Janet Haven

Admitting that the holidays are really and truly over is a painful act, so despite the fact that I've been back at work this week, I'm posting my Holiday Reading List Book Reviews as if I were still at leisure. This holiday season I've managed to plough through a good number of books, fiction and non-, and acquired even more that are waiting for a moment of calm. In case you're looking for something to read, here are some suggestions (and warnings):

• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell: Recommended by one of my most trusted book friends, Cloud Atlas was possibly the best piece of fiction I've read in years. My reading of "serious" contemporary fiction has dropped off in the past five years or so, largely because every time I delve in I'm disappointed, annoyed, or overcome by the schlockiness of it all. The last book I found as satisfying as Cloud Atlas was Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. While I don't think The Corrections is for everyone, I can't imagine a reading friend who wouldn't appreciate Cloud Atlas. Go buy a copy.
• Casino Royale by Ian Fleming: Been watching Bond movies for years but you've never read any of the books? Well, don't bother, if the first one is any guide. Casino Royale was a real snooze; the movie, which I saw over the holidays with my family, was ten gazillion times better. Ian Fleming's young Bond seems an arrogant dolt, deeply unperceptive (I wonder if Vesper's nightly sobbing and daily secret phone calls during our romantic getaway spell T R O U B L E...? Bond's conclusion: no, girls are just weepy), and frankly sounds unattractive (not unimportant if you're claiming to be James Bond, right.) Also, predictably, the girls are real sissies, and not nearly vixenish enough to entertain. Ugh. Go see Daniel Craig instead.
• A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes: I actually read this over Thanksgiving, but am including it in holiday reading since Favorite Husband read it over Christmas, sparking much Russian history discussion at the Haven-D'Amato dinner table. The long and short of it is: read this book, if you have any desire to understand the underpinnings of the revolution. It's excellent, a 900-page page-turner, which is something one wouldn't usually expect in a brick-sized tome. Figes packs the book with anecdotes illuminating the tidal shifts in power, particularly from the 1914-1919 era. A main point that both FH and I took away from the narrative was how unlikely the Bolshevik seizure of power really was -- for much of the period under discussion, the country was entirely up for grabs, and much of the reason that the more moderate socialists didn't step forward was their hilarious and tragic belief in the rule book of revolution: we can't seize power, they explained to each other, because the book says that we need to have another twenty years of bourgeois development before the glorious socialist revolution could happen. Of course, anyone who has studied Marx knows that theory, but the idea that a group of so-called revolutionaries were presented with the possibility of taking on the reigns of state and stepped back from because of a theoretical map laid out by a 19th century philosopher is astonishing in 2006. Lenin, of course, only worried about that issue for, say, five minutes before shoving everyone aside and making the fatal grab for Russia.
• Best American Short Stories 2006 edited by Ann Patchett and Katrina Kenison: Usually, I enjoy this collection, but this year, it's draaaaging. I'm only halfway through, so hope lies in the next 10 pieces, but the stories so far have been ethereal, very atmospheric rather than character or plot driven. I mention it because I think my reaction actually points to a good thing about this series, that is, they pull in a new editor every year who brings their own slant to the choices. As Patchett says in her introduction, these aren't the *best* short stories of 2006, they're *her* 20 favorite stories of 2006. I wasn't a big fan of Patchett's book Bel Canto (although it won all sorts of awards), so I'm not surprised, on reflection, that I'm not moved by her short story choices. A word to the wise: know your anthologist.
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth: Like every dutiful American fiction reader, I feel like I should read AND appreciate Philip Roth. I made it through The Human Stain a while back and did, you know, appreciate it, although it left a bad taste...I always find it hard to read novels peopled with wholly unlikable characters. Nevertheless, occasionally when I know I'm headed for a long flight, I choose to bring a book that I have been meaning to read and that I think in other circumstances, I might set down after the first few pages. So I picked up American Pastoral on my way out the door for the flight from London to Los Angeles back in December, and resisted the urge at the airport to pick up any other reading material that might offer me an easy out, should I regret my Roth. Oh, what a mistake. Six hours into the twelve hour flight, my laptop was out of juice, my iPod had mysteriously shut itself off and poutingly refused to turn on again, and I was two agonized hours into American Pastoral, possibly my least favorite forced reading experience of a decade. Why is Roth The Man of contemporary American letters? Why? Why? Why? Although the flight offered me many, many hours to review this question, I did not manage to come up with an answer, despite the fact that I got three-quarters of the way through AP before touching down in LA. Perhaps the last quarter of American Pastoral holds the key to this puzzler, but since I set fire to the book in the backyard barbeque upon reaching my parents' house, I guess we'll never know, will we?
• Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology by David Gelernter: If you need an anecdote to Roth (or your version of Roth), pick up a copy (and go for the hard cover, you cheapskate) of David Gelernter's lovely long essay on beauty as a driver of innovation in technology. It's counterintuitive but obvious in retrospect, and so engaging that you may not even smell the charred Roth wafting in from the backyard.
• December 6 by Martin Cruz Smith and The Moscow Vector by Robert Ludlum: Let's acknowledge the private, dirty joy of an airport spy novel. What more can I say, except that in truth, the 12 hour flight back to London passed much more quickly with Martin Cruz Smith in hand than with Philip Roth on the way out. And my second iPod also broke directly after takeoff, so it was a completely level playing field. I don't recommend either of these books, but then I also wouldn't recommend that you eat an entire bag of Reeses Peanut Butter cups in one sitting, if you get my drift.



