David Grajal

My brain sometimes is in Eurocentric mode and that makes Ann crazy. When we where traveling in India she  gave me her White Tiger book in a effort to make me understand better the country.

It is a very easy to read book that  explains in a very  simplistic way how the political system works in the poorest democracy (where the lives of the poor people have no value), the new caste system (people with money and big bellies and poor people) and the differences between the darkness (India small villages on the mainland that are still ruled on a feudalism style) and the Light (The big Indian cities)

White Tiger is a captivating read with a lot of brilliant moments!

After the harsh winter, I’m taking advantage of the first sunny, fresh days of the German spring to travel around south Germany. There are only a few cities left that I want to visit in the region. After that I will mark south Germany as done and I will start traveling to northern Germany and the closer countries.

One of the cities I recently visited is Bayreuth. This is a small, romantic city very well known because the important classical musical festival that is held on the city every year. All German cities look the same but each one has different peculiarities. Bayreuth is centered in the person of Wagner and I visited the Wagner house (where he is buried) and the Wagner opera house.

Walking aliens on Bayreuth

I went to Darmstadt to do my TOEFL examination. I’ve been in Darmstadt several times visiting my friend Clerigo and I know the city. After doing the exam, I went to Heildelberg for a Couchsurfing free hugs day event. It was a lot of fun and I met a lot of interesting people.

I used for the first time the VRN ticket to return to Würzburg. This is a very cheap ticket that only allows you to take the slow S-bahn between cities in the country side. This has been my most beautiful train trip in Germany so far. The local train between Heildelberg and Ostenburken follows a river trough a small valley with tiny beautiful towns. This area is not on the travel guides because there is nothing specially really worth of visiting but the entire region is relaxing and plain beautiful.

Dinosaur in Bayreuth

We walked 10 kilometers on top of the Great Wall from the Janshaling entrance till the beginning of the Samatai section. This section is not as turistic as the ones you can find closer to the capital. In fact no other tourists were in sight. This section of the great wall it is mostly renovated but there are still some (dangerous) areas that preserve the original construction.

Great Wall

Visiting the the Janshanling section of the great wall was an amazing experience. I felt peace and silence sorrounded by amazing views. It’s a curious experience to walk over hundreds of years of history. A feeling just comparable to the Machu Picchu visit last year.

Jumping on the Great Wall

This book is the history of a missionary family, who in 1959 move from Georgia to the fictional village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. The book tells how they arrive on the new continent with lots of hopes and ideas, and how all those ideas failed because they were based in misconceptions about Africa and how the nature, the war and the political problems destroy the family and change forever each one of the main characters.

The Poisonwood Bible

It’s the first book I read that is written with a main argumental line on the background but without a clear interlocutor. Each charpter is written in first person, speaking from the mouth of one of the main characters in the book. I felt like entering in the head of different persons every few pages. Most of the chapters are written from the point of view of the teenager daughters and it’s interesting to see how they mature as you progress on the book.

The book is reveling because it tells in first person what happened in Congo in the last years of the Belgian colony and the first years of independence. The author often drops key points about why the Congo was a mess after the colonial period and the effect the foreign interference had on the people.

Overall, the book is a critique of inflexible positions and about situations were there is no possible win scenario. It is also a detailed overview of how the European colonization affected the people on the rural areas and a very detailed description of the post-colonial era following the independence. Social and political changes are always in the background and the characters are not heroes but normal people that looked around and questioned why the things are like they are.

What I learned reading this book? I discovered that I don’t know anything about Africa. I’ve never studied what happened on Africa on the last 100 years during school and sincerely,  I’d never cared about it. The media only tell us how poor and mismanaged they are and to remember us the aid they need each time there is a humanitarian catastrophe. In fact, each time something happened, normally a new war with lots of displaced people I never really understood it because I didn’t know anything about their current situation.

Since reading the book I’ve become a lot more interested on the African puzzle. I’m reading a lot about Africa and I’m getting a huge update about what happened on the continent on the last 100 years. It’s very interesting and fascinating and I recommend everyone to invest a little of time on discover it.

Before Rollback, I had only read one book of Sawyer before, titled ‘The terminal experiment’. I remember that read it was a wonderful experience, although I don’t remember what the book is about!

When I saw this title in the bookstore, I instantly recognize the guy. That’s surprising, remember something, for my short term, selfish memory, homer like, fish-memory it’s a lot! I bought the book right away (plus it was cheap)

I must admit that I had never heard about this book before and I was surprised when I read the back page and I saw that this book was nominated for the Hugo 2008. I remember saying to myself “Waw! I had been too much time disconnected from sci-fi”

Let’s start speaking about the book, reading it couldn’t be on better time, because I just returned from Canada and this book is set in Toronto with lots of references to places I visited a few days before. Furthermore this is one of the the geekest book I have ever read, in the sense that the main characters do the same things we geeks do.

They explore the web opening tabs with firefox, they use google to look for information, they check slashdot, and one of them devote her life to the SETI project. And they are constantly making references to interesting Internet culture.

And what is the book about? It’s a interesting reflexion about two main topics. On one hand it show the importance it will have for humanity to stablish a first contact with alien lifeforms and the difficulty we will have to communicate over vast distances. Generally speaking the author mentions that something like that will suppose a huge impact in the world the first year but the lack of the news (space communication can take generations) will make the people to forget as time goes on.

On the other hand the author foreseen a future in which biotechnology has progressed a lot and people will have the opportunity to ‘reboot’ their body to the same state they had in their 20′ by reengineering their DNA and implanting new organs.

The most interesting thing is that the author don’t explore the topic in the tipical technological centered way, instead he describe his vision of what will happen in a marriage when one of them return to a younger state while the other stay old.

Mixing technology, aliens, cyphers, love and geek culture is a good combo. It’s a pretty easy to read book that I recommend strongly