The Happy Hermit

The German passport is the best – and the worst – passport in the world

Posted on 2017-12-31 by Andreas Moser

For world travelers, the German passport is the most useful passport: 177 countries can be visited without a visa or with only a visa on arrival. That saves money, time, effort and uncertainty. While holders of other passports are running from consulate to consulate with a stack of paperwork, the German explorer is already on the plane to Tuvalu or Mongolia. That usefulness might explain the desire of many to obtain a German passport.

Since February 2017 it’s possible to travel to Belarus without a visa (albeit only for a short stay), leaving Russia as the only country in Europe for which we Germans need a visa. But even here, I have a tip for you: student visas for Russia are issued free of charge. So if you conceal the real purpose of your trip (Transsiberian Railway) and claim a wish to study at the Obninsk Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering instead, you will save 60 euros. (“This blog saves real money and deserves our support!”, the excited readership is proclaiming in the author’s dreams.)

visa Russia.JPG

But the German passport has more advantages. Even in countries granting visa-free entry to other nationalities, one is often better treated with a German passport. In South America, for example, I heard a few times that US-Americans were turned back at the border because they didn’t have a vaccination certificate. I had one, but never had to show it. There simply is more anti-Americanism than anti-Germanism in the world. In Bolivia, I once sat in the park in Sucre when the police checked the passports of all foreign-looking people, recalculated the days spent under their tourist visas and asked a few guys to come with them (they were Argentinian, I believe). When I handed over my passport, the police officer only asked “Alemania?” and handed it back when I answered in the affirmative. (My visa had already expired and I was staying in Bolivia illegally.)

Especially in the Middle East, a German passport allows for much more relaxed travel than a US-American, let alone an Israeli passport. Just compare how long innocent US-Americans or Britons are kept in prison in Iran and that I (not quite as innocent) was released after only one week. The Iranian judge explicitly referred to the close historical ties between Iran and Germany: “After all, we are both Aryans.”

Even in regions rife with conflict, as a German, one is hardly ever targeted, if only because German arms companies are providing both sides with weapons. Another tip: print yourself a Heckler & Koch business card, and you will be treated like royalty anywhere from Homs to Kabul.

But the German passport also has a decisive drawback. Notwithstanding all the hype about “German quality”, it really is very lousily manufactured, almost like that job has been outsourced to China. Cornflakes and chocolate can easily be enjoyed way past their end date (yes, I tried), but the German passport will never last for the 10-year warranty period, at least not if you travel intensively.

This summer, I already had problems entering Armenia because the fabric cover was coming off and the meticulously checking border guards couldn’t believe that this would happen to a genuine German passport. And now, coming to Montenegro, the plastic card became loose. What’s the point of all the electronic chips, fingerprints and biometric photos if the Federal Printing Office doesn’t even use proper glue?

Reisepass kaputt.JPG

It has to be noted that this passport hasn’t yet reached the 60% mark of the promised lifespan.

The border guard at Podgorica Airport called a colleague and then his boss, all of whom again expressed the allegation that this passport was a forgery. (Why anyone should produce such a low-quality forgery, I don’t know.) They told me that I couldn’t enter the country like this, that I would need to wait at the airport and would be returned to Germany with the next plane. (Which is a weird threat to a person accused of somehow not being a real German, but that’s not Montenegro’s problem.)

Only due to my convincing and polite manner, pointing out that I had already rented an apartment for two and a half months, that I had been to Montenegro once before and that ever since it has become my heart’s dearest desire to spend more time in Europe’s most beautiful country, I finally received the coveted entry stamp. But now I will probably really have to apply for a new passport, or I will one day be stuck in the no man’s land between Macedonia and Kosovo or be refused re-entry into Schengen at the Hungarian border fence.

(Zur deutschen Version dieses Artikels.)

Posted in Germany, Travel | Tagged German citizenship, German passport, passport | 12 Comments

Don’t blame the messenger!

Posted on 2017-12-27 by Andreas Moser

This kind of job always ended up with me.

Maybe I didn’t put up enough of a fight. Maybe my silent and thoughtful manner got mistaken for sadness, thought to be a suitable attribute for this particular line of work. Maybe it was the fact that I had been sent on similar missions in the past, from which I had returned unscathed, at least outwardly, each time. Maybe I had never quite shaken off the aura of my cover in Ecuador, where I had been a priest. Or maybe even I thought that I was the best person to do it.

