International fame

Video from the Trans World Sport programme about HSC Csikzereda hockey team.  Some bizarre pronunciations and some very weird historical errors (1947?), but worth watching all the same:

Climb down

Sadly, Csikszereda's most famous son, Zsolt Erőss, (or Erőss Zsolt technically) died last week on his way down from the summit of Kangchenjunga, the 10th mountain of over 8000 metres that he had climbed.  The last two of those he managed to climb with a prosthetic leg after losing one of his in an avalanche in 2009.

It's worth reading his wikipedia entry, so here it is.

The Romanian Education System (brief reprise)

I thought I had finished with this series, but every now and again something comes along to remind me of what a bunch of useless cretins run education in this country.

In two weeks time it is May 1st.  We've know this for quite a long time.  Not long after that, in fact at the weekend, it is Orthodox Easter. Again, this is not a new piece of information.  People have know about it for a long time.  Centuries in fact.  So, Wednesday May 1st is a public holiday (because May 1st is always a holiday, every year, without fail).  And Orthodox Easter Monday (May 6th this year) is a public holiday (because it always is, etc etc and so on).  Now given all of this, you might have thought that someone, possibly at the beginning of the school year, could have put those facts together and wondered whether it might be worth making this into something of a longer holiday.

But no, this has only been thought about now.  And yesterday, yes, yesterday, a directive was issued from the Ministry that there would be a 6 day holiday from May 1st-6th, and that to make up for it there would be two Saturdays of classes. The first of these Saturdays is this coming one. Two days from now.

If you had plans this weekend? Fuck you, we've changed the timetable.  If you would possibly have liked to have used this 6 day break for a holiday of some sort? Fuck you, you've no time to organise anything.

Now I could speculate that some parent who is high up in the Ministry has decided that he (it will be a he) would like to take his family away for a long weekend then, and he has nothing on this weekend, so there is no real problem with rearranging the nation's timetables for that. But that would just be baseless speculation, so I won't.

Last one on this subject

Ok, my last comment on Thatcher (probably)

It was good to see that the news has finally recognised that there are people who are not really sad that she's died. They're still presenting us as a small minority, but at least we now seem to exist. Though last night I heard some bloke talking as if the main problem we had with her was that she was uncompassionate and uncaring. 

Now the fact is I think this is looking at it the wrong way. The people we are told she "seemed not to care about" were actually the targets all along. She famously didn't believe in society, but she also hated community, she hated groups of people banding together for mutual support. It didn't fit her Raynian worldview where everything that was worth anything was achieved by individual endeavour. 

So the mining communities of South Yorkshire for example, the members of the NUM, the families of the miners, were not some kind of collateral damage in her fight with Arthur Scargill. They were the targets. In a sense Scargill was the collateral damage. It wasn't him she wanted to finish, it was them, the communities, the families, the unions. This repeated throughout Britain, wherever working people dared to organise, dared to support one another. They didn't fit the model so they had to be stopped.

She's dead, but this mad hatred of community and society, is unfortunately very much alive. It was perpetuated by Blair, and is now being attempted to be finished by Cameron and Osborne. We're being pitted against each other to fight from the few scraps that fall from the table.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-22183727

Video about this region

This is worth a watch if you want to see where I live. Though obviously, as with all YouTube clips, avoid the comments like the plague.  They will depress the crap out of you.

Fire and Traffic interface excitement

A small coda to my recent post on Vietnamese traffic.  While in Danang, on a couple of occasions I sat at a riverside bar and watched as they tested this flame-throwing dragon out. Now it has officially opened for business. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? A dragon breathing out tongues of fire over the traffic.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/giant-steel-dragon-bridge-vietnam-breathes-fire-215025906.html

Good riddance

Predictably there's a lot of bleating about how one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, or a plea for some decorum in the response to what effectively is the death of an old, senile woman. But Thatcher was not just an old lady, she was a symbol, a symbol of hate and extremism, and an all out war on the poor and the working class that goes on to this day. Her death changes nothing, but to not celebrate it would be to somehow legitimise this view of her regime as a statesmanlike one, when in fact she (and her government) caused more harm, caused more damage, caused more hate and divisiveness than anyone before. Thatcherism, sadly, is very much alive and well. But to celebrate the death of Thatcher herself is just and right and true. Good riddance you vile inhuman beast. 




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-BZIWSI5UQ

My friend David Stubbs provides a better obituary:

What needs addressing as a matter of absolute urgency right now, however, is that Thatcher 's legacy is one of gross, almost comically staggering inequality. We are not all in this together. We are heading down shit creek while a tiny few of "them" are up on the clifftop holding all the paddles. Inequality, inequality, inequality, stupid. If there's good to come from her death, beyond a few street parties, it's that we realise that Thatcherism never died, was never truly even un-elected. It's time to shake ourselves, and others, out of the daze into which we were collectively not so much handbagged as headbutted back in the early 80s. Thatcherism was the worst thing to happen to this country since the Second World War and it'll carry on happening to us unless we do something about it.

http://thequietus.com/articles/11886-margaret-thatcher-obituary 

The beauty of traffic

Ha Long Bay. You know the one

I've been in Vietnam for the last two weeks, my third visit in the last three years.  It's a great place, with nice people, some really wonderful sights (this time I went to Ha Long Bay, which is that bay that you've all seen in various films, including what seems like 50% of all James Bond films), and absolutely superb food.

