It started off innocently enough. We were visiting a theme park in Jakarta this past week called Tamin Mini Indonesia Indah, or TMII. It’s the Indonesian version of Disneyland, right down to the plushies waiting to greet kids with handshakes and hugs. It even has a Disney-like castle. Opened in April of 1975, TMII was [...]
I’m an old guy. I remember the first commercially successful video game – a 2-dimensional tennis game called Pong on which I used to destroy my friend Tim. My first computer was an Osborne, named after its creator, Adam Osborne. It was the world’s first commercially available portable computer, so heavy it was called a [...]
Graffiti is everywhere, from the subway cars of New York and Bangkok to the streets of Bandung. Here, Aris tells us that at least some of the graffiti is gang-related, as it is back in the states. But my favorite drawing here has no gang connotations at all – it’s just fun. The graffiti was [...]
The first thing you notice as you enter just about any Indonesian city, other than perhaps the traffic, is the smells. You’re not as much assaulted by them as you are beaten over the head by a cricket bat full of all kinds of odors. Standing recently at a mobile Singkong Keju stand (similar to [...]
This part of Southeast Asia loves Korean pop music. Girl and Boy bands dominate, singing sweet love songs and catchy pop anthems, all with a strong backbeat and not one of them something you might remember longer than it takes for Justin Bieber to comb his hair. The music is all mostly harmless and clearly [...]
I’m terrible with languages. Research has shown that children exposed early in life to different dialects are able to learn languages more easily later in life. That gives me a small amount of comfort. As a kid I had a few weeks of French in 4th or 5th grade, and that’s it. In high school [...]