Halfway down the Danube

Bethany across the Jordan

Went down to the River Jordan this weekend.

There's not much left of the Jordan these days.  It was never a very big river, but water diversions by Israel, Syria and Jordan have shrunk it by 90%.  It's a muddy creek now, about fifteen feet wide and six deep.

But despite everything, it's still alive.  It waters a narrow strip of scrub forest, a belt of tamarisk trees about a hundred yards wide on each side.  (Back in Old Testament days this strip was much wider, dense with hardwood trees, and home to all sorts of animals -- the "Jungles of the Jordan" mentioned in Jeremiah.)  The river itself is lively with tadpoles and small fish, and dragonflies skim low across its muddy green surface.

Arriving in Jordan

Is it geeky to write posts about airports?

Probably. But I travel a lot, so this stuff affects my life. There are airports so horrible I'll spend money and time to avoid them COUGH Charles de Gaulle Paris COUGH, and others that are so nice I almost look forward to spending time there.

Anyway, Amman's airport is one of the good ones.  It's small and old, but that's no big deal.  The main thing is, it works.  Let me list the ways.

Might be quiet for a while

I'm going to Jordan for ten days.

Long-time readers will recall I went to Jordan just over a year ago.  This is sort of a follow-up to that visit; I'll be doing an analysis of Jordan's new Company law. (Well, of the draft.  It hasn't passed yet.)

Last time I went, I made a fair number of posts.  This time, maybe not. It's going to be a pretty compressed and hectic visit.  That's because I don't want to spend so much time away... Claudia's in her third trimester now, so it won't be easy for her to be a single parent. 

Work-related program activities

Still rehydrating.

Random thoughts:

• Hubris, ate, nemesis. That's a story line.


• Like I was thinking about football at all this past weekend.


• My body is not readjusting to NYC very well. Minimal posting for a bit.

Update: okay, coming home and losing 7% of my body weight in 36 hours and fainting is not rehydrating, but is in fact its opposite. (Don't worry, a pile of books broke my fall.)

I have no idea why -- a textbook cytokine response after the gym -- but I'm kind of sick. On the other hand, I'm really cut. (I can't recommend this.)

Baby please don't go

Away for a bit.

Laissez les bons temps rouler! Carlos posting will resume after detox.

Cuidando a los niños en la madre patria

I am a firm believer in the power of personal experience.  Of course, it’s dangerous on its own:  you never want to reason by anecdote.  On the other hand, some abstract hypotheses are just hard to accept in the face of personal experience.  When the data are ambiguous, I turn to my lying eyes.

There has been an increasing amount of discussion given to low European fertility in recent years.  One problem with the whole discussion, among many, is that there is low fertility and then there is low fertility.  Almost all of Europe is “low fertility” by historical standards, but some countries like France and Norway are certainly going to replace themselves, and others like Ireland and Denmark and the U.K. are quite likely to follow suit.

But there are the superduperultralow fertility countries, like España, where people seem to have given up on child-bearing as a bad deal.  As many people besides me have pointed out, TFR is a really bad measure of fertility, but for what it’s worth Spain clocked in at 1.4 in 2006.  Unlike some other countries, however, in Spain the pictures match the impression given by the TFR.

Some very rough thoughts below the fold. 

And back again

What is there to say about visits home?

They're getting harder, and easier.  Harder because now we're travelling with three kids, none of them babies but all of them under six.  Just in terms of pure logistics it's getting challenging -- more tickets, more visas, more passports, more bags.  (Coming back, we checked eight bags and a box.  A large box.)

Easier because we're getting some of this stuff down to a routine.  Security?  Put bags inside bags whenever possible, drink the last water, loosen the shoelaces; Daddy goes through first of everyone and plays catcher, stroller comes next (to immobilize the two-year-old, who wanders), then kids shoes and jackets, then kids. There's still much room for improvement, but there are also moments of pride: three kids, two days, nine time zones, three continents.  Just a couple of years ago, we could not have done this. 

Mummery!

Remarkably few people (okay, one person) wondered why Imperial Stormtroopers had occupied downtown Philadelphia.  So I'll tell you.  It was the Fancies of Mummers Day.

I'll turn the floor over to Amma.  "It's sort of a white people's Carnival.  And since it's cold, they can make more creative costumes because they don't have to be concerned with, you know, battling the heat with nakedness."  And to continue the parallel, the fancies are sort of like Carnival bands, kinda sorta not really, only that Mummers tend to be older and fatter as well as paler than your typical Carnival reveler.  Which makes it a good thing that they wear more clothes.

Boring serious grown-up types have asked me to put the rest of the revelry below the fold.

No saben lo que hacen en la madre patria

Okay, this had to rank up there among the things that we never expected to see in Sevilla.

It isn’t as bad the two clueless dudes wearing swastika T-shirts whom I ... what’s the word? ... accosted back in Mexico City around 2004.  (There was short-lived fad for the symbol among young chilango working-class wannabe rebels; no political significance whatsoever, except maybe to show up the abysmal state of world history education in Mexico’s public schools.  Thank you Mike and Tom and Pat, for protecting me from myself.)

But still, a Confederate flag?  Even if it was a souvenir shop, my negative reaction is visceral. 

ObMusic:  Jason Ringenberg, “Rebel Flag in Germany.”  Download it now.

