxstep across the linoleum floor.

Noteworthy opinion piece in Newsweek International about Chile and why the country could become a role model for Latin America.

Interesting article in US News and World Report about cultural education classes for businesspeople in China.

In real life, they are successful executives, wealthy and well educated, says the article. “Some are millionaires. But they all have one thing in common: They are too Chinese. So these Shanghai executives take classes (from a Japanese woman) in “international standards of decorum.”

Unfortunately, the NY Times doesn’t allow on-line access to its op-ed columns, except through the subscription-only Times Select program.  But today’s paper has an excellent column by Nicholas Kristof about the educational benefits of travel.  (The article is .  A few brief excerpts:

Universities are - oh so slowly - recognizing that they need to prepare students to survive globalization. But most overseas studies programs are both too short and too tame.

So here’s my proposal.  Universities should grant a semester’s credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world. In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

The cost of a year of travel would be far less than the annual cost of attending many colleges in the U.S. And students would get far more out of a year of travel than a year in classrooms.

Later, he notes that he is sponsoring a contest and will take a college student with him on a future African reporting trip. I think Kristof is on to something. My only quibble is that his proposal shouldn’t be restricted to incoming freshmen. Why not give credit to any college student who undertakes such a journey? My wife and I have been fortunate enough to embark on two different round-the-world journeys of a few months each, and some of the most amazing and educational experiences we’ve had have been in still-developing countries, such as Vietnam, Cambodia and Egypt. So go - travel!

Well, here goes. How does one start a new blog? What is an appropriate first entry? The first day of spring seems like a good time to launch a new venture, and the advent of baseball season is a sure sign of spring, so why not begin with a post about baseball and culture?

Jayson Stark had a nice piece yesterday on espn.com about the clash of baseball cultures between Japan and Cuba in the World Baseball Classic championship game. He writes:

The Cubans play baseball with emotion oozing out of their caps. Fists pumping. Hands clapping. Flags waving. Mouths moving. If something in a ball game is worth doing, it is worth celebrating. That’s their own special M.O. …

The Japanese, on the other hand, often play the game like the men of science they are. Is there any fundamental they haven’t practiced at least 4.9 billion times in their lives? Is there any skill they haven’t studied and perfected with machine-like precision?

Anyone who has ever traveled to Latin and/or East Asian countries will appreciate the contrasting sporting styles that have arisen from these two cultures. And it is exactly items like this that I want to point out with my blog. I would like for this site to serve as a gathering place for cross-cultural perspectives on current affairs, travel, sports, government, business and other topics of interest.