“Moser will go,” Fletcher summed up the consensus. The nature of the mission suggested that this order meant to go immediately. “Take Williams with you,” the boss said in lieu of wishing me good luck, which, in any case, might have been an inappropriate farewell on yet another mission for Queen and country.

Not that I needed a partner, but it was a rule. The reason for that rule, if ever there been one, I didn’t remember. Maybe the office was concerned that the bearer of bad news would be assaulted. Personally, I was more worried about freshly widowed ladies throwing themselves into my arms. Women sometimes did crazy things in my presence.

There are probably some theories as to whether it is easier depending on one having known or not having known the deceased and/or his wife. (Equality had not yet spread enough that I ever had to visit a surviving husband or same-sex partner.) In this case, I knew Grier, had worked with him, had even developed a professional friendship. I didn’t know his wife, but knew that they had children. I just hoped that they were either at school at this time of the day or too young to understand anything. For the thousandth time in my life, I wondered why anyone would want children.

While I was pondering these thoughts, Williams did his job as best as he could, it has to be pointed out: by silently walking next to me, helpfully, almost subserviently pushing the button at each pedestrian crossing on the short walk to the other side of the river, where Grier had lived but never invited me home. It was a professional deformation of sorts, to not let anybody too close into what little was left of our private lives.

I cleaned the sweat from my hands with a handkerchief before I pressed the bell for “Grier”. At least they wouldn’t need to take off his first name.

The woman who opened the door was dressed too neat for a housewife and had a friendly, seemingly genuine smile. “Yes?”, she inquired. She had no idea.

“Mrs Grier, we are from your husband’s work. Could we come inside for a minute?” Often, it really didn’t take longer. Less time than you need to get rid of Jehova’s Witnesses.

“Would you mind if I called him first?”, she asked, expressing first signs of disconcertment.

“I am afraid that is no longer possible,” I replied, almost thankful to her for giving me this opportunity to break the news. “That is what we wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh no,” her right hand covering her open mouth too late to hide two gold teeth in the back. She beckoned us to enter and advance to the living room, where we sat on the couch without removing our coats.

“Mrs Grier, we are very sorry to inform you that your husband had an accident this morning.” She didn’t ask, so I had to go on, unprompted. “He did not survive it.”

With two strangers sitting in one’s flat, people rarely burst into tears or other drama. Mrs. Grier kind of fell together, becoming smaller, paler, grayer, older, frailer from one second to the next. Again, she clasped her mouth, lowering her head and her gaze. Behind her, on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, I spotted a family portrait. A man, a woman and two girls.

The last thing I wanted to do was to prolong our presence in the home of a family that had endured an unexpected loss. Well, as unexpected as it could be, working for the intelligence service.

Which led me to the most delicate part of the conversation. “Mrs Grier, what exactly did your husband tell you about his work?”

“Why, he talked about it all the time.” Her face brightened up a bit, as both Williams and me must have looked as shocked as if we, too, had died that morning. “He likes the children, and he loves teaching French. He adores everything about France.”

Williams looked as if he was about to get sick and I too wanted to get out of that flat as quickly as possible. While Grier’s position had obviously required a high degree of confidentiality, it was actually none of the jobs that asked for the invention of a complete cover for the agent’s family. Such jobs were reserved for bachelors, as I knew only too well.

But there was one last thing.

“That photo behind you, was that also taken in France?”, I asked.

“Yes, we were in Brittany this summer,” she sighed, the memory bringing a flicker of joy into her gray-blue eyes.

“Well,” I got up. “I am really sorry,” I said, “to be the one having to do this job,” I thought.

By the time we left the flat, it had begun to snow, as if to symbolize that the few minutes had aged me by months. But I needed to walk. And to think. And to make a decision.

“Did you know Grier?”, I asked Williams.

“No,” he said, sounding dutifully sad, having missed the chance to work with one of our finest men.

That gave me ten more minutes to come up with a decision.

The man on the photograph wasn’t Grier. At least not the Grier I had known and whose body had been found this morning on a bench on the Curonian Spit, close to the border between Lithuania and Kaliningrad. Frozen to death, but possibly poisoned. To add pressure to problems, if the real Grier was a teacher, he would be home in a few hours.