Dando las propinas en la madre patria

Do Spaniards tip too much?

Of all the things that I never would have expected to be a public controversy, tipping too much had to rank up there with charity and motherhood.  But there it was, a major topic of discussion in a local Café de Indias.  (Spanish cafés, save Starbucks, serve lots of alcohol in their coffee drinks.  I happen to think that this is a Good Thing, but the Starbucks explosion bodes ill.)

Why?  Well, the Economy Minister, Pedro Solbes, told his countrymen that the reason they think inflation is higher than it is might be because they’re all too stupid to realize that a one euro tip is too high on, say, a €2.00 drink.

I took an utterly unscientific poll of Sevillana waitresses on the topic.  The reaction?  One snort, two guffaws, an eye-roll, and two exclamations of the word “puta.”  (The latter two were born in Honduras.) 

The idiocy wound down when reporters found out that the minister and his friends regularly dropped only four euros on a €60 lunch.  The fact that food prices have skyrocketed also helped.  Food prices jumped 0.5% in November (6.3% at an annualized rate), after a similar increase in October, and the Economy Ministry managed to stick its foot in its mouth again by recommending that people eat more rabbit to save money.

Anyway, this all begs the question:  how much should you tip in the madre patria?  I’ll be damned if I know.  Everybody gives you a different answer, ranging from “nothing” to “just like in the United States.”  Help!  Leticia?

Manejando el auto en la madre patria

Haven't driven a car in Europe since 1986, and that probably wasn't legal.  Closest I came this trip was taking a taxi from the Barcelona airport (which is less than necessary, since the train is quite good), and while the taxista made great conversation — “Both parties are the same.  But that's fine!  The country is going well, so why change anything?” — his driving was quite boringly professional. 

Same thing for Sevilla.  The most interesting thing that cabbie from the airport did was explain that the green-and-white flags we saw waving from all the buildings on the outskirts of town were either the Andalucian provincial flag (the striped one) or the flag of the Betis soccer team (the one that vaguely looked like Saudi Arabia's). 

I can, though, say something about being a pedestrian in the madre patria, which is:  good, but frustrating.  Good, because this is one of those countries where drivers don't seem to want to kill you.  (Well, unless you're a jaywalker in Barcelona.)  Frustrating, because Sevilla (Barcelona, not so much) is one of those places where pedestrians will stand and stand and stand and wait for the light to change, regardless of oncoming traffic.  Now, I'm from New York, so on my own I made like Eminem and just didn't give a ****, but when I was with Amma we hewed to local customs ... it wasn't easy.

And I can say something about scooters.  Don't.  Ride them.  Vehicular craziness in Sevilla seems to be reserved for motor scooters.  And Barcelona leaves me at a loss for words, but thankfully still with my life. 

On the whole, I found car-people interactions to be far superior to Boston, where the f****** drivers honk at pedestrians.  That says more about Boston than Barcelona, though, because cars don't routinely honk at pedestrians anywhere else in the United States. 

What's the matter with Boston?

Tomando el tranvía en la madre patria

There are two types of rail transit systems in the United States.  The first are actual genuine rail transit systems, you know, that get people around and without which their cities would collapse.  Or at least not work very well.  New York’s subway, Chicago’s El, Boston’s T, Philadelphia’s SEPTA, San Francisco’s much-hated Muni, even (after many years in the second category) Washington’s Metro.

And then there’s art.  Take Miami-Dade’s Metrorail.  In fact, the county went so far as to deck the tracks out in neon tubing, just in case you missed that the point was public art, not public transportation.  And there are others.  How many people would notice if San José’s light rail shut down?

Barcelona’s Metro (above) falls into the first category.  It’s incredibly efficient:  never did we have to wait more than two minutes for a train.  It’s got these signs that tell you when the next train will arrive, and it does.  The old trains are comfortable, and the new trains have arrived out of the future, with open articulated connections between the cars and bright video screens.  There’s even this bitchen feature that you first think is stupid until you realize that it really speeds things up:  to get the doors to open, you got to push a button.

One of the things that Amma and I like to do when we’re in a strange city is grab a public conveyance and take it to the end of the line.  You can learn a lot that way.  And Sevilla has a futuristic streetcar that runs along the pedestrianized downtown.  So ...

Leyendo los archivos en la madre patria

I’ll try to keep up the slack while Doug’s in Germany this holiday season.  This one goes out to Carlos’s paternal grandparents. 

The Republic of the Philippines is unique in Asia in how well it’s assimilated it’s Chinese population.   Chinese-Filipinos have served their country in every position from private to President of the Republic, and nobody seriously questions their Filipino-ness.  As a result, for all their communal solidarity Chinese-Filipinos consider themselves Filipino first, Chinese-Filipino a rather distant second, and Chinese-Chinese not at all.  (I have a sneaking suspiscion that future Chinese governments will find themselves unpleasantly surprised by that fact.)  This didn’t happen in Burma or Thailand or Vietnam or Malaysia or Indonesia. 

So why did it happen in the Philippines, and what does any of this have to do with the madre patria? 

Amma and I were in Sevilla because I was looking for tax and budget data on the Spanish Philippines.  The first place to look for that is the Archivo de Indias.  You can see the main building behind the beautiful woman in the above photo.  The reading room is across the street behind the main building:  look for the sand-colored edifice to the right of this group of typical Sevillano pedestrians.

