I just got back from a friend’s wedding in Minsk. There were a bunch of awesome sounding weddings this season and I usually make a point of going to all the weddings I’m invited to, but given my new career situation (which I’ll be ready to talk about soon) I’ve unfortunately needed to conserve both the time and money. There’s always an exception to the rule though and my friends Paul and Jenia’s wedding in Minsk was somthing I just couldn’t miss. Highlights:
- Yes you really can consume an entire bottle of vodka on your own and not die. You just want to.
- There is a cured meat there that is basically just the fatty part of the bacon with all the meat part cut away. Amazing.
- Belarussian nightclubs. Wow. We went three nights in a row.
- The “purchase of the bride” – a Belarussian tradition where the groom and friends must convince the bride’s friends to let her go with bribes of chocolates, singing, champagne and cash. We had stacks of 10 ruble notes (worth about 1/3 of a penny.)
- Simultaneous English / Russian / Belarussian translation of the speeches at the wedding so everybody could understand. It certainly makes for short speeches.
- There were 17 nationalities represented at the wedding. (And that doesn’t include cheating ones like “Texas”) An amazing, awesome group of folks.
- The younger sister of the bride (who speaks both Belarussian and English) gave a very different speech in Belarussian that her family could understand than she gave to the invited English speaking guests. I won’t reproduce it here but it was classic.
- Belarussian singing / dancing / cover-band. You really haven’t heard Guns ‘ N ‘ Roses until you’ve heard the Belarussian cover.
- Being beaten by birch branches in the Sauna the day after the wedding. Really the whole sauna experience which involved ice cold water, scalding sauna, absolutely ridiculous hats and of course – more cured meats.
- Going to see Swan Lake the day after the wedding at the Belarussian Ballet. (Yes mom, I really went to the Ballet!)
- And of course – the absolutely amazing and cool friends I met there. The only thing I find sad about weddings is at the end knowing that this group of people will probably never assemble again. As I was leaving I had the urge to tell people, “See you at the Christening.”
Today I’m heading out to San Francisco for the summer. I’m going to be working for a VC fund. I’ve already done some work with them and I’m super excited. They’re super smart, have a great track-record and seem like a ton of fun.
I’m also pretty excited to move back to San Francisco. I haven’t lived there since Dec. 2001, so this is kind of a homecoming for me. I think there’s a very good likelihood that I’ll be moving to SF permanently when school is finished in a year, so this is an auspicious start. I’ll be living in the apt. of an old friend from Echo Networks. I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds awesome and the few photos I’ve seen look great as well. I’ve also shipped my motorcycle (an 1989 Honda Hawk GT 650 in case you’re wondering) down from storage in Seattle.
So if you’re in SF this summer or plan to be there or would like to plan to be there, please drop me a line. I’d love to catch up with old friends.
I’ve been in a lot of cities with crazy traffic. Boston has no lane markers on the roads and few street signs. I once thought that was bad.
Bangkok has congestion that means traffic jams at any hour of the day or night.
Moscow is still the only city I’ve been where I felt as a pedestrian that the cars were genuinely trying to kill me.
But still, nothing quite prepared me for Ho Chi Minh City. Every road has an endless stream of scooters carrying 1-5 passengers. Nobody stops, ever. Traffic merges and splits in a continuous and chaotic process that feels a lot like a river. Trucks and buses ease out into traffic and the little particles flow smoothly around them. Or sometimes they don’t…
Observe.
I just got back from 2 weeks in China and Vietnam, travelling with 50 awesome folks from b-school. Amazing amazing places. Travelling with 50 people naturally constrains the kind of trip you can have. The school can basically never let you get into a situation with actual danger on a trip they organize. So the parts of travel where you think to yourself, “Man, I’m really not sure what I’m going to do” (and that really turn out to be a ton of fun) basically don’t happen on a trip like this and getting out of the cities in general was pretty limited. On the other hand, we met with government officials, toured a Nike factory, a Mattell factory and a farm and met with a ton of local business people; all things you could not do traveling on your own.
The pace of change in China truly needs to be seen to be believed and honestly is somewhat frightening. Shanghai just added a Manhattan worth of construction in the last 5 years. Pudong (the famous part of Shanghai with all the iconic looking skyscrapers) just wasn’t there 7 years ago. The relationship of the people and their government is very different than we are used to. When a decision is made to develop a particular area, the people living there are summarily moved or compensated with little dissent. We met with a real-estate firm that has a downtown project measured at 3.5 square kilometers. That size of development downtown is unthinkable in the West.
The pollution is pretty unbearable (bad enough in Beijing that I really wouldn’t want to live there) but I sense that it’s something else that the Chinese will get under control before too long. The same sort of autocratic control that lets them move people will let them just announce new pollution standards that are to be followed. The situation today is a conscious choice.
