Swiss voters ban minarets

There was very disappointing news from Switzerland today of discrimination against Muslims. A ban on building minarets has passed. Currently there are 400,000 Muslims in Switzerland and only 4 minarets, while church steeples are everywhere. This follows a French ban on headscarves and a German controversy on building mosques. This goes to the root of something that really bothers me about Europe. Europeans see themselves as liberal, egalitarian and democratic, but immigrant populations, particularly Muslims, are expected to become culturally European rather than maintain a distinct cultural identity. I have heard Germans tell me that they don't like Turks, for example, because they are arrogant (which is extremely ironic coming from a German) and don't want to "integrate." (And yes, I can hear the comments coming, I know Americans can be arrogant, we have our own historical problems, and are as anti-Muslim as anyone, but that doesn't mean I don't have a valid point.) There seems to be trouble in Europe of seeing ethnicity as separate from the country you are living in (e.g. you can be "Irish" and "American,"or "Jewish" and "Canadian," ... but in Europe there is emphasis on "becoming" either Irish or American exclusively--as a metaphor).

A while back I talked to a group of Germans about this (and I apologized before hand that I do not want to be telling them what they should do, and that I understand this is for German citizens to decide, but I do want to ask this question) and asked, why not take a traditional Turkish holiday and celebrate it in Germany, as a gesture to accept Turkish immigrants, and their culture, into Germany. Like it or not, Turkish culture is a part of Germany now, why not be open and accepting of it rather than adversarial and trying to stamp it out? My suggestion didn't go over too well and they looked as if I had asked them to do something strange that would normally never be considered--"but this is Germany." Then they discussed it some more and said perhaps it would be OK to adopt some "harmless" Turkish holiday as a gesture (it's hard for me to understand how one could be harmful).

Unfortunately, as much as Europeans like to say they are more sophisticated than Americans regarding cultural differences, there is a great deal of xenophobia in Europe and I don't see the general acceptance of European Muslims happening anytime soon.

Thanksgiving

We have postponed thanksgiving a bit again this year. However yesterday I did take V shopping in a large, new (to us) grocery store while the kids were in school and she fixed a roast chicken, with stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes and sweet corn for supper! Today we also kept to the Black Friday shopping tradition by getting some Christmas presents while the kids were in school.

1989

Before November 2009 ends I wanted to mention what I remembered 20 years ago. Back in high school I planned with a friend of mine to visit Germany when we graduated and we talked about traveling to Berlin, surrounded by communist East Germany. I don't remember noticing any news reports about the growing demonstrations from Leipzig in East Germany. But I clearly remember a night in November of the news reports and video of crowds of people crossing from East Germany, climbing onto the wall, then the wall being sledgehammered. The morning after the first news report I bought a newspaper before going to school and read the paper when I could at school. I remember wondering if Germany would become unified again or if the Soviets would invade and crack down, and if that would finally escalate into WWIII. I had no idea that it would spread so quickly and a short while later, spring 1990, I was reading a newspaper before class that announced Lithuania succeeding from the Soviet Union. Then of course the Soviet Union collapsed not long after that and the cold war ended. I was amazed; the powerful Soviet Union, our biggest threat, was gone so quickly. I have heard Europeans criticize this, that it all happened too quickly and didn't give time for people to adjust and so on. But I can't help thinking how glad I was that, after having the threat of total destruction from nuclear war hanging over us my entire life, the war was finally over. With that kind of threat the best thing we could do was end it as soon as possible and the worst thing we could do is end up in that kind of situation again.

German Chowder

In the grocery stores here it is hard to find some things we are used to cooking with (okra, some spices, ground turkey, black beans, ...) and there are other things we are not used to. One vegetable that seems to be commonly used here is celeriac (a variety of celery plant that has small stems but large round roots, the celery roots are sold in the store and used for cooking). In English when we say celery we think of the stems of the plant, but in Germany "Sellerie" (pronounced zellery) means the root by default. To mean the stalks specifically you have add "Stangen" (~rods/poles) to it, "Stangensellerie". Another thing that is common are leeks, which of course I know of but have never used in cooking before. The store makes up soup bundles of half a celeriac, with two carrots, and a leek (and occasionally also a parsnip), wrapped together in a rubber band. Back when V was last in the US I bought a German soup bundle to try something with it. What I made has evolved in a few more tries into a kind of bacon chowder, which is very good (also V's opinion). Usually when I make a chowder in the US I use a lot of fennel and potatoes, but here I essentially substituted celeriac for those two ingredients. I will try to put a recipe together here, but I am not sure of all the amounts so I will use x's and either use what seems right or later I may edit and add more specific amounts.

Ingredients:
1/2 celeriac root
2 carrots
1 leek
1 liter whole milk
50-75 grams butter
x cubed/chopped bacon
a small can (8 oz?) of sweet corn nibblets
3-4 handfuls corn flour
a medium bundle of fresh parsley
2 hot (cayenne style) peppers
a few potatoes
some more water

I peeled and finely cubed the celeriac, chopped up the leek, peeled and finely chopped the carrots (first by thinly french slicing them then cross chopping), and put them in a pot (gallon sized?) with a liter of whole milk and butter, the chopped bacon and corn. I started heating this slowly and keep stirring regularly. While that's heating I finely chop up the parsley leaves and dump them in. Turn up the heat a little more and stir everything well. Then chop up two hot peppers and add (I prefer to use fresh hot peppers but they are hard to find here, we have some pickled ones in a jar and I have been using those). Turn up the heat a little more, stir well. Along the way I usually add some more water to increase the volume, and I add a few hand-fulls of corn flour to thicken everything up. I stir it really well with each bit of flour so it doesn't clump and/or burn to the bottom. Each time I have made this I ended up peeling and adding some chopped potatoes to top it off, which can't hurt. The key is to take your time and spend a long time cooking it, heating very slowly, chopping finely, and keeping it stirred almost constantly until it is bubbling. Also, don't eat it right away but give time for the flavor to mix and get into the vegetables. Often it tastes better heated up the next day after cooking. In the end it should be very thick and creamy with some light spicy flavor.

