Halfway down the Danube

Tulcea

It's pronounced TOOL-cha, and it's the jumping-off point for trips into the Delta.

Tulcea is a pleasant town, much nicer than we expected. The Lonely Planet dismisses it with a couple of lines -- "you won't want to spend much time here before heading off to the Delta" -- but I liked it. There's a modest esplanade along the riverfront, and a couple of nice little parks. Lots of shops and restaurants, many of them new-looking... you can see that some money has come in recently.

Of course, there's also the standard post-Communist gigantic empty central square. They've nibbled around the edges of it with trees and benches, but there's still a good acre of completely useless bare concrete space, the hot sun beating down on it, with no shelter and no decoration but an equestrian statue of Old King Mircea.

And speaking of post-Communism, there's also a gigantic aluminim refinery just outside of town. You can see its smokestacks and towers from the esplanade. It really seems like the Romanian Communist leadership placed major industrial works in all the most beautiful sites in the country. The aluminum works at Tulcea isn't quite as bad as the oil refinery that dominates the beach at Mamaia, but it's up there.

We came into Tulcea from the west, and it was a surprisingly nice and scenic drive. The two-lane road from the Braila ferry runs parallel to the Danube, but a mile or two inland. On one side are the hills of upper Dobrogea...

...brief geographical digression here. We all know that the Danube has a big kink at the end, yes? Instead of flowing straight east into the Black Sea, it suddenly turns north for about 120 miles and then turns east.

Well, the reason for this is that there's a range of hills along the coast of the Black Sea. In American terms, it's as if a piece of the Ozarks had been snapped off and moved 300 miles south to the Gulf Coast, so that the Mississippi suddenly had to swing around and reach the sea somewhere over in Texas. The region inside the "kink" is Dobrogea.

So, driving from Braila to Tulcea, you have the rugged hills of northern Dobrogea on one side, and the Danube on the other. And the Danube is just spreading out into the Delta. So it's a huge river surrounded by marshes and lakes... some reclaimed and turned into sheep meadows, but most still half-wild wetland. The road stays at the edge of the hills, so it's perpetually going up and down and turning, giving you ever-changing views of marshes, fields, little lakes shining in the sun. And every few kilometers you go through another pleasant-looking little village.

It's nice. Tulcea is supposed to be a poor judet, and certainly the villages didn't look rich or even prosperous. But neither did they have that dusty, run-down look so common in the south of Romania. The houses were well kept, and there were flower gardens everywhere. You had the feeling that, for one reason or another, Communism hadn't really managed to get its teeth into the people here.

Oh, and the people themselves looked a little different. Dobrogea was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878... you could walk from Tulcea south 400 miles to Istanbul, and you'd be on Turkish territory continuously all the way. And the Turkish legacy lives on. Several of the towns have very Turkish-sounding names (Babadag, Mahmudia), and several of the villages had mosques.

Well: for about 200 years, Dobrogea was the refugee center of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman settlers driven out of Hungary and the Banat ended up there, and so did Crimean Tatars from Russia. They mingled with a pre-existing population of Romanians, Gypsies, and four or five different sorts of Slav... Russians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, you name it. The hills of Dobrogea and the marshes of the lower Danube became ethnic catchbasins, impromptu melting pots.

So the people just look different. Very mixed, from Celtic-looking blondes to folks as dark as Indians. Several generations of Romanianization have flattened out most of the cultural differences, but the sheer physical variety is still pretty striking.

And not all the cultural differences have been flattened. There are still large Muslim minorities, Turks and Tatars. Nobody seems to be paying any attention, but after 2007, these folks will be the oldest large Muslim communities in the EU.

To the Delta

There are two ways to drive from Bucharest to the Danube Delta.

Bucharest sits about 40 miles or 70 km north of the Danube, which runs from west to east. About 100 miles east of Bucharest, though, the Danube suddenly turns north. It runs north-northeast for another hundred miles or so. Then it turns east, splits into five channels, and flows into the Danube as a huge, swampy delta.

So, to get from Bucharest to the Delta, you can drive east, parallel to the Danube, until you cross it (there's a bridge), and then swing north and come to the Delta from below. Or, you can drive east, and then north, and then east again, crossing the Danube further north, just below the "neck" of the Delta. That's the way we drove up.

This route takes you out the A2 Autostrada, Romania's newest and proudest highway. Okay, it's almost Romania's only highway -- the stretch west of Bucharest barely counts -- but let's not be snide; the A2 is a wonderful stretch of road. It's broad, it's smooth, and it runs straight as a ruler across the flat green country east of Bucharest. You just don't appreciate good highways until you've lived for a while without them.

After you leave the Autostrada, you take a bad two-lane road through the city of Slobozia. Slobozia is notable mostly for looking exactly as you'd expect it to. I mean, there's a huge fertilizer factory just outside of town. And when you reach the town limits, you're greeted by the Hotel Paradis... a Communist-era block that's visibly in a state of advanced decay, with letters missing from its sign. "Ho el Par dis S oboz a", like.

(Bizarre Slobozia fact: in the mid-1990s, someone built a replica of the South Fork Ranch from the TV show "Dallas" near Slobozia. It was supposed to be a theme park. "Dallas" was shown in Romania under Communism, and was very popular. So... so, well, I'm not sure how the logic went. But the ranch/park was not a great success. It's what most Romanians seem to know about Slobozia, though.)

North of Slobozia, there's a long flat run across the Campea Baraganului, the Plains of Baragan. This is the region where I nearly got snowed in last year. It's a sinister name in recent Romanian history, because this was where the Communists deported thousands of internal exiles. In a Romanian version of the great forced resettlements of the Soviet Union, "unreliable" families from the south and west were shipped across the country and dumped on this flat, featureless plain, to live or die as best they could. Today a Ford Galaxy, with a couple of small children nodding off to "Finding Nemo" in the back, can cross the Plains of Baragan in an hour.

North of Baragan we come to Braila, on the Danube. Braila, an ugly but lively town, sprawls for miles along the river. There's no bridge -- the lower Danube is vast, and there are only three bridges in 250 miles -- but several car ferries go back and forth. We just missed one, but another left 20 minutes later.

While we were waiting, a storm came walking across the river towards us. We could see it coming from miles away, curtains of rain beneath a great dark fortress of cloud. As we drove onto the ferry, fat drops began to make leopard spots on the deck, while lightning snaked down to snap at the far shore.

It would take more than a little damp to keep Alan inside the car, though. A jacket, a hat, and he was trotting around in the rain: ducking between the cars, peering over the side of the boat.

"Lamp!" he suddenly said. "Lamps!"

"Lamps?" Whatever was he talking about?

"Lamps," he insisted. And sure enough, there were two lambs taking shelter under the pilot deck.

A bit further along, I noticed a car with a cardboard box full of ducklings in the back. When I lifted Alan up to look at them, the driver immediately reached into the box, grabbed one duckling, and held the frantically peeping morsel out the window for a delighted Alan to oh-so-carefully touch.

By the time we reached the other shore, the storm had passed on. Thunder rumbled behind us, but the sun was shining again as we drove into Dobrogea, the land at the bottom of the Danube.

All the Way Down the Danube

We went to the Danube delta this weekend.

Just got back, and unpacked and made some dinner and put the kids to bed, and are tired. So details will have to wait until tomorrow. But we drove up to Tulcea (which is worth an entry or two in its own right) and took a boat deep into the Delta, and stayed there overnight.

There are a lot of birds in the Danube delta.

More in a bit.

My secret blogroll

My co-bloggers are elsewhere along the Danube this weekend, leaving the weird guy with the coffee mug and the viral pneumonia in charge. Since you're all probably bored out of your minds, here are some links that might amuse and distract you.

Benn loco du taccu - Best damn music on the block.

Hitherby Dragons - One of the great fantasists of our time.

Fafblog! - I have such a crush on Giblets.

Diablo Cody - If this isn't safe for work, you need to change jobs.

The Loom - Good bioscience journalism is hard to find.

The Valve - Holbonic goodness in plenty! (As if there could be holbonic goodness in short.)

The Decembrist - Mark Schmitt is a wonk's wonk.

More Words, Deeper Hole - The unexamined genre is not worth reading. James Nicoll is.

This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics - John Baez walks you through a garden of mathematical delights. This is not an oxymoron.

Organizing the sock drawer

Or rather, Xeroxed papers I have unpacked. This is more of an aide-mémoire in blog form than anything else, but hey, if you got any questions about these, ask 'em. Or suggestions for follow-up reading, either. Extra points if you can divine a theme!

