Halfway down the Danube

Random historical quote of the month

"I came to Bucharest two years ago with a legion of conquering heroes. I leave with a troupe of gigolos and racketeers!"

-- German Field Marshal August von Mackensen, on the moral effects of the German occupation of Bucharest

Chilly? Eat chili

Chili is one of those crazy American foods that have a thousand different recipes, all of which are right (except for the ones that aren't).

The first chili was likely Native American: game stewed with hot peppers. In a Balkan context, a venison or boar paprikash wouldn't be too far off. The great civilizations of Mexico gave chili the tomato, the Spanish brought cattle to the American plains for the beef, the Texans turned chili into a cult, and the Depression spread it across the United States. With that in mind, here's a recipe for a basic chili that shouldn't be too alien to Balkan tastes:

Cut 500 g of good stew beef into 1 cm cubes. Brown the meat. Add 250 g of tomato sauce, enough beef broth to cover the meat, salt, pepper, and as much paprika as you dare. Let it simmer as the meat becomes tender, and let the broth reduce. If you want, you can add cooked kidney beans, up to 500 g, and let it simmer fifteen minutes more.

You can serve this by itself, with sour cream or grated cheese or yogurt, with a pilaf or over egg noodles. But it goes really well with the taste of maize, and I usually make corn bread to go with it.

Americans don't use paprika all that much in their chili. It's a little too mild. We use chili powder, which is a little like an Indian masala spice mixture, except we usually don't grind our own, but get it pre-packaged. Most commercial mixtures are mainly ground dried chile peppers, cumin, Mexican oregano, and garlic powder, in roughly that order. It's rather an exotic flavor combination, especially for American comfort food cooking. What can I say. If you use hot paprika and Italian oregano in place of the ground chile peppers and the Mexican oregano, you won't be too far off.

There are many, many, many ways one can tweak chili recipes. There is the traditional 'beans/no beans' divide. There is the more recent vegetarian/meat chili split; since I am firmly on the carnivore side of the debate, I have to recuse myself from that discussion. Mushrooms will add richness of flavor, and a little bittersweet chocolate will add depth, but take away some heat.

Since I am a pepperhead, I might throw in some chipotle -- smoked jalapeno -- peppers to heat my chili up, or sometimes a few habanero peppers. Most people find habaneros too hot. I use habanero sauce like ketchup. But I grew up with one of the mildest chilis out there, Green Bay Chili. This recipe is my mom's, so it's authentic, although I have converted everything to metric units.

Brown 500 g of ground beef in a skillet. Drain the fat and put the ground beef in a soup kettle. Add two to three liters of tomato juice, enough to cook 500 g of spaghetti. Bring to a boil, and add those 500 g of spaghetti. When the spaghetti is cooked, it's done. Salt and pepper to taste. Ladle into bowls; some people like the meat, some people like the noodles. Serve with slices of Colby cheese, and make sure the can of chili powder is on the table.

The amount of tomato juice might seem extravagant, but we canned our own from the garden. (The secret ingredient is dill.) You can use other sorts of yellow cheese -- Cheddar works just fine -- but Colby is mellow and creamy and melts perfectly over the hot spaghetti. Lately my dad has been adding chopped onions to the broth right before serving. He's such a wild man.

Snow falling on Bucharest

We haven't had much snow this winter - so far. Friday night, it started snowing seriously and it hasn't stopped since. Snow in Bucharest is almost always yucky - wet slush on the streets, turning brownish-black, mixed with dog poop...

But after two days of snowing, the snow is up to half a meter at some points and covers everything. No snow ploughs ever venture into our little side street and few cars have dared the elements, so the snow on the street is untouched. Since we were too cheap to buy those expensive winter tires, it also means that we're stuck for the time being. Shopping will be by foot at the expensive 24-hour supermarket. Good thing we live in a neighborhood that has shopping and restaurants in easy walking distance. (How easy that walking will be with toddlers who will be up to their hips in snow, we shall see.)

Mind you, I'm not complaining. The kids love it. It looks beautiful. It's a nice cozy feeling of "nature prevails" without actually being in any danger.

Spring sometime next week would be nice, though. (Yeah, I'm a wuss. But you knew that, right?)

A picture of our winter street and one of our landlord digging out his car are under the fold.

Snow, Flower, Car

Clowns and Spiderman

Alan really doesn't like clowns. In fact, he's a little bit scared of them. Quiet a bit.

On the other hand, he loves Spiderman. He's got a little Spiderman action figure he plays with even though it has long lost its little head. He has the Spiderman pajamas which he wears every single night (yes, they do get washed sometimes). When we were in New York last summer, and he saw this giant movie poster that was easily as big as a house, he snuggled up to his Dad and sighed happily "I love Spiderman, Daddy". You get the idea.

