Halfway down the Danube

Rugova

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here - my right hand has no index finger. -- Jorge Luis Borges, The Lottery of Babylon

Unhappy the land that needs heroes. -- Bertold Brecht

We were in the taxi, driving along, when suddenly the taxi driver lunged forward and stabbed the radio with a stiff index finger. The news, which had been murmuring along, suddenly boomed and blared, filling the taxi with harsh Albanian: President Rugova was dead.

"Bah!" said the taxi driver.

There was silence for a few moments. Solemn music began to play. The driver turned the radio back down.

I couldn't resist. "Bah?" I said.

"I didn't like him."

Certainly not everyone liked Ibrahim Rugova. He wasn't all that likable. He was, by all accounts, a remarkably boring man in person. And in his political life, he was stubbornly, utterly fixated on just two ideas: that Kosovo should be independent, and that this should be accomplished by nonviolent means.

Half right.

There are plenty of pocket biographies of Rugova on the web; I don't feel a need to add to them. If you're interested in the Balkans, you probably know all about him already: the pacifism, the rock collection, the scarf.

There are a couple of things, though...

Rugova was accidental. "He was a kind of loser who sat in the corner drinking too much coffee." He was the head of the Kosovo Writers' Union, for goodness' sake. Even in Kosovo, even in Kosovo under Communism -- when people took things like writers' unions sort of half seriously -- this was a little ridiculous.

Rugova got the job because the best candidate didn't want it, and none of the other candidates could tolerate each other. But nobody was threatened by Rugova. His very lack of charisma propelled him to the fore.

Rugova was stubborn, sometimes to the point of willful blindness. Clear into the summer of 1998 -- months after the KLA had become a broad-based popular movement -- he was insisting that there was no KLA, that it was all a Serbian plot to justify a crackdown. To admit otherwise was to admit that nonviolence had failed, and he was not going to do that.

On the other hand, that same stubbornness let him make a political comeback that once seemed completely impossible.

When the NATO bombing started in March 1999, Rugova disappeared for a day or two. Then he popped up in Belgrade, on Serbian television, shaking hands with Milosevic and calling for a peaceful solution. I remember watching that and thinking, what the hell. We're starting a war for this guy, and he's sitting in a chair chatting casually with Slobo?

Now imagine the feelings of most Albanians. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovars were driven from their homes that March and April by Milosevic's Operation Horseshoe. My taxi driver was one of them. He and his wife waited on a narrow mountain road for eight days. They had a three-month-old baby girl. There were tens of thousands of people on the road, trying to get into Macedonia. It was cold at night, and there wasn't enough food or water, but that wasn't the worst. The worst was not knowing if the Serbs would come at night to kill them.

No, he didn't like Rugova.

The Belgrade episode remains mysterious. Was Rugova under duress? Or was he sincerely trying to talk peace, somehow imagining he could convince Milosevic to back down? Rugova later claimed that his family had been threatened, but he was oddly reticent about the details.

And his subsequent behavior didn't help. He flew to Italy, then sat out the war there, not returning until well after the fighting had stopped.

When he did, he found himself... well, not quite a pariah, but far fallen from his previous status. Oh, he still had supporters. Rugova, that dull and difficult man, turned out to have a curious ability to inspire fanatical devotion. But in late 1999 and 2000 they were painfully few. Most Kosovars viewed him with some mixture of disillusionment, contempt, even hate. The KLA, the heroic guerrillas who had fought for Kosovo's freedom, were the province's new leaders. Rugova was finished.

Except not. A year passed, and another, and the KLA turned out not to be so heroic after all. Yes, they had fought bravely. But they knew nothing about actually governing. Months after the end of the war, there was no electricity, no running water, no heat in the winter. Some KLA members seemed to be getting rich, but the rest of the province's population was worse off than ever. There were rumors of drug smuggling, of KLA "officers" forming criminal gangs to traffic around the region in heroin, arms, prostitutes, stolen cars. Certainly there was open traffic in loot and apartments taken from the Serbs; and certainly many of the KLA guerrillas conducted themselves with a great deal of swagger. And the former comrades seemed to spend more energy bickering with each other than in working together for Kosovo.

Slowly people came back to Rugova. He hadn't changed. He had been living quietly, doing a little writing, working on his rock collection. People came to think: Rugova might be stubborn, and sometimes stubbornly wrong, but he was what he was. You knew where you stood. Rugova's party, the LDK, won an unexpected victory in Kosovo's first free elections in late 2000; and in 2002, Rugova was appointed Kosovo's President, this time for real.

Rugova is worth a long look, if only because determined pacifists in positions of real power are so rare. Rare anywhere, and doubly so in the Balkans.

But me... I don't have anything more to say about Ibrahim Rugova today.

The death of a stranger

The packs of dogs prowling the streets of Bucharest are dangerous to begin with, and this is even more true in the winter when food is scarce. They become vicious and unpredictable. They attack from the back, they work together, they are desperate. I fear them.

The culling of the Bucharest street dogs has been called for many times. It has been done before, with mixed results. Romanians love dogs, in general, and it's hard to push through anything which looks like a cull. So they are doing it differently now, but they are doing it with a vengeance.

Why? Because on Sunday, a member of the Japanese Embassy died after a dog bite.

