Today in Culture Awareness: exotic! glocal! creative!

A couple of days ago inessita posted an article from Spiegel Online about Buenos Aires. Holly neo-Orientalism! The amount of buzz words in that article made my head spin (glocal?! who uses that word anyway?!). I’ll summarize the article in a few words: exotic city! beautiful and creative people! hipsters! urban bliss! world travelers congregating! Read an article about India from the Victorian era, add a few neologisms and presto, you have the exponent of what from now on, I will refer to as neo-Orientalism (i.e. the other as mysterious, yet open to the ways of the colonialist).

Actually, it almost reads like a promo brochure for an expensive travel agent. Either that or I have lived away from the city for so long (actually I have) that from that article, I no longer recognize it as the place where I actually grew up.


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