Street Legal

It was one of the first lessons that we learned here: things always take longer than you expect.

Sometimes, it’s because as clueless foreigners with a shaky grasp of the language and complete ignorance of the normal ways of business, we have absolutely no clue what we are doing, and so the simplest things—like buying a trashcan—take weeks longer than they should as we figure out how and where to buy something (we lived with garbage bags on our kitchen floor for longer than I’d like to admit).

Sometimes it’s because, as a developing country, infrastructure in Benin hasn’t quite caught up to the standards we’re used to back home and things just take longer to get done.

Sometimes, it’s because the Beninese seem to have absorbed the French penchant for bureaucracy, and so there is always one more form to fill out or box to check before we can, say, get our passports back from the health authorities after our post-arrival COVID test.

And sometimes, like for example buying a car (and writing this update, which I wanted to do AFTER we got our car), it’s a combination of them all.

Our first attempt fell through when—after finding a suitable car and negotiating the price—we told the seller that we’d return the next day with the cash to pay for it. He sold it to someone else. (See item #1 above). This was in early February.

Just one corner of the car park. Anyone want a silver Toyota?

Our second attempt very nearly ended in disaster. I spent some 6 hours at the car park (essentially a collection of absolutely enormous used car lots outside of town—the cars sit in these duty-free lots after being imported until they can be sold either in Benin or, more frequently, throughout the region) negotiating with someone I thought was the seller’s representative. The deal fell through when, upon returning to the car park a couple of days later to pay for the car, I demanded to see the car title and noticed that it was very obviously fake (wrong location, misspellings, it even had several words written in the wrong language!). This was in mid-February.

(In retrospect, the fact that “representative” refused to meet me in person, told me that I couldn’t speak directly to the owner since he was out of the country recovering from surgery, wanted me to pay for the car at some office downtown instead of at the car park, and couldn’t promise that I’d have all the necessary documents upon payment should have probably tipped me off that it was a scam from the beginning. Also see item #1.)

How many mistakes can you find?

Finally, our third try. A colleague introduced us to a trusted intermediary to handle the purchase. We hired a customs agent to handle the paperwork and make sure everything was above board. And we carried the necessary cash (oh yeah, you have to pay cash for these things) to the car park to actually buy the thing once we made our decision.

Car bought—a 2012 Rav-4 from Rhode Island, some 180,000 miles on the odometer, and a little bit of rust here and there (there was no avoiding that). This was early March.

And then we waited.

Our customs agent told us it would likely take 3-4 weeks for the paperwork to get taken care of and our plates to be delivered. That stretched into 6+ weeks as (per Item #3 above) each week seemed to require a new piece of paper that needed to be written, procured, or otherwise stamped. Once we were told that things were slow at the government offices because of a bad internet connection (Item #2). Meanwhile, the car sat in the car park as it couldn’t be released until the paperwork had been approved.

We asked our agent when the car would be ready. “Let us just do the next step,” he would reply.

Finally, a week ago, we got a call. “Are you home? I can bring you the car.” Joy! “But you cannot drive it yet until you get the plates.”

“When will that be?”

“I do not know. There is a shortage of the materials they use for the plates. I will let you know.”

So our car sat in our driveway—so close!—for a week until we got another call. “Are you free today? The plates are ready.”

Our agent came. We drove to the DMV, picked up the plates, and got them riveted to the car. Sweet!

One more step—a safety inspection.

We drove to the inspection facility where a guy made sure we had all the necessary safety equipment. A front headlight was out, so another guy replaced it. And then I waited—three, four hours?—before I got the little sticker that said we passed. Free to go!

There she is!

It was a long process, and we learned a number of important lessons. First, have someone you trust show you the ropes—it’ll help speed things up. Second, be patient—“Let us just do the next step.” Third, don’t be too ambitious—we plan on taking care of one thing per day. And finally—always, always bring a book—it helps to pass the time.

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Happy New Year from Cotonou Benin!

I owe you all an explanation.

