Halfway down the Danube

Second summer in Tajikistan, with tortoises

Still in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Claudia and the kids are in Germany for the summer, because it's cool and green there, and the kids have friends and the grandparents are there.  I have to work, so I stay.  

This is the second summer in Tajikistan, and that's interesting right there because it's been a while since I've had two summers in one place.  Summer 2011 was Moldova, summer 2012 was Germany, 2013 was Kosovo, 2014 was Germany again.  Put another way: we've moved five times in five years:  to Moldova, back to Germany, to Kosovo, back to Germany, and to Tajikistan last year. 

Anyway.  I'm alone in the house, except for the tortoises.  These are two Russian tortoises:  Jebediah, who is large and lives in the garden, and Franklin, who is small and lives in a box in the kitchen.  (Because we worry about crows or cats. So Franklin will stay in the box until he grows a bit bigger.)

Jebediah was David's 12th birthday present.  (David is a kid who has yearned for a pet for a long time, so he was pretty happy.)  I literally got him from a guy who knew a guy, and he was handed to me in a brown paper bag.  He's not very social.  Pretty cool to watch when he decides to patrol around the garden, though.  Little Franklin was inherited from a little boy who left Tajikistan; formally he belongs to everyone, but only David and Jacob give him much attention.

 

Franklin needs exercise and sunshine, poor little guy. So every day or so, I take him out and let him run around in the garden for a while. Okay, walk very slowly around in the garden for a while.  Slight complicating factor: a small Russian tortoise can disappear like a goddamn ninja. Seriously.  He's mostly brown with some black, some gray and some green -- precisely the color of his environment -- and for a thing with a tiny brain, he's incredibly competent at slipping around behind a tree or into the hollow at the base of a tuft of grass or something, and then going utterly motionless and just blending.  So I can't just put him down and come back a while later. If I want to walk him, I actually have to sit there (okay, with a book or a laptop) and keep one eye on him.  The boys would lie in the hammock, but I sit in a chair, occasionally moving it around to keep a close eye.

 

-- So the garden.  The house is very large, six bedrooms, and it's half wrapped around a small garden.  Very typical Tajik design, and it makes sense given the climate -- summers are long and hot.  There are roses, some small trees (several apricots and a persimmon), and a grape vine.  We brought the trampoline and the hammock, and there's just barely room for both of them.  On the minus side, the soil here is not good -- once bare, it turns to hard-packed clay, and then it's damnably hard to get anything ever to grow again.  (If I were sure we'd be here for another year, I'd put some sod down.)  We had a rabbit for a while -- another inheritance -- but he was eating the garden bare, and I didn't want the kids getting too attached (moving six people around the world is hard enough), so after they left for the summer I passed him along to another expat, an Embassy employee with a bigger garden.   

The kids didn't get attached; they don't ask about the rabbit.  They check in on the tortoises, though.

 

Otherwise... it's quiet.  Most days are very hot, 95 or 100 or more, and sunny and dry and a bit dusty.  I more or less live weekend to weekend.  I'm reading a lot more books.  Wednesday nights are Pub Quiz.  Saturday afternoon is the Hash.  I try to water the garden at least once a day.

 

It's summer in Central Asia, and I'm alone in the house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

First hike in Tajikistan

So I'm in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Short version: this is a new job, and it may keep me here for up to three years.  I've been here two weeks already.  I'm alone for almost three months; Claudia and the kids will follow in July.  My task is to get settled in the new job, find a house and a car, and prepare the way for them.

Dushanbe is very post-Soviet, and yet much nicer than you might think.  The downtown is planned, but not in a horrible way.  There are a lot of perfectly attractive buildings.  It's definitely a bit of a backwater, mind.  It's a very long way from anywhere.  Most people don't speak English, so learning at least basic Russian is firmly on the menu.  

So what is there to do in Dushanbe?  Well, for one thing, there's the hiking club.  Every Sunday at 9 AM, whoever wants to go hiking gathers at a corner at the north end of downtown.  A local tour group picks everyone up in a couple of vans and off they all go.  This week there were 15 or 20 of us, all expats, plus a couple of local Tajiks who acted as guides and chaperones. 

Dushanbe sits at the northern edge of a flat plain.  Beyond that northern edge are mountains: the Gissar Range, which is a spur of the Tien Shan.  (Trivia: the highest peak in this range, on the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is about 4,600 meters or >15,000 feet... and for many years, it enjoyed the euphonious name of Peak of the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party.  These days it's known as "Khazret Sultan", which is also good.)  So from the northern edge of Dushanbe, it's about 15 km to the foothills of the mountains; within 30 km, you're deep inside them.

These aren't big mountains by regional standards (note: regional standards are quite high), but they're geologically young -- meaning, they're steep and full of interesting geology stuff.  We drove for some miles up the main road, which runs along a brown busy river, and then turned up a side road that wound through a couple of villages and then up, up.

The hike was maybe 6 or 7 km each way, starting at around 1500 meters up and climbing to maybe a little over 2000 meters (~6500 feet).  It was up a narrow valley, almost a canyon, carved out by a fast-running stream.  We crossed the stream seven or eight times; no bridges, one just waded across at a shallow bit.  The trail was literally a donkey path -- we passed a donkey at one point.  Lots of scrambling over scree, some Alpine meadows still green with spring.  Spectacular views, of course. (Though I suspect that my idea of what constitutes a spectacular view may be adjusted a bit over the next few months.)

The end point was a "swimming pool" which was really just a couple of pools in the stream, not much bigger than bathtubs.  We'd been told to bring bathing suits, so I changed behind a rock and... had second thoughts?  The water was runoff straight from the snowpack still visible a couple of thousand feet above us.  And it was obviously cold -- like, you could feel the chill radiating off it.

Well: the trick really is to plunge, before your brain realizes what's happening and can stop you. Because, yes, it's cold.  It's AH AH AH AH very cold. But: do you want to stand beneath the icy waterfall like a samurai in a Kurosawa movie? Yes. you know you do.

Sore legs and a touch of sunburn, but very much worth it.  And more on Tajikistan anon.

Around Baalbek

We had the place to ourselves.

It’s the off season, for one thing – tourists don’t usually show up in great numbers until April. Driving over the summit of the Lebanon Mountains, there was still plenty of snow on the ground. (Baalbek itself was fine, though – sunny and pleasant.) More to the point, there’s been some shooting along the border near Baalbek… supposedly the Lebanese Army squaring off against ISIS in Syria, though who knows. Anyway, in two hours of strolling around Baalbek I think we saw maybe three other tourists.

