Csíkszereda musings

Romanian Education System (brief reprise)

2012-01-26T11:16:00.000+02:00

This is a sort of coda to my post on money in the Romanian education system (or rather the lack of it). I still have to write the third in that series, which sort of ended abruptly when things got rather hairy last year. That should come soon, now that I have remembered that this blog exists (and that I have some time)

It's just a short one, but illustrative of so much I feel. The government has decided to create a "Year Zero" class for children who have yet to begin the first grade (nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge, you'll be glad to hear). This is to ensure that children entering year one are prepared for the rigours of a school education. Or something like that. I think in the UK something similar is called the Reception Class. Anyway, it seems like a pretty reasonable idea on the face of it. Kids here don't start school until they're 7, and the idea of a sort of slightly more schoolish year between kindergarten and that first year of your actual real school makes a certain amount of sense.

The problem of course is that while the idea is reasonable, the practicalities have not been thought about in the Ministry. You can imagine someone sitting there saying in some meeting "Let's create an extra year of school, that will prepare kids for things better, and possibly enhance learning", and the others just sit around nodding their heads and saying "Excellent idea. Consider it law". The problem, of course, as you may already have worked out is that when you effectively create an extra year of school, you need to find some teachers to be in charge of it, and crucially you need classrooms to put these kids in. And this in a school system which is basically being starved of any money whatsoever - teachers' pay, buildings, materials, everything is being cut. And yet, here is this plan to put kids into these schools a year earlier. It makes you want to weep.

What solution will be found? Well right now it seems that the most likely solution is that the kids will have to have their reception classes somewhere other than the already overcrowded schools. Where, you may be asking yourself. Well, the plan will of course free up some space in certain buildings, so at the moment the most likely way of coping and meeting the requirements of the new law seems like it will be that the reception classes will happen ... in the kindergartens. Thus ensuring that, in fact, at the end of the day, absolutely nothing will have changed. I can think of no better example of the incompetence of this government.

My Hopes for Transylvania in 2012

2012-01-13T11:30:00.000+02:00

It's the New Year, and I have a dream, and all that...

I have this utopian vision in which people get over their need to be intolerant dicks who see everything through nationalistic spectacles. (I mean those that are intolerant dicks who see everything through nationalistic spectacles anyway. The others who are not can just be as they are, safe in the knowledge that they haven't incurred my meaningless wrath).

Anyway, to the idiots who insist on making everything into some national dick waving contest:

Let me let you into a secret: There is absolutely no difference between Hungarians and Romanians, aside from the fact that they speak a different first language (and there are a few nurtured "cultural" differences). That's it. In fact anyone who is from Transylvania is pretty much guaranteed to have both Romanian and Hungarian ancestors, that's just the way it is.

The history of Transylvania is one of diversity and different groups. Can't people be proud of that rather than find it as a reason to be irritating intolerant bastards? It makes me so tired.

Can't you celebrate the diversity? One of the greatest ever heroes of Transylvanian (and Hungarian) history is Matyas Kiraly (Matthias Corvinus). He's a great example of a Transylvanian having (as he did) a Romanian father and a Hungarian mother. Everyone should celebrate him, but instead Hungarians want to pretend that the Romanian side didn't exist and Romanians (or at least Gheorghe Funar) want to dig up his statue. This kind of wankery goes on all the time.

The whole area has been home to Romanians, Hungarians, Szekely, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Rroma, Csango, Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, etc etc etc for centuries. This seems to me like something to be proud of. The fact that a lot of these groups have gone or are nearly gone now is the real tragedy.

Romanians: When two people whose first language is Hungarian speak to each other it is entirely normal that they do so in Hungarian. It's not some massive insult to the nation. Swiss people, for example, seem to be able to manage to deal with the fact that some of their countrymen speak a different language from them, why can't you? It's not treason, it's talking.

Hungarians: If a Romanian comes into your shop or your cafe or whatever and wants to buy something, or ask a question or whatever, why can't you just behave like an adult and respond in Romanian? You know you speak it. It's not clever and big to pretend you don't. It's stupid. I speak the world's worst Romanian, but I reckon I could manage to sell someone a loaf of bread. I know you can do it.

Now, I know a lot of people will tell me that I just don't get it. I just don't get the history, I don't get the pain that one set of people have suffered at the hands of the other. I don't, in short, carry around some massive nationalistic chip on my shoulder. That's true. I don't. I do have my fair share of chips, but I don't have some kind of historical grudge against some people whose only crime is to speak a different language from me. I know there's history, I know there have been bad things done to people for terrible reasons, but taking it out on your neighbours - who were not involved in any of these crimes - is not really going to solve anything. Let it go.

Hungarians: Transylvania is in Romania. The only way that it won't be in Romania in the future would be through some absolutely catastrophic event which would definitely be a very bad thing. Get used to it, and perhaps even enjoy it. The land is the same, the people are the same, it's just governed by some people in a far off city beginning with Bu- and ending in -est, so in fact very little has changed. (And yes I know the current government in that city are utterly shit, but even then they are marginally less bad than the current government in Budapest. So, on balance you're ever so slightly better off, anyway)

And if somebody Romanian acts like an wanker, it's because they are an wanker, not because they are Romanian. Likewise if a Hungarian acts like a dick, it's because he's a dick not because he's Hungarian.

To give an example, it seems that the nationalities of the two main protagonists in the story of Basescu vs Arafat are being presented as an issue. They are not. Basescu is a twat because he's a twat not because he's Romanian, and Arafat is one of the good guys because he's one of the good guys, not because he's Palestinian. (Or, if you wrongheadedly see things the other way round, nationality still doesn't come into it)

Even in the case when people allow nationalism to drive their thick-as-pigshit-ness, that still doesn't come down to their nationality. The bloke from here who hanged an effigy of Avram Iancu last March 15th? Those Noua Dreapta scum who showed up here a month ago on December 1st to spread their poisonous bullshit? Those people are arseholes pure and simple. The fact that they hang their arseholery on nationalism doesn't make them arseholes because they are Hungarian/Romanian. It is just because they are braindead fuckwits.

(Romanians: Here's a little test for yourself: Every time you feel the urge to go off on one about Hungarians, first do the following. Imagine the situation in question pertains to Romanians living in Northern Bucovina, and see if this changes your perception. If a Romanian in Cernauti speaks Romanian to his neighbour, or doesn't proudly hang the Ukrainian flag outside his house, do you feel he should be criticised for somehow being anti-Ukrainian)

Basically, nationality is not a factor. You are of course more than welcome to identify yourself as being part of a national group (I don't really understand that either, but I recognise I'm very much in the minority in that), and even if I wanted to I couldn't stop you from making nationality part of your identity, but it's not a factor in anything else. If someone disappoints you or annoys you or makes you angry or challenges you or arrests you or attacks you or pleases you or intrigues you or says something interesting or turns you on or makes you feel good or whatever, their nationality is not the first thing you should focus on. It's not even the last thing. It has no bearing on anything.

I know this sounds like some naive Rodney King-esque plea, but really can't we all just get along? And I'm not talking about tolerance, if that's the best you can do, you probably shouldn't bother. You, we, are all the same. Celebrate that fact. But if you can't do that, just moan about each other out of range of me. You're making me really tired.

A post!

2012-01-12T13:27:00.003+02:00

In fact like buses, I'm hoping that after there has been none along in months there may even be two in very short order. The second one is already half written, but for now...

There is this man in Romania, who pretty much everyone here has heard of, especially now, but I suspect almost no-one outside of Romania has. His name is Raed Arafat. He is a Palestinian who grew up in Syria (like so many Palestinians to refugee parents), and he came to Romania at the beginning of the 80s to study medicine at the University in Cluj, and then subsequently to the university in Targu Mures to continue his studies. After graduating and going into practice in Tg Mures, and following the revolution he saw the need for a real emergency service. He and a team of volunteers knocked on every door in the city (and I am assured that it was every door, and it's a biggish city) and during a time of great hardship raised enough money in whatever donations people could give - very often very small amounts of money - to start something called SMURD. The story of SMURD is a long and impressive one and it has grown from these very small beginnings to be a vital cog in the otherwise ailing Romanian healthcare system. You can read all about the history of it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMURD

Anyway SMURD eventually became incorporated into the healthcare system, and Arafat became an under-secretary of state for health.

But now a "scandal" (everything in Romania is a scandal) has erupted - Arafat has resigned and left the Ministry because of a new health care law which effectively privatises the ambulance service. Basescu (the president), rather than talking to Arafat - who, I submit, knows a fuck of a lot more about emergency medicine than Basescu - abused him live on TV (via the medium of calling into a chat show), accused him of lying, and the went on about his "leftist views" (in this case not wanting to privatise an essential public service is "leftist", which I suppose it is, in relation to what to me seems like a pretty hard line right wing position - viz the privatisation of an essential public service). Basescu then pretty much told him to resign, which fairly unsurprisingly, Arafat then went ahead and did.

It's a great shame, as he's obviously a deeply committed individual who has done an incredible amount for Romania, and deserves to be heard and not treated like shit by an obnoxious president. I hope SMURD will survive, and I hope the healthcare system survives, but I have my doubts. Basescu and his government seem hell bent on using the excuse of "austerity" to destroy education, healthcare and pretty much everything else that the country actually needs.

You can watch Arafat here giving a speech in happier times through the TED network (in Romanian)

Bucharest redux

2011-06-04T15:25:00.002+03:00

Many many years ago, when I was keen and enthusiastic and actually used to write things in this blog, I wrote about my first real trip to Bucharest, here and then again here. Well since that time I haven't really spent a great deal of time in the nation's capital, coming on average once or twice a year for a day or two max. And though I was sort of partially complimentary on those two posts, I had also had some fairly bad experiences (once trying to drive through the city, which is an act I wouldn't wish on anyone, even my worst enemies. I don't think I have many worst enemies - is that something I need to cultivate do you think?), and I also get highly frustrated with the political and media system in Romania being so ludicrously Bucharest-centric (not that I expect it to be Ciuc-centric, but it would be nice if there were to be some acknowledgements from time to time that there is life outside the capital's ring road. This in turn sort of naturally predisposes me against the place, as does the entirely natural envy/resentment of the capital city that every normal person should have in any country.

But now I am back here, and this time for two whole weeks, by far the longest time I've ever spent here. Not that I've had the chance to see and do much as I've been working flat out all this last week. But now it's the weekend and I intend to ~~sleep~~,~~laze around all day, doing sod all~~, go out and experience something of the place. Well, at least after I've written this.

So, stuff that's notable about Bucharest (as far as I have seen this week)

You can buy things. I know you can buy things in most places, but you can buy a wider range of things in Bucharest than you can in somewhere like Csikszereda. To give an example, there is a supermarket just round the corner from the apartment I'm staying in. In that supermarket you can buy things like the ingredients for sushi, or Thai curry paste, or y'know, shit like that. This is very definitely a step up.
As a corollary to that there are restaurants and interesting bars and things. Within 3 minutes walk of my front door here there is an Indian restaurant, a Lebanese place, a Tapas bar, and a Szechuan restaurant. In Csiksereda foreign food is basically Italian or, if you want to be very generous in your description, a Mexican. (But I'm talking seriously generous. Unreasonably generous)
Life is lived on the street much more here. You walk around the city and there are groups of people standing around outside every shop, or just outside houses having loud conversations. I sort of thought it was a cliche that the south of Romania was more Mediterranean and Transylvania more Germanic, but it's actually pretty true in some ways. It does feel like a different country (and I don't just mean to Szereda where the language and stuff is different, but to other cities in Transylvania too)
Traffic in Bucharest seems not as bad I had imagined. I mean I haven't been driving, so perhaps I don't get an accurate picture, but it just seems like a normal big city to me for the most part (the sort of image I had was of near permanent gridlock and really aggressive drivers)
However, the problem with cars here is one of parking. I am told that there just aren't enough parking places in the city, but frankly as a pedestrian it's a right royal pain in the arse, because you can barely walk on the pavements anywhere as there are cars parked on every free bit of space. So you have to walk on the road all the time and then other drivers honk at you for being there. It's really really fucking irritating and it makes me want to key every badly parked car (though if I were to do that it would take me about half an hour to walk one block). If there isn't enough space find someway of limiting the number of cars in the centre of the city. Others cities seem to be able to manage it. If it means banning half the cars one day and the other half the next, then do it. The problem is that drivers here are somehow seen as more deserving than anyone else. I really don't know how people stand it living here. It has driven me mad in a few days, in a year I think I really would snap and start genuinely vandalising cars.
They still have this ridiculous thing on the metro whereby the clock at the end of the platform tells you how long it is since the last train left. This is taking pointless nostalgia to ridiculous levels. Someone assured me yesterday that they have changed this on some stations and they now say when the next one is coming (like someone finally realised that this information might be of slightly more interest), but I have yet to actually use one of these possibly mythical stations
The supermarket mentioned in (1), is called "Mega Image". This is a chain of supermarkets throughout the city. It is a very good supermarket, but it's a really fucking stupid name for a supermarket. What kind of coked-up focus group came up with that? "It'll be great, just think - Mega - punters love mega-stuff. And Image - that's brand conscious right there" "But wouldn't it be better to have a name that at least sounds like it might be a supermarket?" "Hell no, Mega Image is perfect"
Stuff here is expensive. Really expensive. Some things cost the same, but a lot of things seem to cost significantly more. You'd think given distribution costs and economies of scale that things would be cheaper. But no. I guess people charge what they can get away with.

So there you go. Bucharest. That's all you need to know, frankly. Anything else you might read about the city on the internet is just people's opinions. Whereas my opinions, being mine, are actually facts.

A story

2011-03-30T10:22:00.006+03:00

This is an entirely fictional post about a made up country which is not in any way based on reality, no sirree.

Let's imagine there is a country. We'll call it Morania. This country has a number of ethnic minority groups living in it, but the vast majority of the population are Moranian. One of these ethnic minorities is particularly sizeable, making up well over 5% of the total population of Morania. We'll call this group Gamars.

One of the Moranian majority's complaints about the Gamar minority is that they never really see themselves as Moranian and cling very tightly to their sense of ethnic identity (as Gamars). This is a not unreasonable observation in many ways, and while the Gamars are more or less integrated into society they keep a certain amount of separation from the Moranian majority. One good example of this would be that Gamars have been very involved politically in Morania, but always within the context of their own ethnic Gamar party.

One way in which there really does seem to be a clear integration is in sport. Many Gamar athletes have represented Morania at their chosen sport, and this is never seen as odd (by either group). Indeed, a number of Moranian national sporting heroes are from various different ethnic groups (including the Gamars).

So, to get to our story, there was this Gamar sportsman, who was really beginning to make a name for himself, and he became an integral member of the Moranian national team for his age group. There was no conflict in his mind in being part of the Moranian team, even though he regarded himself as Gamar. So successful was he that it would be no great exaggeration to suggest that this athlete was possibly the best in the particular Moranian national side he played for. Recently there was an international tournament in which Morania participated. The National side did extremely well, and finished better than anyone expected before the tournament began. Our hero performed out of his skin and did remarkably well, in one or two games carrying the team to victory, and always being the best player in the squad. Everybody around the team was congratulating him and remarking on what a great player he had become. It was clear to everyone at the tournament (both in the Moranian squad and in the other squads) that he was one of the best players at the tournament, and certainly the best Moranian player.

However at the end of the tournament the top player on each team was given an award. For the Moranian squad this award (to everyone's surprise, even the recipient's) was given to another player - of Moranian ethnicity. Afterwards, members of the team's management and those responsible for making the award approached our hero and said (effectively) "Sorry son, that's just the way it's got to be". It was made very clear to him and others around that he had deserved the award but that the people responsible felt that the award needed to go to a Moranian player.

It would be (if this story were in any way true of course) be a very upsetting tale, which would really go to show how even in areas of better integration between Moranians and Gamars, there are still a number of problems. And also would show how this barrier between the two communities is not merely something which the Gamars have erected. Luckily however, I have just come up with this story off the top of my head.

The Romanian Education System (2)

2011-03-03T16:17:00.004+02:00

OK, part 2 of my searing expose of the problems in the Romanian education system.

This one is the really BIG one. Money.

Romania doesn't have much money to go round. The government has recently signed up to an IMF loan with all the conditions that this usually implies (cuts, cuts, cuts). However, rather than making some sensible economic decisions like having a progressive tax and actually collecting taxes from rich people (and really doing something about corruption and tracking down the billions that vanish every year into personal bank accounts and expensive cars) it has launched into what can only be described as a war on the poor. That sounds melodramatic, perhaps, but take a look at the things proposed so far: Close half the hospitals, cut public sector pay by 25%, cut pensions by 15%, make it easier for employers to sack workers, raise the retirement age by 5 years (women) and 2 years (men), cutting quarter of a million public sector jobs, raise VAT by 5% points to 24%. Not all of these things can or will happen, but it's pretty clear which sector of the population that the Basescu / Boc government wants to attack to get the money from to pay the IMF. And it's not the well-off.

Anyway, inevitably the education system is another victim of these attacks. Not only are teachers salaries being slashed, but it seems that there is basically no money for anything else either. Basescu made a speech last year in which he praised Romania's vast diaspora, mostly working as agricultural labourers and construction workers in Spain and Italy for(a) leaving the country and not burdening the Romanian state with their needs; and (b) sending money back to bolster the Romanian economy. So possibly his plan here is to make this some kind of semi-compulsory national service, sending every able bodied young adult between 20 and 30 abroad to pick strawberries and send their earnings home. In such a scenario educating the population is really just a waste of money, since you don't need to know much to be an indentured peasant.

To give some examples of the lack of money in state education, it has become the norm for us (as parents) to be tapped up for money to support the school at every opportunity. I thought that's what our taxes were for, but I was obviously mistaken. At the beginning of the year, we're asked for money to buy books, or furnish the classrooms, or replace the one computer in the classroom or various other things. (At Paula's kindergarten, also part of the state education system, all parents are asked at the beginning of the year to donate 10 rolls of toilet paper, 4 of kitchen paper, two bars of soap and a packet of serviettes).

Now that they're 11 (apparently) Bogi's class gets various responsibilities thrust upon them. They have a class president and a treasurer and I don't know, possibly a witchfinder general to boot. Anyway, Bogi got elected (meaning nominated and appointed before she know what was happening) as the treasurer. This means that basically all the kids contribute some money (from their parents obviously) at the beginning of the semester and she takes care of it and has to buy things when the need arises (this as you can imagine is a shit job - you have to account for every bani, you have to chase your classmates up for their contributions, you have to keep very accurate records, and you have to do all the shopping and carrying stuff to school).

Now you may imagine that this is money that gets used for parties or excursions, or some special events for the kids. No, it's money that is seemingly used to top up the various classroom needs that ought to be covered by education funding. At christmas for example, Bogi was charged with going to buy coloured cardboard so the kids could make cards.

This reached its nadir a few weeks ago, when Bogi mentioned that she needed to go out and buy a battery. A single AA battery. I asked why, and she said it was because the clock in the classroom had stopped and needed a new battery. I lost it. Thankfully not at Bogi herself or not in any way that made her think I had lost it at her. But at the system, the school, the teacher, the whole bloody ridiculous, messed up, collapsing, desperate, stupid, backward, crappy system that valued education so little that when the battery in the classroom clock ran out the kids had to replace it. It was an epic rant, which I cannot possibly do justice to here, but if it had been videoed I feel quite sure could have been a YouTube hit.

How the hell is this country going to move forward if there is so little money for education that people are scrapping around to buy paper and batteries and soap to keep their child's school from falling apart?

And rich people pay 16% tax. It's absolutely scandalous.

The Romanian Education System (1)

2011-03-02T12:20:00.006+02:00

I have three major things I want to say about the Romanian education system, of which this post is the first. Up until this year I have been only partially aware of some of the problems that exist within the system, because until this year my daughter Bogi was in the first 4 grades. You see there are 3 major and clearly separate bits in the system. Grades 1-4, which are essentially the equivalent to primary school in the UK, where you basically have one teacher (or in some cases, Bogi's included, a team of 2) for more or less every subject with one or two exceptions. Then grades 5-8, in which you start doing more subjects and having specialised teachers. Finally there's grades 9-12, in which you are studying towards your school leaving exams and so on, and preparing (in some cases) for university. [Switching schools at either one - or both - of the two milestone points above is fairly normal, and often unavoidable]

Now, there might be a few problems in grades 1-4, but like primary school it's sort of not desperately important in the grand scheme of things. School at this age, in a sense, is about learning how to read and write and to be part of a class, and a few other basic skills. It seems to work pretty well in my experience.

But now Bogi is in Grade 5, some of the real problems with the Romanian education system have become increasingly apparent. The first of these is this:

Pretty much everything you do in these 4 years garners you a grade. This is a score out of 10. All these marks get tallied up and they count towards the final grade that you end up with at the end of the 8th grade. This grade is extremely important as it basically selects which high school you end up going to. Good grade -> good high school, Low grade -> not such a good high school. There is an exam at the end of the 8th grade which goes towards this too, but the whole system is terrible.

It means that kids are under constant pressure from the age of 11 onwards. Pressure comes from teachers, parents, and of course the students themselves. They are constantly being reminded about how important these grades are. Getting a 7 one day, for example, is seen as a disaster
The (effective) streaming of kids at the age of 15, is counter to everything I believe about good education practice
The whole thing makes school about competition. There are a limited number of places available in the "best" high schools, so not only are you striving to get one of those places, but you are also on some level trying to squeeze out your classmates. (Not consciously I am sure, however)
It means that everything is geared towards grades and marks, and not necessarily towards learning stuff
All the evidence is pointing towards the idea that grading and testing does not aid learning (in general), and certainly not in the case where everything is graded

Just to add another layer of idiocy to this, not only do you get these marks in the academic subjects but you even get them in things like "gym" (or what we used to call PE). Now, I am fully in favour of kids doing PE and that being part of the curriculum, but grading them on it? It's absolutely mental.

Just to be clear, when I say that these are failings of the Romanian education system, I am not comparing this with other education systems. To my knowledge the UK education system also has major problems these days with an obsession with grades, and standardised tests, and for all I know has a very similar system. I'm just saying that this (as the first of my major complaints) is a huge problem in Romania. [I'm pretty sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen in Finland - the gold standard of global education systems^[1]]

I want to be able to tell my daughter that if she gets a bad mark it doesn't matter. I want her to learn from the experience of turning in something that doesn't meet her own standards (as opposed to the state's). I want her to learn stuff at school, and to be aware that this is the purpose of it. And I want her to have fun, and enjoy her childhood. But the system is telling her something different. The system is making her beat herself up, and cry when she doesn't get a 10, and ask to stay up until 10pm or beyond, or ask me to wake her up at 6 so she can do more homework before she goes to school. And while we try and protect her from the system, and make sure she understands that it is not the most important thing in the world, and while she is bright and pretty good at all her school subjects, so it's not like she's being penalised in terms of her future by the system, I do feel like it is a really really bad way of educating kids.

Footnote (I know, look at me and my mad & fancy HTML skillz)
Some links for stuff on Finland's education system 1 2 3

Singing in tongues

2011-03-01T17:44:00.001+02:00

Look! I exist! I blog. Therefore I am?

It has come to my attention that more and more Romanian pop bands/singers/"projects"/entities of the sort entitled "DJ X feat. Flange" are singing their ditties in English. This is a great pity for a number of reasons:

They almost invariably sound absolutely terrible. This is nearly, but not quite, universally true for all bands. Sing in your native language, and it sounds good. In English (unless of course that is your first language) and it nearly always sounds like vomit-inducing pap. To give the worst example, I really truly advise you NOT to click on this link and hear the absolute awfulness of "Lovely Smile" from late last year. If you ignored me and are now cleaning up this morning's breakfast, well, you should listen. The only non-native speaker of English and get away with it is Shakira, and she gets away with it because, well, she could get away with more or less anything I think.
Romanian is a language that really works well in song. It's a great shame to sing in simplified sickly English when something about the rhythms and rhymes of Romanian make it such a good language for songs.

Yet despite these compelling reasons (yes I know that's only 2, but 2 is a number), more and more bands are opting for the Euro-beat stylings of songs about lahv and sexy gaehls. It's quite depressing and has meant that recently I have switched radio stations in the car to one that plays a slightly older mix.

Now, it's quite possible (if indeed anyone happens across this blog after so long away) that someone is going to point out that for a Romanian band to make it big (or at least sell a few records in Belarus or Latvia) they have to record in English, but I would counter that by pointing out that the biggest and most successful Romanian record of recent times (and quite possibly ever in history) was Dragostei din Tei (which you may know as "that Numa Numa Yay song") , which was sung - yes - in Romanian. So ha. That's stumped you, no doubt.

In an interesting aside (well interesting to me, at least), while Romanian is a language which sounds really good in song, yet Romanians seem hell bent on singing in English, Hungarian, which really isn't a good language for singing, seems to go the opposite way around. Very rarely do Hungarian bands sing in English (in fact I only know of two examples, the utterly risible Speak, and the really very amusing and good "Hello Tourist" by Emil Rulez - and the latter is in English for a good reason). Indeed not only do Hungarian bands not sing in English, but they actually go the extra mile and translate English (and other) songs into Hungarian and repackage them. Which is taking the dubbing obsession a stage too far.

As an aside to that aside, while Hungarian doesn't really work in song to my mind (or to my ear), it works absolutely superbly in poetry. Something about the staccato rhythms of it really make poetry sound fantastically rhythmic and intense. You don't even need to know a word of Hungarian to appreciate it in my opinion - listen to this Petofi Sandor poem, for example, or this by Arany Janos

Look! A blog post!

2011-02-28T15:48:00.003+02:00

February 28th is National Face Painting day in Romania. This annual event commemorates the time in 1474 when Stefan Cel Mare came home drunk and fell asleep on the sofa, and while he slept, Mrs Cel Mare invited some of her friends round and they painted his face in a series of vivid images, reminiscent of those on the Bucovina Monasteries. Modern day face painting rarely depicts the banishment of the Jews and Muslims to hell, but instead tends towards lighter, less controversial imagery.

Unprincipled

2010-12-08T10:23:00.004+02:00

Somehow the sight of people selling out their (apparently deeply held) principles is worse than the sight of people who you knew had no principles acting as you expected them to.

So for example, in the UK the Tory/Lib Dem coalition is carving a swathe of destruction through the land - slashing benefits, creating massive levels of unemployment, making higher education only available to the wealthy, while at the same time offering tax cuts to the rich and to massive companies. The tories I expect this from. It's who they are, it's what they do. A war on the poor is pretty much both their modus operandi and raison d'etre (if I may mix languages). However, from the Lib Dems is somehow much more disturbing - the policies would be wrong and heinous whoever was behind them, but somehow to see a bunch of politicians who claimed to be progressive and let's say "social democratic" completely dump their entire ideology in the space of a few weeks in power is really disturbing. I know power corrupts, but I had no idea it corrupted this quickly.

And so it is with the current rabid US reaction to wikileaks. Now the US has always had this very absolutist view of freedom of speech. I have American friends who can and do argue very eloquently and very persuasively that freedom of speech is an absolute and should be inviolable. (Personally I've been a little somewhat less absolutist about it, perhaps a result of having grown up during an age (in the UK) in which "No platform for fascists" was a part of my political make up). And to be honest, I respect that deeply held principle and all it stands for, even if I've not been 100% in agreement.

