Archive for March, 2010
Location, Ecuador: When your first cinema experience is Avatar in 3D
Indigenous Ecuadorians watched Avatar in 3D; for some of them this was their first movie theater experience. (Image from PRI / World in Words podcast) Not intending to jump on the bandwagon of the Avatar-debating blogsphere, I have to bring up one interesting story from the global audience’s experience. Early this year there was a [...]
March 26th, 2010Smart educators, often a rarity.
Chinese students I met in May 2007, who attend a bilingual Chinese-English school in Zhengzhou, China In an atmosphere of economic recession, budget cuts, and even failing K-12 schools, good news in the public school system can be elusive. And in U.S. schools, if the first things to be cut are the arts and music [...]
March 20th, 2010A hybrid port city on the coast of China: Shanghai, good and bad
The financial district of Shanghai, view from the Bund on the other side of the river Rev. Young John Allen, the man I spent last semester studying, was a foreigner living in Shanghai in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his day, the city was the only port open to the outside, although [...]
March 12th, 2010I’d like to buy the world a Coke…
Delivering peace, one Coke at a time… “What the world wants today” is both that elusive peace, and a Coke, as the commercial famously puts it. Buying a Coke is one form of peace, I guess; but how else do we define it? War, in the name of peace… The thought is bewildering, paradoxical, and [...]
March 4th, 2010