So Baalbek. As I noted in the last post, it’s this huge pile of ruins that used to be a pre-Christian religious site.  It was big in Phoenician and Hellenistic times, and then the Romans made it bigger.  At various times, almost a dozen different Emperors stopped here to sacrifice and take the omens. The scale of the place is impressive. For instance, there were dozens of granite columns that weighed sixty tons each. There’s no granite in Lebanon, so these had to be quarried in Egypt, floated down the Nile and overseas, and then hauled several thousand feet up and over the Lebanon Mountains. Our guide said that this was done by building two parallel “walls” – stone rails, basically – and rolling the columns along. There are also some ridiculous large solid limestone blocks – we’re talking slabs the size of a freight container, weighing hundreds of tons. There are a lot of theories about how they moved those, but apparently it’s still an open question.

(Our guide: it’s not required, but it is strongly encouraged that one takes a guide through Baalbek. Ours was pretty good. His price was reasonable – 35,000 Lebanese pounds or about $25 to guide the three of us for about 90 minutes – and he was knowledgeable and spoke good English. His patter was a bit rehearsed at times, but after the thousandth time that’s probably not surprising.)

Religion in the pagan world involved sacrifice, so the center of the complex was two sacrificial altars, one for large animals like sheep and cows and another for birds and other small stuff. Apparently the mechanics of this were fairly well known: there were basins of holy water for washing the animals in advance, flames in which to throw some of the meat, gutters (still intact) for carrying off the blood, and so forth. It does make one wonder: was the atmosphere like a slaughterhouse, all terrified bellowing and squawking and the thick reek of blood everywhere? Or did they keep it neat?

Mark Twain came through Baalbek in the 1870s, and was suitably impressed. "At eleven o'clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec, a noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It has stood there for thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travelers; but who built it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered. One thing is very sure, though. Such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled or even approached in any work of men's hands that has been built within twenty centuries past."  Twain could get a little overheated, but Baalbek really is quite something; the intact Temple of Bacchus deserves to stand beside the Acropolis, and the ruins of the main Temple of Jupiter must have been ridiculously spectacular.

It did leave me wondering: was Roman Baalbek a purely top-down construction, a prestige project for various Emperors?  Or was it funded and maintained by a huge stream of pilgrims over hundreds of years?  And if the latter... what a curious thought, to think of large numbers of people in the Roman world traveling for hundreds of miles for religious reasons.  Did the medieval pilgrim routes simply recreate something that had already existed a thousand years earlier?

There were no less than three museums in the grounds -- a Roman/Phoenician one, a Mameluke one, and a big general historical museum up by the front.  The Mameluke one was there because the Mamelukes turned Baalbek into a fortress for a while, so a lot of the Roman ruins have medieval ruins on top of them, with arrow slits and Moorish arches.  The Roman/Phoenician one contained a lot of sarcophagi, including one with a young woman's skeleton still inside.  Scattered at her feet were a number of tiny glass containers.  At first I thought they were candlesticks, but the guide said they were tear vials: mourners would collect their tears, and drop them into the grave.

In the Temple of Bacchus, there's a plaque commemorating Kaiser Wilhelm's visit to the site.  It's in 19th century German on one side, Ottoman Arabic on the other.  Apparently the Kaiser was a patron of the archeological diggings here.  History doesn't have a lot of good to say about Wilhelm, but this was a thing.

I could have killed another hour or two wandering around -- I never did finish touring the third museum -- but then we would have ended up driving down the mountain after dark.  So after about 90 minutes we moved along. There were a few touts hanging around the parking lot trying to sell us stuff, but there were so few tourists that they were pretty half-hearted.  One guy was selling yellow Hezbollah t-shirts: the Hezbollah flag is  bright yellow with a fist clutching an AK-47 on it.  I admit that I briefly considered it. (When you work in development, you're tempted by the occasional conversation starter.).  But, no.

Afterwards we stopped at a local restaurant and had roasted garlic chicken with mezze and arrack. “Mezze” is the term for all the little dishes, hummus and stuffed grape leaves and babaghanoush and such, that are brought as preludes or accompaniments to a meal. Arrack is wine alcohol mixed with aniseed; it is served cold, tastes like licorice and turns cloudy when you mix it with water.

Back in Ottoman times, there was a railroad that ran down the length of the Levant from Turkey, through Syria and Palestine, all the way to Mecca. Then someone – either the Ottomans or the French, I don’t know – built a spur going up over the mountains into the Bekaa Valley. As noted, the Lebanon Mountains are nearly a mile high and steep, so this was no small effort. Presumably the idea was to open up the immense agricultural potential of the Bekaa to export markets. So Lebanon used to have a functioning railroad system, with connections running north to Turkey and south to Egypt. But in 1947, the southern link was cut when Palestine became Israel; and then during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the whole network got broken up and destroyed. No train has actually run in Lebanon since the 1980s. And none will again for many many years, if ever; the tracks have been torn up in many places, and the rights-of-way have been built over.

I mention all this because it happens that our restaurant was next to an old rail yard. It was pretty big; I’m guessing it was the end-of-the-line yard for the Bekaa Valley branch. And sitting on the rusty tracks were several train cars, including three locomotives. Eating our garlic chicken while sipping our iced arrack, we could look out the window right at them. The locomotives were solid orange with rust, but looked otherwise pretty intact; they looked like coal-burning steam engines, built sometime in the first quarter of the 20th century. A couple of stray dogs picked their way around the old rail yard, but otherwise it was still and quiet, and obviously had been for a long time.

(Did I mention that garlic chicken, or garlic anything, is a rare treat? Claudia is violently allergic to garlic, so I gave it up when we got married. But when I’m on the road… Also, the Lebanese know how to make a good French fry! After years of soggy, greasy, tasteless Eastern European French fries, this is a tiny but real pleasure.)

On the way back to Beirut, we passed a camp of Syrian refugees. There are several hundred thousand Syrians in Lebanon right now, fleeing the civil war there, and it doesn’t look like they’re going home any time soon. The refugee camp looked like someone had put several hundred sheds down in the middle of a farmer’s field.

Going down the mountain, we ran into a a half hour of gridlock traffic -- that happens a lot, in Lebanon, and often for no visible reason -- and then, after we emerged, into a thick bank of fog: we literally could not see more than a single car length ahead.  Somewhere in there our driver Jamil asked us if he could buy us a coffee, which turned out to be Lebanese for "I need to stop and get a coffee".  So we did, at a little general store by the side of the road.  And then we came down out of the mountains and emerged from the clouds, and drove into Beirut by the bright light of the sun setting over the Mediterranean.

A trip to Baalbek

Went to Baalbek today.

I'm in Lebanon for a few weeks, about which more anon. If you're in Lebanon, you really need to visit Baalbek, because it's amazing. It was original a huge Phoenician temple complex devoted to the worshop of Baal -- yeah, the guy from the Old Testament -- and then the Hellenistic rulers reinterpreted it as "we're really worshipping Zeus, Aphrodite, and Dionysus", and then the Romans came along and rebuilt it all into an even more immense and spectacular complex dedicated to Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus. It's just ridiculously huge -- acres and acres of ruins -- and there's enough left standing to give you some idea of how astonishing it must have been, back in the day. It was a major, major religious site, maybe the closest equivalent to a Mecca that the ancient world had.

