In Cappadocia, Turkey
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Hi. I'm William HanIn the summer of 2015, I got deported from the United States.
Well, not technically as a legal term of art. But same difference. I had been living in the U.S. for most the previous fifteen years. I had gone to college (Yale) and law school (Columbia) there. And I had practiced law at prestigious New York law firms representing Fortune 500 companies. Then all of sudden I was out, after 15 years. American immigration law - don't get me started on the details - is neither intuitive nor rational. I had been contemplating a trip anyway, and now it seemed that the universe was telling me to go for it. So I did. |
The Book
I had been contemplating a trip because I had been contemplating writing a book.
Twelve centuries before Marco Polo went to Xanadu, a Chinese explorer traveled the same route in reverse in a mission to make contact with the Roman Empire. I embarked on a journey, by land and sea when practicable, in his footsteps from China through Afghanistan and Iran to Italy. This trip formed the basis of my book, "From the Wall to the Water."
The Bazaar
I finished writing the book in a friend's apartment in Slovenia. I looked around for what to do next. And I realized that I simply didn't want to go home to New Zealand. So I kept traveling, back to Asia, and back to Europe again, and so on. And everywhere I went, the world kept impressing upon me how interesting it really is. Indeed, in my book I sought to capture a few themes, among them just how varied and interesting the world is on the one hand, and how on the other hand people from disparate corners of the world share a common history and heritage.
Eventually I saw so much more of the world than I originally had done to research the book that I felt the need to chronicle the infinite variations and fundamental commonality on another platform. Or, for the true nerds among us, the infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
It occurred to me that the world is like a bazaar, with innumerable fascinating odds and ends in it, if we only take the time to look.
And I liked this word, "bazaar." Persian in origin, it is now shared by so many languages from English to Arabic (بازار) to Russian (базар) to Greek (παζάρι) to Indonesian, and many, many more. After all, what is a bazaar if not a place of exchange?
So this is not a travel blog, or not only a travel blog. It is also, perhaps primarily, a cabinet of curiosities of all things that strike me as fascinating, whether encountered on the road or elsewhere. Fascinating enough that I would want to hear about them if I haven't already. Put another way, one traveler's cluttered brain attic.
I am an exile, and the world is my bazaar.
I had been contemplating a trip because I had been contemplating writing a book.
Twelve centuries before Marco Polo went to Xanadu, a Chinese explorer traveled the same route in reverse in a mission to make contact with the Roman Empire. I embarked on a journey, by land and sea when practicable, in his footsteps from China through Afghanistan and Iran to Italy. This trip formed the basis of my book, "From the Wall to the Water."
The Bazaar
I finished writing the book in a friend's apartment in Slovenia. I looked around for what to do next. And I realized that I simply didn't want to go home to New Zealand. So I kept traveling, back to Asia, and back to Europe again, and so on. And everywhere I went, the world kept impressing upon me how interesting it really is. Indeed, in my book I sought to capture a few themes, among them just how varied and interesting the world is on the one hand, and how on the other hand people from disparate corners of the world share a common history and heritage.
Eventually I saw so much more of the world than I originally had done to research the book that I felt the need to chronicle the infinite variations and fundamental commonality on another platform. Or, for the true nerds among us, the infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
It occurred to me that the world is like a bazaar, with innumerable fascinating odds and ends in it, if we only take the time to look.
And I liked this word, "bazaar." Persian in origin, it is now shared by so many languages from English to Arabic (بازار) to Russian (базар) to Greek (παζάρι) to Indonesian, and many, many more. After all, what is a bazaar if not a place of exchange?
So this is not a travel blog, or not only a travel blog. It is also, perhaps primarily, a cabinet of curiosities of all things that strike me as fascinating, whether encountered on the road or elsewhere. Fascinating enough that I would want to hear about them if I haven't already. Put another way, one traveler's cluttered brain attic.
I am an exile, and the world is my bazaar.