Let Us Talk About Thor for a Moment

Well, I've been slack with blogging lately. Let me get back into the swing of things with a whole lot of talk about how Thor is awesome. 

Of all the superhero films to be released in the last decade, Thor, to me, stands head and shoulders above the others in terms of its feminist interpretation. It might seem strange that I consider a superhero movie about a Norse god to be one of the most feminist films I have ever seen, but I have sound evidence for this claim: namely, every scene in which Thor appears with a woman (and indeed many scenes with women, but no Thor). Thor is a movie that passes the Bechdel Test within the first minute, and then continues to pass on many more occasions. Even without that, what Thor presents is a way in which a man can be a strong feminist, while still remaining Manly enough to be played by shirtless Chris Hemsworth*.

Public Holidays in China

This coming Wednesday is Tomb Sweeping Day, a public holiday in China, and because of this, I thought it appropriate to write a blog post on why this results in me having uni on today, a Saturday.

How to Make Travelling Affordable

Travelling is expensive. Aside from the large overhead costs of air tickets and hotels, you then have to take into account food costs, ticket prices, and (for some jobs) a reduced salary for the period that you're travelling. While some people might be able to afford travelling without having to think about the money involved, the rest of us have to worry about cost. With this in mind, I've made a short list of things you can do to make travel a bit more affordable for  those of us on a budget.

Why I Chose to Study in China

I began studying Chinese when I was thirteen years old. At the time, I didn’t think it would lead to my studying in China, but it was definitely a factor in my choosing to come here. After studying the language through high school and then university, I found that I still only had a rudimentary grasp of the language. Now, had I put more effort into studying, I definitely could have reached a higher level of proficiency, however a large part of the problem was related (I feel) to two issues: 1) specialist language study in Australian universities is not nearly intensive enough; and 2)without having the proper language environment, fluency is very hard to attain.

When I first came to China, I had plans to improve my Chinese while teaching English, but I abandoned this idea after one year. My reason for this was simple: when teaching English, the classroom environment is an English-language environment. Between this, and the fact that the nature of English teaching means that you’re surrounded by students and colleagues who can all speak English (meaning that there’s less incentive to study the local language), I found that during my first year in China, my Chinese speaking skills improved the most dramatically when I went on holiday and talked to people on the train. I would recommend that anyone who wishes to teach English overseas as a way to expose themselves to a foreign language keep this in mind. I’m not saying that my Chinese didn’t improve during this time, but at the same time, it didn’t improve as quickly as I would have liked.

Tourism in Developing Countries

Personally, I'm not hugely keen on the "tourist Meccas", such as Thailand, Bali, and so on: I've been to Thailand, and while I enjoyed myself, and my trip definitely met my requirement of "being warmer than the 1 degree average temperature with no heating that I had to deal with in China", I found the trip somewhat lacking in general, due to the large number of tourists everywhere. Now, I'm certainly not begrudging the Thai people their tourist industry, and Thailand does certainly have natural beauty and a culture that is worth exploring as a tourist, however when a country is as devoted to tourism as Thailand is, I see two problems.

First of all, when such a large amount of your cultural traditions become intertwined with the tourism industry, it's very easy for the traditions to (at least to an outside observer) appear to be mainly for show. At least in Thailand it's obvious that the people there still embrace much of their traditional culture in their daily lives - I loved seeing people pray at Buddhist shrines, and seeing Elephants walking down the street doing the shopping. Too much commercialisation of a culture, however, serves only to turn those commercialised aspects into a caricature of their former selves. The culture ends up being known and recognised not for its philosophy and literature, but rather for consumer-friendly dances and songs. Now, I was born and raised in a dominant culture, so I can only imagine how those from less dominant cultures must feel, however it seems to me that it would be in many ways demoralising to those from developing, tourist-industry oriented countries to see their remaining culture being seen as a sideshow to those from richer nations who come to visit at their leisure. It's a question that I really should ask some of the locals next time I go to a tourist resort region.