Archive for December, 2006
It’s time that I wrote a bit about the time that I spent in Africa at the start of the year. Being more precise, I was in Kenya and Tanzania with David Hewitt and Carna Hodge from my church. David Hewitt set up something called The Africa Fund in 2000 and I’ve been helping here and there with publications for fundraising and the website since then. At the end of 2005 the opportunity came up to go on the trip and everything all came together very quickly.
The main purpose of The Africa Fund - TAF for short - is to raise money for organisations that David visits and help them to help themselves. We ‘invest in virtuous circles’ - giving money, mostly to local churches, to support local projects. The money is raised here in Edinburgh and goes to people we know - that’s the difference.
Before going - even before talking to David about going - I got excited about the whole principle of micro-finance. This has done some amazing things to help people set up micro-enterprises [self-employment to you and me] and has been particularly profound in India and Bangladesh. There small amounts of money are lent to people wanting a bicycle so they can ferry people around.
It’s not a new thing in Africa either, but our involvement in running a micro-finance scheme has been relatively recent. In Moshi in northern Tanzania we gave some money for one to be set up. We call them revolving funds. The principle is that money is lent out by a responsible committee and when the loans are repaid more people can benefit from loans.
While travelling around, I was involved in talking to people to find out whether they would find a revolving fund useful. We’ve been able to give money to start new funds in Arusha in Tanzania [part of the Mkonoo offering in March 2006] and Kisumu in Kenya [general offerings]. We hope to extend these to our Uganda contacts in 2007.
Anyway, for the moment, please give us some money! You can give money towards a goat, a bee hive or a revolving fund. I’ve been mostly involved in the revolving fund side of things, so would prefer if you gave towards that, but I do understand the appeal of a goat. Give anytime, but the sooner the better, and invest in a virtuous circle!
December 9th, 2006
I’ve written separately about the Berlin museums, and also about the shop selling products relating to German traffic light men. In the same complex as the shop, there’s also a museum focused on Anne Frank.
I read Anne’s diary while doing A-Level German, and knew about her story in general. I also knew of the museum in Holland, based in the house where she and her family were in hiding.
What I didn’t know was that Anne was born in Berlin. Even more interestingly, the museum in Berlin told her story from the point of view of her friend Hannah, who she met on their first day at a Montessori kindergarten. Seeing materials from the school, photographs of them playing together, all served to remind me that Anne’s story began before the family went into hiding.
Probably the most affecting part was seeing video footage of Hannah, describing what it was like to be friends with Anne. We tend to think of the girl who wanted to be a writer; we also know that her diaries were all she was able to put across to the world. Hannah also describes the naughty Anne, the one who stood up to the boys at school; less of the ‘quiet saint’ we may have in our minds.
For me, the most shocking part was where Hannah discovered, after being moved to a concentration camp, that Anne was there too. Despite the danger of being caught, the two friends managed to ‘meet’, whispering through a partition of straw and barbed wire. At that point, Anne’s mother and sister had died, and she thought her father was also dead. Although Hannah encouraged her to keep going, Anne seemed to have lost hope, and was dead within a month.
Hannah reflected on the situation - Anne and her story became famous world wide, but she didn’t live to see it. Hannah’s experience of occupation was perhaps just as typical as Anne’s, or others at that time - and somehow she lived.
Perhaps she felt not unlike Anne’s father, who did in fact survive, and who in some ways came to know Anne more through finding and publishing her diaries. You can be tremendously proud of and affected by someone who writes openly about such difficulties. But you’d far rather you had them with you, and not just their words on a page.
A fitting end to the exhibition was a separate, smaller section, based on a competition where children were encouraged to write about relatives who had been affected by war.
Some wrote about their own situations - one fifteen year old who survived the Yugoslav conflict noted that he had experienced war for thirteen of those fifteen years. Some wrote about experiences their grandparents had that are now less well remembered than that of Anne Frank - one grandparent survived the siege of Leningrad, another witnessed the annexation of Kaliningrad, to the north of Poland.
The stories were powerful - and made more so by the children’s own efforts in retelling them in their own words, and illustrating them, or including photographs where those were available.
A little more indication if I needed it of Berlin’s complex history, and of Germany’s attempts to engage with these difficult topics today.
December 8th, 2006
When I was in Berlin in mid-September, on a work trip, the office was close to the Museumsinsel, a series of museums on an island in the river that runs through Berlin.
I bought a 3-day pass, and although the museums shut at 6 most nights, I was able to spend a bit of time in them at the end of the day.