We (my colleagues and I) were considering not going to Baalbek, because there'd been some shooting and shelling along the border nearby. Supposedly ISIS is present just across the border into Syria. (Lebanese may disagree with each other on a lot of things, but they almost all agree in despising ISIS.) But we discussed it and decided to go, albeit with care. I have a negative Life List of wonders of the world that I've managed to miss despite spending time nearby -- Angkor Wat, Petra (twice), Victoria Falls -- and I really didn't want to add Baalbek. Odds and ends from the trip:

• Jamil, our driver, was a little terrier of a man, well past retirement age but still an extroardinarily aggressive driver, and still gifted with a thick, glossy head of white hair. (Which he attributed to using only the local soap from his home village, instead of shampoo.) Jamil liked to stop and yell at people for directions. I know that casual interpersonal interactions in the Arab world can seem odd to Westerners, but seriously... Jamil just shouted at people. Everyone was pretty cool, though, and we managed to get everywhere eventually.
• To get to Baalbek, you have to climb up and over the Lebanon Mountains, which are nearly a mile high and really steep. Jamil's radiator immediately began overheating. (I don't know how old Jamil's car was, but it still had a tape deck. With a tape in it.) Jamil kept pulling over and putting water in. It didn't help. When he dropped us off at Baalbek he said he was going off to "get a new radiator". We assumed he meant a radiator hose or something like that but when we met him again a couple of hours later he said, no, he had bought a new radiator and had it installed.
• Baalbek is up at the northern end of the Bekaa Valley, which means it's about as far as you can get from Beirut without leaving the country. (This is not actually very far... maybe 100 km.) The Bekaa is a lush, gorgeous valley, just 20 miles from the sea but three thousand feet above sea level, that lies between the Lebanon Mountains and the imaginatively named Anti-Lebanon Mountains, a parallel range that lies ten miles further east and inland. So the Bekaa is about ten miles wide and it stretches for about a hundred miles, north to south. It's ridiculously fertile and is the reason that little Lebanon is actually a major exporter of agricultural products: wine, olives, dairy, you name it. The Middle East's largest potato chip factory is up there.
• One passes a lot of military checkpoints. Most of these had just a couple of bored-looking soldiers: you slow down, they glance at you and wave you through. I don't know what the purpose of these is. Maybe just to make clear that there's a military presence?
• The area around Baalbek is almost entirely populated by Shi'as. It's pretty easy to tell when you're in a Shi'a town. The women are suddenly wearing headscarves, for starters. (This is not the case in most of Lebanon.) The signs get a lot more Arabic, and English and French become less common. There are still plenty of billboards, but fewer female models and they're usually wearing more clothes. And big posters and cutouts of Shi'a heroes start appearing along the roadsides... pudgy clerics in black with bushy beards and glasses, beefy looking military men in camo garb.
• There's Baalbek the archeological site, and then there's the town of Baalbek -- about 100,000 people, almost all of them Shi'a. And the town of Baalbek also includes a huge Shi'a shrine. It's a shrine to Sayeeda Khalwa, who was a daughter of Imam Hussein. This gets into come complex early Islamic history, but here's the short version: Imam Hussein is a holy martyr to the Shi'a. He was the loser of a power struggle in the generation of Islamic rulers that followed Mohammed's death. You may remember reading or hearing about the big Shi'ite shrine in Karbala, Iraq? That's the shrine to Imam Hussein. So, after the battle, it seems that his family were marched captive back to Arabia. And during the trip, his youngest daughter -- who was just a tiny thing, less than five years old -- died.And she was buried in Baalbek the town, not half a mile down the road from the old temple complex. And so today there is a huge and beautiful mosque and shrine there.  I mean, just gorgeous: all peacock blue and green with a shiny golden dome . And it particularly attracts Shi'ite women from all over the Middle East.

I suppose I should write something about Baalbek itself. But that may take a little while, and I don't want to start another blog post and leave it unfinished -- I've done that more than once over the last little while. So let's get this up, and I'll try to come back to Baalbeck shortly.

Summer in Fladungen

Done with Kosovo, back in Germany. 

Actually, we've been back for a while now.  We had a complicated summer that included a trip to the US and a two day drive back from Kosovo.  The US trip included a trip to Nashville, Tennessee (my sister lives there now).  We all ran in a 5K race there, and the kids all won medals.  Okay, it was the Gay 5K.  So there weren't a lot of kids.  Still: they'd been running regularly for weeks beforehand, up and down Germia Park outside of Pristina, and I submit that 5K in 41 minutes is pretty good for a five year old girl.  Anyway, we were all pretty pleased.

So now we're back in Germany.  July was pleasantly warm, but August is cool and rainy; it's been like that for most of the last few years.  People say, maybe climate change?  Anyway, we have a fire in the wood-burning stove tonight.  Which makes me sigh a little, but that's life in the upper Rhoen.

It's a quiet summer.  We go on bicycle rides -- last weekend we all biked to Ostheim, then took the steam train back.  (11 kilometers, or seven miles.  The steam train goes on weekends in summer.)  Every two or three days we run a few kilometers.  I practice my German a bit with Duolingo.  I'm tutoring Alan in French -- his Kosovo school didn't have it, but the German school here started it last year.  We're still struggling with the move from Kosovo... it's like trying to fit a house and a half worth of stuff into a single house. Friday night is pizza and movies, as always. 

Yes, this is a bit of a placeholder post.  More in a bit, I hope.

A day in Skopje

We spent most of today in Skopje, Macedonia. 

Getting to Skopje takes about two hours, including the border crossing.  It's not a very good road, and it's actually getting worse.  Two reasons.  One, there's a ridiculous amount of sprawl going south from Pristina, so you have about forty miles of bad two-lane road with pretty constant traffic.  And two, they're just about to start work on a fancy new highway connecting Skopje to Pristina.  When it's done, the trip time will drop by half -- but in the meantime, there's no incentive to fix the potholes or add passing lines or shoulders, since the road is going to be obsolete soon.

Anyway.  Skopje itself is an interesting small city with a pleasantly busy downtown.  We visited the one shopping mall with the toy shop and bought a bunch of Legos and My Little Pony stuff.  (Alan was owed a major toy purchase because he had a birthday recently, and younger sister Leah because she'd just finished her Headsprout reading lessons.)  Ate chicken nuggets and pide in the food court... yes, Macedonia has a shopping mall with a food court, complete with Burger King.  (Food courts are everywhere now.  There was a shopping mall with a food court in Ramallah.)  But you can also get pide and Turkish coffee -- in fact, it's pretty much only Turkish coffee -- and that Turkish lentil soup that comes with the puffy flatbread.

