by Will Cade

Every news agency around the world is covering the disaster relief efforts for the cylone ravished country of Burma (also known as Myanmar). 22,000 Burmese are dead, and allegedly some 1.5 million more are facing starvation and disease in the days to come. The Burmese Government, led by its Military Council, is currently accepting some aid packages from beyond its beyorders but is refusing aid workers and media crews. The media is covering every detail of these events as they unfold, yet only a few articles have even mentioned probably the most pertinent question: why would a government refuse help?

In my experience, people only refuse help if they are proud, they can actually handle it themselves, or they have something to hide. Being that corpses are still rotting in the streets days after the cyclone has passed, the Burmese Governemnt obviously can’t handle this on its own. On the same note, I don’t see how any government (even a military Dictatorship) could feel proud when its people are starving and dying in the street. So what possible explanations does that leave us, or, perhaps more accurately, what is the Burmese government trying to hide?

The Burmese Military Leaders are notoriously suspicious of westerners, even during times of stability – if that word can even apply to a country which brutally represseses any political opposition. When non-violent protests began in multiple cities in 2007, the government deployed riot police who at times fired live rounds into the crowds. The government later raided Buddhist monasteries to detain political dissidents. The exact accounts of these events are still disputed, in part because the government refused western journalists access and allegedly blocked all access to the internet.

If this repressive trend continues, we may never learn why the Burmese Government is refusing aid. The sad fact is that the Burmese government cannot seem to keep all information within its borders: the rising death toll is updated almost by the hour.

by Will Cade

Where I’m from in the States, some young people are scared to put their wild party pictures on Facebook or MySpace, in case their current or future employers frown on such things. Many of my older friends have even removed their Wall-post section, so their boss can’t read into their private life. The U.S. may be called the land of the free, but business is obviously still business. The last thing someone would be scared of, though, is having problems with the government because of a party picture, a wall post, or a blog.

I read today that the Cuban Bloguera, Yoani Sanchez, has been awarded a prestigious Spanish Journalism Award – the Ortega and Gasset Prize in digital journalism – for her blog Generation Y. In it, Sanchez recounts her frustrations living under a communist government that considers freedom of expression to be as dangerous as an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague. She will not not even be able to receive her award here in Spain, because the Cuban government has denied her an exit Visa (and I thought Visa’s were only required to enter countries?)

As a fellow blogger and human being, I was curious to see what Sanchez has to say. But when I checked her blog online (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony) the website was “currently unavailable.” A coincidence, I wondered, or can dictatorships even shut down websites? I discovered that STRATO, the Internet Service Provider which manages her website, is based in Germany, which I doubt takes orders from the Cuban Government. Still I couldn’t read Sanchez’s writing, so I did the next most informative thing I could think of: I got on Facebook.

I wasn’t even sure if Facebook was legal in Cuba, and at first I had a hard time finding real Cubanos (not just people named Cuba). I eventually found a few Cuban groups which looked both politically grounded and open minded, until I saw that they were based out of the U.S. and Sweden. Finally, I found the group “Cubans on Facebook,” but it was a closed group, so I couldn’t learn that much. After hearing what is happening with Yoani Sanchez, though, I didn’t blame them for publicly guarding their privacy: They might lose more than their jobs if word got out what they were doing in their free time.

by Lev Elgudin

If you look up the word quaint on dictionary.com, here’s what you’ll find:

quaint

–adjective, -er, -est.

After taking a five day rent-a-car road trip through southern France, I found that the word describes the historical charm of the region perfectly. And, as with all quaint places, a cheap, mapless, hippie-style ride through the side roads is a must.
The drive from Madrid to San Sebastián is about 4 hours with no traffic, which means about 5 hours in real life. Not too long if you’re used to driving longer distances, plus with beautiful sights and a bit of mountain weaving on the way.
But me and my two friends wanted as much southern France time as we could get, so we didn’t stop on the way, and arrived in Donostia (Basque for San Sebastián) at approximately 1 am, just in time to meet a couch surfer (check out couchsurfing.com) who’d agreed to show us the bar scene. It seems like a cool city, certainly a separate future trip altogether. One weird thing about it: in Madrid, we’re used to “chinos” selling beer and food on the street at night; in San Sebastián they sell glow sticks and weird glowing spinning tops for a couple of euros. And no beer. Needless to say, I was distracted for hours.

Wednesday night’s sleep was both one of the most uncomfortable and satisfying of my life. After leaving Donostia at about 3:30 am, we drove out past the border into France just a few kilometres away. We found a quaint little field, off a small, woodsy road, and parked. We had a tent, but it was raining, and we were tired. So we did the logical thing: we slept in the car. As I received a last minute upgrade from Atesa for some unknown Spanish reason, our car was a Citroen C5, which is a relatively large sedan. So we piled our bags in the front two seats, moved them up as far as they went, flattened out the back seats and stretched out on top of our home-brought blankets and pillows with our feet in the trunk. With the three of us, it was a tight squeeze, but a few tokes and some wine had us good and passed out.

When we awoke, we found that our quaint little field was actually someone’s house, and the small woodsy road was actually part of a residential neighbourhood where people wake up early and get to work. By our 10 am wake up time, the street was bustling with activity. It was a holiday too in France, so we were greeted with a lot of weird looks and stares. What would you do if you saw three bleary-eyed strangers emerging from a seemingly abandoned car parked on the grass right next to your house? The didn’t seem to care though, so my respect for the French went up a lot.

The rest of the trip was filled with lots of French food and wine, delicious chocolate croissants, foie gras, and crepes. And lots of other things too. Here are some highlights.
Bordeaux: Le Fiacre sound bar (www.le-fiacre.com) is located near Place Rey-Berland in the centre of town. It’s a “post rock” punk bar which was relatively quiet on this Thursday night, but the bartender said it’s usually packed with locals and regulars. They have a live band in the basement every weekend, and how can you miss a bar that features acts like Pussydelic and Funky Freaks. The highlight of the night was when we started talking to a Parisian visiting the city on holiday. Boy, did he make a lot of hand motions. Lots of weaving and twirling, sometimes using both hands, seemingly unattached to what he was actually saying. Neither his English nor Spanish were very good, but that didn’t matter, his orchestra directing hands didn’t stop. Nice guy though.

Every little town: has a tourism office, and amazingly, from Thursday to Sunday, they were all closed. It’s amazing the Spanish have a worldwide reputation for not working a lot, the French work week is capped at 35 hours.
All small French villages are equipped with cool-looking cathedrals. Every single one.
Highways are crazily expensive, at least by US standards. The drive from Bordeaux to Toulouse is about 2 hours, but it cost 16 euros.
The road you want to be on if you’re not in a hurry is N1113, a side road that gets you from Bordeaux to Toulouse in about 4 hours. It’s filled with off-road fruit stands with delicious strawberries, a million chateaux for wine tasting mostly in the Graves area, and small little quaint villages that are seemingly all the same but somehow different.

On a final and abrupt note, I want to mention a February article in Time magazine (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1720316,00.html) that states, among other wondrous statistics, 90% of French women over 50 are sexually active. To me, that’s incredible. But after spending some time in the south of France, I saw why. These small little quaint towns, there’s little to do but drink wine, eat foie, and have wild outdoor sex. It’s a beautiful country, I recommend a visit.