In 1864, Madrid decided to modernize the Philippines’ tax system.  Since specific taxes laid on Chinese generated about 7 percent of the islands’ revenue, the Crown commissioned some fascinating reports before deciding on the specifics of the reform.  Extracts below the fold:

Comiendo los alimentos en la madre patria

Somebody ... probably my mother ... once described Spanish food as “letting the ingredients speak for themselves.”

“Hearty peasant food,” Amma says.  “Solid presentations of uncommon meats.  Satisfying to the stomach, but not so much to the tongue.” 

I wouldn’t call it bland, exactly.  But comida andaluza does, I think, explain the Philippines.  The Philippines got the full force of a cuisine that liked to “let the ingredients speak for themselves,” only without the ingredients.  Philippine food is, perhaps, Andalucian food before the conquest of Mexico brought the ingredients to the peninsula.   

Or not.  It’s a hypothesis, anyway. 

Anyway, Spanish cuisine is just plain food — alimentos — more than a “cuisine.”  Maybe I’m just too used to it, having grown up on a faintly Americanized version of the stuff.  Meat-heavy fried food with very light seasoning. 

Overcooked venison is actually pretty good once you get used to it, and I’ve already mentioned croquetas.   

Plus, tapas are fun, although much better in America (or Catalunya, for that matter) where the substance comes from Mexico and Southeast Asia but the style is español.

Imitando a la iglesia en la madre patria

How is Starbucks like the Catholic Church?

In América, and especially in Mexico, the Catholic Church sited its cathedrals on the former sites of indigenous temples.  That way, the local populations faced a minimal change in their daily habits, making (in the view of the prelates, at least) their conversion easier.

In España, and especially in Andalucía, Starbucks locates its branches right next to the former (or soon-to-be former) sites of the Café de Indias chain.  It’s new enough that you can actually spot some of the dead old branches, and you never see a Café de Indias without a corresponding Starbucks.  It’s not just downtown:  we saw the same phenomenon in a most unfashionable section of Avenida de la República de Argentina on the other side of the Guadalquivir.  It was too dark to get a photo of that Starbucks, unfortunately, but here you can see a dead Café de Indias on the far right of the picture. 

One sure-fire way to make a Sevillano crack-up with uncontrollable laughter is to paraphrase this story.  Just be sure to mention the giant robots.

Mirando la tele en la madre patria

I came to Barcelona in order to present “Gunboats and Vultures” at a conference on sovereign debt. 

I was having some trouble figuring out what I could say about Spain or Catalonia or Barcelona, until I turned on the television in our hotel room. 

I used to think that Florida had the most lurid news programs in the world.  Not after seeing Gente on TVE-1, I don’t. 

The first story involved a woman killed by her husband in a long-term abusive relationship.  Marital abuse is a hot issue in Spain (even if it is unclear whether the problem is any worse than anywhere else in Europe), and the story certainly sounds newsworthy.  The second story was about a man who tortured his wife to death over a three-day period.  A little surprising, but it was the same topic, and perhaps TVE was making a political point. 

The third story covered a man who’d burned his wife alive, provoking his children to renounce their last name, followed by a bit about a father who killed his daughter’s boyfriend, a little girl crushed by rubble falling off a construction site, a fatal automobile accident, another fatal automobile accident, a decision not to prosecute a participant in yet a third accident under the country’s Good Samitaran law, and a fellow who shot his dog. 

Finally, after a bit about a calendar for homeless puppies, we got to hear about a woman who takes care of her completely incapacitated father and (perhaps in compensation) a final piece about “in-shape grannies.” 

Dulce María.  I’m going to shoot myself.  I mean, Primer Impacto back home isn’t the best news program on the planet, but this makes it look like Sixty Minutes.   

Nostalgia, Part 4: Canadian Content

Bostonians don't realize it, but New York also has a serious baseball rivalry with Toronto.  (I'm not sure that Torontonians realize it either, to be honest.)  The below picture is at a game against the Blue Jays. 

I've been to couple of Yankees games at whatever they're calling the Skydome these days, and they're always very well attended by whole families of New Yorkers up for the weekend. 

Of course, if the loonie stays around par, that kind of thing might become less attractive. Will the Torontonians care?  I have to say, I've always found the kind of Yankee fan who goes to Toronto games to be remarkably well behaved.  For Yankees' fans.  New Yorkers in general, as we all know, are very polite folks.

(The worst stereotypical big-city rudeness I've ever encountered in my life?  Calgary.  No foolin'.  I think it's because Canadian content laws there have translated into Shania Twain every hour, on the hour.)

Anyway, I think the long slow decline of baseball in Quebec is tragic.  Much as I like the Washington Nationals — much as Washingtonians love having their Nationals — something seems to have gone out of the world with the Expos' departure.   

Day 25: Travel day

I think I hate flying. Not the act of flight itself, which I rather enjoy. But the rest of it. A cumulative bunch of annoyances that add up to something more than dislike.

The Pure Product of America: So it's like dating then?

At least dating I get a decent meal out of it.

