Travels in the Riel World

Need another reason to travel? Because it spurs inspiration and creativity…

The reason travel spurs inspiration is the stimulus, said Jeannine McGlade, co-author of “Stimulated! Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work.”

“When you’re in a new environment, you have what we call ‘eyes wide open,’ ” she said. “It’s not the ‘same old, same old’ where you tend to get into a rut and aren’t alert to having a ‘spark moment.’ Things are different and fresh during travel. You’re seeing things from a different perspective and you’re really paying attention.”

Sounds right to me.

I had to link to this article, which I found fascinating if for no other reason than that it shows how physicists seem to exist on a different plane of existence than I do. I love reading about modern physics, but I truly can’t comprehend how any of this works. What about you?

First of all, no, you’re not about to get sucked into the gravitational field of a black hole. But there are those who now contend that the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland could actually produce a black hole that consumes the Earth.

Huh?

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang…But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth…

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem…The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate. As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

O.K., so theoretically possible. But not likely, right?

William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.” …

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

So, no, we’re not in any danger. But then again, perhaps we could create a black hole that would suck up the Earth, although the circumstances would have to be “really, really weird.” Or, heck, maybe the same process would produce dragons. Like I said, a different plane of existence.

Puerto Moreno Glacier, Argentina

A few days ago I had a post about the popularity of Buenos Aires. Of course, there is a lot more to Argentina than that one city. When Lisa and I were there in 2006, we spent some time in the stunningly beautiful region of Patagonia. Not far from the small town of El Calafate, we visited the Puerto Moreno Glacier.

Now that corporations recognize not only the benefits of international experience but also a real need for managers to have a broad global perspective, a wide array of programs are popping into existence in order to meet these training needs. One of the more interesting programs that I’ve heard about was just profiled in the NY Times. IBM is actually sending budding managers abroad to work as volunteers in various business-related projects.

In July, a team of 8 to 10 I.B.M. employees will travel to Ghana to help tiny businesses make their operations more professional. Another team will help entrepreneurs seek microloans in Turkey, while yet another will create training programs on information technology in Vietnam.

The projects, which were devised by I.B.M.’s citizenship group and are being coordinated through nonprofit organizations, have all the trappings of corporate philanthropy. But that is not why they were created, or how they are being used.

“This is a management development exercise for high-potential people at I.B.M.,” said Randy MacDonald, senior vice president for human resources.

What does I.B.M. hope to gain from sending these employees on volunteer missions abroad? Quite a lot, actually.

“As a development tool, this is a four-for-one,” said Allan R. Cohen, dean of the Olin Graduate School at Babson College, near Boston. “It’s stretching to work in another culture, to work in a nonprofit where the measurement of accomplishment isn’t clear, to take a sabbatical from your everyday routine and to learn to accomplish things when you can’t just bark orders.”

Indeed, Paul Ingram, a management professor at the Columbia Business School, is planning a similar program for this fall, in which executives attending the school’s Senior Executive Program will work with nonprofit groups in New York. Because 80 percent of the students are not from the United States, the New York location is outside their comfort zone.

“The fact that you are an excellent programmer or salesman, or can lead a project in your own area and culture, doesn’t mean you can be a great leader outside of your technical or cultural expertise,” he said.

That is I.B.M.’s logic as well. The company views the Service Corps as a way to learn how well employees work with strangers, in strange lands, on unfamiliar projects.

This past week saw a unique event in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, as residents trekked to the polls for the first time in the country’s history at the behest of the king, who voluntarily decided to give up royal power in order to move his country towards a democratic future. The Washington Post has the story:

Without revolution or bloodshed, this tiny Himalayan kingdom became the world’s newest democracy Monday, as wildflower farmers, traditional healers, Buddhist folk artists and computer engineers voted in their country’s first parliamentary elections, ending a century of absolute monarchy.

In a historic event for this country of 700,000, entire families took to winding mountain roads, traveling in some cases for days in minivans, on horseback and on foot to cast their ballots, marking Bhutan’s transition to a constitutional monarchy.

Despite concerns that Bhutanese would be turned off by the rough-and-tumble world of politics, more than 79 percent of the estimated 318,000 registered voters turned out at polling places.

It was the king, as well as his father and predecessor, who ordered his subjects to vote, in the belief that democracy would foster stability in a country wedged between China and India and known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon…

Before abdicating the throne to his son in 2006, the country’s fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, had taken methodical steps to give power to the people, saying that he believed no leader should be “chosen by birth instead of merit.”

