A smaller world

Today I found the that the water in the at the beach was coverd with a film of olika or petrol.
It smelled bad and my eyes got irritated.
It must have come from one of the small fishing boats. They still use ignition engines here, they sound nice but are probably not so good for the enviroment.

The waves are big today and the oil will disperse but not go away totally.
Some part of it can be transported to the mainland 200 km away.

Marco Polo, the adventurer, stayed here at con dao on his way to China.
That must have been the first contact with another culture for the inhabitans.

Now it's another time and the world has really been connected.

Yuval Harari, the historican, points out that the long trend is that the world is getting smaller and smaller. There has been many wars that have stopped the trend for a while, and some contries, like North Korea, tries it best to be outside of it. But in a wider perspective the trend is unbroken.

It can be symbolized by the green house gases that influences the whole world even if it's created in one specific place.
Perhaps can the climate change get the countries even closer, as they have to cooperate to solve it.

Maybe my visit here brings the world a bit more connected.

If this long going trend is true, we cannot stop it.

Harari also means that the imperialism has had two sides; the bad one is obvious (for instance the the
prisons here on Con Dao). But the good side is the influences the different cultures have given to eachother - railways to India, good Indian food to Europe. Thank you India, for all your restaurants in Stockholm!

I think mixes of cultures are inspiring.
So let's hope the world won't be homogenous to soon.
Internet is probably the best instrument to get a smaller world, but of course it can be used in the opposite  way too.
I could anyway easily from Sweden book hotels and tickets for domesticerad flight in Vietnam via internet.
It semester that Viet people are not so easy going as Thai people. I guess the culture and the history makes the difference.
Not so many smiles here, they really have to know you first.
They are said to be reactive, they listen first and they don't tell you about their problems if you don't ask them. And perhaps not even then. They don't want too lose their faces.
But all this charachteristics you can find in my homeland too. And here , as in Sweden, it depends which class you are brought up in, and so on.

This is a small place, just about 7000 people live here, and you can't compare it to, for instance, Saigon. As you cannot compare Stockholm to some small village in a remote  part of Sweden.

And if it's true that nothing have a separate and unchangeble essence, then both Sweden and Vietnam can change quite rapidly.

And even we can change rapidly and make a difference.














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