Halfway down the Danube

Waiting

So we are having a early morning election brunch tomorrow. Friends are coming over, there will be coffee, food, and alcoholic beverages according to results (champagne if we win, palinka to drink ourselves into amnesia if we loose). Our friends are all rooting for Kerry, so nobody is going to get hurt. Our doors are open from 7:30 on, the breakfast will seemlessly go over into the Wednesday baby group and continue on as long as... No, let me rephrase that. It will go on until we're tired of it.

I'm very nervous. I had CNN on all day, just to get the usual results from something-Notch, and then my maid asked me: "Why is it so important who is president of America?" I have to say, I was at a loss for words there, for a moment or two. Indignation bubbled up in me and I said: "Because Bush is evil." One would assume I should have been able to come up with reasons. Like, rational things. It seems this whole venture has gotten to me.

Anyhow, as long as we're waiting, here's a cool graphic to play around with.

Now I better do some more preparation. In case you are interested, there will be homebaked bread, cheese, buttermilk pancakes, lox, chicken curry, spinach quiche, omelette, veggies sticks with herb dip, banana bread, and oatmeal cookies.

I like to eat when I'm nervous.

Risk of Choking

We stopped at the McDonalds in Otopeni on Saturday. That's the first town north of Bucharest, where the airport is. The McDonalds sits right on the main road north to Ploiesti.

(We were coming back from a trip to a little horse farm, where Alan rode on a pony for the first time ever. I'm sure someone will be posting some photos real soon now.)

Anyhow: we bought a Happy Meal -- look, we're parents with two small children, okay? Happy Meals are a part of our life now, and probably will be for a while to come. Alan, age two and a half, now recognizes those golden arches from a mile away. "French fries!" he cries. And it is, dammit, convenient. No, I'm not defensive about this. Not at all. -- We bought a Happy Meal, and it came with a toy, and the toy was in a plastic wrapper. And on the plastic wrapper, it said:

"ENGLISH -- Risk of choking -- small parts. Please retain information for reference. Drain after each use."

That was all. Except that the plastic bag was covered with writing, on both sides.

Why? Because it repeated that same warning in thirty-five different languages.

Weekend Photo Blogging

On Saturday, we went to the Hollandia Riding Club in Corbeanca. Alan and David loved watching the horses -- although Alan decided that ponies were all right but horses way too big. He did get to ride on the pony for about five or ten minutes. He looked his most serious, I've never seen this look on his face before. He smelled like horse afterwards and talked about "riding like a big boy" the rest of the day. Afterwards, he had a three-hour nap. That hasn't happened in months. Oh, all the excitement.

Take that, spammers!

David from AFoE sent me this wonderful link. It's this neat little code which will make life very miserable for all those spammers who've been making our life very miserable. Stefan, who wrote this, deserves a medal or something - it's really ingenious. It's simple, easy to install, and great fun.

What now happens when you want to leave a comment is that you are being asked to type a certain word into a text box in the comments pop up. It's nothing complicated, and it will keep this site much cleaner (or so we hope). I'm even going to make it fun for you by picking interesting words.

Thanks for your understanding!!

Update: Hm. It just worked like a charm. And now it doesn't let anybody post. Strange. Let me tinker a bit. I'm no computer pro, so I'm only guessing what I'm doing. Sorry.

Update II: OK. Everything is as it should be. I just forgot to tell my program which is the word of the day. D'uh.

A Fistful of Euros

Claudia and I have joined the team at A Fistful of Euros. This is a group blog about, well, things European.

I'm already signed up to be a guest blogger on tacitus.org (where I post very occasionally) and The Head Heeb (where I haven't managed to post once yet), and then of course there's this blog. Which (you've noticed if you've been reading regularly) sometimes goes for a week without a post, because work is intense or the kids or sick or, well, something. So I make no promises as to frequency or quality of posting.

But it's a good blog, run by some good people, and we'll try to keep our end up.

'tis the season

Oh, yes, and and if you think that you will be busy, imagine our situation. We're US and German living in Romania, and this is our holiday plan for the next three months:

October 31: Halloween (US)
November 2: Election Day (US)
November 11: St. Martin's Day (GER, kids parade outside with paper laterns)
November 25: Thanksgiving (US)
December 1: National Day (RO)
December 6: St. Nikolaus Day (GER, kids get their boots filled with goodies)
December 24: Christmas Eve (GER, presents for the kids)
December 25: Christmas (US, presents for the kids)
December 31: New Year's Eve (US, GER, RO)
January 6: Epiphany (GER, end of Christmas season)

Oh, and my birthday is somewhere in there, too.

Earthquake, update

Our friend Christine sent us some links, to which we woke up this morning after a quiet night. Apparently, it was a 5.8 or 5.9 magnitude one, located some 100 miles northeast of us.*

Our friend Dragos at @rgumente and Kit have commented on it too. I have to agree with Kit -- 20 seconds seemed like an eternity. It was enough time to wake up from a light slumber, wondering, realizing, saying "Doug?", hearing the answer "earthquake!" from the study, running to the kids, getting them out of bed and standing in the doorway. Time does stretch.

For me, it also awoke memories of 1977. That big Romania earthquake? I lived in Istanbul with my family back then and I remember that evening clearly. Everything shook heavily and we, too, stood in the doorway with my parents clutching us children. The next day, we had huge cracks in the walls of our house. Not this year - our house here is built very earthquake safe. It also means that you cannot get a nail into the walls if your life depended on it, which used to annoy me mildly a number of times. Yesterday evening, though, I was quite content to live in such a sturdy house.