• The Elements of Style by Strunk and White: Possibly you read this, or exerpts of this, if you were once an American schoolchild. Read it again. William Strunk's clear, cool advice will resonate. As he tells you to use "definite, specific, concrete language," to "avoid a succession of loose sentences," to "omit needless words", you will think: guilty. My version is new and illustrated by Maira Kalman, which makes it more fun. A large part of the fun is not in her illustrations themselves, but in evaluating her choice of phrases to illustratrate. I would have illustrated the book entirely differently than she did, and imagining your own visuals alongside Strunk and White's spare, wise remarks makes for an amusing afternoon. And perhaps improved writing.

And books to look forward to...my father and brother ganged together and bought me, luxuriously, three of Edward Tufte's toothsome books on information design: Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Beautiful Evidence, his most recent. I also have Julian Barnes latest, Arthur and George, on the stack, Gogol's Dead Souls (which I started in California but haven't finished), and eternally, that bastion of the bedside table, Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China (five years and counting).

Recommendations for further reading always more than welcome.

Posted by Janet at 03:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (71)

Ethan tagged me in a little bloggame going around to spill five things about yourself that people don't know about you. So here are the first five that come to mind:

1. Because I've lived a big chunk of my adult life in Hungary, most people assume I have some kind of Magyar in the ancestral closet. I don't, not a single one (that I know of). I just like living here.

2. When I travel, I try to bring home textiles from wherever I've been. Every culture makes textiles of some sort or another, whether they are printed, woven, embroidered, silk, wool, cotton. They travel well, and can be pressed into a wide range of services once you get home. I wear, sleep on, sit on, bathe with and frame textiles I've brought home from various corners of the world.

3. Despite the fact that I grew up in Southern California (or because of it?), my favorite beach is not in a particularly warm place: Cannon Beach in Oregon, where Haystack Rock is.

4. I (ineptly) played water polo in college. It was without a doubt the most terrifying but exhilarating athletic activity I've ever participated in. My only near-death experience to date was an away game in a swimming pool at MIT where a very powerful woman held me underwater until my struggles tore the strap on my regulation speedo bathing suit. For this very reason, the women's team members always wore two bathing suits at once, to guard against having to flee the pool with only a shredded suit as cover. I had found it hard to believe that a speedo could give way, but I'm here to tell you that it will, and that that second suit is a life-saver.

5. I despise lima beans with all my heart. (My mother knows this, of course.)

Now I'm supposed to tag others...so Scotty and Peter, if you're still looking at your trackbacks, how about it?

Posted by Janet at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For those of you that asked, yes, last week's reinstallation of my Thinkpad's innards was entirely successful. Fabulous Joe did a fabulous job, and it's all running 100x better than it was. Of course, the DRM on my iTunes is screwed up (the punitive measures targeted, for some reason, at the recently purchased Beach Boys album), and I think I'm going to have to pay again to get FeedDemon, my RSS reader, back since I've lost the key to it...but otherwise, all is well.

And of course I'll take this opportunity to wax philosophically about how my small situation reflects a larger issue in the non-profit world. More and more, funders without a specific interest in technology issues are willing to fund technology projects with NGOs, and almost always this includes equipment purchases. This is a great trend -- it means that communications technologies are, in international development slang, being "mainstreamed" into programming, which is a fancy way of saying that both funders and NGOs see that technology often plays a central role in all kinds of projects and NGO work. One of the things that organizations often forget to budget for, or that donors aren't willing to fund, is ongoing tech support. However, as anyone who works in an office knows, life without tech support, if you're expected to use a computer to do your work, is well-neigh impossible. When the computer stops working well, due to viruses, windows registry problems, spyware, or system failures, the average person will simply have to stop working on that computer until an expert shows up. Same thing with software, both on server and client side -- if an organization is hosting their own infrastructure in any way, they're definitely going to need someone available to solve their problems now and again, or they're not going to be very effective.

What most organizations we run across do, particularly those in the developing world, is work with "accidental techies" -- that is, self-taught technologists who are somehow related to the organization, either by blood and friendship ("my brother's girlfriend's cousin's schoolfriend") or by issue interest (a volunteer operating within a community organization, for instance, who lives down the block from their office), or have become the designated "person with some technical know-how" within the organization because they know a little bit (or a lot) more than everyone else. One of the issues we struggle with at the Civil Society Communications initiative is how best to increase the skills and resources of the accidental techies of the world -- because most of them are working for love rather than money (or very little money), and often are helping a number of organizations, accidental techies often don't have the time to keep up with the latest in software for NGOs, localized open source resources in their own languages, web 2.0 tools useful for advocacy, as well as the basics around databases, web-publishing, and so on. Projects like NGO in a Box, the Social Source Commons, and APC's range of skills-building material go a long way towards providing resources for this group, but nothing beats hands-on workshops that put new ideas to use in a real environment. The trick, of course, is both seeking out the accidental techies in a country, and convincing an organization's funders that tech support is much more than a peripheral expense in organizational budget planning.

