👀 What's it like over... there?

Places we probably haven't visited.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like over… there?

You know the places I’m talking about. The ones that show up on the news when there’s a disaster. Or, more likely, a “humanitarian situation.”

When I was in high school (circa 2010), the whole Middle East was that place. The only thing I knew about the region was what I learned in the aftermath of September 11th. The only reports I saw were of soldiers, or bombs, or tragedies, or death.

One day, a professor from a university called Quest, in Canada, came to our school to talk about the history of math. Algebra, he told us, was an Arabic word. Much of the math I had studied up until then had been formalized in the golden age of Islam. It turns out the Middle East had its own traders, explorers, scholars, and renaissance, centuries before the western Renaissance we always talk about.

It wasn’t all-revealing, but it was a crack in the wall of my American-centric knowledge. I decided then to study Arabic, to learn more about that side of the world, and ended up fascinated.

The way we learned the language in college, I will say, was absurd. It’s worth a whole article or investigation. We learned how to say “The United Nations” and “My father is an officer in the army” before “Where is the bathroom?” (this is not a joke.)

Still, I took Arabic every semester of college, had one of the best professors I’ve ever had, and that crack in the wall of my knowledge became a window.

After graduation the window opened up into a doorway into living and working in Jordan for 7 months. By traveling and learning about the place, making friends, sharing meals, riding buses, visiting markets and mosques, driving the border with Syria, visiting Lebanon and Israel, I created a whole new understanding of the Middle East (a very small part of it), and it was marvelous.

My dad’s email says “Kindness transforms the world, travel unites it.”

He’s long been a believer that being nice to people makes the world a better place, and that visiting somewhere will change the way you see things. Both actions highlight similarities, and diminish differences.

The internet promised itself as a place that could let us travel without leaving home. TV promised that too. But often those travels don’t truly show what a place is like. Even famous travelers like Anthony Bourdain can’t show exactly what a place is like because of the limitations of the TV medium.

Lucky for us, though, there are thousands of people across the globe filming their world and posting them on the internet. These are relatively unfiltered perspectives – in that, of course, each person creating these videos has a perspective – but they are not mediated by some giant media conglomerate and rooms full of people thinking about advertisers.

One specific film inspired this dispatch. It’s called Manakamana, a 2-hour documentary that takes place entirely in a cable car in Nepal. There is no narration, there are no “characters,” there is no story. There are goats, and couples, and friends, and strangers, and the experience of repeatedly climbing the mountain on a cable car.

Despite this lack of context, I think you get an idea for the place. You capture the feeling of just existing in that context, get a hint of what might exist over… there.

Not every country gets a documentary in this same anthropological style. Still, there are many amateur documentarians I found who are eager to record where they’re from. They film car rides, driving through town or road trips up the mountains. There is no history, no context, no news. I won’t even put my typical commentary after each video (and you don’t have to watch each one in its entirety. 2 minutes is still interesting).

But there is something there that sparks an interest, some kind of connection to regular people doing regular things that is built through virtual travel. Hopefully these videos will open similar cracks in the wall of what we know about these places, just like that the Quest professor did for me.

Afghanistan: (6 minutes)

Venezuela (12 minutes)

Gaza (9 minutes)

Sudan (13 minutes)

• This one does have narration, but it’s in Arabic. Most of the video is a man riding his motorcycle through Khartoum, Sudan’s capital.

I’d love to know what you think.

Until next time,

Francisco

Some hidden spirals on a random walk. Artist: R. Raposo

• P.S. if you’re new here, welcome!

  • I share interesting things from the internet, mostly videos.

  • I’m also experimenting with reading a book about Van Gogh “in public”, i.e. sharing things that jump out to me as I read.

  • I like spirals, feel free to submit a photo of one you see on a walk, at a museum, in the grocery store, or even one you made.

  • Last week was all about music, you can check that one out here.

• E se você for brasileiro/a, seja super bem vindo/a também! To sempre querendo expandir o meu conhecimento da internet brasileira, seja com musica, sites, videos, ou qualquer outra coisa interessante. Pode me mandar que vou adorar.