8 by 11 papers

Agrawal et al., "Transposition mediated by RAG1 and RAG2 and its implications for the evolution of the immune system", 1998
Balfour, "Antiviral drugs", 1999
Barber, "On the antiquity of east European bridal clothing"
Barber, "On the origins of the vily/rusalki"
Barber, "The curious tale of the ultra-long sleeve (a Eurasian epic)"
Berg, "The rotary motor of bacterial flagella", 2003
Benz et al., "The origin of the Moon and the single-impact hypothesis I", 1986
Birch, "Terraforming Venus quickly", 1991
Bordo and Jonung, "The future of EMU: what does the history of monetary unions tell us?", 1999 [I don't have this in .pdf form?]
Bossy, Recollections of a Romanian diplomat, foreword, excerpts from the Berlin years, 1941 and 1942
Brown & Kornberg, "Inorganic polyphosphate in the origin and survival of species", 2004
Burnett, Magic and divination in the Middle Ages, excerpts on the Experimentarius of Bernardus Silvestris
Burt et al., "The dynamics of chromosome evolution in birds and mammals", 1999
Cederström et al., "Focusing hard X-rays with old LPs", 2000
Clark et al., "Inferring nonneutral evolution from human-chimp=mouse orthologous gene trios", 2003
Coatsworth, "Indispensable railroads in a backwards economy: the case of Mexico", 1979 [I don't have this in .pdf form?]
Ehret, "Derivational morphology in Afroasiatic (Afrasian) reconstruction"
Eichengreen and Sachs, "Exchange rates and the economic recovery in the 1930s", 1984 [I don't have this in .pdf form either? *very* odd]
Freedman, "The topology of four-dimensional manifolds", 1982
Galatin, "The long and short of Viagra: featured molecule of the week"
Gheorghe, "Origin of Roma's slavery in the Rumanian Principalities"
Greene, "Technological innovation and economic progress in the ancient world: M.I. Finley reconsidered", 2000
Heideman et al., "Gauss and the history of the Fast Fourier Transform", 1985
Kayser, "Classics and technology: a reevaluation of Heron's first century AD steam engine"
Kayser, "The purpose of the Parthian galvanic cells: a first-century AD electric battery used for analgesia", 1993
Kennedy, "Strategy fads and competitive convergence: an empirical test for herd behavior in prime-time television programming", 2002
Kirkpatrick and Baez, "Formation of optical images by X-rays", 1948
Hansch and Fujita, "Rho-sigma-pi analysis, a method for the correlation of biological activity and structure", 1963
Horsfall and Tamm, "Chemotherapy of viral and rickettsial diseases", 1957
Land, "A new one-step photographic process", 1947
Lampe, "Varieties of unsucesssful industrialization: the Balkan states before 1914"
Mathews, "David Bowie reinvents self, this time as a bond issue", 1997
Needham, excerpt from Science and Civilisation in China, "The enchymoma in the test-tube: medieval preparations of urinary steroid and protein hormones"
Nicholson, "Ibuprofen", from Chronicles of Drug Discovery, volume 1
Ó Grada, Ireland: a new economic history, chapter 1, "Chronology"
Palairet, "Merchant enterprise and the development of the plum-based trades in Serbia, 1847-1911"
Penrose, "Angular momentum: an approach to combinatorial space-time"
Pritchett, "A toy collection, a socialist star, and a democratic dud? Growth theory, Vietnam, and the Philippines"
Rens et al., "Resolution and evolution of the duck-billed platypus karyotype with an X1Y1 X2Y2 X3Y3 X4Y4 X5Y5 male sex chromosome constitution", 2004
Rockoff, "The 'Wizard of Oz' as a monetary allegory", 1990
Roe, "The ghost in the machine: symmetry and representation in ancient Antillean art"
Salton, "The automatic transcription of machine shorthand", 1959
Sausverde, "Seewörter and substratum in Germanic, Baltic and Baltic Finno-Ugric languages"
Schrijver, "Animal, vegetable and mineral: some Western European substratum words"
Snigerev et al., "A compound refractive lens for focusing high-energy X-rays", 1996
Steiner, "Monopoly and competition in television: some policy issues", 1961
Stone, "Bernardus Silvestris, Mathematicus", 1996
Taylor, "Elements of technical creativity", 1984
Todd, "Karyotypic fissioning and canid phylogeny", 1970
Trask, "Some important Basque words (and a bit of culture)"
Von Neumann & Richtmyer, "A method for the numerical calculation of hydrodynamic shocks", 1950
Wayland, "Apache playing cards", 1961
Whitmire and Wright, "Nuclear waste spectrum as evidence of technological extraterrestrial civilizations", 1980
Wilczak, "The pre-Germanic substrata and Germanic maritime vocabulary"
Witten, "Supersymmetry and Morse theory", 1982
Wolffe and Matzke, "Epigenetics: regulation through repression", 1999
Yang & Bielawski, "Statistical methods for detecting molecular adaptation", 2000
Zapol et al., "Artificial placenta: two days of total extrauterine support of the isolated premature lamb fetus", 1969

[thought I had more on artifical wombs? must be a different box, sigh]

assorted Christmas carols with bass part indicated
uncited bibliography on the international arms trade
various formulas for equations of state
various printouts on 1970s US television comedy history

8 by 11 books

Andaya, The world of Maluku: eastern Indonesia in the early modern period, chapters 1 through 4
Archibald, Information, incentives, and the economics of control, 1992
Cipolla, Money, prices, and civilization in the Mediterranean world: fifth through seventeenth century
DeVoto, translation of Heron of Alexandria's Belopoeica (the Artillery Manual) with facing Greek text, notes
Elman, A cultural history of civil examinations in late imperial China, chapter 1
Friedrich, Proto-Indo-European trees: the arboreal system of a prehistoric people, 1970
Guisso, Wu Tse-T‘ien and the politics of legitimation in T‘ang China, chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7
Mirrlees, The Counterplot, chapters 1 through 3
Pearton, Oil and the Romanian state, 1971
Young, Women who become men: Albanian sworn virgins, 2000

The Kanun of Lek Dukagjini, foreword, introduction, excerpts, appendices

8 by 14 papers

Bielenstein, "The Chinese colonization of Fukien until the end of T'ang"
Blust, Austronesian root theory, chapters 1 through 7
Blust, "Historical morphology and the spirit world: the *qali/kali- prefixes in Austronesian languages"
Clark, "Evolution, migration, and extinction of Oceanic bird names"
Dummer, "A history of electronic passive components: a personal view", 1996
Gale, "The rolling of iron"
Heaney, "Biogeography of mammals in SE Asia: estimates of rates of colonization, extinction and speciation", 1986
McNeil, "George Constantinesco, 1881-1965 and the development of sonic power transmission"
Palairet, "Primary production in a market for luxury: the rose-oil trade of Bulgaria, 1771-1941"
Polomé, "The non-Indo-European component of the Germanic lexicon"
Roe, "At play in the fields of symmetry: design structure and shamanic therapy in the upper Amazon"
Schrijver, "Lost languages in northern Europe"
Schanuel, "What is the length of a potato?"
Siebert, "The original home of the proto-Algonquian people"
"Some aspects of technological change -- 1900 to 1939: a symposium", 1983

Allen, "Welding"
Brock-Nannestad, "Mechano-acoustic sound recording and reproduction -- refinement and rejection, 1900-1929"
Darling, "Metallurgical developments between 1900 and 1939"
Ellam, "Developments in aircraft landing gear, 1900-1939"
Semmens, "Chemical process engineering at I.C.I. Billingham"
Duffy, "Power, materials and processes"
Earl, "The development of the thermionic valve between 1900 and 1939"

Stevanovic, "The age of clay: the social dynamics of house destruction", 1997
Stokes, "Hydrogen peroxide for power and propulsion", 1998

Two characters in search of an author

It has recently come to my attention that I have been "tuckerized" as a significant character in Lois McMaster Bujold's new book, The Hallowed Hunt, as the warrior-poet Jokol Skullsplitter! Woo-hoo!

Ahem. Grr.

Sigh. And so has my pet bear, Ted, who in the book is named Fafa.

Fafa! Yes! And now cute girls will come over and feed you honey! Yes!

Um. I don't think it works that way, Teddy.

Yes! And they will tuck you in and tell you stories and comb your fur longingly! Yes!

Ummm... this is getting a little disturbing, bear.

Grrrrr.

Okay okay. They might. I guess it could happen. Okay?

Okay?

Grrr. Okay.

Go to sleep, bear.

Grrr. Okay.

Fafa!

Happy Birthday

... kleiner Bruder! Wir wünschen Dir Gesundheit, Erfolg, Glück in der Liebe, viel Sonnenschein, eine gesunde Leber, keinen vorzeitigen Haarausfall, noch mehr Gesundheit, und vor allem alles, alles Liebe -- deine vier Fans aus Bukarest. Ich drück Dich!

Oh, und feier schön. :-)

Eurovision 2005

Well. Third place for Romania is not so bad. Really. I mean, the German singer ended up on the last place. That is bad.

I can't really talk about this. I haven't heard any of the songs and we missed the contest due to extreme exhaustion after an action-filled day with the kids. (We went to the circus! More about that later.) Poor Doug was really disappointed. He likes the Eurovision so much because it's so... European.

You can hear the Romanian song here, if you like. Or go to Fistful of Euros, where we are still nominally co-blogging, although we never write anything. (Shame on us.) Doug Merrill has some cool links, if you're interested.

Hm? Oh, yes. The winner. Greece. I think that's sort of cool but again, I don't know the song.

Hello, number fifty thousand!

Halfway Down the Danube's fifty-thousandth visitor happened upon our site sometime last night. Cheers!

A minor departure

I have some annoying trash to take out over the next few days, so the Vrancea and Vinogradov blogging will have to wait. In the meantime, enjoy this Unitarian hymn, courtesy of Ereshkigal of Oklahoma:

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee,
Praise the strength of coffee.
Early in the morn we rise with thoughts of only thee.
Served fresh or reheated,
Dark by thee defeated,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

Though all else we scoff we
Come to church for coffee;
If we're late to congregate, we come in time for thee.
Coffee our one ritual,
Drinking it habitual,
Brewed black by perk or drip instantly.

Coffee the communion
Of our Uni-Union,
Symbol of our sacred ground, our one necessity.
Feel the holy power
At our coffee hour,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

More odd theology (of my own devising) can be found with the coffee hymn here:

It has been conjectured that further symmetry breaking will lead to a God in Six Persons, which have tentatively been named Bereshith, Tetragrammaton, Incarnatus, Agape, Pentecost, and Paracletus.

Alas, They do not assemble to form a larger, robot Godhead; on the other hand, one might consider Them/Him a justice league.

Then there's the Lucky Charms unified theory... but that can wait.

Talking about playgrounds

I said in passing last week that I'd write about playgrounds here in Bucharest. Well, promised is promised, and so here we go.

