A Portable Exhibit: Review of Steve McCurry's "Portraits" for iPad

By Beth Green

The best art exhibition I’ve seen recently fits in my travel purse.

A photo collage tribute to McCurry's "Afghan Girl"
by Flickr user francisshanahan. 

While nothing will replace for me the experience of seeing art in the flesh—of examining a larger-than-life image in a quiet, contemplative atmosphere and the fun of puzzling out what the artist and the curator want me to “get”—I am blown away by the quality and enjoyment factor of the photographs exhibited in the “Portraits” app for iPad, a collection of images of faces and places by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry.

If you don’t recognize his name—I didn’t—you’re sure to know at least one of his photos shown in this touch-screen gallery visit: “Afghan Girl,” the 1984 portrait of a green-eyed Pashtun refugee. It was on the front cover of National Geographic magazine in June, 1985, and is likely the magazine’s best recognized image. Many people liken the photo’s intensity to that of the “Mona Lisa.”

Swiping through the 100 images collected in the app, it’s clear that the intensity in “Afghan Girl” is one of McCurry’s signatures. Traveling the world for National Geographic—you can search the app for photos from different countries by tapping a map and browse receipts and scrapbook-worthy tidbits of his travels in another section—McCurry has captured the profundity of people’s life experiences again and again. Elderly believers in France hoping for a miracle cure in Lourdes. A little girl pounding grain in Niger.  An eleven-year-old bare-chested gold miner in the Philippines. In his frank images, the viewer can interpret the stories of whole lives.

In the integrated 23-minute video narrated by McCurry, he says that he chooses his subjects for the depth of expression on their faces. While he’s walking on the street and browsing crowds for potential people to approach with his request for a portrait, he looks for the “intrinsic story written on their face,” he tells us in the video. I was surprised that McCurry says most of his portraits are taken in just five minutes; since he tends to find people who are busy or on their way to another place, he doesn’t want to ask for too much of their time.

Some of the people featured are ones we know are busy: activist Aung San Suu Kyi, actor Robert De Niro, and author Paul Theroux. But most of the portraits are of humble, everyday people, featured in their workday clothes, going about their business. There’s the Tibetan woman by a fighter jet in Lhasa, 2000; an engineer with clasped hands in Kashmir; a woman selling paintings from her car in Italy; Dubliners waiting for a bus.

After I get past the intensity of the eyes in these pictures, the next element that draws me in is the sense of place from the photos; the feeling of anticipation, of guessing what scenes are beyond the borders of the portrait. The woman practicing her cello in the mirror in France—is she about to give a performance, in her red jacket? Does the boy at the door in Mauritania invite McCurry to go inside, or is he too shy? Why is the Burmese woman, with her neck elongated by rings, laughing?

It’s amazing that, in the short amount of time McCurry says he is able to capture these street-side images, he’s able to harness the light in such a way that each one looks like a studio portrait. In the app’s video, he cites Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio as his inspiration. What would these painters have done with a camera, I wonder? Probably something similar to what McCurry does.

The app is available on iTunes, and, at time of writing, is free to download. For non-iPad-toting readers, many of McCurry’s excellent travel photos can be seen on his blog and on his Facebook page.

A Year of Asian Festivals

By Beth Green

At the end of every year I like to think back on the travel I enjoyed over the previous twelve months and make some general plans for where I’d like to go and what I’d like to see in the next calendar cycle.

Sinulog. Photo by Sidious Sid/Flickr.com

Twenty-twelve was a year of near misses for me in the festivals department. I was lucky enough to visit seven countries this year, but poor planning on my part had me losing out on good music, great photo ops and interesting cultural insights I would have experienced if I had been more diligent about checking holiday and festival calendars for my destinations. So, perhaps that’s one reason that I’m so excited about Sinulog, the religious street dancing festival held in Cebu City, Philippines, every January.

The Sinulog dance pre-dates Christianity in the Philippines; however, converts in Cebu began using the dance to honor the local miracle—the discovery in a burning home of an unburnt image of the baby Jesus 44 years after Magellan brought it here. The same ritual dance has been done for centuries with an added tradition of dressing in costumes to perform it on the festival day of Santo Nino (Jesus). In the 1980s a formal parade was organized, and the event has blossomed into an internationally recognized street festival lasting more than a week.