Posted by Janet at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (63)

You just can't beat CNN broadcasting burning cars and angry rioters down the street from your flat if you want old friends to get in touch. Thanks, everyone, for writing and calling. Fortunately, there's nothing particularly to report. The truth is, Speak Truth to Power '06 in Budapest was apparently about 150 ultrarightwing nationalists who took the opportunity to disrupt a legitimate and peaceful citizens' demonstration in front of the Parliament building. Yes, people here are really, really mad to hear Prime Minister Gyurcsany remind his party activists that they've been lying through their teeth (''morning, noon, and night"!) to get re-elected. What perhaps did not come across in the international media, however, is that no one is particularly surprised to hear that. It's just that you're not supposed to say it out loud, duh. My impression from talking to Hungarian friends is that people are more offended by Gyurcsany's language: not that saying "fucking" in Magyar is a particularly big deal (Hungarians are famously colorful in their cursing), but the point is that Gyurcsany used the word not in conjunction with his opponents or the bad EU or whatever, but about Szép Magyarország (Beautiful Hungary) itself. Hence, I'm assuming, the psychotic reaction of the ultranationalists. For a little background, thse are the guys who are still seriously plotting how they're going to get back Transylvania (owned by Romania since the Treaty of Trianon, 1920), as well as formerly Austro-Hungarian slices of Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and Ukraine. The movement, known as "Greater Hungary", breaks bread with the anti-Semites, the anti-Roma, the anti-foreigners, and the skinheads. Nice.

So yes, it was a surprise to see the Hungarian police in riot gear a couple of blocks from Chez Haven-D'Amato, but it all seems to have calmed down quickly, and we're fine. Hungary, on the other hand, is feeling a little bruised, and it will be worth following the story in the coming weeks to see how the government faces up to the fact that they've just announced their own untrustworthyness while facing an economic meltdown which is going to require voter backing to solve. And apart from the rioters who stole the media limelight, they've also got a lot of legitimately angry Hungarians concerned about what seems like an increasingly unstable future. So cross your fingers for us, but for different reasons than you might have thought.

Posted by Janet at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

My Polish colleague Jerzy is one of those crushing European polyglots who make single-language Americans like me despair over our upbringing, education, and entirely unrigorous way of life. Jerzy effortlessly speaks Polish, Hungarian, and English. If you're at all into language families, you know that's not like being able to speak Italian, French, and Spanish. Polish, Hungarian, and English are, to put it mildly, way, way, different.

To lull me out of my despair, Jerzy occassionally asks my advice on the finer points of composing in English; mostly recently, he asked me when it was appropriate to use a semi-colon in a sentence. Since Americans of my age (33, if you must know) were not requried to study grammar (at least in California, I kid you not), I actually haven't the slightest idea what the official answer to that question is, and so waxed philosophical about semi-colons, linked sentences, the emotional qualities of punctucation, and so forth. Then I recommended Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, and slunk off to my office, embarassed at my loquaciousness on a topic that I don't actually know the answer to.

Today, the question came back to me, and I googled "When do you use a semi-colon?" The magic 8-ball gave me back this answer, which I thought was much more accurate than what I told Jerzy:

Q. When do you use a semicolon?
A. After you’ve attended grad school.

So, there you go. Sorry, Jerzy, I got it wrong.

Posted by Janet at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm about to leave for a week of vacation in Croatia's golden port city, Dubrovnik. Aside from admiring the beauty of the ancient walls and the blue, blue Adriatic, I also want to eat well -- squid ink risotto, fried calamari, clams in white wine and garlic...all of these top of the list of reasons to head down to seaside Croatia from landlocked Hungary. I've spent this morning scanning the web for restaurant recommendations in Dubrovnik, and I find myself stymied once again by the complications of sifting through online information.

Conventional wisdom tells me that I should be using my trusted online networks to find this information, and indeed, I have turned to the places I normally would for restaurant recommendations, that is, sites that I trust to give me some good reviews. I started with Saveur magazine's online archive, moved on to Chowhound, Gridskipper, and TimeOut. I checked Dubrovnik on Technorati to see if anyone had blogged about restaurants recently, and Dubrovnik/food/restaurants on Flickr to see if anyone had usefully tagged photos.