The good news is: the playgrounds are becoming much better. There are new ones built all over the city, and our kids love them.

The bad news is: the existing playgrounds are maintained really badly. It seems that as soon as they are up, nobody cares about them anymore. In Germany, if a child gets injured on an unsafe playground, you can sue the city. Somehow, I think it's different in Romania. It's gotta be.

What often strikes foreigners first is the cleanliness, or the lack thereof. Let's stick with Floreasca playground, the one with the rat. The big structure in the middle of Floreasca park is strewn with litter -- chips bags, bottles both plastic and glass, pieces of food, shreds of clothing, strings in all sizes and colors, cigarette butts, and dog poop.

I don't pick up every piece of trash and carry it to the waste bin. I do throw everything into the trash can that my sons carry over to play with, though. It's quite a bit after a while. I do wish it was cleaner but then, I'm German. I always wish it would be cleaner. So maybe it's just me.

I have to say that this particular issue has gotten better over the last two years - or I've become less squeaminsh about it. Ion Voicu Park, for example, is certainly quite clean.

The thing that really bothers me is that the structures are just not maintained. They are erected, and then left to fight for themselves. After a while, time, and weather, and little kids, are taking tolls. Nails are sticking out. Rust is having a feast on the metal parts. Boards are cracked or missing. Color is flaking off. Ropes are fraying and breaking apart. Holes appear. The concrete foundations rise up from under the sand.

I can deal with this as long as there is no active danger to my kids. If the color on that see-saw doesn't resemble any I've ever seen before, so what? I don't care. Having David rip himself open on a nail protruding from a board on a ladder, though, or have him slip through the boards of a bridge because pieces are missing... that I have a problem with. I also don't like the concrete foundation peeking out from under the sand -- I just see the potential for cracked little skulls.

Here are some pictures for illustration purposes. They are all taken at Ion Voicu park on Bulevard Dacia. The pictures are thumbnails, if you want to see more detail, click on the picture to enlarge.

This slide has a concrete foundation - hard, ragged, sharp, dangerous. David, btw, loves this particular slide. Figures, eh? (And yes, it's sort of an odd design for a slide to begin with.)

This slide has a broken part at the very end. Not so bad if you're still in diapers. Otherwise - ouch!

Here you can see the rust gnawing at one of the slides. If you look closely at the seam, you can see the sunlight shining through.

This slide has a hole at the top part where the kids sit down. It's big enough for a child to put his foot through it. David got caught there once but he learned to avoid it.

General appearance of the equipment. Actually, I'm fine with this. Nothing wrong, just needs a little paint.

No, this is not a Romania-only problem. It's all over the Balkans, certainly has been true in Serbia. (Although one of the nicest playgrounds we ever encountered was in Ruse, Bulgaria.)

Romania is poor, yes. Funds are missing, sure. I just can't imagine that a little maintenance would be so horribly expensive.

The nails, the rust, the rotting wood, the disintegrating ropes, the holes in the structures, the plain concrete? We live with it. We have to. We avoid the more dangerous places, as do our neighbors and friends. Our point of view is slightly skewed but Romanian friends also complain about the state of the playgrounds, so it's not our attitude towards Romania that makes us take notice.

Can't something be done, please?

Wednesday lazy photoblogging

Just because I'm lazy today and rather read than write, and because you might want to know how we look like at 8 in the morning. (I'm sure you couldn't care less but I'm really lazy today.) Sorry about the reflecting strip on David's jacket - we were about to go out.

Red circles

Romania has high exposure to seismic activity, but many of its urban structures are incapable of withstanding a powerful earthquake. With the help of the World Bank, authorities hope to address the problem before catastrophe strikes.
From the Southeast European Times

It seems to me they are a little bit late with this plan but any time is better than never, I guess. But the article boggled my mind.

The Times goes on to write:

Between 1992 and 2000, more than 3,400 buildings across Romania were examined by construction experts, evaluating their readiness to withstand earthquakes. The experts placed 578 buildings in the highest category of seismic risk, meaning that they could collapse in a quake measuring more than 6.0 on the Richter scale.

This number comes a little bit as a surprise to me. 578? Not only in Bucharest but in all of Romania? That seems like a very low number. Also, the predicitions are for a quake of close to 7.0 or above before the year 2006, according to Gheorghe Marmureanu, the director of the national seismological institute. But wait, there is more:

Most of the high-risk buildings are apartment blocks, while some are home to restaurants, theatres and stores. Furthermore, no fewer than 67 hospitals in 55 cities -- among them, three out of the four emergency hospitals in Bucharest -- are on the list. That leaves many wondering where the victims would be treated in case of a major catastrophe.

The buildings most risk-prone are marked with a red circle, and it is believed that as many as 17,000 people inhabit such houses. The efforts to reinforce the structural integrity of these buildings is noble, and needed. The World Bank is giving a 155 million dollar loan to Romania to do the necessary upgrading. Since it's a loan, Romania expects the owners of the buildings to chip in. Here's where things get tricky.

By law, the public budget can only provide support for families with a monthly income of under 165 euros. The others must pay their part over 25 years, in installments without interest. Many people are reluctant to pay, despite the constant danger they face.

Hm. Maybe the owners don't actually live inside the endangered buildings themselves but are safely tucked away in houses without the ominous red circle? Just a thought.

For the past 13 years, the government has promised to take action. But so far only 26 high-risk buildings have been reinforced -- less than one out of 20. This year, authorities allocated the money necessary for another 47 consolidations, including 40 in downtown Bucharest. Work should start on the remaining 500 buildings by the end of next year, the government says.

Hm. That would be 2006, right? Maybe they can just use the money to rebuild the rubble if the big one hits according to schedule. Ah, but that's just me being sarcastic, again. Surely things will work out all right.

The Road to Istanbul

When we lived in Belgrade, we had a little house just off the old Istanbul road.

It wasn't called that, of course. These days it's Bulevar Kralja Aleksandar, King Alexander Boulevard. I think for a while under the Communists it was Bulevar Revolutsija, but they changed the name back. Anyhow, it's the big street that runs from the center of the city to the east, roughly parallel to the Danube.

(In those days we lived on Golsvortieva Street. Golsvortieva is the Serbian version of Galsworthy. John Galsworthy was a British novelist of the '20s and '30s who wrote a lot of "social fiction". Real Communists considered him kind of a wuss, but Titoist Yugoslavia -- the kinder, gentler Communism! -- found him very agreeable, and so named a street after him.)

Belgrade was under the control of the Ottoman Turks from 1423 until 1867. During that whole time, the big road going east from the city was called Drum Stamboul: the Istanbul Road. -- The word drum, incidentally, got left behind all over the region. Here in Romania, you often say drum bun for "goodbye". It literally means "good road", or "have a nice trip".

Anyway, the Drum Stamboul used to run into the center of old Belgrade, which under the Turks was a town of maybe 20,000 people. The Turks called Belgrade "the Portal of Wars"; I won't bore you with the history, except to say that the name was entirely appropriate. But Belgrade was a walled city in those days, and where the road hit the wall, there was a gate: Stamboul Kapija, the Istanbul gate.

Now Stamboul Kapija wasn't just a gate. No, it was a miniature fortress projecting from the greater wall. It was four stories tall, and flanked by two towers filled with soldiers. The road, passing through the gate, became a tunnel, with doors at one end and a portcullis at the other.

In front of the gate was an empty space. It was kept clear for reasons of military security, except that it was occasionally used for public punishments and executions. This was the scene of one of the most gruesome episodes in modern Serbian history: in 1814, in response to riots in the city, the Turks impaled nearly two hundred Serbs on stakes. (There's a bloody backstory there too, involving the First and Second Serbian Uprisings, but maybe some other time.)

There's a story that three of the executed Serbs were Orthodox priests or deacons. The story further goes that the youngest of them, a fellow named Avakum who was just 20 years old, was offered the chance to live if he would convert to Islam. He refused, was impaled, and died horribly. Thereafter he was proclaimed a holy martyr by the Serbian Orthodox Church. No problem there... but in recent years, he's also become a symbol for Serb nationalists. There's a whole "transcendent holiness of the Serb victim" thing going on there. More on this anon.

Meanwhile: the Second Serbian Uprising was a success, sort of, and Serbia won autonomy from the Turks in 1819. But the Turks kept nominal sovereignty. They showed this by keeping control of the Kalamegdan, the citadel-fortress in the center of Belgrade, and also of the Istanbul Gate. So, while Serbia was an "autonomous principality", all traffic in and out of Belgrade's main gate passed under the eyes of the Turkish garrison.

This odd and rather humiliating arrangement lasted nearly 50 years. Finally, in 1867, autonomy became full independence and the Turks were expelled. This, BTW, is part of the reason many Serbs still hate the idea of "autonomy" for Kosovo and other regions of Serbia. While the term has a neutral or slightly positive connotation to most modern Europeans, Serbs have learned from their history that it really means "way station on the road to independence".

And as soon as the Turks left, the Serbs tore the Istanbul Gate down. It was a symbol of hated alien rule and national humiliation, obviously. And they needed the building material. Belgrade, the capital of newly independent Serbia, was bursting out of its old walls.

So the Serbs took the stones of the great Gate and used them for new construction in the city that was, finally, theirs and theirs alone. The site of the Gate became the great central square of the new city, flanked by the National Theater -- built in part with the Gate's own stones -- and the National Museum. An equestrian statue of the Prince who drove out the Turks was placed in the center of the square.

And a wall of new buildings was placed across the old empty space where the Drum Stamboul had approached the city. I'm not sure why they did this, but I suspect it was symbolic. The Istanbul Road no longer ran directly to the heart of the city. And this is why, even today, if you want to exit central Belgrade to the east, you have to do a strange little workaround; it's curiously difficult to get from "Freedom Square" to Bulevar Kralja Aleksandar by car, even though it's just three or four blocks' distance walking.