The main attraction is the Pergamon Museum. This is one I went to on my initial visit to Berlin, aged 18 and on a ‘culture vulture’ trip with my German penfriend. I’d just finished A-Level Latin, and the highlight for me then was the huge Roman frieze, part original, part reconstruction.
It’s the first thing you see when you go in, and it gives you some sense of what temples and other official buildings must have been like. The stairs up to the top are very steep, but you can also see the frieze from lower down. I probably spent a whole hour in that room the first time.
A few years later, when I was working in Poland, Dan came out to see me, and spent some time in Berlin on the way back. He too went to Pergamon, and loved it.
I think we first went there together at Easter 2002. There’s also art covering other civilisations, including a reconstruction of the Ishtar gate (Babelonian) and lots of Islamic art. One part has a reconstructed room from the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain.
I knew this time I would only have time for the hightlights, so: back to the frieze, to the Ishtar Gate, and a quick sweep round the Islamic section. This time, there was a photo exhibition of Turkmenistan, up the stairs to the Islamic section, which was also great: beautiful colours in people’s costumes and homes.
My next day, I went to the Altes Museum, one of the museums I hadn’t visited before. Its treasures are its ‘Greek boy’, a bronze statue of a boy in prayer, and a mask of Nefertiti. So, with the minutes ticking past, I managed to see both. The mask was really amazing, but probably more so for having had a look at other sculptures in the Egyptian section first. Some of the most unusual ones were of families - the children are shown in minature on the lap of either parent.
The museums are due for a big face-lift and restoration is underway on the five different buildings. To see more, have a look at the websites for each above, or here for a picture of Nefertiti herself.
December 8th, 2006
If you haven’t yet come across Jasper Fforde the novelist, here’s a strong recommendation for his books. A combination of crime novel with literary references and a strong vein of surrealist humour, they’re perfect for satisfying your brain while also tickling your funny bone.
Fforde writes about an alternative Britain where you can have a dodo as a pet, where Swindon takes on much more significance, and where Literary Detective is a possible job option. All these work around the character of Thursday Next, who comes to investigate when characters go missing from books, plotlines change, and the dastardly Goliath Corporation try to expand their empire further.
An off-shoot series deals with the Nursery Crime Division, in a similar vein to Thursday’s work, but with villains such as the Gingerbread Man. The hero, Jack Spratt, is also not what he seems…
For the die-hard enthusiast, there is the possibility of attending literary events while clutching your own dodo. It could be your best Out and About activity of 2007…let me know if you get to one.
December 7th, 2006
Dan’s digital camera has been kept very busy this year. Much of the time, we’re taking the more conventional kind of holiday snap, but I’ve also been taking pictures on work trips which I can use in presentation, to bring the language assistant experience to life.
So, as a mix of both: here are some of the more unusual examples of signage we’ve come across this year.
And first prize for signage has to go to Madrid’s airport, which helps you locate the right place with use of beautiful colour coding. It’s not just us - it won the Stirling prize this year for UK architecture (as the architect is from the UK, even though the building is elsewhere). If you were to ’sing a rainbow’, this would be a good starting point.
December 6th, 2006
I managed my first proper roast dinner this year!
When I’ve said this to others, they always tell me that a roast is easy. But with timings of potatoes and veg to add to the equation, I was never sure I would manage to make it work out at the right time. As a former vegetarian, I probably worry more about whether the meat is cooked, etc, quite apart from knowing how to carve it.
For the vegetarian readers, I also managed a nut roast this year, Dan’s mum’s speciality from a time when she cooked macrobiotic meals more. Nut roast is actually Dan’s favourite meal ever, a great reassurance to me when we started going out, and my cooking repertoire was mostly veggie.
2 factors that made doing the roast even better:
- handing cookbook to Dan for him to come up with an ambitious recipe for stuffing. Why roast a chicken if you can’t do it in style too?
- having a few recipes for leftovers, such as risotto, that I felt comfortable with. So not only do you enjoy the roast, you have a further feeling of smugness when you make use of the rest!
Having said that, my homemade stock has tended to sit in the freezer, as I forget I have it. In a toss up between rapidly defrosting the stock, and grabbing a stock cube instead, the stock cube wins every time.
Perhaps next year, I’ll attempt some other kind of roast. On the other hand, I’m sure I can practice the chicken one for a while yet…
December 6th, 2006
Dan and I are not necessarily known for being the sportiest people, but we like a walk, particularly where there’s some good scenery to take in.