The result is not that great, an hour later, and has led me to consider (as I often do when I'm looking for travel information) what a hit or miss operation information searches and relying on trusted networks are when, in reality, you don't have a trusted network in place. Here's a quick run-down of what I found:

Saveur, my most exalted, trusted source, is not in any way a member of the read/write web. They publish a dead-tree magazine, and they put those articles online. That said, they are absolutely the best, and have never, every failed me in any of my travels from lobster pasta in Venice to mind-bendingly good tapas in Xerez, Andalusia. Unfortunately, they've never written on Dubrovnik. So cross that one off for this trip.

Chowhound, my next best source for recommendations, troubled me this time around. Chowhound is a site for people who consider themselves "foodies", and the "chowhounders" do their good work by sniffing out small, unknown restaurants. Their very useful discussion forum can sometimes yield epicurean gems. The problem with Chowhound is that it's largely a US-based site; their international discussions are not, in fact, very trustworthy. In a search for Dubrovnik, I found lots of discussion threads, but when I cross-referenced the recommendations on the discussion threads with a guidebook I have (the always-useful but not culinarily-minded Lonely Planet), I found almost 100 percent overlap. That is, the so-called chowhounds who were writing about Dubrovnik were not sniffing out new, unknown local joints, but were in fact commenting on the restaurants already in the guidebook that just about everyone who visits Crotia has in their backpack. There's certainly utility in that, but ... if the users on Chowhound are simply discussing what Lonely Planet has already recommended, I wouldn't rely on them as experts; it's not a trusted network after all. And indeed, there are no Croatians posting on Chowhound that I saw, which is really unfortunate. (The other kind of recommendation on Chowhound for Dubrovnik are the "I went to a great little restaurant down a back street near the port, but I can't remember the name" variety, which are just kind of irritating. Please, don't bother.)

On to Gridskipper, which does list Dubrovnik as one of its cities "on the grid"; however, the only restaurant recommended there is not qualified in any way -- the writer just says it's "one of the city's best". Well, maybe, but when I search online I don't find other information on it or recommendations for it. So that really wasn't so helpful, and I realize that when push comes to shove (am I going to get into a cab and cross the city to go to a specific restaurant) I don't really trust Gridskipper on restaurant issues -- or at least not on this one. Since there's no context for the recommendation, and I don't know who the writer is, I'm skeptical.

TimeOut is semi-useful, but they want us to buy the dead-tree copy so the information is light. I do trust TimeOut, but again -- not really the read/write web. I'm just going by their single writer's recommendations.

The noise on Technorati around Dubrovnik is too difficult to sift through -- lots of link factories or advertising come back, so I give up. Flickr yields, as usual, a wonderland of beautiful pictures of Croatian seafood when I do my search, but there's no associated information with any of the pictures (i.e., where did you eat that gorgeous shrimp?)

The moral of this story is that I've ended up a bit stymied. No online source that I really trust has led me to good restaurant options in Dubrovnik. I'm now planning to call up a friend who's a tour guide and was in Croatia with a group a few weeks back for her insights, and then go out and buy a copy of another friend's book on Croatia, Annabel Barber's Visible Cities Dubrovnik.

I think the reason I find this long tale interesting is because of, well, the theory of the internet's long tail that Wired's Chris Anderson and others have written extensively about over the past two years. The theory, which I largely agree with, is that web 2.0 allows for incredibly rich information geared to very niche markets or demographics (foodies traveling to Dubrovnik, i.e.); related thinking revolves around the idea that trusted communities will form around these niches, and that the read/write web allows everyone to join those communities as both a consumer and producer of information. That's great, again, I largely agree with that.

The problem I see is that some niches which are transitory, and some niches aren't. I am going to care for a long time about data security and human rights organizations, and it's worth it for me to build a community of trust around that issue. I only care this week about good restaurants in Dubrovnik, and it really not worth it for me to build or join a community of trust around that. Nevertheless, I want to be able to dip into online communities who do care about that issue when I need to know more about it -- and yet, I'm not really in a position to evaluate who is a trusted source in a specific network. How do I know that so-and-so poster on Chowhound is reliable? Why should I trust the person who recommended to Gridskipper that X restaurant in Dubrovnik is excellent? So, one of the downsides I see with the beauty of niche information is the inability of an individual to be involved in as many as they want to, or need to, be. I think that what comes out of this is more and more recommendation systems a la Slashdot or Digg that are geared in a very niche way. However, a lot of sites will need to be rebuilt to put those kinds of tools in place....so I still see a long haul ahead of us for making the read/write web truly useful. These kinds of experiences are a good reminder to me that, no matter how fast it seems like we're moving on communications technologies, we're still taking baby steps. And that's why I'm heading out now to buy Annabel's book to take with me this afternoon to Dubrovnik.

PS: If any of my five readers have a suggestion for where to eat in Dubrovnik, leave a comment!

Posted by Janet at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Back home here in Budapest, we have a semi-embarassing American ambassador: George Bush's cousin, George Walker. He's a nice enough guy, I've heard, even with a sense of humor. However, as the Prez's cousin, one wonders about his qualifications for the job**. Nevertheless, George (the Prez) seems to like him, or at least feel a familial draw, because he's decided to pay him a visit here in Budapest.