-- This was a post I originally wanted to write two years ago, when we still lived in Belgrade. I finally got around to it now, because the story of the Mogosoaia pavement reminded me of it. Constantin Brancoveanu's oak beams under Callea Victoriei; the stones of the old Stamboul Kapija deep in the foundations of Belgrade.

One difference, though. A few months ago, on December 30, 2004, a cross suddenly and mysteriously appeared in Freedom Square in central Belgrade. It was a large cross with a cement base, no casual thing. It popped up as suddenly and unexpectedly as a mushroom. And it was dedicated to "Holy Martyr Deacon Avakum".

Nobody knows who put it there, and nobody has claimed responsibility. But in the context of modern Serbia, it's not too hard to guess.

Sometimes the past gets buried and forgotten. And sometimes it just gets buried.

Granny

So, Ion Iliescu.

Former friend of the Ceausescu family, later turned democrat, or "democrat", depending on who you believe. Later leader of the National Salvation Front, the curious organization that took over Romania's government after the Ceausescus went up agains the wall. He's dominated Romanian politics for the last fifteen years. President of Romania twice, 1992-6 and 2000-2004. Probably the single most loved, hated, controversial figure in Romanian politics. Sometimes known as the "kindly grandfather" of modern Romania, or, more simply, "Granny".

Iliescu finished his second term as President back in December. But was not about to retire. Goodness, no! He took a position as President of the Senate, and was all set to take over the Partidul Social Democrat, or PSD. (Non-Romanian readers may recall that PSD was the party of government for the last four years, 2000-2004. But then just barely failed of re-election last December, so that it's now the opposition.)

So Iliescu was ready to move without a beat from being President to being leader of the opposition, and still one of the most important figures in Romanian politics.

But...

...his party didn't see it quite that way.

I'm going to grossly oversimplify a story of truly Byzantine complexity, and say: there is a generational split in the PSD. The old guard, around Iliescu, wanted to stay in charge of the party. They see themselves as the natural party of government in Romania. They expect the current government, a somewhat fragile coalition, will collapse in the next year or two, allowing them to return in triumph.

However, the younger generation -- I say again, this is a simplification -- is worried; they fear that the electoral defeat showed Romania moving away from the PSD, and that the party needs to catch up. And putting Granny back in charge is not the way to do this.

So, a few weeks back, the Young Turks got together and rejected Iliescu. -- Now I'm really simplifying things. The anti-Iliescu faction is itself a coalition, opportunistic and probably fragile. But distaste and fear united them, and when the dust settled Iliescu had been firmly rejected. Former Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana -- a much younger, more attractive figure -- was placed in nominal charge. And for a little while, there was much rejoicing.

(This all happened at the PSD all-party conference. One amusing moment came when Iliescu, perhaps somewhat off balance, accidentally addressed the party faithful as "comrades". Apparently the entire audience gasped as one, with various mixtures of horror and delight.)

So Iliescu was reduced to being a simple party member. And that was the end of it, right?

Ha ha. No. Iliescu sulked in his tent for a little while, but has now come roaring back. He has accused the PSD leadership of nepotism, arrogant behaviour, abandonment of true Social Democratic principles, and "allowing the party to be labelled as corrupt and one belonging to parvenus and the rich".

Most alarming of all, he has threatened to withdraw from the party. This would be a serious disaster for PSD, because Iliescu is still quite popular, especially with poor and rural voters. If he leaves... well, it won't be the end of PSD, but he could easily take a million votes with him. And President Basescu would be strongly tempted to call new Parliamentary elections while the PSD opposition was disorganized and split.

On the other hand, keeping Iliescu in the party will have a price tag, which may well be too high. One proposal, for instance, has been to create a special unique position purely for Iliescu. But he probably won't accept this unless it comes with real power. And giving real power back to Iliescu is a terrifying prospect for PSD's new leadership.

So, there'll be a complex game of brinksmanship playing out in Romania's opposition over the next little while.

(And my liberal friends here in Bucharest? "More popcorn, please. Hmm, perhaps I'd also like a beer.")

Credit where credit is due

I don't have much use for Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan. Not because he's Australian, mind. That's correctable and sometimes even endearing. No, Egan annoys me because he's a sectarian who converted to atheism, but kept his old structures of thought. In Egan's case, this is less caesaropapist-cum-Leninist, and more "here is a cunningly reasoned pamphlet I'd like to give you showing the error of your ways". Very Anglosphere. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of his fiction explores themes of eschatology and transcendence -- but without that nasty 'god' business -- or that it's been embraced by the "Rapture for Nerds" contingent of geekdom.

On the other hand, Egan has done some very solid stuff for University of California physicist John Baez. Most recently, check out his animations of Klein's quartic curve, and his comparison of said curve to the Fano plane (scroll down).

On the third hand, Egan's fiction is not very good in several other ways. Why doesn't he reinvent himself as a Martin Gardner-like figure? He has the right mad math skillz and a similar skeptical convert nature. Ah well.

Strong stuff

Two glasses of smoky Georgian white wine, and I end up talking about K.A.R.R., the evil twin of the talking, crime-fighting car K.I.T.T. on the 1980s television show Knight Rider.

The unanswered question: what would three do?

Not Buying the Economist

I didn't buy the Economist today.

This is a big deal for me. I've been a loyal Economist reader for years. I mean, it's a great magazine. News from all around the world, including places you rarely hear about. Good book reviews and science stories, too. Pleasantly ironic editorial voice. The dishwater libertarianism could be a bit annoying sometimes, but every good periodical needs some ideological prior, and at least the Economist wears its on its sleeve.

When we moved to Belgrade in 2001, I used to hike out to the Hilton -- about 3 km outside of town -- to buy it there. And here in Bucharest, I've learned where the magazine appears, and when. Published in Britain on Thursday night, it arrives in Bucharest late Friday afternoon, and spreads across the city over the next 48 hours. So, for instance, it's available at the airport after about 8:00 Friday evening; at the train station starting around 9:00 Saturday morning; at the big mall on Piatsa Unirii early Saturday afternoon; and at the Nic supermarket on Piatsa Dorobant' (a few blocks from our house) sometime Sunday.

So every weekend, I'd make this little calculation... go to the train station with the boys Saturday morning? Find a way to get downtown, Saturday afternoon? Or just buy it Sunday at the Nic, hoping the news wouldn't be too terribly old by then?

But today I had chance to buy this week's Economist... and I just didn't.

Two reasons. One, I think there's been a slight but noticeable decline in quality over the last couple of years. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the level of the writing seems to have dipped just a bit. Also, the ideological stuff seems closer to the surface.

Maybe it's just because, after several years of reading it every week, I now can predict what they're going to write just from knowing the topic. But I don't think that's all of it. The Economist has been doing very well in recent years -- I think to some extent they're expanding to fill the niche left open by the death or degradation of most good American weekly newsmagazines -- and I have a feeling this has encouraged a bit of dumbing down. Again, it's slight -- it's still a fine magazine. But I think it's there.

Second, they made the damn thing more expensive.

It used to cost 134,500 lei. That's about $4.50, give or take a dime. My Economist habit was costing me over $200 a year. Still, it seemed worth it.

Then, about a month ago, boom. The price suddenly went up to 154,000 lei. About $5.20. It's not the exchange rate. No, apparently they've raised their cover price worldwide. Whether you're buying it in Washington or Paris or Tokyo or Bucharest, your Economist now costs about 10%-15% more than before.

But it hasn't gotten any bigger, nor has the quality increased.

Well... somehow, that pushed me over some internal tipping point. I would pay this much, but not that much.

It didn't happen at once. I kept buying for a few weeks after the price increase. Then last week, I flipped through it in the Nic and put it back on the shelf. Then this week, I didn't even try to buy it at all.

It has left me a little sad. Buying the Economist every weekend was a little ritual, part of my weekly cycle. When I could get it early -- before noon Saturday, say -- it was a little triumph. For the next day or so, I would try to find the time to actually read it...

I suppose I can still read a lot of the articles online.

It's not the same, though.

Dang, another one

Another earthquake this morning. I woke up at 4:55 - for no reason at all. Then I heard something like a loud rumble and a moment later, the house shook hard. I felt it much stronger than the last one -- or maybe, my memory has edited the sickening feeling of a house moving around you. It was only a 5.1, compared to 5.6 last time. It was short, over in a few seconds. No (palpable) aftershocks so far, although I lay awake until the kids woke up at 6:30.

It wasn't the big one Romania is waiting for. Sigh.

The Mogosoaia pavement

There used to be a lot more trees around here.

Bucharest sits on an almost perfectly flat plain, about 40 miles or 70 km north of the Danube. Get out of the city and it's just flat, empty fields stretching away to the horizon.

But it wasn't always like that. A few centuries back, the plains between the Carpathians and the Danube were a mixture of forest and prairie. North of Bucharest, it was mostly forest -- oaks and beech and maple. South and west of the city, the ground was more open, but there were still stands of trees mixed in with the sea of grass. It was a savannah rather than a steppe.

I didn't realize this at first. Certainly you'd never guess it from looking at southern Muntenia (the region around Bucharest) today. To quote myself:

...an absolutely flat plain. Fields of straggly, unhealthy looking corn alternated with fields of sunflowers. Miles away in the distance, at the edge of vision, a line of cypress trees marched against the horizon.

And that was all. There were no roads. No towns. No grain elevators. I looked in all directions but I couldn't see... anything. Just absolutely flat land, stretching to the horizon. Withered-looking corn, millions of sunflowers. And the cypress trees far, far away.

I remember looking at an old 19th century map in the Museum of Bucharest and being surprised to see a few little "forest" markers scattered around the city to the north and east.

