Halfway down the Danube

America again

We're back in the USA.  Yah, all of us.

We plan be around for about six weeks -- basically spending the month of February working, then the first two weeks of March driving around seeing family and friends.

The day before we left, Claudia's parents took all four kids and we spent a day cleaning the house.  (Conclusion: we should do this once per month regardless.)  As we got in the car, Claudia pointed out that this is our first plane trip in almost ten years without a stroller.  Yeahh. -- It's definitely helping that the kids are getting older.  Leah can walk everywhere and we don't need to drag a diaper bag around; Alan and David are old enough to pull suitcases, and can sit quietly and read books (though of course they'd rather play Nintendo or something explosive on the iPad.) 

The trip over was, as these things go, pretty straightforward.  The plane was almost empty, which let us spread out a bit.  We flew over Greenland, which was pretty cool.  (Okay, cool for Claudia and me.  Bunch of mountains sticking up through an ice cap.  Boys were mildly interested for a minute or two.) Then we were through US immigration in about five minutes, which was totally a record.  There was a lot of traffic on the DC beltway -- it took over an hour to reach our apartment -- but otherwise, smooth enough.  Kids fell asleep in the van, woke up, went back to sleep (with a lot of jet-lag addled whimpering and complaining), woke up a few hours later FULL OF ENERGY.  It's now a quarter to six and they've spent the last couple of hours playing Angry Birds and watching Phineas and Ferb.

So, America.  Howdy.

 

 

 

 

 

A short primer on the Ethiopian banking system

Because this is what I do.

Ethiopia's banking system is weird.  It's like a throwback to an earlier Africa, the Africa of the 1970s or 1980s.  Three reasons.

First, the system is dominated by two big state owned banks.  One of them -- the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia -- accounts for almost 50% of all lending, by itself.  Throw in the other one (the Development Bank of Ethiopia) and the majority of lending in the country is being done by state-owned banks.  That was pretty common in Africa thirty years ago, when almost everyone had a big state-owned bank or two that dominated the sector.  But in 2012, state-owned banks are an endangered species.  About half of all African countries don't even have them any more.  In those that do, the SOB is usually small and specialized, either a "development bank" or focused on some neglected sector like agriculture. 

There are a couple of reasons for this.  One is that, historically, SOBs in Africa generally didn't work very well.  Another is that the big multinational lenders -- the World Bank and the IFC -- dislike SOBs, and have encouraged African countries to break them up and privatize them, or at least shrink and marginalize them.  (For the record, I think this was mostly a positive thing -- but like a lot of World Bank/IFC policies, it's been applied in a rather ideological and ham-handed way.  A lot of bad, corrupt, ineffective old SOBs needed to go, but a lot of babies got thrown out with that particular bathwater.)

Ethiopia, though.  Ethiopia is run by a bunch of former revolutionaries who are very nationalistic and not inclined to trust or listen to the World Bank and its ilk.  So they're keeping their big state-owned banks.  But at the same time, they've allowed -- no, encouraged -- the growth of a vibrant private banking sector.  There are about fifteen private banks in Ethiopia today, and they account for about 40% of lending and about 60% of deposits.  They're a vital part of the economy already, and they're growing by leaps and bounds.  So the banking sector is a true public-private hybrid. 

The second odd thing about the sector is that it's closed and protected: no foreign banks are allowed.  Ethiopia has no Barclays, no Bank of Africa, no Citi or HSBC.  That's also weird and unusual, because in 2012 most African countries have opened up their banking sectors to foreign competition.  Among other things, you can't join the World Trade Organization unless you agree to do this -- and everyone wants to join the WTO.  Out of 54 African countries, all but seven or eight are already WTO members.  (The ones that aren't are either oil-rich -- Libya, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea -- or weird recluse states like Eritrea, or tiny places like the Comoros.  Oh or Somalia, which doesn't really have a functioning government.)  So pretty much everywhere in Africa, from Botswana to Senegal, you'll encounter a bunch of international banks.  But not in Ethiopia.

The third weird thing: the Ethiopian Central Bank?  The guys who regulate the banks, control the money supply, set interest rates and all that?  The Central Bank is not independent.  Doesn't even pretend to be.  It's an arm of the executive branch.  It's there to do all the normal central bank stuff, but it's also there to carry out government policy.

