My father sent this photo to keep me up to date about the change of seasons in Germany.
It shows the creek Kleine Ohe near Waldhäuser in Bavaria.
I have been trying to convince my father to travel with me sometimes, so that he can take photos and I can focus on writing. If you think that this is a good idea, please leave a comment below, so that I can show him that there is popular demand. Other examples of his photos are here, here and here. He also takes the best photos of me.
Taking the bus in Transnistria, you are not only going from A to B, but also back to the 1950s or 1960s. With beautiful old curves and colors, for which you otherwise have to turn to Hitchcock films.
And some Europeans fly all the way to Cuba to marvel at old cars, when they have these exotic beauties next door in Eastern Europe.
This poster was for sale at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. until recently.
It no longer is for sale now.
In South America, I meet a lot of people who want to visit Europe, but always the same old boring places: Germany, Italy, France, Spain and London. When I suggest that they rather visit Eastern Europe which is more interesting, more exotic and where you can travel for three months for the cost of one week in London, I am met with blank stares: Where? What? Why?
It’s like people have never heard of beautiful countries like Montenegro, Slovenia or Romania.
Sadly, even many Europeans whom I meet in South America know more about Brazil or Australia than about the eastern half of their own continent.
As anyone who has met me over the past year knows, I am fascinated by Romania. It is not only the friendliest country in which I lived in Europe, it is also objectively beautiful. If you like mountains and hiking and castles, it’s actually paradise.
Because nobody believes me, I have looked for some videos that capture just a tiny bit of that fascinating country.
The video focuses a bit too much on the Transfagarasan Highway, but for anyone with a motorcycle or indeed a bicycle, this road through the mountains is a delight. I like how the drone got up early to capture the morning mist, for example in Sighisoara. The salt mine in Turda is really spectacular and well-captured in the video. It’s so huge that I was afraid of heights – underground.
The next video is about Transylvania, one of the regions of Romania, and coincidentally where I lived for one year. Watching it makes me want to return to cross the whole country by walking.
Romania is also quite beautiful in winter:
Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels.
Orthodox Christianity is perfect for people who are always late with getting presents. Because everything happens later, you have some extra time. Christmas is on 7 January, Easter is later as well (but with a different time lag each year). If you like to party and to get drunk, you may also use this schism to celebrate twice. I personally don’t benefit from this at all because I am an Atheist both in the West and the East.
In Romania I learned that this time difference also applies to Valentine’s Day. It is not celebrated on 14, but on 24 February. It’s not called Valentine’s Day either, but Dragobete. In Romanian mythology, he was the son of Baba Dochia, the main character in a spring saga.
When I ask around how Dragobete is celebrated, everyone tells me a different story. According to some, I am supposed to collect snow on this day, melt it and keep the water for healing purposes. But the snow is long gone. (Global warming). Instead, it is apparently also acceptable to pick flowers and to weave them into one’s hair or to present them to a loved one. Allegedly, it also has something to do with the beginning of spring. I personally find it sad to celebrate the beginning of spring by killing off the first flowers who have just barely managed to pierce through the hard and cold soil.
Today, on 1 March, it becomes even more confusing. Because now the beginning of spring and Valentine’s Day are celebrated again, but this time it’s called Mărțișor, meaning “little March”. Suddenly the parks, the bus stops and the church grounds are full with hundreds of vendors offering hundreds of thousands of talismans with a red-white string. By my own estimate, in Târgu-Mureș (population of around 140,000) at least 300,000 Mărțișor talismans were offered for sale.
These numbers lead me to conclude, first, that it will be obligatory to wear this talisman on one’s lapel in the coming weeks, and second, that they are being stockpiled to serve as reserve currency in the case of a currency reform.
The likable and progressive thing about this second Valentine’s Day is that this time, women give presents to men.
Until the next holiday!
Links:
Flying to El Alto Airport, the airport serving La Paz in Bolivia and the highest international airport in the world (4061 m), is a beautiful experience, particularly when you whiz past Illimani, sometimes dangerously close.