From what I've been hearing, the man was attacked Sunday night and died because one of the bites tore open a vein. He bled to death before anybody could do anything. It's not as if this happened somewhere in the outskirts of Bucharest. Nicolae Titulescu is a 15 minutes walk from our house, off Piata Victoriei.

Now, the dogs are pulled off the streets again. No, they are not killed. But an amendment to the law that will be pressed through in a hurry says that dogs picked up from the streets are to be kept at the shelters for 72 hours now and not for 15 days anymore. They are then to be sterilized and then... well, what happens then I have not been able to find out.

It's a bit sad that it takes the death of someone (and of a foreign diplomat to boot) in order for the stalled campaign to move again. The stray dog situation is a political mess. 70 to 80 people are bit every day in Bucharest but politicians are fighting over cognizances. Nothing has been done in the last two years, after the Animal Monitoring Agency was dismantled and its activities were taken over by the District of Bucharest from the City of Bucharest. (Still with me? I said it was a mess.) Blame for the suspended "stray dog campaign" which had been introduced by Basescu (then mayor) in 2001 is handed out in troves. Nobody is responsible and it's always the other one's fault.

But it's not only the politicians.

People are picking up dogs from the shelters only to set them free again. What the hey? That is an extremely short-sighted thing to do but it's impossible to argue with dog lovers. Almost all Romanians I've talked to said two things: Yes, the dogs are a problem. No, they should not be killed.

I'm going to make myself really unpopular now: I say, kill them all. As a mother of three kids, who has herself been attacked, who has a friend who needed rabies shots after a bite, and who sees the packs roaming the streets, I am very firm on this one.

Pull the damn dogs off the streets and cull them. Introduce a steep dog tax. Register dogs, give them tags. Give them stupid microchips so irresponsible owners who set their dogs free can be traced and penalized. It's time to get this problem solved once and for all, so that the citizens of Bucharest can wander their streets without fear. It would be nice if all the tourist guides had to be reprinted, too.

Harsh? Maybe. But come to Bucharest and meet a pack. And then we talk again.

Travel side effects

Doug is in Laos and Cambodia for the next four weeks, after 10 days in Kosovo and 2 short days in Bucharest. The kids are understandably confused and upset. We try to ease the pain as best as we can and we found that Skype is a great help.

We can talk daily without bloodcurdling phone bills. We can talk as long as we want, the kids can talk and stop talking and run away and come back without either one of us twitching over money trickling down the drain. We even had Doug sing good-night songs to the boys via Skype. With the webcam, Doug can watch the boys during the evening routine of bath, book, brush and watch his youngest getting more alert every day. I recommend Skype to all traveling Dads and Moms.

There is just one thing you have to be careful about:

Yesterday, we had the first video call with the boys since Doug landed in Laos. David prodded the laptop a little and said - "Daddy, are you in computer?"

The connection was a bit bad and I shifted to text chat instead of talking - I can almost type as fast as I talk anyway. As I started typing, David started screaming: "Don't do that, don't do that!"

He's 2.5 years old. He throws fits for every reason you can think of, and then some. I try to ignore it as best as I can. But this time, he wouldn't be consoled, grabbed my hand, pulled it away from the keyboard and said, with tears running down his chubby cheeks: "Daddy in computer! Don't hurt Daddy! Don't hurt Daddy!"

Things were explained, and no lasting damage has been done. We think. Although - David did tell his teacher today that Daddy went back into the computer...

Off the Plane in Vientiane

Now I'm in Laos.

I've only been here for half a day, but I can see already that this is a strange country. I mean, it's still officially Communist, and it's very poor. But there's all this... stuff.

Things about Laos that are totally Communist:

Opaque, sluggish bureacracy. To get a visa costs $30 and about half an hour of filling out forms. I ran to be in the front of the line and so got done in well under an hour. There was one (1) desk for perhaps 100 people, so the ones at the end of the line were looking at a 2+ hour wait.

Hideous modern architecture.

Attractive pre-Communist architecture that's been allowed to go unpainted, get covered with mold, and slowly fall apart.

Tiny, slow elevators.

Low-pressure, variable temperature showers.

Lots of guys in uniforms wandering around, many carrying automatic weapons.

Crumbling sidewalks

No construction cranes in sight anywhere. (Go a few stories up in a building in the center of town and scan the skyline. Voila, the construction crane index: a crude first measure of economic vigor.)

Frickin' huge Palace of Culture.

National Museum of the Revolution (closed).

Dust

Things in Laos that don't seem very Communist:

Hotels with Executive Suites

Hotels with friendly, helpful staff

Markets overflowing with fresh fruits and vegetables

Lots of little shops, especially tailors and beauty salons

Buddhism. Not as obvious as in Thailand, but we passed a huge (and obviously active) temple complex coming in from the airport, smaller shrines are everywhere, and I've seen at least half a dozen yellow-robed, shaven-headed monks wandering around doing their thing.

Loud music playing on the streets.

Lots of Western backpackers looking for eco-tourist adventures and white-water rafting, along with all the standard infrastructure that goes with Western backpackers (internet cafes, 10$ a night guesthouses, cheap restaurants, etc.)

Huge National Palace of Culture is not actually eye-poppingly hideous.

So what does it all mean? Hey, I just got here.