Here's an astonishing example.  Couple of years back, the Ethiopian government wanted to build a hydroelectric dam.  Huge, huge thing.  Going to light up half the country.  Also going to displace tens of thousands of villagers and do untold ecological damage, including possibly wiping out Lake Turkana, but do you want electricity or not?  -- So they want to build a dam, but for various reasons nobody wants to lend them money to build it.  (Ethiopia's credit is not good: Dagong rates them CCC, and Moodys and Standard & Poors don't even bother.)  Where to get the money, then?

Well, the government of Ethiopia simply followed the Willie Sutton principle.  The Central Bank told the private banks that they needed to start buying dam bonds.  Lots of them.  In fact, the Central Bank announced that for every dollar lent by a private bank, they would have to buy twenty-seven cents worth of bonds.  Since commercial loan rates in Ethiopia are around 12% to 15%, and dam bonds pay just 3%, the banks were not very happy about this.  But they had no choice: if they didn't comply, the Central Bank would shut them down.  So they've been buying dam bonds -- millions and millions of dollars of them.  And now the government has money to build its dam.

So, a mixed public-private banking system that's protected from international competition, run by a non-independent central bank with a history of brutal intervention.  How's that working out?

Surprisingly well.  But this may need another post.

 

 

Ethiopia

So, I'm in Ethiopia.

Addis Ababa, to be specific -- the capital.  This is a job for my current employer, and it's relatively short as these things go -- just ten days.  I've been here a week already, so I go back in a few days.  Meanwhile, a few things about Ethiopia.

It's high.  Most of the country is mountains or plateaus.  Addis is about 2300 meters or 8000 feet up.  You can definitely notice this.  I have the habit of running or trotting up stairs; after three flights, I'm noticeably wheezy, and half an hour on the hotel's treadmill the other night left me light-headed and shaky.  There's about 25% less air in every breath, so I guess one must either breath 1/3 more deeply or 1/3 more often. 

The altitude also means that it's not that hot during the day, and it's actually coolish at night.  You see people walking around with jackets and sweatshirts, which is not something I'm used to in Africa.  (It also means Ethiopia is mostly free of malaria mosquitoes and some of the more hair raising parasites.)

It's Africa.  But it's slightly askew.  By which I mean that in some ways, it's very typically Sub-Saharan African, but in others it's just weird.  For instance, it's mostly Christian and part Muslim, which is pretty common in Africa.  But the Christianity isn't Catholic or Protestant.  No, it's the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which is 1700 years old, rather Old Testament (no pork, lots of fast days), and looks down on Catholicism as an upstart newcomer.  Or: everyone speaks English as a second language, which is common enough.  But the first languages are Oromo or Amhara, and everything is written in both English and the Amharic script -- which is its own weird alphabet that resembles nothing so much as Armenian.

Ethiopians look different, too.  On one hand, there are some very typical Ethiopian faces -- one spots that right away.  On the other, there's a remarkable range of skin colors and hair textures.  My tentative assumption is that I'm looking at different ethnic groups, but that's just a guess.  Certainly the place has had a history complex enough to support a lot of mixing.

The food is supposed to be excellent.  Unfortunately, I'm here on business, which means I'm gravitating towards bland foods that are thoroughly cooked.  I broke with this rule one day, and had some chili, and ended up getting really sick for a day -- nausea, chills, you name it.  (Man, I hate chills.)  Business travel makes you conservative, y'know?  So I can't talk much about the food.  Well, I can note that the coffee is brutally strong, and any meat is going to be tough.  (Seriously.  Africans generally enjoy their meat tougher than Europeans or Americans, but Ethiopians seem to take this to an extreme.) 

Ethiopia is poor, but it's also seeing very rapid economic growth.  Very, very rapid.  As in: better than 8% average growth per annum sustained for over a decade.  Since the turn of the century, they've more than doubled the size of their economy.  Since their population is growing rapidly, per capita income has only grown by about 50%.  But that's still pretty impressive.  And you can see the growth happening in real time: downtown Addis is basically one huge construction boom.  I haven't seen anything like it since 1990s China.