After that, we headed for an English-language bookstore that was mentioned in the guidebook.  This turned out to be a pretty large bookstore selling mostly remaindered academic books.  You know how textbooks are constantly coming out with new editions every couple of years, so you have to plunk down $120 for the new edition of Cell Biology instead of paying a third of that for a secondhand copy?  Well, the unsold older editions in the warehouse have to go somewhere, and one of those somewheres is Eastern Europe.  Same thing for five-year-old coffee table picture books that didn't sell, and mass market paperbacks that were overproduced.  Not to sneer; we ended up finding a lot of interesting things (Robert Chambers' King in Yellow: two bucks.  Collected Solomon Kane stories of Robert E. Howard, same.  A "best of Woody Guthrie" CD, like four bucks.) and dropping about a hundred dollars. 

One peculiarity: this bookstore has several large shelves of science fiction mass-media tie-in books. Hundreds and hundreds of Star Wars and Star Trek novels, plus a fair number of Battlestar Galactica, World of Warcraft, and others.  What the market is for these in the lower-central Balkans, I can't begin to guess. But there they all are. About $3 each. We found the Star Trek Novel Graveyard, and it's in Macedonia.

So then we walked around the central plaza for a while, with its crazy statuary -- Alexander the Great, woo -- and looked at sunspots through a telescope set up by a very nice man who was with the Macedonian Astronomical Society.  (I had never seen sunspots directly through a scope before!  They're, dang, spots on the Sun.  Crazy.)  (Yes, the scope had a filter so our eyes were not destroyed.)

Then we went for a walk through the "bazaar", which is what they're calling the Albanian Quarter these days.  And therein lies a tale.

So way back in 2002 -- not long after the Ohrid Agreement was signed, if you follow this sort of thing -- I visited Skopje for a day or two for work.  And I happened to walk north across the Vardar River into the Albanian Quarter.  It was kinda scenic, with cobbled streets and lots of Turkish-style houses, but also obviously pretty poor.  There were few people on the streets, everything was somewhat run-down, and most of the shops seemed to be just-barely-scraping-by subsistence businesses... little one-man tailor shops, coffee places where the locals would nurse a thirty cent cup of Turkish coffee for hours, and so forth.  And when I walked back across the river, my Macedonian colleagues gave me serious side-eye: you went over to *that* side, where *they* live?  Crazy foreigner, you're lucky to have come back alive...

So 2014, back again for the first time in twelve years.  And holy socknozzles, the Albanian quarter is jumping.  It is, I kid you not, Skopje's yuppie quarter.  Restaurants, souvenir shops, antique stores, ice cream stands.  The streets were packed solid with middle-class Macedonians and curious foreigners.

I know that an area a few blocks square doesn't represent a whole city, never mind a whole country.  But... wow, what a difference.  It was just really encouraging.

Oh, and also the ice cream shop was run by a couple of English-speaking Gorani.  I had never met any Gorani before!  Well, not knowingly.

And then we walked back and had coffee and salads in a place by the Vardar (near the skateboarders park... none of the skateboarders wear pads or helmets and honestly they're not very good, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves and the boys enjoyed watching them) and the three younger kids rode on the carousel that's right there for some reason, and then we went home.  Came into south Pristina with the moon rising out of southern Serbia on our right, boys building Lego constructions in the back of the car, and Leah falling asleep to Woody Guthrie explaining why he had to keep on organizing, keep on organizing, won't the boss be surprised, when he finds us organized.

 

The winter that wasn't

Winter 2013-14, in Kosovo.

It's snowed maybe twice, for less than a centimeter each time.  Since the second week of January, it's hardly gone below freezing.  Right now -- Sunday, February 16 -- it's about 15 C or 60 Fahrenheit outside on a sunny blue day.  It looks and feels like April, not February.  Germia Park (the big park that starts a couple of hundred meters from our house) is full of people strolling, kids in the playgrounds.  Flowers are blooming, and a few insects are cautiously investigating them.  Our kids have spent much of the weekend in the yard, jumping up and down on the trampoline with the neighbor kids.  The mild, unseasonably warm weather is predicted to continue through at least the end of next week, at which point we're almost out of time for winter to make a comeback.

American readers -- who have had a very hard winter indeed, with two Polar Vortexes and multiple massive snowstorms -- may not be delighted to read this.  But apparently it's all part of the same thing: the same jet stream diversion that's bringing horrible weather to much of North America has drawn mild, gentle weather up into much of Europe.

Here in Kosovo, this is very much of a mixed blessing.  It's kept our heating costs down.  In fact, it may have kept our house habitable -- our current residence is a large, new rental house with a very damaged and dysfunctional heating system.  We're really not sure how it would have handled many days of very cold weather, and we're glad not to have to find out.  And the bit of steep road going up to our driveway never gets plowed (most places in Kosovo never get plowed).  A foot or two of snow could have made that problematic.

But: Kosovo relies on a certain amount of rain and snow in the winter for water.  The winter has been dry as well as warm.  There's not much snowpack on the mountains.  The local reservoirs are all low -- you can drive past them and see vast stretchs of dry ground that used to be under water.  Pristina is likely to run out of water this summer.  A partial fix is possible by pumping water from the Ibar River, over on the other side of the country.  But it's only a partial fix, because the Ibar is a small river that doesn't provide enough water for a city of half a million people.  Also, the water has to be pumped uphill, and that's expensive.  So, unless the next few months are very wet indeed, we're probably looking at water hours this summer.

(How will this affect local farmers?  Honestly not sure.  Kosovo used to use a lot of irrigation, back in the 1980s.  Like a lot of other things in Kosovo, that went to hell in the 1990s and has only just barely started to recover.  So, most local agriculture doesn't involve irrigation.  That suggests to me that they'd be hit hard by a dry summer, but won't much care about dry winters as long as the water table doesn't sink.  But it's not my area.)

Anyway: it's a lovely day outside.  Worrisome if you think about it too much, but lovely.

(Update: by midafternoon, it's so warm that we spotted a bunch of little lizards on the south-facing bank of dirt across the street, scrambling around trying to bask off their winter sleep.  David, Jacob and Leah are out with a neighbor kid right now trying to catch one.)

The Prizren Mountaineers' Club

11:45 AM, altitude 1600 meters:  There were about 15 of us trudging steadily across a snow-covered meadow.  Maybe six inches of snow?  Enough that you'd prefer to walk on a path that someone had already trodden.  So we walked in single file.

About 50 meters off to our left, the meadow stopped at a fairly sheer cliff face, dropping maybe 150 meters down into an impressive canyon.  Every few minutes a big roller of cloud would break over the cliff edge like a wave and pour slowly across the meadow.  When that happened, visibility would drop to the point where you could see two, maybe three people in front of you or behind.  You keep walking, of course, and hope the guys in front breaking trail know where they're going.