Sinulog. Photo by Sidious Sid/Flickr.com

In addition to the dancing, among other events, this year’s schedule has choral competitions, a beauty pageant and a parade of giant puppets. I’m also looking forward to the fluvial parade, when flower-bedecked boats navigate the channel between Cebu City and Mactan Island bearing images of the Santo Nino (Read my post on the history of Lapu-Lapu here).

But Sinulog isn’t the only festival I’m hoping to attend this year. With a little searching, I’ve found interesting festivals in Asia for every month of the year ahead. Will I have a chance to attend them all? Probably not. But I do hope to make one or two. Which ones would you most want to go to?

Asian Festivals for 2013

January—Sinulog. Events begin before the third Sunday in January. (Jan. 20 this year). The festival’s motto is “one beat, one dance, one vision."

A Spring Festival street market. Photo by Beth Green

February—Spring Festival. Celebrated in slightly different ways in China, Taiwan, Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam and elsewhere, the lunar new year—or Spring Festival—celebrates the coming of spring and the end of winter darkness with lights, feasting and togetherness. This year, the Year of the Water Snake will begin on Feb. 10.

March—Holi. Another festival marking the beginning of spring, Holi is a Hindu festival celebrated mostly in India and Nepal but also in Indian communities in Malaysia and Singapore. The most famous—and fun! —part of this ancient celebration is the tossing of powdered dyes. This year, Holi falls on March 27. 

April—Songkran. The Thai new year doesn’t begin until Songran, the Water Splashing Festival. Held between April 13-15, people celebrating Songkran—and the end of the dry season—bless each other with splashes of water, and visit their families to pay respect to their elders. The water washes away bad luck and opens the floodgates of second chances.

May—Wesak. May 27th, 2013 is Wesak, or Buddha’s Birthday (called so even though it actually commemorates the Gautama’s birth, enlightenment and death). Celebrated throughout Asia, Buddhist devotees bring offerings to temples, set captive animals free, and make donations to charities and the poor. It is a national holiday in Malaysia, even though Islam is the state religion.

A Holi celebration in Jaipur, India. Photo by Dan Pelka

June—Dragon Boat Festival. June 12, 2013 is when the Chinese will remember the poet Qu Yuan, who filled his pockets with stones and threw himself from a bridge after he was captured in exile. Nowadays on Dragon Boat Festival, people throw glutinous rice packets in rivers to entice the fish to eat the rice instead of the body of the fallen poet. (No fools, people eat the yummy packets, called zong zi, too.) The Dragon Boats which are raced represent the nine children of the Dragon King who raced to save the beloved poet (some versions of this story say the boats represent the villagers only; I like the dragon kids better).

July—Nadaam. Every midsummer, Mongolian athletes hope for strength and luck while participating in Nadaam, a competition of wrestling, horseback riding and archery. It is held in Ulaanbataar on July 11-13 every year, and, though an ancient tradition, now commemorates the 1921 revolution.

Boryeong Mud Festival. For a quite different type of festival, I’m intrigued by Korea’s Boryeong Mud Festival, also held in July. (July 19-28 in 2013). Festival-goers enjoy the world’s most natural spa treatments by mud bathing, mud sliding and getting mud massages.   

Nadaam. Photo by Julie Laurent/Flickr.com

August—Litang Horse Festival. August is a sleepy month for festivals in Asia, but back in China they always hold the Litang Horse Festival in Sichuan province from Aug. 1-7. Celebrated by the nomadic Tibetan Khampas tribes, it started as a religious festival for monks and has evolved into a chance to do trade as well as compete in horsemanship.

September—Tet Trung Thu. This Sept. 19 sees Vietnam’s Tet Trung Thu, the country’s second biggest holiday. In China, the same date on the lunar calendar is called Mid-Autumn Festival. In both countries people have a family gathering, give thanks for their good luck, and pray. In Vietnam, it’s sometimes also called the Children’s Festival, and youngsters wear masks while carrying lanterns in parades.

October—Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. I couldn't resist looking at the various literary and arts festivals also happening in Asia. For example, I’d love to go to the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Not only is the destination alone worth the trip, the festival celebrates storytelling in contemporary literature from around the world. This year it will be held on Oct. 2-6. 

