Online friendship

Whenever I'm abroad, I realise how precious friendships really are. The absense of my friends makes my daily life a lot quieter, and boring. I realize how their presence always inspires and feeds me and how I enjoy having them around.
Nowadays, it's practically impossible to not stay in touch, thanks to social media and the internet, who make distance a relative concept. I have daily chats with friends on Facebook, I Skype at least once a week with friend A. and exchange long emails with M. about the Important Stuff in Life.

Over the last years I - and I am probably not the only one - have had many discussions about the online versus the wordly friendships. Being an advocate and consumer of social media, I love being able to learn about the lives of my online friends, even if I don't see them often in the offline world. I personally think social media don't devalue friendships, they mainly create the opportunity to maintain friendships that wouldn't exist otherwise. I know people who I rarely see in daily life, who I've met while traveling and who I consider to be dear friends of mine.

Like my friends Sam and Heinrich, who gave me a ride eleven years ago in New Zealand and who I've seen four times since, in different places on this earth. I don't know anything about their daily life, their favorite restaurants or how their house looks like. But I know who they are, what they do and where they live. I know they have a dog and two cats and that they love to travel, and thanks to Facebook I can see glimpses of their daily life. Whenever we meet again, it feels like we just saw each other yesterday. On one hand that is thanks to the social media and on the other hand, it's because they are great guys and our friendships apparently doesn't need weekly updates. Knowing that these gentlemen are living their life on the other side of the world and are also a part of my life, even though it might be small, is very dear to me.


The American Paul Miller was offline for the last year, but last week, he got reconnected to the online world again. He concludes some interesting things about the pros and cons of our online life.

Cosy

While I slowely walked forward in line, along extremely decorated stalls, eating people and dressed up pilgrims who tried to make music on triangles and tambourines, I wondered why this was considered to be 'gezellig', a Dutch word that is best translated by 'cosy', although it's more than that. People looked with indifferent glances at the stalls at the displayed goods: beaded necklaces, nose flutes, expensive olive oil, those terrible crystal animal figurines and the latest results of the community centres Christmas workshop. Actually, they mainly were making their way to another food stall, the sausage came after the mini cheese fondue, then the marinated mushrooms, the potato cookies, and then crepes, waffles and ice cream with whipped cream. The stalls in between offered a moment of piece to taste the newly acquired taste sensation, before plunging in the next culinary adventure.

The Christmas market.

I grew up with this phenomenon, although the German version is much better and bigger. Maybe that explains my antipathy to this annual ritual. Maybe it's the memory of Christmas, and the forced conviviality that in my case lasted for three days, or that we tried to enforce upon each other, which makes my hair stand on end at the mere thought of it. There probably will be a lot of psychological reasons for my behavior.



But frankly, I think it mostly has to do with the excess, the mindless consumption, and easy marketing that gets so many people to walk in line like sheep in a meadow. Is there a crisis? Are we having hard times? I can't see it. Here, on an estate in Germany, thousands of people pay five euro, just to get into the area where they are going to spend a lot of money on stuff they don't really use.

Although I try not to sound patronizing, and I do not want to condemn the visitors - what's wrong with good food and nice stuff to buy or watch, and hey, you're outside too - I realize that I fail miserably. Because well, I just don't get it. I don't understand that you buy on impulse, I don't understand why it's fun to wait in line for an expensive sausage that can be bought cheaper and probably with better taste, somewhere where there's no line. I don't understand why people don't get annoyed by standing in line, walking in a slow pace, with people behind you that kick your shoes off your heels, and the mustard you suddenly find on your jacket because the guy that just passed you didn't bother to clean his hands.

And what stuck me most: few people looked happy. There was little joy to be seen. Yes, the sellers, they radiated joy, and they added a little more when they saw a potential new buyer coming towards them. And my large group of friends, of which eleven of the twenty had never been to a Christmas market. They were happy too. They danced in the tent where the glühwein was sold, and they enjoyed all the crazy food and trinkets. But hey, they had never been on a German Christmas market before.

China

Yesterday, I walked in the pooring rain at ten thirty with two people through Chinatown. We were hungry and we figured it should be possible to get something in this exiting part of New York at this time of the day. However, while walking through the narrow streets, the only thing we saw was the closing of one rolling shutter after the other and Chinese men cleaning their steps. The rain made it all even more desolate. Then, we saw a light and seven waiters who just cleaned the place, sitting together after a hard days work. When we asked them if it would be possible to get some food, they quickly talked in Chinese and then gave us a short nod. Enter. While seven waiters, and the five cooks that were also free now, sat on the table next to us, we ate our Foe jong hai. Back in the rain we talked about the Chinese work ethics: if there's a chance to make money, you have to take it.

Today, I saw a documentary about the The Chinese bubble, in which a cab driver concludes that he has to work for two hundred years to be able to buy a house and a real estate magnate decides to buy a piece of land in, of course, New York to built an Asian city. "I will call it Asian Star or New Asia." They are all so positive, those Chinese. Or at least, the wealthy ones. they have big dreams, want to reach the skies. The cab driver just hopes the economy won't collapse, because less people will take a cab when it does. The builder longs for the past in which everything was better than it is now. He works way up high and "even in my dreams I'm in the air".

The documentary reminded me of the Go West Project, by journalist Michiel Hulshof and architect Daan Roggeveen. They are researching the development of the new Chinese cities, which, due to the stagnant growth of the metropolises in the East, increasingly extends westward. In a presentation of their project, which ultimately results in a book, they showed how China is slowly filling up with empty cities, with empty apartments, empty roads and huge empty shopping malls, where no one walks yet, but that are waiting for millions of people who are about to leave the countryside.

According to the economist in The Chinese Bubble, real estate is the only way of investing in a country where you can't invest abroad and where the stock market is too weak. On the website of the GWP, the deserted cities are on every photo you see.

lastly, this reminded me of Highrise, out of my window, in which Tainan (once founded by the Dutch) is the only 'Chinese' city in this project. You'd think there are plenty of other cities that can show you a beautiful view out of their windows.



Check those sites! They are great!