One guy had a little MP3 player with an endless supply of classic rock.  We kept trudging across the meadow to Dire Straits' "Industrial Disease".

* * * * *

I'm alone in Pristina all this month.

Alan had to have his tonsils out.  (He really, really did.  When the doctor went in, he found there was already scarring.  The adenoids went too.)  He can't fly for a while after.  So, Claudia and the kids are in Germany until early February, while I'm at work here in Kosovo.

We've done this before.  The usual pattern is, I'm good for a week or two -- more sleep, unlimited internet time, read in bed all I like -- then I start to miss my family and mope.  This time I cut straight to the moping.  Something about the big empty house?  Anyway.

I have a colleague from the office who goes out every weekend with the Prizren Mountaineers Club.  Which is a club of mountaineers based in, yes, Prizren.  Prizren is a small city in southern Kosovo.  Historically it was one of the most diverse corners of the province, with Serbs, Albanians, Turks, Bosniaks and Roma all mixed together.  It's a lot less diverse today, but there are still members of various different groups down there, and it's still an interesing corner of Kosovo with a very distinct identity.

My colleague is considerably younger than I, and she and her husband exercise regularly and are very fit.  So I had my doubts.  On the other hand, spending another Sunday moping around the empty house didn't really appeal.  So, okay, I'll give it a try.

* * * * *

0805 AM, Prizren, 480 meters:  Getting to Prizren from Pristina takes about an hour and a quarter, on a Sunday morning with no traffic.  And then you wait for a bit in a crowded, smoky, steamy little coffee shop, drinking tea and eating [i]burek[/i] while the other members of the Mountaineer's Club drift in.  There was a nice little wood-burning stove which reminded me nostalgically of our stove back in Germany, with a black iron pipe snaking endlessly up into darkness below the roof.  There was a lot of smoking, which is technically not allowed in coffee shops in Kosovo any more.  After a few minutes there was a fender-bender outside -- Prizren has very narrow, cobbled streets.  (Not the mountaineers.  Two random people trying to navigate the streets on a Sunday morning.)  I was wondering how people would handle that.  Very politely, it turns out.

* * * * *

The Mountaineers began as a Yugoslav thing, way back in 1951.  The current leader is the son of the man who founded it.  They climb mostly around Prizren, but with excursions around the region -- Albania, Macedonia -- and occasional trips by small groups abroad, flying the Prizren Mountaineers flag on peaks from Ararat to Kilimanjaro.

There's a mix of ages, but the average age is surprisingly high -- there are a lot of older guys.  ("Older" here meaning older than my fortysomething self.)  Very fit, tough older guys.  At one point I was thinking to myself, I wonder if any of these guys were involved with the KLA during the war?  Sure enough -- at least one of them was.  He would have been about 40 then, and already deeply familiar with every goat trail, side canyon, shepherd's hut, sheltering overhang, and crevasse suitable for hiding (say) a weapons cache within a 20 kilometer radius. 

And at the same time several of the older members expressed nostalgia for Yugoslavia.  They used to travel regularly to Serbia, Bosnia, the Julian Alps.  Kosovo has a lot of mountains, but it's not the same.

* * * * *

1030 AM, ~1300 meters: We were hiking in a state park.  Like a lot of state parks in the region, it has problems.  Some the Mountaineers were ready to talk about, some could simply be seen.  Illegal logging has been a big problem, and there are gashes of erosion down several of the slopes.  Overhunting and poaching... we encountered one group of hunters walking past us, and later heard shots in the far distance.  The park is not very well funded.  The Mountaineers love it, but they don't have a lot of resources.  "Shar Mountain State Park in Kosovo"... man, that's obscure.  Not a lot of tourists, even in summer.

And yet it's beautiful up there.  This January day, the sun kept coming in and out of banks of thick, cold fog.  The snow got deeper as we went higher.  In the distance, the peak of Mount Ljuboten drifted in and out of visibility like a dream.  It's said that Sari Saltik, the legendary dervish, is buried up there.  But then, Sari Saltik is supposedly buried in seven different places.  

* * * * *

Some of the Mountaineers have some English.  We managed to communicate.  They took a lot of pictures.  They were pretty relaxed.  This was -- literally -- a walk in the park for them, a fairly easy 17 km trek through snow a mile or so up.  They do harder hikes than this most weekends, and most of them have been doing so for years.  I nodded a lot and smiled a lot and did my best to keep up.

* * * * *

12:30 PM, ~1650 meters: The last peak was what I think of as a stairmaster, just walking up and up through the snow.  It wasn't a peak so much as a saddleback ridge, with a slope on one side and a sheer dropoff on the other, going several hundred feet down into a deep, narrow valley.  Big masses of cloud or fog drifted slowly up the valley, every so often boiling over the edge.  We spread out in a line and held up the Mountaineers' banner and took pictures of it and each other.  My legs were trembling a little.  I hoped nobody noticed.

* * * * *

The hike started at the village of Novo Selo, which is a village of "Bosniaks", which is to say people who speak Serbian but are Muslim.  I don't know if they have any connection to the Bosniaks of Bosnia, or if they're just people who happened to speak Serbian and be Muslim.  The Balkans are full of these sorts of things.  An Albanian told me the story of a Serb family that lived in Peja:  apparently the ancestor was an Albanian who was a senior and respected servant at the great Orthodox monastery there.  When the Serbs took over Kosovo in 1912, the monks went to him and said, Enver, you've been our loyal servant for many years.  Now Kosovo is Serbia.  Why don't you become a Christian?  Enver thought about it and agreed, and he and his whole family -- sons, grandsons -- got baptized and took Serbicized names.  Everyone knew they were originally Albanians, of course.  I asked what happened to the family three generations later when the war came.  The person I was talking to shrugged, and changed the subject.

* * * * *

2:30 pm, 1300 meters -- We ate at a hunters' lodge.  A couple of mountaineers stayed behind and made a fire in the stove, so it was comfortably warm by the time we got back from the peak.  Everyone insisted that I sit near the stove, which I'm pretty sure was one of those Balkan hospitality things that outsiders have to guess at.  People pulled out sandwiches and cans of tuna bars of chocolate and plastic bottles with new wine in them.  It got very cosy.  I had to struggle not to wolf down my apple, sandwich, and chocolate Hobbit biscuits.  A discussion about politics broke out, got loud, died down.  The lodge used to be the summer house of an important politician, back in Yugoslav times.  There was an empty concrete tank below it that used to hold a fish pond.  At the end the Mountaineers cleaned up meticulously, wiped down the table. 

* * * * *

I walked alongside one of the Mountaineers for a while and we talked about deforestation.  "It started in Ottoman times.  Caravans came through the valley, and the Ottomans were worried about... robbers?"

"Bandits?"

"Yes, bandits.  So they cut down all the trees for a long way on either side of the road, so the bandits would have nowhere to hide."