Of course, it's growth from a very low base.  Ethiopia is still very poor.  It's poor even by African standards.  And you see that too -- people in ragged clothes, beggars, you name it.  But fifteen years ago, it was very very poor.  Now it's just very poor.

I'll probably have more to say about the economic stuff in a day or two.  Meanwhile: questions about Ethiopia?

 

 

 

 

Last Friday links of 2011

Claude out shopping for a new faucet (because the one in the downstairs bathroom is shot), kids watching Rocky and Bullwinkle (because they've lost the Wii remote).  Quiet Friday evening in Fladungen, the sky clearing for what looks to be a frosty night.

So for a while it looked like we might be going to Mongolia next.  But now it appears not.  Oh, well!  That said, here's an interesting thing: most of us have heard the factoid about how X million men are descended from Genghis Khan.  Well, it appears that it's true.  Yes, one out of every two hundred men -- or more like one out of every four, in some parts of Asia -- is a descendant in the direct male line from the late Khan of all the Mongols.

A link I stumbled across while looking for something else: Devil's Lake, in North Dakota, has been growing steadily for years now, very probably because of climate change.

I used to live in Illinois, and I used to like driving around on two-lane roads.  Over time, this gave me a rather low opinion of small towns and cities in America's middle west -- most of them seem, frankly, kinda depressing.  But just from the wikipedia article, this small city looks like a nice place to visit.

A short article about childhood in the classical world.  There are things here I'd like to know more about.

So a Russian prosecutor's office opened a prosecution against the holy text of the Hare Krishnas, and it has turned into an international cause celebre.  Apparently this is part of a general crackdown against the Hare Krishnas, which in turn is part of a broader pattern of Orthodox churches encouraging state aggression against minority religions, especially ones that are "odd" or "foreign".  Which arguably is just part of an even bigger pattern of assholic behavior by state-sponsored churches worldwide, but never mind that now. 

The Hare Krishnas are an incredibly tempting target, because they're prominent and easy to spot (shaved heads, robes) and kind of obnoxious (chanting, proselytizing). That said, there are probably better ways of dealing with them.  The real world doesn't give a Gouranga Bonus.

The last ten years (part two)

The last post covered 2001 to 2003.  What happened then?

2004 and 2005 were good years.  We were living in Bucharest, Romania, in a nice townhouse in a somewhat run-down but pleasant residential neighborhood.  I had an interesting job as component manager of a large USAID project. Claudia was pregnant with our second boy, David, when we arrived; David was born in July 2003 and was a baby and toddler throughout this period.

Bucharest is an interesting town, and those were good years to be living there.  Romania was desperate to join the EU, so my work was pretty easy and straightforward.  The economy was growing rapidly, so you could see things getting better from month to month.  We were two hours from the mountains and three hours from the beach.  The expat community was friendly.  I had a Dungeons and Dragons group.  There were large, green parks with playgrounds, great for the boys.  We lived in a small townhouse with a friendly landlord, easy walking distance from the supermarket.  What was there not to like? 

2006 was a complicated year.  In January, I got a job offer from BearingPoint, a large consulting company.  The job was to take over CLERP, a USAID project in Yerevan, Armenia.  CLERP was a troubled project and USAID had asked BearingPoint to fire the Chief of Party.  BearingPoint was casting around for a replacement, and they found me.  Meanwhile, Booz Allen wanted me to go to Southeast Asia for a month.  I ended up going to Southeast Asia (Laos and Cambodia) for a month and then moving to Armenia.  At this point we had just-turned-four Alan, toddler David, and new baby Jacob, so things were getting a little challenging.  But we found a pleasant house in the Arabkir suburb of Yerevan and settled in.

Here's a summary of my time in Armenia: I was there just over two years, of which the first six months and the last six months were pretty horrible.  The year in between was just fine.  The first six months were rough because the project was pretty messed up and needed a salvage job.  The last six months were rough because 1) USAID cut our budget, which meant we had to end the project several months early, while slicing off a bunch of workstreams;  2) we got a new COTR (the client representative who gives direction to the project) -- the old COTR had been very good, pedantic and meticulous but honest and fair, while the new one was a crooked local with a chip on his shoulder; and, 3) BearingPoint was spiraling downwards into bankruptcy, causing the home office to become both incredibly difficult and almost completely useless.  The year in between, none of those things were true, so it was actually pretty good. 

