By Jennica Peterson  December 11th, 2009 6:00 am  |  Comments (3)

The volunteer teaching program in Bali includes three surfing lessons.

Last Friday on WPIX-TV, Afar co-founder Joe Diaz recommended five trips that might inspire you to change your career. If you’ve ever considered becoming a teacher–or a professional surfer–check out this program in Bali:

Trip: “Surf and Teach English in Bali” volunteer program with i-to-i
Overview: On the tropical Indonesian island of Bali, you’ll teach English to kids at a public school where funding is not available to hire native English speakers. You’ll especially focus on practicing conversational skills using games, songs, and story-telling—not just a grammar book. You’ll also learn to surf on this island known for its waves.
Skills you’ll learn: How to teach English as a Second language through an online TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course and classroom practice; how to surf through three lessons included with the program.
Other highlights: Meeting mellow Balinese surfers while waiting for the next set of waves. Exploring the island’s beautiful beaches and green highlands
Price: from $1,299 for three weeks

Four other career-changing trips:

• Work alongside marine biologists in Greece
• Learn to cook in Morocco
• Live the life of an organic vintner in New Zealand
• Help healthcare workers in Guatemala

Photo by yummiec00kies

By Jennica Peterson  November 16th, 2009 6:00 am  |  Comments (0)

Learn how locals make silk on the Meet the People Tour in northern Thailand.

In the Good Trips department of Afar’s December 2009/January 2010 issue, you’ll find seven trips that use arts and crafts to help you get inside cultures around the world. Here’s another:

Traidcraft “Meet the People” Tours, 44/(0) 191-265-1110

U.K.-based Traidcraft is a fair-trade organization dedicated to reducing poverty in developing countries. Its “Meet the People” tour to northern Thailand takes you into the homes of fair-trade craft producers in villages inhabited by the Thai Leu, Hmong, and Mien hill tribes.

What you’ll do: Spend time with silver jewelers, bamboo-basket makers, and silk weavers, who will show you how they make their crafts; meet with fair-trade craft companies to discuss business models; talk with farmers near the border of Laos about their way of life.

Highlights: Ride atop an elephant through the jungle. Snack on som tam (spicy papaya salad) at the night market in Surin. Take an early-morning stroll through a tea plantation.

Price: 13-day trip from $2,495, includes lodging and most meals.

Photo courtesy of Traidcraft.

By Derk Richardson  November 2nd, 2009 9:57 am  |  Comments (3)

When it comes to contemporary music around the world, the new Museyon Guide, Music + Travel: Touring the Globe Through Sounds and Scenes, is on the same page with Afar magazine’s Sounds department.

In Afar’s premier issue, Zachary Mexico broke down the history and latest developments in Beijing’s avant-rock scene; in the December-January issue, on newsstands Nov. 10, Dan Strachota does the same for the digital cumbia movement in Buenos Aires.

Music + Travel touches down in 12 locations. Among them are Paris (”New Rap City”), Australia (”Art Rock Confidential”), Addis Ababa (”Swing Shifts”), Mumbai (”Passage to Indipop”), Berlin (”Techno Color”), and, yes, Beijing (”Experimental Methods”) and Buenos Aires (”The Digital Domain”).

Music scenes in Chicago, Southern California, Dublin, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul get similar close-up treatment.

Not only do Museyon Guides, which include three volumes of Film + Travel and the new Art + Travel, take the Afarish approach of tapping local experts to take readers on “a far-reaching, accessible, and inventive journey into the things they love,” but, like Sounds, they get inside the local culture through a mix of text, photos, time lines, maps, and annotated discographies.

Bringing the synchronicity full circle, at Museyon’s New York City launch celebration for Music + Travel, the special guests will include Beijing avant-rock stars Zhang Shouwang (Carsick Cars and White) and Xiao He. The party takes place from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., Wed., Nov. 4, at Von, 3 Bleecker St. Admission is by RSVP only, but you can find the open invitation on Museyon’s blog. Of course you can become a Museyon Facebook fan and follow Museyon on Twitter.

Related posts:

• Listen to the sounds of Beijing rock
• Imogen Heap spins the globe and scores a hit
• Singing in the Sahara with Tinariwen

By Nicole Solis  September 30th, 2009 2:57 pm  |  Comments (0)

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

With the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the founding of the People’s Republic of China approaching in October and November, Jeffrey Wasserstrom examines how communism’s biggest defeat helped strengthen China’s Communist Party in an article for Foreign Policy.

Toward the end of the piece, Wasserstrom looks at two key lessons China learned from the end of communism in Eastern Europe:

1. Patriotism is a winning strategy, but it only works for one side.

By capitalizing on national pride, Eastern Europeans were able to unify citizens within each country against Communism, positioning it as a regime imposed on the country from outside forces. Taking control of this powerful tool, the Chinese Communist Party “placed renewed emphasis on patriotic education, stressing the party’s pre-1949 role in chasing out foreign invaders,” Wasserstrom writes.

2. Class divides give rise to dissent, so give people opportunities to bridge those divides.

East Berliners had to merely look over the wall to see how capitalism afforded their West Berlin counterparts a higher standard of living. Within Eastern European countries, Wasserstrom writes, “The only meaningful social divide was between a small privileged coterie of corrupt officials and the rest. And the rest was pretty much everyone.”

China avoided similar problems by encouraging a consumer revolution over the past two decades. As more working Chinese entered the middle class, there was less of a divide between the average Chinese worker and not only the party faithful but also middle-class workers in capitalist Taiwan.

Read the full article here.

Photo by unknown author, released by permission of the Senate of Berlin. CC 3.0.

