Travels in the Riel World

Ladakh is a fascinating place. A Tibetan Buddhist culture in northern India, it has more in common with such neighbors as Bhutan and Nepal than it does with the country to which it belongs. David Desjardins and his family recently discovered that the Ladakhi landscape is also spectacular and the people are friendly and welcoming. He, his wife and their 12-year-old son recently went trekking in Ladakh, an adventure that David recounted in a story for the Boston Globe.

A high desert plateau pitched between the autonomous Chinese region of Tibet to the east and Pakistan to the west, Ladakh (”Land of High Passes”) is part of India, but has more in common with its neighbors. It is the meeting place of two mountain ranges - the Karakoram and the Himalaya - and of two cultures, Buddhist and Muslim. For centuries, it was an important stop along the ancient Silk Road, but today political tensions to the east and west ensure that most visitors to Ladakh approach it from the south.

Surrounded by mountains, Ladakh was for centuries inaccessible for much of the year, its high passes choked with snow from October through May, often longer. Air travel has changed that, but even today flights are frequently canceled because of bad weather. The region’s high paths and roads are open in July and August. When the throngs arrive, they flock to Leh, Ladakh’s ancient capital and the center of its tourist trade.

Nestled along the Indus River valley at an altitude of 11,500 feet, Leh is where visitors catch their breath. The need to acclimatize, and to organize a trek, usually keeps newcomers in Ladakh’s biggest town for a few days - and for most, that’s more than enough. Leh’s narrow streets and alleys are choked with traffic, shops, and meandering dogs and cattle. Although it had its charms, we were soon eager to strike out for the wide-open country…

So began our journey into the backcountry of Ladakh, where all traffic is foot traffic and life is lived at a slower pace. Our daily routine - rising, eating, walking, eating, sleeping - helped us slow down too, and let us experience the rhythms of Ladakhi life. Passing fields, we heard farmers singing as they worked. Atop mountain passes, we paused as our guides strung up prayer flags and lighted incense. Descending, we picked our way through herds of grazing sheep and dzos, the Ladakhis’ hybrid of yak and domesticated cow. Visiting a town’s temple, we turned the prayer wheels that lined its walls and rested in the presence of centuries-old Buddhist sculptures, gilded in riotous colors that contrasted with the gray-brown terrain outside.

The landscape we walked through was a slideshow of wild, tortured peaks and ravines, mostly tan and gray, interrupted occasionally by purple funneled hoodoos and reddish slashes raked into the hillside. Glaciers sprawled below snow-capped mountains, feeding streams that carved the deep gorges we hiked through.

If you’d like to read a sample of my own experiences in Ladakh, you can check out this section from my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

Students who take advantage of study abroad programs have a wide variety of experiences. In the best scenarios, they not only have a fun and enriching life experience, but also come away with nuggets of insight into the culture of a new country. That’s what happened for Laura Corser, who was recently profiled in the Boston Globe after spending a semester in Seoul, South Korea.

One of her key insights into Korean culture:

ACT YOUR AGE: “Korean etiquette is highly focused on age and rank. Often the first question out of someone’s mouth (after ‘what’s your name?’) is ‘how old are you?’ One habit I had to acquire (other than taking off your shoes when you enter a house and several restaurants or eating rice with a spoon) was the style of interacting with elders, like serving them with both hands, or with one’s free hand on the arm if only one hand is required.”

Here is another small example of the value of educational exchange programs. Several teachers from Indonesia had the opportunity to spend some time at a school in the United States and, according to this story, they came away from the experience with a much different view of the U.S. than they had expected.

Three Indonesian educators entered a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Catholic school two weeks ago expecting what they’d seen in American movies: surly teens, self-indulgent adults and violence. They’ll return home on Sunday knowing a common U.S. expression: Don’t believe everything you see on TV.