Our summer holiday in 2005 gave us lots of walking opportunities, visiting a town in Slovenia which is a ski resort in the winter, but has lots of walking and biking options in the summer. The views were fantastic, and there were lots of well-signposted routes to try out. We even came back contemplating further active holidays, which is a good sign for us.
This year, we didn’t really manage anything on the same scale, although we did some walking in Fife around Easter time. However, going to Austria, which has some stunning mountains, we felt we had to have a day’s walking at least.
Maybe it’s an efficiency thing in Germanic countries, but when we set out to do our walk, we found a lot more people with us! The Alpine societies keep everything in very good order, and we took on a gorge climb, mostly through series of wooden ladders which enabled you to move from level to level.
I gave up counting how many we’d been up after 100 - and yes, every bridge was neatly labelled…What impressed me was the number of families where everyone was out walking, even where the kids were quite small.
By the top of the gorge, the organised air continued: a fully functioning pub serving meals as well as liquid refreshments. Admittedly the weather was good for walking that day, but the pub and surrounding meadows were packed with people resting after the climb.
We headed back down the path, rather than return down the gorge, though the path was also pretty steep in points. The number of people who had climbed with kids in backpacks or brought trecking-type pushchairs up became more and more impressive. It wasn’t as restful as being able to hike almost on our own in Slovenia, but we came away feeling we had gained an extra insight into Austrian society.
We also felt we should gain some extra points for hiking from a starting point town called Mixnitz. Maybe there’s room for some kind of pre-Christmas product called Mixnutz.
December 5th, 2006
Another first for the year - watching the Portugal v France World Cup game at a bar in Glasgow, while the World Cup was on.
I co-run an induction course for our English language assistants every July: two days of a bit of everything to prepare them for a year of teaching abroad. We hold the course at the University of Glasgow, so there’s a chance to try out the student areas nearby.
This year, we had a French student on work placement with us, who was helping at the course. Naturally, we had to follow France’s fortunes (at semi-final stage at that point) in the World Cup so that she didn’t feel too homesick.
Dan claims this was not a real ‘match at a pub’ experience because the bar also had a restaurant inside. One part of the bar floor was raised up and screened off, a bit like a square band stand, and you could sit there and eat while all the blokes stood in front of the bar instead. There were even additional TV screens by the tables so you could be sure of a good view, should someone block your line of sight to the bar.
If anyone thinks this is a more civilised way to try the experience, we were at Bar Buddha, near Ashton Lane. Food well recommended too! And thankfully, France didn’t lose that game, so all went well for our French guest. (She did however come in late, the day after the France v Italy final…)
December 4th, 2006
Or preferably, two weeks of half days.
I did this a couple of years ago, when we moved into our flat. I liked it so much, I did it again this year, during August, while Dan’s mum Jen was up to stay. Work in the mornings, feel virtuous, then run away quick at lunchtime…
One of the nicest aspects of taking the time off was just doing normal Edinburgh things, like walking round Arthur’s Seat, the hill in the middle of Edinburgh that looks a bit like an elephant’s head. It’s something I did from time to time as a student, but don’t often get round to doing now, particularly as we don’t live close to that part of town any more.
The walking is quite easy, and you can also drive around. You get a whole range of views, from ones of the coast, to being between Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags (surrounded by hill, but with an unexpected loch at the top of the road up), then looking down on the village of Duddingston and its bird sanctuary, followed by aspects to the south of Edinburgh (Pentland Hills etc). Finally, back to face the Edinburgh buildings skyline, looking back over university areas where Dan and I used to study.
A grand afternoon out - for free. Maybe I’ll manage a climb up Arthur’s Seat again sometime too.
December 4th, 2006
What does your workspace say about you?
Mine has a postcard in Polish, claiming that gherkins are good for stress. I haven’t actually tried eating them at work. But probably it’s just the sight of a silly postcard, and a link to Poland, that cheers me up.
I work in an open plan environment, which has pinboards separating desks from each other. Occasional gifts from visitors can make their way to a desk or pinboard, looking for a home. I also have a flower painted by a friend’s child. A copy of another friend’s poem. Nostalgic advert-style wrapping from some German chocolates a colleague brought back from holiday.
From time to time, we’re encouraged to clear our pinboards, and start again. As a teenager, I used to find it very hard to change displays of cards, ornaments etc - what record would remain of that stage of life?
I’m less precious about it now, but perhaps keeping things the same around my desk is a way of standing still, while the work shifts and changes around me. A way of saying who I am, a snapshot to accompany the name tag on the edge of the pinboard. In these days of hotdesking, it’s nice still to have a space to call my own.
December 4th, 2006
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