But I did some digging and, sure enough. This region has been deforested down to bare grasslands, but that's historically quite recent. In fact, most of the deforestation happened in the last 150 years. Before that, there was first-growth forest within walking distance of Bucharest.

And then there was the Podul Mogosoaiei.

Some time back, we visited Mogosoaia, the old palace of Prince Constantin Brancoveanu. So I knew that Mogosoaia was a lovely old building by a lake, about 20 km (12 miles) outside of Bucharest.

What I didn't know was that Prince Brancoveanu had built Romania's first paved road. It reached from the center of Bucharest -- which was just a small town of a few thousand people then -- to the palace by the lake.

And it was made of wood.

Brancoveanu's men cut down thousands of oak trees and used them to make the new road. It was called the Podul Mogosoaiei, because it was paved, or floored (podit) with oak beams. It ran through farms, vineyards and orchards for 20 km, paved all the way, to the center of Bucharest.

It wasn't perfectly straight -- apparently Brancoveanu made a point of running it right through the estate of one Constantin Balaceanu, a political rival who was favored by the Austrians as a candidate for the princely throne. But it was not only the first paved road in Romania, it was the most impressive thing for hundreds of miles in any direction. (It was started in 1692 and finished sometime around 1700. The whole region was part of the Ottoman sphere. And the Ottomans were far down the road of decadence, so there weren't a lot of great construction works.) For the next century or so, the Podul was famous around the region, and a point of pride for Bucharesters.

Eventually, the 19th century came along, and Bucharest grew more modern. In spring, when the water was high, flatboats could come up the Dimbovita from the Danube, bringing stones to pave the streets. The Podul was resurfaced, first with cobblestones, and later with asphalt. And in 1878, after Romania's successful war against the Turks, it was renamed Calea Victoriei, the great Way of Victory.

Calea Victoriei still runs north and west from the center of Bucharest. It's a busy road now, full of cars. It passes just a few blocks from our house.

Oak is a tough wood, and can last for centuries. The forests of Muntenia are gone, yes. But a few feet under the asphalt of Calea Victoriei, the huge oak beams of the Podul Mogosoaiei are probably still sleeping in the earth.

Evil parents, that's what we are

David is 22 months old and very much two years already. He is my little devil in disguise - incredible charm and charisma liberally coating a will of steel.

Yesterday, we went for a short walk after dinner. Just up the street to the supermarket to get some pistachios, and to check for a portable potty at the maternity store next door. Roundtrip maybe 700 meters. The route leads along Calea Dorobantilor which is a very busy street.

Now, Alan is very well behaved and will hold your hand while walking where it's dangerous. He doesn't always like it but he will always do it.

Not so David.

Did I mention he's already very much in his Terrible Two's?

Well, we started walking and as soon as we closed the garden gate behind us, he yanked his hand out of mine and started running towards the big busy street. All educational experts say that if your child runs away from you, don't run after him. That doesn't work in a busy big city with lots of cars and buses and trucks. No.

So I ran after him and picked him up. Much screaming and kicking ensued. Repeat the following dialogue twenty times over the course of the next half hour:

"David, do you want to walk?"
"YES!"
"Then you have to hold my hand, OK?"
"Yes."
Down he goes on his feet.
"David, take my hand."
"NO!"

Kicking and screaming, repeat dialogue. It gets tiring after a while but we want him to learn this. It's a contest of wills.

His ultimate weapon is the tantrum. He throws himself on the ground - actually, he carefully lowers himself to the ground - and lies on his back, screaming. Usually, we just ignore him and walk away. Sometimes, I come back and distract him. This works or works not. Then I walk away again.

This is somewhat more complicated on the sidewalk of a busy street in Bucharest. The first two or three times, he just got picked up by Doug or me, kicking and screaming. On our way back, though, at a relatively safe stretch of the sidewalk, we kept on walking, carefully watching him out of the corner of our eyes.

First, he was stunned, then the howling began.

Now, it was about a quarter to seven, and that's a very busy time in Bucharest. People are coming from work, doing some grocery shopping, running to catch buses, traffic is thick and slow-moving. Within seconds, David had an audience.

We were maybe fifteen meters down the street, our little boy lying on his back on the sidewalk. He's blonde and blue-eyed just like his brother, so it's easy for people to make the connection between those two adults with the blonde, blue-eyed three-year-old and this pitifully crying, blonde, blue-eyed darling. Oh, the parents! (Dirty looks in our direction.) Why would they do such a thing to such a wonderful little creature! Isn't he adorable? How dare they! (David flashes one of his famous smiles.) Oh, oh! (Flower girl appears out of nowhere.) Oh, you poor little boy, here's a flower for you! (I'm not making this up!) He caused a little commotion and we got a few pieces of advice on parenting.

Sigh. It's very Romanian, that. In Germany or the US, nobody would think of interfering with your educational efforts. This has its bad sides, definitely. But the Romanian way of giving you unsolicited advice about missing hats, gloves, about potty training and bottle feeding, needs some getting used to.

We're here for almost two years now (in two weeks). We smile and say "da, sigur" because we know the intentions are good.

But we still walk away when David throws a tantrum. Because he finds tantrums without a rapt audience utterly boring.

Blind raise

Because Bojan's recent comment about Magic: The Gathering in Belgrade tickled my memory.

Somewhere, and for no very good reason, I have a Xerox of a monograph on Apache playing cards. The Apaches were not originally French street toughs; no, at first they were a Canadian Stone Age dog-sledding people who inexplicably moved far to the south, picked up the use of the gun and the horse from the rather surprised Spanish, and became an extremely mobile nation of badasses. They got along with the other peoples of the region about as well as you'd expect. This included the Spanish.

Given their mutual unfriendliness, it's a little unusual that the Apache also picked up from the Spanish their use of playing cards. (Or maybe not, since many native North American peoples were avid gamblers.) The Apache made their own, out of rawhide, but copied the Spanish designs -- different from the Anglo suits, with coins and cups -- and kept some of the Spanish names for the cards.

Some decks still survive. They're collectors' items now, and museums will bid for them.

I should note that they were not made from human skin. Apparently there's an urban legend about that.

Upshot: playing cards will diffuse through some of the toughest cultural barriers imaginable.

Playing cards themselves are derived from medieval Chinese paper money. This is not common knowledge, although the broad outlines have been known for over a hundred years. Gamblers would bet based on the bank notes they held in their hand, a little like modern Liar's Poker. I wonder if the early Chinese hyperinflations helped? The monetary value of the bills might have dropped, but their utility as game markers would have remained.

That bane of comment boards everywhere, poker, seems to have a Persian origin, in the game Âs Nas. The problem is, no one has ever been able to confirm a Persian connection to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, where poker was first reliably recorded. On the other hand, if there ever was a place for a Persian card game to enter the early US, it would have been New Orleans.

And just for the hell of it, here's the origin of that mysterious casino game, Keno, or as it was originally known, the White Pigeon Ticket. Betting on randomly chosen words from the Thousand Character Classic? I usually only say this when contemplating Wisconsin or the Philippines, but: "Oh, my people."

Lazy geek sm bleg

Retired machinist Lloyd Schumner is looking for space opera with an Alan Furst feel. You know, cramped paranoid interwar Europe in SPACE. I suspect, in a pinch, Eric Ambler in space would do as well, but *not* Ian Fleming. (Sorry, Charlie.) Little people keeping their heads down as great powers go to war. Lloyd doesn't care if the orbital mechanics are finagled, as long as they get the details on small engine repair right.

(I admit it. He stumped me with this one.)

Dungeons and Dragons in Romania (2)

Or, see your Alpha Geek and raise.

Last month, I mentioned that I had found some D&D players here in Romania. About which more anon. But first, answers to some questions about that post.

Andrew asked:

Being a part of the Washington Establishment who rubs shoulders with the international elite, do the financiers, technocrats, etc. with whom you come into contact on a daily basis know of this habit of yours? I ask this because I'm rather embarassed for a professor of Old French to find out that I game; I can't imagine the horror that I'd feel if I were meeting a finance minister and s/he found out.

Or is part of coming to terms with the inner geek the ability to have no fear that a foreign minister would also know of your habit?

Good question, Andrew. Well, first, I'm not really rubbing shoulders with the international elite. I have met the last couple of Prime Ministers here but we're not exactly close. Most of my work takes place at a much lower, technical level.

Second, D&D has such a low profile in Romania that it's unlikely the finance minister would know what the hell it was about. Expats know about it, but there are only two other expats in my office.

Third, I'm working as a consultant right now, and you'd be surprised what sorts of eccentricities are tolerated among consultants. In that respect, it's easier than working at, say, a big law firm.

Fourth, while I'm not concealing it, I'm not emphasizing it either. It's not on my CV. But then, neither is the birdwatching, the Usenet, or the fact that I love playing hide-and-seek with our two-year-old.

And fifth and finally, at the end of the day, screw it. I am a geek. I play D&D and I like it. That's been true since I was in high school, so it looks like a pretty fixed part of my character. If employers, colleagues, or local counterparts are going to have a problem with that... well, they just are.

Then Novak asked:

Can you compare the D&D experience in all thrre places (States vs. Serbia vs. Romania)?

Yes I can. Short answer: it's incredibly similar.

It's a bit odd, because I've seen differences between Serbs and Romanians in other, related areas. Serbs like science fiction more, while Romanians are great fantasy readers. Serbs love CounterStrike, while Romanians play a lot of Grand Theft Auto. (Albanians, BTW, absolutely LOVE CounterStrike.) Romanians seem to play a lot of Magic: the Gathering, while I've never seen a deck in Serbia.