On Saturday, we were on the birthday party of Alan's special friend Ilinca. There was a clown. A clown who did face painting. She painted Spiderman masks on little boys' faces.

It took Alan three hours to nerve himself up to it. He watched from a safe distance, then a little closer. He confessed his wish to me but wouldn't go near the clown. Then he edged a little closer. And a bit closer. It was a fierce battle of desire against fear.

Desire won...

... and we had a very happy, very proud little boy.

I believe in the predictions of coffee

Before there was Ceca or Severina on the Yugoslav pop music scene, there was... this.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken (3)

Raising kids abroad.

Personally, I think that we're doing our kids a great service by raising them abroad. Huh, you say. Of course you would think that, having been raised abroad yourself.[1] Yeah, I say, you're right. However, others agree with me.

In general, third culture kids (TCK)[2] tend to be more flexible and tolerant than their peers and often exhibit strong observation skills. Having lived in foreign cultures, they have a multi-dimensional world view and feel a stronger connection to other people on this planet. Often, this kind of tolerance and openness comes along with a greater spiritual perspective, as well as a higher maturity level. Finally, add in the fact that most expat kids are raised bi- or multilingually, which makes for great linguistic abilities for the rest of their lives.

It does sound a little like they're only lacking the ability to fly, then they'd be superheroes.

Alas, not all is so rosy in the lives of expat kids.

Rootlessness, restlessness, trouble with intimacy, loneliness, isolation, and unresolved grief are only some of the problems that TCK's are battling with. Subsequently, their parents are dealing with vast amounts of guilt about inflicting all those feelings on their precious children.

Where do you come from? (That one has multiple answers.)

When are we leaving this posting, where will we be the next? (That one is difficult to answer. Our last move was announced one week ahead.)

You're my best friend now, but soon I'll be gone. (...)

I hate this (new) place and I want to go back (to the last place). (...)

It's not easy to be raised an expat kid. I remember all those feelings well -- I hated Istanbul and everybody there when we moved to Turkey. I hated Germany and everything about it when we moved back. For a year or more, I absolutely refused to mingle with my classmates in Germany. Still today, I don't know quite what to answer when people ask me where I'm from. And that was just one country that I lived in, other than my passport country (the other countries came later, in adulthood).

My boys will have a much harder time of it. Not only do they have the additional burden of a bi-cultural home with parents coming from two different continents. They also have not spend much time in the country of their birth (Germany) and even less time in the other country they hold passports of (US). (Let's just skip entirely over the Irish passports and the fact that they've never even been anywhere close to Ireland.)

When Alan was six months old, he made his first move from Germany to Serbia. At this point, he'd already accumulated frequent flyer miles in the tens of thousands[3], and had visited no less than seven countries. At the ripe age of sixteen months, he was moved from Serbia to Romania. He had just started to babble his first words and the shock of relocation (and the well-timed arrival of his brother) rendered him speechless for about half a year. He caught up, though, and another year later he's fluent (whatever counts for fluent at the age of two) in three languages, one of which he'll forget entirely before the age of five.

He's had two nannies, both of which he loved dearly and which he won't remember at all as an adult. His current classmates come from Israel, Turkey, Sweden, US, Belgium, and Romania, but he will very likely graduate from a High School where the most exotic specimen might be the guy from Tennesee. Or he himself.

But I hope that the advantages will outweigh all of those drawbacks. I turned out okay (if I may say so), and I think that some strategies and some applied lessons from my childhood will help raising healthy kids.

We are moving with plenty of stuff -- which is annoying and cloying sometimes but it gives the children a sense of belonging. Sort of, this is my bed, has been my bed since I was born, so I feel safe to sleep even if the bed is in a strange room. I have no idea whether that actually works.

We also enforce a strict daily routine that doesn't change wherever we are. We have a bedtime ritual that is set in stone. The boys are sleeping sacks at night and each has a favorite plush toy that travels with them, always. We have a sit-down dinner every single day. We go outside and to the park every single day, never mind it's freezing cold/raining bullfrogs/blistering hot. We cook ourselves, so the food is familiar too.

[We've only broken once with this routine and that was recently when we spent Christmas in Germany. It didn't pay off. The kids were squirly and uncontrollable without regular bedtimes and daily outings. It was stressful for us, them, and the grandparents. Never again, we swore.]

It's definitely a challenge to move kids around. I'm already dreading to tear Alan away from his friends at school and at the park. I'm not even thinking about the nanny. That will be awful.

However, they are healthy normal kids (thus, only moderately screwed up). They will suffer, as will we, and then life will go on. They will explore new surroundings, they will find new friends, and I think they will be fine wherever we go next. After a while, at least.

This is not the case for all parents. One of the definite downsides of expat living and frequent moves is that there is no such thing as a continuous care for kids with special needs. Speech therapy? Physical therapy? Hard to provide when you change locations every 18 months. If one of the boys needed any kind of long-term therpy, I think we'd break this venture off and return to either the US or Germany permanently. In fact, I know only one family who has a special needs child, and that child has a very mild case of Trisomy 21. I don't know of any blind, deaf, autistic or other children in this expat community.