But the last couple of days have seen the deeply unedifying spectacle of a US government (and indeed a vaguely liberal US administration - in theory anyway) trampling all over the first amendment in a desperate attempt to silence wikileaks. Pressuring web hosting services, paypal, credit cards, countries and everyone it has some vague influence with to cut them off. It's truly disgusting. Politicians there are even calling for the assassination of Julian Assange. Really. It's utterly shocking and appalling. Difficult for me to imagine myself saying this, given the alternatives, but I hope this whole sorry mess brings down the Obama administration. Any government which has so lost sight of its guiding principles deserves to fall.

As an aside, did you know that you can no longer donate to wikileaks via visa or mastercard, but you can still use those cards to donate to the Ku Klux Klan? What kind of fucked up world is this?

Anyway, as so often these days, Johann Hari in the Independent has said everything I wish I could have articulated about wikileaks.

The past two days have done one thing at my end - they have made me want to donate money to support the work that wikileaks are doing. Though craven and pathetic companies like Visa and Mastercard and Paypal are no longer ways of doing that you can do it via bank transfer and some other methods. http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/how-to-donate-to-wikileaks/

To the Manor Osborne

2010-10-21T10:27:00.003+03:00

I know someone who, because of depression, hasn't been able to work for years. Some days he is OK, some days not. There is no way he can hold down a normal job, because there are days he just can't get out of bed. He lives in London and can barely scrape by on the welfare payments he is able to claim. He can't afford to go out with friends or do anything that most of us take for granted. Now Gideon "George" Osborne and the government of old Etonians and assorted other people who have no idea what life is actually like for poor people, have decided that he should lose his right to incapacity benefit (unless he can manage to be classified as "seriously disabled", which sounds like a physical definition rather than a mental one). His story is not in any way unique. In crafting a budget which they claim to be "fair" and "progressive" they have in fact attacked the poor of Britain in a way that even Thatcher might have balked at.

Benefit fraud costs the UK taxpayer something like £1bn a year. Tax evasion is thought to cost in the region of £40-70bn a year. Which one is the government targeting?

I'm sickened by these scum. I urge everyone to read this fantastic and savage piece by Johann Hari in today's Independent. It says everything better than I ever could. This is war on the poor, pure and simple.

Emerging from hell

2010-10-14T10:19:00.005+03:00

Like most of the planet, I assume, I spend much of the last 24 hours or so gripped by the scenes from Chile, and moved very deeply by the whole event. Watching every miner appear, hug their families and some of the rescuers and be cheered by the crowds of people, never failed to get to me, even after I'd watched practically the same scene several times. How those miners survived, particularly in the first 17 days when they were sort of presumed dead and they were completely alone living on a spoon of tuna and a drop of milk a day, is amazing. The rescue effort, too, was astounding and incredibly admirable. And even the personal, hands-on involvement of the Chilean government was impressive (I have no time for Mr Piñera's politics, but he and his mining minister and everyone else involved have definitely done fantastically well here).

All in all, I have been moved to tears, riveted and totally impressed with everything that has happened on that mountain. Who knew that watching a wheel turn very slowly pulling a cable upwards for 20 minutes at a time could be such gripping TV?

However, it has brought home to me that by the standards of much of the world's population I am weird. Because two themes that have been rammed home again and again by the miners, by the rescue team and by everyone else strike no kind of chord with me at all.

The first is religion. Now I get that the majority of the population of the planet believe that all the stuff that happens is somehow controlled or ordained or just watched over by some kind of unearthly power. I even understand some of the reasons why people might feel this way and want some kind of non-worldly force to cling to at times. But (and again I know here that I'm in the minority) I just cannot understand the repeated thanking of God on emergence from that hole in the ground. Partly because it seems actually disrespectful of the incredible rescue effort - God didn't get you out of there, I want to shout, these amazing engineers and workers and safety experts and drillers and paramedics and psychologists and designers and everyone else involved got you out of there. Hard work, creativity, perseverance and human endeavour got you out. Those people who you are hugging and who are clapping your rescue - it was them. Not some mysterious otherwordly force. And, while we're at it, you did it too. Your survival is primarily down to you, and your fellow trapped miners. Your resilience and strength and bloody mindedness got you through this.

The other reason why I don't really get it is that if God got them out, in the face of all the evidence of the human rescue effort, then surely that means God trapped them there in the first place. I know logic doesn't really enter into faith much, but ... (and here I shake my hands around the keyboard and take on a facial expression of total speechless bafflement). It really does surprise me every time.

The second big theme that emerged (and you can see this on that picture up there, that the miner pictured is wearing a T-shirt, which, along with its obligatory "Gracias Señor" slogan also makes clear reference to the Chilean flag) is that of national identity. Now this one is likely to be even more controversial than the religion one, since at least there is a sort of ongoing conversation about religion and belief, and everyone knows that there are differences of opinion, but what is national identity? I don't get it. Really, I know to most people it's like the air you breath - there, necessary and entirely self explanatory - but I've never understood it. [I should point out that if the miners were going to thank Chile or God, I'd rather they thanked Chile, because at least I can see that people and expertise and equipment from Chile along with the Chilean state itself, did get them out]. But what does it mean to be Chilean? What does it mean to be English, or Hungarian, or Romanian? I still don't really know. I ask people here, and here in Csikszereda, national identity is a really big deal, and as I ask them I get a few reactions. First there is complete bafflement that I've asked that question. This is often followed by a sort of "Well it's self-explanatory, surely?" type response. And when I say that no, it really isn't, I get a lot of confused half answers (this is not really anyone's fault, because they haven't thought about it before, and it's a difficult question to answer). Eventually, people sort of resign themselves to "well it must be about language" - mostly because when it comes down to it language is really the only major thing the differentiates Hungarian Transylvanians from Romanian Transylvanians. But in Chile's case it can't be language. They don't speak Chilean, and in fact they speak the same language as pretty much all the countries around them.

As I say, it baffles me. I mean I know all the arguments about identity and belonging and I've read "Imagined Communities" and all that. But I still can't really "get" national identity, on a personal deep empathetic level. I understand it intellectually, sort of, but not really on a deeper level.

And so I watch miners coming from out of (a real earthly) hell, and thanking God and singing the national anthem and I am left utterly moved by the human aspect. the relief, the families, the love, the sense of community of rescuers and rescuees, the joy and the happiness, and yet utterly unmoved by the religious/national aspect.

And, I do know that this makes me weird, and not them.

Clowntime is over

2010-10-05T09:30:00.004+03:00

Norman Wisdom has died. One of the people who has actually made it into the blog before: http://szekely.blogspot.com/2006/02/wisdom-of-ages.html There's probably some "Mr Grimsdale" type line that I could use here to conclude that otherwise meaningless comment into something with gentle pathos, but so unfamiliar am I with Mr Wisdom's oeuvre that it's beyond me frankly

Frost last night. Bollocks. It's too soon for winter for me.

This blog post can safely be ignored.

Katalin Varga (film review)

2010-09-22T14:28:00.007+03:00

So a couple of weeks ago we watched Katalin Varga, a film made by a British director, set near here and filmed in Hungarian (mostly) and Romanian.

There are actually quite a few similarities between this film and "Along the Enchanted Way" (which I just reviewed here), though they may not be immediately obvious. Essentially both are clearly made (written/produced/directed etc) by Britons who obviously came to Transylvania and fell in love with the whole mediaeval vibe thing here - the scything, the horse carts, the natural beauty, the wildness, all that stuff. This is overt in Blacker's book, and perhaps less so in Strickland's film. However, so lacking in action and events is much of Katalin Varga, that you can only assume that it must have been a vehicle for Strickland to indulge his desire to show long slow shots of Transylvanian landscapes, and storks lazily flapping over remote villages, and men in fields cutting hay, and horsecart journeys across wide open fields with mountain backdrops.

In addition both feature very much a local cast of characters - "Enchanted Way" with your actual real people, though some are pseudonymised, and "Katalin Varga" with local crews and actors (and as I mentioned here, some of whom are actually based in Csikszereda).

There are two major differences though. Firstly that Katalin Varga is fiction (at least I bloody hope it is), and secondly that while life in these pastoral villages in "Enchanted Way" is idyllic and romantic and somehow beautiful, in "Katalin Varga" it's nasty, brutish, and short.

It's difficult to describe the plot of Katalin Varga at all without giving half the film away (primarily because very little actually happens in it), so I won't bother trying. It's mostly filmed in Covasna county (in the town of Kommando/Comandau in case you're interested), and I guess it is somewhat atmospheric. But because the film appears to be actually a showcase for the scenery rather than the scenery forming a backdrop for the film, and because I live here and see all this scenery every day, I have to say it left me feeling a little bit ...well, bored, frankly.

But, I guess this is my problem rather than the film's. I've just started reading another book "Blue River, Black Sea" by Andrew Eames, in which he says, while he's explaining what brought him to this part of the world:

The final catalyst for the book was a trip I made to Transylvania, where I stumbled into an almost medieval landscape that I never dreamed still existed in Europe, of scything farmers and their fruit-collecting children, of horses and carts, of wells in the villages, wolves in the woods and bears in the hills. The storybook detail was captivating. The storks on the chimney stacks, clapping their beaks when their youngsters stood up. The chicks in homemade chicken runs on the roadside verges. the little smoking huts in every yard, breadmaking ovens for summer use. And the daily cow parade, when all the villagers' cattle brought themselves back from the fields punctually at milking time and wandered down the main street until the reached their owners' houses, where the gates would be standing open to welcome them home. Transylvania seemed a mythical place, one where you literally didn't count your chickens until they hatched, and one where you made sure you made hay while the sun shone

And he's right in that very evocative and very real description. That is, more or less, exactly how it is. And it is beautiful. But somehow living here, I have sort of forgotten. I no longer notice any of these things, so utterly normal are they. And that does make me slightly sad I think, that I live in this place which to an outsider seems almost impossibly exotic (in a very retro sense of exotic), but which has ceased to make me swoon on a daily basis as it obviously did Eames, and Blacker, and Strickland.

I haven't really reviewed "Katalin Varga" have I? To sum up, beautiful and evocative and atmospheric if you don't live in Transylvania, with a fairly slight (and very dark) plot.

[By the way, Katalin Varga, is actually the name of a famous Transylvanian woman who led a miners' movement. I presume the choice of her name for the lead character of this film is significant in some way, but I'm not sure what the significance is]

(Girl)friend in a koma

2010-09-21T20:02:00.003+03:00

I went to a christening on Saturday, in which we (and a whole host of others) became godparents (I can only assume that the two actual parents have concluded they will just have the one child, as they must have godparentised pretty much everyone they know). It was a much better priest than the last one I saw christen a baby in this part of the world, but he’d have had to go some to beat that racist old bastard. (In truth he seemed like a nice bloke, for a priest, etc etc. He didn’t care that I, for example, am not, nor have any intention of ever being, a Catholic. Though he was apparently told that I am Anglican which is a little bit weird to me – in these parts you are what you were “at birth”, not what you actually decided to be once you were old enough to actually have an opinion of your own. Not sure if he’d have been more challenged to learn that I am actually a godless heathen rather than, as advertised “an Anglican”)

Anyway the post church bit party, featured the massed ranks of godparents (there were 11 of us for the record, I may have exaggerated a little for effect in the previous paragraph, but that’s still a fair number. An entire football team of godparents), and an absolutely (and dangerously) delicious apple palinka which I could have drunk all night, so smooth and tasty was it. As it was the few that I did have, were a few more than I should have had, as I discovered when staggering home.

During one (relatively sober) conversation with a fellow godparent, she used a word which I wasn’t really familiar with, to describe our relationship. As she had no idea of the English term for it, I called upon Bogi (my 11-year old stepdaughter, and occasional translator) to provide some help. “Koma?”, she said (for that was the word we were struggling with), “It’s, errm, someone you go to the pub with”. As a lapsed language teacher, I find this kind of circumlocution is very laudable, and I was proud of her way of coming up with a way of explaining something she couldn’t really translate. However, it turned out that this was a fairly loose translation, and in fact koma, in this instance at least, means the relationship that two godparents of the same child have with one another. I’m 99.9% sure that we don’t actually have such a word in English, so I could hardly fault her, and if it turns out that my komas become drinking buddies, then I shall not be complaining. (It also of course gives me a great opportunity to use a not-at-all-forced title for this blog entry)

We don’t have a word for that do we? Perhaps it’s that British way of remaining as distant as possible from people in case we suddenly end up with obligations or the necessity of a relationship. There is a slightly sickly expression “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet”. I suspect the standard English version is “A stranger is someone you might not like, who you haven’t met yet”. And of course, we act accordingly.

Along the Enchanted Way (book review)

2010-09-17T12:35:00.001+03:00

William Blacker is an Englishman who lived in Romania for 8 years from 96-04. This book is part travelogue, part autobiography, part love story and part elegy for a dying way of life. It takes place partly in Maramures in the village of Breb, not far from Sighet, and partly in the village of “Halma” in the Saxon lands. Halma is not its real name, as Blacker elects to keep the village anonymous for fear of what might happen there if he names it (I have a pretty good idea of which village “Halma” actually represents, but I’ll not speculate here).

The first half of the book mostly takes place in Maramures, where Blacker delights in the lifestyle of the Romanian peasant. He lives with an older couple, almost as their son, and learns the ways of the country – sharpening his scythe, cutting the grass, dealing with the seasons, travelling to market, wearing local clothes, drinking copious amounts of horinca (Maramures version of palinka). He bemoans the fact that this lifestyle is not long for this world, as modernity creeps along the valleys and through the forests, but marvels in it and delights in it and the discovery of this lifestyle existing in late 20^th Century Europe.

Simultaneously he is falling in love with a Gypsy girl in “Halma”. This is the love story part of the book, though in fact the passion he has for the village life in Maramures comes through much clearer than the passion he has for Natalia. Perhaps it is a reluctance to expose his true feelings or just his Englishness coming to the fore, but it’s hard to really feel that he is actually in love with her. He just seems somewhat interested. This to me was the weakest point of the book. Almost like it’s a section he has to tell to make the story hang together, but he does so reluctantly and without any great willingness to do so.

The second half of the book sees Blacker move away from Maramures and take up residence in Halma with Natalia’s sister Marishka. This section of the book deals with the challenges and difficulties they face as well as describing the community problems that exist – a nearly extinct Saxon population, reduced to just one or two older people, with the village now taken over by Romanian and Rroma families (and a single Hungarian, Blacker’s new “father-in-law”). For me this was the most engaging part of the book, as the inter-group prejudices and struggles come to the fore, and Blacker is sort of forced into the role of reluctant peacemaker and champion of the downtrodden.

It is a fascinating book, and is beautifully written. The slow and easy pace of the Breb sections, matches the life of the village, and in a sense this is the love story of the book. As the action intensifies in Halma, the pace of the writing picks up too. He describes wonderfully and with a great deal of gentleness the peasant way of life, in an almost bucolic writing style, if there is such a thing. It’s clear he see the Maramures village life as something beautiful and is deeply saddened by its impending passing, which may (or may not) mean he is slightly guilty of overromanticising it, but that, I suspect is a subject for another blog post...

Small coincidences

2010-09-13T15:37:00.004+03:00

Couple of little coincidences happened this week. Firstly I was sitting in the garden reading William Blacker's "Along the Enchanted Way" (review will follow later this week), when he describes how in Maramures (where he lived in a village) peasants often speak to their horses in German (rather than Romanian). The example he gave was zurück when they want the horses to go backwards. About half an hour later, a guy from the village shows up to take away some construction rubbish (rubble, etc) from the mess that constitutes our garden at the moment. He has a horse and cart to do this job, and lo and behold but as he tries to persuade the horse to go back and take the cart closer to the pile, there it is... "zurück". So Hungarians speak German to horses too.

Then on Saturday night we watched Katalin Varga, a film that was made not far from here a couple of years ago by a British director, with local actors (also a review to follow). As I stood in the Orange shop to pay my phone bill, who should stand behind me in the line but the guy who plays Gergely, a fairly important character in the film (I can't really say much more for fear of giving too much away). And then after that I come to the office and there sitting next to me is another guy who was in the film playing one of the police.

It's a fascinating life I lead, and no mistake

Before the fall

2010-09-07T11:06:00.004+03:00

It feels like summer didn't happen this year. May and June were appalling weather-wise, and I spent July and August out of the country working. And now it's September and all of the signs are that winter is on its way

The storks have gone*
People have started harvesting potatoes
We picked a barrel full of plums off the ground in the garden this weekend (we measure plums in barrels because that's where they make their transition from small fruits to delicious winter warming palinka)
It's already pretty cold (though thankfully not yet as cold as it was in England 10 days ago when I was freezing my arse off)
Trees have started changing colour
The kids go back to school next week
The ice hockey season starts this evening with Sport Club playing Steaua. On September 7th! Ice Hockey! Bloody hell. (Apropos of which, I've just discovered a new English language Sport Club blog)

See what a rural nature-based life I lead? Apart from the ice hockey and school bits obviously.

Thankfully here we don't have the arrival of Christmas decorations in the shops until much much later in the year (unlike the UK where apparently this year they started in August), but it does feel like we're on the slow slide towards winter. I like autumn, really, and it's especially beautiful here in Transylvania, but it just feels too early. I'm not ready for this yet, I need to have a summer first. Please.

(*Storks seem to be the primary measure of weather and seasons here. In addition to their arrival and departure dates being of interest, this year, I'm told, the early summer was so rubbish that their eggs didn't hatch, and so they laid a second batch. These did hatch, but the resultant young are not big enough to fly south for the winter, so they will stay here and die. This tragic tale would be more convincing were I to have seen any of these poor doomed orphan storks anywhere, but I haven't, so I'm not sure whether it's of any validity)

Greet Expectations

2010-09-02T16:03:00.003+03:00

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that there are very few places in the world where the act of greeting someone on the street is as complex and fraught with difficulties as here in Csikszereda.

Let's start with Hungarian, to get us going. Now in Hungarian there are many ways of greeting someone, many of which are entirely dependent on a perceived or actual relationship between greeter and greetee.

Informally, you can go with szia or szervusz, unless of course you are greeting more than one person, in which case it is sziasztok or szervusztok. Apparently szia is slightly more informal than szervusz, but this is not something I've ever really encountered. You can also, as I may have mentioned before, actually use hello.

However, even if you know the person, you have to be a little bit careful with such levels of informality, because saying it someone to whom you ought to be granting some form of respect (older people, VIPs, etc), could cause offense. Even if you don't reckon they've earned that respect. To an older woman, for example, you are supposed to go with Csókolom which is sufficiently respectful for that group. (However, I occasionally worry that if I offer a Csókolom to someone who is younger than me, or around the same age, or just marginally older, but who seems "obviously" older, I risk causing age related offence).

To an older man, or someone you don't really know (assuming they don't fall into the "older woman" category), you need to offer some form of good morning/day/evening etc. This would be jó reggelt (good morning) or, gussied up a bit, jó reggelt kívánok (I wish you good morning - it's not clear what else you might be doing with your "good morning" if you're not wishing it, but there you go). Others include jó napot (good day) and jó estét (good evening). OK, so far so good, but then you have to remember that what you might consider the morning is not necessarily the morning to a Hungarian (nor to a Romanian for that matter, but we'll come to that). Say jó reggelt at 11am, and you are looked at like you are mad. In villages it's even worse, because the morning very definitely seems to finish at 9am. A 9.15am jó reggelt would probably get you kicked out of the community for being a lazy good-for-nothing who didn't actually wake up at 4 to feed the chickens (or whatever it is that people do at 4am)

It's been 6 years now, and I still mix some of this stuff up. Yesterday I was going to pay the phone bill and saw someone I sort-of-half-knew, and offered a cheery szia. The moment it left my mouth I knew that this was almost certainly a jó napot situation and that I had erred. The really tricky thing is that if you are greeted first you don't necessarily respond in kind, like you do in English. Children (especially polite ones) tend to Csókolom all adults, and I may have inadvertently confused one or two kids in my early days here by offering the same greeting back.

OK, so that sums up the greeting challenges in Hungarian, but here of course there is another level of difficulty - the fact that some people you meet aren't actually Hungarian, but Romanian (this being Romania and all that). Thankfully, Romanian doesn't seem quite as complex as Hungarian in this regard. Here in Transylvania there is the use of szervusz (though I am sure it's not spelled like that by Romanians), but apparently that's only here, and not elsewhere in the country. Then there are the various good (insert period of day) greetings, in which like Hungarian, there is a "different" understanding of what constitutes "morning". I said bună dimineaţa (good morning) to two Romanians I met in England a couple of weeks ago (at about 11am) and they laughed as if I was an idiot, and said "Dimineaţa?" with heavy emphasis. You can just about get away with the bună bit on its own most of the time (you couldn't just say jó any more than you could just say "good" in English).

The extra level of challenge here is knowing who you should greet in Hungarian and who in Romanian. Obviously if you know them well, it's no issue, but sometimes you sort of half know someone, but can't actually remember what their first language is. There are two Romanian blokes who live in my building for example, but I am always confusing them with a Hungarian bloke who also lives there, and so I frequently guess wrong (and I never seem to learn).

The only one I always get right is my own slightly pathetic little rebellion against organised religion, whereby I always offer a cheery jó napot kívánok to any Orthodox priest I walk past on the street (knowing full well that he must be a Romanian), and a similarly breezy bună ziua to Catholic priests (knowing full well that they must be Hungarians). I like to think it throws them a little, and it makes me feel vaguely smug for a nanosecond, so that's a result in my mind.

Words don't come easy

2010-07-08T12:26:00.003+03:00

When Bill Bryson moved back to the US (to live not far up the road from me, in fact) he wrote a book of his experiences as a long time expat returning to his home country, called "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" (I think). Anyway, one of the most memorable bits for me was his comment that there were words that he wasn't sure of the American English for, having not needed those items when he was growing up (I think he left the US when he was 19). I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't vouch for this quote exactly, but the one that sticks in my mind was him going to a DIY shop (or Hardware store as it would have been) and asking "I need some of that stuff you fill holes in walls with. My wife's people call it Polyfilla". with the guy responding "Ah you mean spackle"

My problem is similar only at least Bryson had words which he knew in English, just in a different version of English. I have words which I only know in foreign languages. The first one of these to cross my consciousness was rucula, which was a delicious salad leaf I first encountered in Spain. Later I learned the Italian (rucola) and then arugula which I'm not even sure what language it is in. Finally I discovered that in English it is called "rocket", which frankly is a bloody stupid word. This comes about mostly because I am knocking on a bit and in my day fancy vegetables like rocket were not available in England. Salads had iceberg or cos lettuce in them, and that was your lot.

But there are also words which I still have no idea of in English. Yesterday we went out and picked some mushrooms and wild fruit, most of which I have no idea of what they are in English. The most commonly picked wild mushroom round here seems to be the rókagomba, which translates literally as "fox mushroom". I have no idea what it's called in English, though I am sure it's not fox mushroom. There are also the csirkelab gomba ("chicken leg mushroom" which to me looks a lot more like coral), the galambgomba (pigeon mushroom) and various other evocatively named edible mushrooms. Last night I had a delicious mushroom omelette made of fox and bear mushrooms (rokagomba and medvegomba).

We also picked a lot of szamoca - these are small wild fruits of the strawberry family. They may actually be known as wild strawberries in English, but I'm not sure. And a fair few afonya, which I do know because I used to pick then in England growing up (bilberries in case you're wondering. NOT blueberries as many dictionaries will tell you).

Away from food, like Bryson, I have some difficulty with some construction words too, mostly because I obviously have never done any construction/DIY work in England (I'd never done any anywhere to be honest until I moved here). However, for whatever reasons, it seems like most words used for such items here tend to be Romanian rather than Hungarian (I mean by everyone). So for example there is this material called gips carton (Everybody calls it that but it must be a Romanian word rather than a Hungarian one). I can't even describe what it is exactly, but it is a sort of board material that is not wood, but is strengthened in some way. The inner walls of our renovated barn are made of it. God only knows what the English is for it. There is also a kind of thin wood that you use for the walls of sheds and similar called (something like) lumberia (again that must be a Romanian word).

So if you ever see someone in a branch of Jewson or somewhere looking a bit lost and asking for some gips carton or lumberia, before idly speculating whether it would be possible to pick fox mushrooms in the woods over there, then it's probably me.

Picking a team

2010-06-15T15:32:00.002+03:00

At this time every 4 years I like to hunker down and gorge myself on as much football as possible. I've never exactly been a fan of England despite that being my country of origin, but then I've never been much of a one for any sort of national identity anyway. The fact that many of the England team are quite obviously utter wankers is not terribly helpful in convincing me otherwise.

Also, Romania, my chosen home are not there because they are utterly rubbish at the moment, and neither are Hungary, who at least would garner local interest were they there, but they've been shit ever since the 50s.

So, who should I support? Here is a site which has some complex formula to tell you which country ought to get your support (Ghana, apparently). I would be very happy were an African team to win, and Ghana are the most likely to do OK, it would seem.

But I have to have arbitrary criteria. Algeria have one good thing going for them - the presence in their squad of ex-Sheffield Wednesday defender Madjid Bougherra. But the best option is Honduras. Yes, they did have a very dodgy coup last year, which is not exactly what one looks for in a nation (I'm not sure how they come 3rd in that site above given that to be honest), but there are some reasons to support them (these may not convince you but bear with me)

I have seen them play. I have only seen 3 international matches in my life, so this is something that sets them apart - two when I was working as a steward at Wembley and saw England play Scotland and then Columbia three days later in something called the Rous Cup, and the other as a paying customer in Washington DC in a World Cup qualifier a good few years ago - The USA vs Honduras. It was a great day out and Honduras surprisingly won 3-2 with a great performance. I distinguished myself by chanting "You're not singing any more" in the face of a baffled and rather initimidated teenage girl, which is not exactly my finest moment.
Their captain is called "Guevara". Need I say more?
They wear blue and white stripes. There is no better footballing strip than the classic blue and white stripe. And this is objectively and unargaubly true. But Argentina's light blue and white doesn't cut it. You need royal blue.

So support Honduras. They won't win, but they will deserve to.

Once they get knocked out though, I'm going for Spain. Don't think they'll win either, but I'd like them too.

That time of year again

2010-05-20T15:01:00.003+03:00

This Saturday is the Pünkösdi búcsú the biggest pilgrimage in Eastern Europe, where Hungarian Catholics from wherever you might find Hungarian Catholics (ie Hungary, mostly) descend on Csikszereda to be pious or some such.

A couple of years ago my friend Denes made a video of me covering it which was almost shown on Duna TV (Hungarian channel), but ultimately wasn't. Anyway here it is (again):

Part 1:

Part 2:

Any TV people who actually want to use this should contact Denes via the you tube page :-)

Whinging Poms

2010-05-19T10:18:00.002+03:00

Or is it whingeing? The Internet seems divided.