But when it comes to D&D, well. All the familiar types are right there: the role-player, the power-gamer, the rules lawyer, the munchkin. The guy who won't let anyone else touch his dice. The guy whose character who always has to slip off ahead of the party and look for loot. The guy who always plays a paladin. In both Serbia and Romania, I passed around some back issues of Knights of the Dinner Table, and everybody recognized everybody at once.

-- Oh, there are some differences. There are no gaming stores, so everything has to be imported somehow. Some people pick stuff up on visits to western Europe or the US; some make purchases on eBay. Some get friends to buy stuff for them. (I've schlepped at least 20 issues of Dungeon and Dragon magazines into Romania.) You don't meet gamers with hundreds of supplements, thousands of miniatures, and the $75 leather-bound special edition of the Player's Handbook. And since the hobby is relatively new out here, you don't meet Elder Geeks with war stories dating back to the Carter Administration. ("Hah! I'd like to see you kids try running through the Tomb of Horrors! Let's see if your silly feats and skill ranks will stop your soul from being sucked into the crystal eyeball of a demi-lich!")

But the gamers are the same, and the experience of being a Dungeon Master is almost uncannily the same.

I have a bit more to say about this, but let me pause now. Here are some pictures.

The DM needs to check a spell description. Stalling for time, he starts babbling in a squeaky kobold voice. "Oh no, hobgoblins, very bad! No no, run away!"

Oddly, this photograph has caught two female players. As far as I know, they are the only two female D&D players in Romania. Otherwise, it's pretty typical.

Note the homemade DM's screen. You can buy a DM's screen for, I don't know, $15? That's a lot of money in Romania, so one bright fellow printed out the screen art, laminated it, and then spiral-bound the pages into a screen. Clever, no?

Note also the coffee mugs, the beer, and the food dishes. Romanians are incredibly hospitable and Romanian D&D players are no different. The DM must carefully control his intake, especially of alcohol. Your hosts will keep pushing beer and wine at you. Not so great, when you're trying to coordinate the attacks of six goblins, three hobgoblins, an evil spellcaster, and the carnivorous assassin vine that guards the entrance to the second level. So make that beer last.

Finally, note the tchotchke rack in the back corner. By American or German standards, Romanian apartments tend to be tchotchke-intensive. (Serbs too.) No idea why, just thought I'd mention it.

A close-up of the gaming table:

The player characters, assembled, celebrate their triumph over the hobgoblin chieftain! Now they can descend to the second level and foil the schemes of the evil druid who lurks below.

An ordinary lead miniature costs a couple of hours' wages for an average Romanian, plus the cost and trouble of importing them. Putting together enough miniatures to play, including monster minis for the DM, is a serious investment of time and money. So, I make sure to use the miniatures as much as possible. If I were paying the equivalent of, say, $30 apiece for minis, I'd want to see them get a workout.

Okay, more on this in a bit.

(Photos courtesy of Adrian, gnome illusionist.)

The lounge is renovated

Comments are re-opened. Come and celebrate with us! (We still don't know what the problem is but it doesn't seem to be the comments. Anybody else have a problem with MT slowing down a server by spawning multiple processes?)

Blue watermelon

This is what happens when you leave the kid -- briefly -- alone

a. with the markers
b. without a piece of paper.

Don't worry - it was super-washable paint. The water melon he grabbed from the table about five seconds after this picture was taken turned a nice blue-ish tint within the blink of an eye. Yum-y!

Operation Clean Sweep

You all know that I don't like the new law on abandoned and orphaned children. I've made that clear in the past. Now, you might be thinking that I'm foreign and without understanding and arrogant and all that. However, I'm in good company in my dislike - namely people working in orphanages, people from the National Agency for Child Protection, lawyers, nurses, doctors. All Romanians.

They all hate the new law because it's bad for the children.

Why is the law so bad? It looks like a law with good intentions and I'm sure that the men in the green silk rooms were thinking of doing something good for Romanians left-behind children (and Romania's chances for accession to the EU).

But:

The law requires all abandoned children under the age of 2 to be placed in foster families. This means that the countless private homes for babies are obsolete. The main problem, however, is that there are only foster families for about half of the babies. Half are left... behind, again. Good solution, that.

Remember that international adoptions are now illegal, except under very constricted circumstances? Many of our commenters found this not a problem, even when I pointed out that Romanian society is not very conducive to adoption.

The solution Romanian politicians have come upon is, hm, very Romanian. The rumor says that international adoptions are going to be allowed for a very short while again, in order to clean out the hospitals and get rid of the accumulated human capital. (This is coming directly to me from people inside the Agency for Child Protection. No names can be given, as I'm sure you understand.)

Then, back to square one.

I wonder how many times per year, or per decade, this "Operation Clean Sweep" will be necessary. Last year alone, 2,000 babies were abadonned in Bucharest hospitals. Consider 1,000 babies between the ages of two and newborn up for grabs. Want one?

You may have to wait a little, though. The accession to the EU is not yet certain. If Romania wants to go ahead and lift the ban for a short while, it would be best to do it at the end of the year, after the signatures have dried -- otherwise it could cause a backlash (Brussels having been the driving force behind the new law).

And why do I know about this and why does the EU obviously not?

Comments on hold

I'm sorry, people, but our MT install has some problems with the comments. The server we're hosted on comes to a standstill every time someone posts a comment here. I am on it, but it may take a day or two, so please be patient. Until then, out of courtesy to all other bookcase users, we need to shut the comments down.

I'll let you all know when things are back to normal again.

I know where I get my ideas from, and it ain't Poughkeepsie

(Hm. Looks like my co-bloggers are busy this Mother's Day. Best fill the gap with weird blather.)

So I get these migraines sometimes.

Because I am me, I classify my headaches. Stress, sinus, and migraines, which might (or might not) be triggered by the first two. I don't get the aura, dammit -- which would be neat -- but I do get the classical hemicrania, the pain on half the skull which Galen named, as well as the urge to vomit and the sensitivity to light. It's a little like being badly hungover, but without having the good time beforehand.

One upside of these migraines is that I can use them to track how I associate concepts. When I am not contemplating my own death, or wondering where the bucket is, I can drift into a dreamlike state, and 'watch' however it is concepts form connections in my head. (This might be a hallucination, with no reference to how the brain works at all, which makes it even cooler, in my opinion.) It's a little like the old TRACE commands in slow, interpreted computer languages.

Anyway. A few days before, I had been reading God's Long Summer, about the various strains of theology that went into the civil rights and anti-civil rights movements in the US, not so very long ago. I'd also been reading R. Sean Borgstrom's amazing short fiction at Hitherby Dragons. It turns out that she wrote some supplements for the In Nomine role-playing game -- which Doug has played, I know -- as well as a very interesting sounding game called Nobilis, where one plays the personification of an aspect of reality, like Night, or Flowers. I'm not sure how that works. There's a live action version of it as well, and I am even less sure how that works.

I also was sent a picture of Bad Mama's Peanut, sitting in her crib amidst a pile of books she had pulled down. I recognized one of the books on the top of the pile as Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. It's bright green and hard to mistake. It's about the odd pop culture legacy the old Confederacy has in the US, Civil War re-enactors and the like. Not something the Balkans has much of, I imagine. Peanut herself is half Yankee, half Rebel, so it was an appropriate choice, even though I think she still views books as 40% delicious teething toy, 60% word repository.

So all these things were sifting through my migraine-blurred mind yesterday. I sensed them attempt to find connections of meaning. They felt as if they were turning and rotating, although there was no visual impression. Then they 'clicked' -- no auditory impression either. And suddenly I had a new idea:

The civil rights re-enactment live action role-playing game!

Now, what can I do with it?

The Dukagjini Code, part 1.75: The coffee cup of forgiveness

As readers may have noticed in previous installments, the kanun of Lek Dukagjini contains a few slightly anachronistic elements. "Blood follows the (trigger) finger" is a central adage of the Code; yet the adoption of the personal firearm must certainly date to the centuries after Lek. (One wonders what the original adage was, if there was an original adage. "Blood follows the hand"? "Blood follows the hilt"?)

In the same way, coffee -- which almost certainly was not consumed in the hills of northern Albania in the fourteenth century -- played an important role in peacemaking under the unwritten law.

Doug mentioned in a recent post how modern Tirana is a city of cafes. But traditional Albania was also a land of coffee consumption. Even poor Albanian households would have a coffee set, with a "metal tray with coffee cups inverted to keep them clean and a tiny pot with a long handle for making Turkish coffee" in the hearth, as Margaret Hasluck recounts in The Unwritten Law in Albania.

(I should note that by "Turkish coffee", Hasluck is using the English name for that style of brewing coffee by boiling its fine grounds, and does not intend any specific ethnic or religious identification by it. Albanians of all faiths drank coffee; and the Turks do brew a fine cup. Languages are weird sometimes.)

Coffee was also a marker of status. A man of standing would be offered the first cup at the table, while a man too slow to kill his enemy would find "his coffee cup was only half-filled, and before being passed to him it was passed under the host's left arm, or even his left leg, to remind him of his disgrace."

As can be imagined, satisfying the demands of honor and blood under the kanun made peacemaking a difficult process. A third party was always involved, and the reconciliation was laden with symbolism. Unsurprisingly, coffee often played an important role. Hasluck provides several examples:

In Shpat the original criminal must take the initiative and go to his enemy's house, escorted for safety's sake by at least one friend. The enemy came to meet him in the open air, but did not offer him his hand, for a man reserves his hand for his friends. Then both went into the house, the coffee, the all-essential to a peace-making, was served, followed perhaps by a meal with meat. Both coffee and meal were 'like a funeral', enlivened by next to no conversation and with little cordiality of mien. A day or two later the enemy must go to the original criminal's house, and the same ceremonies were gone through. Alternate visits had to be paid for some time, until at last the original enemy declared that he had forgiven the other. A marriage very often cemented the peace-making. Occasionally the attempt to make peace broke down -- one's gorge rose at the idea of making friends with the murderer. Then the whole evil story began again, murder alternating with murder.