Thankfully, Williams was still quiet.

(This story was also published in Medium.)

Posted in Travel | Tagged espionage | 7 Comments

Film Review: “The Pirates of Somalia”

Posted on 2017-12-27 by Andreas Moser

The story of a young graduate who wants to become a hot-shot journalist, receives the advice

“you wanna make it as some big-swinging dick journalist, you gotta go somewhere fucking crazy”

and goes to Somalia to learn and write about pirates is fascinating, not least because it’s the true story of Canadian journalist Jay Bahadur.

Sadly though, the movie The Pirates of Somalia distorts this feat of reporting into an unrealistic (TV stations admitting on air that they have absolutely no sources? the Canadian journalist having a flirtatious affair with the drug-dealing wife of the pirate mastermind?) slapstick film, with Evan Peters playing a buffoon character out of a high-school comedy. Each time he pleads how important it is that the world learns what is happening in Somalia, one wonders why the much more competent Somali journalists can’t do that job.

The stupid dream scenes, some of them in Quentin-Tarantino-rip-off manga style, discredit the film completely.

After the movie, I watched an interview with Jay Bahadur to see if he was really as clueless and dim as portrayed by Evan Peters, and – no surprise – he isn’t:

The smartest thing is probably to read Mr Bahadur’s book The Pirates of Somalia: Inside their Hidden World and remember that not all books need to be turned into films.

Posted in Cinema | Tagged Cinema, journalism, movies, Somalia | 3 Comments

Random Thoughts (19)

Posted on 2017-12-23 by Andreas Moser

But what will become of James Bond if we don’t tolerate sexual harassment anymore?
Trying to cash in on crypto-currencies, I have now invested all my savings in Paypal.
I always find it strange when people say “I am writing an eBook”, as if form matters more than substance. On the same note, I find it fishy when people say “I am studying for a master’s”, without mentioning the subject.
In Romania, you notice in the streets that the big Christmas dinner is near. (photo by Bogdan Gabriel Nitu, hat tip to Valentina Dimulescu)
– Hey Andreas, how easy is the language in Montenegro?
– Well, the language calls itself “crnogorski književnojezički izraz srpskohrvatskoga ili hrvatskosrpskoga jezika”.
– Oh.
I have actually never been influenced by an “influencer”.
From Wikipedia:
“Smoking in public places is prohibited in Montenegro, unless you obtain a smoking permit from the government.”
So where do I get this permit to smoke on top of a mountain?
Thanks to Daniel Kehlmann’s wonderful novel Measuring the World, Alexander von Humboldt became even more popular than he already was. But this BBC podcast points out that one of the other scientists in the book, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, is just as interesting.
How to get rid of fake friends. (I am the blue part in the conversation, of course.)
If you find life in North Korea interesting, but you are more of a listener than a reader, here is a recent interview with Barbara Demick.
Communism is on the march, at least in Nepal. The recent elections were won by the Unified Marxist Leninists and by the Maoist Center.
More German language porn: Verkehrswegeplanungsbeschleunigungsgesetz.
With every train ride and with every flight, I hate children more.
Kenya bans plastic bags.
All the brouhaha about the decision by the USA to move their embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem overlooked the fact that Austria always had its representative offices in Jerusalem.

Posted in Austria, Economics, Israel, Language, Montenegro, Politics, Romania | Tagged children, christmas, James Bond, Jerusalem, Kenya, Nepal, smoking | 70 Comments

Two Books on North Korea

Posted on 2017-12-20 by Andreas Moser

If there will be a nuclear war in 2018, it will most likely have something to do with North Korea. So you may as well use your last weeks alive to read about that country.

Suki Kim pulled off a fantastic journalistic feat, tricking not only the North Korean government, but also the internationally funded Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), which is a cover for Christian missionaries. Ms Kim was neither an English teacher, nor Christian, but wanted to write a book about North Korea. Thus, during her months in Pyongyang, she was always afraid of being uncovered by either the North Korean government or by her international colleagues and bosses.