Daytrip to S. Denmark

I've been very busy at work and haven't been spending much time with the kids and realized not long ago that we have been living in Europe a year and a half and the kids have still not been to another country in Europe (other than a brief stop in London traveling between the US and Germany, which doesn't really count). So I promised myself, that we would do more traveling together and to begin I would offer to drive them to Denmark on Saturday. (Plus, after weeks of overcast sky and on/off rain the sun finally came out on Friday.) When I mentioned it to them Friday they both eagerly accepted and wanted to do a "road trip." The next morning M had a daybag packed and ready to go; T is a little slower getting into motion in the mornings but he also threw some things together and hopped in the car. V stayed home with L for the day. We drove west and connected to the German autobahn network (no speed limit!). Then headed north to Denmark. The kids wanted to see how fast the car could go on the autobahn. We got it up to 130 km/hr (the recommended/advised speed limit), and some people were still flying past us, but I had a feeling parts of the car would start flying off or the engine would shake apart if we took the little car any faster. We crossed a huge bridge spanning the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal (shipping canal between the Baltic and Atlantic North Sea). Eventually we crossed the border into Denmark and pulled off at Padborg (a town I had been to on the train line, and I knew where an ATM was). Once we crossed the border it was very dark and foggy.



We parked and walked to the ATM, I took out some Danish Krone (Denmark doesn't use the euro yet). Then we went back to the car and pulled into a gas station. The nozzle didn't fit into the tank of what I thought was gas (I don't think it was diesel either, that was clearly marked at a different spot, perhaps it was kerosene? --good thing I didn't put that in the engine!), so I tried the next one and it fit, but then I had to pay and press a button before it would turn on, ... finally figured out how to fill the tank with gas, then we got a snack at a bakery.



Then got back on the road and headed west. One problem with driving in Denmark was I have no idea what the general speed limits are. So I tried to get behind people and follow them. It seems like outside of towns it is something like ~100 km/hr and inside towns ~60 km/hr, which is a bit faster than in Germany. We passed a car that had crashed off the road and that was a highlight for the kids, the back of the car was sticking up in the air from its angle on the bank.



We passed lots of rustic houses (thatched roofs, timber frame) farm buildings, and churches.



All in all it was very similar to Schleswig-Holstein Germany, which is not surprising. The kids got to hear Danish being spoken, and they commented that people were quieter here then in Germany. We made it as far as Tønder (Tondern in German), ate a late lunch, then it was time to head back. On the way back I stopped at a shopping center outside of Kiel and let the kids run around the stores for a while, by the time we finally got back home it was well after dark.

Car is running again

So, the oil light kept coming on, I smelled oil burning, and sure-enough the car was leaking oil. We stopped to check and put more oil in. V pulled the dipstick out and the entire tube around it had broken off and came loose. This of course lead to jokes about her not touching anything connected to the engine again (especially after her "fixing" the radiator in our apartment on Easter Sunday 2008), but driving over teeth rattling cobblestones every day at 50 km/hr on the way to school probably did it. So we put the car in the shop to get it replaced and V and the kids went back to taking the indirect bus route to school and back. There was a series of miss-communications about when the car would be ready. "They needed to order a part; it would be ready tomorrow, ..." Tomorrow: "they needed to order a different part, it would be ready at 4pm ...". 4pm: "It's not ready, come back tomorrow ..." I'm not blaming them, the combination of V's and my German and their English could have lead to anything happening, but the dipstick tube did get replaced by the next weekend. The bolts had sheared off and rather than drilling and using a reverse-thread extractor to remove them, they just welded the new parts on. But this was not the end of the story. After replacing the dipstick tube the oil pressure switch was leaking oil (which we only noticed later after getting the car back). It was right next to where they had welded and a gasket was clearly bent on the switch where the oil was leaking out. We took it back and they replaced it for free, immediately. Now we have the car back and everything seems to be fine.

GETonline

I wanted to mention a website (GETonline) that lets people set climate goals and energy use parameters and the program calculates the best (minimal cost to the economy) way to meet the goals, if possible, by phasing in and out certain sources of energy (oil, solar, nuclear, ...) at different times over a century. Of course it is far simpler than reality, but I think it is a great way to present a feel for the dynamics of what is a very complex system.

From playing with it a general pattern seems to be, if there is no energy policy then coal use will predominate in the future (it is cheap and plentiful); if there is a non-trivial energy policy, solar is likely to predominate in the future.

M's tooth

M lost her first tooth Saturday night! She was worried because it was taking so long, but we told her it is normal in our family and our teeth are stronger because they grow slower. She can't wait to tell her friends at school.

Smoked Herring

Back from Sweden, off to Austria

No time now -- heading to the airport. Will update as soon as things settle down.

...

In Sweden I was too busy for much sightseeing. Also, the sun came up late and went down early. I was only able to snap a few photos of the sunset from in front of my hotel before it got dark. (BTW- I stayed at the Hotel Charlotte. The rooms are arranged in an octagon with a spiral staircase in the center.)

Halloween

M's birthday