We never did fall in love with Armenia -- we found it a difficult country in a bunch of different ways -- but we did have some good times there, including a wonderful trip to Nagorno-Karabakh.  Alan had a good teacher, David had a good preschool, and Jacob learned to walk in the back yard (and ate figs right off the tree).  And the view of Mount Ararat never palled.

But CLERP ended in March 2008.  I stayed on another three weeks to do wrapup and write the final report, and then flew back to Germany -- where we had just bought our first house, in the small town of Fladungen, and where Claudia was several months pregnant.  Good things both, except that I was now without a job.

 

 

Chisinau, last days

And so back to Fladungen.

My project was originally supposed to end in late September.  It turned out that we had extra money -- a fair bit of it, actually.  The previous Chief of Party, the guy I replaced, had been pretty frugal.  (Actually way too frugal.  He'd let several key personnel go, and the project was several hundred thousand dollars under budget.)  So I was able to get a "no-cost extension" and stretch the project nearly to Christmas.

But everything must end. So now I'm back in Bavaria, looking out at our snowy back yard (actually not that snowy; it's an unseasonably warm December) while Claudia teaches English spelling to the boys at the kitchen table.

Odds and ends:

Moving out

This weekend was packing.  Tomorrow we drive.

It's two and half days to Germany, if all goes well.  Five countries, four kids, two thousand kilometers.  Then a day and a half in Germany, then I get on a plane and fly back here for the last month of the project.

Packing was... packing.  Packing is not my bliss.  Claudia is really good at it.  So packing days tend to be a lot of me standing around waiting for Claudia to tell me what to do.  (If I just do something, it will almost certainly be wrong.  Trust me.)  The kids get very wiggly because all routine has been abandoned.  Wiggly is not horrible, but it does involve a fair amount of squabbling and begging for electronics.  (Can I watch TV?  No.  Can I have the iPad?  No. Can I play on the computer?)

Washed the car, because it was filthy, and we needed to climb all over it to put the cargo pod on top and then pack it.  (Note to self for future reference: do not wash the car in November when it's just a few degrees above freezing.)  One wheel was going flat; took it to the tire guy, who found that we'd run over a screw.  Leah came with me and got to watch a lot of tires being taken off and put back on their cars, which she greatly enjoyed.  We walked down the street to the nearby ice-skating rink, and then bought a Kit-Kat bar, which we split.  (One, two, three, four pieces.  Two for Leah and two for Daddy.  Okay?  Okay.)

-- Here's a thing: Leah is going through a difficult period right now.  Screaming, tantrums.  Stubbornness.  Bedtimes tend to be difficult.  Mealtimes can be a trial.  She can drive her poor brother Jacob to tears, and regularly does.  But for 90 minutes, at the tire-changing place, she was great.  Lively and full of energy, but in a good way.  Playful, fun, all smiles and laughter -- and obedient.  Maybe she just needs more one-on-one time?

Anyway.  Checked the oil (low, filled it up) and coolant (low, can't fill up here -- fingers crossed).  Moved the seats around inside the car -- the optimum configuration for long-distance travel involves spaces between the seats, where you can stuff additional items and also keep the kids from elbowing each other too easily. 

Today I had one last day at the office; I wrote a long memorandum on severance pay for our employees (the USAID contract office is trying to avoid reimbursing us for this), met with a bunch of people from the World Bank to talk about tax policy, and attended a staff birthday party in the office kitchen at 5:00.  The roll-out of our biggest software procurement will happen on Thursday; I'll have to miss it.  Will get back Monday to a very full desk.  Actually, I'll probably go into the office Sunday.

So, moving out.  I'll be back by myself for a month but it will be rattling alone in the empty house.  We've done this before -- we did exactly the same thing in Armenia, back in February-March of 2008.  One gets an extra half hour of sleep in the mornings.  But after a while it gets a little lonesome.

