On the Liban(on)

Slowly but surely the roads in Harghita County are being resurfaced and therefore made driveable. When I arrived here (4 years ago TODAY! bloody hell), the roads here were appalling. Potholed and virtually impassable even for gas-guzzling SUVs (not that I ever actually experimented with one, but I reckon)

As time has gone on though the county council has made a concerted effort to make destinations accessible for people, which is a nice touch. Cities and towns are a bit slower to catch up, so you can still find yourself leaving a pristine new road surface for the old style potholed track whenever you get to a town or village, but you can't have everything.

Anyway, the latest road to get the treatment was the one that runs over the mountain between Udvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc) and Gyergyo (Gheorgheni), and this weekend we drove along it to see places we'd never seen before, for fear of destroying the car. It was spectacular. The road crosses the mountain at a place called Liban, which affords great views over thickly forested mountains and hills.

Here is a map of Harghita County to give you a sense of where the road is:

Since the county has three sizeable towns of note and this road connects two of them, it seems like an important one to have had done, so presumably it will make life easier for people having to travel between the two. The bus which goes between them, for example, has always used that road and it must have been one of the most miserable "short" journeys in the country. Now however it will be almost pleasurable.

Another road which was made useable two or three years ago was the one over the Bucsin pass between Gyergyo and Parajd (Gheorgheni and Praid). I only know of a couple of important roads now that could really use some work - the one between Csikszereda and Gyergyo, and the one between Udvarhely and Keresztur (Cristuru Secuiesc)

By the way, I would have tried to show this map on Google Maps, but for some reason Google Maps hates Romania, and just has vast empty spaces where anything should be. There is nothing there north of Brasov. Absolutely nothing. It's weird. The satellite images work, though they're not especially close in, and the ones round here are all taken in the winter so you can't actually see half of the roads as they're covered in snow.

I would quite like to know what Google has against Romania and why they can't be arsed to stick a map up, though.

Racism returns to the European mainstream

What the hell is going on in Italy? Berlusconi is using his first weeks in power not only to evade prosecution in all the corruption trials he's up against, but he and his government seem hell-bent on returning the country to the days of Mussolini.

Recently, for example,

Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that "all Gypsies were thieves"

(taken from this article)

I mean...christ on a bike, this is fucking appalling (I hope you'll excuse the language, but when talking about acts as repulsive and racist as those which the Italian government is currently engaged in and engaged in supporting, strong language is unavoidable)

When an angry mob went on the rampage and burnt down a Rroma slum, the government's response was... to praise them.

This is a country in Western Europe. In the G8. in 2008. And it is being run by a bunch of vile extremist throwback bigots and no-one is saying or doing a thing about it. It's appalling.

The EU prides itself (with no little justification) on helping to rebuild a Europe shattered by war and fascism, and to ensuring that the conflicts of the past could never happen again. Yet it sits idly by while one of its core members returns to the 1930s.

Turkish Horse

A week or so ago, I was talked into going to the Turkish Horse shop with/by the wife. The Turkish Horse shop is the place where you can go and rummage through bins full of clothes to maybe find something you might consider wearing on an especially dark day in a particularly deserted part of Spitzbergen in December. These clothes (it is said) come from England, and apparently this gives them a special cachet or je ne sais quois (it is perhaps indicative of something that the only two words/phrases I could think of to use there were French and not English at all. It certainly ought to indicate that England would not be the place one would commonly go to to find stylish clothes). I may have mentioned this place before, and its intriguing business model, based I suspect on flogging off clothes donated to charity by unsuspecting people in the UK.

[I should perhaps at this juncture mention that the shop is not actually called a Turkish Horse shop, this is just me being "amusingly" daddish and perverting the Hungarian word turkáló, which is what these shops are actually called. (I think it means "rummage" or something really)]

Anyway, we went on a Monday morning and the place was packed, as that is the day of the new and exciting stock. It was a very strange experience. Mostly because people obviously take it so seriously (I've heard people when asked what their hobbies are, answer "Turkálózni" - or "Turkish Horseplay" as I would like to translate it). This seriousness is manifested by the fact that this is a shop, packed full of people, the vast majority of whom are women, and there is no talking. At all. Not a murmur, not a little side chat, not a pair of friends talking about the weekend. Nothing. It's really really disturbing. The pair of us were quite out of place actually discussing things and chatting and laughing and we got some fairly hostile glances thrown our way.