Last week some friends and colleagues ran what I can only describe as a fantastic week-long programme here on arts/crafts/folk traditions. Participants from all over Europe attended, met people working on traditional folk arts and crafts, observed them in their work and also participated themselves and practised what they had seen. Among other things this involved weaving, linen work, traditional wood painting, folk dance from all over Transylvania, making (and playing) traditional local musical instruments, riding on horse carts, visiting museums and art galleries, and many more. As a bonus they even got taken bear watching one evening (and saw 10 bears). One Polish guy in the group said he'd always dreamed of driving an old Dacia, so he got that chance too. They stayed in a fabulous local inn which is located in an old water mill, with accommodation in renovated traditional local peasant houses. The food at this place is plentiful and delicious, and is accompanied with lashings of palinka and wine. All in all it was the kind of week that would cost an absolute fortune if arranged through a travel agent/tour operator, but the people in this group got the whole thing completely funded through the European Union's lifelong learning programmes. Including their travel and everything else.

Everybody was incredibly impressed, happy, delighted, overwhelmed, and full of nothing but heartfelt praise for the experience.

Everybody except one person that is. The one English person on the course seemed to delight in moaning about anything and everything. First of all she had an allergy to paprika. Now this she stated on the form before coming, so every meal the group had was absolutely and perfectly paprika free. Timea, the female half of the couple that owns the watermill-pension who does all the cooking made sure of that (and as you can imagine in a Hungarian context cooking paprika free is quite a challenge). But the English woman insisted that she thought she could detect paprika in her food and got very upset and demanded to see the kitchen. Eventually she reduced Timea, who is the sweetest most caring person you could ever meet, to tears. Then she complained that they hadn't seen enough "Romanian" (as opposed to Hungarian) folk culture - though of course they had all received tons of information before coming to let them know what to expect, to talk about the unique character of this region, and to generally ensure that no-one would have unmet expectations. (Obviously if they had been driven to Bacau or Piatra Neamt or somewhere similar where they could have experienced something more "Romanian", she would then have complained about the distance).

But these are fairly small things. The thing that has really made my blood boil is that on Friday evening when I met the group I asked her how everything was going and she said everything was fine, great, it was a wonderful week etc. However, now, via email she is sending in another great litany of complaints. My favourite being that there were things at breakfast that English people wouldn't eat. Now I have eaten breakfast at this place and there are plenty of things to eat, and if you don't want to eat szalonna, for example, you really are not likely to go hungry. I don't eat szalonna, but I manage to put on weight every time I eat there. Plus, when you travel, you get things that you don't normally eat for breakfast. It's normal is it not? And she wasn't a first time traveller by any means.

I think the thing that really pisses me off is that to my face she told me that everything was great and now back in the UK she is shooting off cowardly emails complaining about ridiculous trivia which marred her experience. An experience which to everyone else was a wonderful amazing life-enhancing experience. An experience which was, let us not forget, entirely and absolutely free.

They say we are nation of whingers, grumblers, and complainers. I didn't really think this was entirely fair until now. It's really pissed me off.

[Now I of course, have whinged and griped about her, so I am obviously a product of my culture just as much as she is.]

Politics week - Part 3: Hungary

2010-05-13T11:59:00.002+03:00

So, the UK now has a Tory prime minister and basically a Tory government. (On a side note, I discovered yesterday that I am older than both halves of Britain's new conjoined prime-ministers. This is obviously the next stage in feeling ancient, after many others - being older than some professional footballers--> being older than all tennis players--> being older than all professional footballers--> and now being older than not just the PM but the mini-me version too). Who knows how it will all pan out, but looking at the cabinet it looks very dicey. Have you seen Michael Gove's views on education for example? Shudder)

And Romania has a government which seems destined to shatter even the Thatcher government's worst excesses. See Bogdan's comments adding to my post on Monday for more details.

However, these two countries pale into insignificance when we look at Hungary. Like the UK, Hungary also recently had a general election, and like the UK it previously had a very unpopular sort-of-but-not-really-left-wing-party in power. However, whereas in the UK the mainstream right-wing party didn't really take full advantage of this, in Hungary they (FIDESZ) swept to power with a huge majority. Now as I think I've said before I think FIDESZ are a pretty dodgy bunch, with a number of dodgy people involved (not least their leader Viktor Orbán).In common with many other mainstream right wing parties they tend to play the "we're not racist, but" game - not being openly racist or having openly racist policies, but not really speaking out against racism (and as we'll see in a couple of paragraphs time, there is a lot of racism in Hungary that really needs to be spoken out against).

In theory FIDESZ's election ought to be reasonably good news for people round here since they do tend to go in for the "let's support our poor oppressed Magyar brothers isolated from us by the evils of Trianon" rhetoric, and in previous periods of government they funded a fair amount of activity here in Székelyföld. Though with Hungary as bankrupt as everywhere else in Europe seems to be, such financial support looks a bit further off this time. There is a suggestion that as they have such a huge parliamentary majority now which allows them to alter the constitution, that they will resuscitate the attempt in 2004 to award Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians from outside Hungary. Personally I think that if they do, everyone here ought to reject it, since (a) in theory now both countries are in the EU there is basically no difference which passport you hold; and (b) it seems like it would just play into the hands of hardcore nationalist Romanians who think Hungarian Romanians should "go back" to Hungary. I can imagine it might open doors for Hungarians in Ukraine or possibly Serbia, but for people here it just seems like a poisoned chalice. Still it's not really for me to say. The other possible effect it might have here would be to shake up the Hungarian Romanian political scene, since FIDESZ created and supported the MPP, a party which appears to have all but disappeared recently, and which provides a more right wing nationalist alternative to the nationalist soft right RMDSZ (UDMR) party which represents the Hungarians in Romania (and hence runs essentially a one-party state here in Harghita County). Who knows what will happen there. [One question that does arise with the possible award of Hungarian citizenship to Hungarians from outside Hungary, is that anyone taking the passport will have to have a vote in Hungarian elections, and of course those that accept the passport will likely to be predisposed to the party that gave it to them, which means that one could see the whole thing as a cynical vote buying grab]

The really big disaster of the Hungarian election though is the rise of Jobbik. Now people on the left often (and occasionally with good reason) get criticised for calling anyone on the right a "fascist" or a "nazi", and it is clear that these terms are extremely overused. But Jobbik are genuinely a Nazi party. By that I don't mean they have strong views on immigration or integration a la Le Pen or Bossi for example. By that I mean they are openly anti-semitic, vehemently anti-Rroma with the threat of violence against that community never far from the surface, aggressive, racist bastards. They even have their own paramilitary force the Magyar Gárda, who have been likened to Hitler's Brownshirts. (As an aside you will see from that article, FIDESZ have been pretty complicit in Jobbik's rise).

In this election Jobbik got 16.67% of the vote, which translates into 47 parliamentary seats (just under 7% of the whole). Next to figures like that Thatcherite politics in Romania and the UK seem like merely a small problem.

The only positive to come out of the election (and I mean the only positive) is that a 4th party (basically a green party) called "Politics can be different" (LMP) got 7% and 16 seats.

Some references in case you want to immerse yourself further in this deeply depressing set of results:
Hungary Lurches to the Right (Der Spiegel)
"Hungary has turned into a grubby hive of nationalism" (Der Spiegel)
Hungary party to follow European extremism's move away from fringes (Guardian)
Head of far-right Hungarian party Jobbik vows to wipe out ‘Gypsy crime’ (The Times)

Who is David Cameron anyway?

2010-05-12T12:29:00.002+03:00

Bit busy today so the Hungary section of politics week has been put on hold. However, the UK now has a prime minister and I thought it would be worth highlighting some of the things he has done and positions he believes in, especially as regards foreign policy (which gets less press attention in an election).

Now I could take the approach of going on about what kind of leader I think he will be or whether his background qualifies him to have any say on the lives of normal people, but I'll resist that temptation and just stick to some of the things he has actually said and done:

In the 80s he accepted an all-expenses paid "sanctions-busting" visit to apartheid South Africa. (Link here). As far as I can tell from searching the web, despite a lot of pressure, he has not actually apologised for this.
He is a member of an organisation called "Conservative Friends of Israel" a lobby group which promotes the occupation and is vehemently anti-Palestinian. (Watch the Channel 4 Documentary - Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby)
In the European parliament he has aligned the Tory party with a disparate group of homophobes, anti-semites and other extremists (including a Latvian party which celebrates the SS) (Link)
He voted for the war on Iraq (though he's not exactly alone in this)

So, from a foreign policy perspective that's the new Prime Minister of the UK. Doesn't look that good does it?

Politics week - Part 2: the UK

2010-05-11T10:27:00.003+03:00

It's been a big week in British politics. But I reckon it must look dead weird from an outsider's perspective. Partly because of our weird electoral system through which the number of votes and number of seats are not really linked, and partly because when this system delivers a "hung parliament" (ie no overall majority for any party), this is such a rare event that it seems to send the whole system into craziness. For most countries (in Europe at least) the idea that after an election you have a period of horse trading and coalition talks is so utterly normal that the last few days of frenzy in the UK must seem really bizarre.

Anyway, to sum up what has happened so far. Firstly everyone lost in the election last week. The Labour Party (or New Labour as I still like to think of them in the vain hope that somewhere deep in the party lies the hope that they will one day return to actually sticking up for working people) got summarily kicked out of government and lost a huge number of MPs. The Liberal Democrats, the third party, who suddenly as a result of the introduction of presidential style debates, were thrust into the limelight and briefly saw the possibility of being the second biggest party (at least in terms of votes) slipped back to pretty much where they were before (more votes, fewer seats, go figure). And the Conservative Party who were the primary opposition to a massively unpopular government, with a hugely disliked prime minister, and with vast amounts of media support for their campaign couldn't even get a majority, which goes to show how even now many many people still hate and distrust them (me included). They did get the most votes and the most seats, but frankly in the circumstances it was as bad a performance as Labour had in 1992.

So no-one won, and now the media is in a frenzy of speculation and, in many cases, blatant attempts to influence the outcomes of negotiations. The vast majority of newspapers in England are rabidly pro-Tory, and they have been flip-flopping madly as things change. Yesterday Gordon Brown was a squatter who needed to resign immediately, and then when yesterday he did announce his resignation this was suddenly a shabby act of treachery of something. In addition the TV is increasingly pro-Tory. Rupert Murdoch's Sky News is extremely biased (and their chief newsbloke Adam Boulton yesterday was hilariously called on his Tory bias yesterday by Alistair Campbell - Blair's former spin doctor/spokesman - causing Boulton to blow up in highly amusing apoplectic rage). It is fairly widely accepted that Murdoch has done a deal with Cameron and the Tories that if they get elected they will savagely cut the BBC thereby leaving Sky with a greater access to the market. Hence Sky and Murdoch's papers - the Time and the Sun being even more rabidly right wing this year than ever before. However, in a perhaps desperate bid to suck up to the Tories and hence not be cut too much, the BBC has also lurched to the right, and their chief political journalist Nick Robinson is unfailingly pro-Tory in everything he says and anti even the prospect of anybody else having a say in government. (His latest disingenuous wheeze, in common with his right-wing brethren, is to suggest that if we end up with a Labour prime minister who is not Gordon Brown, then that's an unelected PM. But the system doesn't actually elect a PM ever, it elects MPs, and the leader of the party with the most MPs is the PM. No-one has ever elected a PM in the UK, despite the new presidential style of the campaigns).

The there are these shadowy "markets" which apparently are going up and down every time anyone sneezes. So ubiquitous have they become in the post-election commentary that one wonders why we even bother to have elections in the first place. Let's let the markets decide, since the media seem to want to let them anyway. Never mind that the markets are a completely indeterminate entity, and that essentially they are made up of a bunch of global gamblers and speculators who spend all day every day betting on stocks and currencies, but who manage (in a really neat trick) to be both gamblers and bookmakers (and yet somehow respected for all that). The only people who care what the markets "think" are the markets themselves and the compliant media.

What the election has delivered is the possibility, however small, of actually having a sane voting system in the UK in the future, one in which everyone's vote counts for something. I am not holding my breath for such an eventuality, but it does now seem to be at least on the agenda.

Aside from the need for a new electoral system, I'm torn on what I think the outcome of this election should be. I am instinctively and deeply anti-Tory. In fact I firmly believe that anyone who was alive and in any way politically conscious in the 80s must for ever distrust and despise them, and never ever vote for them. I cannot ever see myself voting Tory - and I don't believe they have or will ever change. Anyone who remembers the 80s and would vote Tory has either been lobotomised or should be. In the current circumstances with a large budget deficit to deal with, they just be rubbing their hands with glee as (at least in their minds) they have an excuse to make savage cuts in the welfare state. Thankfully we don't have a majority Tory government who would by now already have started dismantling the NHS, education system, and any other troublingly beneficial services.

However, they did get more votes than anyone else, and they ought to be able to have first crack at forming a government. This they have done, and by the end of today they may even have managed it. If they don't and can't put together a workable government then we have to see what other alternatives there are. The press would have you believe that it's Tory or nothing as they are the "winners" in the eyes of most of this band of chancers, but the mainstream press are, for the most part, a bunch of scum who actually care not one jot for democracy, while all the time protesting that they really ONLY care about democracy. From time to time I even get this feeling that from a long term perspective it might even be better for them to form a minority government (or one propped up by the Lib Dems) so they can piss everyone off and get kicked out again when the next election comes round in a few months. But then even that short period of power would result in the destruction of lives, communities and basic human rights, so I can't give in to that one. But then again, I wonder if coalition of Labour and the Lib Dems (with a savage right wing press against them) will not be even more unpopular, and lose even more badly next time round, thus delivering an unchecked Tory government free to launch into its attacks on the country.

It's a quandary and no mistake. But despite the uncertainty (which is not really a big deal, whatever the markets and the press think) actually might make UK politics better in the future.

I really really hope so. Meanwhile if you think that a better voting system is necessary and important, then sign up here: http://www.takebackparliament.com/

This post could be pages and pages longer than this, but I already feel I've rambled way too much.

[Tomorrow's edition of politics week features Hungary. And if you think things are bad in the UK and Romania, then they are nothing compared to that country]

Politics week - Part 1: Romania

2010-05-10T09:46:00.006+03:00

It's going to be politics week on Csikszereda Musings (taking over from the last few weeks during which there were clearly a series of "no activity at all weeks" on this blog).

I'll get to the UK election later this week, but I'll start with Romania. Now Romania's economy is pretty bollocksed (as I believe the technical macroeconomic term has it), and some months before Greece made headlines and made it fashionable the country took a large IMF loan in order to try and bail out the system.

As ever one of the conditions from the aforementioned IMF was that the country had to reduce its budget deficit. So last week, the plan was announced, and quite frankly it's the shittest most ridiculous plan in the history of rubbish plans. Basically it is that state sector employees take a 25% pay cut and pensions and other welfare are cut by 15%.

Let's start with public sector pay cuts. Public employees in Romania are not, frankly, overpaid as it is. Nurses, for example, earn an absolute pittance. Every hospital experience I've had here (either as patient or visitor) I've been absolutely blown away by the commitment and dedication of the nursing staff despite them being paid pretty much the minimum wage. If they're taking home much more than €250 a month I'd be utterly shocked. Meanwhile they are working inside hospitals plastered with posters advertising nursing jobs in other European countries where they will earn 10 times as much. Teachers too, especially those at the early stage of their careers earn basically the square root of fuck all. I'm quite sure that this low pay culture is reflected in most other public service occupations. How shall we deal with debt crisis? Oh let's cut further the pay of those who already earn virtually nothing in the first place.

Pensioners are about the only group in society who make public sector employees look well off. Pensions are very low, and with inflation relatively high, I have no idea how most pensioners will be able to survive a 15% cut in their income. The vast majority of them are pretty much barely making ends meet on a month to month basis anyway. At least from the government's point of view pensioners can't strike, so perhaps that's the motivation.

So what should Romania do instead? If we assume that it must abide by the IMF's requirements (I'm not sure we should assume that, but let's just run with it), obviously money has to be found somewhere. Money either has to be cut from something or raised from somewhere. Cuts seem not what Romania needs right now, with the country's infrastructure in a complete mess, and stuff needing to be done in pretty much every area, and the aforementioned poverty-line existence of nurses, teachers, pensioners, etc etc. Obviously there are large stacks of cash that get siphoned off between being earmarked for public works or what have you and actually being spent, and this would be one area that could profitably be dealt with. Actually have a serious effort to deal with some of the worst corruption, but obviously politicians, as some of the primary beneficiaries of this money leak, are not so willing to go for that option.

The other blatantly obvious place to raise more money is in the taxation system. Romania is one of the few countries in Europe or the world to have a flat tax system. Not only is there a flat tax system but it's pegged at a very low 16%. There is a staggering amount of inequality in Romania, and a better more progressive tax system seems like it would not only raise money but actually make the country a fairer place in general. People earning up to €10,000 a year (a fortune in Romania to be honest) pay 16% as now. Over 10,000 and you start paying 30%, over 50,000 and you start paying 50%. It's not that difficult, you wouldn't punish people who can't afford it, and you'd raise money to start getting the deficit down (and in the grand scheme of this you are not suddenly making Romania less attractive to investors, since what I've just suggested is fairly close to what everyone else has). If you could combine this with a serious anti-corruption effort then suddenly things get better without forcing nurses to go overseas to work so they can eat and pay the gas bill, and without creating an underclass of pensioners.

But no, the government have spoken. Wankers. I have the feeling that this is now going to make the economy worse, since the public sector workers will now all go on strike (and with good reason) and thus, effectively increase the problems. Good work Domnul Basescu, you stupid stupid bastard.

Stories from the apocalypse

2010-04-17T15:35:00.003+03:00

If you rely on the UK media for your news you may be under the impression that the current volcanic dust problems are affecting (a) holidaymakers who can't go on their trip; and (b) the arrival of exotic fruits and the subsequent trauma of the English middle classes. (Honestly I'm not making that up).

However, as I have spent some time over the last few days in the company of people who have been genuinely affected by the wrath of Eyjafjallajoekull (when my 4 year old daughter writes to me on messenger I'm sure that's the word she usually types, which means she's been warning me of this event for some time, which is a bit freakish), I do know that there are some actual stories of hardships beyond the awfulness of not being able to buy pineapple at Waitrose. These are all people I've met in the last couple of days (mostly on my non-flight on Thursday), or who I know or am connected to in some way.

1. The British man and Romanian woman who were flying out to their own wedding in Bucharest (should have been today - Saturday) along with assorted relatives. I have this image of a church full of people in Bucharest standing around even now looking at their watches and muttering "I knew it wouldn't last" to their neighbours.

2. The Egyptian guy who was flying home to Cairo via Bucharest. He is now stuck in the UK with a soon to expire visa and no money whatsoever. With this promising to go on for some time there are increasing number of people in a similar situation. If you've nowhere to stay, no money, no way of getting home aside from by plane...what do you do?

3. The Cypriot businessman who lives in London and who has a factory in Romania. he was flying over to sign all the cheques to pay his workers. He needs to be there to do that, and no-one else can do it. So a large number of people who were not even flying anywhere have a massive problem.

4. Someone I met in Moscow a couple of weeks ago whose visa expires today, and who was due to fly home yesterday. I suspect Russian visa officials will not be terribly sympathetic.

5. Daughter of a friend who is stuck in Bangkok with no money, dodging riots on the streets.

So, what all these things remind me is that (a) my situation is not terrible in the grand scheme of things. I miss my family (and I'd like to think they miss me), and really really want to be home. But I have somewhere to stay, access to some money, and time to work out other options; and (b) anyone complaining they can't buy a fig wants shooting.

Ash Thursday

2010-04-15T23:36:00.002+03:00

So, today I have managed to check off the "get delayed by volcanic ash" item from the "Things I must do before I snuff it" list. It hadn't been very high up that list to be fair, but I thought today was an opportunity too good to miss. Only comes around every 200 years apparently. Bastard has to be today.

However, I feel I have to use an opportunity here to praise Tarom and their rep at Heathrow Catalin Zlota. Now as we all know airlines don't actually have any obligation to help passengers in a situation not of their making, such as weather, and less commonly vast clouds of volcanic ash floating over from Iceland. And in fact nearly all the airlines around basically told everyone to go home and come back tomorrow, whereas Tarom gave us food tokens and actually put us all in a hotel (from where I write this), with dinner and breakfast. I was chatting to a couple of Alitalia staff (it was a long day) and they said that as far as they could tell not only were we the only passengers to get this treatment, but Domnul Zlota was the only airline rep who was out working with his passengers.

I get the impression that Tarom doesn't get much respect in Romania, but it should. I have always found it a reasonable airline (in European airline terms), and the staff are always friendly and helpful, and today's events have reinforced and extended that feeling. No idea whether I'll feel this way tomorrow after the ash has delayed us for another day, but so far, they and specifically Zlota are doing a great job.

Unexpectedly positive post perhaps. Especially in the circumstances where I really really REALLY want to go home.

Contradictions

2010-03-30T11:23:00.004+03:00

The two stories below are connected but seem to contradict each other in some small way. See if you can spot the well hidden paradox:

1. Last week I travelled from Moscow to Krakow. There's no direct flight so I went via Warsaw. While killing time in Sheremetyevo airport waiting for my departure, I decided to purchase a duty free bottle of vodka for my father-in-law. I perused the shelves at length and eventually settled upon a bottle of Stolichnaya, primarily because it is made in Moscow and that seemed most appropriate. As is the way these days with duty free shops, it was placed - with receipt- in a plastic bag which was all then sealed up with one of those special sealing machines.

When I arrived in Warsaw though, I went through the deep pain of having my carefully selected booze snatched from me by security guards. This is not the first time this has happened to me as long time readers of this blog will know. But last time the wine was in an unsealed duty free bag, and these days I know that they must be sealed. Apparently, the guards explained to me, the sealed bag system only works if you are travelling within the EU or if you are coming from Croatia, the USA, or South Korea. And that's it. Have these countries done deals where they take EU officials round their duty free shops and show them how impossible it would be to pack liquid explosives in bottles of alcohol, and then sell it to passengers without their knowledge, and make it explode only when they'd got onto their connecting flight? It's hard to know. But it does seem like yet another load of inexplicable bollocks done in the name of "security". I wonder whether if I'd been routed Moscow-Zagreb-Warsaw-Krakow, whether I'd have been able to keep it - if so, it sounds like a very good way for Zagreb to become a major hub in Europe. I can only hope that the Polish security guards who put the bottle in the bin, retrieved it after I left and took it home. It's would be a great shame to have wasted it entirely.

2. On the same flight, my bag was checked all the way through to Krakow. As my final flight was domestic and I arrived at the large echo-ey empty warehouse that acts as Krakow's domestic terminal, this meant that my bag never went through customs at any point. In Krakow I just picked it up and walked out.

Not thinking things through

2010-03-30T11:08:00.002+03:00

According to the survey data reported here, among the depressing findings that 91% of Romanians would like to reintroduce the death penalty and 88% think it should be a crime to criticise the Orthodox Church, is the statistic that 89% of Romanians think that anyone in favour of autonomy for Székelyföld should have their citizenship revoked. I suspect people didn't really think this through, since, you know, if you revoked everyone's citizenship round here, they'd effectively be autonomous. No taxes, no need to obey the law, etc etc. You couldn't deport them because they'd have no state to be deported to, so they'd have to stay here. In a stroke you'd effectively have created Székely autonomy. Brilliant thinking, Iosif Public.

Either 89% of people in this country are a bit thick, or the questions were skewed in such a way as to make the findings seem really newsworthy. I suspect the latter.

15th March 1848

2010-03-15T09:35:00.006+02:00

Today is, as you may have noticed, March 15th. Not much special about that for most people, aside from that whole ides of March / et tu brute thing. But it is a big deal in the world of Hungarians, as it represents possibly the biggest day in the Hungarian calendar - the commemoration of the revolution of 1848.

Of late I've been reading a great history book called "The Hungarians: 1000 Years of Victory in Defeat" by Paul Lendvai. (The title is very apt since the history of Hungarians in Europe does seem to have been a litany of defeats - and in fact the two biggest holidays in the Hungarian calendar - today and the commemoration of the 1956 uprising both, ultimately celebrate and romanticise defeats).

The thing that really stands out about the history of Hungary prior to 1848 is that if Hungarians feel the need to hold any historical grudges, they ought to hold those grudges at two groups
(1) Their own ridiculously self-interested and anti-progressive nobility. With a few notable exceptions this group kept Hungary (and it's attendant bits) in a ridiculously backward state for centuries; and
(2) The Austrians/Habsburgs who seemingly never missed an opportunity to screw everyone over, and especially the Hungarians.

What's inspiring about the 1848 revolution which Hungarians celebrate today is that it is liberation from these very two groups that characterises the positive side of the uprising. The removal of serfdom, the emancipation of the Jews and the wresting of control from Vienna were some of the truly forward thinking things achieved by the revolution. On the negative side the leaders of the revolution, including it's most famous member Kossuth Lajos, wrapped everything up in a Magyar nationalism which ultimately led to its downfall. This was not only a political error - nothing good ever comes of nationalism, and to use nationalism as a tool or worse as a basis, always ends up badly- but it was a massive tactical error too. Rather than liberating peasants from serfdom, the sense was that it was about liberating Hungarian peasants - Romanians and Serbs and other ethnic groups within Hungary and Transylvania were not to be liberated, and so had no stake in the success of the revolution (and indeed could not have been faulted for being highly suspicious of it and fearful of its success). Austria got them to fight along with Vienna against the revolution (and promptly, when it was successfully put down, screwed them over too. The Habsburgs were equal opportunity dickheads it seems). Later in exile, Kossuth Lajos argued for a loose Danube confederation of peoples, which would have been a much better bet from the word go, but by then it was too late.

Eventually the revolution was finally put down with the support of Russia. One of the best things about Lendvai's book ( as well as it being a very even-handed and well-written history) is some little vignettes of interest - people who rose to minor prominence and/or infamy. One of these is Alexei Gusev. Alexei Gusev was a Csarist captain who realised how important the revolution was and ended up fighting alongside the Hungarians. Except that he didn't actually exist. During the time of Soviet domination of Hungary, the USSR wanted to present themselves as long time friends of Hungary - this was a problem because Hungary's most romantic historical moment (1848) was eventually put down with Russian support. In trying to form a clear revolutionary link between Kossuth and Stalin, a compliant Hungarian historian was recruited who then researched in archives and came up with the aforementioned Captain Gusev, who had rebelled against the Csar and joined Kossuth. Here was the link between the USSR and Kossuth. They even named streets after him in Budapest and other towns. Until of course it was discovered after 1989 that he had in fact been entirely made up.

But anyway, I digress. 1848. Kossuth. Petőfi. It's difficult to overstate the importance of this moment in Hungarian history, and in the Hungarian consciousness. As I look out the window today, I can see Hungarian flags all over the place. This is about the only day of the year when you see those flags here (except outside the Hungarian consulate). There will be a laying of wreaths on the statues of Petőfi and Nicolae Balcescu (who was a Romanian revolutionary leader in 1848 also, and who ought to have been listened to more by Kossuth, as much more could have been achieved)

I'll write more about the Lendvai book as I go through it. It's really worth reading for anyone vaguely interested in regional history and in particular the Hungarians' place in it.

Round the Bloc

2010-03-12T11:49:00.011+02:00

I have had a fairly long period in Romania since my last trip (without really working it out, I suspect the longest uninterrupted period in the country since I arrived), having not been anywhere since November. Not sure if this represents any major trend, but fortunately I have actually been working a fair amount during that time, but doing it online rather than in the flesh. I have to say though if one was to pick a time period in which to remain constantly in the Ciuc depression, the November-March slot would not necessarily be it. Especially not this ridiculously long, cold and snowy winter. Anyway, this period is about to come to an end next week when I depart these shores for the sub-tropical climes of ..., erm, ...Moscow.