• I can't stand the lowered cabin air pressure -- I always seem to get some respiratory crap as a result -- and most regular seats are too narrow for my shoulders. Midwest Airlines is the exception.
• I get jet-lagged incredibly easily, one time zone easily, and no, strenuous exercise does not reset my internal circadian. You know who you are. It doesn't even do that when I don't fly.
• There is also the family travel jinx, about which the less said the better. The family recited a dozen or so tales of family travel horror to my brother's appalled SO. While my own favorite is spinning out on the runway in Anchorage, my mom is increasingly fond of the story how she mooned a TSA agent who was getting a little too free with the hands. My brother: "I've left that all behind in Wisconsin."

On the other hand, flying is great for people watching. I can practice my eye stalking on unsuspecting thousands.

Anyway. Regular November daily blogging tomorrow.

From the Country that Brought You the Katipunan

The city of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, commissioned a great deal of public art.  The sculptures are more-or-less abstract, quite playful, and rather weird.

When I was last there, after a very luxurious trip across the country, I was thoroughly sick of being wined-and-dined.  Since Jeddah is one of the few places where a vaguely Arab-looking man in Western clothes can walk around unnoticed, that's what I proceeded to do.  That led to an impromptu basketball game with a group of Filipino expats. I automatically blurted out "Kumusta-ka!" when their car pulled up in front of me as I watched other people toss a ball around on some public courts, and an invitation to play naturally followed.

So when they told me that the below sculpture had, in fact, been designed by a Filipino, I was not surprised.  I have also been unable to stop laughing.

And a close up:

Brought to you by the country that named its first independence movement the "KKK."  I am not surprised, and I am still laughing. 

Shusha

Because pictures say more than words, or something.

Here's the church I was talking about in the comments to Doug's Karabakh post.  No, not new, but it looks like new which is a startling contrast to the rest of Shushi which looks not new, at all.

This apartment house is right across from the church:

Amman

I haven't described Amman yet, have I.

Sprawling, low-rise city. Very few large buildings, so the city just goes on and on.

The dominant color is white. Cream, with accents of bone and pale grey. Amman sits on a plateau of white limestone and that's what the city is built of. Sorry, Belgrade -- this is the whitest city I've ever seen.

It's hot and dusty. Later in the summer, I'm told, it gets hotter and dustier. (On the other hand, it has pleasantly cool winters -- snow is not unheard of.)

Amman

I haven't described Amman yet, have I. Sprawling, low-rise city. Very few large buildings, so the city just goes on and on. The dominant color is white. Cream, with accents of bone and pale grey. Amman sits on a plateau of white limestone and that's what the city is built of. Sorry, Belgrade -- this is the whitest city I've ever seen. It's hot and dusty. Later in the summer, I'm told, it gets hotter and dustier. (On the other hand, it has pleasantly cool winters -- snow is not unheard of.)

Nothing

If you fly from Dubai to Amman, your route goes across northern Saudi, parallel to the Kuwaiti and Iraqi borders but maybe 100 km south.

And if you look out the window of your plane, you see... nothing.

Well, you see desert. But it's empty desert. There are no roads, there are no towns. There's no sign of humanity. There's no sign of life at all. Just this reddish-tan... surface.

The day was pretty clear. Some haze, but I could probably see eighty or a hundred miles. And the desert extended, empty, for as far as I could see.

And this went on for a couple of hours.

Nothingness is strangely hard to look at. The eye sort of claws at the desert and then falls back, baffled. Perhaps it's different on the ground but from cruising altitude it's almost painful after a while. If not for the signature blue of the atmosphere, we could have been in a probe flying low over one of the duller parts of Mars.

The desert gets livelier when you get close to Jordan: there are hills, and depressions, and lots of dry riverbeds. You can look at that with interest. But northeast Saudi is just flat and dead and empty, going on for hundreds of miles. There's just... nothing.

However: there's a part of Saudi Arabia called "The Empty Quarter". And the part we were flying over? Wasn't it.

It's a big world.

Dubai

Holy crap, Dubai.

I only spent a few hours in Dubai, but it made a hell of an impression. It's rich, it's modern, it's clean. Big new buildings. Huge wide roads. (Crazy drivers, but that bugs me a lot less than it used to.) No visa hassles -- you show your passport, you go in.

First impressions: hot and sticky. Apparently Dubai has three seasons: dry and warm, dry and hot, and hot and intolerably humid. We're just at the beginning of the humid season, so: dog breath. And it will get worse before it gets better.

It's flat as a pancake. The combination of flatness, heat, and humidity reminds me faintly of central Florida... Orlando on the Persian Gulf, I guess.

But it's the Middle East. I saw my first woman in a, what do you call it, burqa? The one with just an eyeslit. That's not the norm --most women were just wearing headscarves -- but wow.

The woman at the visa desk had henna patterns all over her hands and wrists. I think of henna as something bored teenage girls do, not something people take seriously. But someone had obviously spent hours on this.

The airport was full of South Asians with a sprinkling of Central Asians and Filipinos. Dubai is one of those places where the locals have desk jobs and guest workers do everything manual. How well this works I can't say based on a few hours, but they've certainly managed to build a lot.

The air conditioning in my hotel room was turned to deep freeze.

Hotel: modern business culture has a tremendous homeogenizing effect. The hotel had a British pub, an Italian restaurant, and a Mexican place. There was also a bar with a little dance floor and a band. Which was of course Filipino, and which of course played the most awful hits of the last 40 years. ("Loooovving you... is easy 'cause you're beautiful...")