Anyway, we managed to actually get a few nice things for the family, plus I got to experience a side of local culture which I hadn't previously experienced, so it was all good, really. Can't see it becoming my hobby, though.

Tök paprikás

Yesterday I invented a new dish, which, I believe, will quickly become accepted as a new standard in Hungarian cuisine. Actually, I cannot imagine that nobody has previously hit upon this dish, so I probably was not actually the first discoverer of this, but like Columbus, I am laying claim to it anyway. (Googling "tök paprikás" brings out two links, so there is the suggestion that I am not exactly the first, but close enough - in 2008, two links is practically as obscure as to be on the dark side of Titan)

Anyway, paprikás, for anyone who doesn't know, is the true national dish of Hungarians. Goulash is all very well and that, but people don't eat it that often. Chicken paprikas (Csirke paprikás) is guaranteed to be on any menu anywhere in the Hungarian speaking world (possibly with the exception of vegetarian restaurants, though even they probably serve it as it may be an act of treason not to). Chicken is the most popular version, though there are others, including mushroom paprikas which is pretty damn finom (delicious).

Well, yesterday while in a friend's garden I hit upon the superb idea of tök paprikás. First though I will have to explain what tök is. A tök is kind of a courgette, but not really. It's a much lighter green colour, and it has a thicker skin. Even in the US, a country which seems to have thousands of different varieties of squash, I never saw the tök. Though it does resemble the summer squash quite a lot, except that it's pale green and not yellow. It's pretty good as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking it's just a light green courgette. It has a firmness and density that allows for some different options. It doesn't go quite as well in a ratatouille as a courgette for example, but for tök paprikás it can't be beat.

Anyway, I was complimenting our hosts on their tök crop, and they said, yes, but they're only small at the moment. I argued that they weren't small at all, but actually perfectly sized. Picking them late when they're massive, runs into the same problem that you get with courgettes - thick inedible skin, massive seeds that you have to scoop out, tasteless flesh. To prove that I was correct, and they utterly wrong, I offered to cook one. And thus was born tök paprikás.

Without further ado then, to the recipe for this great invention that will be sweeping the world within a few short millenia:

Finely chop an onion and slowly cook it in oil until transparent (is the verb I need here "sweat"?). Add to this some paprika (piros paprika as it is known here - the red powder made from dried and ground red peppers). Fry for another minute and then throw in your quartered and sliced tök (at this point my hosts were stunned when I didn't peel the tök, but that's people for you. Weird), some fresh dill and some salt. Put a lid on it for a while and let it cook (the tök exudes its own liquid so you don't need to add any). Stir occasionally. After about 10-15 minutes it should be done, at which point, you throw in some flour, and then some milk, stir until it has a thickish sauce. Bring it back to the boil for a minute, and Robi's your uncle. Tök paprikás. It goes well with mashed potato.

(This recipe works for any other paprikas you want to make, just substitute your ingredient of choice for the tök. I'm now trying to work out what other things would work. Aubergine wouldn't, I reckon, but kohlrabi might. As might leeks. I'll let you know.)

It may have helped that all the ingredients were so fresh (tök, onion and dill were all especially picked just for this dish and cooked within 10 minutes of their harvest). I also fried up the tök plant flowers for fun, and they actually turned out to be delicious too (though if not peeling tök was weird, eating flowers was positively certifiable).

Milking it

A couple of years ago, I pondered on the impact that EU membership would have on the small farmers of Romania. Just to clarify, the farmers of Romania are not, to my knowledge, any smaller than farmers anywhere else - many are of average height and build, while some are even quite tall. There are just rather a lot of them (farmers of all sizes) and they mostly have very small farms. In fact many of their farms would not actually be described as farms by most people and more like "having a cow or two in their back garden". In fact, I think I should probably go with smallholder, so as to not delude you as to the scale of their operations.

