Next trip: Israel

Posted on 2015-02-28 by Andreas Moser

From 8 to 22 March 2015, I will be in Israel.

“… I will be in Israel again,” I should say because this will be about my fifteenth or twentieth time to visit Israel. But six years have passed since my last trip.

Why go to the same country so often? Because Israel is not only beautiful, but above all interesting, versatile and multi-faceted, because I learn something new each time. And because discussions about war and peace, about the future and identity of a nation are more interesting than those about the debt ceiling or a Royal baby.

Here is the schedule of my trip:

I will spend the first few days in Haifa. The third city after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is too easily forgotten. I have never spent more than a few hours there, which seems inappropriately brief. That’s why this Israel trip will kick off in Haifa.

Bahai garden Haifa 2

Then I continue to Jerusalem where I will run the half marathon on 13 March 2015. Not an easy feat in this hilly city, but hopefully a very special experience.

Jerusalem dome of the rocks

Then I will go hiking in northern Israel. I will walk the Jesus Trail (as an Atheist) and part of the Israel National Trail. This is my itinerary:

13 March 2015: going to Nazareth, the starting point of my hike

14 March 2015: hiking to Cana

15 March 2015: hiking to Ilaniya and Arbel

16 March 2015: hiking to Tabgha and Capernaum

17/18 March 2015: election night and resting in Tiberias (if resting won’t feel right: circumventing the Sea of Galilee by bike)

19 March 2015: hiking to Kibbutz Kinneret and Kibbutz Degania (the first kibbutz ever)

20/21 March 2015: hiking back to Nazareth across Mount Tabor

Capernaum

I had to drop my original plan of spending a few days in Jordan. I would have needed a pre-arranged visa for the border crossing at Allenby/King-Hussein-Bridge and the Jordanian Embassy in Bucharest ignored all of my e-mails. Going to any of the other border crossings would mean spending a whole day on a bus. Sad, particularly because my visa fee would have financed the fight against ISIS.

For those of you in Israel: Here is my Couchsurfing profile with plenty of reviews, so that you can be sure that I am a friendly and uncomplicated guest.

(Diese Ankündigung gibt es auch auf Deutsch.)

Posted in Israel, Jordan, Travel | Tagged | 13 Comments

It began with dense fog. (Part 1)

Posted on 2015-02-27 by Andreas Moser

Mount Dinnammare sits 1,130 meters (3,700 feet) above the port city of Messina and offers splendid views across the strait of Scylla and Charybdis, to Calabria, across the mountains of Sicily and on both the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian Sea. After having just arrived by ferry from the Italian mainland, you can drive up the winding road for about half an hour, crossing several different zones of vegetation on the way, in order to gain a first impression of the diversity of the Mediterranean’s largest island.

These are the views that you enjoy from here:

Meerenge

Blick von Dinnammare

Dinnammare Bäume

Etna from DinnamareWhen I first went up to Dinnammare, I saw cyclists who had just completed the mountainous ascent. They didn’t even look too exhausted.

There is a small pilgrimage church at the summit.

Dinnamare church-001

When my mother and sister visited me in Sicily, I obviously wanted to take them to this fantastic place. Because both of them had no trust in my driving skills, it was my sister who sped up the serpentine road in our Fiat. It was early in the morning, the hilltops were still engulfed in fog, but we thought that it was going to clear up. Instead, the fog became denser, grayer, wetter, colder and darker.

On that day in March, the pilgrimage church looked like this:

Dinnammare fog

Naturally, that was a huge disappointment. The intended hike did not only fall through, it was swallowed up by the fog. We stuck around for another 15 chilly and damp minutes, hoping that the fog would clear. But it didn’t.

Thus, we turned around and went down the mountain at a crawl for lack of visibility. Below the zone of the fog, we stopped to make up for our cancelled hike at a different, unknown location.

In the middle of the forest we discovered something which we had never hoped to discover, not least because we hadn’t even known of its existence. Disappointment turned into a surprise.

(Continue with part 2. – Hier geht es zur deutschen Fassung dieses Texts.)

Posted in Italy, Photography, Sicily, Travel | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Top 10 Ethical Travel Destinations? I doubt that.

Posted on 2015-02-27 by Andreas Moser

I don’t know why people need lists with suggestions for travel destinations. Do people really sit at home without any idea and wait for “the top 10 travel destinations in 2015”, “the most underrated travel destinations this year” and “the best 10 beaches in 2015”? I doubt that. If you have ever looked at a map and seen photos from other countries, you have some kind of idea where you want to go and what is reachable, both geographically and financially.

These lists range somewhere between unnecessary, boring and annoying.

My curiosity was however raised when I read about “the world’s ten best ethical destinations for 2015”. As you know from my travel writing, I am not one of those shallow sunset-and-beach travelers, but I am quite curious about the political, social, economic and environmental situation of the countries I visit and live in.