(Claudia: "It's always the same.  You love it for a week or two, and then you start moping."   Me:  "Yeah... well, maybe I'm sort of pre-moping."  Claudia:  "Okay, cut that out now.")

Will being alone make me blog more often?  Check back in a week!

 

Happy Halloween!

Trick-or-treating and a small Halloween party today.

Moldovans don't do Halloween yet, so the small American community does it on their own.  The US Embassy organizes it, which is nice.  Between twenty and thirty parents showed up -- most with small kids, of course.  We walked around the neighborhood to houses where expat volunteers had agreed to dress up and hand out candy, and afterwards we went to Marine House and had pizza and cupcakes and popcorn. 

It was pretty tame, but a tame expat Halloween is much better than none -- the boys had been looking forward to it for days.  The boys went as ninjas (Claudia had brought back ninja masks, plastic swords and nunchucks from the States), while Leah went as a very small princess (princess dress courtesy of her grandmother, who goes in for that sort of thing).  The walking was pleasant -- it was a lovely autumn day, cool but clear and sunny.  (The weather has been turning cold the last few days, with frost in the mornings and leaves coming off the trees all at once.  Moldova has a continental climate -- long hot summers, long cold winters, spring and fall go quickly.)  We stood around chatting for an hour or so while the kids ran around, then packed them into cars and headed home.

And that's about it.  It's a small but friendly expat community here.  Armenia had more Americans, and more stuff going on, but was also... how to put this delicately... a bit more dysfunctional.  Here it just seems like a nice group of people.  We didn't make close friends with anyone here, but then with just eight months in the country (and the kids not in school) that was never very likely. 

Anyway: Halloween.  Followed, as always, by days of slowly rationing out candy.

 

Towards the end of a project

Our project ends in nine more weeks.

It's not a terribly big project, as these things go -- about $8 million over four years, and just ten employees.  Still, shutting it down is a moderately complex little dance of management.  You have to follow all the local laws, which can be baroquely complex -- we have to give each employee one day off per week to look for a new job (even if they've already found one), and there's a complex system of severance pay (which we're arguing with USAID about, because they're choosing to view some payments as "gratuities").  You have to dispose, and explain the disposition of, every single item that the project owns; it's the property of the US taxpayer, after all.  Our office equipment, from desks and lamps to laptops and fax machines, gets donated to deserving charities and local NGOs.  Other USAID projects occasionally put a claim in -- another Chief of Party wants all my conference room furniture, and our PowerPoint projector, and our camera.  (There's a big argument over the camera.  Don't ask.) 

End of the Fiscal Year

USAID's fiscal year runs to September 30.  Any money not obligated by that date goes pfft, back into the Treasury.  So, the last week of September usually sees a frenzy of contract awards.

And why doesn't USAID plan ahead, and award these contracts in June, July and August?  I truly have no idea.  One would like to think that the world's largest development assistance agency, a multibillion dollar body with half a century of experience, would be a better planner than an eighth grader frantically scribbling his homework on the school bus Monday morning.  But whatever the reason, the last week of September is usually interesting for us.

Case in ppoint: this year, USAID awarded the follow-on contract to BIZCLIR. 

BIZCLIR was the contract (or, to be technical, the contract vehicle) under which I did a lot of my short-term professional work over the last three years.  My trip to Senegal?  BIZCLIR.  To Tanzania?  BIZCLIR.  Uganda, Zambia?  BIZCLIR yet again.  I did a lot of non-BIZCLIR stuff (Congo, West Bank, Macedonia, a bunch of fiddly analytical stuff for the IFC) but BIZCLIR was the baseline.

So I'd been hoping that USAID would award the new BIZCLIR contract (which for some reason is called BEAM, but is universally referred to as "the BIZCLIR follow-on contract") either to my previous employer or my current employer. Either would be delighted to deploy me on new BIZCLIR assignments.  While that's not my first choice -- I really want a stable, steady job somewhere -- it would be a nice fallback.  Basically what I did for almost three years, except as an employee, with health insurance and stuff.

Not this time.  USAID awarded new BIZCLIR/BEAM to a dark horse -- a small, relatively obscure bidder with (seemingly) no relevant experience.  Nobody can quite make head or tails of it.