Bali. Photo by Beth Green

November—Loi Krathong. Celebrated in Thailand, Laos and parts of Burma, Loi Krathong (Nov. 17, 2013) is a chance for people to get rid of bad energy and send their prayers and wishes to the water spirits via floating offerings. Participants launch their “krathong” on water on the full moon. These offerings are folded out of leaves or made from bread and decorated with flowers, incense and a candle.

December—Dongzhi Festival. As you’ll have noticed, many Asian festivals revolve around the changing of the season. So it’s no surprise that in China the beginning of winter is celebrated too. On Dec. 21, on Dongzhi Festival, Chinese people have different ways to celebrate. In one place I lived, local tradition held that you had to eat dog meat on Dec. 21 so you wouldn’t be cold the rest of the year. A friend from a different part of China shared that his family always made ear-shaped dumplings, to make sure their earlobes wouldn’t get frostbitten in the coming months.

A Garden in Flight

By Beth Green

Changi Butterfly Garden,
Photo by Beth Green

Downy wings fluttering, tiny legs trembling on neon tropical flowers: There’s something soothing about watching butterflies flit around.

And, traveler, where do you most need to feel calm?

Maybe in the middle of your next intercontinental trip.

Visit the butterfly garden at Changi International Airport in Singapore (airport code: SIN) to momentarily forget the stresses of air travel. Lost luggage, stiff-lipped security guards, and the ubiquitous crying baby three seats in front of you will all seem like part of a far-away world after spending time watching a garden in flight.

Located in Terminal Three, the Changi Butterfly Garden has almost 50 kinds of butterflies. The insects swoop, glide, and dart freely among the flowers and plants of this airport grotto. And, unlike most things associated with air travel these days, entrance to the garden doesn’t even cost one shiny Singapore dollar.

The garden from the upper level.

The garden is two-tiered, with a waterfall and a staircase connecting the levels. On the top, visitors get a bird’s-eye (or is it butterfly’s-eye?) view of the downstairs and a real feel for how amazingly many butterflies are loose in the garden. If you stand still enough, one of the thousand or so free-flying butterflies might perch on something of yours that’s brightly colored for a moment or two. Of course, that makes a long visit by butterfly standards, as most butterflies have a lifespan of less than two (human) weeks.

Butterfly lunch.

The bottom level of the garden is surrounded by greenery and tinted glass so that you feel completely immersed in a jungle. From the top of the stairs, however, you get a glimpse of the outside airstrip and airport workings—a truly a unique chance to contemplate the world of flight by comparing delicate butterflies and behemoth jetliners.

Downstairs, curious travelers can watch butterflies feeding on sticky sweet pineapple rounds, peek into hutches where pupae cocoon and morph, and read educational signboards about their fluttering friends.

Taking flight.

It’s also downstairs that you can see examples of jungle noir—carnivorous “monkey cups,” the dipper-shaped, insect-eating plants native to SE Asia. If it seems a bit “Little Shop of Horrors” to put these hungry flora in with the swirling cloud of resident butterflies, don’t think about the fact that in the wild some of these plants also consume vertebrates. 

The Butterfly Garden is one reason why Changi Airport is one of my favorite airports to route through. Other reasons include the airport’s orchid garden, koi pond, interactive art exhibits and entertainment deck—all free of charge to enter.

Two (Western) Holidays in One

By Beth Green

It’s holiday season again.

My relatives and friends in the U.S. have already started groaning about the incessant drone of shopping-mall carols, the thought of making lists and checking them twice, and the old rant that Christmas comes earlier every year. It makes a nice change, Facebook-reading-wise, from all the election posts, but mostly it draws my attention to the way the end-of-year holidays are celebrated differently all over the world, and the way facets of American culture have been adopted in Asia.

A Christmas tree vies for attention with one of the old towers of Xi'an

This year, in the Philippines, I’m looking forward to seeing how this overwhelmingly Christian country celebrates Jesus’ birth. The Christ figure is revered here, and Christmas carols started up, right on time, in late September.

But I’ll never forget how the decidedly not-Christian country of China has unofficially adopted the spirit of two western holidays—Halloween and Christmas—and turned them into one big mash-up of fun and partying at the end of December. 

