Another side
Monday, May 10th, 2010 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
afunaI've been thinking a lot about how Australia is different from the Philippines in ways that I could not imagine before I actually started staying here. As a tourist, of course I noticed things like how clean the cities were, how green the cities were, how nice various things are, but living in rb's house for the past three days has opened up an entirely different perspective.
This is split off from my previous entry because the mood is entirely different. Three things make an entry, yeah?
There are a lot of things that are different here in Australia than back home, and they've combined to pretty much thwap me upside the head with a series of realizations. So many things are easier in ways that I had not realized could matter
Like: having drinkable water straight from the tap.
Tap water back home is not drinkable in the same way. You either need to filter + boil + let rest so that the rust and all the sediments settle to the bottom, or if you have money you give up and start buying purified water five gallons at a time, because it's too much hassle to prepare the water from the tap. I was introduced, in a recent post somewhere, to the concept of needing drinkable water to wash hands/food/etc which makes perfect sense, and yet boggles me because drinking water is either effortful or expensive, so wow! Though, it's not that the water back home is so very horrible; I drink tapwater when I head out to restaurants. Most of the time, they probably even filter it. It's just that it's not guaranteed to be safe.
Like: being a "major" enough country that you can "just google it" for something in your area
Say, being able to use Google Maps to look for shops for slightly more obscure hobbies online. clickthecity.com, etc, work well for locating restaurants and moviehouses, but aren't very helpful for looking up things like yarn shops in the Philippines/Manila area.
Google did kindly point me to a bunch of blog entries and comments to sift information from. Some had been obsoleted by years, so I had to filter those out, and after days of following links and sifting threads, I found the (only?) four places to buy yarn/thread, which I'm listing here in case anyone ever needs the information: Dreams Yarnshoppe in Glorietta 5 (good-quality, but expensive, mostly imported), Craftworld in Megamall, Rosario in Pasig (a collection of mostly threads, but occasionally some yarn from Baguio), Carona in Megamall (mostly sells fabric and sequin/feathers/etc, but there's a corner where they sell crochet thread and yarn. I found this place once but I can't seem to find it anymore; not sure if I'm searching the right floor). And again, it's not that the information is horribly impossible to find, it's just effortful because there's no organized way to get the information.
I am struck by the realization that so many of the things (tiny things!) I take for granted as good enough could be better (so much better!). More than that, small improvements can make a huge impact. You can laugh at me now; haven't we been saying this a lot about the tiny bugs in Dreamwidth, and how reducing the friction slightly can enhance the entire experience by a disproportionate amount? Turns out I never connected it back to the physical world.
What would it be like if these things were also convenient back home? And I keep leaping to the conclusion: it would change things.
I can't predict how or what or when. It would change things in ways I am unable to imagine, because I cannot make myself accept that things could be that easy. The concept is too big a leap away.
Occasionally I see people qualify complaints with "I know, first world problems, etc". I get where they're coming from -- I live in a third world country, but I occupy a very privileged position within it -- and basically it's saying I need to get things off my chest, but I am aware that other people have it way worse so I feel guilty now but I really need to unload.
But, even though I can sympathize, sometimes it makes me twitchy because I see it the other way around. I've noticed that when someone says "first world problems", oftentimes they're referring to something that would be a minor thing to lose, but would be a major thing to gain.
I have a half-formed idea, about how the guarantee of quality is what separates a developed country from the developing. I sometimes see people point to the malls, or the occasional rich man's rich-man's-toys to indicate that hey there is prosperity here after all, but those are exceptions (even when the malls seem like the rule). Look at the minimum, not the maximum, at the poorest, not the richest; we shouldn't look at whether the rich can afford to live in style, we should look at whether most of can afford to live at all. It's not about whether we have any state of the art facilities, but about whether the majority of our population can receive some (any) medical care at all. Many of our basics are much cheaper, food is definitely cheaper, but what guarantees of safety do we do without, in order to get things that cheap?
(But then can we afford to regulate that much? Literally afford as in afford to pay with money. But in the long run, can we afford not to? And then a quiet niggling thought, does all this point to my being too "westernized", too idolizing of ideas that are unsustainable in the context of my own country?)