I can reach out to these guys to let them know I may be available in (glances at calendar) another 90 days or so.  But they're so small and obscure that I don't even know anyone there! 

It's not exactly "back to the drawing board".  But it means it'll be harder to count on the short-term stuff as a fallback. 

Other people's job searches are generally pretty boring, so let's move along and talk about something else.

 

 

 

 

Last Naked Day, 2011

Naked Season ended today. 

I went outside and mowed the lawn and emptied out the plastic swimming pool.  It's been too cool for swimming for a couple of weeks now, and the swimming pool was filling up with leaves and getting gunky.

Our yard here is small -- maybe a fifth the size of our yard in Germany.  But it's pleasant enough; grass, lots of trees.  And there are high walls around it.  I brought out the hose for cleaning the pool, and before long the kids got their hands on it and started spraying each other.  It was a sunny day, and warm for mid-September, so in very little time they were running around naked.

They do this a lot, in summer.  In Germany nobody cares.  (Well, we do have to remind the two little ones that they're not supposed to run out into the front yard or the sidewalk.  But it's not like anyone is going to call the cops if the five-year-old is drawing with chalk on the front driveway while au naturel.)  Moldova's a lot more conservative in some ways, but our yard has a high wall all the way around.  So, lots of spraying! and splashing! and yelling!  for an hour or two on a sunny Saturday afternoon, while Claudia was out shopping and I was taking apart the pool and doing random bits of minor yard work.

Naked Season ended around 3 pm in the afternoon of Saturday, September 17, with shivering little boys wrapped in towels.  After Claude came home we had a late lunch, then some television, then books, then dinner.  The days are getting shorter quickly as the year tumbles down towards the equinox, and it's not likely there'll be another afternoon quite so sunny and warm.

Next year, if we're in Germany, we'll break out the hose and sprinkler sometime in May.  If we're somewhere else... well, we may be someplace where local mores don't allow little kids to run around with no clothes on.  Or we may just not have a yard.  We really don't know.

Meanwhile, though, they had an afternoon of spraying each other with hoses.  Which is always good.

 

 

 

Single Parent, briefly

It's Thursday night.  I flew down from Germany with the two little ones Tuesday. Claudia and the boys start driving tomorrow, so should arrive on Sunday.  (Fingers crossed.  Long drive.)

What's to tell: I had a month by myself, which was nice.  No, for two weeks it was more than nice; it was great.  Caught up on my reading, caught up on my sleep.  But then it really started to pall.  Apparently I like having my family around.  By week four I was, plainly put, moping.  So, I'm good with that being done.

That said, our newly minted three-year-old is making it very clear that being a single parent means an immediate shift back to sleep deprivation.  Leah doesn't like going to bed!  But she does like wandering around after bedtime!  And waking up in the middle of the night because of bad dreams, or because she needs to pee, or simply for no reason at all!

Still: mustn't grumble.  Jacob and Leah are both cheerful and healthy, and it's very nice to have them around.

Job stuff: project going great, client happy.  Project ends in November -- specifically, at COB Friday November 11.  What happens after that?  There are various possibilities, but at the moment we truly have no idea. 

What else... did I mention that I found some Dungeons and Dragons players here?  So I've been running a campaign for about six months now.  That'll end in November too, alas.

Meeting with a Deputy Minister first thing tomorrow morning -- so to bed.

Some Stuff I Did Not Know (category: art)

Was out of town over the weekend, and had the chance to spend an hour in a secondhand English-language bookshop.  Picked up a bunch of books, including this one -- a 50+ year old paperback on painting.  (Because, you see, I know very little about painting.  I took an art history course years ago, and I guess I have a layman's knowledge of the major schools, but that's about it.)

Anyway!  This book, out of print for fifty years, turned out to be a little gem.  It's full of all sorts of good discussion, pitched right about at my level -- to the reader who knows who Goya and Giotto are, but who doesn't paint and knows almost nothing about the actualy craft of painting.

Here's one thing I discovered: traditional artists studios faced north, because the artists did not want to paint with different slants of light coming in the window at different times and seasons.  Makes perfect sense, right?

