Okay so I am supposed to write a blog on China, but as I stated in an earlier blog I am on a search for light hearted blogs rather than heavy human rights issues, and as the Olympics move to China this year, controversy is on its heels.
Instead I am looking into a part of Asian culture that I love, Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty is based out of Japan, but its popularity spans the entire globe, China included.
In a Google search I typed, "Hello Kitty Blogs" and I was surprised by the amount of blogs about the cute cat.
Here is one of my favorites: It is about how a wife's love of the cat spawned a deep hatred for HK from her husband.
In a recent drug bust in Guatemala, law enforcement officials found cocaine wrapped in Hello Kitty paper. This is what the Hello Kitty Hell blogger had to say about it:
"You knew that it was merely a matter of time. Was there really any doubt that we would eventually confirm that Hello Kitty is dealing cocaine?
This is what Guatemalan anti-narcotics police found when they seized 1.2 tons of the cocaine on its way to Mexico on April 13th. Now, this really should not come as a surprise to anyone. Cocaine and Hello Kitty display an awful lot of the same properties when it comes to addiction so combining them together probably seemed like the perfect move for Sanrio. If you have ever had to deal with a Hello Kitty fanatic in your life, you already have wondered if they were high on something whenever Hello Kitty is mentioned."
This blog is pretty great, check it out if you have the time.
Hello Kitty is so popular in China that manufacturers have created Hello Kitty Panty Liners! Again, Hello Kitty Hell Blogger covers it all.
Many Hello Kitty products are only available in China. As the Sanriotown Blog displays a new HK phone only available there.
Here is a picture a HK from China:
As I sit in my living room with the window open, a warm breeze hits my face and instantly the smell reminds me of my other home: Athens, Greece. It also helps that two men walking by were speaking Greek.
Experts say that our sense of smell is our most powerful and any of us that have been instantly transported to another place just by a whiff of air would agree.
The smell for me is the warm air mixed with the aroma of diesel fumes, instantly I am taken to my home in Athens, where I am sitting drinking coffee listening to the roar of cars. The way the warm dry breeze mixes with the air you only feel in a foreign country.
Greece is a country deeply rooted in its history. The Aramaic alphabet is the oldest language in existence and is the basis of all languages used today, many words in English hold their roots in Greek.
In my search for blogs out of the country, most often people write about their travels through the unbelievable landscape and culture of the country.
Instead of connecting readers to them, I thought I would give you some of my experiences and showcase some of my favorite places.
I love Athens, it is dirty, gritty and crowded. I tell friends who travel there to only stay for a couple of days because I think it is hard to handle for the average vacationer. Tourist areas in Athens are notoriously high priced and Greeks love to take advantage of the wide-eyed tourist.
My mother and I have tested this. We sat down to eat the heavy tourist traffic of Monastiraki and Plaka, we were speaking English. When the waiter greeted us and handed us the menu we were both shocked at the prices.
We both kind of laughed and then my mom in her Athenian Greek accent said to the waiter, "Give us the real menu."
"I am sorry," the waiter replied, "I thought you were Americans."
He promptly returned with another menu, and the price was 5 Euros cheaper for certain items.
The Greeks have been living with tourists for a long time, and they have quickly adapted their dislike for outsiders by taking them for all they have, I guess it makes up for visitors invading their homeland.
Native Greek people are homogeneous, and it is hard for them to see outside of their culture.
My sister, Christine, was born in Greece and lived there until she was five years old. My sister does not look Greek with blonde hair and blue eyes, but is 100 percent native.
She traveled last year with her boyfriend Matt to Athens, and said she never wants to vacation in her homeland again unless she has to.
Christine and Matt have lived and traveled all over the world and said that the Greeks were the rudest people they had encountered. It was only when she began speaking Greek to locals that they warmed up to her.
I too have seen this side of the country, as my Greek is at times pretty bad. I don't look Greek either and have experienced prejudice because I don't blend in.
On a much greater scale, here is another example of Greece's reluctance to accept outsiders. BBC Article
But all of this could never keep me away from Greece; the islands are some of the most beautiful places in the world. The highly tourist populated Santorini is one of my favorite with its volcanic cliffs and theory that it was where the lost city of Atlantis once stood.
Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the world and at present, has one of the highest rates of AIDS infections in Southeast Asia.
National HIV prevalence rate among adults (ages 15 to 49): 1.6 percent1
Adults and children (ages 0-49) living with HIV at the end of 2005: 130,0001
AIDS deaths (adults and children) in 2005: 16,0001
AIDS orphans at the end of 2005: not available1
| Emergency Plan Results in Cambodia | ||
| # of individuals receiving antiretroviral treatment in fiscal year 2007 | 5,700 | |
| # of pregnant women receiving prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) services in fiscal year 2007 | 31,200 | |
| # of pregnant women receiving antiretroviral prophylaxis for PMTCT in fiscal year 2007 | 170 | |
| # of counseling and testing encounters (in settings other than PMTCT) in fiscal year 2007 | 108,100 | |
Taken from U.S. President's Plan for AIDS Relief
There is a lot of information regarding the AIDS epidemic in Cambodia, but not many people from the country blog about the disease in their country.
AIDS is still seen as a stigma in the country and this video helps to explain that:
The country's sex trade drives the spread of AIDS in Cambodia and it now rivals Thailand as a leading destination for sex tourism. Prostitution is illegal in the country but is tolerated and often public officials are involved.
According to March Reuters report HIV cases in Southeast Asia could increase as much as 150 percent by the year 2020.
Nearly 5 million people are infected with HIV in Asia now, with 440,000
dying annually, the report said. The annual death toll will rise to
almost 500,000 by 2020 without a scaled-up response, according to the
report, entitled "Redefining AIDS in Asia - Crafting an Effective
Response."
AIDS is the most likely cause of death and work days lost among
15-to-44-year-olds in Asia, according to the commission, which worked
on the report for 18 months. Asia ranks second regionally in HIV cases
behind Sub-Saharan Africa, which has an estimated 22.5 million people
living with HIV.
I am really sick of writing about business, politics and all the sad shit that goes on in this world. I have decided to only write blog postings that have nothing to do with the aforementioned.
The Middle East. I feel that when most Americans think about this far off place our minds usually lead us to all the atrocities occurring there or we tremble in fear about all the terrorists and how they are out to kill us all.
I could write about Iraq, Iran or Israel, places of great turmoil in the region, but I just can't do that. So I looked into my memory bank and found the United Arab Emirates, a place that I associate with the rich and famous. A country that has an indoor ski resort when the average temperature is 80 degrees, for frick's sake.
The first blog about the UAE that I found was: The Secret Dubai Diary. In the author's April 8 post titled, "A 'Jumeirah Pillow'"
"What is the best way to get that extra special touch of personal room service when staying at a five star hotel? All is revealed in an article about the Jumeirah Carlton Tower:
Just in case you need to know, there’s a coded way to ask for a prostitute. You phone the concierge and say: “Can I have another pillow?”
As an April Fool's joke the author writes about Dubai's plans to build the "Actual World", an obvious reference to Dubai's penchant to build on a grand scale.
"Faced with lukewarm celebrity interest in its The World artificial islands project, Dubai has decided to build The Actual World.
The multi-trillion dollar mega-project, believed to be largest in the known universe, will see a scale replica of the entire Earth rebuilt on the planet Mars.
The Red Planet was recently acquired by Dubai Holdings as part of its property portfolio diversification strategy."
In the few blogs I have read out of Dubai it seems that the people have a bit of sarcasm that I greatly appreciate. It gets lonely as a cynical business reporter that cannot tell Kraft Foods to screw off.
Here is another blog out of Dubai: Adventures in Dubai by Keefieboy
"Apparently the land that the Hard Rock Café stands on has been sold to somebody who wants to build a skyscraper, and we know how desperately Dubai needs more of those. So yet another Dubai landmark will be pulled down."
In my search to find blogs from Central and South America I happened upon blogs about "emo" culture in the countries of the region.
"Emo" is short for emotional, usually those that follow this way of life define themselves through dark clothing, dark makeup and listen to depressing music. "Emo" is a label, like "grunge" in the 90's or the free loving "hippies" of the late 60's. More often than not, those who follow the emo scene are teenagers or young adults who find something to connect with in the culture.
Personally, I don't have too much association with people in the "emo" scene and often use the label to make fun of my boyfriend who hates it when I say his "outfit looks soooo emo." Yes, I am stereotyping a little but I identify "emo's" with tight fitting jeans, Van's shoes and black hair with long bangs. Hey as a tattooed woman who owns a rottweiler I am often lumped into categories such as gay, punk rocker, white trash or a felon. As human beings I think all we lump everyone into some kind of organizational structure. But seriously, to beat someone to a pulp because of their clothes and musical preferences.
Wow?! Here is a generic photo I found (right) from Google, showing that Emo bashing has been around for a while. People get crazy huh, when someone is not like them?
The emo culture has spread to Latin and Central America and many of the youth who are involved in this scene are facing persecution from local residents and the news media.
On March 22, Daniel Hernandez, wrote about "emo's" in Mexico for his blog Intersections.
"A bizarre wave of mob emo-bashings is sweeping across Mexico. The movement is being generated on message boards and social networking sites by non-emo youth who highly dislike like the emo look and attitude.
The spark came first in Queretaro on March 7. An estimated 800 young people poured into the city's Centro Historico hunting for emo's to beat the crap out of. They found some. The next weekend it spread to Mexico City, where emos faced off against punks and rockabillies at the Glorieta de Insurgents, the epicenter of emo social space in the capital. There have also been reports of anti-emo violence in Durango, Colima, and elsewhere."
Hernandez followed up his "emo" blog report for LA Weekly.
"In Mexico, emo culture is a butt of many jokes. It is either despised intensely or generally ignored. But it's only the despising sentiment that lately has been getting wide airplay. For Televisa an on-air personality named Kristoff expresses a serious dose of antiemo rhetoric and switches to English to say, on network television, "Fucking bullshit" to the emo movement. Some emos I've interviewed point to the Kristoff clip as a defining provocation of the current wave of anti-emo violence."
Mexico City resident, Harry24, a user on the LastFM "Anit Emo Death Squad Forum", describes why he thinks there has been a rash of attacks on Mexican emo's.
"But why there are a high number of emos here in my country?????
As you may know, Mexico is a "developing country", but that's a fuckin lie, we are walking backwards, and the country is turning worse and worse, if somebody tells you that Mexico is walking to the progress its a fucking liar, i say this because I live in Mexico City, and I can honestly say that this city and all the country is getting worse.
So what are the factors that contribute to the high number of emos???"
Here are his five reasons involving a breakdown of these aspects in Mexican society:
1. Family
2. Music
3. Media
4. Culture
5. Government
The phenomenon of "emo" hating as spread to Peru and bloggers are telling the public of what they think about Peruvian emo's.
Here is what Marco of Andando Sin Caminos wrote about "emo's" in Peru.
"It is true that I was not familiar with such a strange living species until I went to the Spanish Cultural Center, which is located in Lima and I stopped to observe a park located in front of the center. It attracted my attention, in the first place, to see so many youth dressed in a strange manner, somewhere between black punk clothing, mixed with a bright pink, and with a haircut of a character of Japanese anime. Upon first glance, they appeared to be defenseless for how skinny they are and for looking childlike. And they are defenseless because a friend told me that he had seen many of them beaten by gangs and by punks that hang out around the Spanish Cultural Center for their appearance."
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