Parts of it make sense to me, but other parts are still ringing false (because not everyone in a developed country has that same guarantee!), which means I need to examine it a lot more.
rb's house for the past three days has opened up an entirely different perspective.This is split off from my previous entry because the mood is entirely different. Three things make an entry, yeah?
There are a lot of things that are different here in Australia than back home, and they've combined to pretty much thwap me upside the head with a series of realizations. So many things are easier in ways that I had not realized could matter
Like: having drinkable water straight from the tap.
Tap water back home is not drinkable in the same way. You either need to filter + boil + let rest so that the rust and all the sediments settle to the bottom, or if you have money you give up and start buying purified water five gallons at a time, because it's too much hassle to prepare the water from the tap. I was introduced, in a recent post somewhere, to the concept of needing drinkable water to wash hands/food/etc which makes perfect sense, and yet boggles me because drinking water is either effortful or expensive, so wow! Though, it's not that the water back home is so very horrible; I drink tapwater when I head out to restaurants. Most of the time, they probably even filter it. It's just that it's not guaranteed to be safe.
Like: being a "major" enough country that you can "just google it" for something in your area
Say, being able to use Google Maps to look for shops for slightly more obscure hobbies online. clickthecity.com, etc, work well for locating restaurants and moviehouses, but aren't very helpful for looking up things like yarn shops in the Philippines/Manila area.
Google did kindly point me to a bunch of blog entries and comments to sift information from. Some had been obsoleted by years, so I had to filter those out, and after days of following links and sifting threads, I found the (only?) four places to buy yarn/thread, which I'm listing here in case anyone ever needs the information: Dreams Yarnshoppe in Glorietta 5 (good-quality, but expensive, mostly imported), Craftworld in Megamall, Rosario in Pasig (a collection of mostly threads, but occasionally some yarn from Baguio), Carona in Megamall (mostly sells fabric and sequin/feathers/etc, but there's a corner where they sell crochet thread and yarn. I found this place once but I can't seem to find it anymore; not sure if I'm searching the right floor). And again, it's not that the information is horribly impossible to find, it's just effortful because there's no organized way to get the information.
I am struck by the realization that so many of the things (tiny things!) I take for granted as good enough could be better (so much better!). More than that, small improvements can make a huge impact. You can laugh at me now; haven't we been saying this a lot about the tiny bugs in Dreamwidth, and how reducing the friction slightly can enhance the entire experience by a disproportionate amount? Turns out I never connected it back to the physical world.
What would it be like if these things were also convenient back home? And I keep leaping to the conclusion: it would change things.
I can't predict how or what or when. It would change things in ways I am unable to imagine, because I cannot make myself accept that things could be that easy. The concept is too big a leap away.
Occasionally I see people qualify complaints with "I know, first world problems, etc". I get where they're coming from -- I live in a third world country, but I occupy a very privileged position within it -- and basically it's saying I need to get things off my chest, but I am aware that other people have it way worse so I feel guilty now but I really need to unload.
But, even though I can sympathize, sometimes it makes me twitchy because I see it the other way around. I've noticed that when someone says "first world problems", oftentimes they're referring to something that would be a minor thing to lose, but would be a major thing to gain.
I have a half-formed idea, about how the guarantee of quality is what separates a developed country from the developing. I sometimes see people point to the malls, or the occasional rich man's rich-man's-toys to indicate that hey there is prosperity here after all, but those are exceptions (even when the malls seem like the rule). Look at the minimum, not the maximum, at the poorest, not the richest; we shouldn't look at whether the rich can afford to live in style, we should look at whether most of can afford to live at all. It's not about whether we have any state of the art facilities, but about whether the majority of our population can receive some (any) medical care at all. Many of our basics are much cheaper, food is definitely cheaper, but what guarantees of safety do we do without, in order to get things that cheap?
(But then can we afford to regulate that much? Literally afford as in afford to pay with money. But in the long run, can we afford not to? And then a quiet niggling thought, does all this point to my being too "westernized", too idolizing of ideas that are unsustainable in the context of my own country?)
Parts of it make sense to me, but other parts are still ringing false (because not everyone in a developed country has that same guarantee!), which means I need to examine it a lot more.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 03:32 am (UTC)