With the End in Sight

I have a love-hate relationship with this time of the year. As I exchange seasons greetings with friends and family, I slowly awaken to the fact that in a couple of days, the year will be over, school will start, and life will rumble on clumsily, like a horse-cart with mismatched wheels, out of control.

Europe has been so much fun. I know I promised to update as I traveled, but a lot of time I was really too tired to do so, and there wasn't wifi anyway. Perhaps during winter term I'll have more time to write. As if. Soon my trip will be over, ending in Barcelona before I head back to Milan to pack up.

Well, here I've learnt to ski, tried currywrust and gluhwein, visited a nuclear bomb shelter, met up with friends, had a secret-recipe seafood soup, had steak pie and almost tried London Pride (which sounded more like London Pry cause of our lovely waiter's thick English accent). I took more photos than I've ever taken before, of sights more exciting than I've ever seen. There's so much I want to bring back with me, but there's only so much I can afford, because I only have 20 kgs (around 50 pounds) of baggage allowance and limited purchasing power.

I've seen the beauty of globalization on the streets of London: people of all colors, sushi bars beside old English pubs, and cheerful tourists snapping photographs. And the joys of capitalism on Boxing Day, where hordes of zombie-consumers flooded streets that had been dead silent just hours before, craving for brains bargains. I felt moody reading about the failure of Copenhagen on The Guardian, especially with respects to China. Despite being outraged at their blatant disregard for the discussion, I felt sorry for China perhaps for one of the first times in my life. As I told my girlfriend, say you get a souvenir for 5 Euros. That's almost 10 RMB. How much of that is being paid to the poor factory worker who works under horrifying conditions, has 5 kids and a wife to feed, and will never step foot outside of Asia because he—and his family—has been insidiously locked into a phantom caste by the invisible hand. As the West shifts it's manufacturing to China, he will be continually exploited to meet the malignant "global" demand while a select few of his own countrymen will enjoy tremendous blood money.

The wealth of the world is held, tightly-clutched, in the big, greedy hands of a few. The rest of us spend our lives flailing around feebly, trying to grasp the pennies that slip through.

Running the risk of sounding incredibly preachy and hypocritical, since I have enjoyed much about this out-of-control capitalist system that I so often diss, I am truly thankful that I can indulge in the little things that life presents: the spicy flavors of curry powder and worcester sauce mingling with the rich taste of german wurst, giant buildings left behind by those before that remind me of what we can achieve if we set things right, and the warmth of good-morning hugs. I'm sure we all have little things like such that we experience everyday, but too seldom remember. Things that money can't accentuate nor diminish.

Things that make us, human. Europe is still full of these.