“I will tell my students that what you see on TV and film is not reality,” said Veri Muhlis Arifuzzaman, 33, who teaches at a small boarding school in a rural village in West Java, Indonesia. “I feel safe here. The people are warm and have good hearts and can receive us as Muslims.” …

Arifuzzaman, Hanifah and Nuning Nur Laila, 29, of East Java, made their first trip to the United States through an exchange program by the East-West Center’s AsiaPacific Ed program. The goal is for Asian and American educators to learn from each other and abandon stereotypes.

Some countries easily embrace the concept of adoption. In the United States, for instance, adoption has long been commonplace and even foreign born children find easy acceptance in this multicultural society. In some other nations, though, people have struggled with the idea of adoption. This is especially true in a place like Korea, where family and ancestry are a vital part of one’s identity.

The situation is slowly changing, however, as this NY Times article notes. Last year, for the first time, more South Korean babies were adopted by Korean families than by foreigners.

Daunted by the stigma surrounding adoption here, Cho Joong-bae and Kim In-soon delayed expanding their family for years. When they finally did six years ago, Mr. Cho chose to tell his elderly parents that the child was the result of an affair, rather than admit she was adopted.

“My parents later died believing that I’d had an affair,” said Mr. Cho, 48, a civil engineer who has since adopted a second daughter.

Now, with South Korea becoming more accepting of adoptive families, Mr. Cho and Ms. Kim feel they can be more open, with relatives and nonrelatives alike. Ms. Kim, 49, attributed the change partly to the growth of other nontraditional families, like those headed by single parents or including foreign spouses.

“We feel attitudes have changed,” she said.

Just how much, though, is the critical question as the South Korean government is pushing aggressively to increase adoptions by South Koreans and decrease what officials consider the shameful act of sending babies overseas for adoption.

Bathhouses have long been popular in many countries. The Finnish sauna, Turkish hamam and Japanese onsen are all deeply ingrained in their respective cultures. But in South Korea nowadays, the public bath (the jjimjilbang) has undergone a contemporary renovation and provides all manner of social interaction, according to this NY Times story.

Calling the jjimjilbang a bathhouse hardly begins to describe its attractions. “Here, you take a bath and a sauna,” said Kim Eun-yeong, 40, a frequent visitor to World Cup Spaland, one of the city’s largest jjimjilbang. “But you can also eat, sleep, date, watch television, read, play computer games. It’s one-stop total service in the Korean way of relaxing.” …

By the late 1990s, many bathhouses had turned into true recreation complexes, and going to one became as much a part of Korean social life as going to the movies. In 2006, there were more than 13,000 in the country, more than 2,500 of them in Seoul. Some can accommodate thousands of people…

At the front counter, customers pay about 8,000 won, or $7, pick up their top and shorts and a towel and enter the sex-segregated bath halls. There, for an extra fee, they can be scrubbed by a professional using exfoliating mitts.

From the bathing halls, patrons of both sexes dressed in the facility’s “uniform” step out into the common room, which usually looks like a mix of hotel lobby, giant living room and small shopping mall. Some jjimjilbang have karaoke rooms, concert halls, swimming pools, even indoor golf ranges, as well as cafeterias and rooms to watch videos.

But a jjimjilbang’s reputation owes much to its saunas. Some feature heated huts suffused with the aroma of mugwort (important in traditional medicine). Sometimes the walls are studded with jade and amethyst, which many Koreans believe emit healing rays when heated…

But the jjimjilbang are as important for socializing as they are for restorative treatments.

“We don’t consider someone a real friend until we take a bath together,” said Han Jae-kwan, 25, a college student.

His girlfriend, Yang Eun-jeong, 25, agreed: “We women also believe we become closer when we get naked and bathe together.”

The two were playing the board game Go after emerging from a sauna. Since most young Koreans live with their parents until they marry, jjimjilbang have become popular places for couples to spend time together.

“We often come here on a date,” Mr. Han said. “At a cafe, the owner gives you an unwelcome look after a few hours if you don’t order more. But here, you can stay as long as you want.”

