Four years later, I’m finishing this piece of archiving business.

A couple months ago, I announced I had moved my honors thesis to a subdomain of this site for the sake of organization and archiving. Following up on that resolution to make more tidy a rambling online portfolio, I have brought another dated, collection of work of which I am proud under this house.

I spent the better chunk of 2006 in Tokyo video podcasting, writing, traveling and learning on behalf of NBC Universal Digital Studios. Now all of that work can be found at japan.christopherwink.com.

See all the Episodes here and all the Archives here. Go and explore.

A few things interested me from my work in 2006:

• Short, bad titles — The post headlines were all short and sometimes not even descriptive. I didn’t recognize then the importance.
• I wrote a lot — I far outpaced all of my fellow castmembers in output, which is great, but I could have made much of the content terser and more straightforward.
• I actually had comments — On many posts, I had a handful of comments. I haven’t transferred them… yet.
• I never linked – I didn’t have a single link to a past post.
• Photo albums, not in posts – Photos and the video episodes were never embedded. This is the one major change I’ve made, by incorporating them.
• Yes, I called posts ‘blogs’ — But that was 2006. What’s the excuse today?
• I learned and experienced so damn much — I interacted with an audience and explored and created multimedia, but ultimately, I was just a young kid learning. ..And what a clear stepping stone toward the WDSTL podcast I did while in Western Europe.

On Christmas Eve, why not discuss gifts.

For, what, the past few hundred years, the more far-flung and exotic the purchase or discovery, the better. Those emotions are mixed up into colonialism and exploration and Manifest Destiny and so many human and American spirits that I don’t care to explore them.

But I think there’s something changing there.

In 2005, I spent a small fortune in the local currency on hand-crafted wood carvings and jewelry from new friends and acquaintances in a Ghanian mountain village, all to be given to friends and family at home. I was back home for no more than two weeks before I showed off a necklace I was particularly fond of and someone remarked how similar it was to something she had seen at Target.

Oh.

I was brought back to this thought and what it means by a great last-page essay in the strong Philadelphia sustainability magazine Grid.

…I realized that local products are exotic. In this era of cross-culturalism and international trade, it’s easy to lose sight of just how little of what we buy is made where we live. Consider your morning cup of coffee, the T-shirt you’re wearing, or the bottle of water on your desk. We rarely stop to consider that an everyday product could have traveled 3,000 miles to get to us.

…

So, this year I’m looking forward to giving gifts that have the exotic provenance of my hometown. The objects will still be vessels for imparting my experiences, still carry the stories of the people I’ve met and the things I’ve enjoyed. I’m excited to show off the counter-global foods and wares that make Philadelphia unique. When you put some thought into the source, you’re giving a gift that benefits more than just its recipient. MORE

Yes.

So as technology and globalization makes the world flatter, it will be supporting a local economy and finding the most local and most special product that will be *better*.

We’ll see a trend of the local becoming more and more interesting before, of course, as a friend noted, it switches again like all trends do.

It fits into a world of sustainability and urban renewal that thrills me. I don’t know what to do with all those wood carvings now.

Travel is most often the privilege of the privileged. Two years ago last month, I was returning from a trip that was certainly a great privilege.

If you can’t go out to eat with friends without referencing something you learned or experienced from some travel experience you had, then I think you’re doing it wrong.

Great travel writers, I think, tend to have always done so for a personal love for travel — not primarily to be a travel writer or to tell someone else about what you did.

Of late, I was reminded.

There are nearly a dozen different, conflicting things I believe strongly about travel:

• Everything you do while traveling will be a cliche. Seriously, everything. Check out the many many Onion stories or ones from Stuff White People Like for any confirmation you need.
• It’s a really aged, really important part of human experience and it will help you come to terms with lots of ideas you have already heard, so you should do some of it if you are so blessed to be able to do so. Tim Ferriss recently ran a well-trafficked post about that.
• Travel is wildly overrated. Penelope Trunk did a great job of explaining that.
• You should try traveling somewhere, sometime by yourself.
• The most expensive thing about travel is getting there, and you can do the rest pretty cheap. …Not that you always may want to.
  