My nanny didn't sleep all night. She, too, was plagued by memories of 1977. She used to live in a house next to a huge empty patch of land. After the earthquake, all the rubble from the flattened houses was brought there.
She remembers seeing body parts mixed in with the concrete and pieces of buildings - arms, legs, heads. Gruesome pictures, guranteed to keep one's mind far too busy to sleep. Ceausescus Romania was an awful, awful place.

*That's pretty close to Zabola. I wrote them an email, hoping to hear back from them soon.

Update: Reuters reports that "Romanian officials said buildings, such as the historic Bucharest city hall, had suffered mostly cracks in walls and falling plaster and some roads were slightly damaged but utilities were functioning normally." The strength has also been upped to 6.0.

Earthquake

A little one. Just a couple of minutes ago.

There was a low rumbling, sort of like a subway train going underneath the house, but... rhythmic. Pulsing, with a frequency of about half a second. The desk lamp by the computer -- it's one of those with the jointed arm and the cone around the bulb -- began to sway back and forth. I felt my chair going up and down, like it was going on rollers down a bumpy road, and then the whole house began to sway.

We ran to the kids' room. I picked up Alan, Claudia grabbed David, and we stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs. That's what they tell you: stand in a doorway, if you don't have time to get outside.

And then it stopped.

Dogs were barking up and down the street, and a minute later a confused flock of birds went cawing and creaking overhead in the darkness. But then everything got quiet again. It's very quiet now. We don't hear any sirens or anything. Like I said: a little one.

Much of Bucharest was flattened by an earthquake in 1977; the whole middle and lower Balkan region is tectonically unstable. Earthquakes are a fact of life here, and there's nothing to be done about it.

We're going to go back to bed now. Eventually we'll sleep.

Walking down Strada Roma

Sunday evening I took the boys for a walk down Strada Roma.

We live in a residential neighborhood where all the streets are named after capitals: Strada Paris, Strada Londra, Strada Roma and Stockholm and Brasilia. I like walking down Strada Roma because it's lined with lovely old houses with little yards full of overgrown flowers and cats. It's nice to walk there by myself; it's even nicer with the boys, because there's always something happening. A woman sweeping the sidewalk; a man too drunk to walk straight. Birds bathing in a sidewalk puddle. Two teenagers working on a car (with power tools!). Children on bicycles, a friendly dog, interesting bugs. Something.

At the end of Strada Roma, just south of Piatsa Dorobant' (that's the one with the bust of Brancusi), is a high school. The high school is shaped like three sides of a rectangle, with the street going past it making the fourth. Inside the rectangle is the school yard: a concrete playground with a couple of basketball courts and an open area where boys play soccer. The playground is separated from the street by a high wall with a couple of gates in it.

So we're walking along, David in the stroller and Alan holding my hand, and we've just reached the schoolyard gate. We pause to look inside. Alan likes to go inside and watch the boys playing ball. A car is going slowly down the street behind us. I tell Alan we won't go inside, we have to go home, but we can watch the ball players for a minute or two. One of the boys kicks the ball high. Alan turns to say something to me --

Vote!

If someone tells you that Europe is not trying to influence the US election with all her might -- then this someone is wrong.

I'm European, I'm not allowed to vote. However, I'm the wife of a (voting) US citizen and the mother of two (non-voting) US citizens. Therefore, I feel obligated to do my best and ensure a brighter future for my husband and sons. These are my tactics:

Blackmail
I told my US relatives that we WILL NOT live in the US as long as a Bush is president. I'm keeping this vague on purpose. This way, I have my options open if Jenna gets elected in '28 or so.

My mother-in-law is persuaded; however, she does live with her husband who is a stout Republican. I love him but he's got a political blind eye, and he tries to undermine my efforts. I shall call her on election day and remind her of my threat, just to be sure. Unfortunately, the threat doesn't work one bit with my Republican sister-in-law and her husband. I think they are not taking me seriously. Will they ever be surprised. (Of course, I'm hoping that I don't have to live up to my threats.)

Encouraging voter registration
Doug did want to vote, yes. But he's also Mr. Procrastination and while I love and trust him, I did make sure that he applied for his absentee ballot. (Opening the respective website, cajoling him into the desk chair, hovering over his shoulder until he hit "send" can, I believe, be called "making sure". Or harassment.)

Reminding to vote
I also asked him every day whether he'd sent his ballot off. Every day. Multiple times.

Stating my side
We do have a Kerry/Edwards yard sign. I made it myself. Isn't it gorgeous?

Why, you ask, a yard sign in a country where 99.9% of the inhabitants cannot vote in this particular election? So, what if an expat walked by my sign, acknowledged my deep feelings, and out of respect and friendship for me made up his undecided mind and voted Democrat? I say, if I play the lottery, I can also put up a yard sign.

I also made my husband laugh in delight. So there.

Endorsement
While I'm only speaking for myself, I'm sure my co-writers Doug and Carlos agree: Halfway down the Danube endorses John Kerry and John Edwards.

Please consider voting for Kerry/Edwards. I'm not saying they are the greatest, or that they will make everything wonderful and good. But they will make things better, because -- let's face it -- it would take a very extraordinary talent to make things worse than they already are. Remove that one talent from office and give the other team a chance.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Yours gratefully,

Claudia Muir