51vqx8qisal-_sx329_bo1204203200_ The result is Without You, There is no Us, a reference to a song about the Great Leader, of course. The students at that university are no ordinary students, they are the sons of North Korea’s elite. Maybe because Ms Kim is not only American, but also Korean, the students warm to her and gradually open up, revealing a fascinating insight into how closed-off from the world even the elite in North Korea is. On the other hand, despite some bonding, the students are always ready to lie to cover up technological or other deficiencies in North Korea.

Ms Kim conveys the feeling of being in that tense situation where she has to think about the consequences (for herself and her students) before every sentence. However, at times she goes into too much detail about her personal life, the story of her family and her on/off relationship with a boyfriend in New York, which really has no place in the book.

In a way, it feels like she wanted to add some extra plots to fill the book, because there is really not much happening at the school. Ms Kim can never leave the compound alone or unsupervised and even her communication is monitored. This isolation explains one of the drawbacks of the book: it’s an interesting insight into that university, but it’s not representative of North Korea. The teenagers there are better educated, better fed, financially better off, better connected than the rest of the country. Halfway through her term, Ms Kim finds out that all other universities in North Korea have actually been closed and that PUST is the only one still operating.

At least to readers who already know something about North Korea, the most shocking revelation in Without You, There is no Us are the similarities between the North Korean regime and the Christians running the university. They both praise their leader/idol in hymns and speeches, repeating the ever-same chants, believing that he has everything under control and that he will guide and steer everything towards the better.

Sometimes, the Christians seem even crazier, for example when they rationalize the suffering, oppression and hunger in North Korea as a test imposed by God. At the end of the term, the teachers are allowed to show their students one film. But the movies must not be political, critical, advocate individualism or portray the archenemy USA in a positive light. Finally, Ms Kim receives approval from the North Korean counterparts to show a Harry Potter film. One of her Christian colleagues storms into her office, furious. “I’ll never show that to any of my students! What’s your motive for wanting to show such filth to our students? What kind of a Christian are you? What would Christians around the world say about our decision to expose our students to such heresy?”

But if that is your thing, PUST is looking for teaching volunteers. It’s unpaid of course, because you will get your reward from God. (The university meanwhile takes in millions in donations from churches around the world.)

8551322 While Without You, There is no Us focuses on a small group of elite students, the second book focuses on one city, Chongin, and this is a smart choice because everywhere in North Korea is more poor and grim than in the capital Pyongyang. In Nothing to Envy (also based on a North Korean slogan), Barbara Demick spoke to six defectors from Chongin and uses their stories to weave together a disturbing and at times heart-breaking image of life in North Korea for ordinary people.

How Ms Demick uses these stories, enriched by research, to convey a feeling of almost living the harrowing life in North Korea oneself is masterful. Of course she has the advantage that her subjects have already fled and are now free to talk. In this book, the personal stories are no superfluous side plot, but the relationships between parents and children or between two lovers, all of them made incredibly harder by political and economic circumstances, illustrate how much the dictatorship intrudes even the personal lives of everyone.

Nothing to Envy is much richer in detail than Without You, There is no Us. I learned about people collecting tree bark and grass to avoid starvation, children collecting human feces, that any North Korean needed a special permit to visit Pyongyang, that they were scared to death when they couldn’t produce tears in a public mourning of the late Kim Il Sung, that the TV set is preset to the government channel and that government officials make house calls to check that it hasn’t been tampered with.

One important fact I learned from both books is that the North Korean political philosophy can hardly be called communist. It is rather militaristic and filled with propaganda of racial superiority above everyone else in the world.

So, both books were very interesting, but the second one was clearly better and offered more insight into a larger part of the population over a longer period of time. If you want to read only one book about North Korea, I would go for Nothing to Envy.

Links:

More about North Korea.
Thanks to Dieter for Without You, There is no Us and to Maryam for Nothing to Envy! If you also want to support this blog, I always appreciate a book from my wishlist. But please don’t send a Bible.
This review was also published on Medium.

Posted in Books, Economics, Human Rights, North Korea, Politics, Religion | Tagged christianity, Crown Publishing, Granta, Human Rights, Rider, Spiegel & Grau | 11 Comments

Serbo-Croatian

Posted on 2017-12-17 by Andreas Moser

Dear ex-Yugoslavs,

without any intention of being disrespectful to your dramatic break-up, I am not going to have time to learn Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin separately.

No, I am going to stick with good old Serbo-Croatian.