• Just because you traveled somewhere, doesn’t mean you know it. No, Paris isn’t France, and hell, even Paris isn’t Paris.
• You should try your hand at using as much of a local language as you can, as an entire blog exists to suggest.
• It makes for some really incredible writing. Like, one of my favorite pieces of journalism of all time (even if his reading isn’t so exciting) and lessons from legendary travel writers.
• And, as I think most importantly: you should travel for yourself and for no one else. Keep your mouth shut from sharing every four seconds the experiences you had and wildly broad cultural decisions you’ve made, and just travel for yourself if you enjoy doing so. Few things make so many people more self-conscious than having not traveled, so stop. If you traveled for yourself, then it’s quite easy to keep it to yourself.

I spent about a week in a few Italian cities, unfortunately, my luggage was lost, so I was without my camera for most of the trip.  I flew in and out from Rome, was based in Florence and made day trips to Pisa, Sienna and Venice.

Here are some photos I took from Venice, in addition to others pilfered to fill in the gaps.

Our group of Temple volunteers and some of community leaders with whom we worked

By Christopher Wink | January 28, 2005

On a recent trip to poverty ravaged Tijuana, I could not help but see the irony, clichéd as it may be, of a border wall – that divides with great tumult the U.S. and Mexico – extending into the serenity of the Pacific Ocean. It is unreal to brace oneself against the rusted wall and watch it snake its way into the greens and blues of the water below as it divides San Diego and Tijuana. Here, lines drawn on maps are far from imaginary and they carry emotional meaning that no fence should.

But for me, when I travel, the first things I notice are the similarities between where I am and where I live. Mysterious or not, the smiles of children are the same in Mexico: where south not only describes its geographic relationship to the U.S. but also its location below the poverty line. Of course American business spills over the fortified walls, so the border region oozes the products of Sam Walton and Ronald McDonald with a Mexican touch.

Otherwise though, the two sides could hardly be more different. The smiles of youth, globally recognized, are eclipsed by the speed with which Mexican children are forced to mature. Repeatedly I was asked if I were married: an idea, as a nineteen year old American boy, that had not yet occurred to me. But there in Tijuana, resting with other volunteers who were helping to build a school for kids with special needs, I stood a man without a wife. A few miles north and I was back to being a boy without a care.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the exchange rate is not in pesos or dollars, it is in decades. Time has a different meaning in Tijuana. Ages don’t translate. Twenty-three year old women with more horrors in their pasts than the American troops we support and more violence in their presents than the urban teens we neglect are forgettable there. Married fifteen year olds and buried infants are part of a generational pancake, where diversity of age is as nonexistent as paved roads. The cavernous potential of Mexican youth is too often eroded through bitter time and darkening age.

And so crossing the border becomes a way of life: a fundamental part of Mexican culture. For many, Tijuana, where a gallon of milk costs the same as in the U.S. but wages don’t correspond, is a stopping point before moving on to the riches and splendor of an American minimum wage. Some say that migrants are criminals, but it is hard to imagine doing anything less for your family than risking your life. It is hard to lean against that fence dividing work and poverty, success and failure, life and death, and imagine fathers and sons, mothers and daughters watching their families die without risking a trip across the border.

Standing in the way of the hopes and dreams of millions of Mexican migrants, however, are walls of steel, armies of border agents, and the most dangerous predator of all: the mountains and deserts that line the border east of Tijuana.

Since 1994’s Operation Gatekeeper instituted hugely increased protection of the border, the mountainous and desert regions offer the only possibility to cross for Mexicans without the money for the documents to cross legally. Physical boundaries will not stop men and women from trying to save their families; they will instead ensure that many will die with unimaginable pain.

It is not rational to support open borders, but it is altogether impossible to live and breathe in Tijuana and not recognize that American enforcement of the border has become savagely murderous and insufferably unjust.

I write this on the plane ride home after watching a patient father with bags under his eyes walking the aisle with his recently pacified daughter. It seemed to me that in Tijuana even the most devoted parent rarely had the strength, if blessed with the time, to coddle his child. So the crying doesn’t stop and the closest thing to being pacified is in the reach of the nearest ocean. The fences may muffle the sound, but as the death totals climb well over three thousand, the cries cannot be ignored forever.

As prepared after spending a week working with community groups and living in a migrant workers’ home in Tijuana, Mexico.