One contributing factor to this might be that expat schools don't usually provide for special needs kids. They are often stretched to the limits anyhow, and depend on lots of volunteer work by the parents. They can ill afford specialized teachers and expensive equipment for some rare cases. I'm not sure whether this is a vicious circle - no special provisions, no special needs kids, no special provisions... or whether parents with special needs kids just always choose to do the sensible thing and stay put.

Guilt is definitely a feeling all expat parents know well. But we're also very proud of our children, of the way they travel well and speak multiple languages, adapt to new situations and people. We all hope that one day, our kids will look back and think - it's great I got to see all those things and meet all those people. It's made me who I am.

I certainly am grateful to my parents that they opened our eyes for the world. The downside is, of course, that my brothers and I turned out to be vagabonds in our own right. There was a time when we all lived in different countries -- Serbia, USA, and Turkey. It's not easy for my parents to have children and grandchildren so inaccessible but then, it makes for nice vacation destinations.

[1] My family moved to Istanbul/Turkey when I was nine.
[2] The term TCK was first used 40 years ago by Ruth Hill Useem in her research on North American children living in India. TCK refers to someone who has spent a significant period of time in one or more
culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture. (Kay Branaman Eakin, According to my passport, I'm going home, page 18)
[3] But since he was a baby without a seat, he didn't get to cash all those miles in. More's the pity.

Anal doesn't begin to describe it

Carlos pointed me to this. If you have kids, and if they are still in diapers, or very recently out of diapers, you may enjoy this blog. Be warned, you'll snort your coffee through your nose. It's hilarious and scary at the same time. Who would spend so much time on this? I especially love the metrics. Oh, boy.

Deep roots are not reached by the frost (2)

Home visits. Almost every expat looks forward to home visits, and almost every expat fears them, even more so when they have kids. Travelling with jetlagged children and living out of suitcases for weeks do not generally rate high anybody's list of favorite things to do. Home visits add an extra twist, though.

I asked my expat friends what they hate most about home visits. Everyone of them answered that they found most annoying how all the relatives and friends claim a piece of you. Since you're the one "on vacation", everyone expects you to visit them, spend time with them, and pay attention to them. You end up with an agenda that would make the busiest executive faint.

And who has all their relatives conveniently in one place? Ours are scattered among two continents, and in the US in five or so states. So we're spending a lot of time in transit, on trains going to New York and Connecticut, or on planes going to Florida. Hauling your tired, jet-lagged, cranky kids from a train onto a platform where you're waiting until a redcap shows up to help you with your mountain of luggage drains a lot of energy. I'm snapping at my kids and husband a lot more during these trips -- which adds an additional layer of guilt, and more stress.

Since flying across time zones to visit your passport country takes a lot of ressources (energy, money, and vacation days), and all of those are precious, you are tempted to limit your spending. So you end up cramping visits to all possible relatives and friends into 10 days or less in order to save vacation days, plus sleeping over at relatives' and friends' houses to save money. Bad idea.

You don't know how noisy your jetlagged kid is at two o'clock in the morning until you try to keep him quiet in order not to raise the rest of the house. We've done all sorts of desperate things, like driving around for hours in the night, waiting for some damn breakfast place to open, or pushing strollers in below freezing temperatures while mumbling the age-old mantra "just sleep, damn it, just sleep!"

You are trying to be a good guest while maintaining your own plans and adjusting to the third or fourth set of house rules and daily routines on this particular trip.

Did you know that no two people on this planet load their dishwasher the same way? It's true, believe me. Some rinse, some don't. Some put pots and pans in, some don't. Some run two cycles, one for delicates and one for sturdy stuff, some pack everything together. Some put chopping knives into the machine, some don't. Chopping boards - yes or no? We've scorched baby bottles and nipples because we didn't know the cycle was too hot for plastics.

People will have the strangest hang-ups. Some don't like you to use their phone for long-distance calls, even if you offer to pay the bill when it arrives. Some are really peculiar about receiving packages for you at their homes. A friend of mine ended up shlepping her laundry to the laundromat every second day because her mother-in-law objected to her mass of laundry. With two kids and a limited amount of clothes, laundry is a daily essential. We don't ever stay at places where we can't wash our clothes.

Then there are the meal rules. Some regard a sit-down lunch as essential, others don't talk to you anymore when you don't appear in time for the five o'clock dinner. Some will leave you leftovers, some won't include you in the meals at all. Some people have coffee, some don't. Some have only soy milk, so you better go shopping for your own supplies. I hate soy ice cream, I really do. When I'm in the States, give me Ben & Jerry's, and lots of it.