I had to try the Mexican place. It was decent basic Mexican, maybe half a cut north of Denny's. It had one of those annoying TV screens that announces the specials. They all were about 50%-100% more expensive than in the US. "Barbecue ribs! (may contain pork)" said one screen. "Thursday is Karaoke night!" warned another. I ate nachos and read my book until they turned the lights down for dancing. They weren't great nachos but they weren't bad either, and you'd be surprised how good even mediocre Mexican tastes after six or eight months without.

Walked around for a few minutes after, but the hotel was not in a good neighborhood for walking -- by which I mean it seemed to sit at the intersection of two large highways, with no neighbors but other hotels -- and anyway I was tired. And my flight was at 7:00 so I had to be early to bed.

Internet was $30 for a card good for 10 hours, so none of that. Read a few pages, crashed, got five hours of sleep.

And that was Dubai.

Nothing

If you fly from Dubai to Amman, your route goes across northern Saudi, parallel to the Kuwaiti and Iraqi borders but maybe 100 km south. And if you look out the window of your plane, you see... nothing. Well, you see desert. But it's empty desert. There are no roads, there are no towns. There's no sign of humanity. There's no sign of life at all. Just this reddish-tan... surface. The day was pretty clear. Some haze, but I could probably see eighty or a hundred miles. And the desert extended, empty, for as far as I could see. And this went on for a couple of hours. Nothingness is strangely hard to look at. The eye sort of claws at the desert and then falls back, baffled. Perhaps it's different on the ground but from cruising altitude it's almost painful after a while. If not for the signature blue of the atmosphere, we could have been in a probe flying low over one of the duller parts of Mars. The desert gets livelier when you get close to Jordan: there are hills, and depressions, and lots of dry riverbeds. You can look at that with interest. But northeast Saudi is just flat and dead and empty, going on for hundreds of miles. There's just... nothing. However: there's a part of Saudi Arabia called "The Empty Quarter". And the part we were flying over? Wasn't it. It's a big world.

Dubai

Holy crap, Dubai. I only spent a few hours in Dubai, but it made a hell of an impression. It's rich, it's modern, it's clean. Big new buildings. Huge wide roads. (Crazy drivers, but that bugs me a lot less than it used to.) No visa hassles -- you show your passport, you go in. First impressions: hot and sticky. Apparently Dubai has three seasons: dry and warm, dry and hot, and hot and intolerably humid. We're just at the beginning of the humid season, so: dog breath. And it will get worse before it gets better. It's flat as a pancake. The combination of flatness, heat, and humidity reminds me faintly of central Florida... Orlando on the Persian Gulf, I guess. But it's the Middle East. I saw my first woman in a, what do you call it, burqa? The one with just an eyeslit. That's not the norm --most women were just wearing headscarves -- but wow. The woman at the visa desk had henna patterns all over her hands and wrists. I think of henna as something bored teenage girls do, not something people take seriously. But someone had obviously spent hours on this. The airport was full of South Asians with a sprinkling of Central Asians and Filipinos. Dubai is one of those places where the locals have desk jobs and guest workers do everything manual. How well this works I can't say based on a few hours, but they've certainly managed to build a lot. The air conditioning in my hotel room was turned to deep freeze. Hotel: modern business culture has a tremendous homeogenizing effect. The hotel had a British pub, an Italian restaurant, and a Mexican place. There was also a bar with a little dance floor and a band. Which was of course Filipino, and which of course played the most awful hits of the last 40 years. ("Loooovving you... is easy 'cause you're beautiful...") I had to try the Mexican place. It was decent basic Mexican, maybe half a cut north of Denny's. It had one of those annoying TV screens that announces the specials. They all were about 50%-100% more expensive than in the US. "Barbecue ribs! (may contain pork)" said one screen. "Thursday is Karaoke night!" warned another. I ate nachos and read my book until they turned the lights down for dancing. They weren't great nachos but they weren't bad either, and you'd be surprised how good even mediocre Mexican tastes after six or eight months without. Walked around for a few minutes after, but the hotel was not in a good neighborhood for walking -- by which I mean it seemed to sit at the intersection of two large highways, with no neighbors but other hotels -- and anyway I was tired. And my flight was at 7:00 so I had to be early to bed. Internet was $30 for a card good for 10 hours, so none of that. Read a few pages, crashed, got five hours of sleep. And that was Dubai.

Home again

We're back.

A week and a bit in Germany, which was nice; Ostheim was full of green grass and flowers. The boys love spending time with their grandparents.

The trip back is challenging. We leave Ostheim around 4 pm, drive two hours to the airport, catch an 8 pm flight to Vienna, change planes and catch the 10:30 flight to Yerevan. It arrives around 5 am Yerevan time (2 am German time) and we get home around 6. Three small kids, threee airports, eleven hours. Also, both of us have colds.

On the plus side, the house is in good condition, the kids are well, and everyone is happy to be home.

More anon.

Home again

We're back. A week and a bit in Germany, which was nice; Ostheim was full of green grass and flowers. The boys love spending time with their grandparents. The trip back is challenging. We leave Ostheim around 4 pm, drive two hours to the airport, catch an 8 pm flight to Vienna, change planes and catch the 10:30 flight to Yerevan. It arrives around 5 am Yerevan time (2 am German time) and we get home around 6. Three small kids, threee airports, eleven hours. Also, both of us have colds. On the plus side, the house is in good condition, the kids are well, and everyone is happy to be home. More anon.

Cairene guest-blogging!

My first guest-blogger while on retreat is from Luke Schleusener! Luke is yet another member of the soc.history.what-if Usenet mafia, who crashed in my Brooklyn book-lined crypt apartment when he took the Foreign Service exam. He's got a dry wit and a warped sense of humor, so he should fit right in. Also, he swims.

Here's my first contribution for your readers' interest.

Flight time from the US to Cairo is about fourteen hours--theoretically, it's thirteen hours and fifty-five minutes. In actuality, it's somewhere closer to fourteen and a half hours, due to inevitable delays.

This only mattered because the nice folks from the State Department behind me remarked that they were "screwed" with coach rather than getting promoted to Business Class, as the cut off is the fourteen hour mark.

Cairene guest-blogging!

My first guest-blogger while on retreat is from Luke Schleusener! Luke is yet another member of the soc.history.what-if Usenet mafia, who crashed in my Brooklyn book-lined crypt apartment when he took the Foreign Service exam. He's got a dry wit and a warped sense of humor, so he should fit right in. Also, he swims.

Here's my first contribution for your readers' interest. Flight time from the US to Cairo is about fourteen hours--theoretically, it's thirteen hours and fifty-five minutes. In actuality, it's somewhere closer to fourteen and a half hours, due to inevitable delays. This only mattered because the nice folks from the State Department behind me remarked that they were "screwed" with coach rather than getting promoted to Business Class, as the cut off is the fourteen hour mark.

Joe Goes Global

It seems like everyone is mobile these days. (Except me!) Friend of HDTD Joseph Eros is wandering this old Earth as well, and you can read about it at the site Joe Across Asia.

I have a commitment to be at Baku on May 14 to catch the Caspian ferry. I hope to get there by way of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Belgium, France, Corsica, Sardinia, and then cross Italy and go up the Adriatic coast before heading southeast to Istanbul. Then I'll cross Turkey and visit all three Caucasian countries (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) before joining my group in crossing Turkmenistan. After Turkmenistan, I'll be in Uzbekistan for about a week visiting an old friend, and after that I hope to cross into Tajikistan and take the Pamir Highway to the Kyrgyz Republic. I'll definitely be crossing into far Western China from Kyrgyzstan. In China, I hope to take the Silk Road route to Xian, then go to Baektusan on the North Korean border before heading south to Hong Kong by way of Shanghai. I'll fly home from Hong Kong.

As we used to say, go-o-o-o Joe!

Joe Goes Global

It seems like everyone is mobile these days. (Except me!) Friend of HDTD Joseph Eros is wandering this old Earth as well, and you can read about it at the site Joe Across Asia.

I have a commitment to be at Baku on May 14 to catch the Caspian ferry. I hope to get there by way of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Belgium, France, Corsica, Sardinia, and then cross Italy and go up the Adriatic coast before heading southeast to Istanbul. Then I'll cross Turkey and visit all three Caucasian countries (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) before joining my group in crossing Turkmenistan.

After Turkmenistan, I'll be in Uzbekistan for about a week visiting an old friend, and after that I hope to cross into Tajikistan and take the Pamir Highway to the Kyrgyz Republic. I'll definitely be crossing into far Western China from Kyrgyzstan.

In China, I hope to take the Silk Road route to Xian, then go to Baektusan on the North Korean border before heading south to Hong Kong by way of Shanghai. I'll fly home from Hong Kong.

As we used to say, go-o-o-o Joe!

Cambodia notes

Been in Cambodia for a week now. Truth to tell, I'm not liking it as much as Laos. This may not be fair to Cambodia. I'm working harder, because I have to write both my Laos and Cambodia reports this week -- no way I'm going to get much done in Romania, with kids and moving. So I'm not seeing as much of the city, never mind the rest of the country. That said, Phnom Penh is kind of a mess.

The Mekong, halfway down

The Mekong is low. It's a bit spooky. Vientiane sits right on the Mekong, and you can see that it's supposed to be a serious river, like the Mississippi or the Danube. It's like a mile wide. Except it isn't. From the shore -- or where the shore should be -- several hundred yards of dry, bare ground stretch to the water's edge. You have to walk for five or ten minutes before you reach the actual river, huddled mournfully against the opposite bank. At a guess, I'd say half of the Mekong's bed is bone dry right now. You can see that this is a recent thing, because no ground plants are growing on the bare mud flats yet.

Off the Plane in Vientiane

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

Home again

We've been on the road, driving from Germany to Romania. This was about a 2500 km (1500 mile) trip, with a three year old and a two year old in the back. We originally planned to do it over seven days, but in the event we cut it to six -- the boys were talking about "home" a lot ("want go home"), and the car was starting to smell a bit. We just got back a few hours ago. The boys are asleep in the next room, in their own beds again at last. We originally planned to blog from the road, but that proved a bit... impractical. But we'll try to retroblog the high points. More in a bit.

To the Delta

There are two ways to drive from Bucharest to the Danube Delta. Bucharest sits about 40 miles or 70 km north of the Danube, which runs from west to east. About 100 miles east of Bucharest, though, the Danube suddenly turns north. It runs north-northeast for another hundred miles or so. Then it turns east, splits into five channels, and flows into the Danube as a huge, swampy delta. So, to get from Bucharest to the Delta, you can drive east, parallel to the Danube, until you cross it (there's a bridge), and then swing north and come to the Delta from below. Or, you can drive east, and then north, and then east again, crossing the Danube further north, just below the "neck" of the Delta. That's the way we drove up.

All the Way Down the Danube

We went to the Danube delta this weekend. Just got back, and unpacked and made some dinner and put the kids to bed, and are tired. So details will have to wait until tomorrow. But we drove up to Tulcea (which is worth an entry or two in its own right) and took a boat deep into the Delta, and stayed there overnight. There are a lot of birds in the Danube delta. More in a bit.

On the road again

We are hitting the road again. After school tomorrow we leave for beautiful Sibiu, then we plan to get as far as Vienna the next day, to arrive at my home town of Ostheim on Sunday. (You guessed it, we're driving.) Not to dwell too long, I'm leaving for the US the following Tuesday. Doug will be back in Bucharest on Friday, the kids and I will return some ten days later. As we all know, you're in good hands in the meantime.

Back from Budapest

So we decided to go to Budapest for Valentine's Day weekend. No, no real reason. Just that we hadn't travelled for the hell of it since... oh, since that weekend trip to Szekler land, back in October. Well, and we had to visit an IKEA. We took the overnight train there and back. Can I just say that I love travelling by overnight trains? So sometimes the toilets aren't as nice as they might be. Who cares? You get to lie in bed and watch a continent unroll outside your window. Watching the stars from a train window on a clear winter night? Reading in your bed with the little reading light, and then you're jolted out of your book for a moment because another train has gone RUSHING PAST OUTSIDE, and then it's gone and you go back to your book? I just love that stuff. Of course, when you travel with an almost-three-year-old and his 19 month old younger brother, it has an effect on the experience. Yes. More on this anon. But anyway, we went and we came back. With a big boy bed! For Alan! Which came from IKEA, of course, and which weighed rather a lot more than the 20 kg it said on the website, but more on that too anon. Good to go, good to come back.

Up the Trans-Fagaras Highway

In which we finally ascend the Trans-Fagaras Highway. As I blogged a while back, the TFH is this completely insane road that goes up and over a fairly sheer mountain range in the middle of the country for, really, no reason whatsoever. Ceausescu built it back in the 1970s. Officially it was to improve the defense of the country in case someone -- coughHungarianscough -- invaded from the west. But this was obvious nonsense. The highway is ridiculously vulnerable; it could be completely destroyed by a single bomb or shell. More to the point, it's closed eight months of the year anyhow. No, Old Nick built it because he wanted to, and because he could, and that's really all there is to it. But anyway. If you approach the Trans-Fagaras from the north, you come at it along a little two-lane road that crosses a dusty plain at the foot of the mountains. Village, slow down, open plain, speed up, repeat every few kilometers. Then you come to the foot of the mountains -- which is, like, abrupt; the mountains pretty much jump right out of the plains -- and you start doing switchbacks. Hairpin left, up up up up, hairpin right. Repeat. After a while you're in pine forest.

Belgrade to Timisoara

Last week I took the train from Belgrade to Timisoara. Belgrade is a city of more than a million people; it's the former capital of Yugoslavia, and still the capital of Serbia and Montenegro. Timisoara is the largest city in western Romania, about half a million people. Timisoara is the nearest large city to Belgrade, and vice versa. The two cities are just 175 kilometers apart... about 110 miles, for Americans. The train ride takes five hours and fifteen minutes.

The Tomb of Dracula

We visited Dracula's tomb last weekend. (You know, it gives me a quiet but real pleasure to be able to write that.) We've been living in Romania for well over a year and we haven't once blogged about its most famous son. And I know y'all have been waiting for it. So: a few words about Vlad Dracula. Dracula -- the real, historical Dracula -- was, as everybody knows, a king named Vlad who lived about 500 years ago. This was back in the days when not-yet-Romania was a collection of petty kingdoms, under constant threat from the Hungarians on one side and the Turks on the other. The politics got mind-bogglingly complicated. Vlad ended up being king no less than three separate times. (His younger brother, who became his enemy, also got to be king for a while.) He also spent years in Istanbul with the Turks (as a hostage) and more years with the Hungarians (as a prisoner, then as a guest). It's a long story. But here's the part that everyone remembers: Dracula was one hard bastard. Even in a time and place when rulers were often callous and cruel, Dracula was noted for an excess of fiendish malevolence. He was commonly known as Vlad Tepes (pron. tsep-esh), Vlad the Impaler, and he's supposed to have killed between 20,000 and 50,000 people by this means. A couple of sample anecdotes, not for the squeamish:

A Night in the Red Light District

We flew from New York City to Frankfurt yesterday. The flight itself was not bad -- the kids both went to sleep quickly, and so did we, dozing upright in our chairs. Singapore Airlines, with those so friendly flight attendants. The hard part had been getting to the airport, actually. Heavy rains in New York, so it took more than 90 minutes to get from midtown Manhattan to Kennedy Airport. David was squirmy and Alan was in full blown squirrel-on-crack mode, literally bouncing around the back of the taxi. Usually, car travel in the city offers a lot of distractions -- "Look, a BIG truck! There's a RED car! Hey, is that a CEMENT MIXER!?" -- but gridlock traffic, less so. So we were a bit frayed by the time we arrived; and finding our flight delayed by that same heavy weather didn't help. But the plane did eventually take off, and land where it was supposed to. Claude took the kids into the car and we kissed goodbye and away she went to Ostheim, for a fun-packed week with inoculations and checkups and grandparents. And then I went to the little hotel reservation desk and asked for a cheap hotel downtown, near the main train station. What I had forgotten is that the main train station is right in the middle of Frankfurt's very busy red light district. Well, I was very tired. And the hotel room, though tiny, was clean. So.

