Back to skool
It's been an interesting week. Quite apart from sitting through a 3
day conference on Media censorship in Latin America with the heads of
the most important Human Rights NGOs in each country all interjecting
their personal experiences and possible solutions on the matter (2
prime specimens are pictured above), I have also been successfully
burning the candle at the other end. The world has become a little bit
smaller since we last met with my meeting someone who knows my cousin
(Arabella) and lives 2 doors down from her in Richmond, and my french
friend (Aurelie) bumping into an Algerian guy here who she'd sat next
to when learning Spanish in paris before coming out here. My Spanish
has come on leaps and bounds thanks to the amount of desperate men in
this city. It's fantastically easy meeting people if you're female.
It's not quite so fantastically easy to get rid of them. I am
practically bilingual when we get onto the conversation of "the
existence of platonic relationships" though am not sure I choose the
best context to talk about it last night when I discovered my hosts
had taken me to a stripclub/brothel. I have become used to the 9pm nap
that is an essential for bodily survival in this city, and am
rejoicing about finding the nicest pair of boots you'll ever see. They
are cooler than me. I am keeping a beady eye on them to make sure they
don't get too cocky. I gave in to Western luxury and watched V for
vendetta a box of popcorn bigger than a television and realised that
it had failed to notice that anyone not from England has no idea who
Guyfalkes actually is. I've found myself spending money on whole
crowds of peoples' birthday presents when I've known them for about 10
days and I'm struggling over whether to go back to the drawing board
and do a Human Rights Law degree.
Oxford Uni has a 4 week summer course on Human Rights law for a
whopping 4205 pounds - one way of buying myself a career promotion.
I've descended back into the 's e a r c h t h e i n t e r n e t f o r
j o b s' mode which is tedious and a wee bit scary. I guess buying my
way to the top is one way to shorten the pain and maximise the gain!
Media censorship is fascinating though. Bit of trivia for you - Every
country in Latin America has a problem of 'indirect censorship of the
media' through something called government advertising (GA). GA is all
the articles in the media by politicians or by state owned companies.
Every time a paper publishes any GA, they get financial rewards. The
government/state owned companies decide who to give the GA to and,
here's the wonky part, obviously only give it to those who say nice
things about them. Kind of like little kids behave with their parents'
friends or, I guess, I'm doing when I'm giving birthday presents to
all these randoms (shite). Romania had the same problem and recently
got the EU Commission to change the priority rating for risks to media
freedom so that GA came at the top. Now Romania has implemented far
stricter regulations for any GA transaction worth more than 2000
euros. The funny twist is that, though the government and companies
seem happy to oblige with the new rules, it's the journalists and
media owners who are fighting to return to the old ways when money was
bigger, more frequent, and often in the black. The conference last
week was to assess the current situation, chat about other countries'
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