Allegedly, flying to and from such a high-altitude airport requires special training, and manufacturers of planes use the airport in El Alto for high-altitude testing of new models.
But I was more taken in by the vintage planes sitting next to the runway.
If you think that these planes don’t fly anymore, you are wrong, as demonstrated by James Bond in Quantum of Solace.
If you have already watched all the episodes of The Newsroom and are looking for something equally funny, yet meaningful about journalism, I recommend turning to this 1938 novel. Evelyn Waugh, who had been a journalist himself and had reported from the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, wrote a satire about news journalism. Set in the fictional African country of Ishmaelia, it is the story of a rural garden and nature writer who gets mistaken for a hot-shot journalist and sent to report on a war which may or may not be happening. Nobody knows.
But that’s how the news are made. As one of the more seasoned journalists recounts on the boat to Ishmaelia:
‘Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote.
Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you.’
This is what media criticism has to be like: insightful, sharp and witty. Although Waugh does not spare the owners of newspapers,
‘And what please,’ asked William, ‘is a news agency?’
Corker told him.
‘Then why do they want to send me?’
‘All the papers are sending specials.’
‘And all the papers have reports from three or four agencies?’
‘Yes.’
‘But if we all send the same thing it seems a waste.’
‘There would soon be a row if we did.’
‘But isn’t it very confusing if we all send different news?’
‘It gives them a choice. They all have different policies, so of course, they have to give different news.’
it becomes very obvious that the ultimate responsibility lies with lazy and sloppy journalists. Remember that before you go on your next rant about “mainstream media”, whatever that is supposed to be, just because you don’t like a particular story.
Of course, the problem has shifted since Waugh’s times. When in the inter-war years too many correspondents were sitting on top of each other in a bar in Africa, talking more to each other than to local sources, the problem today is that there are no correspondents in the country at all. Only when something happens will newspapers and TV stations drop in some parachute correspondents for a few days. They will have read the Wikipedia article on the way and their main source will be an overpaid taxi driver. – But then, if you don’t want to pay for your newspaper or at least for your favorite blog, you can’t really complain.
I found this selfie-taking statue in La Paz, Bolivia.
The film Spotlight cited a study by Richard Sipe, according to which at least 6% of all Catholic priests are pedophiles and actively practice their “passion”. This was confirmed by the research of the Boston Globe. In my film review, I posed the question why this should be different in other dioceses than Boston and in other countries than the US.
The figure has now been confirmed in Australia. Over the past 30 years, 7% of Catholic priests have sexually abused children there. And not only priests, but members of religious orders, both monks and nuns, as well as laypeople.
Because these numbers have now been confirmed in different countries, I once more pose the question: Why should the figure be lower in other countries? It’s the same organization, with the same hiring practices, the same training, and apparently the same way to deal with pedophilia, all around the world. And we have to keep in mind that even these investigations couldn’t have brought all cases to light, that most pedophile priests abuse more than one child, sometimes dozens of them over their years of service. The number of victims is therefore much higher.
Looking only at the known cases, it is obvious that pedophile acts are widespread and that this could hardly be kept a secret within the Church. There have been systematic cover-ups. If you don’t find your country or your diocese in the list of sex abuse cases, it doesn’t mean that nothing criminal and sinister is going on. It just means that nobody has dared to speak up, that people are threatened or bribed into silence, or that the criminal justice system is not very energetic in investigating cases of child abuse by clergy. Probably, it’s even worse in South America, Africa and Asia because dioceses from North America and Europe often send known pedophile priests to “the third world” as “punishment”, obviously not considering the well-being of children living there.
It has to be stated that clearly: The greatest danger for children does not come from terrorists, wild animals or vaccines, but lurks in Catholic churches, schools, hospitals, kindergartens, homes and youth groups. If there was another organization applying for a permit to run a school and they would admit that at least 6% of their employees are pedophiles, they would never receive that permit.
“When you are a priest, they let you do it. You can kiss them, you can grab them, you can do anything.”
(This article was also published in Medium. – Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels.)
The Happy Hermit 