As it happens the way things have worked out I now have a month of travel coming up, centred around a tour of post-communist Eastern Europe. Next Thursday I make the Bucharest-Warsaw-Moscow trip beloved of apparatchiks in the 1970s taking in all those amazing monuments to the beautiful architecture of the aesthetes of those times (they all look peculiarly and ironically Disney-esque to be honest, and show a great in-your-face penchant for architecturally flipping the bird at the very proletariat they were supposed to inspire)

From here...past here...
...to here
Back from Moscow at the weekend via a few days in Krakow, and then a couple of weeks later to that other city at the heart of it all, Berlin. This Bloc party is rather spoilt by the fact that in between the Russia/Poland trip and the Berlin trip, I will spend a week in Harrogate, a town which is about as far from the Communist heartland as it is possible to be. Twee-blue-rinsed-conservative-small-town-England. But still, who knows what hidden secrets Harrogate conceals beneath its genteel Victorian skirts. A gulag in which those not toeing the mustn't-grumble-except-about-immigrants party line are dunked in vats of strong tea? We'll see.

Stupid quiz

2010-03-11T12:45:00.004+02:00

A completely gratuitous and apropos-of-nothing-in-particular quiz for your Thursday pleasure.

Translate the following. What's the link?

Öreg sonka
Enterrer
Casco
Ficat piscină
Schüren
Lupi
Novo castelo
Mlýn zeď
Okuma
Zapad šunka

Note: I can not actually vouch for the perfection of many of these translations, but as far as I can tell they work.

Sign of the signs

2010-03-10T09:39:00.003+02:00

A very important addition to the Romanian road side. Particularly for people who are not familiar with the fact that driving through any village you are likely to find extremely pissed up people staggering in front of your car, just collapsing on the road in front of you, or if they're on a bike, slaloming slowly up and down the street.

Story here. Though I wouldn't trust the Telegraph's translation of the sign. As far as I know it says (quite poetically) "Tormented Citizens"

Beer news

2010-03-09T19:11:00.003+02:00

Romanian beer is decidedly average. The best of the mass produced stuff is Ciuc, made here (and I don't say that because it's a local product, it's just the best there is - I think it's because we have the best water)

However, as I reported some years ago there did briefly appear the very wonderful Sapte Coline.Sadly this excellent beer was only available in its home town, Iasi, and was therefore a bit niche market. (It has, I'm told by my Iasi contacts, since died out).

However, I have just discovered a very nice replacement called MaDonna brewed in Galati. As far as I can tell the brewery doesn't have a website, but there is an article about it here (in Romanian). A real Belgian style beer brewed in Romania, and available throughout the country. Delicious. I am drinking some right now as I type this, and I can thoroughly recommend it. So there you go. Good beer in Romania.

Evangelism and its discontents

2010-03-05T10:23:00.002+02:00

Am I the only person who really really cannot stand evangelism? I'm not just talking about religion here, though obviously there are certain religious groups and people who are particularly guilty of being insanely evangelical, and in fact it seems that the very concept comes out of Christianity. I have no problem with people believing whatever they want to believe, but when it starts to be something they want to force it down everyone else's throat, it pisses me right off. Aside from the obvious - war criminals, rapists, paedophiles etc etc, I would say that missionaries are quite possible my least favourite group of people (they might be nice enough as people, but they have chosen a life which is all about looking down on others, criticising and then trying to turn them into carbon copies of themselves. Really arrogant and repulsive stuff).

The other evangelism I've become aware of of late is tech evangelism. There is much talk these days of "digital immigrants" and "digital natives", but I think it's time to coin the term "digital missionaries" (and as may be apparent from the above, I don't use that word in a positive way). I touched upon it recently when I wrote about mad Mac-o-philes (though I realise that post implied that all Mac users were fundamentalist evangelicals, which is not true. Just some of them, though seemingly a large proportion)

Of late I've been moving in newish circles of people (I mean this in the online sense of that phrase), many of whom are passionate about the use of technology in education (education is, in case you didn't know, my professional field). Now for the most part this is great - people who are trying to improve the learning experience for students, trying to help them learn more effectively and making use of many of the tools that exist. But there are a few who seem to make it their mission to criticise, belittle, patronise and ridicule those who are not using aforementioned tools (even if those people are in places where they really can't). It drives me mad. And, it has the effect of making me want to NOT want to use the stuff they peddle, just as i-vangelism has the effect of making me NOT ever want to own anything made by Apple. [Yes, I do recognise that this is my problem not theirs].

Now possibly someone will pipe up and suggest that as I keep a blog, I am - in a sense- evangelising too, but I really don't feel that I am. I obviously have opinions (as does everyone else), and I'm happy to share those opinions and bore everyone to tears with them, but whether anyone is swayed in any way by my opinions is entirely up to them (and in fact I actually presume that no-one ever is). To give an example, I am vegetarian. I've just done a search of the entire blog and I have mentioned this fact twice. Just mentioned it. No "why you too should be a vegetarian" or anything like that. We (vegetarians) are always being accused by meat eaters of being evangelical - I've never seen this, but I think the perception exists. As it goes I think there are pressing reasons why a greater number of vegetarians would be a good thing, but I'm still not really interested in telling or even suggesting to people that they should follow me on this path. I figure people think about it, (because I assume the vast majority of people have brains, and thoughts, and can weigh up various options) and make their own decisions. Whatever I happen to think of that decision is irrelevant.

I have pondered the possibility that I am using "evangelism" to mean "going on about things I don't like" and "just sharing my opinions" for "going on about things I do", but I'm pretty sure that's not it. After all, I am in favour of using technology in the classroom in a well thought out way (and in contexts where it's possible), I just don't like it when people try and make it seem that people who don't are somehow inferior and, worse, professionally incompetent.

I have the strong suspicion now that people are going to use the comments section to highlight places where I have been evangelical - but at least if that happens I might be able to more clearly define what constitutes evangelism and what doesn't. Since I think I probably haven't yet, even though, to coin a phrase, I know it when I see it.

Microclimates

2010-03-02T12:06:00.003+02:00

I occasionally forget that I live in a microclimate. It is well known (at least within Romania) that Csikszereda is the coldest place in the country (though locally, that title is hotly contested by Gyergyószentmiklós (Gheorgheni). [In fact the official coldest place in the country is Gyergyóalfalu - Joseni - which is near Gyergyó] When I watch the weather forecast on Romanian TV, if they don't mention the projected temperature here (and they rarely do, since it's not exactly a big place), I have to take the temperature they give for Brasov, and subtract a few degrees to have a rough idea. But I do tend to forget that we really have different weather here. A couple of weeks ago, we drove over to Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc), and I was stunned to realise once we climbed over the mountain pass at Tolvajos-tető (no idea what that's called in Romanian, I'm afraid, I'm not even sure it has a name), suddenly there was no snow. A few patches in sheltered north facing nooks, but basically nothing. And that's just 20 kms from here. We, then at least, still had tons of the stuff lying around everywhere. It's slowly going now as it's been warmer for a week, but there's still a fair amount. Elsewhere? Not a flake.

Csíkszereda, you see, lies in a depression in the mountains. We're 700m above sea level, which means, for example, that we're way higher up than the Tan Hill Inn, which bills itself as the highest pub in Britain at 1732 feet (which in real money is just under 530 metres). However it doesn't feel like that as we are surrounded by montains on all sides, most of which are getting on for 2000m high). Thus we get our own little microclimate. Sometimes in the winter all the mountains and even nearby towns are blanketed in snow, and we've got none. Or the other way round (like now). We have very cold winters*, and pleasant summers (while the winter here is pretty brutal, we are a haven for people from all over the country sweltering in deeply unpleasant summers). Famously, you can't grow tomatoes in Csíkszereda. (To be honest this is not exactly true, because (a) obviously you can in greenhouses; (b) you can grow them outside too, they just don't get ripe; and (c) increasingly these days as the climate gets warmer you seemingly can).

[* This has been a fairly tough winter, and temperatures dropped below -30 a few times, but I have lost count of the times so far this year that people have told me about 1985 when it got down to -41. I live in a world where people measure their worth by the ability to withstand cold]

Documentary recommendation

2010-03-02T10:50:00.004+02:00

Just watched a nearly hour long astonishing documentary made by a Romanian guy for the BBC on Romanian Rroma kids in Europe being exploited as child criminals. Well worth watching if you've a little time to spare:

Part 1 is here and after that you can follow the links to the following parts.

I'm trying to run a hotel here

2010-02-25T14:13:00.004+02:00

This is typical. Absolutely typical... of the kind of... ARSE I have to put up with from you people! You ponce in here, expecting to be handwaited on hand and foot while I'm trying to run a hotel here! Have you any idea of how much there is to do? Do you ever think of that? Of course not! You're all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking around for things to complain about, aren't you? Well, let me tell you something - this is exactly how Nazi Germany started! A lot of layabouts with nothing better to do than to cause trouble! Well, I've had fifteen years of pandering to the likes of you, and I've had enough! I've had it! Come on, pack your bags and get out!
-Basil Fawlty

Last weekend, Mrs H decided to take me away on a romantic weekend as an early celebration of my birthday. We went to one of Romania's top spa hotels, which has 4 stars (how do these star rating work? Is it self-assessment, or something more complex? I'm never really sure).

Anyway, the whole weekend was very enjoyable, and romantic, and celebratory. Though sadly this was despite, rather than because of the hotel itself, which was, to be honest, utterly farcical rather like a 4 star, large chain, Fawlty Towers. Much of the weekend was spent laughing about the whole incompetence of the experience.

We were booked in on a special Valentine's Day weekend package (though we actually went a week after Valentine's Day, but the package was still available). This included a number of extras. Chocolate, champagne and a rose in the room, romantic aromatherapy bath for two, breakfast in bed, etc etc

Some "highlights" of this experience:

The rose in our room was dead. And I don't mean it had been cut and put in a vase, I mean that it had been cut and put in a vase some days (possibly weeks) earlier.
The breakfast in bed involved extremely cold coffee, the wrong food, and no cutlery. We called to ask if we might get a knife and fork, perhaps, and a little while later there was a knock at the door, and when I opened it, the apologetic waiter bustled past me and handed the cutlery to Mrs H - who was sitting, naked and uncovered, in bed. (He did have the presence of mind to apologise and say "I'm not looking")
The special romantic aromatherapy bath took place in the "wellness centre". the room was absolutely brilliant and I wish I had got a picture. It was in a curtained off area of the treatment area. I think I've mentioned before that "spas" here are not into all that relaxation stuff that tends to be part of the "spa experience" in the US and increasingly other places, rather they are the sort of health concentration camps beloved of Victorian Britain. So this romantic bath took place in what was basically a hospital room, with a large plastic tub in the middle. To make it a bit more conducive for its Valentine inspired purpose, some strings of cheap red heart shaped balloons with "I Love You" written on then had been hung from the ceiling. And there was CD player with soothing music. That's it. It was still not exactly the most romantic place I've ever been, and in fact would not really make the top thousand. It would, however, probably make it in the top ten of most comical places I've been, and the top 50 of least romantic places I've ever been.

These problems were all, as you can see, actually pretty amusing in their own way, and as we're not exactly the world's sappiest couple, they didn't really dampen our weekend, as much as provide us with a selection of amusing stories to tell on our return to the real world.

One or two other things were a little bit more annoying, however. The hotel website clearly advertised that there was a swimming pool, something which we were both quite looking forward to. We looked everywhere for this mysterious swimming pool, but it was not to be found anywhere. When questioned, the staff looked a bit sheepish and confessed that actually there wasn't a swimming pool at all. In addition, it was all but impossible to get a drink of water in the whole spa area. This seemed a bit off to me since there were saunas, steamrooms, a hot salty bath, massages etc going on, and you'd think that water to drink was a fairly essential commodity. But no. Even the taps in the sinks in the changing rooms were turned off. The only real option was hanging around the "snack bar" for 15 minutes while someone was found to serve us, and buy a bottle of mineral water at (wait for it) a 2000% mark-up (from the retail price I pay for the same water in the shops).

It was, in short, the Eastern European customer care experience writ large. The hotel was nicely renovated, well decorated etc. but the details were, shall we say, not really taken care of. At all. The attitude often seems to be "We've done the place up, and it looks really good. Isn't that enough?"

So anyway, I complained, and received a couple of emails telling me how sorry they were (and they've now removed the phantom swimming pool from the website), but not really satisfied my complaints (in fact, each new email that arrives makes me more pissed off for what it doesn't say and the apparent lack of understanding why I might be a tad peeved about this).

[Since I often seem to be read as having some kind of nationalist agenda vis-a-vis Hungarian/Romanian issues, I'll point out here that while the hotel is in Romania, it's in a very Hungarian town, and is actually part of a large Hungarian chain of hotels. I wondered whether I ought to keep the actual name of the hotel out of this, but in the end, have decided that there is really no reason why I need to protect them from anything, since I am increasingly regarding them as a bunch of dishonest chancers who really couldn't care less, so I feel my message of (extremely) limited reach can go ahead and warn people away from the Danubius Hotel Sovata/Szovata. Based on this experience, I'd go as far as to warn people off any of the hotels in the Danubius chain]

Is there a Monoathlon?

2010-02-24T15:08:00.002+02:00

To my surprise I have found myself getting into the Winter Olympics of late. Partly because this is because we have a genuine bona fide local hero(ine) to watch competing. This is Eva Tofalvi who is a biathlete and, despite the Romanian biathlon team having barely a ski to rub together, has done superbly well. She's finished 14th, 19th, 11th, and 24th in the individual events she's been in, and 10th in the relay, which is a great set of results.

Biathlon, by the way, is a great sport. I've really enjoyed watching it. It's a race where every now and again they have to stop and shoot targets and then do extra bits of racing every time they miss one. It's a fantastic spectacle, and I reckon all races should have this extra bits tacked on. Formula One, for example, would be improved immensely if the drivers had to parallel park 5 times every 15 laps, and if they made any mistakes they'd have too do an extra lap, while horse racing could have a stop every mile during which jockeys would have to find some oats and feed the horse. No idea why these sports don't learn from the biathlon's greatness. I've even got into cross-country skiing (though it lacks the crucial penalty bit of the biathlon).

What baffles me is the fact that it seems like the sports which are most popular to watch in the Winter Games are the ones which are most tedious. Ski-jumping, for example, is incredibly tiresome. I also find the whole bobsleigh/luge thing to be as fun as watching paint dry (they used to have a little frisson around the possibility of crashing, but now that someone's gone and very publicly died doing that, this pleasure has gone out of the window). The less said about figure skating the better.

I haven't managed to point you in the direction of the biathlon in time, I'm afraid as I think they've now finished all the races, but watch out for it on Eurosport or similar in the future.

Skistone Cops

2010-02-08T09:55:00.007+02:00

Last week we went skiing more or less every day. It was half term for the kids, so each day I drove them up the mountain to our local resort Hargitafürdő / Baile Harghita, and Bogi had an hour long lesson while Paula got pulled around on skis by me, and then went down shallow slopes on her own. Except on Saturday when she went down a much faster slope and I had to grab her and lift her off her feet before she careered into a tree. After that she didn't want to go again.

Anyway, things at Hargita have improved a lot over the last few years. There are far more places to stay, cafes, and there is even a new small ski lift for kids and a tubing place (where people sledge down the hill on an inner tube and then get pulled up by some kind of special lift). The other thing that has changed is the demographics - when I first went up there 5 years ago, one only ever really heard Hungarian spoken, but slowly over the years it's become far more of a Romanian resort, to the point now where you barely hear any Hungarian, and the majority of the cars are from Bacau or Neamt or places. Having said that though, it was pretty quiet last week seeing as it was a school holiday nation-wide, and it's a very good winter for skiing. I guess that's a visible indicator of the crisis.

Saw two new kinds of police up there too, to add to my collection of various different Romanian police forces, of which there appear to be a huge number. This time I encountered Mountain Gendarmes (Jandarmeria montana) (not sure what they do exactly, but since I've never been really sure what the normal lowland gendarmes in Romania do, this is par for the course). There were also a bunch of blokes in a thick brown uniform skiing around, who were part of the Brigada Antiterorista. Which of course raised the question in my mind as to what the hell they were doing there. Were they on a work outing, and if so, did they really need to wear the uniform? Were they there to counter some specific threat that had been made to the small Csipike ski run? (live webcam here) Which as you can see is not exactly the kind of place that you'd think would be high up the Al Qaida hitlist (they were there all week too, before Romania had announced it was going to spend money it doesn't have installing some bizarre American missile defence shield. Not sure why the US can't pay for all of this, but there you go. Perhaps it's part of the oddly lopsided and with no corruption at all no sir Bechtel deal) . Or, were they there to reassure Romanian skiers that they were being protected from some previously unknown violent Hungarian secessionist movement?

(In the course of checking some spellings for this bit, I have discovered that there is a "Special Intervention Brigade" within the Jandarmeria who go by the name "Vlad Ţepeş" (Vlad the Impaler). I swear I'm not making that up. Look.)

This week there will be a big event up there. The world cup in ski orienteering (round 3) is being held here. (You can find it here and here), and this is apparently the biggest winter sport event held in Romania for many decades. Personally I'd never even hear of ski orienteering (though now I have, it does sound like an event that makes perfect sense), and we've had short course speed skating championships and Junior Ice Hockey world championships here since I've lived here, so that does sound quite a claim.

Just to finish off the winter stuff, we had another big snowfall this weekend, but everybody seems to be managing. Unlike in Bucharest where the city is apparently paralysed, schools closed and all sorts. Soft southern jessies.

i-dolatry

2010-01-27T13:18:00.002+02:00

Today half the internet is in a state of wild-eyed, priapic excitement over the latest whatever-it-will-be that Steve Jobs reveals today. Geeks all over the world have been metaphorically shaving their legs and sliding on their sexiest underwear in preparation for this moment. (I may have done some slight gender mixing in my sexual metaphors there, but I'm sure you'll cope)

I on the other hand, am less breathless and and doe-eyed. Not because I don't suspect that the i-whatever will be something pretty cool, but because I have become steadily more and more bitter and twisted by the unquestioning drooling and fundamentalism that spreads amongst the population whenever Steve Jobs speaks.

Firstly, lets get over the stuff that Apple does well. They produce cool new products that tend to be ahead of the field. They are also seemingly the first tech company that recognised the value of design and style, and that you can actually spend money on making things look really good as well as just functioning well.

What they really do best though is marketing. Not just producing stuff but convincing many, often thoughtful, people that to own an i-thingy is cool and somehow sticking-it-to-the-nasty-microsoft/PC-man.

But, it's a massive and incredibly rich multinational corporation. You're not supporting some struggling hand-to-mouth co-operative when you buy an Apple. They sell more computers than anyone else. I'm sure they also sell more MP3 players than anyone else, and increasingly are taking a huge slice out of the mobile phone market. It's as if Pepsi had managed to convince everyone that to buy Pepsi and not Coke was some kind of independent-minded, deeply liberal thing to do.

Apple consumers (and you are a consumer, not a style guru), will go around telling everyone how amazing their ipod/macbook/iphone/whatever is this week's gimmick is. You don't get that from other people. You don't hear people who use Windows raving about how amazing their OS is, or people who have a Dell or an Acer or something go on about their computer, but Apple users never bloody shut up about it. Is this because the current Mac OS is better than the current MS OS? No. There have been some very very shit versions of Windows and there have been some equally shit versions of Mac OS. An OS is a like a language - you feel slightly more comfortable using the one that you first used, but you can learn to use another if you chooose and one is not inherently better than the other. In the main, Mac OS does some things better than Windows and Windows does some things better than Mac OS. Big deal. Some people prefer Coke to Pepsi, others prefer Pepsi to Coke. Get over it. You have a computer. It's a product just like any other. And, I might venture to add, an expensive one at that. For whatever reason pretty much everything made by Apple costs significantly more than it's non-Apple equivalent. Given that they have a willing army of evangelists ready and willing to openly masturbate (metaphorically) over their products, they don't even really need to spend anything on advertising so they ought to be cheaper, but no.

I have to hand it to Apple, honestly. They do make good stuff, but this marketing trick is absolutely amazing. I half-expect people to start showing up at the door offering copies of Watchtower and telling me how Apple changed their life, and how Steve Jobs is their personal lord and saviour.

But when I see people I respect and like who've obviously been suckered into the role of willing tool in extending the reach of a massive multinational corporation it makes me sad and makes me want to slap them (gently - I like these people, remember) until they snap out of it.

Apparently one of the possible names for today's big unveiling is the i-con. Seems really appropriate.

Poster boy

2010-01-25T11:37:00.002+02:00

A bit of a follow-up to last week's rant about Cameron and co.

You too, can have fun with modifying the wild-eyed, slapheaded, "look at me I'm not wearing a tie, I'm that cool" Dave Cameron poster here.

Bloody cold today, of the "hairs on inside of ones nose freeze up within 3 seconds of stepping outside" variety. If you're not familiar with the hairinnose scale of temeperature it's about -28 at the moment, and it's nearly noon when I type this.

Whatever happened to the BBC?

2010-01-21T09:45:00.008+02:00

These days, thanks to the miracles of modern technology and that, we can get two BBC channels on our TV all the way out here in li'l ol' Csikszereda. (The same technology means we can no longer get the very local channels like Csiki TV and Szekely TV, which is kind of weird, really, but I guess that's globalisation for you)

Anyway, these channels are BBC World (which is the news channel) and BBC Prime, which has recently been rebranded as BBC Entertainment. I'm assuming that the rebranding came because lots of people were asking "is this really your prime output?". It may well of course be, and that all the BBC actually shows these days are interminable shows about antiques, "The Weakest Link", and seemingly thousands of soap operas with "Holby" in the title. Every now and again I flick over to see, but it's always some awful rubbish. The only time it gets watched is in the early morning when Paula watches the kids shows on it. These are actually quite good (at least compared with the alternatives she has available), though all of them seemingly ask her to guess something (which window to look through in Tikkabilla*, which coloured house someone will visit in Balamory, which teletubby will get the TV beamed through their stomach, etc), which is something she's not yet comfortable with. Perhaps it's something that you get along with breast feeding in the UK, but here I try to chivvy her along "Which window do you think it will be?" but she's having none of it "I don't know". "No, I know you don't know, but guess". "I can't know". "No, I know, just guess", by which time the camera has already zoomed in on the square window so she then says "The square one".

(*Tikkabilla, by the way, is clearly just the children's programme formerly known as Play School, but rebranded to be more hip for today's web 2.0 generation. New name, dolls and teddies replaced by small purple dragon, etc etc.)

But, anyway, I digress.

So, BBC News, has really gone downhill, and is depressing me. This is the channel that the hard right calls "leftist", but is in fact, as far as I can tell these days very much rightist. Some examples:

1. Yesterday, they invited someone from the Wall Street Journal to comment on the Massachusetts election (and provided no information that the WSJ has over the past few years turned into a hard right wing rag of the lowest order, nor any balancing viewpoints). This guy proceeded to say that the reason Obama was losing popularity was because he wasn't reaching across to the other side, which as far as I can tell is patently false, and if anything his problem is that he's spending too much time trying to appease Republicans. He's not reaching out to the mad Limbaugh/Beck/Palin extreme end of the Republican party, well, because they're all barking mad, and how the hell would you reach out to them? Promise to bomb Iran and jail people for using birth control if they agreed to say not such nasty things about you?

2. Just before Christmas the woman who does the business section on the morning slot was discussing the possibility of a strike by British Airways cabin crew. "It's really important that BA win this" she said (and that's a word for word quote, since it stunned me so much that I can still hear her saying it). Firstly "BA" does not equate to "BA Management" as she implied, and also what kind of reporting is it to say out front that the workers needed to be defeated? I know she's the business correspondent, but still. How left wing is all of that?

3. Today's top story was that the Chinese economy was moving ahead of Japan's. Haiti was barely even mentioned. I know it was a week ago, but it's still a huge story and one that is a bit more important than China moving up to second place in some kind of imaginary world economic league table. Euronews, by the way, has been fantastic on Haiti. Really good reporting, important information (journalists have been banned from the airport now, by the way, which is not something I've heard on the BBC), and great testimonies from people there (Haitians and relief workers).

4. They are really pissing me off with their pro-occupation stance whenever the issue of Israel - Palestine comes up. I mean compared to any US media outlet they come across as balanced, but they're really not. (And in fact an independent report a year or two back, confirmed this feeling of mine that they are more favourable to the Israeli government position than anything else)

So, what happened to the BBC? And what will become of it under the next government? It's all very depressing.

Romania in the grip of violet flame conspiracy

2010-01-19T11:37:00.004+02:00

Just to balance the last post I made, at least in the sense of showing that the British system isn't the only one that is built on a steaming pile of bullshit, Romania is currently going through bizarre political fights over some kind of hocus-pocus "energy attacks" and rings of purple fire and witchcraft and tons of other weird new-age claims and counter claims

There's a news article here and the story is covered in much more amusing depth by Craig over at Bucharest Life - yesterday and today. It's all very amusing/ludicrous/slightly terrifying that these people represent the political elite in this country.

The Last Big Lie of Thatcherism

2010-01-19T09:38:00.006+02:00

It's probably apparent where I stand on Thatcherism to anyone who's read much of anything on this blog, so I'll not go into it in any great depth - I'm not a fan, basically. [This shouldn't of course be read to imply that I think Britain had it worse in the 1980s than Romania, for example - obviously we didn't, and compared to Ceausescu, Thatcher and her odious cabinet of scum, were not even in the same league. Nor should it be read to imply that I somehow think that war-criminal Tony Blair was somehow a beacon of positive change. He, after all, is a Thatcherist himself]

However, when one argues about Thatcherism with people who do think that it was all a good thing, there are a number of things which get raised as examples of what she did that was positive. One of the main ones of these was that she (and her team - it's not really all about her specifically) ushered in neo-liberal economic policies, which I personally never saw as "a good thing", but which now has been shown up to be a house of cards that has collapsed in spectacular fashion. That's one aspect of Thatcherism that has, at least, been shown up for its disastrous consequences rather than its supposed benefits (you'll note that, Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, who came to power preaching a Thatcherite economic revolution for France, has been very quiet on this issue since Lehman Brothers went down).

The second argument is that she crushed the unions and stripped them of their power. This required the idea of unions themselves to be demonised, which was accomplished (with the aid of a compliant media) very successfully. However, unions are (and always have been) a vehicle for organised labour, and the concept of the powerless joining together to give themselves a voice seems, to me, to be something that should be celebrated rather than demonised. Do unions have problems? yes. Are unions and the idea behind them problematic in themselves? No. So, yes, Thatcherism disempowered the already powerless. Difficult to see how this was a benefit to anyone, honestly - even "management", for whom organised labour ought to be a partner and something vaulable and helpful rather than an obstacle.

The third and last big lie of Thatcherism was that it ushered in a newly meritocratic Britain. A class-free Britain in which people could rise to success regardless of their position in society. This has been the one enduring "success story" of the Thatcherite ideology.