The first year I spent in China, 2006, my partner and I took advantage of the long Christmas weekend given to the foreign English teachers at the school we were working in and flew up to Xi’an with some friends. Xi’an is the home of the Terracotta Warriors, one of the must-see sites in Asia. I was thrilled that we were going to see this historic place, and while a little bit homesick as always over the last two weeks of December, I didn’t mind skipping the holiday that year.

Larger-than-life Santas for sale on the sidewalk in Xi'an.

So I was truly surprised to find Xi’an all dressed up for a party. A huge Christmas tree, lights everywhere (well, Chinese cities usually have lights everywhere, but this was more than normal) and yes—even in the city that started the Silk Road—Christmas carols. 

We toured the Warriors in the daytime, and then in the evening headed over to the Muslim Quarter (one of Xi’an’s ancient districts) to have dinner. The fun of eating Muslim fare on Christmas in China was not lost on us. On the way, we met throngs of people out for a stroll. 

Sidewalks in China can get crowded, and what with one-point-however-many-billion people you see why, but these groups of people were mobbing the pavement. Vendors selling balloons and pinwheels (which are often bought in China on holidays as they’re believed to blow luck to you) did roaring business. Groups of girls wearing glowing devil’s horns over bright orange clown’s wigs tried to take sneaky pictures with us foreigners. Small children carried water-filled bags of tiny goldfish their parents had bought them—it wasn’t Christmas, it was a Halloween Carnival!

Twelve months later I looked forward to the spectacle, and thought I was prepared for it. To research a potential new job, my partner and I flew to another city over Christmas. We made sure we brought our cameras, even though it was primarily a business trip, and asked at the hotel for the best way to get downtown. This year, we decided, we wanted to photograph the action. 

A "snow" fight in Guiyang.

However, if we thought the broad avenues of Xi’an were flooded with people, we hadn’t anticipated what the narrow city streets of Guiyang, Guizhou province, would feel like when everyone was in good-time mode. 

Guizhou province is poor, and a lot of people from there go find work in the more prosperous east. The people who stay behind work hard for small wages. And apparently, love a chance to party. In Xi’an by comparison, our experience had been kind of sedate: groups of people walking, snapping photos and snacking. In Guiyang, bands of young men were ‘attacking’ gangs of young women with cans of silly string.  The laughing women would retaliate with aerosol cans of colored fake snow—the kind you use to frost and decorate windows in holiday season. By the end of a couple of hours on the street, you could spot the married men—they were the ones the girls had left out of the snow-fight.

Devil's horns on Christmas? Why not?

My favorite sight that night was a trio of girls, winter jackets and blue jeans completely covered in wads of silly string and blasts of fake snow, holding roses some boys had given them. They were writing words on the sidewalk in silly string, and then lighting the messages on fire. They had a hard time getting space on the sidewalk to do this, but once they announced their intention, they got plenty of area protected by the crowd of onlookers, myself included. To my English-teaching delight, they mostly wrote English words, “hello!” burned brightly, and then “I love you.”

I can’t remember now if anyone wrote, “Merry Christmas,” but the holiday was celebrated, all the same.

[Note: Read more about Beth’s trip to Xian  here , the trip to Guiyang here  ]

Off the Beaten Track: Food Spies and Illicit Barbecue

Leah Andrews lived and traveled in China for two years and has backpacked through Europe and Asia. She repaired shoes and pants with thread and duct tape, and learned how to sleep sitting up on packed trains in order to see interesting places and try new things and she would do it again in a heartbeat. At the moment her days are spent in an office, behind a desk building and maintaining websites. In the evenings she tries out new recipes and reads travel books and blogs; dreaming of prayer flags dancing in the wind and the enticing smell of spices from street food stalls.  All images used in this post are hers, as well.

Being a food spy is the best form of espionage. One time, while standing in line to file my work visa paperwork in Hong Kong, I was enlisted by a German chef who worked at a hotel in Mainland China.

For the next three days we wandered from hotel to hotel to see how they had their buffets set up, what they were serving, how they were prepared and displayed. We had tea at the Shangri La, tested out the soup, salad and noodle bar lunch and the view at the Hyatt, and walked through a number of hotel buffets pretending to be a couple who couldn’t make up their minds.