The Ottomans did the same thing in Jordan, cutting down the country's only belt of forest to get at the bandits that infested the region around the turn of the last century.  As a bonus, they got timber for the sleepers for the railroad to Mecca, later made famous by T.E. Lawrence.  That was the end of Jordan's forest; the topsoil washed down off the hills into the Dead Sea a hundred years ago, and that was that.  The Shar Mountain Park has problems but you can see how with care it could come back.  Things could be worse.

* * * * *

4:00 pm, ~600 meters: Back down to Novo Selo with the day rapidly greying around us.  There had been no birds up on the mountain -- too cold? -- but in the little village there were jays, songbirds, magpies.  I counted six, which I suppose means "gold".  Something was keeping them active around the village.  There didn't seem to be any people out and around, so it was hard to guess what.

And that was my Sunday with the Prizren Mountaineers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kyrgyzstan

I spent most of the month of April in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic in Central Asia.  And now, seven months later, I'm going to blog a little about it!

I liked Kyrgyzstan.   Bishkek, the capital, was very Soviet. Wide streets, huge squares, women sweeping the sidewalks in the gray light of dawn.  It was spring, and I think spring in that part of the world comes on fast -- it was rather chilly when we arrived, four weeks later it was mellow and warm with flowers everywhere. 

Kyrgyzstan is a smallish country that is mostly mountains.  Bishkek sits on the plains some miles north of where the mountains end.  When the air is clear (which, since this is a former Soviet city, it isn't often) you can see the mountains in the distance.  They're the Tien Shan -- a range I'd barely heard of.  But they're huge: five, six thousand meters. Higher than the Alps, steeper than the Rockies. I had no idea.

Kyrgyzstan's economy has three pillars.  One is remittances from Kyrgyz workers who have left the country, mostly for Kazakhstan and Russia.  (That's pretty common across the former Soviet Union -- Moldova was much the same.)  The second is the mining and re-export of gold. While we were there, the gold bubble popped, which caused a certain amount of entirely justified consternation.  The crash in gold prices is going to knock a couple of points off Kyrgystan's GDP this year, and they were pretty poor to begin with.

The third pillar is that Kyrgyzstan  is a major re-export center for Chinese goods. They come across the border on trucks and then get transshipped to Russia and the other Central Asian republics.  At one point in the visit, we went to the "bazaar" outside of town, which combines wholesale and retail.  Whatever image the word "bazaar" conjures up, this didn't much look like it.  It was more like a series of enormous interlinked warehouses covering a couple of hundred hectares.

One section of the bazaar was all Chinese shoes. imagine a metal roof, two or three hundred meters long and maybe 20 meters off the ground. Under it, freight containers in rows two high. The lower containers are mostly retail outlets and/or showcases. The upper row of containers, connected by flimsy catwalks, are wholesale, just filled with shoes.  A million shoes? More? Anyway, enough to hit some critical mass that the whole place had a special smell. glue and leather and plastic and whatever they make soles out of.  You've had a whiff of it in a shoe store but never like this. A Platonic Smell Of Shoe.

Unfortunately, the transshipment business is also not doing so well -- the Chinese are figuring out how to bypass Bishkek, eliminate the middlemen, and sell directly to the Russians and Kazakhs.  So, all in all it's looking like a rocky year or two ahead for the Kyrgyz economy.

What else?  Well, Istopped by the Bishkek train station. It was very Soviet -- reminded me of the one in Chisinau, and also the one in Yerevan.  Apparently the station (along with some 200 km of track) was built by German POWs after WWII. Also, it seems that many of the POWs died in the process, and were dumped in mass graves somewhere in the area. I haven't been able to find any details online, though. There was no monument or memorial, not even a plaque or something, in the train station.  Kyrgyzstan was a back

The Kyrgyz themselves?  I really liked the Kyrgyz.  They're phenotypically very diverse -- Kyrgyz can look like Mongols, like south Chinese, like Turks, or even like South Asians.   But if you speak the language, and self-identify as Kyrgyz, you're Kyrgyz.  (Kyrgyz is a Turkic language.  Everyone is bilingual in Kyrgyz and Russian.)  The folks I met and worked with consistently were friendly, hospitable, and professional.  Kyrgyzstan has all the standard post-Soviet problems, but the people are pleasant and the food is good.  

Last random detail?  The Kyrgyz, like the Mongols, play a game that is basically bocce ball with sheep vertebra. I thought it was a cultural relic that got trotted out for tourists maybe. But no -- walking through a big monument square, there were a bunch of kids and teenagers playing it, and they were obviously deadly serious.

Kyrgyzstan: I really liked it, and would go back any old time.  (And if I do, I won't take seven months to get around to blogging about it.)

In Kosovo

So we're in Kosovo.

A lot has happened in the six month (!) since I last posted here.  The biggest change is, I got a job -- a full-time job on a USAID project -- and it's here in Pristina, Kosovo.  We got the news in early May (just after I got back from a month in Kyrgyzstan; yes, I spent four weeks in Kyrgyzstan and never blogged about it, my bad), I moved down here at the beginning of June, and the family followed in August.  We're currently living in a house on the edge of Pristina, near Germia Park.

There's a lot I could write about Kosovo.  But it kinda feels like I should slowly ease myself back into this blogging thing.  I'm not entirely sure why I stopped.  Facebook, that's certainly part of it -- a lot of the stuff that might have gone into blog posts goes into FB statuses now.  On the other hand, surely there's still room for the occasional long form article about my life and whatever interests me?  Still contemplating this.

So let me just talk briefly about the job thing. I'm actually pretty pleased to be in regular employment again.  I've spent four of the last five years as a freelancer, and while that's been very interesting in all sorts of ways, it's also been kind of a pain in the ass.  Number one, first and foremost, it had me away from my family a lot.  Number two, no benefits -- and when you have four kids, health insurance is a think that you think about a lot.  Number three, it was unpredictable; the Kyrgystan trip, for instance, had me going off to spend most of April in Central Asia at about two weeks' notice.  And number four, while the money was sometimes quite good, at the end of the day working half or even two-thirds time is just not going to lead to putting large sums of money in the bank.  On the plus side, I did get large chunks of downtime at home to hang out with the kids, go on long bicycle rides and work in the yard... nonetheless, it wasn't really how we wanted to be living.

So this job.  Like all USAID project jobs, it's for a fixed period: in this case three years, from May 2013 to April 2016. It's possible I may get another job before then.  It's also possible that come the spring of 2016, I may be back to freelancing again.  TBD.  Meanwhile, I'm working on a lot of contract stuff (very familiar), commercial law stuff (also very familiar) and enforcement of judgments (new). 

The biggest difference between this job and the last two is that I'm not the Chief of Party, the guy in charge of the project.  Someone else is COP; I'm a component manager, one step down.  That has taken some getting used to.  Because of USAID's rather baroque compensation system, I actually get paid exactly the same.  And I'm working less; there's all sorts of COP administrative stuff that I don't have to worry about.  So there's that.  On the other hand, I'm not the boss, and that has taken some getting used to.  But four months in, it seems to be going okay.