Consider this an open thread for things Southeast Asian. (Or Rugova. I'll do the Rugova thing soon, honest.)

Green soul transplanted

Yesterday evening I sat at the dinner table with the boys while my maid cleaned up the kitchen. She washed the dishes, and she washed them Romanian style, under running water. While I winced listening to all that water gushing down the drain, fractions of all the conversations that I ever had with her and her predesessors flashed through my head.

"Why?"
"It's a waste of water."
"Water is cheap." Delivered in a dead pan voice.
"Hm, water is actually a very valuable resource. It's important to conserve water because...," trailing off as I see a blank look appear on her face. Oh, my green soul, it ached.

I like my house clean. Unfortunately, my definition of clean differs vastly from that of my maid(s). I don't like to have cleaning supplies in the house that have the potential of killing my children. Anything that cannot be ingested without little more than a stomach ache is, in my eyes, a hazard to my kids and very probably not good for the environment.

Before we started to use rechargeable batteries, I collected the empty batteries and brought them to Germany on the plane, to be disposed of in a more responsible way than just dumping them into the trash. (These days, I think one can actually bring them to a collecting place at the Carrefour. I have no idea what happens to the batteries afterwards, though.)

Every time I throw away paper, plastic or glass, I wince. I'm used to a thorough recycling system and while the German one has its weaknesses and its problems, it's better than just piling every thing on one big dump.

One cannot buy organic cleaning products in Romania and I could not convince my maid to use lemon juice and baking soda for scouring the sinks. So I bring green cleaning products from the US and from Germany. Blue juice and red juice are not for drinking in my household (although it wouldn't hurt you terribly if you did, which is the whole point).

This resulted in the following little incident: a few weeks into Alan's toilet training, my (prior) maid went out and bought a big bottle of Domestos from her own money. She then proceeded to use half of the bottle on the tiny downstairs bathroom which, granted, stank to high heaven. Alan had watched his adored friend Jesse (aged 5) pee while standing and couldn't be convinced to sit down ever after. So yes, the bathroom needed cleaning every day. But it was just fine to use one of the green products for this. Urine is in itself not a terribly horrible substance to remove. It doesn't even withstand simple water and soap... Anyhow. I came home and could not even stand to be in the house, that's how much the stink of Domestos had invaded every nook and cranny. Domestos has a big fat black cross in a red square on the back of the bottle - health hazard! Keep out of reach of children! I was pregnant at the time, David was just two years old, Alan some over three. I made her take the rest of the bottle home and did not offer to pay for it. I don't think she ever forgave me for that.

I tried to explain my reasons to her. I tried to explain to her the connection between cleaners, clean water, and our future. I guess I am not a born teacher (coming from five generations of teachers on both sides of my family, this must have required a rare genetic mutation).

This ties in with the heating-plastic-thing. We used to heat the kids' bottles in the microwave. When the studies came out about chemicals leaking out of heated plastic, we abandoned this practice. The following conversation ensued:

"L-, we don't heat the bottles in the microwave anymore. There is a study out [snip long explanation]. We are going to use this [ceramic milk pot] instead and then fill the milk into the bottles. I'd like to get glass bottles but that will have to wait until we get to Germany next."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"We always used to heat the bottes in the microwave before."

"Yes, but now we know it's dangerous. The study found that [longer explanation in simpler words, or so I thought]."

"But the kids never got sick from their milk."

"Eh..."

Well. I have to say that she follows my instructions. The milk gets heated in a ceramic pot. The dishes are washed in the sink filled with water. Red and Blue Juice are used in abundance. However, I have the sneaking suspicion that she thinks I'm a little bonkers. In which respect she is, of course, totally correct -- but for different reasons than she assumes.

On an final note, I tried to contact the local Greenpeace chapter which, for some odd reason, sits in Maramures. The activist center sits in Cluj. Both never replied.

(That was almost three years ago, though. Now, there is something called the Rainbow Cafe for activism in Eastern Europe. I couldn't get the site to work in either Firefox or Explorer, though. Hm.)

7 x 7

[now with added Claudia content!]

7 x 7 is forty-nine. This is one of those godawful Internet meme chain letter deals. I got tagged by Cosma Shalizi, and the only way I can get rid of the curse is to pass it on.

1. Seven things to do before I die

(i) Get married. (ii) Have kids. (iii) Have grandkids. (iv) Eat at a three-star Michelin restaurant. (v) Get season tickets at Lambeau. (vi) Write that novel I keep not talking about. (vii) Smite the wicked.

2. Seven things I cannot do

(i) Keep my shoelaces tied. (ii) Cold calls. (iii) Travel through time. (iv) Tolerate stupidity. (v) An Australian accent. (vi) Pick locks (yet). (vii) Think of a seventh thing.

3. Seven things that attract me to [New York City]

(i) The friendliness of its people. (ii) The subway. (iii) The museums. (iv) The restaurants. (v) The New York Public Library. (vi) Brooklyn. (vii) When people ask me where I'm from, there never is any goddam subtext of "because, gosh, you can't possibly be from around here".