Anyway, I have recently learned a little bit more about what EU membership means for these smallholders (and indeed what having all these smallholders means for the EU). Specifically in the dairy sector.

You see, the way things work around here is that people in villages own a cow or two. Every morning people open their gates, and the cows wander out on to the street and follow each other and the village cowbloke who escorts them all to a field where they all spend the day quietly pondering the scenery, rambling, and painting watercolours of the tranquil countryside. At the end of the day, they are led back through the village, during which walk they all peel off and go into their own homes. Really, they do that, they don't need to be guided or anything, and the cowbloke doesn't need to recognise all the cows, they just go home of their own accord. I mean cows may not be the most actively intelligent of animals, but they are not, well, sheep.

[By the way, and I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the joke around these parts is that the one place that it doesn't work like this is in the Ploiesti area, in which everybody has so little to do, that they all take care of their own cows. Sort of a one-cow town]

Anyway, before they all go out for the day to their alfresco creche (Kühegarten?), they get milked by their owners. The aformentioned owners then take the milk to the village collection point, where it is deposited and cooled and then at some point picked up by the tanker which takes it all to the dairy. I think in the past, much of this dairy activity happened in the village itself, or at least in some villages, but with the changes brought upon by the EU, the only dairies that remain are the large ones which can afford to ensure all procedures and tests are met, and which are usually situated in the major population centres. So a fleet of tankers is despatched every morning to the collection points in the villages, where the milk is transferred to the tanker and brought back to the dairy, where it is tested and pasteurised and what have you (ie converted into good things, like butter, or crimes against humanity, like cheese).

Now this process is pretty much the only way that the old system of lots of people with few cows each can sustain itself (and not morph into the agribusiness model of very few people owning all the cows), but it obviously has a number of problems inherent in it. The main one is that it takes a long while to isolate a problem. If one cow is receiving antibiotics, for example, that cow's milk cannot be sold (because milk cannot legally contain antibiotics). But if the owner and the village vet keep it secret (because obviously you lose income for a while), then the antbiotics show up at the dairy, meaning that the whole tanker full is unusable. At that point, all of the villages on that tanker's route are under suspicion, and the next day the milk of all those villages will be checked at the collection points to determine which village it is. From that point, I guess the guilty cow can be identified, arrested, and charged, but it's at least a three-day process. The other problem is that there are an awful lot of people who have been milking cows for a awfully long time who now have to re-learn some things to ensure that the milk they obtain is cleaner (in terms of bacteria content).

I also learned that each of these producers has to have a quota to sell the dairy issued by the EU (or I presume issued more locally, under EU rules). Because of Romania's smallholding culture, there are 250,000 of these quota holders in this country. That is one half of all the quota holders in the whole of the EU. That's one of those statistics that sounds like it should be really interesting, but when you delve deep down into it, it's kind of hard to see why. A bit like this post, I fear.

Child Labour

Electile Dysfunction

So, the election came and went while I was away last time, and basically the UDMR (or RMDSZ as they're known in Hungarian) cleaned up round these parts. I heard that all the MPP had to show for their efforts was one mayorship (mayoralty? mayordom?). I'm told they made a number of tactical errors - one of which was to tie themselves fairly closely to the Hungarian (ie from Hungary) Fidesz party. This included having a Fidesz speaker at all their rallies and so on, and clear links on all their literature. This might have seemed like a good idea at the time - many Erdelyi Hungarians have some sympathies towards Fidesz as they are seen as more in favour of the non-Hungary Hungarians than the Hungarian government, plus the Szekely, at least, are pretty conservative and therefore pre-disposed towards that end of the political spectrum - but people here also think (not without reason) that a party in Hungary has no real idea of what the issues and problems facing people in Transylvania/Romania are, and so this link backfired. In addition, an anonymous letter appeared in every mailbox in Csikszereda setting out the alleged sexual indiscretions of the mayor. This had the effect (as far as I can tell) of ensuring that people who would not normally have voted did so for the mayor as a protest at dirty tactics. (There are also strong rumours, which I have no evidence for, and which could be -and sound like- rubbish, that the leader of the MPP, Szász Jenő , was encouraged to set up the party by Basescu in a meeting a couple of years ago.) Szász , who I'm told was a terrible mayor of Udvarhely, bombed completely in his bid to be Hargita County Council President.

