Trip to Bali
One of the reasons for my delay in posting is that I was waiting for a friend to send me pictures he took of Bali during our brief trip there. I have a few of my own, but unfortunately my phone ran out of power pretty quickly into the trip. Anyway.
I took a last-minute trip to Bali, which is an island and the smallest province in Indonesia. Unlike the rest of Indonesia, which is predominately Muslim, Bali has remained Hindu since the fifth century, resisting the later shifts towards Buddhism and Islam. This struck me as an interesting historical fact, but cursory investigation reveals only a non-specific mention of 'cultural barriers' that impeded the acceptance of Buddhism and Islam. For whatever reason, Bali has remained Hindu and combined traditional beliefs with Hinduism to form a unique culture and religious practice.
Today, Bali is a huge tourist destination for Australians and Singaporeans. It's easy to understand why- it's famous for beautiful beaches and temples, hospitable people, and excellent food.
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| I could have just linked a map from the internet, but then how would I have justified taking this picture? |
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| On the door above my hotel room. Even though I knew about the swastika in Hindu culture, it still took a bit of getting used to. |
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| Near the hotel in Kuta, the once sleepy town by the airport that a tour guide I read described as 'a tourist-infested concrete warren'. There were some nice beaches, but I tend to agree. They left out the smell of bottled vodka mixers and bad decisions. |
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| A shrine at the end of a very out of the way alley. They're everywhere. |
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| Downtown Kuta. Very Westernized. There's also a lot of signs out advertising the sale of the local psychedelic mushroom, bit of a way off these main streets though. |
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| The beach! Elsie in the front. |
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| These vendors in the background come up to you about once a minute hustling everything from beer to dart guns to tattoos (who gets a tattoo from a guy on a beach?) |
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| Entrance to the beach, Viktor and Tom in the foreground. |
For more pictures, I'll direct you to some taken by my friend Tom: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tpefoley/sets/72157640909967053/
Rain, campus life
Rain has finally come to Singapore, and I've got to tell you, it does not mess around. honestly did not know it was possible for it to rain so hard. You get soaked to the bone in literally 10 seconds in the open.
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| I'd wondered what these huge ditches were for. They're empty most of the day, maybe the slightest trickle. But when it rains, they get about half full in seconds, as you can see. |
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| First time having Japanese here, it's not as common as you'd think. I'm told pop cultural influences have also trended away from Japan and towards Korea. |
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| Yong tau foo + laksa. I don't know exactly what it is, but it is really, really spicy. |
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| Stewed chicken ramen + some kind of miscegenated sea protein |
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| Atop the Art Design and Media (ADM) building. Lots of foreigners come up here at night to lounge on the artificial knoll, most of the grass on campus is not nearly as tame. |
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| A Singaporean friend, Carol, invited a bunch of us out for Dim Sum. I really should have photographed some of that food, but I was a bit busy shoving it in my mouth. Really quite tasty. |
Foreign perspectives on US imperialism
It's probably not a secret to you that I have some pretty unusual political views. What's reassuring is that a lot that I've learned about the real functioning in the US government back home appears to resonate in the public consciousness abroad. Singapore, as a state militarily and economically linked to the US, tends to be pretty uncritical of American foreign policy, but nearly contemptuous of the disorder of the state of domestic politics. But meeting people from other countries like Indonesia, Russia, and China has brought me into contact with some pretty interesting perspectives. For one thing, discussing a recent row between Indonesia and Singapore in my TV studies class, an Indonesian exchange student mentioned that Indonesia gets pretty rankled by Singapore showing off their American military hardware and their overall aggressive posturing, which is doubtless backed up by the US-Singapore mutual defense treaty. She went on to say that Indonesia tends to take a pretty critical position on American wars in the Middle East, which she was insistent was more due to its recent history as a colony and not Indonesia's sympathy for Muslims abroad. The US military presence in South East Asia is impressive. A friend in the Canadian Navy says that a good half of Singapore's airforce is training in the US at any given time. Some marines I ran into on Arab street were deployed in Singapore to train the local military.
Another interesting experience was meeting a local child at an overlook in Bali. He maneuvered circles around us and asked us where we were from. When it was my turn, I said 'America' (I say 'US' to most, but I've noticed people seem to react more intuitively to 'America') and he shot up and proudly declared 'Obama! Barack Obama!' It was quite cute.
What's interesting in longer political conversation is the credit Obama gets for health care reform. When I try explaining to people that Obamacare is not universal health care as, say, Western Europeans and Canadians understand it, they're usually pretty surprised. I think it's safe to say the ACA has been more successfully marketed abroad than it has been in the US.
Something I had learned from political studies in the US is that Obama's foreign policy is basically indistinguishable from George W. Bush's. This turns out to be almost verbatim the sentiment a lot of people hold.
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| Should be a drone in the background, obviously. | | | | | |
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I've also met some Russians recently, so I had to ask their opinion on the current criticism of Russia's handling of gay rights. They were quick to point out that Russia has gay clubs and no formal policy against sodomy- from their perspective, the recent torrent of criticism is simply politics. I've been reading up a little, and I've actually recovered some interesting information about Arizona.
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| 'Enumeration' refers to process of citing sexual orientation specifically in bullying laws. Source: http://glsen.org/learn/policy/issues/nopromohomo |
What do so-called 'No Promo Homo' laws say? Well, in Arizona: "no district shall include in its course of study instruction which…(1)
promotes a homosexual life-style…(2) portrays homosexuality as a
positive alternative life-style…(3) suggests that some methods of sex
are safe methods of homosexual sex.” AZ Rev. Stat. § 15-716(c).
I don't think Russia is a great place to be gay. But, it would seem that the legal story is nearly the same in a good portion of the US. Russia also empirically has a more homophobic society, so it seems even less excusable that the US should have these laws while simultaneously criticizing Russia. It's also interesting to note that Singapore, a US ally, has laws banning sodomy and many kinds of gay political activity, yet receives no such criticism. Granted, the Olympics aren't happening in Singapore any time soon.
This issue is an interesting one, and related to a fairly recent push in Feminist studies towards understanding the trend of so-called 'homonationalism'. Homonationalism is the ideological collusion of nationalism and LGBTQ activism to maintain and reinforce a racial and social boundary between the 'West' and the 'rest', as well as to support the increasing continuity between supremacist ideology and tolerance of sexual minorities. For more, I cannot recommend highly enough
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Dr. Jasbir K. Puar, a chapter of which is linked
here.
Also, stay tuned for a blog on the American cartoon
The Boondocks for my TV studies class!
