Photos of Europe: #7 France

By: cd - March 12th, 2012  Filed under: Europe, Photos Add Comment

I returned to the US after spending the summer in Poland and posted on a Vietnamese forum about my trip; from this forum, I met two Vietnamese who lived in Paris. After a year resettling in US,  I got antsy again and decided to go back to Europe. My obvious stop was then Paris.

Vietnamese don’t travel much, but if given the option, they likely choose France for the obvious reason that France is the only Western culture which is closest to Vietnam. 100-year colony must have counted for something. Many things which we encounter in our daily lives: food, vocabulary, ritual, etc. are taken from the French.

My grandmother, who had never traveled outside of Vietnam and didn’t care much for world news, unsurprisingly could tell you a thing or two about who else than the French. If you give her fifteen minutes, she would eager tell you about her famous long-lost nephew. And who is that man? He was the late France’s socialist president, Francois Mitterrand.  Her long-lost sister married a French and they had a son with whom my grandmother never met. How she connected a half Vietnamese-French to the French president is beyond me. So you see, before I heard of anyone world-wide famous, before Confucius, Hitler, Stalin, Superman, I’d already knew Mitterrand.

My longing to visit France had nothing to do with finding my missing celebrity cousin nor to examine the secret of ‘why French women don’t get fat’, rather I was following the melodies which had always captivated me since childhood, the French chansons.

Why visit France?

  1. Ask 75 millions people who flock to France each year. There must be something about France for it to take the lead in world tourism.
  2. You are ready to kiss your single days goodbye and waiting for the right moment to lean over someone, kiss him/her on the cheek and say ‘I love you.’ Though I can vouch for many more romantic, proposal-inspired European spots, most people believe Paris is the one.
  3. Maybe you come for the food. France claims to invent the best cuisine in the world. After all, if it weren’t for French food (I don’t mean French fries), Americans would probably still eat out from cans. Let try steak au poivre, poulet frites, pommes duchesse, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, pot au feu cassoulet, boudin blanc, foie gras, waterzooi, ratatouille, moules à la crème normande, madeleine, choux à la crème. I have no idea what I’ve just written but I can swear I’ve already fallen in love without knowing what they are. That’s the thing about French food. You love even the things you might not like just because how the syllables bounce from your tongue.
  4. Food and wine, you can’t have one without the other. Again wine experts and amateurs agree the best wine in the world is made in France. I can’t confirm this fact since I’m more or less a beer person. The only way I can pick out the wonderful glass of France wine is if you place it next to a wine box sold in any supermarket. But if the expert says it’s the best, it’s definitely the best.
  5. Ladies, do you want to know why French women don’t get fat? Then what are you waiting?

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What’s in My Inbox? Why Don’t Asians Take Vacation

By: cd - September 18th, 2011  Filed under: Europe Add Comment

4/8/2011

Dear sender,

I am out of office till 14th August. In urgent cases you can reach me on +420 xxx xxx xxx.

For all support requests please contact X.

Best regards,
Y.

Dear sender,

Thank you for your e-mail.

I am currently out of the office till 08.08. I will have no access to my e-mail account during this time.

Best regards,
E.

Dear sender, I am not able to answer your e-mails today. In urgent cases, please contact John Dee. I’ll be back in office on 16th August.

K.

I out of the office on vacation and will return on Monday, 8 August.

T.K. may be contacted for urgent topics.

Dear sender, I’m on holiday till 22 Aug.

Dear Sender,

I am on vacation and cannot answer your electronic communication. I will return in the office on September 1st. I apologize for the inconvenience. For integration issues D.P. and J.P. are appointed as substitutes with power to act.

J

Dear sender, I’m on holiday till 22 Aug.
If needed you can contact:

Best regards,
G.

Hello,
I am currently on holiday and will be back on Monday 9.8.2011.

From June until the end of August, these messages are the most likely response I receive after hitting the ‘Send’ button.

I changed jobs, departments, colleagues and have moved to different projects but one thing has remained the same: the automatic “out of office” replies and their frequency in the summer.

In a way, Czechs and Europeans take their jobs seriously and I could feel their sense of urgency when we were working on projects together. But regardless whether we had a mountain-load of work to do and their concern over meeting the deadline, nothing and no-one could stand in the way of Czechs and their vacations. This applies not only to the Czechs but also to all other Europeans I’ve been working with.

