Unfortunately, on my side of the Pacific Ocean people behave just the same, if not worse. A few weeks ago, I discovered the most beautiful beach inside a protected country park. It looked like paradise from the trail above. Then I went down to the coast line and there was plastic trash everywhere. On the beach, in the bushes behind it, hanging from trees. Plastic bottles, styrofoam lunch boxes, toys, bags, and lots of shoes. All dumped into the sea one way or the other and then spit out again by wind and waves.
One of the commentators on youtube asked why the Pacific garbage patch can’t be seen from satellites. I read because the plastic is not necessarily swimming on the surface, but just below it. If you go swimming on one of Hong Kong beaches it’s just the same. It looks ok from the shore, but then you head out, and garbage bags touch your legs and wind themselves around your arms.
The big beaches here are cleaned everyday, but the cleaners find it hard to pick up tiny pieces of plastic and styrofoam. So there is this constant colorful line of miniscule plastic bits on the beach that marks high tide.
A year ago, I wrote an email to the biggest supermarket in Hong Kong commending them on the introduction of a HK$ 0.50 fee for plastic bags at the checkout, but also asking them to get rid of the excessive plastic trays and cling wrap they use for fruits and vegetables. Why does a single fruit need to be put on a plastic tray and wrapped in cling wrap?
I got a call back from them, and I got the feeling that the girl did not like her job, although I was very friendly. She told me that she would send my email further up the command line. Don’t think that I had ever any hopes. Writing emails has as much impact as cleaning beaches.
I have decided to buy more of my veggies and fruit in wet markets, where the produce is not disguised in cling wrap and where I can bring my own bags. I have also decided to leave excessive plastic wrappings right where I bought it, in the bins behind the checkout counters.
And I feel pretty helpless to be honest, and a bit angry, like that teacup yorkshire.
As a mummy I should loathe them, reprimand my nine year old son the second they come out of his mouth and put a stern face on. I mean swear words of course.
But I am a lazy mummy, and if you ask me if it’s a shitty day, there is no better adjective to describe it.
Of course you have to teach your kid that swear words are to be used like most spices… sparingly. They should never be used during job interviews, oral university examinations, or other situations where you have to appear properer than you really are. And if you ask me to call someone an asshole, especially to his face, says more about you than him.
I admit that little man learned to say shit in two languages (Scheiße in German, if you must know) at the tender age of two and probably from listening to me. German swear words tend to be “anal orientated” as one Anglo-saxon author of German habits put it. If a German calls you an “Arschloch” chances are he or she doesn’t like you.
From my own observation Anglo-saxon swear words tend to be sexually orientated. “F..beep” is a prime example. To a Teutonic like me fucking is very enjoyable, shit on the other hand smells badly, but listening to beeps on TV while you mouth-read every word of it is probably strangely satisfying to all of us.
A while ago little man came home and told me that is school mate J. is “gay”. Gosh I thought, J. is only eight years old the chances that he is gay before puberty are pretty slim, so I asked little man if he actually knew what gay means. He told me that gay means acting like a girl.
Well, that’s close but not really what it means, and not wanting to play tag on a boiling hot day is rather smart not gay if you ask me. Sometimes being a parent is quite complicated, because you have to decide in a snap what to say to steer your offspring to the right direction.
I told him that J. was right to go inside.
When he is a little older I will tell him that being gay is ok, and chances are that he will know that by himself by then, because in the end parents are the most crucial influences kids have.
Beeps on TV are useless if you ask me, and not letting your kids watch youtube videos is useless as well. They will hear it on the school bus anyway. On the other hand talking about it is very useful. Youtube videos in which people say fuck in every sentence are not bandwidth-friendly. My son knows this. They could be much shorter and to the point.
Teaching your kids what is appropriate by example and what will diminish their own worth is probably the most fucking awesome sweet thing you can do for them, not gay at all, nor sick.
PS: My Dad lost his remaining foot. I visited him in hospital a few weeks ago, and on the very bright side, I think he understood that although it is uncertain how he will get into and out my parent’s second floor apartment (no lift) and roll to the loo (very narrow door), he is very much loved. There is no poison needed Dad, although you suggested it. We will find a way.
