City is not only a transit point for travel, but also the beginning of understanding different cultures.
When traveling in different cities, Liu Zichao realized that the world has different “times.” The lagging or rapid development of a place has its own stages and reasons, and cities are more likely to reflect Out of this change.
[Traveler] is a newly opened column on the 9th line, which focuses on original in-depth travel experience. Everyone can be a traveler, we want to know another corner of the world, and there are people living like this.
This article is from WeChat official account:Nine lines (ID: jiuxing_neweekly) author: Zhao Jingyi, title figure from: Liu ultra
This year, travel plans to the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and other places have all been ruined, and Liu Zichao feels like he is unemployed. For the first time in five years, he stayed in Beijing for a long time.
On weekdays, he rarely goes out, and he has long lost interest in exploring Beijing. Every day, he will run 6 kilometers along a fixed route, travel outside, will give up this habit.
“In a strange city, if you run far, you may not be able to come back. I don’t want to run while looking at the phone.” Liu Zichao said.
In recent years, Liu Zichao has traveled in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and other places, and he has gone as far as possible.
△ November 2018, Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent, a street vendor in the Dome Bazaar. Picture/Liu Zichao
In some of the villages and small towns he visited, most travelers rarely set foot in them, but the first to arrive is always the big cities, Bangkok, Manila, Mumbai, Tashkent… They are not just transit stations for travel, but also It is the beginning of understanding different cultures.
“The city can best reflect the different aspects of this country. It has a sense of folding in time and space.” said Liu Zichao.
When traveling in different cities, Liu Zichao noticed that the world has different “times.” The lagging or development of a place has its own stages and reasons, and cities are more likely to reflect such changes.
△Floating Market in Bangkok, Thailand/pixabay
Liu Zichao said that young people should go to different cities more, so that they can not only observe the world better, but also reflect on the current life they are used to.
“You can see that there are different ways of living in different parts of the world. For example, the opportunities you think are sometimes not taken for granted. When you go to a city in Central Asia, you will find that there are few opportunities there. Now you have Opportunities will not necessarily be there in the future. This is related to the country and the stage of development it is in.” He said.
1″At this moment, the world is in sync”
Once, on the eve of Ramadan, Liu Zichao came to a bar on the 52nd floor in Jakarta, overlooking the night of the city. He thought to himself: This may be no different from what you saw on the top floor of the Four Seasons Hotel in Guangzhou.
What he wants to understand more is that different people in this city want to walk into more concrete and more life-like streets.
Every time he goes to a new place, Liu Zichao divides the local society into different aspects to correspond to specific people. And everyone will show part of the face of the city and country he is in.
He said: “For example, if I want to write about New York, I will visit evangelical whites,’leftist’ whites, and also find American blacks, black foreigners, Hispanics, and sexual minorities. New York is all In the most complicated place in the world, you need to find many slices and different people to understand this city.”
△Times Square, New York/pixabay
When visiting a city, Liu Zichao will definitely go to the local slums and places where ethnic minorities live.
For example, in Istanbul, he went to “Little Uzbekistan”; in Southeast Asian cities, he would go to visit “Little India” and “China Town”.
He said that these places are like enclaves: “I have always been obsessed with things outside the mainstream. They will retain things that are different from the mainstream in the city. People there have their own culture, food, and live by themselves. Life.”
△Istanbul/pixabay
Everyone sees different cities. In India, Liu Zichao clearly feels that the educated class thinks that they are close to the mainstream of the West, while ordinary local people seem to be struggling more and face survival problems more often.
“In India, Latin America and other places, good communities are completely different from slums. Many people never set foot in each other’s areas. The same city has two completely different worlds. The same is true in the United States. Communities with frequent crimes are also very different.” Liu Zichao said.
△Children in slums in India/pixabay
On his second trip to Mumbai, he deliberately lived in Bandera, a wealthy district.
All around are newly-built expensive apartment buildings. In the coffee shop, people wear shirts and trousers, and they smell of cologne.
Hearing people around me talking about commercial projects in English, the feeling of ambitiousness reminded Liu Zichao of the coffee shops in certain business districts of Beijing and Shanghai, “The world is in sync at this moment.”
The right bank across the river was Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia. It has an area of 1.7 square kilometers, is located at the node of two main railway roads, has many intricate alleys, and about 1 million people live here.