One is left wondering at the wisdom of the level of investment the West has made. The cost advantages of China create a prisoners dilemma of sorts for Western firms. If you assume your competitors are going to take advantage then you need to as well to stay competitive. And of course the allure of a 1.5B strong market is pretty strong. But investing comes at a high price. The weak state of IP laws seem like no accident. There is a very conscious effort to extract IP broadly speaking (know-how, expertise, etc…) and I have no doubt that China will one day have very strong IP laws, except they will flow the other way. They will protect China from the West. Many of the Western firms we spoke to seemed to have an increasing leeriness, that perhaps they hadn’t gotten as good a long-term bargain out of moving operations to China as they’d initially believed.
One of the most interesting things I saw was a local company called Li Ning. If the products, logo and general positioning seem familar, that’s because they are. Everything is virtually cloned from Nike, including the stores which very much resemble Niketown. They’ve even signed Shaquille O’Neal as a spokesperson. This kind of development represents a new and especially frightening kind of IP infringement because their products are not exactly counterfeit. They are “legitimate” clones that resemble Nike products in almost every way except that they cost much less. I expect we will see a lot more of this type of thing in the coming years.
Obviously lots more interesting stuff to talk about, including wonderful Vietnam, but I’ll have to save that post for another day. A bunch of photos from the trip are here and also on Facebook.
November 11th, 2007
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A blog that is 5 months stale is embarrassing. Better not to have a blog than to leave it stale. Despite the best entreaties of my parents I’ve never been a great diary keeper – my old justification was that I was too busy living things to write them down. Somehow that argument gets older as I do. With this, I try again.
In case you’re wondering if I ever made it out of Gili Trawangan, I did. I went on to Malaysia, Malawi, Zambia, Dubai, Russia, Estonia and England before coming back to the US and driving from Seattle to Boston. The photos from my various travels are posted here. Needless to say it was an amazing, life changing experience.
I’ve been asked many times what the highlight of my trip was. This may seem mundane to some but I’d have to say it was the 12 days I spent on the beach in Thailand. My daily itinerary was wake, relax, eat, 2hr yoga, beach, 1 hr massage, nap, dinner, party, sleep. 12x in a row.
There was a great group of 6 of us hanging out together and we rented motorcycles and drove all over the island, finding random beaches, bars and restaurants. Eating barbecue on the beach by flickering candlelight with just your friends and nobody else in sight is something you must experience.
All my other vacations and even the rest of my travels have been about doing stuff – sightseeing, meeting people, perhaps partying. The time in Thailand, the knowledge that I could stay as long as I wanted and thought that I had 4 months of travel still in front of me allowed me to unwind in a way that I’ve never experienced before.
Getting to the Gili Islands is hard. Well, there may be an easy way, but I did not find it. While I have come to believe the Lonely Planet and it’s brethen are a bit of a scourge on the traveller, the minimal info on how to get somewhere is at least helpful.
This is how I went: Fly Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur. Spend the night in Kuala Lumpur. Fly to Bali. Take a taxi to the harbor. Realize that you’re at the wrong harbor and take another taxi (1.5 hours) to another harbor. Take a 5 hour ferry to Lombok. Arrive 11pm. There are no hotels at the port. Hire a private van (for way too much money) to take me to San Giggi. Wake up a hotel owner in the middle of the night to get a room. Wake up and meet the same drivers (at slightly better rates this time) to take me to the port to the Gili Islands. Pay 8000 IDR (About $1!) to take the ferry to Trawang. Arrive 11am or so. Elapsed travel time about 48 hours.
All along deflect (sometimes not so successfully) people trying to “help” me get a good deal, offering me a “special rate” etc… You start to wonder if it’s worth it.
Then you get here and you realize it is. Gili Trawangan has about 800 inhabitants and I walked clear around it in about 3 hours this afternoon. There are no motor vehicles anywhere on the island and the pace is truly laid back. If you really need to be taken somewhere you get on a horse drawn cart. There are kids around which were nowhere in Phangan although I didn’t notice it at the time. The room I am staying on, a beautiful little bungalow with a clear view of the ocean about 25 meters away is $25 a night. The most expensive place I have seen on the whole Island is about $40 per night and truly gorgeous. There is very little intrusive selling here, at least by standards of the region. Add a yoga class and this place would be perfect. 
Although my time in Bangkok was short, I must admit I am not a huge fan of the city. Look like you are hesitating for about 5 seconds (or walk down the street with a backpack on) and someone will be on you trying to sell you something in a pretty intrusive in your face way. I actually wanted to get a tux made (Harvard has a thing for formal parties apparently) but the feeling of constant pressure and of getting ripped off was so overwhelming that I ended up just abandoning the idea.
It feels like a classic example of the tragedy of the commons: I am sure that if everyone could collectively back off a little bit the “yield” of dollars from each tourist would go up, but nobody can do so individually under the assumption that everyone else will keep pushing as hard.
Bangkok is also an interesting example of what really happens in a place where there are no trademark laws. Because every suit maker claims to offer “Armani” or “Prada” suits and none actually do, one becomes very skeptical of any commercial claims at all. At a restautant or hotel you can see what you are getting but any commercial good that requires the assumption of quality (clothes, watches, movies, software, travel, etc…) becomes very difficult to assess and ultimately something to avoid. This doesn’t feel like the best way to run things.
I did have an enjoyable time walking through the shopping district although a shopping mall is a shopping mall pretty much the world over. I went into a “computer mall” that in another life would have been like heaven – if you like to assemble computers out of their constituent parts, you are in a great place, but that is not me anymore.
I went by the Pat Pong night market and I had a hard time imagining that I wanted anything. Aside from the fact that essentially none of the clothes fit me, the feeling of impending rip-off is just to overwhelming to ignore. I left without buying a thing.
Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t go to any of the “shows” in Pat Pong either. I am not sure if it was just that I was turned off with the whole place but the men with their little lists of physically improbable acts and the ever present sex-tourist farangs with their tiny little Thai “girlfriends” were a real turn off. I ignored them all and went back to Kao Shan (which seemed almost calm at this point) and had a few drinks with the other backpackers. The next day I headed for the Gili Islands.
Although my time in Bangkok was short, I must admit I am not a huge fan of the city. Look like you are hesitating for about 5 seconds (or walk down the street with a backpack on) and someone will be on you trying to sell you something in a pretty intrusive in your face way. I actually wanted to get a tux made (Harvard has a thing for formal parties apparently) but the feeling of constant pressure and of getting ripped off was so overwhelming that I ended up just abandoning the idea.
It feels like a classic example of the tragedy of the commons: I am sure that if everyone could collectively back off a little bit the “yield” of dollars from each tourist would go up, but nobody can do so individually under the assumption that everyone else will keep pushing as hard.
Bangkok is also an interesting example of what really happens in a place where there are no trademark laws. Because every suit maker claims to offer “Armani” or “Prada” suits and none actually do, one becomes very skeptical of any commercial claims at all. At a restautant or hotel you can see what you are getting but any commercial good that requires the assumption of quality (clothes, watches, movies, software, travel, etc…) becomes very difficult to assess and ultimately something to avoid. This doesn’t feel like the best way to run things.
I did have an enjoyable time walking through the shopping district although a shopping mall is a shopping mall pretty much the world over. I went into a “computer mall” that in another life would have been like heaven – if you like to assemble computers out of their constituent parts, you are in a great place, but that is not me anymore.
I went by the Pat Pong night market and I had a hard time imagining that I wanted anything. Aside from the fact that essentially none of the clothes fit me, the feeling of impending rip-off is just to overwhelming to ignore. I left without buying a thing.
Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t go to any of the “shows” in Pat Pong either. I am not sure if it was just that I was turned off with the whole place but the men with their little lists of physically improbable acts and the ever present sex-tourist farangs with their tiny little Thai “girlfriends” were a real turn off. I ignored them all and went back to Kao Shan (which seemed almost calm at this point) and had a few drinks with the other backpackers. The next day I headed for the Gili Islands.
All good things must end and so after the full moon party it was unfortunately time for our little group to head our seperate ways. Dan and Yara headed for Singapore, a bunch of the couples headed down to Kolanta for some relaxing (and no doubt romantic) time and I headed to Ko Samui to meet my college friend Beth and then head on to Bangkok.
Although I didn’t love Ko Samui physically after a place like Phangan, it was really fun to see Beth and her friends and hang out with some familiar faces. Time has an odd way of drawing people close. Beth and I were never that close in College but we rented a scooter and drove around the island (got lost really) and had a great day, heading for a buddhist temple (until we realized we were dressed too informally to go in) checking out the beach and generally just chatting the whole way. I got a flat tire on my bike (for the second time!) and was once again impressed with how entrepenurial and helpful the Thai people can be. 150 Baht ($5) and about 20 min and I was on my way, good as new. Yara had said that a similiar incident in Zimbabwe would have taken a week to fix and I can believe it.
I spoke a little before I left about what the perfect Zen day would be. Here is the rough schedule, amended for the experience of actually living it:
- 10 am wake up
- 10-12 lie in bed, read in the hammock, take a walk through the totally quiet town
- 12-1 eat “breakfast”
- 1-3 Yoga class. Amazing
- 3-5 Hang out on the beach. Chat with people. More reading. Thai Rummy.
- 5-6:30 Thai massage $7 for an amazing hour.
- 6:30 – 8:00 nap
- 8:00 – 10:00 food and hang out with friends.
- 10:00 – 2:00 or later: party.
Some days we would take the centre out of the day (even the yoga class!) to “do something” like drive up to a remote beach or try to go sailing. (Unsuccessfully as it turned out – low water levels this time of year make sailing difficult.)
If you get the opportunity to live a week or longer like this, I highly recommend it, especially if you can have the psychological feeling of letting it go on as long as you want, rather than having the end of a vacation looming before you.