Dropping in on your cousin seems like a friendly thing to do, doesn't it? Let's review: currently I'm sitting in my office listening to helicopters circling the downtown. Instead of taking five minutes to walk to work this morning, I took nearly half an hour; I live in the sixth district and must cross one of the major arteries of the city, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, to get to work. Turns out you can't cross Baj-Zsil right now: no pedestrians, no car traffic, no nothing. The fifth district, where POTUS is headed for very important slabs of Eszterhazy torta, is surrounded right now with a triple ring: cops, another line of cops, and a throng of hapless Pestieks trying desparately to get to work. (The fifth district is Budapest's Wall Street, so much of the banking and associated companies are within the ring of cops. As is my office.) I joined a group of sweaty, briefcase-clutching investment bankers moving from crosswalk to crosswalk, pleading with the cops to let us across to our offices. Finally, we found one who ushered a group of us from Erzsebet Ter to Oktober 6th, obviously an act of mercy. All this rumpus is of course following on the three day towing extravaganza that has cleared the inner city (including my street) of thousands of parked cars. The length of Bajcsy, Deak Ter, etc have been under police wraps since Monday night. And on top of that, all the guests in the Meridian Hotel on Deak Ter got uncerimoniously booted, no warning, on Monday night to make room for crowds of buzz-cut guys with ear pieces Subtle. Of course, maybe it is a decoy, and POTUS is actually staying elsewhere.

The real question, raised by the ever-astute Favorite Husband last night, is: where does it end? What's actually reasonable for a state visit? Is protecting the life of POTUS worth shutting down public transportation for hours, preventing people from working, closing Hungarian airspace, bringing in a rocket-proof motorcade and American helicopters, a thousand security dudes on top of all the Hungos who are going to be involved? What's a reasonable expense for the American and Hungarian people to bear? I live in a flat that overlooks Bajcsy where POTUS's rocketproof limo drove moments ago: my living room window is a perfect sniper's perch, as are thousands of others along the street. (Note to Secret Service: that's not a threat to POTUS, just an observation.) Would it be reasonable to make everyone who has a Bajcsy-facing window leave their apartments while POTUS drives by? Would it be reasonable to clear the downtown entirely and shut all businesses for the day? Do George and George really need to eat goose liver together in Budapest if it causes all this fuss, disarray, and inconvenience?

Two observations: based on the comments I heard on the street going to work, the anti-Bush rally planned at 4 pm this afternoon in front of the US embassy on Szabadsag Ter is probably going to be a lot bigger than it would have been if POTUS hadn't pissed off so many Pestieks by coming to town.

The second observation is that this POTUS has taken a lot of flak for not traveling enough, for staying home in America and receiving our allies in the White House. Following this experience, I have to say that I think this may have been one of his better decisions.

*POTUS= President of the United States, for those not into Secret Service lingo
**Continuing the theme, our next ambassador is slated to be George's (the Prez) ex-girlfriend.

Posted by Janet at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My family isn't hugely into traditions, but the ones we have stick: Thanksgiving at my aunt Ruth's in Laguna Beach, Yorkshire pudding once a year on Christmas night, decorating the tree with ornaments my brother and I made in early years that my mother has kept carefully tucked away. Etcetera. I like these traditions, and find them to be more than habit -- they have meaning for me and others that go beyond simply doing things the same way every time because its easier than coming up with something new. They create a thread of continuity for us which is very satisfying. And so often I look, with my good friends and family, for new traditions that we can start and keep to over time.

I'm pleased to report that two of my favorite people and I have started a new tradition. My friends Kathleen and Steven, who I manage to see a few times a year (which is still not enough) went on my request tonight to Palm Too, a steakhouse in New York. I've never been to a proper, over-the-top, red leather banquette, wood panelled steakhouse, and I knew that Steven was the man to sort it out for me. Steven is a native of the city, and despite a recent move to Connecticut, his heart still lies in Manhattan. To be more specific, his heart lies on plate, next to a 24-ounce ribeye cooked medium rare with a side order of buttery green beans and crispy fried onions. In short, the man knows where to eat.

Palm Too was spectactuar, exceeding my steakhouse fantasies. As we hacked our way through the bounty, Steven mentioned to me that there are dozens of excellent steakhouses in the city, and we pondered, over our grilled meats, the tragedy that our short time together prevented any further exploration of the New York's restaurant beef. But there is an obvious solution, with an eye to a new and beautiful tradition: we agreed that each time I came to the city in years to come, we would visit a new steakhouse together. And really, I can't wait.

For posterity, here's what we ate tonight:
Clams Oreganata
Shimp Bruno
Shrimp Cocktail
Tomato and Onion Salad
24-ounce rib-eye (Steven and me)
10-oz filet mignon (Kathleen)
Steamed leaf spinach
Fried onions and potato slices
Green beans with garlic cloves

Posted by Janet at 03:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Setting aside all the deeply, deeply serious clash-of-civilizations rumblings in my other post on last week's trip to fabulous Andalusia, Favorite Husband and I also had a truly excellent time. The week included two of my absolute favorite things: food that I don't usually eat and public celebrations that I don't really understand.