There is a short but thoughtful article in The Atlantic about the current U.S. engagement with Afghanistan and the story contains some useful pieces of information about Afghan culture. Specifically, it speaks about the tremendous importance of tribes and clans in the nation’s social structure, while suggesting that the U.S. strategy is on the wrong track in that we’ve tried to rebuild the country from the top down rather than from the bottom up.

(T)he current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now…

National government has never much mattered in Afghanistan. Only once in its troubled history has the country had something like the system of strong central government that’s mandated by the current constitution. That was under the “Iron Emir,” Abdur Rehman, in the late 19th century, and Rehman famously maintained control by building towers of skulls from the heads of all who opposed him, a tactic unavailable to the current president, Hamid Karzai.

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum—whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy…

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there…The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun­cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs.

One of the most impressive but least known sites in the world is the Indonesian monument of Borobudur. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on this stunning edifice, which is considered the largest Buddhist monument in existence.

Making lists of the world’s most impressive monuments is an irrational and ultimately pointless enterprise: Who has seen all the wonders of the world? And what would the criteria be? Yet scribblers have been at it since the second century B.C., when a Greek poet named Antipater of Sidon came up with his canonical seven, now all gone or reduced to rubble except the pyramids of Giza.

If Antipater had lived a millennium later, he would surely have put Borobudur, the astonishing stone mountain of exquisitely wrought sculpture in Central Java, on his list. No construction of the preindustrial era makes a more wondrous impression…

Borobudur rises to a height of 400 feet, nearly as tall as Cheops’ pyramid, in a series of concentric terraces. Its walls are lined with exquisitely carved bas-reliefs illustrating episodes from the life of the Buddha and his teachings, amounting to more than a mile of continuous sculpture — and that doesn’t include 504 life-size statues of the Buddha…

Like its Egyptian predecessors, Borobudur poses many enigmas to archaeologists. One visionary, slightly mad aspect of its design is that the ground plan, visible only from an aerial perspective, is a perfect mandala, a symbolic schema of Buddhist cosmology that serves as an aid to meditation. Or perhaps the monument represents a lotus blossom, a nearly universal image in Buddhist art. In 1931, a Dutch artist named W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp proposed the whimsical theory that the plain surrounding Borobudur was once a lake, and the monument was conceived as a lotus flower floating on it. His hypothesis became less fanciful in 2000, when archaeologists found stratigraphical evidence of a paleolake in the area.

Have you ever imagined what it’d be like to spend time at a yoga retreat in India? Well, now you can live vicariously through Kyle Jarrard, who wrote an account for the International Herald Tribune of the experience he and his wife had in Puducherry, India.

The first sound in the morning is crows, right at 5. Then we hear waves off the Bay of Bengal slapping the shore. In the garden, a man meditates while walking quickly over the lawn of the ashram guest house in the dark. Along the shore, other men pace the beach in the silver jetty light. Fishing boat lanterns like stars ride the black sea south to north.

My wife and I have come to this old French comptoir (formerly Pondichéry) in southeast India mostly for the yoga. The classes used to be held in one of the many parcels of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram scattered across the colonial city. But for this retreat, there’s a new venue and to get there you have to be on Ajit Sarkar’s bus by 5:45…

For the first few blocks the streets have French names: Rue Dumas, Rue Suffren, Rue Romain Rolland. Then we leave town and head south over fetid canals and clogged streams, through trash-heaped neighborhoods thumping with all-night Hindu festival music while men in dhotis stand around sipping tea out of plastic goblets. Cows with brightly painted red and green horns meditate in the middle of the road as we plunge into the lush Tamil Nadu countryside…

We take our yoga classes on the roof of the new school, under a tall thatched structure with open sides. Most of the people in the assembly know their Hatha-style yoga; others stumble a lot - but soon everyone gets into the flow, despite the great sensual distractions: banana groves to the north wavering in the gold sunlight; rice paddies to the east where a few dozen women bend weeding at daybreak; thick coconut trees to the west that invite the eye to enter and roam; and to the south, the village, overlain with teak, drumstick and casuarina trees, where cooking-fire smoke rises and every dog yaps at everything.