By April Kilcrease  September 10th, 2009 1:46 pm  |  Comments (0)

Swedish musician Victoria Bergsman (female vocalist on Peter Bjorn and John’s whistle-tastic hit “Young Folks”) traveled to Pakistan to record her new Taken by Trees album, East of Eden. A fan of Pakistani rhythms and native Sufi singers Abida Parveen and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Bergsman packed her microphone and headed to the source.

She hoped to record with female musicians there, but was told that was out of the question. “I did find it very emotionally difficult, especially seeing how it was for women,” she says in a mini-documentary from National Geographic. Despite widespread sexism and the male musicians initial skepticism, eventually she gained her collaborators respect.

“Every third hour the electricity went off. So we had to hang around with them and improvise and play music and then in 2 or 3 hours the electricity came back… After some time…in the same environment…, they understood I was a professional, and so were they. So we were kind of the same and wanted to express something beautiful, something artistic.”

Reflecting on the experience, Bergsman says, “I don’t know if I’m brave. I think I’m just very curious and very restless.” Sounds like an Afar traveler to me.

By Nicole Solis  August 18th, 2009 10:35 am  |  Comments (0)

Is India ready for a craft-beer renaissance? On Global Post, Jason Overdorf examines the challenges facing TVB Craft Brewers as it reintroduces India Pale Ale and other craft beers to India:

India’s alcohol market is governed by arcane rules designed to encourage local production and discourage consumption, so distillers and brewers here never had to worry excessively about quality. A handful of brewers enjoyed a near monopoly, with the result that Indian beer is manufactured with inferior malt and malt-substitutes like rice flakes — as well as a syrupy preservative called glycerine. It’s not uncommon for two bottles of the same brand of Indian beer to taste completely different from one another.

[via Global Post]

By Jennica Peterson  August 14th, 2009 8:59 am  |  Comments (1)

In the Good Trips department of Afar’s premier issue, you’ll find seven adventures that help save our planet’s oceans. Here’s another trip worth taking:

Coral Cay Conservation, 44/(0) 20-7620-1411

Since 1986, Coral Cay Conservation has successfully completed marine conservation projects worldwide from Borneo to Belize. Its latest venture in the Philippines unites the government of Southern Leyte province, the Philippine Reef and Rainforest Conservation Foundation, and local communities to safeguard the reefs around Sogod Bay—vital feeding areas for whale sharks and pilot whales.

How you help: Collect data on coral reefs endangered by destructive fishing practices so that the local population can effectively plan for the reefs’ future; clean up beaches; teach schoolkids about marine conservation through theatrical shows.

Highlights: Learn to dive in a tropical ocean. Perform a puppet show, “Fred the Fish,” for schoolchildren. Encounter unusual blue-spotted ribbon-tail rays, bobtail squid, and whale sharks.

Price: Four-week trip minimum, from $2,150, includes meals and lodging.

To get a better even idea of what the program is like, check out this video from Current TV:

Photos courtesy of Coral Cay Conservation

By April Kilcrease  August 10th, 2009 2:33 pm  |  Comments (1)

In Mumbai, you’re never too old for mom to pack your lunch. Thanks to deliverymen known as dabbawallas (box-carriers) office workers can have mom’s home cooking delivered to their desk for about $10 a month (presumably, mom cooks for free). To learn more about the 120-year-old  system, check out this dabbawalla video from London’s Journeyman Pictures. Mom, if you’re reading this, where’s my chicken curry and rice?

Be your own dabbawalla with this stainless steel tiffin carrier from To-Go Ware, featured in our premier issue’s Feast department.

Dabbawalla photo by Steve Evans. CC 2.0.

By Nicole Solis  August 6th, 2009 11:40 am  |  Comments (0)

One of a series of four Puti Tree prints by Nod Young. Courtesy of L'Affiche Moderne.

In Nod Young’s limited-edition Puti Tree series of prints, the Chinese graphic designer and devout Buddhist reinterprets a 1,500-year-old Zen text, the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, and explores what it says about modern creativity.

The poems used in the four prints encourage people to overcome the boundaries of existence to reach a state of Zen. “I believe that creativity generally follows the same path,” Young wrote. “It is difficult to achieve true creative freedom because we are overly concerned with aesthetics and meaning.”

In the captions to his Flickr photo set of the designs, Young goes into more detail about his interpretation of the text and his inspiration for the series.

All four prints are available from L’Affiche Moderne.

By Derk Richardson  August 3rd, 2009 9:21 am  |  Comments (4)

In the premier issue of Afar, writer Zachary Mexico sketches a multifaceted portrait of the post-punk music scene in Beijing. The only thing missing from his “China’s Avant-Rock Revolution” story for the Sounds department is the music itself.

In lieu of booking a flight to Beijing for a firsthand experience of Carsick Cars, Joyside, Subs, P.K. 14, Queen Sea Big Shark, and other bands playing such clubs as D-22 and Mao Livehouse, check out this selected Beijing audio and video guide.

Carsick Cars

• “Zhong Nan Hai” and other tracks at the band’s MySpace page
• Carsick Cars front man Shouwang’s solo guitar playing
• The first Carsick Cars music video, “Mogu Mogu”

CARSICK CARS – 蘑菇 蘑菇 MOGU MOGU (Music Video) from Maybe Mars / 兵马司 on Vimeo.

• Carsick Cars performing “Zhong Nan Hai” at D-22 in Beijing in 2007

P.K. 14

• “Mei yi zhong fen li” and other streaming tracks the band’s MySpace page

Snapline

• “Party Is Over” and “Nice Dream” at the band’s MySpace page

Yan Jun

• “4th Ring Shopping Killer” and other streaming tracks the band’s MySpace page

Subs

• “Red Hair,” “Drew the Line,” and “What More” at Pure Volume
• Onstage at Vuoritalo in Helsinki, Finland