On the food side of things, Andalusia is the land of tapas. Although I haven't lived in the United States for many years, I get the impression that tapas bars were cool once, but have now gone the way of the Squirrel Nut Zippers (or have been replaced by the more urbane-sounding "small plate restaurant".) Anyway, woe is to you if you're not sitting in a tapas bar in Jerez right now, eating a plate of oily artichoke hearts, or a chickpea-and-chorizo-and-cabbage stew or a still-sizzling platter of calamari frito. Southern Spanish tapas is unrepentantly meaty, deep fried, fat-laden, salty, glorious. And it's cheap. And it's almost always accompanied by plates of gorgeous local olives (the endless varities of which baffle and delight an olive-lover like myself -- personally, I always tried to find places that served "gordo", the fat green olive approximately the size of large duck egg) and elegant small glasses of icy beer or the Manzanilla sherry of the region. It is joyful eating, where the plates keep coming, and everyone around you looks excited at the prospect of what might emerge from the kitchen, and the tab is chalked by the bartender on the bar in front of you (which he also uses as a tablet for his ponderous addition when you ask for the check.) Needless to say, I spent the week in a state of distracted delirium.

Tapas in Grenada

There was only one problem with the whole tapas deal for FH and me: we're just not good tapas people. When we ordered, we waited impatiently for the plate's arrival, then ate whatever was on it, then started looking up for the next plate to arrive. Around us, professional Spanish tapas eaters stretched small plates of cheese and jamon and olives out over hours of leisurely conversation. FH and I tried, we really did. We talked about our flawed approach to tapas; we attempted different techniques (general distraction, word games, bountiful drinking) to stretch it out. As it turned out, it was impossible for us to overcome our cultural training of prompt and dutiful plate-cleaning at every meal. Over and over again, we failed, looking up from our clamshells, our cheese rinds, our sausage casings guiltily as the waiter tsk-tsked and swept the empty plate away. Not that this put us off the tapas, mind you. Just a note to others who grew up in families with a clearly delineated dinner time that this form of consumption takes (not unpleasant) practice.

Semana Santa float in Triana, Seville

On the public celebration side of things, we managed to overlap with the first days of Semana Santa, Catholic Spain's Holy Week. Seville was in a daily uproar during our four days there, with public works crews setting up road barriers and bleacher seating for thousands. When we visited Seville's famous cathedral, we shared the space with a good-sized truck that was moving giant candelbras around and making lots of irritating echoey truck noises under the tremendous ceiling. It all seemed remote and semi-invasive until Friday night when we ran into one of the first Semana Santa processions in Triana, a neighborhood across the river from the main tourist area in Seville. And then it suddenly became clear why all the bustle, and why tourists come from around the world to see the Spanish Holy Week in person.

What happens is this: every church has a procession, and since there are so many churches, they have to double up, or more. So there are multiple processions every night, and it seems that they all follow different routes, meaning that you can wander the streets after dark and cut across the paths of competing parades. Also, there seem to be some Keystone Cops moments of processions running into each other, with lots of priestly glaring and dueling of incense, followed by miffed resolution, but that may have been part of plan; hard to tell not speaking Spanish. The processions themselves include some combination of elements: gigantic candles carried by kids in suits, priests in full gear, sticks of incense taller than me. The one constant, though, in each procession is the big float. The float seemed to be either Mary, Queen of Heaven or Jesus, at some familiar point in the Easter story (crucifixion, resurrection, Son of God, etc). They are so over the top, so glittery, so be-candled, so shiny and big and heavy that you cannot believe it's been pulled together by a little parish church. Earlier in the week, I observed to Favorite Husband that the Spanish, in terms of fashion, were obviously not afraid of sequins; as it turned out, this translates to Semana Santa floats as well. It was all sparkle; this event is not about understatement. The floats, despite their obvious weight, are also entirely man-powered; rows of men covered with the velvet skirts heave the float through the city streets on their shoulders, moving at a stately pace. Corners present problems, and so each float is surrounded by a second phalanx of dark-suited older men who look like Secret Service, but are instead the guides to the blind float-bearers.

It's not what you think: Semana Santa procession in Jerez

We spent our last night in Jerez, a dusty sherry-making town between Seville and Cadiz. Jerez sees day-tripping tour bus visitors who come in to tour the giant sherry factories and then quickly skip town, which is described in both the guidebooks I had as a pointless and ugly overnight stop. Happily for us, Saveur Magazine, one of my food-related spiritual guides, advised that Jerez had one of the best tapas bars around (the Bar Juanito in the Pescadoria Viejo, and they were right), so I decided that we'd buck the trend and stay on for the night.