“This looks good, let’s eat here,” he would say as we approached the hostess.

“I don’t know if this is what I want,” I would reply.

“It is a buffet, how can it not have something you want?” he would ask, and then turning to the hostess he would inquire if he and his picky guest could tour the buffet.

Shao kao--Chinese street barbecue

Espionage was delicious and I thought I had a future in it until we were walking from one hotel to another and came upon a street vendor selling meat and vegetable sticks. I let out a squeal of delight and rushed to the vendor to choose sticks of fish balls with their wonderful pink hue, beef balls, oyster mushrooms, and milky white lotus root with its pinwheel shape and crisp texture. These stands offer a plethora of fast, colorful and pleasing food. I’m an addict.

Almost anywhere in China you can find these stands. They are often outside of schools or shopping areas so children or shoppers can grab a quick snack. Some places grill the meat and then pepper it with spices at the end while in Beijing I found stands that had a vat of water and oil and spices that they submerge the sticks of meat and vegetables in.  Regardless of the method, the result is a satisfying snack.

My spy partner was looking at me with disgust as I happily ate my meat sticks en route to our next hotel, and soon my gig as a spy was up.

“Do you know what is in those?” he asked.

“I’ve got a pretty good guess, but not really,” I admitted.

“But you still eat them?”

“Oh yeah!”

Huang Ming's sticky rice cart

“You don’t know how long they have been sitting out, or how they have been handled,” he said.

“I can say the same thing about food at any restaurant or hotel,” I responded. Things were pretty quiet after that.  It was becoming obvious that my tastes were not as refined as they needed to be.

While it may have ended my career as a food spy, my love of street food isn’t anything I’m willing to give up.

When I taught English in Zunyi, in the Chinese province of Guizhou, I started going to the same sticky rice vendor for breakfast every morning. Huang Ming, the owner, would see me walking toward the stand, and she would wave and start fixing a bowl of warm sticky rice with potatoes topped with pickled vegetables, marinated pork meat, a bit of spicy pepper and some puffed rice. It was the perfect breakfast, it filled you up and the spice worked similarly to a cup of coffee—I seemed to get a little extra energy from it.

Then, I moved to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. There, in an attempt to gentrify the city there is a ban on street food stalls. In the heart of the city you just can’t find them. There are some rebels who have created thin charcoal barbeques with light sawhorse-esque stands that they grill meat sticks on, but they are always keeping an eye out for the police so they can grab the long thin grill under one arm and the stand in the other hand and run to avoid fines and punishment for breaking the ban. For the most part the city is sadly empty of food stands. 

So many choices, so many flavors

A friend and I were riding our bicycles and we found an area about five kilometers outside of the city where several shao kao or small barbeque stands had set up. These were the real deal with large grills, and tables with a brilliant mix of meats and vegetables spread on them. There were fish which swam in plastic bowls until they were chosen by patrons, and then the owner of the shao kao would expertly pull the fish out of the water, break its neck, de-scale it and then barbecue it.  You could choose your meat or your vegetable and then take a seat on small plastic stools and wait for barbequed eggplant and chicken skin to appear.  Sitting outside on our rickety plastic stools, with a cold beer in hand, taking in the smell of the coal grills and the meat and vegetables on the barbeque, we knew we had found something good, and that it was going to taste slightly better since it was forbidden street barbeque.

A Strike Against the Spanish

By Beth Green

A warrior largely ignored in the West, Lapu-Lapu was a chieftain in the 1500s who is celebrated in the Philippines today. His claim to fame?

Image from Rare Books Division, Princeton.edu

He killed Ferdinand Magellan.

Most children in the West learn about Magellan, the Portuguese sailor exploring for Spain who set out to find the westward route to the Spice Islands around the tip of South America. But I’m betting not so many of our readers remember the warrior who commanded Magellan’s downfall.

Here in the Philippines, especially in Cebu City where I now live, Lapu Lapu is a national hero. I’ve been reading quite a bit about him—though I’m guessing there’s more I haven’t learned yet!—and I’d like to share here something about this daring man who fought a foreign invasion.