4. Seven things I say most often

(i) [growl] (ii) [heavy sigh] (iii) [really scary laugh] (iv) [slightly less frightening laugh] (v) "Carlos speaking." (vi) "O, what a happy/cute/adorable/etc. baby!" (vii) [various cusswords]

5. Seven books (or series) that I love

Jesus, Cosma. If I name seven, the rest will get jealous.

Okay, okay. (i) Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville. (ii) Ellington/Mingus/Roach, Money Jungle. (iii) John Zorn, Naked City. (iv) The Langley Schools Music Project, Innocence and Despair. (v) Patti Smith, Horses. (vi) Prince and the Revolution, Purple Rain. (vii) Guns 'N' Roses, Appetite for Destruction.

6. Seven movies that I could watch over and over again

(i) The Blues Brothers. (ii) The Big Lebowski. (iii-vii) to be determined at a later date.

7. Seven people I want to join in, too.

I'm afraid that, for the greater good, I will have to be a chain termination step. (i-ii) I'm passing to Doug and Claudia, and (iii) Carrie at Bad Mama can join in if she really wants. If (iv) Syd Webb, (v) Bernard Guerrero, (vi) Frankie Burdette, or (vii) Noel Maurer want to reply in the comments, I won't delete them.

[new stuff down here]

All right, all right.

1. Seven things to do before I die

i. Run a half-marathon.
ii. Write a novel that someone actually wants to publish.
iii. Travel to Nepal.
iv. Get my brain back.
v. Learn scuba diving.
vi. Beat Doug at Backgammon. (Hah. I can dream, eh?)
vii. Travel into space. (Ditto.)

2. Seven things I cannot do

i. World Peace.
ii. Math.
iii. Real New York Bagels.
iv. Not shriek when W says something stupid.
v. Being a nice person in the mornings.
vi. Beat Doug at Backgammon.
vii. Travel into space.

3. Seven things that attract me to [Bucharest]

i. The parks.
ii. My friends.
iii. Our house.
iv. The restaurants.
v. The expat life style.
vi. Our elusive cat.
vii. The beautiful architecture (inbetween the horrible architecture).

4. Seven things I say most often

i. "Lift both lids, Alan."
ii. "Flush the toilet, Alan."
iii. "Wash your hands, Alan/David."
iv. "Oh, my goodness."
v. "If you can't drive, get off the street, darn it!"
vi. "Guckemal."
vii. "Hey, love."

5. Seven books (or series) that I love

i. Schott's Miscellany.
ii. Das Glasperlenspiel.
iii. The collected poems of Else Lasker-Schüler.
iv. The Vlad Taltos series.
v. Ditto on the Calvin and Hobbes.
vi. The Sandman series.
vii. Lord Peter Wimsey series

6. Seven movies that I could watch over and over again

i. Zugvögel - Einmal nach Inari
ii. I hired a contract killer
iii. Der bewegte Mann
iv. Dinner for One
v. The Thin Man movies
vi. Star Wars (sorry, all of them)
vii. Erleuchtung garantiert

Syd's Antipodean Pimp List

Books
(i) The Lord of the Rings.
(ii) The Book of Common Prayer.
(iii) PG Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves series.
(iv) Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.
(v) Small Gods.
(vi) A Distant Mirror.
(vii) Oxford Concise Australian Dictionary.

Movies
(i) The Blues Brothers.
(ii) Dragnet. (Yes, Syd, I know. I have to draw the line somewhere.)
(iii) The Seven Samurai.
(iv) Casablanca.
(v) Babette's Feast.
(vi) Singing in the Rain.
(vii) Young Einstein.

Bernard's Upstate Pimp List

Books
(i) The Rise And Fall of the Great Powers.
(ii) A Free Nation Deep In Debt
(iii) A New Economic View of American History.
(iv) Angela's Ashes.
(v) Buy Jupiter.
(vi) The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.
(vii) Expanded Universe.

Movies
(i) Escanaba In Da Moonlight.
(ii) A Mighty Wind.
(iii) It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
(iv) A Fish Called Wanda.
(v) Akira Kurosawa's Dreams.
(vi) Saving Private Ryan.
(vii) Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Still waiting for Noel and Frankie.

Phoning Kosovo

Here are some things I've recently discovered about telecommunications in Kosovo.

[Pause to allow people to run away.]

Kosovo doesn't have a country code. Makes sense, right? It isn't a country. Officially, legally, it's still part of Serbia. So it still must use Serbia's country code, 381.

This has some interesting consequences.

Here's one: when you call from country A to country B, you accrue two charges. (Or more, but never mind that now.) Your local provider charges you for originating the call, and then the other country's telecom charges you for terminating the call.

This is lumped together as a single charge on your bill, so you don't need to worry your pretty little head about the details. After all, if I use Verizon to call London, all I want to know is, how much does it cost? And the answer is -- say -- 10 cents per minute, and I make the call, pay the bill when it comes, and move on. But break that 10 cents per minute open, and it's a sandwich of all sorts of charges. And maybe 3 of those 10 cents are British Telecom's termination fee.

(And what happens to those 3 cents? Well, every so often, Verizon tallies up all the calls to British Telecom, and BT does the same for its calls to Verizon. And then they compare the numbers, who owes more to whom, and they "settle". In the old days, this was done between national telcos, and accounts were settled four times per year. Today there are thousands of companies providing international service, and there's a large building in Geneva, Switzerland -- The International Telecommunications Union, or ITU -- full of people making sure it all comes out even.)