This all costs a lot of energy. You want to please everyone but in the end, you're just exhausted. You feel stressed, tired, worn out. Then you have to explain why you were late for dinner and didn't call ahead.

My friend A. has solved this problem perfectly. She and her husband bought a house in a fancy vacation resort. This is where they spend their home visits. Every family member and friend is invited to come and visit them, and since it's on the sea shore and a nice place, everybody loves to come. No hassle with all the travelling, you're in your own place with your own rules, and you can enjoy your guests and your visit. I asked Doug whether we could do the same. He said I would need to win the lottery first. I'm working on it. (In the meantime I prefer to stay at my friend Natalie's house who is the most uncomplicated host I've ever encountered.)

Anyway. At the end of the trip comes another challenge: you have to pack up your shopping and all the presents in a deceiving way. Those carry-ons? Nothing essential in there, just all the heavy books -- this makes the suitcases a little lighter. A little. The cheerios are in sturdy boxes, the maple syrup in plastic canisters, the electronics hidden away in ingenious ways. You make really begging eyes at the check-in counter and place your sweetly smiling toddler on the counter. You hope that the booster seat will be allowed as additional luggage but not count towards your six pieces. And that she'll block the seat next to you for your under-two-year-old without a seat. And then, on the long flight back to your country of residence, after weeks of stress and little sleep, your kids decide to get sick. right. now.

So why do we do these home visits, you may ask yourself?

Well, because we miss our home countries. Because we miss our relatives and friends (and since they don't come to visit, we have to go). Because some of our relatives are getting older and older, and more frail, and we want them to see the kids as much as possible. Because we want to buy cheerios and eat good Thai food and hang out in book shops for hours. Because we want to walk our feet hot and stinky in Dupont Circle and look at our old place on New Hampshire Avenue, reminiscing about good old times. (Because I have to for green card reasons.) Because it's where our roots are. We will always return.

But, when we finally get out of that taxi from the airport, and open up our front door, when we step into our house and dump the luggage, when the kids immediately recover and pull out all their toys, we breathe a deep sigh of relief. We look at each other, and we realize - we're finally back home.

And we desperately need a vacation.

Not all those who wander are lost (1)

Yesterday, my "Mommy group" had a good-bye dinner for one of our friends -- she is moving to South Africa with her family next week. We had excellent Indian food, quietly brushed some tears away, and gossiped about our kids. We all promised to visit M. in Johannesburg one day -- and I think we all were aware that it was unlikely anyone of us would actually live up to that promise, as honestly meant as it was. Expats say good-bye all the time, and we know that friendships often taper off with a move, despite best intentions.

Being an expat is mostly a chosen way of life. The people who live abroad are as diverse as any random group of people -- they are missionaries, high ranking CEO's, diplomats, impoverished language teachers, engineers, aid workers, military personnel. Some have a vision, some don't. Most are curious about the country they live in but many live in bubbles, barely touching the outside world. A large percentage is moving from country to country, while others just venture outside their homeland for a year or two as some sort of family sabbatical.

However, expats also have a lot in common. One of the elements less talked about is the loneliness.

It's you and your family alone in a way that not even those who coined the term "nuclear family" could envision. Consider for a moment a typical nuclear family: wife, husband, child. Consider now the context within which that family system functions when it has lived in one place for an extended period of time. Ongoing relationships have been cultivated: friends, colleagues, neighbours, doctors, teachers, religious leaders, shopkeepers... These extended relationships surround and enfold the nuclear family. In most societies, and often even in the United States, you can add relatives to that web of relationship: parents and grandparents, siblings, nephews and nieces, aunts, uncles and cousins live nearby. The geographically-stable nuclear family is part of a larger relationship system that nurtures and supports the family as a whole and is available to help its individual members.

Consider now a typical internationally-mobile family: wife, husband, child. No relatives nearby. No web of ongoing relationships -- except those renewed on home-leave, those cultivated at a distance via annual holiday greetings, or, for the multi-mover, those expatriate friends from prior postings encountered again in the new location. The larger support system available to the internationally-mobile family consists of the wage-earner's employing organization, the school(s) the children attend, and the expatriate community itself. This support system, however, has some fundamental limitations.

[..]

Thus, given these realities, the internationally-mobile family is the ultimate of nuclear families. Members must rely foremost on one another: spouse on spouse, sibling on sibling, child on parent and even parent on child. In the final analysis, an internationally-mobile family must sink or swim on its own.
www.worldweave.com

Visitors often complain about the expat community. It's so tight, they say. Why don't you interact more with the locals? Why do you keep to yourselves so much?

Well, it's because other expats understand. They understand the stress of home visits. They understand that if you don't keep in touch with relatives and friends, connections will break. They understand the guilt about ripping the kids out of school, planting them into yet a new country, a new language, a new culture. They understand the importance of maple syrup and cheerios. They understand $600 phone bills. They understand the frustration of seeing eyes glazing over when you start a story with "when we...".