There is only one boy left who occasionally beats little man at chess in school, and I fully expect my Dad to teach him how to be patient, be vigilant, and plan ahead for the ultimate chess mate. No foot needed for that.
Did you have one lately? A day that started full of promise and sunshine and as it progressed got worse by the minute?
My Dad is in hospital again. One foot is gone, now it’s the other one. Two toes got amputated on Wednesday, on Saturday my parents received the consent form to amputate the rest of the forefoot. My Dad said no.
Is life worthwhile without legs?
Yes it is, but it depends on all the other surrounding factors, like to what you grew used to the preceding 74 years, and how much pain you experience every night (screaming, terrible no sleep pain), and how much strength you have in your remaining limbs (not much), and how tired you are.
My Dad pinned his hope on this remaining leg. The leg with the black toe, blue foot, but the leg that would make it possible to learn to walk with a prosthesis on the other side. Now they want to amputate that too.
My Mum said that my Dad doesn’t care anymore, he just says no.
With the other foot I talked to him. I said that all that mattered is that we would have him, that he is needed , that he is loved. Now I don’t know anymore. My Dad has to decide.
I don’t think that life is fair. My Dad had a shitty childhood full of hunger, bombs, and beatings by his father, worked all his life, cared for his family, was stubborn, so what? Why can’t he have it easy in the end. Why?
When I was in Kyoto more than ten years ago I made a big mistake. I visited the old town and a couple of beautiful temples and marveled at the beautiful red autumn foliage, but I didn’t visit any of Kyoto’s famous gardens. It was one of those squeezed-in-a -few-days-after-a-business-meeting trip.
To make my mistake even worse I stayed at a truly terrible business hotel in Osaka, which is close to Kyoto. If you are a road warrior you know what kind of hotel I am talking about: expensive, closet-sized room, musty bathroom, smelly (stale cigarette smoke with something more awful mixed in, and the whole night you wonder what it was that died under your bed), air-conditioning either too hot or too cold, and (help!) the window can’t be opened. After that you swear to yourself that you will never, never book your hotel room at the last minute.
I don’t want you to put off to visit Japan after reading the above. Normally, hotel rooms in Japan’s urban areas are tiny but spotlessly clean, and have free internet access (woohoo!).
Where was I? Japanese gardens. They are beautiful.
I have a coffee table book with beautiful drawings and pictures, which I recommend to any Japanese garden fan: Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane. I think Japanese gardens appeal to the average European because they encompass design features that seem familiar to us. They are fenced in (that archtypical paradise garden), surprising after you round the next corner, abstract, and highly symbolic. Yet in other ways they are so different to what we know, and therefore exciting.
I didn’t go to Kyoto this time, but I stopped at every public garden we came across, and sucked in on all the details of road-side private gardens we went by.
A friend of mine likened Japan to the Galapagos Islands. A seed or animal flies in and adapts to its new environment, changes, and becomes something truly unique. The beauty of Japan is that it embraces outside influences,but every new impetus gets adapted to something truly Japanese. I think that is one of the reasons what makes Japan so interesting to visit. You recognize so many things, but see them in a completely new way.
Japanese garden design has strong Chinese influences, yet I bet you would instantly know how to tell apart a Japanese garden from a Chinese garden. A Chinese garden repaints an epic landscape in a highly artificial way, a Japanese garden distills the essence of it and does so seemingly effortless. Ok, that’s the ignorant Western short version, but you are free to dig deeper.
That’s the theory. Then you go to Japan and notice that space for gardens is limited. You walk through Tokyo. Skyscrapers, pavement, smelly cars, and endless sprawl with these gray apartment buildings. You stay in a hotel near Shinjuku Station, and discover the beauty of having your own, tiny, private space. And it has a bath tub. Japanese need bath tubs. As a Westerner (me at least) you are ok with a working shower. After I went on a pan-European business trip with a Japanese colleague I knew that a bath tub is essential for surviving, otherwise you will hear about it all through dinner.
But even in noisy, packed, central Tokyo, you round a corner and suddenly there is silence. It’s a quiet street. There are two storey homes right next to the high-rises. They have a tiny parking space (don’t ask me how they rear-park-oh no!-bang-park-their-car) and a highly clipped pine tree.