Okay, so say I call Kosovo. Well, I have to dial 381, right? So the international switching system sends my call to... Serbia. Belgrade, to be precise.

Now, at first -- just after the 1999 Kosovo War -- the Serbs were pretty touchy about forwarding calls to Kosovo. In fact, they refused to do it. At first.

But then they changed their minds. And now they forward calls to Kosovo pretty conscientiously.

Why? Because they get to pocket the termination fees.

Three cents a minute, give or take, may not sound like much. But over time, it adds up. The total annual loss to Kosovo is measured, certainly in millions, and probably in tens of millions.

-- To be clear: Telecom Serbia also must pay the termination fees for international calls originating in Kosovo. But incoming international calls outnumber outgoing ones by four or five to one. (This is common in developing countries, for a variety of reasons.) So it's a huge net moneymaker.

The local Kosovo telecom -- Post and Telecom of Kosovo, or PTK -- protests this vigorously, but there's not much they can do. They applied to the International Telecommunications Union for their own country code, but were rejected. Reasonably enough; they are, after all, not a country. So they have no choice but to sit and fume while Serbia Telecom continues to pocket millions of dollars every year.

There is an interesting exception to this, though. Now, note: the following seems to be an urban legend, telecommunications style. I have no idea if it's really true. Two different people have told it to me, but who knows? It could just be nationalist bragging. That happens a lot, around here. So I make no claims that this is true.

So: the story is, the Albanians of Albania got tired of seeing calls to their cousins in Kosovo routed through Belgrade. Why should they put money in Serbian pockets whenever they wanted to talk to a friend or relative across the mountains? The whole thing was obviously and grossly unfair, a relic of Serb colonialist oppression.

So the main international switch in Tirana got some creative reprogramming.

Normally whenever an international switch hears the country code for Serbia -- three, eight, one -- it promptly opens a circuit to Belgrade. But the switch in Tirana doesn't do that. Instead, it waits for the next couple of digits. If they are an area code for Serbia, it switches the call to Belgrade as normal. But if they're an area code for Kosovo, it turns around and sends the call directly to Kosovo. Belgrade never even knows about it. And the Albanian telecom and PTK quietly and discreetly settle termination payments between themselves.

Of course, if this is happening, it would be a gross violation of ITU regulations and international telecommunications treaties. So, nobody would care to admit to it publicly. Wherefore I emphasize that this is an urban legend, and to be taken with a grain of salt.

Telecommunications: more interesting than I realized.

(President Rugova is dead, BTW. I'll try to post on that in the next day or so.)

More filler, Captain!

Usually I fill in a little when Doug and Claudia are busy and there's a lull in the blog. Swollen tendons in my shoulder, no fun. Anyway.

Jim Henley covers the gridiron playoffs so I don't have to.

Two cool books read. Dark Shamans: Kanaima and the Poetics of Violent Death, by Neil Whitehead, a University of Wisconsin professor who survived an attack of assault sorcery in Amazonia: basically, poisoning, mind games, mutilation, and ultimately, ingesting the deliquescing flesh of the victim's corpse by a serial killer type. I've elided some of the details, and there's a reason for that. You can read an interview with Whitehead here.

The other is Benedict Anderson's long-awaited book on Jose Rizal, the great Filipino poet-novelist-opthalmologist-revolutionary-martyr, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. The first flag is this banner, which does need some explanation. Oh my people.

Paging through ornithologist-and-promoter-of-urban-legends Jared Diamond's Collapse (no link). Ugh. James B., you will owe me a drink. Hint to Jared: if you're going to use something as your primary source, you might want to mention if it comes to exactly the opposite conclusion as you do. Once is happenstance. Twice is sloppiness. The third time is enemy action.

Picture of the week

A fin whale found dead in the Baltic sea found it's resting place in front of the Japanese Embassy in Berlin, courtesy of Greenpeace. I really hope it stank to high heaven.

For more information, see Greenpeace.org.

Kid wisdom

When you are a single parent even the most mundane tasks can be challenging. Like, getting into the shower. This morning, I was so desperate that I took a shower while the boys were playing next door in their room. There was neither blood nor vomit on the floor when I emerged, so that went well. I could even slather myself with body lotion -- with the help of four little hands, all the while wondering whether I was just laying the groundworks for years of therapy for both of them...

They also helped me blowdry my hair. Three brushes can make a lot of damage. As it turned out, they were very happy with the result. Alan looked me over and said, happily: "You look very nice now." He turned to walk out of the bathroom, stopped, came back and added:

"Now you are as beautiful as your mommy."

Well, good.

(This is not as bad as you may think. My Mom is indeed beautiful and she has very good aging genes, meaning she looks about ten years younger than she is. And Alan loves her to bits so it's the highest compliment he can pay.)

Back in Kosovo

I'm in Kosovo again this week.

I haven't been posting much because I've been busy. (Telecom stuff. Much more interesting than I would have thought.) Claudia hasn't been posting because she's a single parent with two small children, one of whom has the croup, and a baby who's decided to try on "fussy" for a few days. Both these situations are likely to continue until next week, so it may be a little quiet around here.

Claude did find time to post a few new pictures on the spawnblog. So there's that.