On arrival, it became clear that foolish decisions had been made. All the sherry-makers were closed for Semana Santa, Jerez did indeed seem like an abandoned cow-town after the excitement and bustle of Seville, and the police appeared to be capriciously towing all the cars parked near our hotel. FH and I safely stowed our car in a garage, checked in to our surprisingly charming hotel (the Belles Artes: don't stay anywhere else in Jerez if you want to wake up to the cathedral's dome), and agreed to take a quick walk through the presumably decrepit downtown before admitting defeat and spending the rest of the day napping.

Duh. Jerez's jewel-box downtown is gorgeous, and it being Sunday, Holy Week processions were about to begin in earnest. As we walked through the late afternoon sunshine, we were joined by a flood of families walking towards the center to establish their places for the coming processions, by several different marching bands polishing their instruments, people rushing by with eight foot high incense sticks, a truck laden with life-size crucifixes (!), etc. Perhaps most, er, surprising for FH and me was the attire worn by the Semana Santa crowd; in Jerez, most of the processants were dressed in some variety of a loose flowing robe, topped with a very tall pointy head covering with eyeholes cut in it. Some of them were white, some dark blue, and a number were black. In other words, as non-Spanish-Catholics, FH and I had to keep reminding ourselves over the next few hours that we were taking part in a celebration of Jesus Christ's resurrection, not a Klan rally.

Pietà float in Jerez

Four chruches staged processions that night in Jerez; each procession wound its way through the narrow stone streets and ended up at the main cathedral, where the float was dropped off. All the floats were in by midnight, but the street party continued long into the night; tapas bars stayed open, street stands sold sausages and beer and fried everything, and quite obviously, no one was planning to go to work the next day.

Posted by Janet at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (532)

Favorite Husband and I spent the last week swanning around Andalusia, admiring the remains of Moorish Spain's clash of civilizations. It's a trip well worth taking, particularly if you're interested in the historical long view. As it happened, I was in Istanbul (not Constantinople) for work the week before the trip to Spain. The odd juxtaposition of visits to the Hagia Sophia and Seville's Alcazar or Grenada's Alhambra within a few days of each other is something that, I'm guessing, not many people have been lucky enough to do. Given the luxury, as I was, it's fascinating to consider these monuments side-by-side, in the context of both historical and modern Europe.

At one end of Europe is Justinian's tremendous Eastern Orthodox cathedral-cum-mosque, where tourists can still visit bits of the glorious mosaics of Chistendom. At the other end of the continent is Sophia's inverse: Spain's spectacular Islamic fortresses, where Christian kings vanquished Muslim tribes and then continued to reign, leaving the intricate Moorish design intact and adding the odd crucifix or Baroque ballroom just to remind everyone who was boss -- exactly as the Muslim conquerers did in the Hagia Sofia, on the other side of Europe. I've wondered on previous visits to Istanbul why this was: seems like it would be worth the trouble to take down the largest Christian church in the world, if you were the Muslim conquerer of a Christian city. But in fact, it seems that the Christian kings on the other side of the continent made the same calculation -- just make a few modifications, and move right in. Both sets of conquerers also celebrated their victory (eventually) by erecting tremendous monuments within site of the vanquished foes' structures: the Blue Mosque stands directly across from the Hagia Sophia, and Seville's massive cathedral next to the Alcazar, while you could throw a rock from the walls of the Alhambra and hit Grenada's central church.

The Hagia Sophia, the Alhambra, and the Alcazar are museums now, but I found it impossible to see any of them as the neutral space that museums usually are. A visitor cannot help but imagine the bitterness, rage, and thirst for vengence that each civilization must have experienced on being forced to abandon the physical spaces which embodied their beliefs, art, and culture. On visiting the Alhambra, we were told that the city's last Arabic defender, Baobil, wept as he fled the beloved palace while his mother offered him this advice: "Do not weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man." Ouch. But indeed, the sense of victor and vanquished is still palpable at all three sites; perhaps more interesting, though, is the sense of history's ebb and flow. The battles that are being fought today, both ideologically and with terrible violence, are of course nothing new -- and we all know that. However, to be reminded so clearly, so physically, of Europe's endless expansions and contractions over the centuries is more than worth a trip to any of Europe's hazy borders.

Posted by Janet at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (50)

Artist's rendition of me with my iPod

Actually, I'm thinking back to the trip I took to Uganda in January. As readers may remember, I traveled with my friend Stephanie, a woman who firmly occupies a place among the digirati, and one of the prime iPod influencers in my life. While we waited for our flight to leave from Schipol airport in Amsterdam, she bought a new camera -- a film camera. When I expressed my surprise over her retro choice, she said she was sick of using digital cameras...the extra cords, the batteries running out, missing shots, etc. And, she said, she was already overwhlemed with digital detritus -- cell phone and charger, laptop and charger, iPod and cords and earbuds, etc, etc.

Now, looking at the tangle of USB cords, lanyards, earbuds, and other small parts while I will now need to keep track of, I can't help but think that Stephanie was on to something. I remember my first WalkMan, for instance, which didn't need to be charged, and had no accompanying bits and pieces. Of course, one could point out, it's a lot easier to haul around a few cords and an iPod than 100 tapes and a clunky box the size of a wireless router: true, true. But given the iPod flotsam spread across my floor, I don't think that this problem has been solved just yet.