It took a while for me to adjust to this mentality.

 

Why Asians Don’t Take Vacation

 

My parents hardly took any vacation except for the free holiday trips organized and paid-for by my father’s company. In retrospect, neither did my aunt who worked in a hospital, another aunt who worked in the tourism industry and definitely not the relative who worked as laborers.

In those days, economy was the main reason. If you constantly worried about making end meet, luxury such as travel was the last thing on your mind.

But when finance is removed from the daily worry and they still don’t travel, we are looking at reason no. 2: habit or simply culture. Vietnamese don’t travel. While Europeans take time off to recharge their energy by running off to country side, engaging in adrenaline weekend trips or flying to exotic destinations, Vietnamese take time off get together with the family or to tend errands they can’t do while working. First of all, my parents and my friends are descendants of people who didn’t have any perception of vacation or had a completely different concept of “time-off”. Being Vietnamese or Asians, they are trained to think and behave collectively. If kidneys come in pairs, Asians travel in crowd. If they don’t have anyone to travel with, they will stay home.

Maybe this is why I couldn’t get any of my relatives to visit me in the city flooded by millions of tourists every year.

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7 Common Stereotypes about the Dutch.

By: cd - August 16th, 2011  Filed under: Europe Add Comment

WRITTEN by ISABELLE

Isabelle is a culture expert of all-thing Dutch. She hails from the tulip, Heineken and cheese nation, a real Dutch. When she’s not busy with school, work and contemplate about what it’s like to be Dutch, she jumps on any adventures to places further East.

1. The Dutch are stoned all the time.

This might be the most common stereotype about the Dutch, or at least something they are infamous for. However, the fact that soft drugs are more or less legalized in the Netherlands actually contributes to the lower numbers of addicts and users compared to the high percentage, almost twice as high, of soft drug users in the USA.

2. All Dutch are tall, have blond hair and blue eyes

This stereotype is indeed true only if you consider the people who are ethnically Dutch. The Dutch are the tallest people in the world with 1.84m on average for men and 1.70 for women. Dying your hair blond and putting on blue contact lenses won’t make you feel any special in the Netherlands. However, with the arrival of immigrants from all over the world, this once-a-fact can be just another stereotype.

 

3. At least half the population is gay

Most Dutch are very tolerant towards the gay community. Amsterdam is the unofficial Europe’s gay capital. The Netherlands was also the first country in the world to allow gay marriage in 2001. This has made it easier for gays to come out of the closet and for society to open toward them. But this doesn’t mean that most of the population is gay and that in 100 years there won’t be any heterosexual children.

4. The Dutch are greedy

There must be a reason why splitting the bill is called ‘Going Dutch’. It’s true that many Dutch keep a tight watch over their money. Men are unlikely to pay for their dates. (Ladies, take a clue. If you like to be dined and wined while in Amsterdam, going Dutch is not going to be a solution.) I am no sociologist, but perhaps this explains why there are not many beggars on the streets in Amsterdam compared to other mega cities in Europe. You will find street artists in other European tourist destinations complain about greedy Dutch who won’t spare changes for their acts.

But as a collective whole, Netherlands is a very generous country with a high percentage of their GDP going to development aid, 0.82%, above the UN target of 0.7 and lower than only their richer neighbor from Luxembourg, Sweden and the oil-loaded Norway.

5. The Dutch wear wooden shoes

Yeah only if they come with Oilily. They are quite popular with little kids and people in rural areas. We make them so you tourists can buy them. If you think we’re still wearing them, fine as long as you buy a lot of them.

dutch wooden shoes

 

6. All Dutch speak English

Dutch study English from an early age in a good education system and this combined with the similarities between the two languages ensures that you never have to bring a language guide to the Netherlands. You can ask for pretty much anything in Netherlands. Waitresses on the tourist squares are more likely to approach you in English than in Dutch and even if you try to speak Dutch, the Dutch will almost always switch to English in order to make it easier for you (or to brag their language skills).