In Kurbin peace was made by the same methods as in Lumë and Krasniqë. The murderer, who had the sailor collar of his jacket thrown over his head, a sign of mourning and penitence, as well as his hands tied behind his back,a sign of helplessness, remained standing near the door, while his friends sat round the hearth. The host gave coffee to them, but not to him; his forgiveness was not yet assured, and without such assurance he could not drink his coffee. The friends pleaded with the host to untie his hands; they threatened as well as pleaded saying, 'If you like, forgive him -- otherwise kill us along with him'. At length one of two things happened. The host consented to pardon the murderer, got up to throw down his collar and to untie his hands, and bade him sit down and drink coffee, saying, 'You are pardoned, friend'. More frequently, he said he could not at once pardon the man, but would give him a truce of six months, a year, or more; in sign of his mollification he probably gave him coffee, though he sent him away with his hands still tied behind his back and his collar over his head.

Coffee. It's important.

Now, Muse, let's sing of

... books! Ah, the book pile. Mine has been weirdly truncated lately, causing all sorts of free-floating angst to manifest itself like Marley's ghost. "CARLOOOS."

But I have managed to get a few reads in, here and there. Perhaps by posting about them, I can placate the unhappy book spirits here floating about -- and I am so tempted to call them 'agents' -- and get on with my day.

Heinrich Mann, Young Henry of Navarre. Damn, there was a lot of fly-specked romantic treacle here. I don't know how much of it was his translator's fault. Certainly his bro Thomas has had his share of mistranslation oopsies and arghs. But I kinda fear a lot of this was due to Heinrich. Some comments about Fascism and Leaders as applied to the Duke of Guise. The most successful parts were probably the scenes of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, written several years before Kristallnacht, and in fact much like recent descriptions of events in Rwanda. But I'm not looking forward to starting the sequel.

Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Applied theology in action in Mississippi. Not just the good side, either. The most harrowing chapter concerns the theology of former Imperial Wizard of the KKK, Sam Bowers. "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Church burnings, bombings, shootings, people buried in a dam.

Michael Tenzer, Gamelan Gong Kebyar. Wow, this is a dense book, filled with insight into the Balinese gamelan, and stereoscopically, Western musical traditions. I am a tyro musicologist, but I find Tenzer's comparisons exhilarating. Best footnote: Tenzer played Steve Reich's Drumming to his Balinese teacher, who listened to it with mild disdain, and asked, "Why doesn't it go anywhere?" Thank you Claudia and Doug!

Gordon Lish, Extravaganza. Borscht Belt comedy routines given the Gertrude Stein treatment. It's very much a "What the hell? Oh, I see!" sort of book; and after reading it, you too will be able to construct Borscht Belt comedy routines, and skew them at will. On the other hand, if you don't like this sort of thing, you'll be glad it's short.

John T. Noonan, Bribes: the intellectual history of a moral idea. Still only halfway through, but it's hard for me to resist someone who will dive deep into canon law for the apt citation, and then translate Jan Hus as 'John Goose'. I'm very much looking forward to the sections on the history of bribery in America. Andrew Reeves, this book is made for you.

Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews and Anderson & Rosenfeld, Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. I'm pairing these two together, since they're about two great postwar, mainly American, intellectual achievements: jazz and classical neurocomputing. In both cases, you have controversy (Ornette Coleman, perceptrons), you have years in the wilderness, you have geniuses dying young (Parker, Pitts) or starving in pursuit of their art (Werbos ended up writing the checks at the National Science Foundation, most starving jazz people were not so lucky). I nearly wrote 'jazzmen', and that's another point of similarity: the gender ratios are 90:10 male to female. But mainly, these books serve as teasers, for the music and for the research.

And a thank you to Dennis for his suggestion of Popular Music from Vittula, back in December. Cheerful long winters, crazed religious fanatics, random alcoholism, sultry fickle Finnish women, and the best one-line description of losing one's (male) virginity I have ever encountered. [1] It was like going home.

[1] "Like peeing on an electric fence." Obviously from someone who has been there.

Y'all can use the comments for book talk.

The Combover

So Romanian President Traian Basescu finally got rid of his combover.

Back when Basescu was just Mayor of Bucharest -- was it only just six months ago? -- he had a rather spectacular combover 'do, of the sort sometimes known as a "bar-code". It kept the top of his head covered with hair, sort of, but he couldn't feel comfortable going outside on a windy day. Still, the combover fit well with his relaxed, man-of-the-people image.

Last week, though, he finally got it cut. And he's now unashamedly, Presidentially, bald.

(Yes, there is more important news happening in Romania this week. But hey -- combovers are just wrong. So when a man in the public eye finds the strength to walk away from one, it's an inspiration to us all, and worth noting.)

Some "before" pictures here, some more recent shots here.

After Easter

Two things about the days after Orthodox Easter.

First, nobody is eating much. Everyone says they have burta plena -- full bellies -- from all the feasting over the long weekend. Orthodox Easter is both a family holiday and a food holiday; great masses of food are cooked, and it's bad manners not to eat. As a result, after the weekend everyone is indopat -- stuffed.

Second, there's a cool little tradition involving eggs.

Romanians make colored eggs for Easter, just as Americans and Germans do. But when they eat them, there's a little ritual they go through. Two people face each other, holding eggs. One says "Christ is risen!" The other replies, "Truly, he is risen!" Then they tap the eggs together until one breaks. This is usually done in a group, with people sort of competing. The person whose egg breaks last is supposed to have good luck in the coming year.

Googling around, it seems there's supposedly some symbolism here... cracking the eggs represents Christ coming out of the tomb, or something like that. But nobody mentioned this to me. (Well, nobody explained the tradition to me at all. They just asked if I wanted an egg, and suddenly, boom, there I was, muttering in my bad Romanian and smacking my egg against one rival after another.)

Interestingly, I didn't see this tradition at Easter (I was still in Albania) nor in the first couple of days after Easter. But suddenly today, everyone is showing up with eggs from the weekend.

I'm guessing that's because, before today, everyone was still indopat.

Oh, for goodness' sake

Dead rat on the playground yesterday.

This was at Floreasca, which is a very busy playground with a big, modern play center -- tunnel-slides, latters, bridges, all that good stuff. It was about 11:00 in the morning on a holiday (Orthodox Easter Monday), so pretty busy.

The rat was a good-sixed specimen, easily 20 cm (8 inches) long, not counting the naked scaly tail. It had been dead for a little while. Say a couple of hours at least: the ants and the flies were already at it. It was lying next to the bottom of one of the slides. No sign what it died of, but it was definitely dead.

Busy playground, big dead rat. I can't have been the first person to see it.

I stood staring at it for a while. Then I picked up a random piece of trash -- a plastic bag -- and used it to pick up the rat. Carrying it by its tail, I walked across the playground, and dropped it in a trash can.

This isn't the first time I've had this sort of experience on a playground. But it was the first time I found myself angry.

To be clear: it's not the presence of the rat that bothered me. Playgrounds are full of kids, kids drop food, food attracts rats. That's a problem everywhere. What bothered me is that some other parents must have seen that dead rat and thought, well, not my problem.

You know we like Romania. And we try to be good guests here, to learn at least a little of the language, something about the history and the culture. Romania is a beautiful country and has been very good to us. We don't want to be complainers or critics.

But... "Don't leave dead rats lying around a playground." That's basic.

Comments have been restored!

To celebrate, I hereby declare this an OPEN THREAD.

The admirative and the optative

So the Albanian language has these moods.

No, I'm serious. "Mood" is a grammatical term describing the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. And Albanian has some moods that English lacks.

-- Not clear? Okay, think about a common English verb... say, "eat". I eat, you eat, they eat. Now add modal verbs: I could eat, you should eat, they would have eaten. Those modal auxiliary verbs -- could, would, should, ought -- help set the mood of the verb.

Still not clear? Okay, some examples.

Indicative mood. Used for factual statements:

You eat.
We go.

Imperative mood: used for commands, direct requests, prohibitions.

Eat!
Let's go!

Subjunctive mood: several uses, including discussing hypothetical or unlikely events, expressing opinions or emotions, and making polite requests.

I suggest (that) you eat.
Perhaps we should go.

Conditional mood: used to express uncertainty or an "if" situation.

You would eat (if you could).
We might go (if we want to).

BTW, those modal verbs? That's an English thing. Okay, a Germanic thing. Romance languages -- like French and Spanish and Romanian -- don't use them so much. Instead, they change the form of the verb, usually by messing with the ending. So, "eat" in Spanish is comer; "you should eat" is comerias.

Okay, still with me? Well, Albanian has two moods that English doesn't: the optative and the admirative.

The optative (it's also called the desiderative sometimes) expresses hopes or wishes. Think of it as the "if only" or "would that" mood. Only a few languages have an optative as a distinct mood. Among Indo-European languages, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit are examples; elsewhere, Japanese and Finnish.

An ancient Greek speaker might say "Would that you would eat!" with the words "would that" expressed by putting the verb "read" in the optative mood.

Here is an example of the optative mood in ancient Greek:

ei gar genoime teknon anti sou nekros

oh that become-I [OPTATIVE] son instead-of thou corpse
‘O that I might be a corpse, my child, instead of you!’

(Euripides, Hippolytos 1410. Sorry, I can't do the diacritical markings.)

In Japanese the verb inflection -tai expresses the speaker's desire, e.g. watashi wa asoko ni ikitai "I want to go there". Remove the "-tai" at the end, and it becomes "I go there". Neat, neh? Oddly, Japanese uses a completely different method to indicate the desire of a person other than the speaker. (They use the auxilliary verb garu. I know you wanted to know that.)