But look at Britain's next government:

Here they are in all their classless glory. Here we can see David "Dave" Cameron, George "real name something like Tarquin" Osborne, and other members of the shadow cabinet that will almost certainly be elected to lead Britain later this year. In the front row you can also see the cartoonishly bumbling upper-class-twit-of-the-year, and current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Essentially a bunch of people educated at Britain's most expensive public schools and subsequently Oxford. And now we have a meritocracy? I hardly think so. [It should also be pointed out here that Blair also went to some massively expensive and exclusive private school, so this argument was blown out of the water some time ago, but because he was - in theory- a Labour politician, this was overlooked]

And now, "Dave" has come out with his latest statement (on teachers) revealing his understanding of the world and how things work. To summarise, teachers need to have gained high degrees from a "good university" (whatever that is, in Cameron speak). Teacher training in Dave's world is unimportant, and no-one who gets a lower degree or one from a not-so-good university ought to to be allowed in the classroom. Now I do have a professional opinion on this (as a teacher and a teacher trainer), which is that it's absolute fucking garbage, but putting that to one side, lets see what it reveals about this meritocratic society that we've apparently been living in since those heady days of the 80s.

The only people who talk like this, for a start, are those for whom the concept of meritocracy is sort of a nice thing to keep the plebs happy. I remember once overhearing one of my few incredibly snobbish private-school-and-oxbridge-educated acquaintances tell someone that a mutual friend had "a random degree from some mickey mouse university" (that's an exact quote, as despite the fact that this was over 20 years ago, it really stuck with me). That's how these people talk. Anyone not in their exalted coterie, is basically non-existent, and of no real value whatsoever. By revealing his (a) complete lack of understanding of how teaching actually works - and what works in teaching; and (b) "good university" biases, Dave also reveals that despite the attempts to portray himself as a man of the people, he is locked into his own little world characterised by that photo up there.

Does all this mean that he will be a bad Prime Minister? No, though he obviously needs an education adviser very badly. Does his background exclude him from government? No. Does he have any idea how normal people live, what their concerns are, how things could be improved for them? I very much think not.

One could even argue (not that I would, but one could) that he would be a good prime minister, based on the fact that he's been told from an early age that he ought to be in charge of things, and has been prepared for this throughout his education. And that we, those who didn't have his highly privileged background, have been subtly told all our lives that there are a class of people who are better than us and ought to be in charge. But please, let's forget all this shit about meritocracy. The last big lie of Thatcherism is just that - a complete and utter lie.

Finally, to sign off this angry rant, especially for Dave, who probably thinks this is a good song, though he's also probably never really understood it, is something for him to tap his feet to:

You'll never live like common people,
you'll never do what common people do,
you'll never fail like common people,
you'll never watch your life slide out of view

Where is Kauf anyway?

2010-01-18T14:35:00.002+02:00

Csik/Ciuc has a new large, ultra-modern supermarket (in case the title doesn't tell you, it's Kaufland). It's dead fancy, but no doubt many of the more interesting things that are available will soon disappear when the owners realise that nobody in Csikszereda has a clue what they are and therefore won't buy them. Already the fresh basil that was available for the first week or so has vanished, which is a great shame, and I fear for the continued availability of fennel. (I have discovered through the sudden availability of this exotic vegetable that it has a Hungarian name, which is édeskömény (or "sweet cumin" in my direct translation)

It's an odd experience finding oneself in such a place here in this dusty and isolated one-horse town. Before Christmas I was in there and they were blasting out Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody over the speakers, which was a real moment of familiarity/fear that one day the EU will reduce everywhere to some carbon copy of the UK.

Anyway, I recently heard a (possibly libellous, so I'm not repeating it on here) very disturbing story about how Kaufland obtained planning permission for this particular branch, so I'm hanging back from returning.

Christmas is over...

2010-01-11T10:43:00.003+02:00

...which I suppose means I better make an effort to do some more blogging. I'll try and get back on it this week.

More media coverage of 1989

2009-12-17T10:15:00.003+02:00

Obviously I could just list a bunch of articles here, but I've tried to handpick the most interesting ones

The BBC: "Eljen Laszlo Tokes - Szabadsag"
Radio Free Europe: "Ceausescu was sitting and I was looking at his testicles"
The Times: "The situation has worsened so much that many people have in their minds, in my view, a mistaken nostalgia for the Communist era"
BBC (video): "85 of the 100 richest people in Romania today are former top communists"
(That last one will soon be superseded by a much longer podcast in which John Simpson - a bit of a hero of mine - looks back to 1989 here and then to today, which will very soon appear here. I'm keeping my eye open)

And nothing to do with the 1989, but fascinating all the same, an article from Life magazine dated Jan 9, 1939. Interesting on many levels (not least for the dodgy politically incorrect style of writing). I particularly liked the picture of the "vice girl" in a headscarf, swimming costume and slippers, and the Romanian army oxen walking through Bucharest.

Climate, weather, and revolutions

2009-12-16T09:54:00.005+02:00

Happy Anniversary
Today is December 16th, which means it's the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the revolution here, which began on this day, 1989 in Timisoara, before spreading to Bucharest and elsewhere. This is inevitably being covered by real journalists and media outlets, so I probably don't really need to go into it (and anyway, I wasn't here). Here are some of those news pieces:

The best one (IMO) in the Financial Times
The Irish Times
Something called International Security Watch (no idea who they are)

I'm sure there will be more to come between today and December 25th, when Ceausescu was executed, ending the revolution (in the same sense of "end" as the war on Iraq "ended" when Bush appeared with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" or when they pulled that statue down)

Hó Hó Hó
It's been snowing here for getting on for 36 hours now. It started sometime on Monday night (not really sure when, because you know I was all like asleep and that) and it's still going. It's not as deep as you might imagine after such an extended period, because it's not that kind of snow. I'm sure the Eskimos have a word for it, but in the less snow-based language of English I refer to it as that-light-powdery-snow-which-is-oddly-dry-given-that-it's-made-out-of-water-and-is-quite-difficult-to-make-into-snowballs-because-you-really-need-to-apply-a-huge-amount-of-pressure-to-it-to-compress-it-enough-to-stay-together-meaning-really-only-adults-or-older-teenagers-can-make-snowballs-from-it-which-exacerbates-the-already-slightly-unfair-military-strength-advantage-of-the-father-in-a-snowball-battle.

No hope
We're all going to die. Well, you knew that already I presume (if not, sorry to break it to you), but what I mean here is that as a species we might not be long for this world as we increasingly quickly destroy it. It seems likely that in the current talks in Copenhagen, virtually nothing is going to get done, with the developed world refusing to offer much help to the less developed bit (which is a little unfair, to say the least, as the less developed bit is the bit which is going to suffer the most from climate change, with some of it disappearing entirely, and it is also the bit which has contributed least to the problem), and the USA and China being particularly obstreperous in some kind of "we're determined to be the richest country when the world ends" fight-to-the-death.

Now in the grand scheme of things the amount of money that is being asked for to help out here is basically nothing. Currently on the table is an offer of $10bn a year, and there is debate over whether to try somehow to increase that to $100bn (which is very clearly the maximum it's ever going to be). Many rich countries are balking at this, and obviously it does sound like a lot of money. But let's compare it with the amount of money that has so far been thrown at or promised to the banking and financial services sector to bail them out in the wake of the credit crisis. Want to have a guess at how much that might be? Well, I'll tell you. You might need to sit down (you probably are already, but who knows in these days of iphones and the like). Oxfam estimates this figure to be...$8,424bn. Or, if you like, 84 times the absolute maximum that anyone is expecting to be promised at the current summit, and 840 times the amount that has been currently offered. As it stands the argument is whether they can come up with $40bn. 200 times less that what the banks got. (OK, the banks thing is supposed to be a one off and these are annual sums, but I think we're still looking at a massive disparity here).

So, as the sea levels rise, and the crops fail, and farmland turns to desert, and there is a massive global refugee crisis, and traumatic economic, physical, cultural, and environmental changes, at least you'll be able to go and make a deposit and know that the head of the bank will get a vast Christmas bonus. it's a comforting thought, isn't it? Isn't it?

The Romanian Elections - FAQs

2009-12-09T11:27:00.006+02:00

Idly flicking through the news today around the net (does one "idly flick through" websites or do I need a new phrase here?) it is clear to me that the way the Romanian election and subsequent mess is being presented in the foriegn, English-language press is somewhat flawed. So I thought I'd provide a handy guide for anyone who wants to read some English language coverage of what is going on here, which is not stuck in the same old "PSD-leftist communists vs. Basescu-free market superman" thing.

In order to do that I have done what any self-respecting website does and made a list of Frequently Asked Questions. And like every other self-respecting website, these are not actually literally frequently asked questions, rather questions which I have made up which I feel like supplying an entirely subjective answer to.

Q: The PSD says the election was corrupt and fraudulent. Is this true?
A: Of course it was corrupt and fraudulent. Everything in Romania is corrupt and fraudulent. Especially politics.

Q: So does that mean that Basescu didn't really win?
A: Probably not. You see it is difficult to imagine that anyone could possibly be more corrupt and fraudulent than the PSD. Ergo, whatever vote buying, electoral tourism, ballot box stuffing, figure twisting went on, it is more likely to have benefitted Geoana than Basescu. So, while we will probably never know how much scamming went on, by whom, and for whom, it seems fairly likely that the overall result is just about correct.

Q: Electoral Tourism?
A: Ah yes, a great euphemism. It means driving a bunch of voters around in a bus from polling station to polling station so they can vote a few times each. A number of such buses were stopped and the people done for this, which suggests that a number of other such buses were probably not stopped

Q: But ultimately this is a good result for Romania, right?
A: We-ee-lll, maybe. The country has been in political deadlock for months now, with no government and no prospect of one. It is difficult to see how this has changed, and in fact as the presidential election was so close, and so disputed, it is likely to have got worse. When even the IMF are reluctant to let you have a loan, you know things are really rough

Q: But that Geoana is a Communist, so it's good he lost?
A: His party was one of the parties that emerged from the post Communist rubble, through the transitional FSN government. Pretty much everyone in the FSN was fairly well-to-do in the Communist party. The PSD are very much a party of ex-communists. However, the PD-L (Basescu's party) also emerged from the FSN. In the last presidential election he (Basescu) famously said of the battle between himself and then PSD rival Adrian Nastase: "You know what Romania's greatest curse is right now? It's that Romanians have to choose between two former Communist Party members." Things didn't change this time around.

The barking mad Wall Street Journal seems to think Geoana is a Communist because he sort-of-half-wants progressive taxation, which is hardly some incredibly left-wing thing - more or less everyone has progressive taxation, and Romania is weird and arguably hard-core right wing for having a flat-tax. (Of all the odd viewpoints of the elections that I've read, that one really takes the biscuit)

Q: I'm getting bored now, can you tell me any other interesting facts?
A: Not really, except that the votes from overseas made the difference in the end - the majority of the Romanian diaspora who voted did so for Basescu, and without those votes Geoana would have won (obviously that's assuming all the votes were fairly counted, which is obviously a slightly mad assumption). There is some controversy here as the exit polls which pronounced Geoana the winner were made public before some voting had finished (particularly in North America).

Q: So, what's next?
A: The PSD are challenging the results in the constitutional court. This is bound to fail (I imagine), and so Basescu is the president. He'll have to then name a prime minister who can garner enough votes to form a government. Klaus Johannis, mayor of Sibiu, who became a kind of focal point for the PSD campaign, and even managed to get the support of the Romanian nationalist party (bizarrely since he's German), has withdrawn from this possibility. Basically Basescu has to make up with the PNL, who hold the balance of power in parliament (since it's unlikely that we'll now see another PD-L/PSD coalition for a while). How he manages this is more difficult to imagine. I suspect we'll be floating along without a government until at least the new year. Possibly February.

Happy 20th anniversary of the revolution. Can we have another one please, and get rid of all of them this time?

Chadescu

2009-12-07T12:15:00.004+02:00

So, last night the election results (as determined by exit polls) went to Geoana, but then I wake up this morning and it seems like Basescu has won. Though I presume we'll have a fair amount of recounts and challenges since it was very close. Not sure what the Romanian is for "hanging chad" but I suppose I'll find out soon.

No idea how to feel about this - I think Geoana is a slimy git who almost certainly has the vampiric figure of Iliescu hanging behind him, but then again the last few months of complete political paralysis with Basescu at the helm are now presumably going to continue.

Anyway, this was all lightened somewhat by the fact that in the BBC report this morning they captioned the picture of the loser (though they were still calling him the winner at this point) Mircea Geoana as "Mercia Geoana". Mercia is of course not someone's name, but is in fact a region of ancient Britain made famous in the line "What! In Mercia?", which you will find below:

Jött a Mikulás

2009-12-05T21:19:00.002+02:00

Dirty Tricks

2009-12-05T21:14:00.003+02:00

Everyone got an anonymous card in the mail this morning here, with a quote from Basescu (in Hungarian) saying that there would never be autonomy for Székelyföld. Now, I cannot believe that there's a single person in Székelyföld - either Hungarian or Romanian) who doesn't know he said that, but still I suppose it serves to remind people ...on the day before the election. There was no indication on the card of what Geoana thinks about autonomy, but obviously that's not important here (even though it was quite obviously Geoana's people who are behind the card), though if anyone thinks that he (or indeed any Romanian politician) is ever going to support Székely autonomy, they'd have to be utterly stupid.

An authentic must-read post

2009-12-02T11:12:00.005+02:00

Spent the kind-of-semi-official-4-day-weekend* in Budapest, enjoying a weekend with Mrs H (and without children), and generally having a good time - drank hot wine in Vörösmarty tér at the Christmas market, had an afternoon in the opulent but faded Gellert baths, ate well, and saw various friends. All most agreeable.

(*It wasn't really a 4-day weekend, but as December 1st is a holiday here for Romania's national day, and as the government - not that there is a government at the moment- is forcing public sector workers to take 10 days unpaid holiday, most places used that lonely Monday as one of their 10 days, and gave it as a holiday too)

On the way back, we were in Ferihegy airport and there was a sign advertising the "authentic" Irish pub there in the terminal. Now, at what stage does the word authentic lose all of its meaning? And have we already reached that stage? This is an "authentic" Irish pub in an airport. In an airport in Hungary. Almost certainly with not a single Irish member of staff. That looked nothing like what I imagine a genuine Irish pub to look like (see below). Which didn't even sell Guinness. I mean honestly, there was nothing that could be called even vaguely authentic. It sold beer. I guess that's about it. I think I'm going to start carrying round a marker pen and use it to cross out/highlight any uses of the word authentic I see.

(Ken Wilson tells me that he once saw outside a shop in the US the following "Authentic Antiques - Direct from the Factory")

Here is a picture of absolutely appalling quality which I took of this authentic Irish boozer

After marvelling at this masterpiece of deception, I boarded the plane and became profoundly depressed reading the newspaper which contained news that Switzerland had adopted an openly racist measure following a referendum, that with the support of a few US fundamentalist christians, Uganda is about to introduce the death penalty for homosexuals, and the analysis of the upcoming climate change debate in Copenhagen which made it clear that it was almost certain that nothing will get solved there and that we will carrying on racing headlong towards the precipice. What kind of a fucked up world is this? Makes Romanian politics seems positively bright by comparison.

The political divide

2009-11-24T16:20:00.004+02:00

Interesting map of how the country is divided:

Orange counties voted for Basescu (basically Transylvania, Bucharest, the coast), red ones voted for Geoana (the rest of the south and Moldova). (Green ones - Harghita and Covasna, where I am, voted for Kelemen). This country is pretty clearly divided, no? (Note that a fair few of the Transylvanian counties and all of the districts of the capital didn't even put Geoana second)

The morning after...

2009-11-23T12:51:00.005+02:00

As predicted below, the Presidential run off in Romania will be between (incumbent) Traian Basescu and Mircea Geoana of the PSD. So basically that means more of the same for Romania. Let's be honest here, electing a president from the PSD will not represent a huge change for Romania given that they've been in power for the vast majority of the time since 1989 (and before that too, since the PSD is essentially the rebranded Communist party).

One thing that is noticeable in the foreign press's coverage of this election is the insistence on calling Geoana/the PSD "left leaning" or "leftist". This is, to put it mildly, utter bollocks. The PSD are "leftist" in as much as they are made up of the old Communist party, but in any actual policy or ideas or ideology or approaches are a right wing party (with a populist streak thrown in) - to give an example, they are vehemently anti-minority, which is hardly a "leftist" position to take. Even the economic policies they espouse are basically right wing ones. So if you see a report that refers to them as "leftist" I suggest you flick v-signs at the TV or radio or newspaper which is parroting this utterly false line.

In any sane society the PSD and its apparatchiks would have vanished long ago. Corrupt, power-crazed, with a mafia-like grip over many communities. But it is just that apparatus left over from when they were all Ceausescu's mates (before they saw which way the wind was blowing and staged an internal coup under the guise of a national revolution), which has left them so strong. Many parts of the country are still very much under the grip of the local PSD office, through which all power, money and influence flows. Hence getting rid of them is incredibly difficult. Floating over this whole structure is the shadowy vampiric figure of Ion Iliescu, Ceausescu's one-time heir apparent who had fallen out of favour with the dictator, but who came back to lead the so-called revolution and subsequently occupy the Presidency for 11 of the 20 years since then. Geoana paints himself as a reformer of the PSD, but nobody really believes much has changed.

Over the last couple of days I had started to hope that maybe. just maybe, Crin Antonescu of the PNL would get enough votes to enter the second round which would at least have left people with a real possibility of something new. It was not to be however, and the PSD obviously did a good job of getting out their vote (their heartland seems to be in the rural counties of the south, most of which got higher than average turnout). There were also many cases of reported fraud, with some people being bussed from place to place to vote more than once, some dead people voting, and other cases of votes being bought.

The one positive that comes from this election is that the turnout was much higher than expected - dire predictions of 20-30% turnout were suggested but in the end the count was over 50%. Not exactly massive, but at least reasonable (and we can assume that the vast majority of these people only voted once and were actually alive and stuff). This in a country that is in such an incredible mess that, for example, my daughter will have a three day holiday from school this and next week because the government is forcing all public sector employees (including teachers) to take 10 days unpaid holiday this year to save money. When even the education of the next generation is being sacrificed by politicians, you know things are bad.

Now the horse trading begins, with both remaining candidates trying to pick up the votes that went to the others. Logically Antonescu's 20% ought to go to Basescu as those two candidates occupy similar ground politically, but with Basescu screwing the PNL over a fair few times in the recent past, there may be a doubt there. The far-right nationalist vote of Vadim Tudor and Becali (about 6% between them) will presumably go to Geoana. The Hungarians will vote (those who bother to show up) for Basescu, because while they have found him untrustworthy and that he's done absolutely nothing for the Hungarian minority in his 5 years in power, he's also not enacted policies that are specifically anti-Hungarian, while the assumption is that Geoana would. Basescu's real problem is that he's become quite a divisive figure, and it could be that those who will vote for him, already have, and those that haven't, won't.

I hope it goes to Basescu, but only on the basis that he's better than the alternative, not because I have any faith in his abilities. We now have two weeks of being reminded how bankrupt the country not only financially but also politically.

Bald men and combs

2009-11-15T15:53:00.010+02:00

Romanian politics ought to be incredibly exciting and interesting. We've had 3 or 4 governments in the last few weeks, there is a presidential election right round the corner, the country is in the middle of a massive economic meltdown, and the country is in the grip of swine flu fear. It's also approaching the 20th anniversary of the revolution. Oh, and corruption is still totally endemic (as recently reported here on NPR, here in the Guardian, and here in El Pais)

And yet...

The presidential election is being contested between the biggest collection of nonentities and vacuous personality-free greying men you could imagine, while the most competent politicians in the country are having their political careers shattered by being proposed for the Prime Ministership, a job which is a chalice so full of poison that there is actually no room for anything else in it.

To recap, on the assumption that very few people reading this actually follow Romanian politics: Earlier this year there was a general election, which after much horsetrading led to a coalition government of the PDL (liberal democrats - party of President Basescu) and PSD (social democrats, nominally left leaning, but in fact right wing party of ex-communists). This government was led by former Cluj mayor Emil Boc. Faced with the fallout from the ongoing economic crisis, which is really biting in Romania this year, this government was pretty useless, and before long had collapsed in a hail of recriminations, with the PSD pulling out. Boc's govt soldiered on for a while as minority, but soon got kicked out in the inevitable no confidence vote.

Anyway, following this collapse, two of the three major parties (the PSD and the PNL – national liberals) along with the 4^th biggest party, the UDMR (Hungarian ethnic party) came together and proposed that a new government should be led by Klaus Johannis, the ethnic German mayor of Sibiu. This seemed like an eminently good choice as (a) he is not actually part of any of the main parties, and instead represents an party which originally represented the ethnic German population of Transylvania, but he has done such a good job as mayor of Sibiu (German population something like 2%), that he was most recently reelected with something crazy like 75% of the vote, and (b) he’s obviously good at what he does.

Basescu, and the PDL, though, were having none of it, and instead the president nominated a new prime minister whose name I have already forgotten (actually true) so short lived was his government. One theory here runs that Basescu is happy to perpetuate this continued instability on the basis that it enhances his prospects of reelection. Anyway, having failed the first time when choosing a PM who wasn’t Johannis, he is trying again (and once again going against the continued will of the other 3 parties who are steadfast in their support for the German), and has now nominated Liviu Negoita. Now I have a friend who swears that Negoita is the bee’s knees and had completely revitalised Bucharest Sector 3 where he is the mayor. He must be doing something right, since like Johannis he got reelected with a huge proportion of the vote. So, here we have the PM-ship being tossed around between seemingly two really really good politicians, both of whom look like they could really help Romania, but whose national political careers are liable to get destroyed by success (I can’t really see anyone benefitting in the long term by becoming PM at the moment). In the meantime the usual cretins and non-entities are contesting the presidential election. ..

So, a brief run through of the faceless nobodies who might be president (well most of them don’t stand a hope in hell, but they’re standing anyway)

Traian Basescu. To be fair, he at least does have a personality. I’m not sure if I’m fond of that personality but it is there. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could comfortably throw him, though his schtick seems to be entirely based on being a man of the people, “Honest Traian”. You wouldn’t buy a car from him, why would you want him as president? I still can’t really get over the fact that a couple of years ago, he was caught making a blatantly racist remark, and rather than apologising, he said it was just what everybody thought. Only in Romania.

Mircea Geoana. Representing the PSD. A Goana is a lizard in Australia, and while his name is not actually Goana, it would be fitting. I’d say slimy would be the most fitting adjective. He also indirectly played a role in the recent death of my brother in law, which while I am pretty sure he was not really to blame for, it’s difficult to get past. Plus he’s in the PSD.

Crin Antonescu. (PNL) A man whose personality and look are so unobtrusive that you wonder whether he really exists. Despite seeing his face on posters all over, if I was asked to pick him out of a police line-up I don’t think I could. He would be infinitely more appealing if he would just go with the logical campaign slogan “Crin and bear it”. Of the three main parties the PNL is the one which I have marginally more time for, so he’s possibly the best of a bad lot.

Sorin Oprescu. Independent, ex-PSD, currently mayor of Bucharest (you may by now be getting the message that the way to high office in Romania is by way of being the mayor somewhere, and that certainly seems to be the case. Basescu was mayor of Bucharest too). Can’t say much about Oprescu, just that he looks like a bit of chancer. He’s only just been elected mayor of Bucharest, so it seems a bit rum that he’s already trying to dump that job in favour of a bigger one. On top of his couple of weeks experience in charge of the capital, I’m not sure what else he’s done aside from being a PSD apparatchik.

Kelemen Hunor (UDMR – Hungarian party). Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Makes Crin Antonescu look like the life and soul of the country.

Corneliu Vadim Tudor (PRM – far right nationalists for old people and those pining for Ceausescu). Wanker, anti semitic, racist, anti-Hungarian, all round tosser and self-professed poet.

Gigi Becali (PNG – far right nationalists for disaffected urban youth). Makes Vadim Tudor look like the soul of moderation and intelligence. Complete and utter arsehole. Owner of Steaua Bucharest, and self-professed shepherd.

A bunch of others too, including Remus Cernea of the Green Party who I saw on TV the other day and who looks absolutely fantastic, and who if I had a vote I would vote for in a flash, and someone called Edouard Manole, about whom I know absolutely nothing, but whose poster I saw in Bucharest today, and whose logo seems to be the crossed hammer one which he’s obviously ripped off from the film “Pink Floyd: The Wall”. Based on that he could well be yet another far right candidate with fascistic tendencies, like Romania needs any more of them.

In all likelihood the first round will leave Basescu facing Geoana in the run off, at which point this election becomes even less interesting than it is now. The real loser will be turnout which threatens to be the lowest ever since democracy, and which, only 20 years after the overthrow of Ceausescu, and with all the problems that the country faces, is a really sad indictment.

[PS A much more interesting political analysis of the upcoming election can now be found at Gadjo Dilo's excellent blog]

The trip from hell (pt 2)

2009-11-09T06:40:00.002+02:00

Two weeks ago, I started telling the story of my multi-legged trip across the globe. After Bucharest from where I posted that update, things got a little sticky. You see, when I checked in for my flight in Athens, I discovered that I actually needed a visa to go to Australia. It had never even occurred to me to check. I was told to go to the travel agents in Athens airport and see if I could get one. Apparently these things are possible to get online for travel agents. But the system was down, or it didn't like my name, or it perceived me as some form of existential threat to the nation. Like a cane toad or something. So having called ahead to the Australian travel agents who booked my ticket, I was advised to persuade Emirates to let me board the flight as far as Dubai, and from there we would sort it out. This I managed to do. In Dubai, I then spent hours (3+) online attempting to get my visa sorted, and eventually got an email saying that my application had been received and was a valid application (not that it had been accepted, just that I had filled everything in correctly). My Australia contact told me to assume it would be and see if they would let me board the plane. For some reason they did, and I took off for Brisbane, without knowing whether I'd actually get through immigration at the other end (once I reached Brisbane I would have been travelling for 42 hours, so the idea of being turned away and sent back was not really one I wanted to dwell on that much).

Obviously, I made it. Checking my email account later on revealed that the authorisation had come through about 5 hours into the trip, probably somewhere over Sri Lanka.

However, just to cap off the whole marathon experience, I then got busted for inadvertently attempting to bring an apple into Australia. I had forgotten it was in my bag, and a dog wandered up and sat there looking smug next to the suitcase. I was asked to open it up and there it was, a solitary, fairly wizened little apple. I was given a written warning, and told to be much more careful in future, as next time I would get fined, or something.

It was all worth it though, as I had a great time in the antipodes. I am writing this on the way home, back in Dubai airport, with only about 16 more hours to go before I make it back to my family, who I haven't seen for over 3 weeks now...

The Melbourne Cup

2009-11-03T04:53:00.004+02:00

I never finished writing about my mega trip across the globe, and it actually did take on some extra twists and turned before it finished, but that will have to wait for another day.

Since then I have been in Brisbane, a city which is great (so great that I get to commute to work by catamaran), but also, more of that later too.

Today is Melbourne Cup day. The Melbourne Cup is a horse race that is so culturally ingrained that some of the states here actually get the day off for it. (I actually don't know how many do, and it may just be Victoria, which is where Melbourne is). Anyway, even those that don't everybody bunks off for a while in the afternoon to watch the race. To me, it's basically just a horse race, and I don't tend to find horse racing that interesting.