Back online

Ah, world, here we are again. Painful days without internet access due to travelling (make that, due to travelling with two small kids). Doug is already back home - i.e. Romania - while I'm staying in Germany for a week or so to gather the courage to drive back with said two small kids in our funky new minivan. But for now, the only tasks are to get over the jet lag and get some postings done. If anyone is still checking this blog, thank you. You shall get nice posts. Like, tomorrow. I promise.

Things to do in the DC area with your kids I

There are of course countless things you can do in the greater DC area with your kids. You can park them at the Ben & Jerry's Scoop shop on Fairmont Ave in Bethesda while you enjoy your sushi at Sushi Sushi ten meters down the street. You can hand them off to your relatives and spend the afternoon reading. You can also take them to the John Cabin Regional Park in Rockville, just off Tuckerman Lane. The playground is great - large, with different installations for various age groups. It's shady and there is a cool breeze most of the times - very vital for DC summers (although so far we had rain, and rain, and thunderstorms). You can ride a miniature train which all kids will love, guaranteed. I like it for many reasons: it's very close to our current quarters -- about ten minutes -- the kids are busy for hours, literally. The picnic areas are nice and clean. Everything is safe. They have bathrooms that stink of urine but aren't actually appalling. Come early because the park quickly fills up. There are plenty of parking spaces, though. Only the fact that they found a dead bird there today makes me a little uneasy. I'm going to read up on the symptoms of West Nile virus now. Tomorrow, we're going to the zoo. Stay tuned!

So you thought we'd died?

Nope. We survived it all -- the two-day car trip from Romania to Germany with a sick toddler (stomach bug, yuck!) and a baby, the purchase of our new mini-van (yep, we are now officially married with children and van), the flight across the Atlantic with two kids, three days in New York with two jetlagged kids, a seven-hour trip through torrential rain to DC with two bored kids... We are now relaxing for a bit. More to come soon, or so we hope.

We're doing the crazy thing

Next Saturday, as the kids rise with the sun, we will quickly dress them, throw something to eat at them and buckle them into the car. Then we will drive for three days until we are in Germany. Sounds crazy? It sure is, for various reasons. Everybody knows that driving long distances with toddlers is a no-no. It's hot and our car has no air con. The Romanian stretch from Bucharest to Hungary consists almost entirely of country roads with crazy drivers and truck traffic from Turkey to Western Europe. Oh, and Doug can only come as far as Budapest. He has to get back to work on Monday. I did this trip before, last year. So why am I doing it again? Oh, it saves us a buttload of money in air fares. Plus, the car is registered in Germany and we are buying a new one, so we need to get this one back to its home country in order to get rid of it. I'm sure it's better this time around. I'm used to Romanian driving, speak some Romanian and the country is not completely strange to me anymore -- so the overall experience should be a bit better. Plus, this time, the quality of the roads will increase as we go, so that's nice (of course, we are driving back as well, but that's for later in August and I decline to think about it just now).

Danube Day!

HDTD reader Pax has kindly alerted us that today is Danube Day. How could we overlook that! He's also directed us to a very cool link about the Danube which is very worth checking out. Quote the site about the events in Romania:

What will happen in Romania? Danube Day in Romania is a day of national celebration, with festivities in every major town along the Danube. National television will be covering the events, encouraging everyone to join in the fun and appreciate the importance of a healthy Danube. A symbolic torch and special Danube Day message will be transported by boat from Orsova, the start of the Romanian Danube (24 June) to the Black Sea at Sulina (29 June), signifying the immense value of the Danube to the people of Romania.

I'm sorry that we missed this, being two hours' drive away from the river. BTW, last weekend, we traveled all the way down the Danube but that blog entry is still in the making. Now we do have the ambition to visit the source of the Danube in Donaueschingen, as well as the two little rivers that really make the Danube, the Brigach and the Breg. One day.

Back from the beach

You may have wondered about our silence. Well, the simple truth is that we were at the beach for the weekend. We drove out to Mamaia, where we ran into friends and spent the days on the beach and at the pool. It was marvelous. Only Alan destested it all. Sometime last week, or maybe the week before that, my little fearless water rat turned into a water-detesting land dweller. He hated the sea (all those waves, and this water didn't have an ending to it!), he hated the beach (the little shells were poking his feet), he hated the pool ("Don't like it, Daddy, don't like it!). He loved playing around the pool, though, and quickly amassed a group of loyal followers (i.e. little boys of five, six years) who helped him climb on and off the walls. Then he disappeared for a scary couple of minutes and was found outside the pool area, swinging the gates to and fro. But he frequently demanded that we go "home!". Well. On a brighter note, David just loved all of it. The pool, the sea, the beach. He was busy eating sand and shells and destroying the sand castles I built for him. I'm glad one of my sons had a great time.