What this means for the next national elections, due up in the autumn, is unclear. Will MPP fold and throw in their lot with the UDMR? Or will they continue to go out and possibly split the vorte sufficiently to exclude any Hungarian party from parliament? At the moment things are unclear, but it seems that enought bad blood has built up to make it unlikely that the MPP will willingly subsume themselves into the UDMR.

The big Apple

Or more accurately, the grandfather of the apple. That's what Alma-ata (now mostly called Almaty) means. For a few moments after discovering this fact it had me musing on the Central Asian roots of the Magyars, since Alma is also the Hungarian word for apple, and ata is close enough to grandfather to be a feasible link. However, I suspect that the real and more prosaic reason is that it's a Turkish connection - Kazakh is a Turkic language and Hungarian has a fair few Turkish words in it from the Ottoman empire.

So, anyway, Almaty. I didn't get to see a huge amount of it to be honest, since we were holed up in the hotel for most of the time, working, eating and sleeping, but I did get to go to a pretty cool Mongolian-barbecue restaurant (and the sword wielding Mongolian in charge of the cooking was even happy to do a veggie run for myself and a Nepali colleague), and also to take a walk through the town to the main square in which there are some big statues and a place where you put your hand in order to make a wish. I can't really describe it any better than that, I'm afraid. It is what it is).

Finally though on my last day there, I got to have some free time, and spent it in the company of one of the participants at one of Almaty's most famous locations (or at least that's where we initially headed for), which is a big ice stadium above the city called Medeo. When i say ice stadium, I don't actually mean stadium made of ice, I mean stadium which is used in the winter for ice-related events. We actually didn't end up there though, because we got talked into a trip further up the mountain to a ski resort called Chimbulak, which was well worth it, and pretty high up. The evidence for this was the fact that it had been bloody roasting in the town (and even at Medeo which is high above the town), but up at Chimbulak a mere 20 minutes further on, it was decidedly nippy - and then when we took the ski lift up the mountain, not only did we start to find patches of snow, but we also needed the thick coats which we were advised to rent at the bottom. (I think we got to something like 3000 metres).

Anyway, I don't really have anything to say about Almaty (it was a bit like Bishkek, only bigger and with more expensive cars and shops - and if you want to know what I thought of Bishkek, you can just read here and here and here, which will take you back to the days when this blog was actually good. Or mediocre anyway.), so in the absence of any witty and enlightening words, here are a couple of pictures:


Almaty as viewed from Chimbulak


Medeo (Not actually taken by me)


A statue of some Kazakhs. (Also not taken by me, but by an Iranian colleague - check out the Iranian datestamp on the picture)

Reflections on Business Class

The project I've been working on for the last year and a half is coming to an end, and so, I suspect, are my days of business class flying. I have three more legs to do to get back from Kathmandu to Bucharest, and that, I reckon, will be that.

So, what does business class offer that goes anyway to justifying the price? Well, the short answer to that is very little. This is what you get for your business class ticket:

1. Access to the business class lounge in the airport(s). This is a nice perk as it tends to be much more peaceful and comfortable, you get free food and drink, and usually free internet access (except in bloody Germany). However, in most places you can usually pay to get into a business lounge even if you don't have a business ticket. And the price is usually around €20. So, given that the markup on the ticket is way more than that, I'd say this doesn't qualify as something really special.
2. Hot towels. Now this is a perk. The attendants come round with a hot towel at the beginning and end of your journey, and it's a very nice thing to have. (Note: Not applicable on Lufthansa)
3. More seat room. Often this is a serious amount of room which is extremely good. However, when you fly within Europe, what it tends to be is that they block off the middle seat with a drinks/newspaper table. The seats that turn into full on beds though? Thumbs up.
4. Better food. This is nice, but really, you don't fly for the dining experience, so I'm questioning how much of a benefit it really is.
5. Better service. You get more smiles and more use of your name. And probably there is a higher stewardess/passenger ratio. That's about it.
6. Flowers/perfume/toothpaste etc in the bathroom.
7. Occasionally, you get a toiletry set. Not bad
8. You get off first, and can get on whenever you like. A definite benefit.
9. The check-in queue is shorter. Ditto.
10. First choice of the magazines and newspapers.