However, since I'm here, I feel I need to get into it a bit, if for no other reason that then the cultural-anthropological sight of seeing an entire nation getting wasted on a Tuesday afternoon. There is, though, a better reason for getting involved. And that is that one of the participants in the course I'm training is from Melbourne, and his girlfriend is the sister of someone who owns and trains a horse in the race. He told me this last week, and while for me it was sort of one of those vaguely interesting facts, it was clearly very very interesting for everyone else. I have since discovered that this horse is the joint favourite. So, I feel I have a connection (however tenuous the my student's girlfriend's brother's horse connection may seem to you). I think the horse is joint favourite because the story is what the media tend to call a fairytale (small town farmer, has a horse which used to be a polo-refereeing horse, and which came out of nowhere, etc etc) Anyway its name is Alcopop (crap name, but you know) and I am about to head down the pub to have a bit of a flutter (the betting shop is actually in the pub) and watch the race and have the experience of being in an Aussie pub during the Melbourne Cup.

I will report later on this field mission into the equine heart of Australia

[Just back. Sadly the horse came 6th, but it was an enjoyable afternoon watching people dressed up to the nines* getting plastered in a suburban pub at 2pm]

[*Though that was actually just the women. None of the blokes seemed to have bothered]

Onwards, upwards, downwards (repeat x5)

2009-10-21T16:22:00.002+03:00

Currently, I am on the mother of all trips. Was in Riga (that’s Latvia in case you don’t feel like looking it up) for the last two days, and left the hotel there at 6 this morning. Flew from there to Prague at 8.15 and changed planes to Bucharest, from where I am typing this (though I can’t get online despite the promise of free wi-fi in this cafe, so I’ve no idea when this will actually be posted). I now have to hang around here for a few hours before beginning what for ticketing purposes is the second trip, but what to my body is the same trip. Flight to Athens leaves at 7.15pm, and from there I go to Dubai. I’ll be in Dubai for 6 (probably) joy-filled hours in the wee hours, before boarding a plane to Brisbane, where I will end this approximately 42 hour trip on Friday morning. It is, quite possibly, the most ridiculous trip I’ve ever taken (and I’ve lived in the Pacific, where trips were routinely ludicrous with stops at remote atolls/chemical weapons dumps). I intended to do some kind of live blog of the trip but internet access appears to have stymied that slight “can I make this trip vaguely fun” attempt. So at least you, the long-suffering reader of this blog, are spared this less than thrilling experience.

I’m not quite sure when I will actually sleep on this trip, but we’ll cross that bridge when it becomes a major issue. I will be on business class from Athens onwards, so it might be easier than the worst case scenario. On Friday I actually have to go into work in Brisbane, which will be an interesting experience, as I imagine by then I will be a gibbering wreck. Still, it could be amusing, in its own way.

My carbon footprint from all this will be larger than one of those massive meteorite craters. Sorry, world.

5 places that tourists to Romania often visit but shouldn't really bother with

2009-10-12T10:38:00.004+03:00

1. Bucharest. Let's face it, it's a dump. OK, it has almost certainly the best nightlife in the country, and great cultural events, and reasonable shopping (by Romanian standards), and nice people. But it's a dog's breakfast of a city (and is, in fact, a city apparently ruled by swarms of feral dogs). Ceausescu absolutely devastated it, to the point where the only really interesting building is the hideous monstrosity of the Casa Poporului, Old Nic's most ludicrous folly. The traffic is diabolical and the roads are awful. I've had more than one person tell me, when they hear I live in Romania, "I hear Bucharest is a beautiful city". Where did they hear this? Or more importantly when? 1927? [To be fair, I've also heard people describe it as Europe's ugliest capital. Of the ones I've been to, I'd have to agree - though I haven't been to Tirana, Minsk, or Chisinau, and I suspect one of those might come close]. Basically, if you want to come for Romania for nightlife, then Bucharest is probably the place to go. Otherwise, avoid it.

2. Bran Castle. Bran castle is actually quite an attractive place, in a beautiful setting. But why people flock there in their thousands is beyond me. Romania has tons more and better things to offer than it, and Bran Castle as a tourist trap is mostly notable for being a triumph of marketing. Bear the following things in mind if you are thinking of going there: (a) There was no such person as Dracula; (b) the Romanian scenes in the book of that name take place nowhere near Bran; (c) Stoker based his character on a number of different historical characters, one of which may have been Vlad Ţepeş; (d) Vlad Ţepeş may, possibly, it is speculated, have spent one night at Bran Castle. If you want to visit a relatively attractive small castle in a nice mountain pass, then Bran might be for you (though Sinaia is much better, and easier to get to). If someone tells you that it's Dracula's castle, then snort derisively and tell them to spin that line with someone more gullible.

3. The Black Sea Coast. Awful. Rubbish-strewn, over-priced, ugly, over-developed eyesore. Just skip it. If you are here and need to go the beach, hop over to Bulgaria.

4. The spas. There are a fair few spa "resorts" in Romania, but all the ones I've been to are really really run down. They need a lot more work doing than a lick of paint. The abundance of mineral water here means that one day Romania will be the envy of Europe with its spas, but that day is a long way off. For now, they're really only of interest if you are one of the people who enjoys the whole masochistic "medicinal" spa treatment vibe thing.

5. Cluj. I want to like Cluj, I really do, but it's really never grabbed me. It's got one or two nice things to see, but as with many cities here, the whole Communist project was fairly destructive, and has left behind the sort of city centre in which you end up looking round thinking "I bet this used to be really nice". For a city with an attractive Hungarian architectural style, which is less of a mess, I'd definitely recommend Targu Mures over Cluj any day.

5 places tourists to Romania should visit

2009-10-07T08:21:00.009+03:00

1. The monasteries of Bucovina. Absolutely stunning places. If you have to pick only two then I would recommend Voroneţ and Suceviţa. Really you cant fail to be blown away by them. They'd be stunning if they had been created last week, but to think these paintings were done 500 years ago and have been exposed to the elements ever since, then it's impossible to fail to be impressed.

2. The Saxon villages (and especially the fortified churches) located in the old German dominated area roughly demarcated by Sibiu to the west, Brasov to the east, Sighisoara to the north, and the Fagaras mountains to the south. Again these places are incredible. Biertan in particular is just out of this world, but many of the others too are simply spectacular, and unlike anything you will find anywhere else in Europe.

3. Maramures Beautiful traditional villages, great scenery, interesting wooden churches, people wearing folk costume just because they damn well want to and not because it attracts tourists, weird stuff like the "Happy Cemetery", and possibly the best museum in Romania (The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance).

4. Sighisoara Arguably you could include this as being part of no.2, but I think it's worth giving a section to all on its own. Stunning mediaeval city, that would only be improved if they stopped allowing traffic up there. Wander round the German cemetery, the church, the clock tower, sit on the walls, eat a delicious meal in one of the restuarants up there and then stay in one the expertly renovated old houses in the main square. Central Brasov and Sibiu are also very nice, but something about the quiet atmosphere of Sighisoara makes it, for me, the best city to be in in the country.

5. Driving around Now there are lots of downsides to driving around in this country, not least the fact that it's really hard work (bad drivers, bad roads, horse carts, cows, drunk people on bikes, villages with no pavements so children etc are all walking on the road etc etc), but there are also a lot of upsides. These include some spectacular views and scenery, gorgeous villages, and the fact that because there are no motorways to speak of you see it all without zipping by it in a blur (that's a bit of a double edged sword obviously). I recently drove up the Bistrita valley and over the Prislop pass, for example, and it it just amazing. Then there are all the other passes over mountains (Bicaz Gorge being possibly the most incredible). If the difficult bits scare you, then perhaps get someone else to drive you. Whatever, it's worth it.

Other places which might make the list but I haven't been to them - the Danube Delta, The Iron Gates, areas of the Apuseni mountains, and more.

Next up: "Places that tourists often do go to in Romania but shouldn't bother with" (liable to be significantly more controversial)

Summer summary

2009-09-14T12:36:00.003+03:00

I have, you will have noticed, been away from this blog for a fair while. Partly that's to do with having being working a lot, but mostly because two weeks ago, just over two weeks after suffering a brain haemmorhage and being rushed to hospital (well rushed is a massive exaggeration, this is Romania after all), my brother-in-law died, leaving me and especially Mrs Musings and her parents utterly shell-shocked.

So that's why. Normal posting will resume in due course.

My International Football Career

2009-08-19T11:54:00.003+03:00

I am, to put it mildly, not one of the world's greatest footballers. As a child I would be one of the last people picked in playground matches, and as an adult this record has not improved much since (a) I don't play that often, and (b) I'm still crap. But, for two brief years I was, and I say this with a fair degree of certainty, one of the best players in the country in which I resided. (There is a topical point to this post, so bear with me)

For this we have to go back over ten years now to 1996 (cue twilight-zone-esque music and the wibbly wobbly blurring of the screen as the universal indicator of the flashback). I was living and working in Pohnpei, the capital island of one of the world's lesser known countries, the Federated States of Micronesia. Every evening just before sunset I'd meet up with a few people at PICS Field, which was the only football pitch in Kolonia, the main city, and play a match. Most of us were foreigners of various origins, though there were one or two high school kids who joined us. Among the regulars were a Ugandan guy named Charles Musana, and a wily veteran Ghanaian called Thomas who was over 70 and who could still play a midfield anchor role, standing near the centre circle spraying passes around with unerring accuracy. Other nationalities typically represented included Japanese, Fijian, French, Australian and US American. On one occasion we organised an island wide tournament on a weekend, and we had 5 teams that got together - three high school teams, a team of Fijians, and my team of expats, originally called "The Internationals". For reasons that I can no longer remember, we decided to organise the tournament in such a way that we started off with two first round matches (with one team getting a bye to the semis), followed by one semi final and another bye, and then a final. The flaw in this plan became obvious when we were drawn to play in the second first round match, which we won, followed by the semi final, which we also won. Meaning that we, a team of players almost none of whom were younger than 30 and some of whom, like Thomas, were much older, had to play three matches in a row in the intense strength-sapping 100% humidity that was not really conducive to running around. And to make matters worse we were facing teams of 17 and 18 year olds, who were actually getting a break between matches. However, despite our totally exhausted state we managed to eke out a final win against the Seventh Day Adventist team (the SDA school had some enthusiastic American teachers who actually trained the kids, so they were always seen as potential winners).

This epic achievement still ranks as my finest moment on a football pitch, and possibly (and without too much exaggeration) in life. A little later in my Micronesian football career, I caught my foot in a divot while playing and ended up breaking my leg, which was not such a great high point of my life, though I do like to play up the story where I limped around my house for an evening, and then drove to the doctor's the next day, before discovering that I had broken it, and being gently advised not to drive home since the pain I felt on accelerating and breaking was almost certainly caused by the fact that I had a broken leg)

Anyway, why this story and now? Well, I happened upon this story this week, which rather took me back as you can imagine. References to my former colleague and teammate Charles, "an expat from Ghana" and all the things I remember (especially the barefoot approach favoured by the kids). Good luck to the new coaches. I suspect the (obviously tongue in cheek) hope for eventual world domination in football mentioned in the last sentence maybe a little optimistic, but they might beat Chuuk one day.

They all look the same to me

2009-08-12T09:05:00.003+03:00

It is said that people from one ethnic group cannot tell members of another apart. There does seem to be a grain of truth in that, though if people really say they can't tell two different people apart (assuming they're not identical twins) it seems to me that they're really not trying that hard. Anyway, before this post becomes something serious, let me get onto the not-that-serious point of this post and the reason I started down this dangerous little side track. This is that I have recently become aware of a certain group of (sort-of) people which I cannot tell apart.

My daughter, Paula, is a princess. Obviously as a doting father I sort of think this anyway, but this statement comes not from me but from her. She tells me, and anyone else who is paying attention, on numerous occasions every day. She also is a big fan of other princesses. And so, on my recent trip I brought back a Disney princess memory card game (the kind of game that we used to call pelmanism until that word was co-opted to refer to prejudice against Pelmans). In this game, there are pictures of many princesses from Disney films over the years. The definition appears quite flexible, so a character could have started the film a princess and remained as one, or the character could have started the film a humble woman who lived in a menage-a-huit with a bunch of dwarves, or a mermaid or what-have-you, but finished it shacked up with a prince.

The thing is, I get absolutely trounced in this game every time. Partly this is because my short-term memory is shot to pieces through age and youthful indiscretion, partly because Paula, despite the limited attention span of a three-and-a-half-year old, seems to have the recall skills of a small, blonde, cute elephant, but mostly (I contend) because all these bloody princesses look exactly the bloody same. You pick up one card and it features some indeterminate blonde-haired pink-clothed princess. "Aha", you think to yourself, "I've seen this before", and pick up another card bearing a similar, but crucially in the context of the game, not exactly the same, image. Every time.

To be honest, there are one or two of them which I can tell from the others, but these are the one or two princesses from different ethnic groups. Ariel, for example (ethnic group: mermaids) is clearly different from the others, as is the princess (whatever her name is) from Aladdin (ethnic group: non-threatening Middle Eastern. More belly dancer than burka). But those two aside I'm lost. Why? Why do all princesses have to look the same? Is there a rule? They even all dress the same (exceptions: mermaids and belly dancers). Are there no individualists in the princess world? It's a rum do, and no mistake.

Things that irritate me about Romania

2009-08-10T12:49:00.002+03:00

(part umpteen in an occasional, but almost certainly infinite, series)

If you try and change money here they only accept perfectly pristine mint-condition bank notes. Any rumpledness? Sorry, can't accept it. The slightest imperceptible tear in the side? Nope. Any indication that the note has in fact been used at all and has not just been issued by the European Central Bank? No can do.

Why? For the love of god, why? They're still legal tender, they're still banknotes. I'm not talking about something that's been torn into pieces and sellotaped back together, I'm talking about perfectly healthy banknotes that get rejected like they've been taken from a Monopoly set. Romania is not quite the only country that pursues this ridiculous policy, but in Europe, it only seems to be here and Bulgaria. I've asked bank employees why they refuse these notes and you either get a look that says "It's internationally normal for us to do this, you fool" (that's from people who've never travelled and don't realise that it really isn't), or "Sorry, that's just the rules. No idea why, but we've been told". It must be a national law, since it's across the board - every bank and change office follow the same ridiculously strict and unnecessary guidelines. It drives me bloody mental. (As may be obvious)

Le Tour de Ciuc

2009-08-10T08:34:00.003+03:00

I've always been a big fan of the Tour De France. Well, I say "always", but obviously that's an exaggeration, since for many years of Le Tour, I wasn't actually born, and even when I was it didn't feature on British TV until I was in my teens (a quick check of past winners would seem to suggest I first watched it in 1983, when Channel 4 started showing it). More recently two major factors have lessened my enjoyment somewhat - the knowledge that most of the riders are on drugs, and the overshadowing of the race by the vast and obnoxious ego that is Lance Armstrong. [On a venn diagram of those two factors there is a significant overlap, allegedly]. But I still kind of get into it, despite suspecting that any results could be changed at any time in the next 6 months as someone or other gets busted.

Anyway, this weekend I was able to witness first hand professional top drawer road-race cycling. Well, maybe not top drawer, because that would be Le Tour and other major races, and probably not second drawer because that would be other races that might occasionally get a mention on Eurosport or somewhere, and maybe not even the third drawer from the top, but at least the fourth drawer down. Which on most chests of drawers is the bottom one, I guess, so bottom drawer professional road race cycling.

This was because it was the "Tour of Szeklerland" (It exists! Really! Check out the mention of it on the website of the "Union Cycliste Internationale" if you don't believe me). Pretty much every stage started and finished here right outside our apartment so it was fairly easy to keep track. There were teams from all over (well all over Eastern Europe at least - Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech republic, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel and probably others I missed).

Professional cyclists are fast. I mean really quite ludicrously fast. Yesterday the final stage of the race involved 17 longish (5.5km each) circuits of the town, which meant they zipped by on a regular basis, while the official cars following them struggled to keep up. The first stage of the race involved a route which took them from here up to Gyergyo/Gheorgheni, across the Bucsin pass to Parajd/Praid, down to Udvarhely/Oderhei and back here. 193 kms, and a fair few serious hills including Bucsin which is 1300m high and is a right brute even in a car. If I were to set off to cycle that route, I'd take a week off work. They did it (in the pouring rain) in under 5 hours. (Report on that stage and the others - when they are posted today I presume - can be found here) And these are the fourth division journeyman pros of cycling world. Your Alberto Contadors must be just a blur when they pass.

Sadly the little guide which we got for the race which includes the stage profiles and routes and everything doesn't tell me how the hills they climbed relate to the categories that they use on Le Tour. Bucsin is listed as being category A - does that mean it would be a first category climb? I'd really like an idea of how close the hills here which I know very well are to the climbs that they do on the telly. Yesterday morning in "halfstage 3" they did a time-trial up to the Harghita ski-resort from down the bottom here. 14 kms of cycling with an ascent of slightly over 600m. The winner took 28 minutes. That's just insane. I'd struggle to get one-quarter of the way up in 28 minutes.

For the record the winner was a bloke called Vitaliy Popkov from Ukraine. Yesterday's final stage was won by a French guy (Aurelian Passeron) who rides for the local Tusnad Cycling Team who are based here. I presume that means he sort of lives here, which means that I'll have to add him to my mental list of "foreigners living in Csikszereda". He apparently has ridden in the actual Tour de France (last year it would seem, though I don't think he finished it).

It was a good event. I hope they do it again next year.

Police 2.0

2009-08-08T20:16:00.002+03:00

Just got back from two weeks working in Barcelona, from where comes this heartwarming story of modern day technology in action...

One of the participants on the course I was teaching was a Chinese bloke from Xi'an ("A small city. Only about 8 million people"). One day while going back to where he was staying he had his pocket picked on the Metro. He felt something but thought nothing off it until he realised, too late, that his wallet was gone. Not only was there a fair aount of cash in it but various other things which were of no little importance. He called a friend and asked what he should do, and whether he should maybe go to the police. To which his friend responded that he could if he needed the report for insurance purposes but otherwise he would be completely wasting his time.

Less than 24 hours later, though, to his (and to be honest everyone else's) surprise, the police sent him an email letting him know that they had his wallet - with everything in, including the cash - and he could come in and collect it.

Apparently two plain clothes policemen had witnessed the initial pickpocketing, and had followed and arrested the thief (with Peng's wallet as incontrovertible proof). So far, so good, but of course they also needed to reunite Peng and the wallet. A wallet which contained some forms of ID but which of course were of no great help in finding him in Barcelona (not to mention that they were all in Chinese anyway). A Chinese speaker in the Barcelona police was found, and having found his name, they eventually located him - on Facebook. From which it was a fairly quick process to get an email to him.

Not only was I extremely happy for Peng that he got all his money and cards and everything back, but I have to say I'm very impressed by the attention to detail and resourcefulness of the Barcelona police force. I guess, deep down, that it's not really all that amazing, but it is one of those things that seems very unexpected, and therefore notable.

Bobby Robson

2009-07-31T12:53:00.001+03:00

When I was an English teacher in Porto (many years ago), me and another English teaching friend rang up FC Porto and asked if we could bring our football-mad teenage students to meet Bobby Robson, who was then managing the club. Obviously we fully expected a no, but to our surprise, the club put us through to his office and he picked up and agreed right off the bat. We got to see a closed training session in the Antas Stadium itself (the old one), and then we went down to the offices and he sat and chatted and answered all of their questions for close to an hour, before taking us on a tour of the trophy room. He just seemed genuinely happy to offer whatever he could to us.

A smashing bloke and a real gentleman. RIP

Cultural False Friends

2009-07-21T12:09:00.003+03:00

You are probably already familiar with the ideas of cognates and false friends. Cognates are words which are related to each other in different languages. English and Romanian, for example, contain a fair few cognates, since Romanian is Latin based, and English has tons of Latin based stuff in it. English and Hungarian on the other hand have very very few cognates, because Hungarian is just bloody weird. (And because they have one of those academies which insists on creating new words for new things, they don't even have easy-to-grasp words for things like "The Internet" or what have you).

False friends, are words which you think are probably cognates, but turn out not to be. The most famous example of this is the Spanish word embarazada, which means pregnant (and not embarrassed as people tend to assume). Though my personal favourite is the Portuguese word constipação which actually means "a cold", and so (because I have a puerile mind) makes me imagine Portuguese tourists going to the chemists in the UK while on holiday and asking for medicine for their cold, and getting something else.

Hungarian to English has one or two false friends - trafik, for example, actually means kiosk or tobacconists (there must be a "My hovercraft is full of eels" joke I could squeeze in here, but I can't work out how). Akció, on the other hand, means "special offer" or "discount", and not anything like "action". (This is also a Hungarian/Romanian false friend, as you sometimes see shops here with signs in the window saying Akció/Acţiune, which makes the same error. A slightly ruder example is the Hungarian word Szakadék which means cliff or abyss, and nothing like how it sounds (which is more or less "suck-a-dick")

Between English and Romanian there are one or two which come up all the time - nervous being the most obvious. The Romanian word nervos actually means angry, and this causes people (not least me) a lot of confusion. I think the Romanian word mizerabil means something like filthy, which is also a tad confusing. Then of course there's the common menu item crap (fillet of crap, fried crap, grilled crap, etc).

But, I have come upon a new concept here, and that is the cultural false friend. There is a Romanian word imediat, which you hear very often. How long will it be? Imediat. When will you be finished? Imediat. When can I expect it? Imediat. Now, in theory, imediat is a cognate. It means, as you might expect, "immediately". It's just that in English, immediately means "right away", or "I'll drop everything and get it done right now". It doesn't really mean that in Romanian. It means something more like "soon-ish" or "when I get round to it", or "in a week or so". So, I've had to mentally redesignate it as a false friend, or otherwise it just gets too confusing, and more that that, it creates unreasonable expectations (for me).

Any other cultural false friends? Or even just amusing linguistic ones?

Paper View

2009-07-20T09:29:00.003+03:00

I have a nascent theory of the "it came to me while lying awake one night/while I was drinking a beer" variety, that you can judge the quality of a holiday destination by the British newspapers on sale there.

The highest quality such destination is the one that doesn't actually have any British newspapers on sale at all - as that means the place doesn't actually attract enough british people to make it worth while (note: this only actually applies to holiday destinations - you can't buy English newspapers in Csikszereda, but this doesn't imply a high-quality place, merely remote and uninteresting to any outsiders)

However if the number of UK visitors does create enough demand to stock newspapers, then you can start wondering about why and how decisions are made to order which papers. In Malta a couple of years ago, for example, where I was working, the only papers available were The Sun, Mail, and Express. The three worst mass readership papers in the country. The thoroughly downmarket, Murdoch owned Sun, and the two extreme right wing anti-immigration/anti-foreigner rags Express and Mail. Frightening. What had Malta done to deserve this little slice of little-englander hell in it's corner shops and kiosks? Sure the vast majority of English people there were elderly people seemingly escaping the British winter, but not all such people are obnoxiously right-wing, surely? Or are they all in Malta not so much to get away from the weather but to get away from all those foreigners?

Thassos, which is what made me think of this half-baked nonsense in the first place, had the following British newspaper options - Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror and Times (to add to the English language newspaper options it was also possible to buy the International Herald Tribune). Not sure what message this is giving us about Thassos. That tourists there are somewhat right of centre in general (and in the case of the Mail/Express saddoes, completely off the chart). That there was no place for the middle ground Guardian/Independent reader? It's a rum do and no mistake. Wonder what you get in Chiantishire? Guardian and Telegraph?

So, I bought the Times once. I'm not proud of it since it's a Murdoch paper, but I could justify it to myself since the newspaper's online presence does boast the most consistently funny podcast that I know of - The Bugle. I learned that the Times is the official newspaper of The Ashes, whatever that means (it obviously means that the paper contained ludicrous amounts of coverage of said cricketing event), and that it's editorial team have obviously decided that the solution to all the world's problems is David Cameron. One of those "If the answer is David Cameron, it must have been a particularly stupid question" type things. It's a bit like imagining the problems of the world's entertainment industry could all be solved by James Blunt. Another bland vapid inoffensively rubbish toff.

I also bought the IHT (as we seasoned travellers know it). It's not a bad paper all round (though it does give airtime to idiots like Thomas Friedman), but why oh why do all US newspapers do this thing where they start a load of stories on the front page and then ask you to turn to another page to finish each one? It's mad. You have to go front page, page 3, front page, page 5, front page, page 3, front page, page 4, and so on for ages. What possible advantage does it serve? Why don't people complain? It drives me mental.

Greeced Lightning

2009-07-13T11:36:00.003+03:00

Back from our too-short holiday in Skala Potamia, Thassos, Greece. Lots of sun, sea, sand and errrm, well that's it for obvious words beginning with "s", since we were in a small two room apartment with three kids. Salad, I suppose. There was a lot of salad.

You know those brochure style images of couples walking hand-in-hand down a moonlit beach? Sitting in candle-lit restaurants slowly sipping wine and eating delicious food? Frolicking playfully (yet with the obligatory hint of sex) in the foaming waves? None of that stuff happens when you're on holiday with children. Or at least not with our children. Perhaps others have some foolproof sleeping-pills-and-ouzo concoction by which they cleverly create space for themselves, but not us.

Anyway it was a good holiday and I wouldn't like my obvious need to spend a week on holiday just with Mrs Musings to overshadow that fact. The sea was perfect - warm clean clear water, gently sloping beach allowing kids to play without fear of going under, fine white sand. Food was Greek (which means fantastic). The Mythos was cold. We didn't do much besides hang around on the beach, but that was fine.

Driving to Thassos is also easier (and quicker) than driving to Croatia as we've done in the last couple of years. It's just a straight shot down to Giurgiu in Romania, across a ridiculously unkempt border post and run down bridge over the Danube (especially ridiculous given that this is a majorly important border crossing in EU terms, and beyond - the route from Turkey to the west pretty much has to go through here), across Bulgaria, and then into Greece at the the three way Bulgaria/Greece/Turkey border area. From there you hit "developed EU" and the roads are superb all the way to Keramoti, the port for Thassos.

There is a bit more too it than that obviously. For example when I say "just a straight shot down to Giurgiu" I have conveniently left out the need to get past Bucharest. This is no easy task. I asked on a Romanian forum before going for advice, and got lots of helpful answers (which of course all contradicted each other as is the way of these things). Based on that, on the way down we decided to try the "centura" (belt) which is the sort of ring-road thing round Bucharest. My god, what a road. It's more pot hole than road, has incredible traffic and baffling road rules (all the "spokes" going in and out of the city have priority over the centura, so you have to crawl across these mad, churned up junctions every couple of kilometres, dodging cars, being squeezed by trucks, just generally living on a knife edge). On the way back, as it was a Saturday, I decided to instead try out the "driving through the middle of the city" option. Arguably this was better - the roads were in better condition, the traffic was still heavy, and complex, but at least there was slightly more logic to the road junctions. On the other hand, they have obviously banned signs in Bucharest - the only directions point you to the various barrios. This is all very well if you actually want to go to cartier tineretului or wherever, but not much use for the outsider. It wasn't until I had somehow negotiated myself to the road leading out of town from the Arcul de Triumf that I first saw a sign pointing to the airport. I mean surely this is information that might be useful to people? Madness. I think it's some massive scam to try and sell more GPS systems (it's certainly the first place I've ever driven in which I've felt I could have used one. Though such is the disregard shown for out-of-towners that it wouldn't surprise me if the City Hall jammed the signal of Satnavs within the city limits).

