Starting today, travel for Cubans is a whole new ballgame, mainly because they no longer need an exit visa to leave the island nation. That might not sound like much to get excited about but for Cubans, that exit visa was seen as a major obstacle for those who wanted to travel in the past.
In the past, U.S./Cuban relations have made leaving Cuba difficult for its citizens. To get off the island, travelers had to get a letter of invitation from the person they wanted to visit, pay a $200 fee and get permission to be away from work.
“As far as I know, Cuba is the only country with these rules. They shouldn’t exist,” argued Yenier Prado, who had to wait four months to get his exit permit in a BBC report.
Now, Cuban travelers with a valid passport can stay away for two years instead of 11 months and extend that time further, skipping the fees and permission/invitation to travel. Better yet, Cubans who left illegally over eight years ago will be able to return to Cuba, no questions asked.
The idea is that by making it easier to travel, more Cubans will work and study abroad then come back to Cuba with their new skills and money.
As a developing nation, Cubans will still need visas to visit most places around the planet. The United States issues about 20,000 immigrant visas for Cubans each year. Still, this marks a great step in the right direction.
Over the years, many Cubans tried getting to the United States via homemade rafts and were often picked up by cruise ships in the area, only to be eventually returned to Cuba. That’s because of what is referred to as the Wet Foot/Dry Foot rule, which allows those who make it to the shores of the United States to stay while those intercepted are returned, as we see in this recent video:
If you’re looking to visit Beijing, China, in the near future you might want to consider packing a face mask in your suitcase. According to the Associated Press, one of the worst rounds of air pollution is currently engulfing the population there, keeping schoolchildren indoors and sending residents to hospitals.
According to the outlet, pollution peaked over the weekend, when off-the-charts levels hid the tops of city skyscrapers and caused face masks to fly off the shelves of drug stores. The news source reported that government monitoring showed levels of PM2.5 particles reached more than 700 micrograms per cubic meter on Saturday – a number that far outshadows the World Heath Organization’s safety levels of 25. At one point, separate monitoring by the U.S. Embassy reached 886 micrograms.
According to the Denver Post, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality index only goes up to 500, and the agency says anything greater than 300 would trigger a health warning of “emergency conditions.”
The pollution, which is a major problem throughout China, is mostly due to the country’s rapid pace of industrialization, which also includes a reliance on coal power and explosive growth in car ownership, not to mention a general disregard for environmental laws.
Things are starting to look up, though. Thanks to vocal residents and environmental groups, the government is being more transparent about the air pollution than usual. In the past, officials played down the smog, but this time they are holding news conferences and posting messages on the Internet that discuss the pollution.
For more amazing photos of the smoggy capital, click through the gallery below.
The national food of Korea is undoubtedly kimchi. To many, sliced, spicy, fermented cabbage sounds far from a food with mass appeal – and the photo above isn’t exactly inviting. Yet, Koreans eat kimchi with almost every meal, and a typical Korean will eat 60 pounds of it each year. It is in many ways intertwined with everyday Korean life and culture, so much so that when it’s time to take photos, many say “kimchi!” instead of “cheese!”Kimchi is not for everyone, but I absolutely love, love, love it. For being such a simple food, there can be so much variety – different levels of spiciness, crunchiness (dependent on how fresh it is), richness of flavors from other vegetables and seafood used during fermentation, and how well it goes with certain foods. Different regions of the country also have their own variations on the side dish. Additionally, other foods beside cabbage can be kimchi’d, such as radish, scallions and garlic stems (my personal favorite). Like cheese in America, kimchi seems to find its way into almost any food. There’s kimchi fried rice, kimchi soup, kimchi jeon (kind of the Korean version of a pancake), on pizza and in burgers.
This is not some sort of concoction that people buy at a convenience store on their way home from work; two-thirds of all the kimchi consumed in Korea is homemade. The average person devotes a lot of time and energy into making it, with secret recipes handed down from generation to generation. There is even a specific kimchi-making season, called kimjang, in November. Family members get together, typically the women, and make enough kimchi for the entire year to come. You can see the large brown ceramic pots that kimchi ferments in all over the country.
