Eldrich Rebello's personal website

Tag: cities

  • I hate driving

    I hate driving. I hate the act of driving, I hate the thought of driving, I hate everything around driving a motor vehicle on the road for any length of time.

    What annoys me is other road users, other human beings, also engaged in the act of guiding a few metric tonnes of metal, plastic and rubber along clearly demarcated routes. The behavior of these other humans annoys me, especially in a place like South West Ontario where there is often no viable alternative to driving if you desire to displace yourself and your belongings from one location in spacetime to another. The lack of options is what annoys me. I view commuting as a chore, albeit a necessary one. I don’t mind driving short distances to a shop, a few times a month. If, on the other hand, I am forced to drive for forty minutes on Ontario’s fearsome Highway 401 (shamefully, home to the busiest stretch of highway in North America), I dread it. I dread the other drivers because you never know who is tired, high, drunk, distracted, clueless, confused, incompetent or some combination of these. That uncertainty is what scares me and is why I find myself concentrating fully on the vehicles around me, watching what they are doing and anticipating what they will do. That’s tiring and all I want to do is to read a book, play video games or just stare out the window at the sky or the world whizzing by.

    I recently drove to Ottawa and back and the journey was harrowing. On the way there, I sat in Toronto traffic for two hours. I saw numerous bad drivers and dangerous maneuvers. I do not want my personal insurance profile to change hence I give others a wide berth, often wide enough that a north American lorry can fill the gap. A journey of four and a half hours turned into seven hours. Add to this, the variety and unpredictability of weather around the great lakes and you often have to wonder, who around you is driving on summer tires in the winter and whose tires are almost bald, like Formula 1 tires but out of laziness or poverty, not design.

    A car is some amount of freedom, but it comes at a cost. Insurance, tires, maintenance, petrol, the mental load of driving. That’s not freedom.

    This is why I love public transit. That is freedom. Everyone in an urban area deserves good, reliable transit. You can go where you want, when you want, subject to schedules, of course. It bothers me that we don’t view public transit as an investment, an investment in freedom that deserves to be protected. On the train, tram, bus or metro, you can see other people. You can not see other people. You can do your own thing, you can watch someone else doing theirs. A train between Toronto and Ottawa does exist, but it isn’t cheap. Prices are comparable to a flight. When your family has four members, driving is cheaper on your pocket but driving has others costs that people don’t account for – the pubic money spent maintaining road infrastructure. Ontario spends around 13 Billion Canadian dollars to maintain road infrastructure. That’s roughly $ 900 per person, per year on just roads or about three dollars a day. People don’t really care about that money because we assume that roads will continue to be available, maintained and useable. Why can’t we assume the train will be there? A reliable bus service?

  • Build Review – Liverpool FC Anfield Mini BRXLZ Stadium

    Build Review – Liverpool FC Anfield Mini BRXLZ Stadium

    I am a bandwagon fan of the English football club Liverpool FC. I watch some matches, I recognise a few players and am moderately emotionally invested in the club’s success. I do not live in the city of Liverpool or in the UK and have visited the place only twice. Why I support this club, I cannot say. Maybe it is an innate tribalism and this was one available choice at the time? That’s the likely explanation.

    I recently visited the post-Brexit United Kingdom and made my way to Sport Direct, my favourite shop for cheap sports-themed goods. In the discount bin at the discount store, I found a couple of Premier League building block stadiums, one of which was Anfield – Liverpool’s home stadium.

    This kit is sold in two models – the mini version and the full size one. The mini version has 1,369 pieces and the full-size version has 4,650 pieces. The larger version is more life-like, as you might expect. While in line at Sports Direct, I did not know that the larger version existed. Liverpool’s website sells the larger model for GBP 65, over one hundred Canadian dollarydoos, not a price I was (or am) willing to pay. I don’t love the club that much. I bought the mini set for about GBP 24, a much more palatable price.

    I built the stadium model over approximately fifteen hours. The instructions were adequate but did not mention several pitfalls and alignment problems. The blocks themselves are small, much smaller than Lego blocks, and are fiddly to the point where you sometimes require tweezers. The block colours in the instructions are sometimes unclear. There are two shades of grey and one black and the printed colours are washed out, leading to some confusion. The attention to detail required for block placement is also a challenge, especially in a sloped stadium. The specific problem with this kit is the ascending white segments on the stands. Each is a 1 x 3 block with an overlap of 1 x 2 i.e. the blocks stack vertically, offset by one space to create the required staircase. The problem is that the entire stack is supported only at the bottom meaning that pressure anywhere above can split it. This has a tendency to happen often and there are nine such stacks. Annoying, to say the least.