At a used-book shop, I even found a book about it.

But then I had to discover that life in 1973 was apparently quite different from now, because the sentences included such useful phrases as “Where can I send a wireless telegram?”, “I was a prisoner of war” and “Želite li da vam sobarica donese tople vode za brijanje?”

I am afraid that the most important sentence for me will be “Ne razumijem” (“I don’t understand”), because I don’t have the same easy access to Slavic languages as to Romance ones. What a pity that not all of the Balkans are Romanian, at least linguistically.

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In the end, the Cold War didactics was not plausible enough for me, and I bought a current book from Assimil. I find their books the best, but then I have only used them for easier languages thus far.

By the way, the trick with old books works with guide books, too. Instead of buying and carrying with you seven books for Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro, you can get the whole information in one compact volume.

(Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels.)

Posted in Books, Language, Travel | Tagged Yugoslavia | 20 Comments

Video: Hungry Squirrel

Posted on 2017-12-08 by Andreas Moser

The seeds in the flower pot were intended to help the birds get through the winter, but look who showed up and ate everything:

Posted in Video Blog | Tagged animals, squirrel | 3 Comments

Moving to Montenegro

Posted on 2017-12-05 by Andreas Moser

By now, I have really been staying in Ammerthal, the small village in Bavaria where I grew up, longer than I should have. Rent-free living and a cozy room full of books should actually provide agreeable conditions for a student life, but there are almost no social, intellectual and cultural contacts and possibilities. Each time I want to go to the library, the cinema, a café or to the train station, I have to walk through the forest for an hour and a half before I reach the nearest small town.

That was less of a problem in summer, but since November, it has become uncomfortable and depressing. The intellectual wasteland has been joined by the grey drizzly joylessness of provincial Upper Palatinate. The locals try to fight it by putting up the same kitschy twinkling Christmas falderal every year, not achieving more than to signal the endless monotony of their lives, in which they do exactly the same things every year. They could already tell you today what they will cook for Christmas in 2018.

I need to leave here urgently. Definitely before the yearly festivities of horror at the end of December.

I’ve been missing city life a bit. It doesn’t even need to be a big city. Only a town large enough for me not to run into the same people every day, where people have heated discussions while leaning over newspapers in a café, and where writers read their latest manuscripts to each other in smoke-filled basements.

This only exists in Eastern Europe.

The most exciting region of Eastern Europe – and thus of Europe as a whole – are the Balkans. A plethora of small states, of which hardly any European can name all, many of them so small that you can visit three countries, speak three different languages and visit the most distinct churches and mosques in one day. I love this diversity.

Each of these countries is interesting and alluring, but on a previous visit, I already decided that Montenegro is the most beautiful country in Europe. The combination of the Adriatic Sea and mountains, of mountain villages and royal castles, everything in a relatively small country, makes it worth visiting.

Montenegro is also one of the youngest countries in Europe. It only became independent in 2006. In Eastern Europe, I often observed with fascination that there is more social and political dynamic in such countries, that people still argue about the path the country should take. (Just recently, Montenegro became our youngest NATO colleague.)

In Kotor, with its inner city that bans cars but is home to thousands of cats, where the sea and the mountains meet, and where there was an exhibition about Jan Karksi when I last visited, I found a cozy apartment. I can stay there for an affordable price until the end of February 2018, because the time is outside the tourist season. I hope this doesn’t mean that it will be as cold as it was in Malta or in Sicily, where I had the same idea in previous winters. (If it does, I might as well spend the next winter in Siberia.)

In March 2018, I already have to return to Germany for the first exams of my studies in history. And after that – no, let me tell you about that another time.

Talking about history: My grandfather lived in Yugoslavia until November 1948, albeit not quite voluntarily. Maybe I can use this longer stay in ex-Yugoslavia to finally find out where exactly he was imprisoned during and after World War II and to visit the place.

If anyone can help with that, I would highly appreciate it. I only know that he was working in a salt mine, if that helps to narrow the search.

Oh, and I should clarify that my move to Montenegro has nothing to do with a high-stakes poker tournament at the Casino Royale.