So.  I'll try to start blogging at least sort-of regularly for a while; let's see how that goes.  If any of my old readers are still around, welcome back; if you have any questions about Kosovo, or anything else, ask and I'll try to answer.

 

 

 

The Congo again

And I'm sitting in Brussels Airport on a layover after a week back in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It was two and a half years since my last visit.  Not much seemed to have changed.  There's a new business hotel -- the Fleuve -- which is pretty nice, viz., it's actually a functioning business hotel without weird stains on the carpet or stuff falling out of the ceiling.  (Built by Chinese, and a lot of Chinese staff behind the scenes.)  What else... I guess the traffic may be a bit worse.  Otherwise, seems much the same.

I'm working with the US Department of Defense, which is interesting in its own way.  Topic for another post, maybe.  I did get to visit some interesting places!  The Congolese Ministry of Defense, for instance, which sits on a hill with a spectacular view overlooking the city and the river.  The country's main military logistics base, which was interesting if a bit depressing.  Lots of ancient machinery -- including some fascinating old machine tools from the colonial era -- and hundreds of broken vehicles, mostly trucks. 

Oh, and Mobutu's Cadillacs. Mobutu Sese Seko, who was absolute dictator of the Congo (then "Zaire") for nearly 30 years? His black stretch Caddies with the bulletproof armor.  Well, what was left of them. They're junk -- flat tires, gutted engines. Still damn impressive, though. Henry Kissinger rode in them, back in the day, and Mohammed Ali.  I guess they're still official government vehicles, and you never know when you might need a part from an old Caddy.

In my last post, I mentioned that I'd been researching US assistance to the Congo and Zaire.  There used to be US troops in Zaire!  A few hundred of them.  "Trainers".  Their mission was called ZAMISH and it lasted several years.  No lasting effect, and almost completely forgotten today.  Makes you thoughtful.

What else.  Well, munitions and ammunition are not stored very well in Congo.  That's a problem across a lot of Africa, actually.  There have been some spectacular munitions explosions in the last few years.  One of the worst took place just last year, in 2012.  It was in Brazzaville -- right across the Congo river from Kinshasa.  It was big enough that it broke windows in Kinshasa, even though the river is over half a mile wide there.  So, it's a fairly pressing issue.

(There's a theory that these blasts happen because there's a lot of pilfering at the arms depots, and when an inspector or someone gets close to the truth, someone decides to eliminate the evidence.  The Brazzaville blast killed at least 250 people, so I'd kinda like to think that wasn't true.  No way to know for sure.)

Hm, what else.  Learned a lot about Congo's state of military readiness, but I probably shouldn't talk about that.  Let's see... well, there's a big east/west divide in Congo's military right now.  (This is public knowledge.)  Mobutu didn't have a professional military -- ha ha, no -- but his Force Armee Zaire, or FAZ, had a lot of guys who had been trained in the US or Europe.  FAZ's senior generals were all kleptocrats who had no interest in anything as gauche as fighting a war, but at the middle-officer level there were a fair number of guys who were, by African standards, pretty competent.  When Kabila invaded from the east in 1997 (with Rwandan support, which is another long story in its own right), FAZ fell apart like wet tissue paper; most troops hadn't been paid in months or years, the ammunition and supplies had long since been stolen and sold on the black market, and there was no will left to fight for an utterly corrupt and discredited regime.  But that doesn't mean there was no value in FAZ; as noted above, there were some guys who were competent-ish and willing to do their jobs.  Just, not enough of them and they weren't allowed to do much.

So the east-west thing: FAZ was dominated by Lingala-speakers from western Congo.  But Kabila was coming in from the east, where he'd spent more than thirty years (!) in the bush or across the border in Uganda or Rwanda.  And in the east, they're all Swahili speakers.  So when Kabila took power, he installed Swahili speakers from his army in all the key positions. And they -- and in some cases their sons; it's been a while since 1997, after all -- are still there today.

The Swahili-speaking guys were, at best, competent guerrillas.  (At worst they were thugs.)  None had any idea how to run a modern military.  So that echelon of lower and middle level FAZ officers was kept on, because they were the ones who could actually make stuff work.  Many of them are still around today, though they're getting old.  So if you want to find (say) a professional logistician in the modern Congolese military, good chance it's some FAZ guy who has been a major for the last 20 years.  And who is going to retire soon, so someone really should be training up some new ones.

There's more to say about the Congo, but they're calling my flight to Frankfurt.  (Five and a half hour layover in Brussels airport, done.  That's the second time this year I've slept on an airport floor.)

 

From the State Department Archives

And I'm back in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a week.

So  I was doing a little bit of research on US assistance to the Congo.  There's actually a longish history -- we've been sending various forms of aid here for nearly sixty years now -- so it seemed worth at least checking to see whether anyone else had already attempted what we're trying to do.  I didn't get a firm answer on that, but and I did run across some mildly interesting old documents from the 1970s.

A bit of background for those of you who aren't history nerds: from 1962 to 1997, the Congo -- renamed "Zaire" -- was run by a dictator named Mobutu Sese Seko.  Mobutu ran his country into the ground.  At the end of his term, Congo was poorer than it had been when he took power, 35 years earlier.  16 years after he was chased out of power, the country is still suffering the consequences of his misrule; Congo remains one of the poorest countries in the world. 

But whatever else you can say about Mobutu, he was very, very good at getting money and military assistance from the US.  He was a major aid recipient for three decades, give or take.  Why?  Well, mostly because he was very good at gaming our fear of Communism and its spread in Africa. 

Anyway.  These are from "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-76, Volume E-6, Documents on Africa, 1973-76.  I think, taken together, they tell a story.  Maybe  not interesting to anyone but a fellow history nerd, but what the hey. 

Guinea

So I'm in Guinea this week.

Guinea is a small French-speaking country in West Africa, and it's not someplace I'd ever really planned on going.  But that's the nature of this business, and (sometimes) its charm.  The work is unexpected, too -- I'm contracting to the US Department of Defense this time, as part of a team that's assessing the needs of the civilian Ministry of Defense.  (Turns out the Ministry of Defense has a lot of needs.)

My impressions of Guinea are pretty light, because this has been one of those assignments where I go from airport to hotel and then back and forth from hotel to Ministry, period.  Well, sometimes that happens.  The Embassy is discouraging Americans from wandering around Conakry alone just now.

