Let's serve up a hypothetical situation: While out grocery shopping, you see a sizable person trying to shuffle his/her way down a cramped frozen food aisle. There after, you take a second look at the gallon of double dutch ice cream (with extra marshmallows) in your hand, and then a cursory look at the calories …
Continue reading Green vs. a spendthrift shade: analyzing the eco-resort trend
Poorly pasted together and full of pixelated photographs, my Myanmar Lonely Planet has been following me forlornly ever since I picked it up some four years ago from a child book hawker in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Besides my China LP (covered in brown paper to hide its entry from Chinese customs), it stood alone on …
During a recent jaunt to Taiwan, I found myself waking up to the busy sounds of a day market in Nanshijiao, Taipei. The combined cacophony of chattering neighbors, honking motorbikes and not-so-delicate pounds of metal on pig flesh were to be my alarm clock for the duration of the stay. While Taiwan is known for …
Continue reading Why support Taiwan? The heartbeat of free markets is one reason
Recently I've been fixated with totalitarian regimes, and it's beginning to show in my work. Today I published a piece titled "The odd reality behind Shanghai's Pyongyang restaurants" for CNNGo in which I discovered that waitresses of the three North Korean-government run Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai have no clue of each others' existence. Like the …
Continue reading Who are the waitresses at Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai?
North Korea has always been an alluring topic to me. It's the mystery, I suppose; that lingering curiosity of wanting to peek into a land frozen in time, barred from the outside world, especially for Americans to say the least. Demick's book Nothing to Envy peels that mystery away and reveals what most already suspected …
Justin Calderón 