this was an interesting documentary i've seen on my way back to braga. it's about the emerging and..."evil" tourism in bolívia.
i liked it a lot, although it's quite amateur, the way it's done and the subject is very interesting. it is about the tourists who visit the mines in potosi. every travel guidebook would mention it as an "amazing experience" or something like that, and the documentary starts to interview some tourists and kind of portraits them as a bit stupid. maybe they were not lucky finding the people to speak about why they chose to go to the mines or how they felt there. from what i understood, the miners don't have a good idea of the tourists either, and don't understand why they are the attraction. the thing is that these miners work in such horrible conditions that this is almost exotic. they work the same way as they did centuries ago. they interview the town mayor who wants to dress these miners as they did in the colonial times, just for the tourists. and they interview an ex-miner who now works at a company who organizes these tours through the mines. he feels sorry that tourism has been basically destroying the traditional culture. where women used to plant potatoes now they are knitting souvenirs...and he is quite sure that there'll be mines adapted for the tourists, just for them to see. the last scene shows some tourists all happy throwing dinamite and wanting to drink beer after being there. the miners say that the tourists are not good for these jobs because they only enjoy life. i don't know. i could easily be one of those tourists i think. as a tourist, people want to experience as much as possible, but after two long experiences abroad, i tend to value more and more the long stays and to feel more of an intruder in the short ones. my brother travelled through south america recently and he loved it, but this is true, some entire villages live of selling souvenirs. but who's to blame really? northwestern siberia, russia. small khanty girl katerina observes and understands the outer world. she learns the voices of people, animals and other beings. gradually she approaches the unknown and the unknown comes closer - not far from katerina's nomad camp an oil rig appears.
in our second day in budapest we went to the ethnography museum, of course. so, i have this thing for hungarian folclore, because it's so diverse, the dances, the music, the instruments, it's so so rich that it could only have a museum like this: in the museum, if you pay extra circa 0,80€ you can take pictures of everything. so we did. we spent a lot of time in the temporary exhibition. it was so interesting! in the 50's the communist regime wanted to industrialize the country as much as possible. so, with the fear of losing some traditions in the peasant life, two ethnographers made a massive work. for an entire year, they lived with the people from a little village in hungary. every weekend, holiday, normal day was minutiously recorded in pictures, videos ou notebooks. what they ate, how and where they slept, what tools did they use, how did they manipulate them, who was who, etc. it was really motivating and didactic as well to see how this etnography thing is done. it's a lot of hard work, patience. i was very impressed by the amount of work they had everyday, working from 4h to 16h in the fields and then at home to prepare the next day... because we were supposed to meet with miklos and elvira, we didn't have enough time, so we ran across the permanent exhibition, that was very big and interesting. i promised myself i would go there again, just to see it. and then we went to another temporary exhibition called "how we see the finns". it was an hungarian view on how the hungarian people see the finnish people. i didn't know they did competitions and other events together. their language has the same common root, and they sound similar actually. but they cannot understand each other. i'm really getting crazy with this language thing. i want to know how each language works. i just just focus on this one because i still can't manage a conversation, grrr. oh, and of course than hard-core-metal-thing-core-rock had to mark it's presencee!
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i don't understandnerozumiem ti means "i don't understand you" in slovak. a tradition, let's say. after not understanding anything in granada, now i don't understand anything in bratislava. Archives
May 2011
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