If time permits, I'll try to post something about the curious state of telecommunications in Kosovo. (Still a state monopoly, but they're getting dinged on termination fees.) Meanwhile, consider this an open thread. What do you want to talk about?

Welcome to the world

Welcome to my brand new nephew Nicholas who was born in Germany last night, a whopping 52 cm and 3200 g -- four weeks before his scheduled due date! If he keeps this up, he'll beat the crap out of my boys in a few years. In keeping with family tradition, he's sleepy, has black hair and blue eyes, and will grow up trilingually (in his case, German, Spanish and French).

Congratulations, Hajo and Maria!

I could hug the entire world.

Fly Taxi

I've been travelling a lot lately. Which means I've been in and out of Bucharest's Otopeni Airport.

Sometimes, Claudia can pick me up. But when she can't, I use Fly Taxi.

Fly Taxi is the monopoly taxi service at Otopeni Airport. It's been around for about two years now. And the story of Fly Taxi is an interesting little parable of how things work in modern Romania.

Some background. Bucharest has just one commercial airport: Otopeni, recently renamed Henri Coanda. It's about 20 km (12 miles) north of the city. It gets twenty or so international flights a day, plus lots of local ones to other cities in Romania.

Now, up until last year, if you arrived at Otopeni Airport, you really, really, really wanted to have someone to pick you up. Either a friend or a pre-arranged taxi driver. Because if you didn't have someone to pick you up, then you had two choices, neither of them good.

1) You could take the bus. Very cheap, but also crowded and painfully slow. About an hour to reach the city, most of which you'd spend standing.

2) You could take a taxi.

This option would present itself very quickly. Step out of the arrival gate, and you'd be surrounded by men yelling at you. "Taxi! Taxi!"

They were pretty aggressive. They'd pluck at your sleeve, get in your face, try to grab your luggage away. "Very cheap! Where do you go? Good taxi, here!" You could wave them away, but they'd follow you persistently right out of the terminal.

If you actually gave in and took one of their taxis... well. I did it twice.

First time: I negotiated the driver down to about $20. I knew the going rate should be about $14, his opening offer was $50, I was tired. Fine. But... he spent the entire trip trying to renegotiate another $5 out of me. We weren't out of the airport before he was turning around in his seat to leer at me in what he obviously thought was an ingratiating sort of way:

"Twenty five dollars!"

"No, twenty dollars."

"Twenty five dollars very good!"

"No. Twenty."

"Come on... twenty five dollars!"

"No."

"Where are you from?"

[thinking, no, we are not making friends here] "America. Twenty dollars."

"America very good! Very --" [gesture of rubbing money with hands. I am not making this up.]

"Twenty dollars." [Remember, all this was after we'd already agreed on a price. Apparently getting into the taxi reset the negotiation.]

"Is very good! Twenty-five dollars. Very good."

"NO."

"Twenty-five dollars."

"Okay, stop the taxi. Stop."

[With an 'aw, come on' look'] "No, no! My friend. Is no problem."

[Thirty seconds silence]

"So, twenty-five dollars?"

It went like that all the way home.

I won't even mention the guy who dropped me off at Piatsa Dorobants... well, okay. I told him I lived 'near Piatsa Dorobants'. As we got close, I said it was on Strada Bruxelles, which is about three blocks away from the Piatsa. For driving those three extra blocks, he immediately tried to charge me another $10. We could not reach agreement, so I ended up piling out of the car with all my luggage and walking the last three blocks, garment bag over my shoulder and suitcase rolling along the sidewalk behind.

(The taxi driver followed me the first 50 yards or so, waving his hands and yelling. He went down to five bucks, okay, stupid rich foreigner, five lousy bucks... then he just yelled something unpleasant at me and drove off.)

My, my, the memories. My point here is: you didn't want to take a taxi. Bucharest taxi drivers are not generally that bad, but somehow the airport attracted the most obnoxious and dishonest ones.

Which brings us to Fly Taxi.

I mentioned it was a monopoly, right? Well, it was set up that way. And then bid out, with a bid process that was public and open to all. Transparent procurement! Very modern and European.

Except that the bid was structured rather oddly. It said things like, "To qualify, you must already have a fleet of at least sixty large taxis. Painted silver. And you must be willing to post a rather large bond. And your taxis must all have antilock brakes and, ummm, air bags."

As it turned out, only one taxi fleet could fit these rather precise requirements. This taxi fleet ended up being the only one that bid on the contract. So, no surprise, it won.

You'll probably be shocked, shocked to hear that the fleet was owned (through an intermediary) by someone who had previously served in government at a high level, and who had very close connections to the former PSD administration. Also that he expanded and upgraded his taxi fleet a few months before the bid went public... doing things like painting the cars silver, and adding air bags and antilock brakes.

So: a smelly little sweetheart deal, which got past Romania's rather toothless Competition Council (the local equivalent of the FTC) and is now locked in for years to come. (IMS Fly Taxi's monopoly runs until 2014 or so.)

And -- again, big surprise -- Fly Taxi, having a monopoly, charges monopoly rates: more than double the normal taxi fare.

But.

Fly Taxis are good.