Did you know that 100 million people in China are minorities? There are 55 tribal groups in the country who are not ethnic Chinese. That means there are 100 million in China who probably don’t eat all that much Chinese food. NPR’s Kitchen Window has an interesting feature about these ethnic groups and their foods, based on the book Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

Deep-fried cheese, crepes and carrot salad don’t sound like Chinese food. But they are.

Fried cheese momos are a standard snack in Tibet, two-layer crepes are eaten by the Hui people in Qinghai province, and dai carrot salad is from the southern Yunnan city of Jinghong.

These are some of the foods of the 55 tribal groups called “minority peoples” by the Beijing government. These tribes make up 8 percent of China’s population, which amounts to more than 100 million people.

Although these communities are not ethnically Chinese, they have lived on land that is now part of China for centuries. This includes Inner Mongolia, the western Silk Road region of Xinjiang and other lands outside central China’s westernized cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

The story includes recipes for dai carrot salad and cheese momos.

In honor of Beijing playing host to the Olympics for the past two weeks, here is another China-themed post. Many Chinese people make it a habit to get up early every morning in order to perform tai chi exercises, often in a public park. So John Branch went to one of Beijing’s most popular parks one morning and observed the tai chi ritual. You can find his report here.

The giant gates of Temple of Heaven Park swung open at 6 a.m., magnets pulling people into a new day. People quietly poured out of apartment buildings and low-slung hutong neighborhoods and drained through the gates of Beijing’s favorite morning gathering place.

Slowly the corners of the park filled, even the shady spots deep among the tight rows of cypress trees that date back 800 years. Over there, a man performed the slow-motion dance of tai chi. Over here, a woman scratched her back against a tree. Everywhere, people gave themselves pat-downs to loosen their muscles…

Here came a woman walking backward. There went a man furiously rubbing his head. Everyone made room for the man crawling down the sidewalk on his toes and hands. It is exercise without ego. There seems to be no way to move the body in a way that would draw puzzled looks here, although the bear-crawler elicited some second glances….

This is exercise to connect with the world around, not tune it out. This is exercise done to feel good on the inside, not to impress anyone on the outside.

The Chinese are proud to be hosting this year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing, and they certainly want the home team to perform well. But perhaps not too well.

There was an interesting cultural note in a recent Washington Post article about Chinese rooting interests in these Olympics. It seems that while the Chinese are proud of their nation’s growing might on the world stage, some of them think it’s a bit too soon - and too showy - for their athletes to emerge with the most medals this year. It’s typical for the Chinese to be self deprecating, and this reminded me of a Chinese-born woman who used to work with my wife. She was horrified at the thought of filling out a performance review for herself at work because it would be unseemly to be too self congratulatory.

Apparently, that attitude even extends to the Olympics. Here is the telling anecdote from Francesco Sisci in his Post story:

The Olympic Games aren’t just a show for me; they’re a family affair, and one that’s turning out quite differently from what I’d expected. I’m Italian, but I’ve lived in China for about 20 years. My wife is Chinese — and very patriotic — and my two daughters grew up here…So you can imagine my state of mind before these games. I thought we all had to be very patriotic — that is, pro-China.

But when my mother announced before the games that she hoped that China would win the most medals, my wife, Luoyan, looked at me as if my mother had said something inappropriate. “Well,” she replied, “I hope that China comes in second and America will be first.”

She’s not alone. There’s a sizable undercurrent of hope here that the United States will top the medal rankings…The subtle reluctance to win may also be related to China’s being host of the games; by coming in first, China would look like a showoff. It could also be part of an idea that sport stands for economic and political might, and China knows that it certainly can’t challenge American supremacy, at least not yet.

“It’s not our moment. It would be too ambitious and too unreal to be the first in the Olympics now,” said a friend of mine at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s premier think tank. “Many people, even among the leaders, think like this.”