But -- northern light is blue.  So painters would cover the walls of their studios with red and orange hangings and tapestries, in order to warm the light.  So apparently (I have yet to check this), in many paintings up until the middle of the 19th century, the light is somewhat blue but the shadows are somewhat reddish or brownish.

Further.  Up until around 1840, the vast majority of paintings were done indoors, usually in those studios.  Why?  Because portable oil paints didn't exist yet.  Paints were still mixed by hand.  Almost every painter had to be a paintmaker as well, and had to start with lumps and powders and turn them into paints shortly before beginning to work.   (The exception was watercolors, which is why most outdoor scenes before then were watercolors.)  So even when a painter was doing an outdoor scene, he'd often be working from memory, in his studio.  Apparently some painters would go so far as to take rocks or other outdoor items into the studio in order to have them convenient as models.

But around 1840, the first containers of portable oil paint appeared -- the squeezable tubes that we think of today when we think of artists' paint.  And one consequence of that was an explosion of outdoor painting.  And outdoors, the light is often yellow or orange, while the shadows are likely to be bluish. Apparently this took a lot of getting used to.  But it's one of the things that, a bit later, would distinguish the Impressionists: not only were they doing weird stuff with their brushstrokes, but the colors were all different. 

Interlude: back in Germany

Posting from Fladungen -- here for a week on vacation.  Claudia drove with Alan and David, I flew with the two little ones.  Which was fine.  They got a little wiggly on the plane, but that was my fault for not bringing any toys or distractions.  For a five year old and a two year old, they did great.  (And they got to eat popsicles on a train.)

It's strange to be back!  We've been gone four months.  The house is the same but it seems smaller and full of stuff.  (Our back yard, on the other hand, is pleasantly huge.)  Neighbors seem surprised and happy to see us.  Hans and Annemarie have been feeding us large midday dinners.  Claudia's brother Michael and two nephews are also in town, which means there are a lot of little boys running around. There's a lot of bouncing on the trampoline in the back yard. 

My compost pile got ruined.  A squirrel moved in sometime after we were gone and filled it with walnuts.  Walnuts are bad news for compost -- the hulls give off an oil that's slightly poisonous -- and Annemarie didn't discover it until too much time had passed.  So, half a ton of good compost had to be thrown behind the shed with the grass clippings.  (It'll eventually be usable, but only after a couple of years.)

What else: well, it looks like we'll be leaving Moldova in November.  Kind of a shame, since I had some hope that we might get the followon project.  But it appears now that the followon won't arrive until the end of the year or later.  So, come mid-November, we'll have to pack out and leave.  (What happens after that?  We do not know.  Watch this space.)

Meanwhile, I go back in a week to continue working.  Claudia and the boys will stay here in Germany through the first week of August.  Then we'll all go back to Moldova together, for our final three months there.

Until then... I have a week of vacation.  Trampoline!

 

 

Over the Border

This is really Claudia's story, so I'll be brief.

When we come to Moldova, we get tourist visas, good for 90 days.  Generous!  But if we want to stay longer, we have to get special permits called legitimatsiyas.  (Pronounced like the first half of "legitimate" and the back end of "not see ya".)  With a legitimatsiya, one can breeze in and out of Moldova.  Without it... 90 days.

Well: we arrived here in mid-March.  In early May we applied for our legitimatsiyas.  Normally, we were told, this takes two weeks; in no event should it take more than 30 days.

Six weeks later, we still don't have them.

Well, we couldn't hang around waiting.  So Claudia left at 6 am this morning to drive to Germany, with Alan and David in the car.

Long story short: she got stopped at the border, turned around, sent to court, and fined twice -- once for overstaying (about $50) and once for driving a car that had overstayed (about $140).  She reached the border around 7:30, but didn't actually get across it into Romania until about 1 pm.  On one hand, a huge and incredibly annoying waste of time and money.  On the other, everyone is okay and they're on their way -- just half a day behind schedule -- and Claudia wasn't expelled, so she and the boys can re-enter the country.

I'm bringing the two younger children to Germany by plane on Saturday morning.  Will my legitimatsiya arrive by then?  Watch this space.