Mexico is a country of incredible surprises and stunning contrasts.
If in Mexico City you spend most of your time in traffic jams, then in the mountains you find Indian villages, whose shamans and healers still practice their animistic practices and thousands of people in need flock to them. Welcome to Mexico.
The Pyramids of the Sun, and the Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent are frustrating to archaeologists who simply cannot believe that these majestic buildings are not concealing treasure troves, tombs and messages that will reveal the secrets of the Aztecs down to the tiniest detail.
Then comes the legend of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The jade trade in Myanmar consists of the mining, distribution, and manufacture of jadeite- a variety of jade- in the nation of Myanmar (Burma). The jadeite deposits found in Myanmar's northern regions are the source of the highest quality jadeite in the world, noted by sources in China going as far back as the 10th century. Chinese culture places significant weight on the meaning of jade; as their influence has grown in Myanmar, so has the jade industry and the practice of exporting the precious mineral.
Buddhists express their veneration and devotions by giving golden leaves as a gift to the images of Buddha. The thin leaves that resemble scales are placed on the figurines. The golden layers blanketing over the years make the images unrecognizable.
Nelson Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader and philanthropist who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election.
The Maboneng Precinct is a vibrant new neighbourhood located on the East side of downtown Johannesburg, South Africa.
From Maboneng's early beginnings, public art has played a significant role not only in the aesthetic upgrade of the neighbourhood, but in giving Maboneng a dynamic identity. Multiple artists, both local and international, have breathed new life and made their mark in the area, creating large-scale artworks that continue to enhance the precinct's unique aesthetic.
The history of the Datoga people can be retraced thanks to the traditions passed down from generation to generation through word of mouth. Their ancestors gradually travelled Southwards until they reached the highlands area of Kenya and Tanzania and finally settled there; during this migration the Highland Nilotes split into two groups: the first one settled in Kenya and gave birth to the Kalenjin people; the second settled in Tanzania, and became the ancestors of the Datoga.
Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic sixty-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world.
Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city's dark underbelly, interviews Japan's baseball elite after publishing his first bestselling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation.
A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, "the greatest city in the world," Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.