Let me explain this a little.

Keeping in touch. It's a rule of life -- the one who goes away has to keep in touch. The simple truth is, life goes on without you. You're just one person missing from a big social net, that's barely noticeable. So you, as the expat, are the one to make those phone calls home -- that's why we have $600 phone bills. Asking relatives and friends why they don't call us sometimes, we often get the answer it's so expensive, we didn't have a calling card, we didn't even know they have phones in Romania (I really did hear that once). Hm. Most of them don't even read our blog, although it has started out as a source of information for the family (the focus has shifted since, partly also because the family isn't reading it anyway).

In our life, there are only three exceptions to this general rule -- and those are my family, my mother-in-law, and our cybernet friends. My family lived as expats themselves (strictly speaking of parents and brothers here), so they know the feeling and especially my Mom is very good about keeping in touch -- we talk once a week, at least. My family also regularly visits our blog to see what's up. My mother-in-law writes emails on a regular basis. The cybernet friends, who often became friends in Real Life (TM), are an exception because our friendships started off with emails and chats, so it's not awkward to continue staying in touch that way. They also read our blog and even comment (my family usually comments to me on the phone). I really appreciate this interest in our lives. It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

However frustrating it is to be the ones doing the relationship maintenance, we are keeping it up. Sometimes, we get annoyed. After years of sending out 80+ Christmas cards, and getting five or six back, we finally decided to send fewer cards in 2004. Invariably, we received three "firsts", felt guilty about it, and will probably resume to send out mass mailings again this year. We're calling relatives and friends for their birthdays, we send presents and cards, we call when we haven't heard from someone in a while. $600 mean a lot of time on the phone, even with international rates.

But even so, often friendships don't survive an international move. They just... cease to exist. Or they take on a different dynamic. I have a friend who I talk to once or twice a year, but then we talk for hours. We still are friends and I value those rare talks. It's very different, though, from our daily phone calls when we still lived in the same city -- and saw each other almost daily.

(I also have to add that although we try, we are by no means perfect at this relationship upkeeping. We do forget to answer emails, we do drift out of touch with people not out of malice but out of sheer laziness. But overall, the points made above do apply.)

[Tomorrow: the stress of home visits, eyes glazing over, and how to get excess luggage on board without excess fees.]

Still more news from Serbia

Serbia's coalition government is in trouble again.

You can find the details over at Professor Eric Gordy's East Ethnia blog (which I recommend, BTW). Short version: the US has suspended some foreign aid to Serbia, because the Kostunica government still is not cooperating with the Hague Tribunal. This has caused two parties in the coalition (G17, and Vuk Draskovic's two-headed SPO) to threaten to bolt the government. Which would probably bring the government down and trigger new elections.

(Will it? I'm skeptical. See my comment over at Prof. Gordy's blog. Once again, it may all come down to Vuk...)

Just a Sunday in the park

We took the boys to Herestrau today.

Romanian readers will know that Herestrau is the huge park nin the north of Bucharest. It goes on for kilometers, with ponds, playgrounds, football fields, restaurants... you name it. Parts of it are very run down, still recovering from Communism (and post-Communism); parts of it are lovely. The kids see no difference, and love it all.

Things to do in Herestrau, if you're not quite three years old:

1) Ride the new bicycle that Oma (grandmother) got you for Christmas. Alan rides that thing very fast, and he's getting very adept at high speed turns.

It was gorgeous, unseasonable weather: clear, sunny, a few degrees above freezing. So the park was full of Bucharesters soaking up sun while they can. Alan simply plunged into the crowd, pedaling madly. Not a problem! My first couple of outings with him, I would yell and lunge and grab when I saw him heading for someone's legs. Now I don't, because I know he'll swerve in time.

Well, unless he's distracted.

2) Jump on the trampolines. Oh, does he love those trampolines. There is an open chamber with four big ones together. It costs 20,000 or about 70 cents for 5 minutes (which I suspect is a special "rich foreigners" rate, but so what?)

I go in there with him, but he won't let me jump on the same trampoline. Alan will stay just as long as he can, so when our time is up, I make a sudden predatory jump onto his trampoline and grab him. If I do it right, I can bounce him up and snatch him out of the air.

Oh, and today I figured out how to do a sit-bounce, or whatever it's called. You know -- you jump, throw your legs out, come down on your butt, bounce up, get your legs back under you. Do it wrong and you flop in a really humiliating manner. Tricky if you're wearing an overcoat. But I have to keep the overcoat on. (The only think I really liked about the Matrix movies? The fights with Smith. And I was rooting for Smith. But still. Hands in pockets, glasses on, I go soaring slowly up...)