    Alignment is a problem when assembling the stadium roof, as you can see in my pictures here. It is fiddly and difficult to get right with the blocks in place. Too much pressure and blocks lower down just shoot off or parts of the structure collapse.

    The small size of the blocks also means that some have imperfections from the injection moulding. The kit comes with sufficient spares so this is often not a problem but I did run into a few alignment challenges, again, as you can see on the stadium roof section.


    In all, I enjoyed the assembly process and the assembled product looks great. There is a challenge but nothing too great. At the price I paid, I would recommend but cannot recommend this at full price because of the quality control issues.

    Overall, 7/10 at the reduced price. 4/10 at full price.

    My suggestions:

    1. Look ahead and build stacks where you can. Good examples are the brown/orange stadium pillar sections.

    2. When adding 1×1 blocks to the large, flat sections, look ahead and assemble those sections before attaching to the rest of the structure.

    3. Assemble the white stacks in the stands first. Push each block as far back as it will go on the lower block i.e. aim for maximum length.

    Note the alignment issues with the stadium roof girders.
    View showing the white sections of the stands. These sections are stacked 1×3 blocks with an overlap of 1×2. Note the misaligned (blurred) middle white stack on the left stand.
    View showing the “LFC” text built from blocks. This is a nice touch and is quite stable because the blocks integrate into the adjacent rows. I enjoyed this part of the finished stadium.

  • Past Lives – Layers of complexity

    Past Lives is a 2023 romantic drama film focused on the literal past life of a Korean immigrant child in North America. The central plot line is how this child’s parents decide to leave South Korea for Canada, how the protagonist then moves to the USA for professional success, finds it, finds love and in between, reconnects with her childhood sheetheart, disconnects and then is forced to reconnect and examine their relationship.

    I will not review the film nor post spoilers. I will take another angle – the angle visible to someone who is themself an immigrant, or a double or triple immigrant depending on how you define it. The movie’s protagonist claims to have immigrated twice, first to Canada and then to the USA. I immigrated from India to Bahrain, then to India, then Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and finally Canada.

    These moves taught me some simple truths – home is a state of mind but for some, that is intertwined with a location. Any relationship takes effort – love, friendship, siblings, parents, children. Those are thoughts for another time.

    Your name is an integral part of who you are. Not just your name, but the names your friends use. I have one legal name but several nicknames. Some friends know me as Fish. Others as Elda. Others as simply Eldrich. Each has a different connotation in my mind, a different emotion. It is much the same in the film – Na Young becomes Nora. A new name for a new life. One can pretend that your old name ceased to exist, but it doesn’t.

    Another is language. Yes, I am fluent in English but I do not speak the same English with everyone. In Canada, I stick to standard English with metaphors borrowed from cricket and football. With my friends from Bombay, I still use English but with a sauce of Hindi and a seasoning of Marathi words. With yet others in Bombay I speak English but end every sentence with “men”, similar to the Caribbean “mahn”. The inflection is also entirely different. What I say, what I mean, the phrasing, the cadence, they all change with language. Even more different is my speech in Hindi where I use English vocabulary as a crutch until I figure out what the Hindi word for encyclopedia is. (it is ज्ञानकोश or gyan-kosh; विश्वकोश or vishwa-kosh according to Collins).

    At one point, the character of Nora remarks how marriage is like two trees in the same pot. Their roots intertwine and this leads to conflict. How you deal with that conflict is important.

    Another theme in the film is the desire to outgrow your past, to not be bound by it. I too feel this sometimes. You cannot deny your past, it is forever there but it was a moment in time. A moment that has passed, with people who likely changed. You, too, changed.

    Then there is ethnicity and how it means different things in the new world versus in the old world. I am Indian. I cannot change that. Lots of people in Canada are ethnically Indian however, they are distinct from me in an important way – they are Indian AND Canadian. Both at the same time. I am not and never will be despite official documents saying otherwise. I am Indian Indian. From India, fresh off the plane, with an Indian accent and many Indian sensibilities. In the new world, cultures are often reduced to the occasional festivity, the odd piece of cultural baggage, the archaic if baseless custom, aromas in a kitchen or restaurant. In the old world, an ethnicity is who you are, your identity, your role in the world. It is how you behave, how you are expected to behave. Your ethnicity is your culture, how you carry yourself, the food you eat, the ingredients you buy, where you live. It is a curiously new-world phenomenon that your ethnicity and nationality can be distinct and different. Separate, compartmentalised, changing with the date. On diwali, you are Punjabi. Canadian on Christmas.