The average American home has one-millimeter lawn, the Japanese house has a tightly clipped pine tree or two, and Germans have their garden dwarfs.
The charming feature about Japanese cities are tiny plots in the middle of town with detached private homes. It makes these cities human. Other nice features are carefully clipped hedges in between skyscrapers. It’s built up in a higglety pigglety kind of way, which makes it kind of cute, like Japanese cartoon characters and cars. You know what I mean when you visit.
Normally when I am a tourist I walk a lot, this time I had a Toyota Prius. This has nothing to do with Japanese gardens, but why anyone would buy a Toyota Prius beats the :peeeeep: out of me. Ok, you save bucks at the gas station. It’s supposedly ecologically friendly, but if you look into what the hybrid battery is made off you know that’s not true. And then when you drive one, you know that any old Volkswagen is much better than this. For starters, they put the “hand” brake next to the gas petal down below, and when you try to find it with your foot you snap apart some loose fitted plastic thingy (black) and something more complicated looking ( white, possibly from the air-conditioning outlet). The visibility back into your rear-view window is minimal. The overall feeling is that of driving a U-boat . Driving through a city at minimal speed is OK, but when you try to get to Hiroshima from Kagoshima on the Expressway or drive along these beautiful curving roads on Kyushu, you notice that the Toyota Prius’ handling is truly awful. It’s similar to steering a cruise ship down a mountain creek.
Have you ever stopped at a gas station in Japan at 1.30am? You will be greeted by a gas station employee with a deep bow. He looks like he is about 75 years old, and you have the urge to serve him not the other way around. He bows again and shouts a lot in Japanese that you don’t understand. You keep thinking that your generation is no good at all. There is this feisty silver-haired man filling your car’s gas tank in the middle of the night while you are thinking about a nice soft bed. It’s all going down hill from now on for sure.
My name (I mean my real name, Cosima it is not) was chosen for the following reasons:
1) It begins with the eighth letter of the alphabet, my Dad’s and my Mum’s first names begin with the same letter.
2) My Dad liked it, and as marriages go, my Dad is the boss, or so he thinks.
3) My Mum chose the second name. It’s Sylvia. It means wood or forest. I am a natural girl. I like gardening. My Mum knew from the start.
4) My first name is of very proper Germanic origins, but it is so shortened that Wotan would turn in his grave.
5) There was a second girl who had the same name in my class… the horrors.
6) But thankfully it’s not a name people choose for their dogs.
So that’s my first name. I wonder what little man will think about his first name when he is old enough to wonder about it.
Well, little man here are the reasons:
1) You are my everything.
2) For your mum you are the wonder of her life.
3) She was the boss when it came to name giving. Your father chose your middle name. If you ask me it’s too long and rather complicated, but he meant well. He loves you very much.
4) Your name needs to be said with love and ease by a multitude of people of different linguistic origins. So its short, easy to pronounce, and Latin.
5) I am very proud that you were able to write it pretty much on the same day you were able to hold a pen.
6) A lot of people chose it as a name for their dog. I am sorry. Most people love their dog more than they love they next of kin. You should be proud of your first name.
What are the reasons for your name? Do you think it influenced your path in life? Why did you choose that particular, special name for your child?
I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and a wonderful celebration with family and friends!
This year my family celebrates Christmas in the cafeteria of a hospital, and for my Dad it’s not roasted goose but nutritional liquid through a nose tube. Considering that he was in intensive care only three weeks ago, the cafeteria Christmas is one of the best we will ever celebrate. I admit that we needed some time to get our minds around it, but that is what the time of Advent is for. What counts is that we are all together.
Vienna Boys’ Choir singing Gloria from Missa In C Major Kv 257 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Admit it, you do look what the person in front of you buys at the supermarket. I do. How else to pass the waiting time at the check-out? I judge them too. Grade A: Wow, want to invite me for dinner? Grade B: Some short-cuts are fine, I buy them too. Grade C: I hope you eat it yourself and don’t feed it to your kids. Fail: Fifty packets of instant noodles?!? That’s why you look so anemic.