3) Play on the playground equipment. Romanian playgrounds deserve a long entry of their own. Short version: the recent stuff is pretty good, the older stuff can be pretty amazing. Under Communism, it seems, playground equipment was made of cast iron. Safety was not a priority, but damn, the stuff was solid. More on this some other time.

Oh, and Claudia took the chance to get on her rollerblades for an hour or two. She's out of practice, but she could push the stroller, which helped. Though it may have cut down on the whole aerobicise aspect of the thing. Money quote: "At this rate, by 2050 or so I will have a really excellent butt."

Then we went home, and everybody took a nap. The neighborhood cat who has adopted us came and mewed at the door, and I let him in, and he went to sleep too.

And that was our Sunday afternoon.

Kleiman, Jünger, endives

Like Diogenes looking for an honest man, Mark Kleiman has been looking for a modern non-genre pro-war novel of high literary merit. He has had a surprisingly difficult time.

Because I am nuts, I suggested Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. Most people don't think of World War One as a positive transformative experience. Jünger had no such doubts:

"Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favored."

Jünger was born in 1895, and lived nearly to his one hundred and third birthday. He had, um, an interesting life.

Recently the New York City Math Teacher (Now Past the Cusp of Matrimony) and I went to Zum Stammtisch Restaurant, somewhere off the Long Island Expressway. Even though my German ancestors left around 1848, and NYCMT's some ninety years later, the food still calls to us at a primeval, almost genetic level. And so over sauerbraten and smoked trout and rye bread and dark beer (all delicious) we fell to talking about the vagaries of German history; and for some reason, I brought up Jünger.

"Ah, Jünger," said NYCMT. "The lich."

'Lich' is rather an uncommon word in English. I'd only ever heard the word spoken before in two contexts: among people familiar with the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, as a kind of dead man walking; and to refer to then living nonagenarian senator Strom Thurmond. It derives from an Old English word meaning 'corpse'. Cognates are wonderful things.

So Jünger has been a little difficult to rehabilitate. In any case, he's not very well known in English (as Kleiman notes), although he's been championed by figures as diverse as the British aesthete and travel writer Bruce Chatwin and the Texan cyber-guru Bruce Sterling. For the Jünger neophyte, here's a short piece taken from the 1937 edition of his Adventurous Heart, called "Violet Endives".

I stepped into a luxurious gourmet shop because I had noticed in the display window a quite uniquely violet sort of endive. I wasn't surprised when the salesman explained to me that the only kind of meat with which this dish could be served is human flesh -- I had already rather dimly suspected that.

We had a long talk about the manner of preparation, then we went down into the cold-storage chamber where I saw people hanging on the wall like rabbits in front of a meat merchant's shop. The salesman made it a special point that here and without exception I got my prey and did not even consider the pieces crammed into rows at the breeding establishments: "leaner, but -- I'm not saying it to boast -- far more aromatic." Hands, feet, and heads were set out in particular dishes and planted with little price labels.

As we were going back up the stairs, I remarked: "I didn't realize the civilization in this city has already advanced so far," whereupon the salesman seemed to hesitate for a moment, so as then to give me a receipt with a very obliging smile.

(From Thomas Nevin's Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945.)

PUR

It's not only the name of a political party here in Romania, it's also the newest gizmo from the Procter & Gamble toolbox. Read more about how purifying water in poor areas of the world -- or disaster zones -- just got a lot easier. (Free registration required. Or just use bug me not).

Schott's Delight

It's one of those books that you don't really need. It contains nothing but obscure facts. Thus, it's sheer delight.

Schott's Original Miscellany is a unique collection of essential trivia, uncommon knowledge and vital irreverence.

Where else can you find, packed on to one page, some famous lefthanders, the structure of military hierarchy, all of the clothing care symbols, a list of the countries that drive on the left, and a nursery rhyme about sneezing?

Where else but Schott's Original Miscellany will you stumble across John Lennon's cat, the supplier of bagpipes to the Queen, the twelve labours of Hercules, and the brutal methods of murder encountered by Mrs Marple?

Here are some samples of what you can find in Schott's Original Miscellany:

Palindromes

Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus*
Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron*
Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna
Some men interpret nine memos
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Able I was, ere I saw Elba
Too bad - I hid a boot
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama

* indicates that the palindrome has been attributed to W.H. Auden

How to wrap a sari:

Or might you be interested in the deaths of some Burmese Kings?

THEINHKO killed by a farmer whose cucumbers he ate without permission (931 AD). Theinhko's Queen, fearing civil disorder, smuggled the farmer into the royal palace and dressed him in royal robes. He was proclaimed King NYUANG-U SAWRHAN, and was known as the 'Cucumber King'. He later transformed his cucumber plantation into a spacious and pleasant royal garden.