    Finally, your past home, your homeland, the motherland. As a first-generation migrant, you never really leave it and it never leaves you. Your relationship to it is different depending on circumstance. Some – like Syrians or Sri Lankans – have a tortured, fractious relationship with the mother country. A civil war, ethnic tensions, decades of dysfunction mean that not much of their lives are left there. A clean break for some, a swift detachment for others. In the other case – such as mine – life in the mother country goes on without you. Those you left behind carry on in peace, living their lives without you and you without them. India is not at war, there is no conflict and a large section of my extended family continue to live there. I visit them occasionally but it is a strained visit. They have changed. India has changed. My recollection of the country, of the city, of my neighbourhood is no longer reality. It was but a moment in time. A past life, maybe?

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  • Japan #3 – Tokyo, the world’s most populated city and the world’s largest metropolitan economy

    Eldrich Rebello
    The Tokyo Skytree
    Kaminarimon gate, one of two gates to the Sensō-ji shrine in Asakusa
    Tokyo is full of oases of calm, such as this.
    Invisible from the air is the greenery seen here. Yes, the built environment dominates but plants abound.

    Tokyo is a massive city. Its scale, even when seen, is difficult to comprehend. The other similarly-sized city with which I am familiar is Bombay and Bombay is quite a bit smaller than Tokyo. The Tokyo region population is around 32% higher, the GDP is over three times higher as is Tokyo’s land area. Tokyo is also infinitely cleaner and more hygienic than Bombay can ever hope to be and this is cultural, something that takes centuries to shift.

    I arrived in Tokyo and stayed in Asakusa, one of the fifty four subdivisions of the city. Asakusa was historically the entertainment district and my hotel was just across the street from the Bandai Namco offices. Asakusa is easy to reach from Haneda airport. The journey is technically on two metro lines but the same train continues on meaning you don’t even have to get off to change lines. The hotel was small – my room was around fourteen square meters in total, including the toilet. The floor is a tatami mat meaning that the unsuspecting gaijin must remove their outdoor footwear and don the indoor equivalent. Nearby is the Senso-ji jinja (temple) – Tokyo’s oldest and also the golden poo, apparently depicting the head on a mug of beer. Legend has it that the poo was supposed to be installed vertically but locals were not too thrilled and NIMBY-ism led to the structure’s eventual sideways installation. Also visible from my hotel were the Sumida river and the Tokyo Skytree, a 634 meter broadcast and observation tower that’s hard to miss. This is all Asakusa and the surrounding area. I’m telling you this to emphasis a simple point – Asakusa isn’t a particularly central area or distinctive in any way – all of Tokyo is like this.

    From a North American perspective, it is like downtown. If you visit downtown Toronto (I prefer the term ‘center’), you will see that things are close together – businesses, offices, restaurants, apartment towers and so on. There are things not visible from street level including rooftop bars, patios and so on. Once you leave downtown – and this transition is very obvious – things change. Roads are wider, there’s more wasteful single family houses and noise levels drop. Everywhere in Tokyo is downtown. In fact, a lot of old world cities are like this. The city center of Bombay is large, bustling and busy. I lived in the suburbs and right outside every suburban train station in Bombay is another downtown. Think about that – in one city, there are multiple centers. This is the bit that confuses many North Americans. I must confess that in Tokyo, even I was taken aback by the sheer scale of the city, by the diversity of experiences, flavours and choices. There are fewer, large supermarkets and more convenience stores for the things you need frequently. Bombay is exactly like this.

    Tokyo is a megacity but one unlike most others. For one, not a lot of old neighbourhood structures exist as they were flattened during the world wars. There are lots of old buildings and shrines but they are spread out. Most buildings you see from street level were built in the recent decades.

    To give you some sense of scale, there is an aerial image of Tokyo and Mount Fuji that is frequently reposted on Reddit – I copied it below. Visible at the bottom right is the Tokyo Skytree. Notable also is the apparent lack of greenery. This is misleading because Tokyo is full of greenery, just not large trees visible from above like other places. Also missing are the numerous oases of quiet and solitude – the temples, shrines and parks, miraculously insulated from the din of city life.

    Tokyo from the air, looking south. Mount Fuji is in the background. This image circulates on Reddit regularly and I am yet to find a source. I will credit the author once I identify them.

    I spent almost six days in Tokyo and I saw very little. I visited Akihabara, several shops, supermarkets and convenience stores. But Tokyo is so large you can spend a lifetime there and never really see all of it.

    Someday, I will return. Until then, memories and photos will suffice.

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