Okay, it's not Tokyo or even London, but by Bucharest standards they're terrific. The taxis are clean, and are roomy enough to hold our entire family plus luggage. The taxi drivers are polite and know their way around the city. And -- this is quite unusual here -- they're pretty good drivers. (Bucharest taxi drivers tend to be really awful drivers. Not just fast, but scary bad.)

Use Fly Taxi, and you'll pay over double the normal rate. But that's still pretty low -- it's just over a dollar per mile -- and you'll have a decent experience.

In a perfect world, there would have been three or four licenses, and the bidding would have been fair, and competition would bring the cost down to normal rates. We'd be paying about $8 for the airport trip instead of about $15.

But at least now you can take a taxi from the airport. Before Fly Taxi, you really couldn't. The airport taxis were just too horrible: dirty, dishonest, bad drivers, just awful in every way.

(They're still around, BTW. Not as many -- I think Fly Taxi has eaten a lot of their business -- but still a few, hanging around outside the gate from Customs, muttering "Taxi? Taxi?" to every foreign-looking traveller.)

So, as with a lot of things about Romania, I end up of two minds. Fly Taxi is a state-granted monopoly, bestowed in a pretty overtly corrupt manner. It's charging well above the market rate. Every time I use it, I'm putting money in the pocket of a crooked businessman.

But... I'm really glad that Fly Taxi exists, I think it's a huge step forward, and I use it a lot. And if you're coming to visit Bucharest, I recommend you use it, too.

Maintaining the contradictions. It's just that kind of place, I guess.

Terrestrial Ecosystems through Time, the money graph

It's been a while since I've read a paragraph that has wildly changed how I look at the world. I'm so jaded! Anyhow, here it is:

The Recent is a poor analogue for nearly all aspects of Paleozoic ecosystems except for those of the latest Permian. The lack of tetrapod herbivory, the narrow spectrum of plant-insect interactions, the importance of detritivory as the base of the food chain, and the strong partitioning of ecological resource space along widely divergent phylogenetic lines in plants are themes that run throughout most of the Paleozoic. Because of these and other fundamental differences, ecological models based on the present cannot be applied to Paleozoic examples in a uniformitarian manner.

Rough translation: life on land, until about 250 million years ago, was to modern land-based ecosystems much like what a mercantilist, caste-based economy is to a modern market economy. You know the kind: this ethnic group does this, while that ethnic group does that, and those guys? they take care of the horses; and there's never a winner without a loser.

Of course, right after a modern ecology got established in the late Permian, the Earth got whacked with the largest documented extinction event ever. Ah well.

Grammar

Considering that Doug and I met over a question of grammar (vowel harmony, to be precise), it's small wonder that we take a heightened interest in the speech development of our kids. They grow up with three languages and we take more than a little pride in their being fluent in all three of them.

Some observations about tri-lingual kids (findings may vary in other test subjects, of course).

Both Alan and David will mix languages but only if they need a word they cannot remember at the moment otherwise know well enough. As an example, they will use "table" in a German sentence because their hard drive can't find the word "Tisch". It seems strictly necessary to then apply the grammatical structure of the language the borrowed word comes from:

David: "Uite, Geta, Geld-ul!" (Look, Geta, the money!)

This sentence is Romanian with a German loan word that has, in a very consistent manner, appropriated a Romanian article.

Alan: "Mama, ich hab dir ein Bild gepaintet." (Mommy, I painted you a picture.)

The German requires the past perfect here, so "painted" is transformed to "gepaintet". He does this a lot, recently.

In cases where they need a word they don't know, they will translate verbally or invent a new word. Alan called butterflies "Butterfliegen" for some days before he finally got it down that in German, butterflies are really "Schmetterlinge". Or some months ago he told me that his Daddy needed his "Gläser" although in German the plural of "glas" cannot be put onto your nose. (Well, actually, they can but this word for glasses is old-fashioned and outdated.)

Grammatical structure often seems to linger on long after a language has been switched. English with German word sequence, Romanian with English structure -- all very common in our house. We gently repeat the wrong sentences in the correct form but don't make a great fuss about it. Most of the times, the boys will repeat the correct sentence and then move on. I hope this is the right approach.

And then, of course, are the times when they just startle us.

Doug: Alan, can I eat your head?
Alan, screaming: No, I don't want to be eaten!

Perfect use of the passive voice. Oh, this is my child all right.

Kneipp, with two p's

I have to amend my husband's previous post a little. Being American, he has little knowledge of the power of cold water. Even my dear friend Natalie, who is a doctor, didn't come up with the magic word:

Kneipp.

(Yogis, my ass!)

The German priest Sebastian Kneipp lived from 1821-1897. In 1849, he fell ill with tuberculosis and his doctor all but gave up on him. By chance, Kneipp discovered a little booklet called "Unterricht von der Heilkraft des frischen Wassers" (Instruction in the healing powers of fresh water) written by one Johann Sigmund Hahn. He started a self-treatment, which included daily baths in the Danube river (and doesn't that tie in nicely with our overall theme!). Within a year or so, he was completely recovered.

He continued water treatments for his general health, read books about water treatments, and met with others who had been using water as a healing agent for a long time. Over the years, he developed a system of hydrotherapy, exercise, herbal and natural foods, and order (how German, I know) to promote health and well-being.

