Linden Leaf The internal combustion engine rattles into silence and I get out of the white rental Škoda fabia. The drive didn’t clear out all the dead leaves. Yellow-brown, speckled with red-black and grey blotches. I rake them out from the car’s cowl with my hands and they let them fall like a shower of […]
far from homelong awayits words grow strangeits whys go strayit’s ghostsghosts i say A lot of word salad as I try to untangle my thoughts about why Slovenia’s response to the Ukraine crisis and other world-stuff feels so weird from my Ausgänger vantage point. Day 97 The criminal Russian invasion of their neighbouring smaller sovereign […]
To be unreadable is freedom. Of a sort. No Phone Elegy I am overjoyed to have experienced being hooked and tethered to my smartphone. Now, whenever I go for a walk without my phone, I am overwhelmed by how vivid, how three-dimensional, how high-resolution, how multi-sensory reality is. An ant crawling across the moss, a […]
Today is the 30th of September 2021. Since the 3rd of January 2020, South Korea has reported 2,481 deaths as a result of covid-19 and a total 311,289 confirmed cases (source). The test positivity rate is currently 2.3%. The current population of South Korea is estimated at 51,324,162 (source). As of today, 1 in 20,686 […]
Wars Are Bad Wars are really bad. I’m very happy our 30-year old very independent European Union province of Slovenia is independent and sovereign. Still, if Yugoslavia had avoided a war, a few hundred thousand people wouldn’t be dead and a few million lives wouldn’t have been blighted by the decline and fall and the […]
This week the PM of the small and geopolitically almost irrelevant EU province of Slovenia declared his support for the incumbent US president in the upcoming US elections. What kind of diplomatic illiterate does that? After all: 1) The US election isn’t Slovenia’s business. 2) There was no need to pick sides. A small country […]
Nine months into the damned pandemic and Slovenia is fucking up this coronavirus pandemic after getting shit under control in spring. I got out in May, returning home to South Korea. I only keep up with events through the internet and by hearing from my friends and family. I don’t see things on the ground, […]
We did it. All of us. Citizens and new government both. The epidemic in Slovenia looks to be under control. The government’s measures, the citizens’ discipline, and the good fortune that we’re a country of small towns and villages have done the trick. Since May 1st, for two weeks now, we have had less than […]
First, repeating covid-19 advice: maintain social distance, maintain hygiene, follow local healthcare guidelines, protect yourself and protect others, wear a mask or anything that stops you coughing on others, if you are sick avoid infecting others. The leaders of the ‘Free World’ have been pathetically, woefully slow in their response to covid-19. They delayed and […]
Korea is very far from Slovenia. Though airplanes hurtle us through the air at hundreds of kilometres an hour in the aluminum bottle bodies, it still takes very nearly a whole day. Add in the jetlag of an eight hour difference, and it becomes an ordeal. I visit once a year, rarely twice. This year […]