Posted in History, Montenegro, Travel, World War II | Tagged Ammerthal, Kotor, Maps, Yugoslavia | 55 Comments

Random Thoughts (18)

Posted on 2017-11-30 by Andreas Moser

“Time is more valuable than money could ever dream of being.” (Dan Kieran in The Idle Traveller)
Thanks to Thomas Kuban for pointing me to The Ultimate Productivity Blog.
Thanks to Priscila Serrano for the book 60 Degrees North, in which Malachy Tallack travels around the world on that parallel.
Do you remember when I lived in that cute town in Romania that nobody knew how to spell correctly? Well, my article about this dilemma has now prompted a Romanian journalist to investigate the matter further.
Messages for which I delete and block Facebook friends:
I have always been skeptical of those DNA heritage tests where people find out that they are 23% Anglo-Saxon, 5% Sardinian, and so on (maybe because as a lawyer, I determine citizenship legally, not by heritage, identity or other vague concepts). But listening to this show with A.J. Jacobs, author of It’s All Relative, actually made me excited about trying it myself.
I have yet to meet a Brexiteer who understands the difference between the EU, the EEA, Schengen and the Council of Europe.
Thanks to Dieter Schuffenhauer for Without You, There is no Us, an intriguing and excellently written look inside North Korea, and Another Great Day at Sea about life on an aircraft carrier.
Thanks to Jackie Danson for They thought they were free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer’s study of the lives of ordinary Germans under the Nazis.
Thanks to Emmily for Ashenden by William Somerset Maugham, The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson and A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing, a very generous reward for a few questions answered in my FAQ on German citizenship.
My positive view of solitude has been backed up by more studies.
This interview with historian Catherine Nixey was most eye-opening about the fundamentalism and brutality of early Christianity. I am looking forward to reading her book.
Because of the internet censorship in Turkmenistan, I thought this would never happen, but finally I had the first recorded visit from the country to my blog. There are still 11 countries missing, though.
Some of the motorcycle chases by Brazilian police are better than the ones in Bullitt or Jason Bourne:

Posted in Books, Brazil, Europe, Germany, North Korea, Religion, Romania, Time, UK | Tagged Brexit, christianity, solitude, Targu Mures, Turkmenistan | 4 Comments

Stupid Maps (1) Bavarian Independence

Posted on 2017-11-27 by Andreas Moser

On the occasion of the attempts by some people in Catalonia to become independent, The Guardian published this map under the headline Beyond Catalonia: pro-independence movements in Europe.

independence

This map makes it look as if all of Europe is about to fall apart.

Now, I have been to many of these orange/yellow regions and lived in some of them, and I don’t remember any huge independence movements, but I will leave it to those of you who have lived there for longer to comment on the specific regions.

I will just pick Bavaria as an example because it’s the largest colored region after Scotland, because I have lived there for decades and because I know its political situation quite well: There is no serious independence movement in Bavaria. Putting Bavaria in the same league as Catalonia or Scotland, which had referendums on independence, or South Tyrol or the Basque Country with a history of separatist terrorism is just bullshit, as we would say in Bavaria.

Of course you can always find a few people everywhere who will say, after too many beers, “we want the king back” and dream of independence. But that’s like people dreaming of leaving their spouse and their children to travel around the world. It’s not a “movement”, nor anything serious.

There is actually one political party in Bavaria that wants more autonomy and lists a referendum on independence as a long-term goal: the Bayernpartei. (They do however want a democratically elected president, not a return to the monarchy, setting them at odds with the old drunkards at the Stammtisch.) After the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany, they were actually mildly influential, with 17 members in the first federal parliament (1949-53) and in governing coalitions in the state of Bavaria from 1954-57 and 1962-66.

But since 1966, this party of Bavarian autonomy/separatism/independence has not won any seats for the Bavarian state parliament, let alone the federal parliament, the Bundestag. Their best result since 1966 was actually in the last election in Bavaria in 2013, when the Bayernpartei scored 2.1% of the votes – but no seats – in the state which they want to lead to independence. That’s hardly a significant independence movement. The SNP would laugh about this.

Oddly though, the map leaves out the Donbass region in Ukraine, the Kurdish region in Turkey, Transnistria, Abkhazia and Užupis in Vilnius. Or maybe the Guardian doesn’t consider any of these regions to be part of Europe.

Posted in Europe, Germany, Politics | Tagged Bavaria, Maps, Media | 6 Comments