He met with a lot of resistence but also with lots of enthusiastic support. He wrote quite a few books and lived to an age of 76 when he succumbed to a tumor. There are a few things that water will just not cure...

A hundred years after his death, his methods are still very popular in Germany. Health insurances will even pay for Kneipp treatments if prescribed by a physician. Whole clinics and spas are devoted to "Kneippkuren". You can easily do Kneipp treatments at home, though.

For instance, a cure for headaches: Do the cold-hot-water alternation on your underarms, up to the elbows. Use either running water or two basins with cold and hot water. About ten times, and leaving the arms in the water until it pains you. Always finish off with a cold dip. Works like a charm.

Also popular is walking in dewy grass. I do this with the kids in summer when we are in Ostheim. Just throw them outside and let them run around barefeet in the moist grass. It doesn't get any easier.

From wikipedia.de

Or, do knee rinses. It's just what it sounds like: alternate hot-cold rinses from the knee down. Will get your feet warm in no time.

In Ostheim, we have a so-called "Kneipp-Becken". It's a stone canal at the bank of the Streu (the local stream). It's constructed so that some water streams through that canal. Depending on the stream's water level, it can be from mid-calf height to hip-height. What you do is you walk through this water, holding on to a reling on one side (slippery stones and fast current make this a prudent measure). It's icy-cold. Cold, cold, cold. Afterwards, you don't feel your feet anymore. And then, a little later, they get really really warm. You will not freeze anymore during the rest of the day. Our mayor does it daily, with only a break from November to March, or so. He never gets colds. I did it when I was pregnant with Alan and had no problems with swollen ankles at all. Alas, it didn't work for the heartburn.

Doug, of course, doesn't really believe it will work. He's quite dubious but I'm happy to report that he still does the cold rinses. I just heard him scream in the shower like he was being murdered. And then he walked out with roses on his cheeks, very much awake. Hah.

Cold Showers

Strange weather here the last couple of days.

Yesterday it rained and rained, and was around 6 or 8 degrees Celsius... mid forties, for the Americans. For January in Bucharest, that's pretty warm and wet. It was cooler today, down to 2 or 3 Celsius, but still raining. Walking around, it felt like a brisk day in March.

It has the flowers fooled: this morning I saw green shoots poking through the ground by our front gate. Oh, dear. Can you hold that for two months, guys?

This is peak cold season. I fully expect to waste at least a week of the next month shuffling, wheezing, and sniveling miserably. I generally do. I'm guzzling orange juice and zinc tablets prophylactically, but the historical record is depressingly consistent: in winter, I get colds.

This has made me desperate enough to try the Uncle Hubert Remedy.

Uncle Hubert is Claudia's maternal uncle. At the annual family reunion/Christmas party this year, he told Claudia that he had not had a cold for seven years. This despite his being well into his eighth decade.

Why? Because at the end of every hot shower, he turns the water to maximum cold for some period of time. This brisk douse has a tonic effect. How it works is unclear, but Uncle Hubert says that work it surely does: he simply never gets colds any more.

Yes, I know. But like I said, I'm desperate.

So far, I'm up to about 15 seconds. It may help if I tell you that I love long, sybaritic showers, vastly wasteful, with the heat turned up to near unbearable and the pressure on "firehose". So this is... something of a departure.

How long will I keep it up? Until I get a cold, of course.

Meanwhile: has anyone ever heard of this odd practice? Does it have a name? Or any evidence whatsoever that it works? (Hah.) Everyone around the table nodded sagely when Uncle Hubert described the practice, but that may just be the expression of, shall we say, a certain underlying German attitude towards brisk physical sensation.

Yes, and then for my arthritis I spank myself hard for five minutes with a paddle made of dried Swedish reindeer leather.

Ah, that sounds like it would work.

Anyway. If anyone knows anything about this, I'd be interested to hear.

Resolutions 2006

No particular order.

1. To have fewer dates like the plots of old "Three's Company" episodes, and more dates like the plots of old "A-Team" episodes.

2. To catch up on cool math. A guy in Wisconsin proved the 'crank' theorem of the Ramanujan partition congruences a few months ago, and I missed it! The basics of Ricci flow, to see what the discussion about Perelman and the Poincare conjecture is about. The new celestial mechanics. (I will let John Derbyshire have the Riemann hypothesis for now, thanks.)

3. To learn New Testament Greek. I've been putting this off long enough, and it's gotta be easier than Tagalog grammar. (After the Angel of Tongues, Babel, created Basque, he decided to go on vacation on Luzon, where he got smashed on calamansi lime gimlets. "Infixes," he cried -- or rather, he slurred -- pausing to zap into existence a few Object-Subject-Verb languages in the jungle somewhere. "Reduplicatives!" he exclaimed, accidentally creating Albanian. "Ergativity!" and all those click languages in southern Africa came into being. And so forth. Then, when he was hung over, Tagalog.)

4. To accept whatever decision Brett Favre makes with a light heart.

5. To visit my friends in far-off places more.

6. To go to the gym five times a week instead of two, like I used to. Screw this getting older business. Plenty of time to be lazy when I'm dead.

7. (optional) To give Finnegan's Wake another stab.

8. (near-term) To finish up the one post on Mendelian inheritance for Carrie at Bad Mama and the other post on the NYC maple syrup smell for the Brooklyn crew.