Bulgaria, like Romania, is a bit of motorway free zone. But unlike Romania, the other roads are actually pretty good. Even roads marked as minor white ones on the map are in good shape (you'd never venture onto one you weren't familiar with here for fear of spending three hours negotiating a 10 km section of untarmacked hell). It's helped by the fact that almost nobody seems to live in Bulgaria, meaning that you only pass through a village every 20 kms as opposed to every 3 kms here. And when you do it's empty of the horsecarts, dogs, cows, drunk blokes, cyclists, children, and wandering people of all varieties that you get here. (This allows for fast driving but it is slightly disconcerting. It was almost a relief to get back to Romania and it's colourful vibrant chaotic villages on the drive home). The other border, at Svilengrad is the starkest contrast you're ever likely to see within the EU. You cross from organised, fast, clean, well-kept Greece, into shabby poverty-stricken mayhem of what appears to be a major Rroma shanty town in Bulgaria.

Finally, a recommendation. If you're ever driving thorugh Bulgaria (either from N-S or E-W or any combination thereof, and you want a place to stay somewhere in the middle, try the Shipka IT Hotel. Fantastcially helpful and friendly owners, great hotel, good value, in a really nice village at the bottom of the mountains in the Valley of the Roses. Even if you've no plans to drive through Bulgaria, then make some, just so you can stay there. We stayed there both coming and going and felt like we were saying goodbye to friends at the end.

Csikszereda: going to the Blogs

2009-07-01T12:09:00.005+03:00

A few weeks ago, I reported on the blog competition that was going on here. Well the competition closed yesterday and the winners were announced. It turned out that I was one of the judges of the competition (I didn't know I would be when I wrote before) so I did read all of them in great depth, and they are a fantastic bunch of very different, very interesting, well written, well put together blogs.

There were 10 entrants and 6 of them would all have been worthy winners. In the end the winners were:
Under 18 category:

First place- Visit Csikszereda! This one is great and really has some superb photos on it, and has used the visuals in a very good way.
Second place- Aagota's Hometown Again very good, a nice variety of stuff and a different kind of format.

Over 18 category:

First place- Csixereda!? Another really excellent blog. Some really nice pieces of writing (and excellent English). I urge you to watch the video by local band "Los Colorados"
Second place - Ikarosz Grocery Different, varied, great design, very original. Good mixture of items

Public online vote:
A Piece of Harghita. I loved this one, and actually it was my top choice for the competition, so I'm glad it won the public vote, after being pipped in the under 18 category. Very interesting, well written, great design, I loved the way he uses video. Highly recommended.

Not to forget:
Zsu's Blog. Sadly there were only 5 awards made, and as it turns out there were 6 really excellent blogs, so this one missed out, but it is still worth your attention. Well thought out, good design, nice writing and presentation. Good use of pictures.

So, I'm actually about to go on holiday for the next ten days or so, and anyway, it's not like I've been around a lot of late, so, I'd like to recommend that anyone who is in the vaguest bit interested in Csikszereda/Miercurea Ciuc take a look at these blogs. And I'd like to urge the authors to keep at it, since they're doing a great job and they shouldn't stop when the competition is over.

To finish, shamelessly ripped from "A Piece of Harghita" a video presentation of this town. Manages to achieve in 4 minutes what I have failed to do in 5 years of incessant rambling on here

Dan the Man

2009-06-12T10:41:00.003+03:00

(note: Football post follows. Just so you know)

Yesterday was a day I'd rather forget for rather painful/uncomfortable reasons. I won't divulge them here as (a) it wouldn't be exactly edifying; (b) it's still too raw (in a number of ways); and (c) there are some things that are best left unspoken/unblogged

So, instead, to take my mind off my current discomfort, I need to report on the shock winners of the Romanian football league this year. The town of Urziceni (Err - zee - chen) is a small dusty piece of nothingness sort of north east of Bucharest. I have driven through it a couple of times on my way to the coast, and really it's not exactly the must buzzing metropolis on the planet. It even makes Csikszereda look quite attractive and lively, and believe me, that's a difficult thing to do. The population of the town is 17,000, and it's one of those southern Romanian towns in which every lamppost is plastered with posters advertising agricultural labouring jobs in Spain and Italy. In short, it's the sort of place that people leave as soon as they can.

But miraculously, incredibly, its football team Unirea Urziceni (which roughly translates as Urziceni United) have just become champions of Romania. They've achieved this without any real star name players and without importing vast quantities of South Americans as most of their rivals have done. The town will, I think, be by far the smallest ever to host Champion's League football (well when I say host, the ground is too small, so they'll play their games in Bucharest, so it won't really exactly host CL football, but you know what I mean)

The manager who has worked this miracle is none other than Dan Petrescu, who is famous the world over for playing his football for the mighty Sheffield Wednesday (he did also play for some other minor teams, but it was his time at Wednesday which will have been the pinnacle of his career). Indeed, he hasn't yet reportedly said, but I am pretty sure he has it on the tip of his tongue "Winning the Romanian league with Unirea is the proudest moment of my career since the day I signed for the great Sheffield Wednesday". (So successful was his time in England at Wednesday and another lesser club whose name escapes me, that he had a popular TV show named after him)

Anyway, it's a remarkable achievement, and it adds to the highly amusing recent denial of any trophies or any kind of success whatsoever to Bucharest teams. Last year CFR Cluj did the double, and this year Urziceni have won the league and the cup final (this weekend) will be contested between CFR Cluj and FC Timisoara. In addition the second Champions League spot has gone to FC Timisoara after they (yesterday) got their 6 points back from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (and thus pushed Dinamo down into third place). So, all in all, ha ha Bucharest. Sadly Steaua just scraped into the last spot for the "Europa League" (the new UEFA Cup).

In other good news for Romanian football (and Romanian football managers), Mircea Lucescu led Shakhtor Donetsk to the UEFA Cup, László Bölöni won the Belgian league with Standard Liege, and little known local Csaba László (from Udvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc just down the road) took Hearts to a very creditable third place in Scotland. And Mircea's lad Razvan is now the new coach of the Romanian national team about which I feel very positive as I think he's an excellent coach and has to be an improvement over the rubbish, and now sacked, Victor Piţurcă. South Africa 2010 is well out of reach, but it could be a brighter future for the national team.

Fruits of our labours

2009-06-10T11:57:00.002+03:00

As regular readers of this blog (not sure if I should go with a plural there, but what the hell) will know, last year we became landed gentry and purchased a house with a garden. Well, I say house, but I really mean crumbling-building-once-used-as-a-house. Anyway, the barn is in the process of being made into a liveable space and should be done by July, but the house is no less, and possibly more, decrepit than it was this time last year.

But, setting aside all that, last week just before I went to Prague I made a pesto almost entirely from ingredients that we ourselves had grown. I say we grew them, but it seems a little too easy. Dig up some ground, stick some seeds in and then just let them get on with it. Though it doesn't always work, of course, since we do have one patch which seems to resolutely resist producing anything worthwhile (even the weeds grow slowly there).

So, anyway, without further ado, Pesto alla Bankfalva.
You will need:

Large handful or two of rocket/arugula/rucola (this was one of those words I learned in other languages before English, since when I was a lad we didn't have rocket and had to make do with lettuce)
A couple of cloves of garlic
Some walnuts (about 10 per handful of rocket). Shelled, of course.
Olive oil
Salt (these last two were the ones that didn't come from the garden)

Stick everything in a blender and errm, blend, until such time as it all has become a pesto like consistency. Add olive oil as required if more liquid is required. Cook pasta, and stick some of this delicious green gold on it and mix up a bit. Et voila! Or whatever Et voila is in Italian.

Now, there may be those who are at this moment boiling with rage about the un-pesto-ness of this pesto. Pesto purists, for example, will see the replacement of pine nuts with walnuts as an act of great treason (but pine nuts are unavailable here, and we have a walnut tree, so nerr). Also using rocket instead of basil will almost certainly set some peoples' teeth on edge (but our basil hasn't grown much yet, and the rocket is almost as prolific as the weeds, so double nerr, and anyway don't knock it until you try it - rocket pesto is the business). However, it also shouldn't be forgotten that pesto purists would insist that parmesan cheese ought to be in pesto, so I think we can safely conclude that pesto purists are mentalists who would rather make their primi smell of vomit, than eat something tasty and wonderful, so discounting their views is easy.

Local News News

2009-06-09T12:51:00.003+03:00

For many years I have been the English language voice of Csikszereda, the place that people discovered when they searched for English language information about the town. I have been contacted by ice hockey fans, by Hungarian-Americans, by people who adopted children from this area in 1990, by tourists (not so many of them, I confess), and by various others from around the world who have come across my rambling nonsense and thought I might be able to provide them with some insight into the mysterious world of the Csik/Ciuc Depression.

Now there are some problems with this obviously - (a) I'm not a local and so what insight/information I can offer is not quite as insightful as it might be (though arguably, I suppose, it could be more objective); (b) I'm a 43 year old bloke with kids, and therefore do not necessarily represent a hugely diverse body of opinion. (What do women think of this place? Young people? People with social lives? etc etc); (c) Is my opinion to be trusted? On the internet it's always hard to tell. I'm not sure if I would trust my opinion, so why anyone else should is beyond me.

But now, I can exclusively reveal, there are more English language bloggers in the Csiki-blogosphere (Blogo-depression?). These bloggers are not outsiders, but real live locals, with lives and everything. I have not made them up. They are all part of a competition being organised by the Soros Educational Center here - and are listed here (and you can vote for them too). More might be appearing in the next few days, so keep checking that page (I'm hoping that at least one Romanian (by which I mean Romanian Romanian rather than Hungarian Romanian) will join up, because that perspective would be really interesting and valuable too)

So here they all are:

Enjoy. And vote. And, if you live in the town, sign up for the contest.

In other local news news, the town's most historic newspaper "Harghita Nepe" has, as far as I can tell, vanished as a commercial entity, and been bought up by the County Council as a place where it can sing the praises of its works, and especially those of the "Dear Leader", one Borboly Csaba, whose tenure at the helm of the County Council has not so far been one of unalloyed success (and who has, it is rumoured, attempted to drag Harghita County Council into the 21st Centruy by, wait for it, signing the staff up for a Yahoo group. Rock and roll.). So, I suspect the interest in Harghita Nepe will be soon no greater than that for the Pyongyang Daily News.

1930s redux

2009-06-08T09:57:00.005+03:00

Been away in Prague for a week, of which more later, but have woken up this morning to some really scary and appalling news from all over Europe - not least in this corner of it. The EU, which was, in large part, formed to prevent the rise of fascism again in the continent, seems now to be a venue for the resurrection of that disgusting ideology.

I'm sure there is much wringing of hands all over the Net regarding the two MEPs that have been elected from the extremist BNP in the UK. And so there should be. Also, regarding the rise of the extreme right in Holland, Italy, Austria, Finland, etc etc. (All over Europe in fact).

Here in Romania, the extremists (PRM) won 2 seats with 7% of the vote, which is pretty shit, and especially when you see that the two people they'll send are life-long tosser, anti-semite and Ceausescu's poet, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and in second place egomaniac nut job with a Jesus complex and owner of Steaua Bucharest, Gigi Becali. The latter of those two is more of a joke figure than anything to be really scared of, but it remains to be seen how actually being elected to something will go to his head. It's certainly difficult to see him enjoying his time in the European parliament - after all you don't get on TV very much and you have to spend time with a bunch of foreigners. I anticipate he will set new records for non-attendance.

But it's in neighbouring Hungary where things like the success of the BNP and PRM really pale into semi-insiginficance. Hungary in which the right wing "populist" (populist being a codeword euphemism for racist) Fidesz party got a massive 56% of the vote. (Fidesz being a party which desperately reaches out for the votes of the far-right, pandering to the anti-semitic, anti-Rroma views of the extremists and not distancing itself from any of these, cutting deals with various neo-nazi parties down the years). Now, the government in Hungary is massively unpopular, and it may well be that a large proportion of those 56% come from people who are voting for Fidesz just because they are the only real opposition, so let's not jump to too many mad conclusions from that performance.

But we can and should draw a lot of conclusions from the rise and rise of the nazi Jobbik party who picked up an absolitely terrifying 15% of the vote. 15%. A party who are allied with what can only be described as a fascist vigilante movement called the Magyar Garda, a bunch of black booted thugs with fascist emblems and a suspicious salute whose self-proclaimed role is to protect people from "gypsy crime". A party whose members make statements implying that sterilising Rroma woman would be a way to control the population. A party who play up anti-semitism (Hungary, by the way, seems to be the only country in Europe where anti-semtism still seems to be an acceptable, almost mainstream, viewpoint). Indeed one of its new MEPs, Krisztina Morvai, who seems to have been on a campaign to charm and convince journalists in the Western European press that she and her party are not a bunch of disgusting extremist scumbags, only last week made some incredible anti-semitic comments on an internet forum.

Really. These people are utter scum.

Is Europe fucked? Is facsism really back? Is this the beginning of the new 1930s? We've got the economic depression, we've got the rise of nationalisms, we've got the apparently electable extreme right neo-nazi parties. It scares the living shit out of me, to be honest. I mean I don't think that the European parliament will be the venue for this new fascist rise (the PRM is going to have a hard time dealing with Jobbik, for example, as the PRM hates Hungarians. Likewise the Italian Northern League is hardly going to get into bed with the PRM since half their current rhetoric is anti-Romanian), but in general there really feels like there is a tide of really disgusting views sweep[ing over Europe.

Crete is the word

2009-05-25T14:58:00.004+03:00

So, I'm in Crete. Crete is ace. Crete is the word, as they should have sung (not that Greece in general is in any way shabby or unpleasant, but Crete's got it all).

Some things you might or might not know about Crete.

It is the home of the Minoan civilization, which was around bloody ages ago (even before I was born). Yesterday we went to Knossos which is the home of the most famous Minoan palace. This palace was built (most of it) between 1700 and 1400 BC. That's a long time ago, and it was massive. It still is in fact, and it took ages to wander round. Here's the wikipedia article should you be so inclined. I won't go into details about it, since you can read it all there if you want to, but it's really impressive. The bloke most responsible for excavating it, Arthur Evans, reconstructed some bits of it, which seems a tad controversial, particularly since he really didn't know what it was really like when it was still standing and he just basically guessed and stuck rooms on where he thought they should be. Still, I guess it's better than just digging it all up and shipping it to the British Museum.
The palace, having so many rooms, may or may not be also the site of the "labyrinth" which housed the minotaur. (With all due provisos about the fact that the minotaur is a mythical character etc etc and so on)
Crete was also the home of Deadalus and Icarus as well as being the birthplace of Zeus (with all due blah blah etc you get the picture)
Cretans seem like very nice people, despite the fact that in American English (as far as I can tell) the word cretin is pronounced the same way as Cretan, which seems a little bit rude. But in spite of this slight on their intelligence, they seem very friendly.
Samaria Gorge (into which we ventured on Saturday) is said to be the longest gorge in Europe (though this expert local disputes this). We managed to see it the worst possible way, by just deciding to do the first 3 km or so and then going back to the car. The first 3km, though, are straight down hill, for about 6 or 7 hundred metres, which we then of course had to climb back up again. Still it was good exercise, and it was spectacularly beautiful
The food on Crete is absolutely superb. And by absolutely superb I mean really amazingly wonderfully beautiful. Everything is so fresh and delicious. It's such a great change from home (I apologise to Hungarian and Romanian readers of this blog, but really food from pretty much every country on the Mediterranean sea walks all over yours. No offense. It walks all over English food too if that helps make you feel any better.)
Chania is a great little town. Until a week or so ago, I'd never even heard of it. Now I'd like to live in it.
Crete is so full of archeological sites that one day we found ourselves in Gortyna, the Roman capital of Crete, most of which is just a bunch of rubble lying in an olive grove. You can just wander around in it, tripping over columns and trying not to step on bits of pottery.
Did I mention the food?

Most Dangerous Place in Europe

2009-05-19T11:28:00.004+03:00

is, it would seem, Romania.

Take a look at the map here:

(Slightly bigger version can be found here)

Now, what this shows is the level of risk of death due to natural disasters. Green areas are lower risk, red areas are higher risk. Look at where the red bit of Europe is (Basically Albania and Romania). (I think if you look at the bigger map, you can just about make out that Bucharest is a huge angry red spot in the middle of a fairly orange country. I take it this refers to the expectation that there will, before too long, be a devastating earthquake in Romania, and Bucharest will likely suffer more than everyone else)

Taken from here.

Facts about Munich

2009-04-28T11:54:00.001+03:00

Six things you might not have known about Munich:

In Spring they have a mini-version of the Oktoberfest called the Frühlingsfest. It's in the same place as the bigger version, and only has one beer tent, but compared to my recollection of the Oktoberfest (which to be fair was 19 years ago, when I was young and somewhat less wary about my overall consumption as I am these days, so my recollections are liable to be of fairly mixed usefulness) it seemed much better. It was, for the most part, a Bavarian event, filled with your genuine Muenchners, as opposed to the Oktoberfest, which seemed to be an Australian/New Zealand event as much as a German one. Regardless as to the accuracy of this impression, there is something uniquely appealing about an event so unconcerned with modern-day health concerns that the only size of beer that can be purchased is a one litre mug.
Bavaria (or possibly just Munich) has a "strong beer season". (I swear I am not making that up). This season runs from Ash Wednesday until Easter, which you'll note is not a million miles removed from the season often called Lent by some people. I'd like to think that Lent is the season when one is expected to give up normal strength beer in Bavaria, and thus strong beer season was born. Bavarians are, in fact, fairly devout Catholics, so they presumably do recognise lent in some form or other. But it might explain one or two things about their own brand of Catholicism - When the current Pope (who is, you see, a Bavarian) says something like "Condoms cause AIDS", we might cut him some slack and see it as a result of his Lenten diet of large mugs of viciously strong beer, rather than a theologically highly developed philosophical outlook. Or maybe not.
In the Marienplatz, the central square in the city, is a fancy clock (a glockenspiel in fact) which three times a day does this elaborate 10 minute bell ringing thing, involving the small mechanical puppet based reenactments of various important scenes that are vital to Bavarian culture. In one of these, a knight clad in blue and white stripes wins an epic contest against a knight clad in red and white stripes. This fantastic vignette repeatedly reminds us all (tourists and Bavarians alike) of the gloriousness and importance of the FA Cup Semi-final of 1993. You can see this at aboout 2.15 into this video.
Rumours that have sprung up around the coincidence of my visit immediately preceding the sacking of Jurgen Klinsmann are not to be taken seriously. And anyway, was he actually sacked or did he take a dive?
It is forbidden to build anything higher that the twin towers of the Frauenkirch in Munich. These towers, which are more or less in the middle of town, survived the second world war, when pretty much everything around them was flattened. From that moment an unwritten rule appeared which said nothing could supersede them. Sadly, being unwritten it was ignored at some point and there are therefore two buildings that broke it, but after that there was a referendum which made the unwritten rule, written.
One of the beers that I tried (and tried, tried again, just to be sure I really did like it as much as I thought I did) was weissbier. Not like the first time I'd ever had weissbier, but anyway. Weissbier means "white beer", and oddly you can (and I did) also get something called "dunkel weissbier", which means "dark white beer". It is extremely good, if a little oxymoronic in name.

Welcome to Romania

2009-04-27T11:28:00.004+03:00

Flew back into Romania yesterday afternoon after a project meeting in Munich. We'd parked at the airport (which will remain nameless, but is a very nice one serving a particularly German Transylvanian city, and bear in mind that neither Brasov - yet - nor Sighisoara have airports). So once the bags had come through and we'd left the building (all incredibly fast), we went outside to stash the bags in the car and work out how to pay for the parking. The bloke by the ticket machine informs us of the price, but then says "If you don't need a ticket/receipt, you can have it for half price".

I think encountering petty corruption within 15 minutes of getting on the ground in this country is a new record for me. Of course, we took the deal, and so I am not about to moralise about this - I just thought it was funny.

Piece of crap jailed

2009-04-14T13:01:00.004+03:00

So, I go away for a couple of weeks and all hell breaks loose. Moldova turns into some kind of mini-Ukraine, and apparently Romania is to blame. Or Romania and twitter anyway. And the Internet in general. And who knows what else? But it's all a series of dark outside forces anyway.

And then, to cap it all, I learn on my return that the world's most obnoxious Romanian, Domnul Gigi "tossface" Becali, is in prison. It all sounds good and great until I learn that he's not been banged up for being an utter wanker (sadly still not a crime anywhere in the world. When, oh when?) but for illegally detaining some blokes who stole his car. And somehow he's gone from being a declining non-entity whose political career was down the toilet and whose football team were imploding, to being some kind of national hero, presumably for acting out some kind of vigilante justice. (Before you, too, start wondering whether taking the law into his own hands was maybe justifiable, you should be apprised of the fact that he did not act alone, but in fact 5 of his "bodyguards" have also been stuck inside. In short, this wasn't some mild act of getting ones own back, this was a fucking lynch mob posse that was drummed up. But, of course, this doesn't matter, and like some kind of latter day Travis Bickle, he's a hero all of a sudden).

And then on top of this, for the upcoming European elections he's dumped his own party (the PNG, which was a personal vanity project anyway) and hooked up with Vadim Tudor's equally racist and extreme-right wing PRM party. And he's second on the party's ticket meaning that he's almost certain to be an MEP (and there's absolutely no danger of national shame there for Romania, not at all). Apparently in the past Becali has called Vadim Tudor a "venomous cancer" and "possessed by the devil", while Vadim has in his turn called Becali "fit for the straightjacket", a "piece of crap"*, and an "electric monkey" (No, I have no idea what that last one means either). But all's well that ends well, and when it comes to representing the views of the small number of Romanian nationalist scum in the European parliament they have put aside their differences and come together in common cause. So, hoorah for democracy. Luckily, Steaua are still crap.

(*I presume he meant a piece of crap in the English sense of crap, rather than a piece of carp, which is what crap means in Romania. I'm not sure being called a piece of carp would be that insulting. Though I suppose if it were the swim bladder, maybe)

Ceausescu's excrement

2009-03-30T12:11:00.004+03:00

I'm in the UK this week, and probably not likely to be here much, but I just wanted to mention that on Saturday night just after I arrived there was a documentary on BBC2 about Ceausescu, which was a bit less fascinating than I hoped, but still had some interesting nuggets of information. Chief among which was that Nicolae employed someone to destroy his excrement so that foreign agents couldn't get hold of it and analyse it to check on the state of his health. How do you destroy shit? Blow it up? Fire it off into space? Throw it against a fan? Flush it down the toilet?

He also insisted that Romanian TV never filmed him doing anything normal - like eating, drinking, wiping sweat off his brow, coughing, that kind of thing.

I'd tell you to watch it on BBC iPlayer (the title of the programme was "The Lost World of Communism"), but because nothing in the world makes sense you can only watch BBC iPlayer in the UK (which also happens to be the only place in the world that you can actually watch the programmes on TV in the first place - go figure). I believe you can trick the BBC iPlayer into believing you live in the UK, but it's beyond my technical abilities, so I've never done it, and can't pass on the way of doing it to you. But if you manage it, let me know.

Putting on the breaks

2009-03-26T15:50:00.001+02:00

OK, so I’ve had a go at Hungarian TV and its love of dubbing, and now it’s the turn of Romanian TV. Not for dubbing (they don’t, they subtitle *roars of approval*), but for the advertising breaks. It’s not so much the content of the adverts themselves, which are rubbish, but no different from anywhere else (loads of really crap ads for things you don’t want, with one or two funny ones mixed in as well as the standard highly produced ones telling vomit-inducing sweet little stories to a cutesy indie backdrop for mobile phone network providers), as the length of the advertising breaks themselves.

In the UK people typically use the ad breaks to nip to the toilet and have a slash. Or, occasionally, go and put the kettle on. In a football match for example, you might make trip to the fridge to get a bottle of beer. All these activities are doable within a normal sized break, allowing one to settle back down in one’s chair just before the action restarts. In Romania, you can not only go to the toilet, you could run a bath, lie in it for half an hour until the water gets too cold, get out, shave, trim your nose hairs, get dressed, go to the kitchen, cook a large dinner, go out and buy a bottle of wine, invite your friends round, eat the dinner, play scrabble a couple of times, and then clean the house from top to bottom, before settling back down – and you’d still have time to make serious inroads into A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (to be fair you probably wouldn’t get past the first book of the three, unless you were a really fast reader) before the programme restarts. It’s insane. I have no idea how people stand for it.

Not only are the advert breaks interminably long, but they are also placed in such a way as to really really disrupt the film or whatever you happen to be watching. Some exciting, nerve-wracking piece of the action? The crux of the plot, in which the dying old men begins to explain what has gone before? The moment when the hero is halfway through cracking the code? This is when the ads cut in. By the time the film returns whatever tension has been built up has gone, and to be honest you’ve forgotten what the film was about in the first place. Not only that, but on a number of channels they’ve decided that the best time to have one of these endless breaks is 5 minutes before the end of a film. I actually, out of interest, timed all this the other day – just before the end of a film on Pro TV, the ads cut in. The break was 22 minutes long. 22 fucking minutes. Twenty-fucking-two fucking minutes. Then the film came back for the denouement – 4 minutes. But if you’ve got that far in a film, you really need to watch those last 4 minutes. And that of course is what they’re counting on, that you will have to wait and wait, and started plucking your own eyes out in frustration until you get to watch the conclusion which you knew was coming anyway.

The concept of the half-time show in football is unknown here. There is no half-time show. There’s just 15 minutes of adverts. The broadcast stops when the ref blows his whistle and restarts when the match does. No half-time analysis, no highlights, no review of the action. I have no idea if they have any of that stuff at the end of the game, since I have never bothered staying on the channel that long. Perhaps after the obligatory 30 minutes of ads, they do actually have a post-match analysis. But I’m not waiting around for it.

And finally, he says, taking a deep breath before launching into the last element of this angry angriness, many of the channels have this weird propensity to do a kind of mini-skit as the link between the programme and the ads. I have absolutely no idea why, unless it’s just to add a further minute or two on to the break. National TV have this odd “fat policeman walking down a catwalk” thing going on, which I guess (though it’s difficult to really know) is supposed to be amusing. It’s not. Not even the first time you see it. It’s just bizarre. Prima, on the other hand, have this protracted thing with loads of blokes sitting in a company boardroom when two sexy window cleaners appear and put on a little dance. Why? Who the fuck knows.

So, I’ve given up. From now on I have resolved only to watch films and shows of interest on one of the State TVR channels, since they at least never put breaks in the show itself. They do have a lot of ads between shows, but at least the programme is left untouched. (They also show the best programmes anyway, so this is no great hardship)

Between the Woods and the Water

2009-03-25T10:07:00.002+02:00

Ages ago, a friend of mine urged me to read “Between the Woods and the Water” by Patrick Leigh Fermor, which is the second volume of a three part book describing the author’s journey walking to Istanbul (from the Hook of Holland) in the 1930s. I had understood that the book was written in the 30s and therefore assumed it was really difficult to get hold of. However last time I was back in the UK I noticed it in a bookshop, bought it, and discovered that it had actually been written and published in the 80s.