So much of it is made that almost all Korean households will have a specially designed refrigerator to house the stuff. In the perfect collision of Korean culture, Psy (you know, the recent global sensation behind “Gangnam Style”) is even selling kimchi fridges in advertisements using his ridiculous song (you can check that out here).
Interestingly enough, even though kimchi is such a staple of the Korean diet, most of the cabbage sourced for its production comes from China. Which caused a bit of a crisis on the peninsula in 2010 when unfavorable weather where the cabbage is grown near Beijing caused the supply to drastically drop, resulting in prices more than tripling. The government stepped in, reducing tariffs on imported cabbage in hopes to bring prices to a reasonable level.
Kimchi is also insanely healthy, with Health Magazine listing it as one of the world’s healthiest foods. It has tons of vitamins and “healthy bacteria” and it prevents yeast infections and possibly cancer, so there’s no guilt in going on a kimchi binge. The best thing is that at restaurants in Korea, kimchi, along with all other side dishes, are unlimited; so you can eat kimchi as an appetizer, side dish, dessert or even as a main course.
Be sure to check out more about Korean culture from other Kimchi-ite posts here.
I’m sitting on a humble metal chair inside a traditional eight-sided Native American hogan, made with wood planks and packed dirt, trying to work up the courage to ask an intimidating Navajo medicine man if he has the power to heal me. The rich, deep red clay floor looks like the tennis courts at Roland Garros. A wooly sheepskin rug lies before us, a small American flag is hung on the wall, and there’s a loom with a colorful Navajo rug in the corner.
Over by the door, which faces to the east, the direction of the morning light, where Navajos believe that all good things come from, is a wood-burning stove. The smell of burning cedar fills the crisp winter air and the crackling of the fire punctuates the gaps in our conversation. Outside the hogan, the towering buttes and mesas of the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park lend an almost mystical aura to the place.
To my right is Herman Chee, a 60-year-old Navajo medicine man, and his grandson, Larry Holliday, who serves as an interpreter. Chee speaks some English, but is more comfortable speaking Navajo, an oddly melodic tongue with no alphabet that the U.S. military used to confuse Japanese code-breakers in World War II. Holliday is a baby-faced young man who is wearing a straw hat and has a blue handkerchief tied around his neck. He smiles easily when I ask his grandfather questions and radiates warmth.
Chee is a serious-faced man wearing a blue bandana, a long turquoise necklace and elaborate bracelets. His bulky medicine bag is on the floor between us and it looks like the sort of briefcase a pharmaceutical rep would schlep around hospitals and office parks. Each time I ask a question, he closes his eyes, grimaces and turns his head skyward before relaying his answer in Navajo, often using hand gestures to reinforce his points. It isn’t clear if my questions are annoying him or if he’s channeling some sort of spiritual guidance. My instinct as a journalist is to keep the interview impersonal but I have multiple sclerosis (MS) and I can’t leave this hogan without asking him if he’s confident he could heal me.
When I decided to visit Monument Valley, which sits right on the Utah/Arizona border inside the Navajo Reservation, the largest Native American reservation in America, I resolved to find a medicine man. It sounded like a fine idea but finding one proved to be a tribulation. Legitimate Navajo medicine men don’t have websites or Facebook pages and they don’t advertise in the white man’s Yellow Pages.
A contact in Utah’s state tourism office introduced me to Ronnie Biard, the general manager of Monument Valley’s Goulding’s Trading Post and Lodge, who agreed to help me find a medicine man.
“Finding a medicine man isn’t as easy as it used to be,” Biard warned. “It’s kind of a dying art.”
Patients use medicine men to cure them of illnesses but also to restore their spirituality, or purge bad mojo that comes from experiences the Navajo consider taboo, like seeing a dead body. According to a story in USA Today, some insurance carriers in the southwest cover ceremonies performed by medicine men, which can cost thousands of dollars. Medicine men are highly respected in their culture, but a few have abused that power in recent years.
In September, Francis Nez, a medicine man from Gallup, New Mexico, was charged with two counts of sexually assaulting members of his own family, and in 2007, a Navajo medicine man named Alden Chee (no relation to Herman Chee) was convicted of sexually assaulting a female client with a mental disability. Two other medicine men – Herbert Yazzie and David Filfred – were also convicted of rape in the last decade.