When I was in high school, I used to joke that my plan after graduation was to disappear for a few years. My friends would all wonder where I had gone until one day, they'd see me in the background of a photo of some dusty African border town that had been published on the front page of the New York Times. (This was back when people still got actual newspapers delivered to their homes).

"Is that…Jake?" they'd ask. They'd look closer and sure enough--a lanky dude with a spot on his head and a doofy grin on his face. "Huh, I always wondered what happened to him," they'd muse, before turning back to their morning coffee.

Well friends, this isn’t a New York Times cover photo (have you ever tried photobombing one of those?), but is probably as close as I’m going to get to that dream (and frankly a lot closer than I ever thought I’d get). Here I am, coming to you live from Cotonou, Benin.

We moved here two weeks ago, right before Christmas and just as a raging global pandemic was hitting its third, and highest, wave in the US.

(I know what you’re thinking—are they morons? And the answer is, quite possibly yes. But Santa found us all the same. The guy really is magic.)

My wife, Devon, had landed a job as Deputy Chief of Party for a USDA-funded project supporting cashew farmers and processors in Benin. And despite the fact that we had both been working remotely since mid-March, supporting cashew farmers and producers is not really the kind of thing that you can do via Zoom.

So, not 24 hours after helping my parents dig out from the nor’easter that had dumped over a foot of snow on their small Connecticut town, the four of us (me, Devon and the two kiddos, 5 and 2) stumbled off of Air France Flight 804 and onto the tarmac at the Cotonou Airport. It was 9:10pm local time, and I was already regretting the flannel and jeans I had been wearing when we left.

We boarded a shuttle which dropped us in front of a large white tent. Inside, the four of us had our brains swabbed (at least it felt that way) and our fingers pricked for our COVID tests. Another shuttle took us to the terminal—a large stuffy room with linoleum tiles and painted cinderblock walls—where we waited and got our passports stamped (immigration kept them pending the results of our COVID-tests). We collected our luggage, loaded it up onto a couple of carts (we had a lot of stuff! Our shipment doesn’t arrive until mid-February) and stepped out into the night.

 We had arrived.

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A Note: I'll be primarily sending these out as emails (but also posting here in case anyone wants to drop by). My goal here is to send them out once every week or so—to pick up the thread of writing that I dropped when Devon and I moved back from Korea and share a little bit about life with a family in Benin. Hopefully these notes won’t be too long and hopefully they’ll be at least mildly entertaining. If this isn’t your cup of tea, if you have no idea who I am, or if you just don’t care (which, fair enough and no hard feelings), feel free to unsubscribe. If you think you know someone who might be interested in this, they can sign up to receive updates here.

Thanks for reading! And Happy New Year!

All the best,
Jake

Don't Forget to Look Up, or Why I hate Lonely Planet

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Michael Moynihan launches a broadside against popular travel guides, Lonely Planet and Rough Guide for excusing brutal dictators and whitewashing authoritarian regimes:

"There's a formula to [the guidebooks]: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing."

I'm not really going to touch on the political issues here - though I do find the suggestion that by visiting North Korea or Burma (before the recent reforms) you can somehow help ameliorate the lives of people living there naive at best. At worst, telling you that you can visit these places without financially supporting brutal regimes is delusional and grossly irresponsible.

By all means visit North Korea (lord knows I want to). But do not delude yourself into thinking that you are somehow going to peel back the heavily restricted official curtain and learn something "true" about regular North Koreans or that your mere presence there will help promote freedom, as if it wafted off of you like the scent of a red, white, and blue rose (Go America!).

But what really gets me about LP is the way that it's positioned itself as the guidebook for "Travelers," as opposed to "tourists," a distinction made in a recent NYTimes piece, "Reclaiming Travel." Travel is deep, and meaningful while Tourism is cheap, thin, and superficial. Lonely Planet promises that their guide will take you beyond the "Tourist traps," and show you the "authentic" side of whatever country you are visiting - that they can give you an "insider's" understanding of a place that you will be spending a week or a month breezing through. In short, that they will make you a "Traveler" not a "Tourist."