I just watched a German documentary. They send a family of five to the supermarket to buy the ingredients for a three course dinner, tomato salad for starter, spaghetti bolognese for main, vanilla ice cream for desert. Fairly simple, because the family had to watch a short video about how the ingredients were made before they decide if they really want to buy it.
The result was that the tomato salad got axed, because most out of season tomatoes come from Almeria in Spain where low paid workers from Africa spray pesticides inside a huge area of poly tunnels that can be seen from space, pack them unripe, so that they transport better, and look just right when they arrive in German supermarkets (and have no taste whatsoever). Almeria does not have enough water to sustain vegetable farming on such a big scale, so they desalinate ocean water and the run-off forms lagoons full of pesticide water… bon appetite!
Instead they made a carrot salad, because most carrots for the German market come from Germany itself. Although harvest time is not all year round, they can be stored easily, making them a low cost and healthy vegetable all year round.
All meat in spaghetti bolognese was refused too. Most pigs for the German market come from Lower Saxony, where they are raised in high-intensive pig pens. The nitrate in the manure is poisoning ground water in the area. The pigs only see daylight one the way to the abattoir. The family decided not to eat meat as often as before, but refused to become vegans.
Most Parmesan is German supermarket shelves is not made in Italy but in German cheese factories. Despite the fluffy marketing of TV ads, no Italian stands in a cave and waits for the cheese to mature, instead an overbred Hostein cow gives 10000 to 20000 liters of milk every year and a mechanized German factory turns that milk into Parmesan and wraps it into plastic. Despite of this – maybe because four year old daughter and daddy loved cheese – parmesan was put into the cart. At least no animal had to die for it. The film told the story of Holstein bull “Yogurt” whose sperm is send around the world because his female offspring have huge udders and sturdy legs.
Most vanilla ice cream has no vanilla in it. You knew that, don’t you? Instead it has artificial vanilla essence, which – if I understood correctly – is made from mold and pine. The family bought it anyway. We are used to it, aren’t we?
Call me a snob, but when I bake myself I buy the real thing, an expensive vanilla bean. What’s the point of baking at home and it tastes just as artificial and bland as store bought cake?
I have a personal pet peeve too, so called “ham”. I don’t know if it is offered near you, but here in Hong Kong it is a low cost alternative to the expensive “Prosciutto” and “Speck” imported from Europe. It’s very pink and has a few purple dots in it. The fine print ingredients list reads like lab report. Ham for me is a pig’s hind leg, salted and smoked or air-dried for the number of months it takes to turn it into an intensive flavored piece of meat. It does not contain milk protein, soya, nor artificial aromas.
I have seen little man’s school friends bite into white bread with lab ham in between. All I can say is “fail” to the parents.
I apologize for being absent for so long. Thank you We’re Doomed for reminding me that it has been a while. That’s really no Zustand.
My Dad is finally out of the hospital. One foot is gone and during the summer his spirit was gone as well. I told him that we needed him foot or no foot, and I like to think that this is what pulled him through.
When we took care of my grandma who had Alzheimers and couldn’t walk anymore, we always agreed that her sitting in a wheelchair was the lesser of the problems.
The last words she lost was “Manno!” (hard to translate… “Eh! Man!”) Which told us that we had done something wrong. You can’t imagine how important it is to know that you have done something wrong.
My dad is my soul mate, which is unfair to say because my mum took care of me more than he did. She once said to me “For you, he can do no wrong”. No, he can’t, because he has the same faults as me. I know it’s unfair. For my mum, her soul mate was my grandmother, her mum, I can’t forget how much she cried when she died.
So that was the summer, but the autumn is definitely looking up.
Sometimes life reminds you that it is not all roses and that you really should hold, enjoy, and “einbrennen” (burn-into) your memory all that is and was good.
The garden is good. It’s full of mosquitoes and construction waste (gloves, concrete slabs, and iron bars), but harvesting yard-long beans and swinging my pickaxe to plant and move plants has been sweaty and satisfying.
Little man is the joy of my life. I don’t know if I will be his soul mate but he is mine. He just needs to smile and stand in front of me in his “Hochwasser” high-water pyjamas (“Yes, I have brushed my teeth!”) and all is good.
And there is so much more. I love life even if it has it’s up and downs and if you ever wonder… yes, go forward.