So, anyway, my knowledge about the back story to this book is a bit limited because I haven’t read the first one of the series, just this one, the second of three (and I think I understand that the third has still to be written). This book begins with the author crossing the Danube from Slovakia into Hungary, and finishes up with him, again on the Danube, at the “Iron Gates” in southern Romania. In the meantime he crosses Hungary and spends most of the book in Transylvania - hence the reason it had been so highly recommended to me.

As I understand, the 18 year old Fermor set out to walk as much as possible all the way (only accepting lifts in really foul weather), and (I think) to mostly camp out as he did so. However, somehow he has managed to hook into a network of mittel-European aristocrats and he in fact seems to stay far more often in opulent luxury than he does under the stars. I have to confess that my inner class warrior was greatly challenged by this, and by the idea that here we are in the 30s and Fermor is able to put off his Sandhurst/Oxford schooling and take a proto-gap year staying with counts and other landed gentry as he goes. But, pretty quickly, I found myself discarding this struggle and instead allowing myself to be carried along on the enthusiasm, incredible range of knowledge, and wonderful writing style that Fermor has. It is, I’d say, impossible to do otherwise. He’s an absolutely superb travel writer and manages to effortlessly weave into his story vast tracts of history, observations on people and fascinating conversations, as well as seemingly being able to recognise and catalogue every tree and bird that he passes as he goes. It’s an epic achievement. He does all this with such infectious enthusiasm and such conciseness, that I am left somewhat in awe (He manages, for example, to sum up the historical Hungarian/Romanian debate over the history of Transylvania in two pages. Something it has taken me 4 years of writing this blog to not even come close to managing)

Indeed it is one of those books which leaves the reader wishing he had a fraction of the skill that Fermor has in conjuring things up so effortlessly. I have, at occasions in the past, allowed myself a small passing fantasy that I could one day take some of the bits of this blog and form a narrative out of it that might make a reasonable book in the “A Year in Provence” mould, but after reading this book, I feel that I couldn’t even start to do justice to such an endeavour. Perhaps I need to re-read “A Year in Provence” which memory tells me did not quite demonstrate the same level of literary mastery, so that I could remember you don’t have to be an absolutely superb (and absolutely superbly well-informed) writer to get such a thing published.

What’s even more incredible that having walked through this world in the 30s as a late-teenager he doesn’t end up writing the books until fifty years later, based on his notes and memory. I can only observe that this is a man with a superb memory and amazing notes.

After what sounds like a spectacular summer in Transylvania, he eventually crosses the Carpathians and ends up at a place called Orşova on the Danube. To be honest this area of the country had never really crossed my consciousness before – we know someone from Drobeta Turnu Severin, but aside from that it was just that bit of Romania near Serbia that was further east than the Timisoara-Belgrade road/rail link. But he makes it sound incredibly spectacular and worth visiting – the Iron Gates (Porţile de Fier / Vaskapu) in one direction and the Kazan in the other, which are both fast moving narrows (relatively speaking) of the otherwise (by this point) incredibly wide river. Off Orşova he describes the fascinating island of Ada Kaleh, which was kind of a last remnant of the Ottoman empire, mostly Turkish in population (though politically part of Romania). As I was reading I was mentally making plans that this must be the next place in Romania on my visiting wish list. And then you reach the epilogue in which he bemoans the fact that it’s all gone now, thanks a hydroelectric dam constructed as a joint project by the Romanian and Yugoslavian governments in the communist era. Crushing. (Though Mrs H has been since then and hiked around the valleys and canyons nearby and she says it’s still incredibly spectacular)

Muddy ethics

2009-03-24T11:28:00.001+02:00

Vármező (Campul Cetatii) is a small village of no great interest (mostly famous among vaguely local people as being the location of one or two well-known trout restaurants) on the intermittently rubbish road between Sovata and Reghin (see map, up there ---^)

We went there not because we have an insane desire to visit obscure and out of the way places, but because Erika's cousin's daughter and her boyfriend live there (my first-cousin-one-removed-in-law?) and work in the local pension. On Friday night a chance online-bumping-into-one-another on Yahoo messenger (I think) and before we could think it through for too long we'd made a reservation at the pension and were working out when to leave in the morning.

The place they work at and that we stayed at is called History which is an odd name for a pension, but there you go. (Erika thinks that it's a dodgy translation of something that would be better rendered as "Reminiscences" or something). The off-season rate was an extremely reasonable rate of 99Lei for the room (in which all 4 of us could comfortably sleep). It was, with no shadow of a doubt, the best hotel room I've stayed in in Romania. Not that I've stayed in that many, but I have done a fair few. Really well designed and well furnished, and the restaurant is superb too. So, if ever you're looking for a place to stay in an out of the way village in the middle of nowhere, then this is the place for you.

We also, as this is the role of my firstcousinonceremovedinlaw, borrowed three ATVs and went out with them. I would have said rented, but family connections and all that meant that we didn't actually pay anything for the privilege. Now here I have to confess some slight moral quandary. You see, I hate ATVs. (By the way, by ATV here I mean "All-Terrain Vehicle" rather than the ITV Midlands TV channel from the 70s). I think they probably trash the environment, and they certainly cause a lot of noise pollution which can be very irritating if you're off out for a nice quiet walk in nature. I feel the same way about snow mobiles - you're off out for a nice walk in beautiful scenery and then someone comes zooming past on some ultra-loud monstrosity. Now, we weren't disturbing anyone's weekend nature ramble, partly because almost no-one in Romania actually goes walking in nature just for the sake of walking in nature (I mean some people do really get out there and out into the wilderness, but the kind of leisure area in between hardcore hiking and sitting around at home is, broadly speaking, unoccupied), and partly because being "mud-season" it's really unpleasant to walk anywhere much.

However the fact that it was muddy, must also mean that we were churning stuff up more than usual. We did stick to the forest roads used by loggers, so in fact we didn't tear up anything that wasn't already being torn up in a much worse way by dirty great trucks lugging out half the trees. In the grand scheme of things then, we weren't really ruining the environment to any great degree (at least relatively), but on a think global, act local basis, I have some serious qualms.

But you know when you're zipping along a muddy road with your three year old daughter wedged between your legs shouting "woohooo" and laughing uncontrollably, it's pretty hard to be that self-flagellating.

Spring springs

2009-03-23T11:08:00.002+02:00

Spring made a brief appearance here back in early February, decided it didn't really like being out so early and went back in to hibernation for a while. This Saturday, March 21st, the date when it's actually supposed to show up in the temperate northern hemisphere it decided once again to poke its nose outside and have a look-see. It did so in a very flamboyant way, unusual for this normally reticent season, which prefers to dip its toe into the year bit by bit*. Last week there was more snow and some fairly cold nights (and by fairly cold here I mean sub -10). On Saturday, though, we headed up to spend the weekend in Vármező (Campul Cetatii), a small village in the middle of nowhere, of which a little more later.

There is still a lot of snow on the mountains on the way, and even as late as Friday night it had been snowing in Sovata/Szovata, the nearest place of any size to our destination. But on Saturday morning it was sunny and crisp and beautiful. We chanced upon a meadow full of snowdrops, and by a stream there were as-yet-unblooming crocuses (or is the plural croci?). The next day (yesterday) they had all burst into purple and orange life. Then on our way home we saw a stork. There is no clearer sign of spring in Transylvania than seeing a stork. So all is good. Spring has sprung, and I imagine fauna all over the region are frantically trying to get off with each other (I'm imagining that this is what is happening, not actually conjuring up scenarios in my own fevered perverted imagination, just in case you wondered)

In other nature news, there seems to be a glut of eagles this year. Driving along, you see loads of them, sitting in the still bare trees by the roadside, floating lazily over the fields, swooping menacingly. When I say eagles, I mean birds of prey really, since most of them are not, I think, actually eagles, but some kind of hawks, or buzzards, or what have you. I think the technical ornithological way of distinguishing them is that eagles are "really fucking massive" whereas other birds of prey are just "very very big". I presume this means that there are also loads of mice and voles and shrews and that, but I haven't actually seen any of them. Or it could just be that the smorgasbord of small rodents was laid on last year, causing all these young raptors to make it through their first year, but now having feasted heartily last year, this year will see slimmer pickings and they'll all start buggering off to somewhere with more food in it (or die).

*I understand that winter hates mixed metaphors, so I'm attempting to force it to stay away with all that. It's not that I'm a bad writer, at all , no sirree.

[A few short hours later after posting this... It's only frigging snowing now.] Bloody weather.

Sign of the Times

2009-03-16T12:09:00.003+02:00

Setting: The playground in the local park. A 10-year old boy has just heard me speaking English to my daughter and has bravely approached me to practice his language skills

Kid: Are you English?
Me: Yes I am.
Me: (Knowing the answer but wanting to encourage this active learner) What about you?
Kid: I'm from here.
(pause)
Kid: Do you like football?
Me: Yes - and you?
Kid: Of course. Which team do you support?
Me: (Knowing that the next utterance is about to be met with a blank look) Sheffield Wednesday
Kid (blank look)
(pause)
Me:(helpfully) They're in the second division.
Kid: (blank look)
Pause
Kid: But which of the four big teams do you support?
Me: (unhelpfully because I know very well what he means, I just can't bring myself to let this go) Which four big teams?
Kid: Chelsea, Man United, Arsenal and Liverpool
Me: (honestly) None of them.
Kid: (blank look). (Decides to press on regardless) No, which one of them do you like?
Me: None of them. In fact I dislike all of them.
Kid: What about in the Champions' League. Which one of them do you want to win?
Me: None of them. I want all of them to lose.
Kid: (slightly puzzled) But you're English.
Me: (Thinks: Well I loathe Arsenal with every fibre of my being. I deeply detest Chelsea. I despise Liverpool and I abhor Man United. But I don't think this will be understood and at this age he probably doesn't actually need to know a bunch of synonyms for "hate") I suppose the one I hate least is Man United.
Kid: You like Man United?
Me: Well no, but if they play Arsenal or Chelsea or Liverpool I'd want them to not lose. (Realising this is just making life much too confusing and is only going to dissuade kid from speaking English at all. Plus at 10 he doesn't need to know that being a football fan is actually all about misery, despair, and hatred. Decides instead to slightly change subject) Which one do you support?
Kid: Chelsea. I hope they win the Champion's League this year.
Me: Good luck with that. I hope Porto do.
Kid: (Blank look)

Weird and unfriendly

2009-03-16T11:44:00.003+02:00

So, just to follow up on my last post, Solyom did end up coming, but he travelled by car (obviously as an EU citizen Romania can hardly stop him from travelling), which is a fair old drive from Budapest and back. He attended the ceremony at Nyergesteto along with various other Hungarian political figures (Marco Bela, Tőkés László etc), in what was basically a blizzard. He described the revoking of his permission to fly in as "weird" while a Hungarian government spokesman went as far as to call it "unfriendly".

Weird that a few short months ago all was sweetness and light between the governments of Romania and Hungary and now, coincidentally when the populist PSD are in the government, things have got a whole lot frostier.

The perils of translation

2009-03-14T15:10:00.005+02:00

The president of Hungary, Laszlo Solyom, was due to visit here this weekend, as part of the March 15th (national Day of Hungarians) celebrations. Some of the most well-known battles in the 1848 uprising (which March 15th commemorates) were fought in this region, and there are therefore some important monuments and events that happen round here. He planned to fly in today to Targu Mures/Marosvasarhely, then helicopter down to Csikkozmas just south of here for one of these events, before high tailing it back to Budapest to take part in whatever celebrations go on there.

However, now, as far as I know the trip is off, and it seems the cancellation is down to some translation issues (plus some populists seizing a chance to make political capital out of shit stirring). Solyom was officially invited here by the president of Harghita County Council, and as protocol demands, the Hungarian government sent word to the Romanian government that he planned to visit and set out his itinerary. Now the original invite was in Hungarian, the diplomatic letter between capitals was in English, and the Romanian media and various members of the PSD (part of the governing coalition) are reporting its contents in Romanian. But somewhere along the line what came as an invite from the "Local government of Harghita County" has turned into the "Self-government of Harghita County". This has caused the aforementioned shit-stirrers to get all righteously het up and cancel permission for his plane to land, thus sparking something of a diplomatic incident. They were even whining on TV last night about how he would be flying in on a "Hungarian Air Force" plane - which is of course true, but then all presidential aircraft are actually officially air force planes, including Basescu's (and most famously "Air Force One" in the US), it doesn't actually mean he's coming in on some heavily armed fighter jet. Also they have concluded that he was coming to make a speech in favour of autonomy for the Szekely - on what basis I'm not sure, since nobody knows what the contents of his speech were going to be, but the PSD lackey on TV last night was reporting this as fact.

I have no idea if the translation issue was an honest error in Budapest or Bucharest, or a purposeful bit of shit-stirring by someone in either one of those two capitals, but it's certainly caused a stir. Hopefully it will all blow over in a few days, and the good relations between Budapest and Bucharest can resume, but if the PSD (nominally a left wing party, but in fact a party who love playing the nationalist anti-minority card) have anything to do with it, I suspect not. (And then of course if FIDESZ come to power in Hungary next time out, which the polls suggest they will, this trans-Transylvanian sniping is going to ramp up a few more notches).

[Slightly later update: In this article , Smaranda Enache, who is by far and away the most believable and worthy politician (of any party and any ethnic origin) in Romania, says that the translation issue is an honest mistake because of how Hungarian renders the idea of local government ("önkormányzat" being most directly translated into English as self-government)]

Aye, there's the dub

2009-03-06T13:55:00.004+02:00

Hungarian TV is dubbed. Not all of it obviously, some of it is originally in Hungarian anyway, but foreign language films and series are dubbed into Hungarian. Hungarians are extremely proud of their dubbing industry, and claim it to be fantastic. This may indeed be the case – it’s obviously better than the Polish/Russian dubbing industry which involves the original backing track being muffled a little and one bloke doing sort of a consecutive interpretation job over the top – regardless of what gender, age, species etc the speaker is supposed to be. It does seem also to be superior to the Spanish dubbing system.

The Hungarian dubbing factory seems to employ a large number of dubbers, many of whom do really pretty good accents which seem to stay quite close to the original (the bloke who dubs Thomas the Tank Engine, for example, seems to have managed somehow – at least to my ears – to have come up with a kind of Hungarian Scouse accent). (It doesn't always work flawlessly though, even on kids TV - the woman who dubs Dora the Explorer - who in her Hungarian incarnation teaches English whilst conducting her adventures mostly in Hungarian - for example,seems not actually to speak English rendering her pronunciation extremely amusing and/or cringe-inducing)

My problem is that saying that you are the world’s best dubbers is akin to saying that X is the world’s best instant coffee. It may be true, and you may even be proud of it, but ultimately it’s pride in an excellent version of an inferior product.

Based on my experiences as an action researcher in both teaching English and watching TV (by which I mean I have done both of those things a fair bit, and thought about this from time to time when I''ve got nothing much on), I have long held the theory that countries that dub their TV are significantly worse at speaking English than countries that subtitle. Obviously dubbing/subtitling is not the only variable here, but it is my submission that dubbing is a significant one of the variables. The Portuguese (subtitlers), for example, speak much better English than the Spanish (dubbers). They also speak much better English than the Brazilians who speak the same first language, but who are also dubbers. (There is a stress-timed/syllable timed variable here, which cannot be discounted, but I think it does not account for the whole difference).

Note: This theory excludes my own monolingual countrymen whose language skills are not noticeably improved by the fact that we subtitle and don’t dub, but I’d say that this was because if we import CSI or Desperate Housewives, we don’t need to do either, and if we were actually watching French films three times a week, or daily doses of Venezuelan Telenovelas, we would, I believe, through language exposure be better at those languages. Well, not Venezuelan because that’s not actually a language, but you know what I’m saying here.

Hungary is, according to a Eurostat survey a couple of years ago, which I am unable to locate at the moment, so you’ll have to take my word for it, the most monolingual country in the EU. Bearing in mind that the EU also includes Britain and Ireland, this is a pretty poor show. (I suspect that the numbers of immigrants in the UK and Ireland skew the figures considerably and Hungary really is not quite as bad as to be behind us, but even so the figures show something). Yes, Hungarian is a language which is radically different from English, for example, but then so is Finnish and Estonian and they’re up among the top countries. I’m also fairly certain that Hungarian L1 speakers (for those not familiar with the jargon, L1 means first language) in Romania speak better English than those in Hungary (and this is on top of the fact that Romanian Hungarians have to be functionally bilingual anyway because of the need to speak Romanian. English is, for most people here, a third or fourth language). Romanian TV? Subtitled.

So, join with me in SOD (Subtitling Over Dubbing). We can change the world. There is the minor problem of what to do with the obviously very talented people who are employed in the Hungarian dubbing factory should anyone pay heed to this message and throw off the shackles of voiceover, but there is enough work, I hope, in the cartoons/childrens programmes end of the market (I think subtitling TV programmes which are aimed at children who cannot be expected to be able to read subtitles would be a bit much, I’m not that hardcore of a SODomite. There are branches of our movement who believe that even shows aimed at the very young like In The Night Garden, ought really to be subtitled as it would (in their words) “encourage the lazy little bleeders to learn to read as well as to pick up a second language”.

In the meantime, I’d really like to discover that Albanians of a certain age all speak English with Norman Wisdom’s accent.

"Act your age, not your shoe size"

2009-03-02T09:31:00.002+02:00

So sang Prince once, some years ago. Well, he probably sang it more than once, like whenever he did a concert and that, but anyway.

As of today and for the next year, I can take this advice and apply it since the two things have coincided like some kind of other thing when two things coincide. Like, er, an eclipse or what have you.

Despite possible evidence to the contrary I haven't actually started drinking yet. Honest.

Come on you blues

2009-02-27T21:43:00.004+02:00

Last weekend Erika and I went for a romantic weekend to Sighisoara, possibly the most romantic city in Romania. (Erika is my wife, by the way, not somebody I was sneaking away with for some kind of illicit rumpy-pumpy, just in case you were about to shop me). We had noticed, quite by chance, on the kind of news ticker thing on Realitatea TV that there was something called the Sighisoara Blues Festival on and so we went to the Internet and looked it up and thought, "Hmm, that might be worth going to" and so put the wheels in motion to do so. My in-laws agreed for the first time ever to take the kids for a night, we reserved tickets for the Saturday night bit of the festival and booked a hotel in the citadel (the old, really romantic bit of the city. Not far from where Vlad the impaler was born, though he moved out when he was young citing the cloyingly nice nature of the place and went to live in the duller and more conducive to large acts of mass murder south of the country.)

I won't bore you with the whole dropping the kids off stuff, or the drive to Sighisoara, but let's just cut to the concert. It was in one of those old communist theatres untouched since it used to host weekly shows of the Young Pioneers doing a synchronised flag waving competition. We were up in the balcony, and the evening kicked off with a "surprise" - a band of kids from Romania. This, I have to say, didn't strike me as a good surprise at first glance, but in fact these kids were amazing. And when I say kids, I use the word advisedly. the guitarist and bass player were 14 and the drummer was....8. Yes, 8. They were incredibly proficient, and what a set of balls, to get up in front of a packed crowd and play so well. I found a clip of the 8 year old on you tube doing his drum solo. It's a drum solo, so you know, not that interesting, but still - he's 8. This is a packed theatre with perhaps 300 people in it? Maybe more?. 8. I may not have stressed this enough. He's 8.

Anyway, when they went off to rapturous applause after a few songs, our next band was the Ana Popovic Group. Ana P (as I like to call her) is a Serbian woman who seems to be based in the US. She and her band were technically proficient, but ultimately not really anything terribly exciting. As the hour wore on, past my normal father-of-young-children bed time, I began looking at my watch and wondering when they'd finish, and whether I'd be able to stay awake to the next band. It's not that Ms P was bad, just that she was just nothing very special. Anyway, here's a clip of her that night:

In the interval, and now that in think about it, quite amazingly coincidentally, we bump into a newly svelte-looking Romerican (and his Julierican - you may have to think about that one). This is miraculous because, to be honest I don't really know that many people in Romania - outside of Harghita County and Targu Mures, I'm guessing it's no more than 50. And I don't know anyone in Sighisoara. Plus Romania is quite a big place, and it's got over 20 million people in it. So to be having a beer in the interval at a smallish concert in a smallish town and suddenly bump into someone you know is fairly remarkable.

So, I'm tired, and wondering when I'll get to bed, and thinking about how old I've become, when on stage at about midnight steps Lucky Peterson, a man about whom I know basically nothing. And he blows the entire place away. He is absolutely incredible. He plays blues, jazz, soul, whatever he feels like. One of these people who just seems to be able to sense what the crowd will be into and to take it in that direction. Absolutely totally and utterly superb. He didn't finish until after 2 and I wished he'd stayed on longer. There are two youtube clips of him here, but they don't really capture how god he was - they are both at the end when he'd invited loads of people on stage as he was the festival's closing act, but really he was better when it was just him and his rhythm section. Still, Lucky Peterson - if he's ever playing a concert near you, go. Just go. (The whole concert will be on TVR Cultural at some point for those living in Romania, but I don't know when as the TVR website is not terribly helpful).

Fat Tuesday

2009-02-24T12:19:00.002+02:00

This is what my Yahoo mail account lists today as in the little "important dates" thingy at the bottom of the screen. But it's not called Fat Tuesday is it? I know that's the direct translation of Mardi Gras, but that's not a term that is used in English (other than by Yahoo Mail, obviously). Now I do realise that Shrove Tuesday is a specifically British English term and so I don't expect Yahoo to go with that, but why Fat Tuesday. Nobody calls it that, ever. What's wrong with Mardi Gras? Or Carnival? Or Carnaval? Or, here, at least, Farsang.

Anyway, happy Farsang, one and all. And for those of you who will be giving chocolate up for the next 6 weeks in some kind of half-hearted attempt to emulate Jesus staggering around the wasteland for 40 days, good luck.

Blame

2009-02-11T11:05:00.005+02:00

The big story in the Romanian media at the moment is about the murder of one of the country's top handball players in a disco in Vezprem, Hungary. He (Marian Cozma) played for the Romanian national team, and played for the local team in Vezprem along with a few other foreign stars. They were out celebrating a teammates new baby at the weekend, and then fight broke out and Cozma got stabbed in the chest and died (and two others - a Serb and Croatian, were badly hurt).

I have to confess that one of my first reactions on hearing this tragic story (when all I knew was that a famous Romanian handball star had been killed in Hungary), was to fear that he had been murdered by some crazy Hungarian nationalist intent on somehow getting his own back for Trianon or some such. Not that the manner or motive for the killing would matter to Cozma or his family or friends, but that if it were a hate crime, then it could turn into something more widespread and have long term political ramifications. As far as we know this wasn't the case and the team just got attacked for being in the wrong place at the wrong time while what amounted to a local gang/mafia type grudge was being played out.

However, the case is not without its ramifications and ethnic overtones. The men accused of killing Cozma are, you see, Rroma. So large swathes of the Hungarian press and its right-wing politicians have seized on this as clear evidence that this is an ethnic problem, and that "Gypsies" in general are to blame. A newspaper writer, for example, described gypsies as "not human beings, but animals". (In another recent case, a police chief was sacked for making racist remarks about Rroma, and then reinstated after public protest)

You can read a fairly comprehensive and thorough account of the whole tragic event here .

Some other articles in English: Bloomberg ; Politics.hu

As the economic crisis really begins to bite here, it seems that the Rroma will again start being blamed for all of societies ills. It's already pretty much government policy in Italy, and the opposition in Hungary are fairly clearly playing the anti-Rroma race card too.

It's Global Warming Gone Mad

2009-02-10T11:36:00.003+02:00

Being English I have to constantly keep in check my instinctive desire/need to write and talk about the weather. I do manage it for the most part, but occasionally I have been known to slip into it (f'rinstance when I talk to my parents on the phone). It's not that talking about the weather is a bad thing exactly, just that it sort of implies you can't think of anything else to talk about (which, obviously is often the case, at least for me). Also, living in the Coldest Place in Romania (TM), in which winters are brutal and vicious affairs, having previously lived in Vermont, USA in which winters are etc and so on, there is always the tendency to look down upon other people's weathers as being sort of a bit weak and pathetic (which I'm quite sure is more than a little irritating, at least judging by the "why don't you just shut up" reactions I get).

Anyway, because I have nothing else to talk about, and because I am not currently in a position of being able to poo-poo the mild and temperate weather of the rest of Europe, I feel it is time to comment on this so-called winter. For while the UK shivers and grumbles contentedly under severe snowstorms and people stocking up for the ice-age in Tescos, Csikszereda (and the rest of Romania, but it feels more noticeable here) is sitting around twiddling its thumbs in what appears to be spring. Which began about three weeks ago. There was a cold period at the beginning of the year when it was down to the standard -20 ish, but since mid January it hasn't dropped below zero. This weekend we picked snowdrops, for god's sake. Snowdrops in early February.

Every year, on February 2nd, as everyone who has seen the Bill Murray film will know, a groundhog (which appears to be some kind of large rodent, not dissimilar to a wombat) is dragged out of hibernation in the town of Punxutawney, Pennsylvania and asked to predict when winter will end. He's not terribly specific and just limits to his predictions to either "6 more weeks of winter" or "less than 6 more weeks of winter", which always baffled me when I lived in Vermont since the winter finishing in mid-march would actually be reasonably early, but there you go. I have no idea what he said this year, or indeed why I started this paragraph at all, but that's blogging while doing a number of other things at the same time for you. By the time you come to finish a thought, it started so long ago that you have no idea what it was you wanted to say, but being too lazy to delete the whole thing (I mean and waste all those words), you just plough on regardless.

So, the weather, then. It's errm a... thing, isn't it?

(If anyone happens upon this post while searching for the best blog post of 2009, I'm hereby nominating it as my candidate. )

More tolerance news from Italy

2009-02-06T13:32:00.003+02:00

Piergiorgio Stiffoni (no sniggering at the back, that really is his name, apparently) who is a Senator from the ever-delightful Northern League party in Italy (and hence part of that country's racist government) on the subject of Romanians: "If an extraterrestrial came down to earth and asked me what Romanians specialised in, I would say "rape""

(That's my translation of Se un extraterrestre scendesse sulla terra - dice Stiffoni - e mi chiedesse qual e' la specializzazione dei rumeni, gli risponderei 'lo stupro', which since I don't speak Italian is quite possibly slightly wrong, but not by much I think)

If an extraterrestrial came to earth and asked me what members of the Northern League specialised in, I would respond "being disgusting bigoted xenophobic scumbags", and then I'd ask if I could borrow his ray-gun.

Romania to have violent street protests

2009-01-30T13:54:00.002+02:00

"In a few months there will be people in the streets, that much is certain," said Luca Niculescu, a media executive in Bucharest. "Every day we hear about another factory shutting or moving overseas. There is a new government that has not shown itself too effective. We have got used to very high growth rates. It's an explosive cocktail."

-From this article in the Observer a couple of weeks ago

Blimey. Jason Burke is an excellent journalist who until recently was the most informed man on Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, etc etc. I have no idea why he's been redeployed to Europe, especially when it seems that this article is just a bunch of vague possibilities strung together and presented as some kind of prescient "be very afraid" type article.