At the time of Magellan’s death, Lapu-Lapu (his name varies a bit in the annals of history, but this is the currently used version), was a datu, or ruler, of Mactan Island. Mactan is a small island, which in present day is ringed with imported sands and fancy resorts. It’s connected to Cebu City, the oldest city in the Philippines, by two bridges and a lot of economic ties.

Speaking of economics, Magellan arrived in the Philippines looking for spices, directions to spices, and more spices. Oh, and converts to Christianity. Those were good too. He didn’t have much luck with the spices here, but the ruler of Sugbu (now Cebu City) and his queen decided they’d throw in with the newly presented deities and get baptized. Now named Carlos and Juana, they set the stage for Catholicism to enter the Philippines, and even now, more than 500 years later, it is the most popular religion in the country.

Carlos and Juana’s neighbor Lapu-Lapu wasn’t in such a big hurry to change his old god for anybody new. (Some web-pages I’ve visited suggested Lapu-Lapu was Muslim, other sources disagree.)

Either because of the question of converting to a foreign faith was abhorrent to him,  because he didn’t like these weird-looking sailors in their strange ships, or possibly because he had a feud going with Humabon-now-named-Carlos, Lapu-Lapu refused to bow down to the might of the foreign ships, sovereign, or god.

Lapu-Lapu Memorial Statue. Image by whl.travel/Flickr

One source quoted on Wikipedia suggests that Magellan may have made a faux pas when approaching Lapu-Lapu as well. Magellan may have approached the islands with the idea that the ruling classes were structured like those in Europe. That thinking would have led Magellan to believe that Carlos was more powerful than Lapu-Lapu because the latter controlled a lesser population on a neighboring island. However, to get to Cebu City harbor, ships would have had to pass through a narrow channel between Cebu Island and Mactan Island. Therefore, Lapu-Lapu probably was more powerful than Carlos because of his strategic location even though he had a smaller population under his command, or so the theory goes.

Anyway, whether Lapu-Lapu disliked Magellan because he felt the European was disrespectful, or he just had a bad feeling about the newcomers, when Magellan told him that he’d attack Mactan Island if Lapu-Lapu didn’t swear fealty to Spain, Lapu Lapu called his bluff.

Magellan was accompanied on his round-the-world cruise by an Italian adventurer, AntonioPigafetta. Pigafetta kept a faithful diary of events that occurred along the way (and unknowingly discovered the international dateline when he got back to Europe and realized he was a day off in his diary), and it’s from his account that we get most of our details today. Lapu-Lapu’s locals asked for one more day’s leniency before the battle so that they could gather more troops and make it a fairer fight. In fact, though, they had plenty of fighters, but they wanted a little more time to dig some traps before the Spaniards disembarked.

Mactan and Cebu today. A fluvial parade. Image by Storm Crypt

Magellan and his men were at a clear disadvantage from the beginning. First, the men on shore were fighting for their homes and freedom. And, once Magellan ordered his men to set fire to huts in the village, I can imagine any locals who were initially ambivalent about fighting the foreigners decided that Lapu-Lapu was right to attack. Second, the Spanish were wearing heavy armor in a humid climate. However, because of the reefs and shallows around Mactan Island (I’ve been scuba diving there several times) Magellan couldn’t bring his ships Victoria or Trinidad close enough to shore for either the ship’s guns to come into play or to get the Spanish fighters off easily. Even using smaller vessels to get nearer, the foreign troops had to exert themselves wading through water over their knees to get to the beach—while Lapu-Lapu’s townspeople rained poisoned arrows and bamboo spears on them from relative comfort. The Spaniards weren’t wearing armor on their legs, and—you’d have seen this coming if it were a movie--Magellan caught a poisoned arrow in his leg. 

Realizing he was done for, Magellan ordered the rest of his men (Pigafetta among them) to retreat, and they watched in horror as Lapu-Lapu and his freedom fighters hacked Magellan to bits with long knives.

Today, Lapu-Lapu is remembered in the name of a town on Mactan Island, which still guards the waters of the Cebu City harbor. His statue stands in the square, and legends have cropped up around his story.

But, perhaps the greatest token of his fame as a warrior is his depiction on the PhilippineNational Police badge, representing “the symbol and embodiment of all the genuine attributes of leadership, courage, nationalism, self-reliance and a people-based and people powered community defense.”