That's really it. It's not a huge amount really. If you're flying a long distance and you can get a reasonable deal on one of the airlines mentioned below, then go for it. But otherwise, you're not missing a massive amount.

Rankings:

Airlines I've used recently that have really good business class stuff:

• Etihad
• Singapore
• Thai

Pretty good, but not in the top league:

• Emirates
• Astana
• Aeroflot

Rubbish:

• Turkish
• Uzbek
• Tarom

Utter rubbish

• Lufthansa

Basically, what I'm saying is that you're not missing much, but it is a better travelling experience. For in-Europe flights it's a joke really. No wonder it's called business class - it just means the only way people will pay for it is if their company does for them.

A muddy old river or reclining Buddha

A couple of years ago, I took what I expected (nay hoped) would be the most ridiculously out of the way routing I'd ever taken - that was flying from Bucharest to Kiev via Amsterdam. I think though, I've just trumped that one (at least in terms of distance and time) by a huge amount.

I needed to fly from Almaty to Kathmandu, which on a map doesn't look that difficult. Nowhere near as close as Bucharest to Kiev, obviously, but it just looks like a 3 hour-ish flight across Western China/Tibet. You cannot, however, do it directly (which I guess is not a massive surprise, since there probably isn't a vast amount of regular traffic between the two countries). But when you look into it, you discover that it's pretty hard to do it with even one connection. There are two routes. The best one in terms of flight times, is via Delhi. This one however is problematic because the Almaty - Delhi flight arrives in the evening and the onward flight is not until the next morning. This would not be a major hassle were it not for the fact that to leave the airport (to go to a hotel, say) I would have needed a visa. And I didn't have that kind of time. So, instead I had to take the second option. Via Bangkok. To make matters worse, for reasons I'm not sure of, but which seemed to involve a need to circle the Himalayas and not cross the Gobi desert, the flight from Almaty to Bangkok starts off by going west and crosses Afghanistan, and Pakistan before flying east over India, Bangladesh and Burma. (Trust me this is not a terribly direct route). So it was a 7 hour flight. And, after a night in a very fancy hotel (Thailand allows me in with no visa, y'see) I am now in the airport waiting to fly on another 3.5 hours back to Kathmandu.

Still, it's not quite as bad as the fact that two of the participants of the workshop in Almaty who were from Nepal took a flight that routed them through Delhi and Frankfurt. So, I should be thankful for small mercies. Those two, by the way, left their home in the Kingdom of Nepal last Monday and will have arrived home yesterday in the Republic of Nepal. It promises to be an interesting time to be visiting Nepal all round, in fact. I never imagined I would spend time in a country run by Maoists (albeit democractically elected ones)

So, one night in Bangkok. I lived in Bangkok nearly 20 years ago and it was a spectacularly overcrowded, cloyingly polluted, gridlocked mess. It has got a lot better. (It may be one of the few cities in the world where the traffic situation has improved in that 20 year time period - though to be honest it couldn't have got much worse, without just becoming permanent gridlock). The airport is new, and very light and airy, a bunch of expressways have been built, meaning that the drive from the airport to the city centre took slightly less than 30 minutes - completely unimaginable when I was last here, and there is a overground railway system which has taken a lot of the pressure off the roads. I also noticed that on some downtown roads there is the big electronic board over the road which tells you which roads in the area are blocked/slow moving at that time. It's all very impressive. Even this morning (a Monday, after all) I was picked up at 7.30 and whisked to the airport in a similar time. I'm sure that there are still horrible bottlenecks and the extremely slow moving journeys of all cities, but the change that I have just experienced is pretty dramatic. Even the pollution seems tons better - 20 years ago I used to gag walking out the door into the traffic, but now I didn't even notice the fumes.

So, anyway, on to the world's newest Republic. Sawatdee Krap and Namaste.