When I saw the list, I was surprised:

  • Cabo Verde
  • Chile
  • Dominica
  • Lithuania
  • Mauritius
  • Palau
  • Samoa
  • Tonga
  • Uruguay
  • Vanuatu

Seven of these are islands, to which most people would fly, thus causing a lot of CO2 to be blown into the atmosphere. That already made me wonder about the methodology behind this list. Did they not consider the environment? But they do. Going through the reasoning behind the list, the creators mention some numbers, mostly goals for renewable energy, or an organic farm here or there.

Maybe you can swim there?

Maybe you can swim there?

But what’s the point of an island far away in the Pacific trying to work with renewable energy when travelers are encouraged to visit it by a fuel-burning plane?

This is a general criticism against such a list because whether a trip to anywhere will be ethical by environmental standards obviously depends on the place from which one sets off. I am in Europe at the moment, so it will be quite environmentally friendly to take the train to Budapest. That doesn’t make Budapest an ethical travel destination if everyone else flies in from Australia or South America.

Having said that, picking islands which are very far away from most people still seems to be the most stupid of all available choices. Curiously enough, the study even says: “Climate change affects islands dramatically, so they tend to be very aware of the importance of effective environmental policies.” Yeah, but the makers of the study are apparently not aware of simple geography or of how planes work.

The follow-up sentence “Chile and Uruguay are the only two mainland winners” suggests a problem with geography, because where is Lithuania? It’s not an island, that much I can tell you.

The inconsistencies continue: “Latvia became the second Baltic state to achieve status as a ‘developed country’ and therefore is no longer eligible for our list. In 2014 Latvia changed its national currency to the Euro.” Well, I’ve got news for you: Lithuania has the Euro as well. Was it not a problem in this case because you don’t regard it as a “developed country”? Having lived in Lithuania for a year I can assure you that it is quite developed.

Still, Lithuania maybe shouldn’t be on a list of “ethical travel destinations” because of its reluctance to accept gay travelers. Some of the countries on the list, Dominica, Mauritius, Samoa and Tonga, still have criminal laws penalizing same-sex relations. How is this ethical? The producers of the study respond: “because these laws are very rarely (if ever) enforced, the countries were not disqualified” How comforting for those rare cases in which they are enforced and for all others who have to live in constant fear of being harassed, arrested, beaten up or prosecuted.

This list is a complete load of bullshit!

Posted in Human Rights, Lithuania, Philosophy, Politics, Travel | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

What do Love Locks say about your Relationship?

Posted on 2015-02-27 by Andreas Moser

Why do people use love locks as a symbol for their relationship?

Uzupis bridge locks 1They symbolize lack of freedom. Prisoners and kidnapped children are rotting behind doors closed with locks like these. You use them for your basement to store stuff that you never need anymore, but which you don’t want anyone else to take either. These locks are used to close the barn door to keep the cattle in, so that the cows and the sheep won’t escape slaughter.

Throwing away the key is even worse. It’s the nonverbal way of saying: “That’s it. You are no longer in control of your own life. You are going to die here, no matter what.”

You would never use a lock for somebody whom you truly cherish and respect, in whose liberty you believe and whom you trust.

Think!

Posted in Life, Lithuania, Love, Photography | Tagged , , , | 23 Comments

Wow, this ship is huge!

Posted on 2015-02-26 by Andreas Moser

When you walk or drive along Via Giuseppe Garibaldi in Messina, a wide road running parallel to the shore and the port, you could at first sight believe that there is another row of multi-storey buildings behind the ones you’re passing by. Only at second sight do you notice that these massive structures which are twice as high as the buildings in that area are actually cruise ships.

cruise ship between houses Messina

Here is another one entering the port and overshadowing all the buildings in the vicinity.

cruise ship harbour Messina

If you know that the tower of the Cathedral is around 60 meters high, you get a sense for the measurements of that boat. It’s huge.

cruise ship cathedral Messina

Not only are these boats huge, but they also house thousands of passengers, which they spew out for day trips at each of their stops around the Mediterranean Sea. That day in Messina, I was lucky enough to meet two of its passengers, a friendly couple from Canada, who told me about their cruise around the Mediterranean and made the idea of a cruise quite palatable, even more so when I heard that it’s less expensive than I had always thought. That, and I just couldn’t forget the sight of the water slide on top of the ship.

(Photographed in Messina, Sicily, Italy.)

Posted in Italy, Photography, Sicily, Travel | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Medininkai

Posted on 2015-02-25 by Andreas Moser

Most people only visit the small village of Medininkai to climb Lithuania’s two highest mountains. I didn’t stay long either after my mountain tour, but I still paid a visit to the wooden church and the castle.

wooden church 1wooden church 2wooden church 3The church was closed. From the announcements next to the door I could see that this community is mostly Polish-speaking.