As part of his “gross national happiness” plan, he reformed the country’s feudal system, giving land and jobs to the poorest farmers and launching free health and education systems. He and his Harvard- and Oxford-educated son, King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, remain immensely popular. Many Bhutanese still refer to both father and son as “His Majesty.”…

The fifth king, who is 28, will remain commander in chief of the army and will be able to appoint five members to the upper house of parliament. Many Bhutanese said they hoped his opinions would continue to carry enormous weight.

Thoughts on time…

“Eskimos working for a fish cannery in Alaska thought factory whistles were ridiculous. The idea that men would work or not work because of a whistle seemed to them sheer lunacy. For the Eskimo, tides determined what men did, how long they did it, and when they did it…

The Europeans who invaded the North American continent imposed their time system on everything. We have concrete notions concerning books, houses, dams, office buildings, etc., all of which have scheduled times for completion, just as children are supposed to walk and talk and go to school at certain ages. For the Hopi, every living thing has its own inherent time…

Time started as a natural series of rhythms associated with daily, monthly and annual cycles. It is now imposed as an outside constraint that sends its tentacles into every nook and crevice.”

                                                                                                - Edward Hall, Beyond Culture

My son turned six months old yesterday. Happy birthday, Brady!

Baseball season begins today, with a season-opening game in Tokyo between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics. For American fans of these teams, the season begins at the ungodly hour of somewhere between 3 a.m. (West coast) and 6 a.m. (East coast). Still, it’s always an exciting day for fans, and the Japanese twist to the opener gives us a chance to look at some of the different baseball traditions in the U.S. and Japan.

One of the most interesting differences is actually the fan experience at the games. The Boston Globe has been following the Red Sox in Japan and notes that the Sox-A’s game in the Tokyo Dome will not be quite the same as a contest between two Japanese teams.

A good part of the Dome’s charm will be missing when the Red Sox play the A’s in the real games Tuesday and Wednesday. There won’t be thousands of well-lubricated, yellow-clad Tigers fans standing, clapping, singing, and cheering (while a band plays) when the home team is at bat. These guys have gym-class whistles, flags, Thunderstix, and signage.

The Globe is not exaggerating here. I was at a Japanese game in Tokyo a few years ago and I wrote about the experience in my book. Here is how I described the scene in the stadium:

The visiting team was up first and so were their fans, who engaged in a series of coordinated cheering, jumping, shouting, flag-waving, drum-beating, whistle-blowing, trumpet-playing mayhem. And, no, coordinated mayhem is not an oxymoron, but rather a quintessentially Japanese way of rooting for a team. The cheers we saw were all choreographed, loud and non-stop.

When the ballplayers switched from offense to defense after each half-inning, the other team’s fans rose and launched into their own organized pandemonium. The first set of fans politely gave way, since it’s not socially acceptable to cheer while the other team is batting. For the young students sitting behind us in their identical school uniforms, that meant it was time to return to their chopsticks and finish eating their boxed dinners. For many adults, it was time for a concession run to bring back noodles and sake. Or, even better, to order beers from the attractive young women who wandered the stands with lightweight kegs strapped to their backs.

Then, there was the entertainment sideshow. I was amused by the booming English-language rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out” every time the visiting team made its final out of the inning, but most interesting was the “fifth inning sweep.” This was introduced by the public address announcer much as the seventh inning stretch is in a U.S. ballpark. While the grounds crew ran onto the field to do their normal sweep of the basepaths, some cheerleaders and the team’s mascot came out and danced to the song “YMCA.” After the basepaths were swept, the grounds crew joined in the performance, doing a choreographed dance number with their brooms! Yes, I thought, I can just imagine the groundskeepers at Fenway Park doing that.

Amazingly, the fans’ enthusiasm never seemed to waver. In the game we attended, the Nippon Ham Fighters took a 9-0 lead into the ninth inning. I should note that this contest was being played near the end of the baseball season and both teams were hopelessly out of the playoff race. It was the equivalent of watching two of the worst American teams competing during the last week of the season, with both clubs more than 20 games out of first place. Despite this, and despite the fact that Chiba Lotte was losing by nine runs, none of the Marines’ fans left the stadium and they remained just as loud and raucous in the ninth inning as they had been in the first.

When the game was over, the Ham Fighters’ mascot ran onto the field and bowed to the fans, while confetti shot out of the upper deck and rained over the spectators. It was as if the team had just won the league title. Dramatic music blared from stadium speakers, a pedestal was set up on the field, and two of the star players came over and were interviewed live while the team’s fans stayed to watch and cheer.

Or, if you’re interested in cultural differences in how the players perform and train, the Globe also has that covered with an intriguing look at the Japanese Little League.

When the coach spots something he doesn’t like, he barks at the offending player, who instantly removes his cap and stands rigidly before bowing in acknowledgment of the message being received.

There is constant chatter from the players, who yell, “Koi-Koi” (”C’mon, c’mon)” and make other sounds, virtually indistinguishable even to a native speaker, but that are designed to help promote wa, which means unity and team spirit…

These are the values that penetrate to the youngest levels of Japanese baseball. Critics say the Japanese approach stifles creativity and individual expression, but these kids show a mastery of fundamentals that would embarrass some big leaguers.

Ariyasu said he tries to teach his players patience (”nintai”) and discipline (”choubatsu”). These are principles he learned as a youth studying judo, and from his father, who served in the Japanese navy during World War II. “It is a style,” he said, “almost like the samurai spirit.” 

There has been no shortage of press coverage in the past year or two extolling the virtues of Argentina, and specifically of Buenos Aires, which many have labeled as the hip destination of choice for current expats. The New York Times also just published a story along those lines and explored the city’s unique cultural and artistic mix.

Drawn by the city’s cheap prices and Paris-like elegance, legions of foreign artists are colonizing Buenos Aires and transforming this sprawling metropolis into a throbbing hothouse of cool. Musicians, designers, artists, writers and filmmakers are sinking their teeth into the city’s transcontinental mix of Latin élan and European polish, and are helping shake the Argentine capital out of its cultural malaise after a humbling economic crisis earlier this decade.

Video directors are scouting tango ballrooms for English-speaking actors. Wine-soaked gallery openings and behemoth gay discos are keeping the city’s insomniacs up till sunrise. And artists from the United States, England, Italy and beyond are snapping up town houses in scruffy neighborhoods and giving the areas Anglo-ized names like Palermo SoHo and Palermo Hollywood.

Comparisons with other bohemian capitals are almost unavoidable. “It’s like Prague in the 1990s,” said Mr. Lampson, who is perhaps best known for winning a Bravo TV reality show, “Situation: Comedy,” in 2005, about sitcom writers. Despite his minor celebrity, he decided to forgo the Los Angeles rat race and moved to Buenos Aires, where he is writing an NBC pilot, along with his Web novela, www.historyandtheuniverse.com. “Buenos Aires is a more interesting place to live than Los Angeles, and it’s much, much cheaper. You can’t believe a city this nice is so cheap.” …

And then there are the novelists, journalists and screenwriters, quietly tapping away in their $600-a-month apartments, seeking to make a name for themselves on Argentine soil. Nate Martin, a 24-year-old from Wyoming, moved to the city in November and took a job as an editor at The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper, because, he says, “I didn’t want to be a waiter while writing.” For his creative outlet, Mr. Martin maintains a blog, Grating Space. Like dozens of similar blogs written by foreigners, it rhapsodizes about the Argentine good life.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

A Buddhist monk walks between the columns of the temple of Angkor Wat.

Today is the first day of spring. Which means it’s also the start of the Persian New Year, or Nowruz. To mark the day, NPR just ran a story about the holiday and the foods that are used to celebrate the occasion.

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, begins at the exact moment of the vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the equator and winter ends. The festivities continue for 13 days.

Nowruz is not a religious holiday. It celebrates fertility and renewal with singing and dancing, visiting friends and relatives, and lots of feasting. It’s got it all: myth and symbolism, fragrant hyacinth and Persian poetry, magic numbers and magic puddings.

What foods are traditionally prepared for Nowruz? Najmieh Batmanglij, a Persian cookbook author, gave NPR the scoop:

Everything is cooked with loads of fresh, spring herbs. She begins and ends the holiday with a soup with noodles that symbolize unraveling the difficulties in the year to come. Cooked with fresh dill, parsley and four pounds of spinach, it tastes like a bowl of spring.

Eggs, of course, represent fertility. So herb kuku with its dozen eggs and six cups of herbs covers all bases. Batmanglij also makes green rice, loaded with herbs and prepared with fresh fava beans. And there is always fish. “It is very important,” she says. “It represents abundance.”