Google tells me that a contrast to this example is contemporary spoken Finnish, where the optative suffixes -koon and -koot express annoyed dismissal:

Korjatkoon sen itse!
has the he can fix in optative third-person singular
"He can fix it himself!"

Personally, I don't see that as an optative mood, but okay.

Anyway, in Albanian, the optative mood takes the form of an inflection of the verb. So the phrase

If only you would eat!

is, in Albanian, a single word. (If this seems strange, consider the English imperative mood. "Eat!")

And "Oh, how I wish I could see an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker!" would be "I can see (optative) an Ivory-Bill."

Now: waaaay back when the first chariot-riding, beer-drinking, proto-Indo-Europeans came swarming out of Central Asia (or wherever), they spoke a language with four moods: indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative.

Three thousand years later, some Indo-European languages have added new moods, such as the English conditional. But almost all of them have lost the optative. Only a few older or conservative languages -- Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Tocharian, Lithuanian, Albanian -- have kept it. (This leads to the interesting question of whether proto-Indo-European might have shared the optative with proto-Finno-Ugric, the distant ancestor of Finnish and Hungarian. But let that bide.)

Okay, so much for the optative. What of the admirative?

Well, the admirative is a mood that expresses surprise. In English, this is usually represented by an exclamation point. In Albanian, it's done by inflecting the verb. (They have exclamation points too, of course.)

A couple of examples. (These are from the work of Dr. Victor Friedman, of whom more anon.)

A man walks into a barber shop expecting to find the owner, a master barber, but instead no one is there but the owner’s apprentice. The potential customer has two choices in inquiring after the man he is looking for:

(2a) Ku ‘sht‘ mjeshtri?

(2b) Ku qenka mjeshtri?

‘Where is the boss?’

Question (2a) contains a neutral request for information, whereas, in the context given above, version (2b) could only convey surprise at not finding the boss in the shop and could not be dubitative or nonguarantive. An admirative question in this context is thus simultaneously a request for information (attempt to have the addressee take responsibility for an assertion) and an implicit assertion that the speaker had expected to find the boss in his shop

Clear, no? And then this:

If the barber comes out from behind a curtain at the back of the shop, and the customer realizes that the barber was in the building all along and simultaneously receives an answer to his question by seeing the barber, he has the following possibilities of response:

(3a) Ah, k‘tu je.

(3b) Ah, k‘tu pask‘sh qen‘!

‘Ah, here you are’

Response (3a) is a simple acknowledgment that the barber’s act of coming out from behind a curtain in the back of his shop is a sign (index or token) of his presence. Response (3b) however, contains a grammatically expressed tone of the speaker’s surprise that is absent from (3a)... with nuances of ‘as it turns out, you have been here all along and I was unaware of it’.

To use our earlier examples, the admirative would express something like

Wow, you're eating!

Hey, we're going!

But there are a couple of twists.

One, nobody knows where the Albanian admirative comes from. The optative is ancient Indo-European; the admirative seems to have appeared out of nowhere. They didn't get it from the Turks, either. It's unique to the Balkans, where it appears in several languages whose bases are geographically close to each other: Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian. There's reason to believe that the Albanians invented it and the neighbor languages borrowed it, but that just raises the obvious question: why did the Albanians, alone in Europe, develop this unique verb mood?

But wait: there's more. I said that it looked like the neighbors had borrowed this mood from the Albanians. Well, at least one group of neighbors not only borrowed it, but improved on it.

There's a group in the Balkans called the Arumanians. Arumanians are people who speak a language that's very, very close to Romanian... so close that some call it a dialect of Romanian, rather than a separate language. (Apparently an Arumanian and a Romanian can understand each other, if they both speak very slowly and wave their hands a lot.) Arumanians live all over the place, thinly scattered across Albania, Romania, Macedonia and Greece.

Now, there's a dialect of Arumanian -- the Frasheriote dialect, to be precise -- that has taken the Albanian admirative and run with it. That is, they use the admirative, but they use it ironically -- to express not just surprise, but disbelief, uncertainty, or the fact that the information is based on a report. It carries the nuance "to my surprise" or "supposedly, but I don't believe it," or "allegedly, but I won't vouch for it" or "so they say," depending on the context.

So, the Frasheriote Arumanian admirative would go something like

You're eating! (I didn't believe it until I saw you eat.)

We're going! (Someone said so, but I don't think it's true.)

What's interesting is that this wasn't discovered until 1992 -- again by the redoubtable Dr. Friedman:

In the summer of 1992, I was in Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia, conducting field research on Macedonian. There, I had the opportunity to meet Marjan Markovik, who was then working on his M.A. thesis on the verb systems of the Arumanian and Macedonian dialects of Ohrid. At the time, Mr. Markovik was doing fieldwork for the Arumanian part of his thesis with his mother's relatives and their friends (see note 1), who now live in Ohrid and Struga but who come from the village of Beala de Sus (Macedonian: Gorna Belica). We arranged to visit some of them together, and I decided to compose a little story in Macedonian and ask them to translate it into Arumanian. I composed the story so that it would contain many expressions of surprise, doubt, uncertainty, and reported information. Despite the established view that Arumanian had no special verb forms for these nuances, I was curious to see for myself.

Mr. Markovik and I spent a pleasant afternoon and evening with his relatives and their friends, enjoying traditional Arumanian hospitality and discussing with them questions of the Arumanian language over glasses of their delicious homemade arâchie. At one point, I brought out my story, and we taped a line by line translation into Arumanian. The next day Mr. Markovik and I met at my room to transcribe the story. As we sat listening to the tape and writing, we were suddenly amazed to encounter a sentence with a verb form that neither of us had ever seen or heard in Arumanian.

It's not quite up to seeing a live Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, but it still must have been quite a thrill.

What's really interesting about this is that the Arumanians use of the admirative comes very close to being an evidential marker.

Evidential markers are grammatical forms used by a speaker to show where information is coming from. For instance, a language might have a suffix that could be added to a verb to indicate whether "I am told this is true" or "I believe this is true" or "I, personally saw this". Evidential markers are found in a lot of American Indian languages but they're totally absent from the Indo-European language family. Except in Frasheriote Arumanian, kind of.

(Well, to be strictly correct, there's also some ironic/nonconfirmative use of the admirative in Macedonian. But let's not complicate this any more.)

So, I end by putting these sentences in the straight admirative:

An evidential marker in an Indo-European language. And not discovered until 1992.

The Balkans are interesting.

And home again

So, back from Tirana.

Tirana is a very odd city. Nobody is quite sure how big it is; the best guess is around 700,000, but Albania hasn't had a census in a while. The collapse of Albanian Communism led to an exodus from the countryside to the cities, so it's definitely a bigger city than it was, and maybe bigger than it should be. The surprisingly nice city center is ringed by a lot of less nice Communist-era ugly concrete apartment blocks, which in turn is ringed by shantytowns and zoning-free zones of wild and random construction.

I said the city center was surprisingly nice. Couple of reasons. One, a fair chunk of central Tirana used to be off limits to the public. An area known as "the Block", about four or five blocks on a side, was reserved for the villas of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha and other high-ranking Party members. These villas were large and gracious, and surrounded by green lawns and lots of trees.

Well, the Block is no longer off-limits, but most of the villas are still there. Some have become restaurants or coffee shops; one is a cultural institute and English school. But they're still surrounded by lawns and trees.

Meanwhile, the rest of the downtown is marked by two or three great broad avenues from the Communist days, and a couple of huge squares, of the sort that used to have statues of Lenin and Stalin. The combination gives central Tirana a very funny look and feel.

The current Mayor of Tirana -- who's worth a post in his own right -- went on a determined cleanup spree a few years back. So, while the outskirts of the city remain a mess of bare cinderblocks, dirt streets, and shanties, the center has a couple of large green parks. (Also, oddly, a couple of parks that are bare dirt strewn with garbage -- sometimes just across the street.)

Then, for this summer, he went on a construction binge. (Which may be related to the national elections, which are just a few weeks away.) So, all over central Tirana, roads are being repaved, pipes laid, you name it. This is not always a good thing, as Albanian construction seems to be an intermittent and haphazard thing. Sidewalks are frequently punctuated by holes, from little 20-cm ankle breakers to gaping crevasses that can swallow the unwary pedestrian intact.

Further: Tirana is by far the biggest city in Albania, and the downtown is the place to be. So, traffic is incredible, and the sidewalks are always full of people... especially in the evenings, when it seems like every Albanian between the age of 18 and 30 hits the streets of central Tirana.

I haven't even mentioned the occasional bizarrely painted buildings (and I mean bizarre... like the one that was painted in wavy horizontal bands of six or seven different colors). Or the huge drainage ditch down the middle of the largest avenue. It's a very odd place, but I don't know if y'all are really interested in urban design. Or, well, urban non-design. Anyway.

There are a lot of shaven-headed young men driving Mercedes sedans while talking on their cell phones. Albania is supposed to be the stolen car center of Europe. A casual stroll around central Tirana suggests that this is entirely plausible. There are a lot of BMWs and Mercedes. (The high end Volkswagon models are also popular.)

The food is OK. Pizza is extremely popular in Tirana. I ate a lot of pizza. There are little "burek" stands every 100 meters or so.

It's a cafe culture town. Much more like Belgrade than Bucharest, in this regard. Probably seven cafes or coffee shops for every restaurant. Everybody spends a lot of time sitting in outdoor cafes, seeing and being seen.

I liked it. It was dusty and, in April, already getting hot. There were piles of garbage and a lot of beggars. And once you leave the nice city center, the ugliness and poverty quotients go way up. But I liked it anyway.