The star of this YouTube video, Matt Harding, is this lucky guy who is sponsored to travel around the world dancing (albeit quite horribly) in many different locations. He shot to fame in his first YouTube 2006 video (Link to video collection). Seeing his first video made the back of my hairs stand, seeing his latest video did too, making u feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Maybe our world isn’t that different after all and utopia might be on the horizon. Singapore had the briefest of scenes in that video but hey, at least he did visit and you could see people dancing around him.
Which actually, is in stark contrast to his dancing scene in Kuwait, where he dances in front of the iconic water towers with a lone stray dog jumping beside him. I saw his initial video long ago on YouTube, and when his new video came out, watched it and loved it but didn’t think of blogging about it. After all, I tend to see lots of interesting stuff online and I’d be pretty busy if i blogged abt each one. Furthermore, whats interesting to me might not be to others. But i chanced across a post about him in a Kuwaiti blog and saw a different side to Matt. (I take a particular interest in Kuwait cos I’ll be going over indefinitely to work in a couple of months time). Matt writes about his travel experiences on his blog and his Kuwait experience is here.
Read it, its actually a very interesting writeup on Kuwait. I cant vouch for its accuracy as I’ve only been there 3 days, but I can relate to his descriptions. What I can’t relate to though, is his insensitivity to other cultures and religions. I expected something more tolerant from a guy who’s been all around the world. I’ve traveled to quite a few places and took some modules which emphasizes on cross cultural understanding, but even without it, being respectful and understanding to a foreign culture should come across as second nature. The somewhat polarized comments on Matt’s blog are worthy of a read too. To be fair, I’ve read a couple of other entries and they’re all written in a very entertaining and light hearted manner, if somewhat condescending to poorer countries. Being a travel buff, I still plan to go through most, if not all of them in time to come.
To quote the Kuwaiti blog, “Watching the video you get a feeling of world unity and peace but then when you find out the kind of person Matt really is it suddenly makes sense why the world is at war.”
P.S. Its been a pretty eventful past few weeks (for once I’m not working yaay!), and I’ll try to post pics/updates soon!








