But an incident in the edition of Southeast Asia on a Shoestring that D and I bought for our trip through SEAsia drove me nuts. Somewhere in the section on bus travel through Thailand, the authors write something along the lines of the following: (I'm paraphrasing from memory here since the book is either buried in a box in my attic or at D's house):

If you ever find yourself on a long-distance bus in Thailand, and notice that all the Thais are sitting on one side of the bus, don't silently cheer your good fortune at scoring a whole row of seats to yourself. Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all times of day, and you can be sure that the empty side will be scorching hot as soon as you get going. Suck it up and join the locals on the crowded side.

Think about this. Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all times of day."  Thais are magical, in possession of some mystical knowledge that has been lost to Westerners. They all sit on one side of the bus not because they're hot, but because they have some magical ability that you don't. You know, the magical ability to look at the fucking sky you moron.

This mindset is destructive for a number of reasons. It fails to recognize a culture for what it is. It forces that culture into a box based on the pre-conceived notions of the traveler/guidebook writer (in this case, that Thai = mystical). When people visit a country expecting to have certain "authentic" experiences ("authentic" being something they've defined for themselves before even stepping foot in that country), the tourism market in that country naturally caters to those expectations, whether or not those expectations bear any resemblance to reality. (Which is fine by the way, Thais gotta make a buck).

But this mindset also requires nothing of the traveler. That NYTimes article I spoke about above came fairly close to enraging me though, in principle, I agreed with its recommendations: Get lost, wander around, talk to people, learn something about the place you are visiting and about yourself. These are all things that I try to do when I visit a new place, and things that I think, makes a trip more worthwhile and more fun. So why was I so mad at the NYTimes piece?

It was the way that this Traveler vs Tourist setup is used by LP and others that made me angry. "Traveling" requires people to think - think about yourself, think about where you are, about why the people there do what they do. It is only by thinking that we can learn anything about ourselves or the country we are visiting.

But by telling its readers that Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all hours of the day, LP  is telling its readers that they don't have to think. That they can just put everything Thais do (sitting on the same side of the bus) into this pre-conceived "mystical" box, and that's that.

In addition to LP, so much about the "Travel" industry is predicated on showing you what's "authentic" in a country. Eat at this authentic restaurant, go on this trek to that authentic village, look at this authentic temple. This is authentic culture. You don't have to think about anything, because we'll tell you how it is. By selling you on the idea of turning you into a "traveler," these books are just turning you into a tourist.

My Summer Vacation! (Finally)

At the end of July, Devon and I were lucky to have her Mom and sister Ashley come to visit us for a week and a half.  We hit the usual touristy areas Seoul and Busan, the less usual, but equally as touristy Geojedo and Oedo, and the unusual, and not very touristy, but spectacular Jinju.

I took pictures of everywhere we went - well most everywhere since I came down with a minor bout of gastroenteritis which turned into an acute gastroenteritis halfway through our trip, caused by either the slices of raw chicken or 9 month old margarine that I had eaten the week prior.  Whatever it was, it put me out of whack and in a mood that wasn't very conducive to taking pictures.

Still, I persevered, and with the help of Korea's finest medicines, managed to drag myself and my camera out of our various hotels.  These photos (more can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/melvillj) are the result of that trip.

We started our journey in Seoul shopping along crowded artisan streets, in jam-packed markets, and in the swank downtown area with all the famous brands.  Somewhere in between, we managed to ride a cable car up to the top of Namsan, one of Seoul's many mountains and the only one with a 497 meter tower on the top where we were treated to a view of the full enormity of Seoul.

Like I said...Seoul is BIG

I'd always known Seoul was big - some 40% of Korea's population lives in or around the capitol, but to seeing apartment stack after stack dissolve into the summer haze put a new perspective on the size.  I can climb a mountain in Gwangju and on even the haziest days see where the city ends and the farms begin.

