I Have A Theory
I've become obsessed with the HDI wikipedia page on this trip. Every country we've gone to I check the list, compare it to my own experience, and see how it's doing against previous and future countries visited.
"My own experience" means what I, a budget traveler, see every day. And what I see is public transit. Every time I investigate a country's rank on the HDI my mind moves to my transit experience in that city or country. Most recently it was Budapest, where everything is ancient and the plush seats are filled with cigarette butts and dead rats. Before that it was Prague, decent, but no Canada Line.
My theory is that this is also the way the UN is measuring the HDI.
Instead of gathering the best Liberal White minds in the world to gather information on so called important things like infant mortality, I think there is a group of UN suits (in my mind they are a mixed race bag of slightly inebriated middle-aged men) who ride around on public transit in countries around the world. They do this all year. If there is no transit system they walk the dirty streets, frowning, with clipboards in hand.
I could, by myself, replace whatever team they have working on these numbers. Buy me the plane tickets and pay my cell phone bill and I will create a better HDI than those fancy U.N.ers.
What's With The Top 20 Percent?
Compare Hungary's spot in the top 20% against the top 20% of other categories - schools, hotels, or sports leagues. A top 20% NBA team has a decent chance of winning the title, Hungary, on the other hand, is nowhere near places like Norway or Canada. In the NNA (National Nation Association) Hungary has no chance of winning the title. Its professionals are underpaid and often leave the country, corruption in government is high and, as mentioned before, the bus seats contain bubonic plague.
I don't mean to be coming down on Hungary, they're 23 years removed from a time when people waited years to get a telephone installed in their home. They've come a long way; but the nations of the world are less evenly spread then even the shadiest of sports leagues and we, the people of Earth, could do a lot better.
Captain Phillips and Star Wars
Our Captain Philips experience was unusual because while a majority of the movie was in English with Hungarian subtitles, a lot was in Somali. When Somali is being spoken Captain Phillips has no idea what's going on. With the Hungarian subtitles under the Somali parts our movie experience was entirely through the eyes of the Captain, what he didn't understand, we didn't understand. It heightened our sympathy towards him.
Wesley Morris puts my feelings about the movie in much better words.
Also, Tom Hanks, man, I don't know if there's anyone better.
Being in the theater reminded me that there is a new series of Star Wars movies coming out. I've seen two of the original three and have nothing invested in this series, but I think the upcoming series will be good. For the last 3o years Star Wars fans have had to endure gross mismanagement of their world. On December 18th 2015, with the help of this plea, they'll put it all behind them.
From Awe To Anger
The Deep Dark Zoo
We showed up at the gate of the Vienna Zoo - consistently ranked one of the best in the world - and the place looked near abandoned ... in a good way.
There's been a zoo crisis playing out way down in the C-deck of my mind these past few years, but being here brought me to terms with my uninformed aversion. I now feel that, with 7 billion people on the planet and growing, we're only going to make things worse for animals in the wild. Its gone from taking them away from their habitat to taking them away from their habitat before we destroy it. Who knows animals, if you're lucky we'll all get wiped out by a virus, but we'll unlock your cages before we die.
The Vienna Zoo was friggen awesome, after staring at inanimate museum things for a month, the wonder and entertainment we got from these animals was priceless.
At closing time there were stern German warnings to leave coming from the PA, but we were lost in the middle of the exhibits. I stopped at the lion place, there were no people, it was almost completely dark and it was starting to rain. A lion was right at the fence and staring off somewhere, his head was huge and there were little beads of water collecting on his lion mane. We locked eyes and I thought we would have a moment where he pried open my soul and roared in the dark abyss of my psyche. Instead he looked away, he didn't care. Then we left the zoo.