ANAWRAHTA gored by a buffalo during a military campaign. (1077)

UZANA trampled to death by an elephant. (1254)

NARATHIHAPATE forced at knifepoint to take poison. (1287)

MINREKYAWSWA crushed to death by his own elephant. (1417)

RAZADARIT died after becoming entangled in the rope with which he was lassoing elephants. (1423)

TABINSHWETI beheaded by his chamberlains whilst searching for a fictitious white elephant. (1551)

NANDABAYIN laughed to death when informed, by a visiting Italian merchant, that Venice was a free state without a king. (1599)

I want it!

(All info courtesy miscellanies.info)

Pictures to Trans-Fagaras Highway

Under the fold, some pictures of the Trans-Fagaras Highway. No pix of our trip through the clouds, though -- that was just plain white boring stuff. But you can see bits and pieces of the road through the clouds from the top. With a good connection, click on the pictures to see them slightly bigger.

Up the Trans-Fagaras Highway

In which we finally ascend the Trans-Fagaras Highway.

As I blogged a while back, the TFH is this completely insane road that goes up and over a fairly sheer mountain range in the middle of the country for, really, no reason whatsoever. Ceausescu built it back in the 1970s. Officially it was to improve the defense of the country in case someone -- coughHungarianscough -- invaded from the west. But this was obvious nonsense. The highway is ridiculously vulnerable; it could be completely destroyed by a single bomb or shell. More to the point, it's closed eight months of the year anyhow. No, Old Nick built it because he wanted to, and because he could, and that's really all there is to it.

But anyway. If you approach the Trans-Fagaras from the north, you come at it along a little two-lane road that crosses a dusty plain at the foot of the mountains. Village, slow down, open plain, speed up, repeat every few kilometers.

Then you come to the foot of the mountains -- which is, like, abrupt; the mountains pretty much jump right out of the plains -- and you start doing switchbacks. Hairpin left, up up up up, hairpin right. Repeat. After a while you're in pine forest.

If this doesn't sound too exciting, well, it isn't really. Yet.

But go another few km, and you get higher, and you start getting these dropoffs on either side. Deep, sheer dropoffs that go down for hundreds of feet. The sort where you're looking down into the tops of trees. Tall trees. Far below you.

And the hairpins keep coming: back, forth. You go over bridges that arch high over loud streams full of white water. You go past places where the road runs along a sheer cliff face covered with what looks like heavy chicken wire, presumably in case of avalanches. Here and there you begin to notice spills of stone and gravel on the road where, presumably, the chicken wire failed. Some of these stones are not so small. This may make you a little thoughtful. Best not to dwell on it.

And then you start going through tunnels. The tunnels look like they were constructed very hastily out of, basically, cinderblock. Often they have water running over, around, or into them. There's usually more chicken wire involved too. This, too, might make you a little thoughtful. Again, best not to dwell.

At this point in our trip, things suddenly got a lot more interesting because we entered the clouds. We had seen low-hanging clouds around the mountains as we approached. Now we drove right up into them. Visibility immediately dropped to about two car lengths ahead, except when a random gust of wind caused fog to eddy and thicken. Then it dropped to just beyond our front bumper.

Also at around this point, the guardrail situation began to get a little alarming. Not that there weren't guardrails. There were. Some. But they were sort of randomly placed. More than once, as we crept upwards through the fog, we hit sudden hairpin turns that did not have guardrails; or that had guardrails, but placed several yards off to one side, so as not to get in the way of the sheer drop into the abyss; or that had once had guardrails, but now just had a couple of snapped-off guardrail posts.

Somewhere around here my forward speed dropped to a few kilometers per hour. Walking speed. Soon after this, people began passing me -- some flashing lights and honking as they zipped past us, in the moment before disappearing into the mist ahead.

And then we came out of the top of the cloud.

A man of wealth and taste

Romania sure gets a bad press in American popular fiction. Vampires, orphans, war crimes, vampires. The horror writer Dan Simmons once managed to work all three together in one of his books, with added vampire content (this is not a recommendation).

But Romania might now be best known among American readers as the home of the Antichrist.

Yes, that's right. Just when you thought Romania's PR couldn't get any better.

The Left Behind series of books is immensely popular in the US. Tens of millions of copies have been sold here. Basically, it's a series of disaster thrillers where the disaster is a fringe Protestant interpretation of prophecies regarding the Christian Apocalypse. The story begins with all the good Christians vanishing -- the Rapture -- and the people left behind (get it?) scrambling in their wake.

It's religious fiction with a viewpoint from deep within the paranoid tradition of the American psyche. About the only concession these books make to modern ecumenical sensibilities is including Old Red Socks the Pope in the general disappearances. (This is a big step forward, believe it or not. Remember where Ian Paisley got his doctorate.) I'm not sure if there's a parallel European genre to this type of fiction. Holy Blood, Holy Grail? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Kind of sort of? Gentle European readers, you tell me.

The authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, aren't exactly subtle. I'm an extremely lapsed Methodist myself, but I am familiar with Protestant traditions even more paranoid and esoteric than theirs, so when I skimmed these books I kept on expecting the obvious Jesus guy also to be a minion of the Devil -- those false prophets, don't you know -- and his followers cast into the Lake of Fire to burn forever and ever, mwahahahaha! No such luck.

Anyway, the real Antichrist in the series is a fellow named Nicolae Carpathia. See what I mean about subtle? At the beginning of the first book, he's an obscure politician from the lower house of the Romanian parliament, I dunno, maybe from Brasov, but due to his extraordinary, nay, vampiric charm... well, you know.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist is doing a page by page commentary of the Left Behind series, all of which is worth reading, and the rest of his blog is pretty good too. But this comment in particular caught my eye:

That word -- "peacemaker" -- practically screams Antichrist. For LaHaye and Jenkins' intended readers, it wouldn't be any clearer if Carpathia had the number "666" tattooed on his forehead and went by the nickname "Horny Beast."

It so happens I have a book called Gorbachev! Has the real Antichrist come?, by one Robert W. Faid, published by Victory House Publishers of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1988. You know I'm going to give you a sample.

Gorbachev is anxious to present himself to the world as a man of peace, to be trusted and accepted by the Western World. Such a treaty would establish him as the leading global statesman of the age. He would be hailed by the entire world community as a 'man of peace'. I expect such treaties to be signed before the end of the current administration and to result in what will be a monumental victory for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.

The irony of all this is that Gorbachev, the man who is very probably the antichrist, could conceivably win the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Ronald Reagan who will retire from office with dignity and respect for it.

What irony will this be, for if Gorbachev is truly the man John saw astride a white horse with a bow and a crown, he will, as told to us in Revelation 6:3, "go forth conquering and to conquer."

In our reality, Gorbachev couldn't even put down the Lithuanians, and ended up making TV commercials for Pizza Hut. He did have that freaky birthmark though.

At least thinkers within Orthodox Christianity have wrought a more interesting picture of the Antichrist. Here's an excerpt from Vladimir Solovyov's last work, War, Progress, and the End of History:

At that time, there was among the few believing spiritualists a remarkable person -- many called him a superman -- who was equally far from both, intellect and childlike heart. He was still young, but owing to his great genius, by the age of thirty-three he had already become famous as a great thinker, writer, and public thinker. Conscious of the great power of spirit in himself, he was always a confirmed spiritualist, and his clear intellect always showed him the truth of what one should believe in: the good, God, and the Messiah. In these he believed, but he loved only himself.

He believed in God, but in the depths of his soul he involuntarily and unconsciously preferred himself. He believed in Good, but the All-Seeing Eye of the Eternal knew that this man would bow down before the power of Evil as soon as it would offer him a bribe -- not by deception of the senses and the lower passions, not even by the superior bait of power, but by his own immeasurable self-love. This self-love was neither an unconscious instinct nor an insane ambition. Apart from his exceptional genius, beauty, and nobility of character, the reserve, disinterestedness, and active sympathy with those in need which he evinced to such a great extent seemed abundantly to justify the immense self-love of this great spiritualist, ascetic, and philanthropist.

Did he deserve blame because, being as he was so generously supplied by the gifts of God, he saw in them a sign of Heaven's special benevolence towards him, and thought himself only second to God himself? In a word, he considered himself to be what Christ in reality was. But this conception of his higher value showed itself in practice not in the exercise of his moral duty to God and the world but in seizing his privilege and advantage at the expense of others, and of Christ in particular.

Then a mysterious stranger advises him to become a best-selling author. Around the world, "cheap editions with portraits of the author were sold in millions of copies", and soon this fellow reaches the highest political office of them all...

Honest.

I'm just saying.

Mature relationships

German ambassador to the US Wolfgang Ischinger is generally viewed as one of the more brilliant heads in German foreign policy. I read his article on US-European relations in last week's Zeit magazine and had two immediate thoughts:

1. Oh, I'd love to share this article on the blog, if only it were in English.
2. Hm, the sentence structure somehow feels English.

Well, not for nothing am I a trained translator. It turns out that the original English article appeared in newly launched German paper called "The Atlantic Times" back in December and can be read on the website of the German Embassy in Washington.

Interesting read, that.

Hopes and fears

Lessons I learned in 2004:

1. Just because you can outdrink Russians doesn't mean you should outdrink Russians.
2. Only see women who are happy to see you. Even. Especially.
3. Dissection tweezers are for dissecting.

Details would be superfluous.

Probable causes of my death in 2005:

1. Crossing the street while distracted by beauty. Hell, this nearly happened today.
2. The Green Bay Packers. I love them, but they will kill me. Since my Reggie White jersey is now a holy relic, at least I'll have something to be buried in.
3. Something the administration forgot. Whoops!

And an aphorism for the ages:

1. More yoga is better than no yoga.

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