After Seoul, we jumped back to Gwangju for one last day of teaching before the official vacation started.  As soon as school let out, we were on our way to Busan, Korea's second largest city and home to it's most famous fish market.

In Busan, we eschewed the tower on the mountain in the middle of the city and instead wandered through the maze of alleys of the Kukje Market.  We didn't buy much beyond the odd pair of socks and the lunch we ate sitting on tiny plastic stools in front of a gregarious ajumma serving us noodles in plastic bowls in the middle of one alley.

It was in Busan that my "mild" case of whatever it was I had turned "acute," and so we went to the hospital in search of aid and stronger antibiotics.  When we arrived, a very helpful nurse who was obviously used to dealing with lost and stricken foreigners ushered me into her office and told me I'd have to wait for 45 minutes while the doctors finished their lunch.

I had mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I really appreciate a country that places such a strong emphasis on lunch while at work.  It shows that at least someone has their priorities in order.  On the other hand, being told to wait 45 minutes with an acute case of whatever it was wasn't fun.  I'm just glad I didn't ruin their meal.
An hour later, we departed the hospital with my stronger antibiotics and headed towards Beomeosa, Busan's largest and most famous temple.  It's located about a half hour outside the city by train, and right as we got there the weather decided it would start to rain.  Hard.

The Entrance to the Temple

The temple was beautiful, but the antibiotics hadn't kicked in and besides it was raining, so you'll have to settle for pictures from the last time Devon and I went to Busan (it was much sunnier).

The temple in the Mountains.  Note the sun

The next day, we headed to Geojedo where we'd finally get to see Oedo.  In case you don't know, last summer Devon's parents visited us, and the one place Devon and her Mom wanted to see was this island - described in guidebooks as somewhere between "Paradise" and "Heaven."  It was a private island that some guy turned into an opulent tropical garden paradise and opened to tourists.

The entrance to Paradise

But last year, with some apocalyptic traffic and a ferry that didn't take cars, we were forced to skip the island altogether.  Devon and I made it as far as Geojedo earlier this year, but didn't have enough time to cross the island and quite frankly had no clue how to get to Oedo, and so we left it unseen.  This was the one place Devon wanted to visit before she left Korea.

Somehow we figured out how to get there, and boy oh boy were the promotional materials right.  It was Paradise - beautiful blue sky, lush green vegetation, and statues of every kind everywhere.  I was reminded of the real estate magazines I used to flip through as a kid, dreaming of owning a villa on the French Rivera or some Mediterranean Island somewhere...

Mediterranean Dreams

After being dragged kicking and screaming off of Oedo, we booked it to Jinju, a smallish city about halfway between Gwangju and Busan, located on the beautiful Nam River.

Jinju by night

Way back when, Jinju was the sight of a huge fortress and a couple of ferocious battles with the Japanese.  The first ended in glorious victory for the Koreans, the second a couple of years later ended in crushing defeat and the deaths of some 70,000 Korean soldiers and civilians.  After the battle though, Non-gae, a Korean "professional female entertainer," drowned herself in the river with one of the Japanese Generals. 

Brave woman

With both the first victory over the Japanese and the story of Non-gae, Jinju has taken a special role in the Korean psyche (the Japanese brutally colonized Korea for 35 years back in the early 20th century).  Today, the fortress has been rebuilt and a museum highlighting both Korea's long history and the 16th century war with Japan has been added.  Both are pretty interesting. 

View of the fortress

But Jinju was more than just forts and museums.  The best part was how small the city seemed.  Families wandered around the fortress grounds at night, enjoying whatever respite from the heat of the day they could get.  I wandered along the river banks (the antibiotics finally kicked in), and stumbled across a summer festival, complete with a battle of the bands competition and children playing in fountains.

The right way to beat the heat

Far from the crowded chaos of Seoul, or even the bustle of Gwangju, Jinju felt like a real community.  I felt like everyone in the city was out that night, walking along the river and enjoying the reflections of the bridge in the river like so many stars.

My favorite picture from the whole trip

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Check out more pictures from the vacation here