Every country has to deal with contrasts between its rich and poor citizens. But in few countries is this disparity as stark as it is in India. A new film there (“Barah Aana”) looks at the life of migrant workers who are employed as waiters and chauffeurs, and it explores the contrasts between their existence and the lives of those who employ them. It has apparently stirred a good deal of conversation in India, as described in this NY Times article.

India may be changing at a disorienting pace, but one thing remains stubbornly the same: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.

“Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy,” Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, wrote in a recent book, “The Indians: Portrait of a People.”

The subject, usually overlooked, has been raised by a provocative new film depicting India from a servant’s-eye view. The movie, “Barah Aana,” by Raja Menon, tells the story of three migrants to Mumbai from the ailing villages of northern India. They work as a chauffeur, a waiter and a security guard, sending most of their earnings home. They are heroes in their villages, but in Mumbai they are invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being an accessory to other people’s lives…

The director’s answer is that India has something deeper than a poverty problem. It has, in his view, a “dehumanization” problem. In an interview, he described India’s employers and servants as living as “two different species.”

Want to know the long-term consequences of a society filled with one-child families? Apparently, the situation gets a lot more complicated when combined with an economy that produces too few professional level jobs. Check out the current situation in China, which is described in a fascinating article in Psychology Today.

When China began limiting couples to one child 30 years ago, the policy’s most obvious goal was to contain a mushrooming population. For the Chinese people, however, the policy’s greater purpose was to turn out a group of young elites who would each enjoy the undivided resources of their whole family—the so-called xiao huangdi, or “little emperors.” The plan was to “produce a generation of high-quality children to facilitate China’s introduction as a global power,” explains Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the policy. But while these well-educated, driven achievers are fueling the nation’s economic boom, their generation has become too modern too quickly, glutted as it is with televisions, access to computers, cash to buy name brands, and the same expectations of middle-class success as Western kids.

The shift in temperament has happened too fast for society to handle. China is still a developing nation with limited opportunity, leaving millions of ambitious little emperors out in the cold; the country now churns out more than 4 million university graduates yearly, but only 1.6 million new college-level jobs. Even the strivers end up as security guards. China may be the world’s next great superpower, but it’s facing a looming crisis as millions of overpressurized, hypereducated only children come of age in a nation that can’t fulfill their expectations…

“In this generation, every child is raised to be at the top,” says Vanessa Fong, a Harvard education professor and author of Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy. “They’ve worked hard for it, and it’s what their parents have focused their lives on. But the problem is that the country can’t provide the lifestyle they feel they deserve. Only a few will get it.” China’s accomplished young elites are celebrated on billboards as the vanguard of the nation, yet they’re quickly becoming victims of their own lofty expectations.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for first linking to this story.

What is life like for expatriates in Afghanistan? There is an interesting feature in the Financial Times today - an interview with Belinda Bowling, a South African lawyer who currently lives in Kabul. An excerpt:

What brought you to Afghanistan?

When I turned 30 I decided to take a year’s career break from my law firm and explore my fragile sense of national identity by travelling to other countries in transition. My journey took me to Kurdistan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Afghanistan. Entranced by the soft light that envelops Kabul at dusk, I fell in love with Afghanistan immediately. Four and a half years later I’m still here.

You have the only house I’ve been to in Afghanistan where you enter directly into the kitchen.

Typically in Afghan homes the kitchen is an outhouse shed, since the fumes from the charcoal-burning stoves are unpleasant, and cooking – done by women, of course – is a low-status activity. I wanted to bring the kitchen into the main house, so I converted the large entrance hall. I installed a modern gas stove, built a breakfast bar, so friends can chat with me while I’m cooking, and added a wall of open shelves to hold all my spices and condiments.

You have a cat. It’s not very Afghan to have her indoors, is it?