Throughout the holiday, there are plenty of pastries — baklava soaked with rosewater and honey, tiny marzipan berries with a sliver of pistachio for stems, honey almond crunch with saffron, rice cookies with poppy seeds and cloverleaf-shaped chickpea cookies with cardamom.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but in fact “slum tours” have become popular in some parts of the world, according to this NY Times article.

Slum tourism, or “poorism,” as some call it, is catching on. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums. When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough customers for one tour a day. Now, he’s running two or three a day and recently expanded to rural areas.

Predictably, these tours have their detractors…

Critics charge that ogling the poorest of the poor isn’t tourism at all. It’s voyeurism. The tours are exploitative, these critics say, and have no place on an ethical traveler’s itinerary.

“Would you want people stopping outside of your front door every day, or maybe twice a day, snapping a few pictures of you and making some observations about your lifestyle?” asked David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario. Slum tourism, he says, is just another example of tourism’s finding a new niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners feel better about their station in life. “It affirms in my mind how lucky I am — or how unlucky they are,” he said.

And their supporters…

Not so fast, proponents of slum tourism say. Ignoring poverty won’t make it go away. “Tourism is one of the few ways that you or I are ever going to understand what poverty means,” said Harold Goodwin, director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism in Leeds, England. “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”

The crucial question, Mr. Goodwin and other experts say, is not whether slum tours should exist but how they are conducted. Do they limit the excursions to small groups, interacting respectfully with residents? Or do they travel in buses, snapping photos from the windows as if on safari?

Many tour organizers are sensitive to charges of exploitation. Some encourage — and in at least one case require — participants to play an active role in helping residents.

On travel… 

“A curious human linkage is forged amongst travelers, making it possible to understand one another almost immediately because we recognize something of ourselves in each other. We’re the sort that doesn’t need a home. The desire to see the world is what matters. Traveling is like being in love; it has that kind of strength. The love some people give to another person, to a home, to a career, we give to the road, to the mountains and villages, to children running in the streets, to the women at the well, to the trees, the moon.

We throw ourselves into the world and become creatures of chance, of the stars. Traveling alone can be hell, in its utter solitude and in its panic, panic not from rain or cold or sickness but from the sense of displacement, and the question ‘Why am I here?’ But something compels us and it’s this: when we travel we absorb fresh life around every corner. For years the urge to travel might refuse to identify itself, as if it’s a dormant seed inside us. But one day we find it somewhere else, furrowed in the body of another person we may meet on a train or at a bus stop, and suddenly this yearning is happily, instantly recognizable. We understand each other’s need to travel. We understand this without question.”

                                                           - Lauri Gough, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! What better way to mark the day than with a tour of Irish cuisine? Ambrose Clancy did just that recently, traversing the island and sampling a variety of Irish meals. He wrote about his tour for the Sunday travel section of the Washington Post.

The Irish have become prosperous and, of all things, European. I decided a food safari was in order to smell what was cooking. Here is a chronicle of some meals during my recent visit: a sampling of the new and old.

Clancy experienced the new diversity of Ireland at Italian and Indian restaurants, but he also enjoyed a good amount of traditional Irish fare, such as this breakfast:

The next morning, at Darry Ryan’s B&B in the heart of town, the old advice is true; we could eat this breakfast all day. Eggs over easy fried in bacon fat, two small mild sausages, a grilled half-tomato garnished with fried mushrooms, white toast in a rack, brown bread, strong tea.

There’s also black pudding, which I eyeball carefully. You can’t have a proper Irish breakfast without black pudding, a sort of sausage that uses pig’s blood as its dominant ingredient. Added to the blood are oatmeal, milk and bread. It’s baked and then cut in thick circles and fried. The texture is dense; ditto the taste, heavy and unpleasant. I drown it with tea.

And this pub fare for lunch:

In the town of Clifden, set above an estuary leading to the sea, a place where hikers and cyclists make base camp, lunch is at E.J. Kings, a pub of stone-flagged floors and food either simple or full of flair.

The Guinness is creamy, and an open-faced crab sandwich on brown bread, with no mayonnaise but just oil, gives a straightforward tang of the sea. Just as good is a BLT, with crispy rashers (bacon), sun-dried tomatoes, caramelized onions and a sharp farmhouse cheese making every bite satisfyingly complex. But the star is the chowder, based in rich stock, laced with sherry, cream, onions, potatoes and salmon that adds a touch of pink to the creamy whiteness.

From China to Cuba, governments have done their best to control technology and the internet in an effort to keep their societies from becoming too open. They’ve had some successes, but it’s nearly impossible to stop people from connecting to the outside world, as shown by this International Herald Tribune article about Cuba.