Biard asked if I was willing to pay the medicine man for his time and although I’ve never paid anyone for an interview, I was also asking the medicine man for a consultation or a service, so I felt that I could justify it. I told Biard that I wanted to ask the medicine man how they would cure someone with MS and he said that his wife also had MS and had used a Navajo medicine man to try to help improve her condition.
“She went to a sweat lodge and had them perform a ceremony for her several years ago,” he recalled. “I think it made her feel better for a while but I don’t think it really worked.”
“How much do you think they’ll want to meet with me?” I asked.
“I’m just going to throw a number out, and it’s possible they won’t charge at all,” he said. “I’m going to say $200.”
That was more than I could commit to, so I asked Biard to try to find a medicine man who’d be willing to meet me for $50. A few days later, Biard called to tell me that he’d found a medicine man willing to work with my modest budget and the following week, I found myself in the hogan with Holliday and Chee.
Chee tells me through his grandson’s interpretation that he “was picked by the creator, the element, the spiritual people,” to become a medicine man after his wife became very sick about 27 years ago and was treated by another medicine man who healed her.
“After the ceremony was done, she was healthy,” he says. “She recovered and to this day, she’s alive.”
Chee says that medicine men can help relatives but they can’t help themselves or their spouses.
“A lot of the people who come to see me were hit by lightning, which disturbs their spirit,” he says, when asked about his patients. “Or if they see a dead body. We Navajo are very superstitious, so when we go to a funeral, that interferes with our spirit.”
“So how would you treat someone who is struck by lightning?” I ask.
Chee says that he has instruments, tools in his medicine bag to treat them, but when I ask to see them he closes his eyes, grimaces, tightens his jaw, exhales deeply and is silent for several moments. I can hear the crackling of the fire and a bird squawking in the distance as the anticipation builds. I’m like a child hoping to get an ice cream cone.
“In the traditional way I learned from my teachers, these instruments were given to me to use in ceremonies, so this stuff is sacred,” he says. “It wouldn’t be right to bring them out just to show them to people.”
Chee tells me he was in the Air Force many years ago and has worked as a bus driver and a carpenter but is now simply a medicine man. I ask him if he refers very sick patients to medical doctors and he shakes his head dismissively.
“Most of the time, I don’t,” he says. “I can remove and fight witchcraft and illness. I’m a crystal gazer and a hand trembler. I help a lot of patients, even people with cancer. I’m so positive about my ceremonies, that I don’t usually recommend doctors.”
He says that his clients have to make a reservation to see him and that they pay him for his services, or if they don’t have money, they offer him turquoise, buckskins, sheep, jewelry, horses or even cows.
“What do you do if you get really sick?” I ask. “Do you visit another medicine man or go to a hospital?”
“I go to a doctor only if I have a severe illness or broken bones,” he says, as Larry gets up to add some logs to the fire. “But if I just have a fever or small illness, I go to another medicine man.”
Larry tells me that his grandfather wants to know more about me and I see this as the opening I’ve been waiting for. I explain that I have MS and would like to know if he’s treated people with this disease and if so, how and what was the outcome.
“There is a ceremony that can be done for this,” he says. “But you have to make a reservation.”
I suppose it makes sense – you don’t walk into a medical doctor’s office and expect to be treated on the spot – but the response caught me off guard and I wondered if they were expecting me to ask for a price quote. Perhaps they sized me up as a typical ignoramus who rolls into town and expects to have some natives do a tribal dance on the spot and I didn’t want to be that guy.
“How would you treat me?” I ask.
“After you make your reservation, I will go to the Sacred Mountain and ask the elements, all the different gods how to treat you. (The four sacred mountains mark the traditional boundaries of the Navajo Nation.) And I will get all those herbs and plants, bring them home and I will give you the medicine bundle. And I will build a fire and talk to the different gods to invite them to the hogan. I will look in my crystal and X-ray you with my crystal, from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head and that’s where these elements and different gods will talk to me and tell me how to treat you.”