No. My Afghan colleagues think I am a bit of a loony foreigner. Having pets is utterly alien to them. Shortly after I arrived in Kabul I found Screw (short for the Screwdriver cocktail – it’s yellow and she’s a ginger cat) in a sewage ditch. It was snowing and she was whimpering because she had been run over by a bicycle. Like all Afghans, she’s a survivor – she pulled through and we’ve been together ever since.

What’s the best part of the house when it’s 40°C in the summer?

The thick mud walls of old Afghan houses like mine keep the soaring temperatures at bay to some extent. However, I prefer to be outside (as long as there is no dusty windstorm). I had a local carpenter make a large wooden daybed, on which are a kelim and kelim-covered floor cushions, and a low coffee table. One can lounge about on it and read and relax or chat with friends. My other indulgence is a kiddie pool. I spend many summer Friday afternoons on a lilo reading and looking up at the children’s kites in the sky.

The Southeast Asian nation of Laos is still a fairly untraveled destination, especially compared to its neighbor, Thailand. But the word is getting out about the charms of the Laotian town of Luang Prabang. Gayle Keck went there recently with her husband and wrote about their experiences for the Washington Post.

Strangers talk to one another here, people who’d never strike up a conversation when touring London or Rome. It’s one of those clues that tell you this Mekong River town in northern Laos is an outpost. The atmosphere is part “Star Wars” bar, part “Casablanca.” Backpackers descend from the surrounding mountains or step ashore off slow boats, clutching tattered Lonely Planet guides. Europeans, Australians, Thais and a few Americans wing in on prop planes. Members of ethnic hill tribes, particularly the Hmong, appear at sunset, spreading their wares along the street. And everywhere you turn there are Buddhist monks in blazing-orange robes…

From our balcony, lazing against triangular bolsters, we shamelessly gaze down on our neighbors across the river with that fascination modern urbanites have for the simple life. The far bank is patchworked with small plots. Men hoe vegetables, women scrub laundry in the dingy water, a fisherman checks his bamboo traps, kids turn a washbasin into an impromptu boat and skid away from their soap-wielding mom.

The vast majority of Laos’s population is rural, but 10 minutes away by tuk-tuk, the bargain-priced motorcycle-powered open trucks, Luang Prabang bustles. In 1988, the year Laos reopened to tourists, only 600 of them visited the entire country; there are probably that many trolling Luang Prabang’s streets today alone. We see bamboo scaffolding where repairs are being made to colonial-era stuccoed homes with mossy tiled roofs and sagging shutters, efforts to meet the growing demand for guesthouses.

No, it’s not the KFC you were probably expecting. Although it’s close. In Afghanistan, Kentucky Fried Chicken has been transformed into Kabul Fried Chicken by an Afghan expatriate who has returned to his home country with his sights set on an emerging market for fast foods. Time magazine has the story.

As the sun sets in Kabul and the wail of the muezzin issuing from loudspeakers mounted on minarets calls the faithful to evening prayer, the fryer at KFC is being fired up for the evening rush. But Kabul Fried Chicken has little in common with the U.S. chain whose initials it copied: The chairs are a little too high for the tables, and the delights depicted in photographs mounted on the walls — big milkshakes, braised ribs, lattes — are conspicuously absent from the menu. The fare on offer is more egalitarian. Kebabs, pizza and, of course, fried chicken.

Kabul Fried Chicken is, if he is to be believed, the brainchild of Mirwais Abuldrahizmi, who long ago observed that the young people of the Muslim world like to express their cosmopolitan yearnings through their consumption habits. And returnee Afghans, like himself, bring with them visions from exile of girls without headscarves, shopping malls as social hubs, and the rituals of fast food…

Mirwais is not the only Afghan pretender to the Colonel Sanders mantle in Kabul. Another is Jamshed, who uses only one name, and runs one of three rival KFCs…He claims that after being told by the (real) KFC regional HQ in Lahore, Pakistan, that opening a franchise in Kabul would cost him a few hundred thousand dollars, he opted to go the pirate route. He claims to have bought the U.S.-based KFC’s secret fried chicken recipe on the black market for $1,200, although obviously that claim can’t be verified. “You can get anything at the bazaar in Pakistan,” he says.