Guinea is a poor place even by West African standards.  That seems to be mostly for historical reasons.  Way back in 1958, DeGaulle offered independence to the French colonies of West Africa... but on France's terms: monetary union and continuing French influence on their military and political structures.  Most of the new nations -- Senegal, Mali, and the rest of them -- said yes.  Guinea said "Non!"  De Gaulle promptly withdrew all French assistance and colonial bureaucrats and technicians (who, by all accounts, sabotaged a fair amount of Guinea's infrastructure on the way out).  Guinea was thrown on its own devices.  It became sort of the Albania of West Africa -- Communist, isolationist, and fiercely nationalistic.  Africa nerds may be aware of some of the odd bits of subsequent Guinean history (the Portuguese raid from nearby Guinea-Bissau in 1970, with the goal of killing the Guinean President), but we'll skip over a lot of that.  They had a dictator for 26 years; he died; they got another dictator; the USSR collapsed; after 1991 their economy hit the skids; the second dictator abandoned socialism in the middle 1990s and gradually moved towards a mixed economy.

Then in late 2008 the second dictator died.  A military junta immediately took over.  The junta lasted a couple of years but couldn't stay in power, so they held elections.  A guy who had been in opposition since forever -- like, the Nixon administration -- unexpectedly won.  He's been president for a couple of years now.  Guinea still doesn't have a legislature, but they do seem to be well embarked on a fragile, tentative transition to something like democracy.

So, the poor part: Guinea had all the standard socialist mismanagement problems on top of the usual African stuff.  Like most West African countries, it exports just a couple of things (bauxite ore, corundum, a bit of coffee) and imports almost everything.  It's not a member of WAEMU, the West African monetary union, and the Guinean franc is not exactly one of the world's harder currencies.  Only about 10% of the country has electricity, and much of that irregularly.  (The lights go out in our little hotel several times a day.  There's a generator.)

To make things more complicated, Guinea is in one of the world's nastier geopolitical neighborhoods.  Guinea has six neighbors and they all either have major problems, or have had them in the recent past.  Senegal has a nasty separatist movement in its southern provinces, which border Guinea.  Mali, as you probably know if you watch much TV, is having a civil war right now.  Ivory Coast had a civil war the year before last.  (France intervened in that one, too.)  Sierra Leone and Liberia both saw protracted civil wars and horrifying bloodbaths in the last decade.  And little Portuguese-speaking Guinea Bissau is basically a narco-kleptocracy, a corrupt and violent ministate run by gangsters and drug lords.  So, a rough neighborhood. 

Remarkably, despite all these regional problems, Guinea has remained a relative -- I probably should emphasize this -- relative island of peace and stability.  There have been some unpleasant episodes, most notably in 2009 when the military junta responded to proests with mass shootings, lootings, and rapes.  But compared to the last 20 years in Sierra Leone or Liberia, Guinea has on the whole been pretty pacific.

So what's it like?  Well... tropical and hot.  Conakry seems to be a vast sprawl of city without any perceptible downtown.  (There are some big socialist ministry-looking buildings, but around them it's the same sprawl.)  The people seem friendly enough.  Everyone speaks French.  The coffee at breakfast is pretty good for coffee in Africa.  (Many African countries export the good stuff.)  My hotel room doesn't have a toilet seat but one gets used to that.  The hotel is owned by Lebanese; one of my teammates thinks they're likely Hezbollah folks doing a bit of money laundering.  (My teammates are all former military intelligence guys and don't seem much given to macho fantasizing; this particular guy spent several years in Lebanon.  So, maybe.  He didn't seem too worried about it, so I guess I'm not either.) 

I flew down here via Casablanca.  Was recovering from a really nasty head cold (antibiotics, go), so the first day or so was a little blurry.  Wish I had more chances to walk around, or at least look at a clear night sky -- I miss the tropical stars.  But I have seen a lot of cool-looking lizards, and some no-kidding bald-headed vultures hanging out on the beach waiting for garbage, and those neat little West African weaver birds that make the little hanging ball-shaped nests.

I've been spending a lot of time every day with the Guinean military, who are, under the circumstances, pretty professional.  They're surprisingly cool about the fact that they were running the country a few years ago and no longer are.  (Yes, I understand that they may not be telling the foreigner how they really feel.  But for the most part, they just don't seem that nostalgic for the golden years of junta rule.)  They all shave their heads and speak good French.  Most of them seem pretty sharp.  Certainly they've been very patient with me.

I leave late tomorrow night, so if you have any questions about Guinea, ask now.

 

 

 

Juicing season

We got our apples juiced today.

I think I mentioned a while back that we have some apple trees -- five in the back yard, one in the front.  Well, this was a good year for apples.  We have apples.  We brought a hundred and twenty kilos to the juicery, and that was after throwing at least that many away on the compost heap.  (In retrospect, I was probably too picky.  The juicer doesn't worry much about bruises or the occasional worm.)

Picking apples is pleasant exercise; you bend down a lot, then you shake the tree, then you bend down some more.  You whack the tree with sticks.  You send small boys up the tree to shake the higher branches.  You carry buckets of apples around from here to there.  I can imagine that if we had more apple trees it would quickly grow tedious, but we have just five, which means it's just a couple of hours of work, done in ten- or fifteen-minute intervals over a few days: let's go out and collect some apples.

 

Golsfortiyeva 16

I'm back in Belgrade for a couple of weeks.  Short-term work.

I took the opportunity to look up our old house on Golsfortiyeva street.  (That's the Serbianized version of "Galsworthy", by the way.  The street was named back in Communist days, after the English author of social novels.)  The street has changed so much -- new shops, repainted facades, a completely new shopping center on the corner -- that I couldn't find our house at first.  I had to ask Claudia for the house number, then go back a second time.

As it happened, the front door to the apartment had been left a little ajar.  Our house was built in the apartment's internal courtyard.  (There was some sort of obscure, long-lasting property dispute about this.  We never really got the details.)  It was a small thing, more like a bungalow -- two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room and a living room.  It seemed big enough for us, back when we had just a single small child.  I remember it as being painted bright cheerful colors, yellow and blue.  There was a large glass skylight which let in a lot of sunshine (very pleasant in winter) and that made rainfall so loud that conversation was almost impossible. 

Walking in through the apartment building, one goes up a few steps, then down a few more to reach the courtyard.  (I had a sudden physical memory of lifting the stroller with Alan in it up and down those steps.) The courtyard was empty except for a Siamese cat, probably belonging to the artist who lived in the other house in the courtyard.  (Still there, as far as I can tell -- there was a sign saying "Galerija", or gallery.)  The front steps that Alan fell down nine years ago were exactly the same. 

The house looked a little faded and run-down -- I had the impression of some years of deferred maintenance.  I considered knocking on the door but, honestly, I've lost almost all my Serbian -- and what would I say, really?  "I lived in this house nine, ten years ago.  We had some good times here."  And anyway, I remembered pretty well what it was like inside -- kitchen over there (with the tiny balcony behind it), living room with two overstuffed chairs and a couch over there, the bathroom with the swirly bath upstairs.  No point in bothering the current tenants.

Life goes on.