But the thing that tourist guides don't tell you, is how utterly compelling the traffic is.  Now I'm not a big city person for the most part, as you might be able to tell from the fact that I've chosen to live in non-thriving metropolis Csikszereda (and, well, now we've even retreated from the lack of hustle and bustle of there and gone to live in the tranquil village of Bankfalva). Traffic in big cities usually bothers me. A lot. But traffic in Vietnam is different.  It's worse.  And yet, somehow, much much better. Standing at a major intersection is to marvel at the wonder of humanity, to see how people can exist without rules, without limits but still respectfully, working together, somehow creating order out of chaos.  Now this sounds like hippy bullshit, and I've obviously done that deliberately, but while the language may be all a bit unnecessary, the fact is that it's true.

Danang, where I spent the vast majority of my time is, to all intents and purposes a new city, so the roads are on a grid system and are pretty wide.  So there you get these swarms of motorbikes, interspersed with some cars, a few trucks, buses, bikes, rickshaws and people pushing food on carts and barrows.  With pedestrians crossing.  But there are very few rules (or at least there is very little enforcement of rules.  There are a few red lights which people more or less obey). So at intersections (especially ones without traffic lights), you get these incredible mingling of traffic, crossing and turning and intermingling and somehow there are no accidents.  Sometimes you'll see someone trying to turn left across the traffic, and on their own they really have no chance, but then they are joined by one or two or more and suddenly the weight of numbers open the flow and allow them to turn.  Seriously it's absolutely riveting to watch.  You know how you get these huge flocks of starlings flying over a city at dusk twisting and turning and changing direction, forming patterns in the air?  Or how you see huge shoals of fish darting and shifting?  All the time miraculously not having any collisions?  It's like that.  A bit slower, but almost as amazing, just because, well...it's traffic.

Crossing the road on foot in such a situation at first seems like an absolutely impossible task.  You can see the tourists who have just arrived because they spend up to 10 minutes trying to step into the traffic. After a while though you realise that just like with each other the vehicles will adjust, flowing around you.  The worst thing you can do, in fact is to be hesitant - stopping as you cross, and generally behaving unpredictably. After a while it actually becomes enjoyable to cross the road - a sort of 99% safe adrenalin rush.

An alternative is the old quarter in Hanoi, which has the same type of traffic but on narrow streets.  The pavements are crammed with motorbikes, parked (it seems that's what pavements are mostly used for in Vietnam). So the honking flowing traffic squeezes along these narrow dark streets, while the food vendors and the pedestrians weave in amongst them.

Soon, this phenomenon will be dead, though.  As the Vietnamese middle class grows, more and more people are buying cars.  The numbers have visibly and radically increased in the 30 months since I first went. At some point there will be a tipping point at which the number of cars on the road will mean that the flowing amazing mass becomes just gridlock

I'll miss it.  Vietnamese traffic, is weirdly, a thing of almost endless beauty and fascination.  I've dug up some youtube clips of the traffic so you can see it, but even these somehow don't do it justice.  You need to see it up close.  And the Vietnamese tourist office needs to promote it.

Don't tell me...

I've been away for two weeks, and am currently writing from an airport on my way home.  Please tell me this flag bollocks has blown over?

It hasn't has it?

Can we form two new countries - an autonomous region of normal well-adjusted people who can live together in harmony, and a place where all the nationalist cretins (of whatever nationalism) can all live together in disharmony?

Thanks.

Notes from the new front line

The flag debate drags on and on and ...

Political capital is made by both sides in perpetuating it. Easy to whip Romanians into a fury over this treacherous irredentist piece of cloth, and easy to whip Hungarians up into a fury over attempts to ban it.  It is, obviously, a complete non issue, especially at a time when people have far bigger problems to worry about.  But, hey, it's an easy distraction for politicians and media to indulge in.  In both countries.

Yesterday I saw a job advert from the US Embassy in Vienna asking for a Hungarian/Romanian media analyst.  A full time position to monitor the media in both countries and report. If the CIA* are now taking an interest in this, it must mean they are at least slightly worried.

(*It wasn't technically a CIA job, but this hardly seems like a consular need)

This is how it starts though.  Times of great economic stress lead people to seek an easy outlet for their worries/fears/concerns/anger.  In some countries it's immigrants.  Here it's Hungarians (and in Hungary it's dragging up Trianon again).  It will probably blow over, but it's as depressing as fuck though.  Depressing that the electorate in both countries can't just say to their political leaders "No, for fuck's sake, they're not the problem.  You are."

See? Incontrovertible proof

On Tuesday there was a Szekely flag raising ceremony in the main square here.  We've never had one there before, but there are more Szekely flags flying now than there ever were before, and whoever is making them, is doing a tidy business.  Oddly they scheduled the ceremony for exactly the same time as the start of the biggest and most important ice hockey match of the season. And as you will from this scientifically accurate venn diagram I've just made up there's a pretty big crossover between people who would like to attend a ceremony raising the flag and local ice hockey fans. Anyway, the mayor (who I may have mentioned before is something of a  dick) made some speech saying that Hungarian ought to be mandatory in this town.  Which I guess means I need to leave.  This blog will probably have to be closed.  Nonsensical bluster of course, but he managed to get the Romanian press up in arms, so I guess he feels it was worth it.

Anyway, HSC Csikszereda (the ice hockey team) won, you'll be glad to know, and are now in the playoffs and about to face Nove Zamky of Slovakia, with either DAB or Miskolc (both from Hungary) awaiting the winner. It's been an excellent and highly competitive season for the MOL league, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it.  The final of the Romanian championship will follow, and given all this flag and attendant other nonsense, I fear that is likely to be less fun as it will imbued with lots of heavy meaningfulness and the whole sporting contest element will be somewhat lost.

Finally, here is a video aimed at helping Romanians speak Szekely.