Posted by Janet at 04:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Blue Heron

Southern California doesn't usually yield quite such varied reports, but just recently Dad started seeing a blue heron on near the flood control channel that runs up from Seal Beach towards Long Beach. He managed to snap a picture of it perched on the peak of an aluminum-roofed building, and sent it on to me. Beautiful bird, isn't it?

Posted by Janet at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Because OSI program staff (which I am) tend to travel often, and sometimes to less-than-stable parts of the world, our employer goes to a lot of trouble to make sure we don't run into trouble. We get alerts about state-department travel warnings, and internal messages from executive management telling us where we should or shouldn't go. Which is all very helpful, because showing up in a country during a plague or revolution always makes one feel rather stupid, and worries the parents to boot.

Additionally, OSI provides its staff with an external service, the SOS International Card. SOS International takes care of tasks for its clients like crisis management, health care intervention, repatriation of remains (!!), and other somewhat scary things. One of the apparently useful services that comes with membership is the "International SOS Medical Alerts", which members can sign up for in email format. I signed up, and immediately started receiving the Daily Anxiety:

"Zimbabwe: Cholera kills 11 in three southeastern districts"

"China: Toxic spill threatens water supply in Guangdong province"

"Kenya: Measles outbreak affects Nairobi, other areas"

"Indonesia: Surge in Malaria cases in East Lombok"

"Sudan: Yellow fever in South Kordofan state"

"Turkey: Avian Influenza (Bird Flu) Situation Update: Main Points"

"Zambia: Cholera outbreak grows worse in Lusaka"

Good grief. What I haven't been able to detemine is how the SOS service decides to send out an alert. There seems to be no rhyme or reason. Surely there is more than one health crisis around the world per day that involves epidemic, poor water, or the developing world? Measles in Nairobi doesn't preclude toxic spills in China, as far as I know.

Perhaps the answer lies in the point of production: the email arrives from something called the "SOS Alarm Center". Does SOS International simply pick a random, daily health tragedy from a list of many in order to keep their clients mildly alarmed, slightly anxious, sweatily checking their supplies of generic antibiotics, iodine, and malaria tablets? This isn't to complain about the services that SOS International provides, which I'm sure are very good and useful (although I, thankfully, have never had to make use of them myself, and hope not to). But it's useful to remember: alarmed clients are good clients, at least to a crisis management service.

Posted by Janet at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I live in Budapest, Hungary, and work for the Open Society Institute's Information Program. OSI is a private, grant-making foundation that works both in the United States and internationally, although I only work on the international side. Which is one of the reasons for writing this blog: my work takes me to the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and South East Asia. Three years of amazing travel has gone by without any record, aside from a few pictures on my hard drive and many more in my head.

The job itself is the other reason for starting this blog up again. I'm lucky in my work: I travel quite a bit, regularly see fascinating projects and meet extraordinary individuals. It seems worthwhile to share that information with those who might also be interested.

Within the Information Program at OSI, I run the Civil Society Communications program, which includes a capacity-buliding piece and a toolsets piece. To translate: the Information Program works to enhance the ability to access, exchange and produce information by civil society constituencies (i.e., activists, advocates in a range of areas) . Some of this work is done via policy interventions, or investment in libraries, publishing, translations. What I do is work on the problem of how it's done at a hands-on level - what are the software tools, communications tactics, and capabilities that civil society groups need in order to communicate both with each other and with their target audiences, be that the general public, national governments, or international communities. We look at issues along the lines of "what can blogs do for a human rights community in the Middle East?", "how are networking software tools relevant to public health activists working for anti-tobacco legislation in Eastern Europe?" or "what technologies will help in categorizing hundreds of human rights abuse reports?"

And to wrap up the bio part of things: I grew up in Seal Beach, California, in the heart of Orange County. Unfortunately, I skipped town before Orange County became "the O.C."; when I lived there it was known only (if equally, probably) for its phenomenal number of strip malls, its conservative (and later bankrupt) powers-that-be, and its ska scene. I wasn't into any of the above - regrettably, ska-wise - and moved on majority to SoCal's antonyn, Amherst, Massachusetts. Western Mass was different and quickly beloved, but pork stew, Urgic languages, and nations in transition called, and I moved to Hungary in the mid-1990's.

I spent one year in Hungary, and then moved on to the UK, Prague, and back to Hungary. I fit in a masters' degree at the University of Virginia (in a fantastic American Studies/Computing in the Humanities program, one of the first of its kind in those days). Post-MA, I joined two start-up software companies in Central Europe. One, Netbeans in Prague, was bought up by Sun Microsystems (and survives to this day as their open source Java IDE); the second, Uproar in Budapest, was purchased by Vivendi during Jean-Marie Messier's crazed shopping spree in 2001.

Budapest has been my home for the past six years. I live here with Favorite Husband and the Stuffed Turtle.

Posted by Janet at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (50)