Normally, a knock-off of a global company would have to deal with legal issues of intellectual property rights. But this is Afghanistan. As the story notes:

Imitation … is endemic to Afghanistan’s business environment. “We’re an underdeveloped country,” Mirwais says. “So we can’t come up with our own ideas.”

If you’ve traveled abroad, to someplace other than Europe, than chances are you’ve had an experience or two with haggling over prices in an overseas market. The drill is the same pretty much everywhere and, once you get used to the practice, it can even be a bit of fun. That’s what Yemisrach Kifle discovered, as well, and he wrote a fun little essay for the Christian Science Monitor about his experience bargaining with a shopkeeper in a Vietnamese market.

That shopping day in Hoi An, I had to remind myself to focus on what I thought was a good price for the gray shirt.

“How much?” I repeated my question. The saleswoman came closer and peered at my face searching for telling signs of what she should charge me. I tried to project a blank face.

With the most confident voice she could muster, she responded, “One hundred ninety” and continued to stare at me with a straight face.

“Noooo!” I exclaimed, my eyes wide with feigned surprise and offense. I stomped my feet. I pretended to walk away.

She didn’t betray hesitation. She didn’t call after me to come back. She was on top of her game.

I looked back begrudgingly and shouted, “I pay 30!”

Now it was her turn to pretend to be offended. She shook her head. “You crazy!” she yelled. But she knew that I knew how it worked. “One hundred, last price!” she said throwing her hands up in the air.

I considered the offer for a few seconds. “OK, how about I pay 85?” I asked in a conciliatory voice, taking my money out of my wallet.

“OK,” she said, smiling now. “Ninety,” she pushed my offer up a bit as a matter of course and put the shirt in a bag. She then playfully pointed her index finger at my chest. “Good for you,” she beamed and pointed it back at herself, “good for me!”

Mongolia is not the first place one thinks of when pondering the fate of budding democracies around the world. Heck, how many people could locate Mongolia on a map? Now, though, the country may become known as a poster child for the risks of mixing democracy with vodka.

The charred shells of two Soviet-style buildings rising from the center of this capital stand as a warning of the dangers of mixing vodka with voter frustration.

In a barren land where nomads still gallop across pastures to polling booths, that potent mix led last week to the literal gutting of some of the country’s most prominent political and cultural institutions. Now, with an election in dispute, Mongolia’s fledgling democracy faces its biggest challenge since its birth in 1990.

Following cries of fraud in parliamentary elections — accusations that were disputed by international election observers — hundreds of rioters, many of them drunk, attacked the headquarters of the dominant political party and the neighboring national art gallery on July 1. Fires were started. Five people were killed. More than 1,000 pieces of artwork were destroyed, damaged or looted…

(J)ust as shocking as the violence was the government’s reaction — it declared a four-day state of emergency, sent soldiers into the streets and shut down television and radio stations. The outburst of violence was without precedent in democratic Mongolia, and many here — from sheepherders to business executives — are deeply ashamed of what unfolded.

For nearly two decades now, Mongolia has had one of the few true democracies in northern Asia, a fact which made this outburst of electoral violence there all the more unfortunate.

On the surface, Mongolia is an unlikely place for an experiment in democracy. It is the most sparsely populated country in the world. Half the population still lives in round felt tents called gers, and livestock outnumber humans eight to one.

Yet Mongolia’s literacy rate is 98 percent, a legacy of nearly seven decades of Communist rule. The country held a constitutional referendum in 1990 and a vote in 1992 that led to its first democratic change of Parliament. Since then, it had held peaceful elections every four years — until June 29…

As the country’s leaders grapple with how to resolve the election, everyone knows nothing less than the future of Mongolia is at stake.

“We made our democracy ourselves, we will defend it ourselves,” Oyungerel said. “I love democracy. I want to give this society to my children.”