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet café remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned café charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary - about $5 - to use a computer for an hour…

Yet the government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night. Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.

Still, it does take dedication and persistence for Cubans to maintain these channels of communication with the world:

Yoani Sánchez, 32, and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 60, established Consenso desde Cuba , a Web site based in Germany. Sánchez has attracted a considerable following with her blog, Generación Y, in which she has artfully written gentle critiques of the government by describing her daily life in Cuba…

Because Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet café, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand.

Mt. Sinai, Egypt

Two Bedouin men lead their camels down the mountainside. I took this photo as we trudged down the rocky trail on the way back to the village of St. Catherine’s after having hiked up it during the night (from 2 to 5 a.m.) so that we could watch the sunrise from atop Mt. Sinai.

I came across an interesting recent blog entry on Blog Critics Magazine in which Terence Clarke reminisced about a two-decade-old journey to Nicaragua and what he learned about that country and its love affair with baseball.

“Baseball is a poem,” my companion said. I looked out the bus window….My companion’s sentiment was similar to one that both John and I had noticed among the Nicaraguans in general. Whenever we asked one of them what he did for a living, the answer was almost universally, “I am a poet.”

Putting aside for the moment that at the time it was almost impossible to make a living in Nicaragua…it still seemed unusual to us that so many Nicaraguans claimed to be poets. It’s well known in the United States that writing poetry will make you no money at all. So John and I figured that maybe the Nicaraguans were simply acknowledging that fact, and that, since there was no money anywhere in Nicaragua, maybe poetry was as good a profession as any.

But that was an insouciant observation on our part, because baseball and poetry in Nicaragua have in common one very important element. The heart itself is best expressed by baseball and by verse. The two make the soul sing in that country, equally so, and they do not alternate. Both express the same emotional infusion of earth, water and light. Both bring forth the same artistic flower.

Our group played a game of baseball against an all-star team of farmhands in the town of Boaco…Afterwards we were honored at a fiesta on a ranch outside town. The farmhands had all been invited, and there was a smattering of dignitaries as well, including the nurse at the local clinic, who was holding a baseball in her hands when we met.  She explained that she had loved the game all her life, and was overjoyed that we had come all this way to play against her neighbors here in Boaco.

At first John and I didn’t know that she was the local nurse, because when I asked her what she did, she replied, “Well, I’m a poet.” Only a few minutes later did we discover her medical leanings.

But I took the opportunity to tell her that many, many Nicaraguans had told me that they were poets. Did she know, I asked, why there were so many poets in her country?

“Of course, señor,” she replied. Her eyes fluttered. Her hands caressed the baseball. Smiling, she took in a hurried, excited breath. “It is because Nicaragua is a poem.”

A couple of months ago, I had a post about author Eric Weiner and his new book, ‘‘The Geography of Bliss,” for which he traveled to some of the countries ranked as the happiest in the world.  Now, there is a follow-up of sorts, as Newsweek interviewed Weiner about some of his conclusions regarding this international pursuit of happiness.

Eight out of 10 Americans say they think about their happiness at least once a week. Some might say we are obsessed with it. We invented the smiley-face, made Oprah a billionaire and spend millions on self-help books and yoga. But for all our efforts, we’re far from the happiest country. We rank 23rd in the world—behind Bhutan and the Netherlands. Malaysia even came out ahead of the world’s sole superpower.

In a new book, “The Geography of Bliss,” author and self-described grump Eric Weiner explored countries, from Iceland to Qatar, that ranked highest on the World Database of Happiness … and one, Moldova, that’s consistently near the bottom, to find out what makes a country happy—and why America isn’t more so?

There’s no single answer. Some factors are obvious, others just weird: optimists are happier than pessimists. People who go to church are happier then folks who don’t. But the happiest countries are the most secular. The Dutch find joy in their tolerance of the illicit, from prostitution to hashish, while the Swiss are made content by trains running on time. In Qatar, money is the path to happiness while not fretting over minor things keeps you satisfied in Thailand…

In America the hunt for happiness is more complicated still. For Americans bliss is an individual sport, but in the happiest countries it’s a team effort. As Weiner puts it, “We’re so ambitious about things, including happiness, and that’s ironic because in order to be happy you have to be less ambitious.  Happiness is connected to your friends and family. Getting in touch with your inner child is not necessarily the best way to be happy.” It’s a curious conclusion: our search for happiness might be exactly what is preventing us from finding it.