The castle was closed as well, but in this case it meant that the gate was open, but nobody was available to sell tickets or to explain something about the history.

castle gate

castle insideThe castle with a perfectly square layout was built in the 13th  or 14th century to serve as protection against the Teutonic Knights. These successors of the crusaders waged a war against Lithuania which lasted for more than 100 years. That Lithuania was the last country in Europe which had not yet been Christianized was a welcome pretext for a battle about territory.

The last time that Medininkai rose to sad prominence was on 31 July 1991 when Soviet troops attacked the Lithuanian border post and killed seven Lithuanian police officers. No wonder that Lithuania aspired to become a member of NATO.

(Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels.)

Posted in Lithuania, Photography, Travel | Tagged | 2 Comments

The bird doesn’t care what you did

Posted on 2015-02-25 by Andreas Moser

You may have done great things in life. Maybe you are a hero. Maybe you are famous. There might be a statue erected for you on a bridge in Edinburgh.

soldiers statue Edinburgh

Then a bird will come and shit on top of your head. It won’t care what you did or who you are. To the bird, you are like any other human being, in fact like any other animal or like a stone or a piece of wood.

bird shitting on statueThink!

Posted in Life, Philosophy, Photography, Scotland, Travel, UK | Tagged | 5 Comments

Castelbuono

Posted on 2015-02-23 by Andreas Moser

DSCN9072

DSCN9078 DSCN9080 DSCN9084 DSCN9086

matrice nuova Castelbuono sky DSCN9088 DSCN9092

DSCN9093

mit Kamera auf Burg

Posted in Italy, Photography, Sicily, Travel | Tagged | 3 Comments

The effects of FATCA?

Posted on 2015-02-22 by Andreas Moser

For more than 10 years, I have been helping clients to obtain German citizenship. Those who have German parents, grand-parents or further removed ancestors either are German already (often without knowing it) or eligible for naturalization under less strict conditions than other applicants.

Those who have no such family ties have to meet a set of criteria for naturalization, similar to that in most countries: residence in Germany between 3 to 8 years (although there is an exception to that), German language skills, a citizenship test, lack of a criminal record, the ability to support yourself financially and so on. Regular stuff, nothing surprising.

But then there is one thing where German citizenship law is rather old-fashioned: it requires many applicants to give up the citizenship which they already hold. Of course there are a number of exceptions to this, for law needs to remain complicated in order to sustain thousands of my colleagues.

For clients from Ghana, Haiti or Pakistan, this usually doesn’t pose a problem. But until 2010, I had never had a US-American client who would have given up their citizenship, even if they wanted to live in Germany or Europe for the rest of their life. An American passport seemed to be something sacred, not merely a travel document that you fill with stamps.

passport cut in half

This is actually not how you renounce your citizenship.

This has changed in the past couple of years. There still aren’t many, but I receive a steady trickle of e-mails from US citizens who wish to obtain German (or any other European) citizenship and who don’t mind losing their US citizenship in the process. Apparently, this is part of a wider trend. In 2014, a record number of 3,415 Americans renounced their citizenship, a sevenfold increase compared to a decade ago. And this is just the number of people of whom the US Treasury Department knows.

The timing and anecdotal evidence suggest to me that it does have something to do with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act FATCA, which requires foreign banks to report accounts held by US citizens to the US Treasury. There is more paperwork, checking and reporting involved, both for the US citizen and for the foreign bank. Some banks in Europe have reportedly told US citizens that they won’t open bank accounts for them anymore because of the paperwork (and possible criminal and civil liability) involved.

Unlike most other countries, the US taxes its citizens’ income regardless of where in the world it is earned. You may think of that what you want (I wouldn’t like it myself), but if there is an obligation to pay taxes, I can understand that the Treasury wants to follow up on that and try to combat or at least limit tax avoidance. I wish some other countries’ treasury departments would be only half as tough.

We should also put things into perspective: 779,929 people got naturalized in the US in 2013.

Posted in Economics, German Law, Immigration Law, Law, Politics, USA | Tagged , , | 23 Comments

Why I don’t play the Lottery

Posted on 2015-02-22 by Andreas Moser

Because it’s a Soviet scam, a Communist charade:

Soviet lottery Grutas Parkas

In the novel Twelve Chairs, Ilja Ilf and Evgeny Petrov describe how the Soviet Union organized steamship tours, accompanied by orchestras and dance groups, whose goal it was to get people to sign up to lottery bonds. Apparently, trains were used for the same purpose.

(Photographed at Grutas Park in Lithuania.)

Posted in Books, Economics, History, Lithuania, Photography, Travel | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments