albert is a sweet little robot, who lives in a print made by yooniverse using a handcarved linocut :) i wasn’t going to frame him until i went back home, but in the middle of organizing things to ship we found some never used frames, et voila!
albert doesn’t know it yet, but he’s the first of what i hope will someday be a very big collection of handmade prints in a very big wall of a very big house i will have!
another quirky/cool/cute korean invention: maum teabags, by designers wdaru. the concept is simple: teabags with themes, that hang on the border of your cup. since the designs feature people, the result looks as if there is some one chilling out in your swimming pool cup!
there is a swimming pool collection:
and a school bus collection:
and even a xmas collection, for december:
brilliant! i think these are just a concept, but wouldn’t it be cool to get some? i’m hoping more buzz about it will make someone realize they’re commercially viable and start making them! :)
Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled “coffee shops,” Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don’t enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal’s drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.
The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”
the audacity of sneakily pushing this law in 2001 without making a fuss about it was genius. if this law had been put on a referendum 8 years ago for the people to decide, it would have never gone through… which is not to say that some things shouldn’t be put on referendums, it’s just that portugal is mainly a conservative/catholic country, with a lot of resistance to change. this was a bold step, but one in the right direction, as the studies have shown. well done!
naturally, we couldn’t go to beijing without walking on the great wall!
following a tip from dingle, i investigated the possibility of doing the stretch between jinshaling and simatai… 10kms on the wall sounds like a bit too much, but in the end we decided to just go for it instead of the manicured & ever-crowded wall in badaling. if we were going all the way north, might as well make it memorable!
so i searched around for ways to get there (about 3 hours from beijing), and stumbled upon jeff, a really nice couchsurfer in beijing who regularly organizes trips to people who want to go there. if you tell him you want to go there, he might know of other people going there on the same day – the driver’s fee is 450rmb for the car – the more people, the less you pay. meet our driver, mr. pei (13161847160):
mr. pei is a cheerful chap, knows a bit of english and is eager to use it! he dropped us in jinshaling and was waiting for us in simatai as promised – no driving the foreigners to fishy places to shop or eat, whatsoever.
the chinese say the wall is like a dragon stretching over the mountain tops, and i couldn’t come up with a better comparison if i tried.
the jinshaling-simatai trek takes about 4 hours. 4 hours of nearly vertical climbs…
…and descents…
… of watchtowers lined up…
…some of which in precarious conditions…
…with some caution signs…
…of neatly lined up steps…
…or caotic and hard to walk ones (or sometimes even on parallel paths to the wall)…
… 4 hours of feeling on top of the world…
… and then asking ourselves if we had the guts to actually finish this adventure…
but we made it, 4 hours, 4 bottles of water and 90rmbs later! (50+40 entrance fees for the different parts of the wall)! yay!
paulo took his gps with him and mapped the walk, and in the end it turns out the total is closer to 6km (from parking lot to parking lot). still, good exercise and magnificent views! if you’re in shape, i highly recommend it. :)
i bet you were all thinking i was going to talk about beijing duck… et non! i introduce you the donghuamen night market!
i believe we were lost or looking for something else when we stumbled on the donghuamen street market… but we were instantly converted, and came back every day at dinner. food is one of the (main) reasons we travel, and so it was impossible to resist the temptation!
here’s how the tested snacks ranked, according to the “yummy or meh” classification:
crunchy dry yellow thing: meh. quite tasteless, and hard to eat with the mini-sticks they gave us!
stewed meat on bread bun: yummy! this was excellent! perfectly spiced & stewed, with lots of fresh herbs, and lots of sauce from the stew.
squid: meh, not that good. the sauce they covered it on was a bit too sweet for our liking…
fried “banana” balls: yummy! but banana? these things tasted nothing like banana! a fluffy favourite nonetheless :)
meat on wrap: meh. not good.
strawberry/pineapple stick: yummy yummy yummy! those strawberries were gigantic and thus a little lacking in flavor, but the pineapple is sooo tasty… it more than makes up for the rest. you can also have these in other combos (just strawberries, strawberry/melon, strawberry/kiwi…).
meat kebab: yummy! although we didn’t quite get which kind of meat it was, but probably lamb. very tender.
there were also lots of strange things, like snakes, starfish, sea horses or crickets… they must be popular among foreigners, since all the vendors waved them at us… but i’m not that much of a fan.
that’s it! i would highly recommend this place if you want to taste a bit of everything, and i have to say my belly had absolutely no complaints (this being street food and all).
a little advice though: more than 20rmb is probably too much for anything here, so raise an eyebrow and be ready to speak out if they ask you for more than that. don’t be dumb.