“But does it work?” I ask.
Both men look at me as if to say, “Well of course it works, you damn fool. If it didn’t, why would we do it?”
“After the ceremony, you have four days where you don’t shower,” he says, after a long pause. “You’ll be covered in herbs and medicines and given some prayers and songs. They will put you back together in one piece. All the evil, the taboo will be left behind. It’s helped a lot of people. Five days later, patients come back and say ‘I feel much better.'”
I’m a skeptic by nature and I’m really not the sit in a circle and bang a tribal drum with people wearing tie-dye and taking peyote type of guy. I believe in science and drugs, not spiritualism and native healing. But after seven years of daily injections of a medication that would cost $50,000 per year if, God forbid, I was uninsured, I want to believe that Herman Chee, sitting next to me here in this hogan can cure me. Fuck injectable medications, I’m in the Navajo Nation now.
“To respect our ceremonies and traditions, you have to witness them,” Chee says, when I ask if white men are usually skeptical of his powers.
I have a deep respect for the Navajos and their traditions but I’m from another world, another culture. Still, half the battle in fighting illness is mental. If you believe you’re getting better, you can actually feel better.
But I resist the temptation to make a reservation for a ceremony because I don’t want to leave this hogan as a skeptic buying a ceremony just to test if it works, because under those circumstances, the experiment is doomed to fail. Herman tells me that he makes people feel better and I believe him.
I want to ask him about the three Navajo medicine men who were charged (two have been convicted so far) with sexual abuse crimes, but decide to lighten the mood first by asking if he knows of any cures for hangovers. As Larry translates the question, a huge smile breaks out across Chee’s distinctively featured face for the first time and both men begin to laugh hysterically before Chee responds.
“Give them another beer,” he jokes.
Medicine men don’t cure hangovers but they can help treat alcoholism, he says. I ask about the criminal medicine men and Chee says he doesn’t know them and knows nothing about their cases. He estimates that there are about 200 Navajo medicine men on a reservation the size of West Virginia with a population of nearly 300,000. But he suggests that they probably weren’t real medicine men to begin with and says that those who abuse their craft will have to pay for their crimes.
We step out of the hogan and the luminous glow of the towering, ageless buttes and mesas off on the horizon lend our meeting a fitting denouement. In these parts, where the landscape hasn’t changed much in centuries, it feels normal to be meeting with a medicine man. But Holliday and Biard mentioned that medicine men were becoming harder to find and I want to know if there will still be medicine men in the Navajo Nation 20, 50 or 100 years from now.
“Not too many young people are studying to be medicine men now,” Chee concedes. “But medicine men are always going to be here. Our prayers are always going to be here. Our language will always be here. That’s our survival. One hundred years from now, there will still be medicine men here.”
We all know that airplanes double as mobile petri dishes. But with a particularly nasty flu epidemic upon us, the Gadling team thought we’d mother you by reminding you to get your flu shot, already. That, and bring along these proven deterrents to the flu and other airborne nastiness. Look at it this way: it can’t hurt.
1. Airborne or Emergen-C: If nothing else, these will shorten the duration and symptoms of an oncoming bout of cold or flu, if taken regularly at onset of symptoms. You can also talk to your travel doctor or primary care provider about prophylactic immune supplements (be wary of homeopathic or naturopathic preparations, which may not be FDA-approved, or could interact with prescription drugs you may be taking. Always talk to your pharmacist, first.).
2. Travel pillow: Need another reason? Because sharing leftover drool from an airline pillow is gross. While you’re at it, pack a lightweight blanket or shawl; if you are coming down with something, it will ward off the chills. And god knows your airline won’t supply you with one.
3. Ibuprofen: Being crammed into a seat is uncomfortable enough without adding fever aches to the mix.
3. Packet of antibacterial wipes: This time of year, it’s a good idea to wipe down airline bathroom faucets, your tray table, and possibly that runny-nosed, coughing toddler seated next to you.
4. Hand Sanitizer: Travelers should always be in the habit of carrying this, in lieu of soap and water. Use it after touching ATM’s, airline check-in screens, elevator buttons and money.