7. Every Dutch shed keeps at least a dozen bicycles

There are more bicycles than people in the Netherlands. For short distances people prefer biking over driving and waking.. Dutch also take pride in decorating their bikes. Every morning thousands of Dutch school kids will take their bikes an ride a distances up to 20km to get to school. Every season, rain or shine, summer or winter Dutch are seen on their bikes. There is probably nowhere else you will see many women in elegant dresses or skirts pedalling on their bikes

Decorated bike in Netherlands

My First Ramadan Fasting

By: cd - August 7th, 2011  Filed under: Random Thoughts Add Comment

Sarajevo mosqueI fast. Finally. I’ve been doing it for seven day straight. This is my first Ramadan fasting. But I’m not a Muslim and don’t believe in it. So what does this mean?

At first, I decided to do this only because it was one of the things I wanted to do in life, an item on my bucket list, nothing more. I was introduced to Ramadan in 2005 when I lived in Sarajevo. I landed in the country on the day of the Eid ul-Fitr, the festival celebrating the end of Ramadan. This country, the people and Muslim events forever has left a strong impression.

I’ve always wanted to live in a Muslim country in the Middle East, and once came so close to achieve it and while there I would fast. Unless you are a Muslim or live in a Muslim country, Ramadan isn’t something on the back of your mind. I kept forgetting about it. The Muslims around me either didn’t observe this tradition or if they did, they would not shout from the rooftop. This year, I met a Muslim colleague from Malaysia. She fasts regularly. We talked about it and here I am.

The 5 Pillars of Islam

I’m a loose faster and don’t observe anything else other than not eating anything from 4.00 to 20.00. Any Muslim will tell me that my fasting is invalid and means nothing since I’m doing it for myself. They are right. My fast is absolutely invalid under Islamic rules which are very strict. To see why, you have to understand the five pillars of Islam.

  1. Shahada – Chant, accept Muhamad as God’s messenger and believe it.
  2. Salad – Pray five times a day.
  3. Sawm – Fast during Ramadan.
  4. Zakat – Give alms to the poor.
  5. Hajj – Make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

For one to be valid, you must also do the one(s) precede it. For example, it doesn’t mean anything if you pray five times a day and don’t believe in Muhamad or fast and don’t do the first two. This is my 1st violation according to the Islamic pillars.

The 2nd violation is that I drank water, not only water but together with vitamin tablets and protein power to maintain energy throughout the day. In addition, I popped chewing-gums every couple of hours to keep my breath from descending into a bacteria pool because as I need to talk to people.

I don’t follow the strict fasting hours, my 3rd violation, which change every day (319, 342, 354… to 830, 812…). To simplify, I rounded up to 4 in the morning until 8 in the evening. I can’t help it if my first fasting coincides with the summer when the day is much longer. My last one is I do the things that even Muslims violate.

Why Fasting is Unhealthy

Fasting isn’t as bad as I thought before trying, however I don’t think it is a healthy habit if one does it for a long time.  The first day of course was the worst. My head hurt so much due to the lack of morning breakfast. I felt hungry every hour. It was unbearable already at only 10 in the morning.

Food was the only thing I thought about before, during and after lunch hour. I walked past someone’s room at work and immediately noticed a bowl of chocolate. In the evening, I arrived at a Vietnamese restaurant 45 minutes before 8 so I took a tram going away and then back on the hour and shoved an entire plate of grill-duck noodle and tempted to ask the waiter to bring me some more.  I went home and stuffed a giant bowl of salad after that. I boiled two eggs and made a big plate of spaghetti for the breakfast the day after which I ended up didn’t eat because I woke up later than 4. This brings another serious issue: possible weight-gain and packing around my waist-line. By eating less regularly, your hungry body thinks that it should store the food instead of burning it. I can feel the effect almost immediately. Though I felt very hungry, I also felt stuffed.

The Benefits of Fasting During Ramadan

Nonetheless, fasting brings many benefits.

  1. Wake up early – For a few days, I woke up a quarter before 4 to have breakfast to not have an empty stomach for 24 hours. I couldn’t go back to sleep again with a full stomach and did a few things before going to work.
  2. ‘Everyone is wonderful‘- Occasionally, on my not so good day I complain this and that about other people, and on my worst day I scream murder on the world. For the last few days, every time I really wanted to stick it to somebody, I tried to switch immediately. This didn’t happen smoothly though as ‘b’ and ‘a’ words occasionally slipped from my tounge.
  3. Discipline – Anybody who knows me knows discipline is not my strong suit. For years, I’ve tried to working on following things through and sticking to a schedule. To keep up with a rigid diet without food and only water and vitamin for 14 hours a day in god-knows-how-many days I plan to keep this up requires a lot of self-discipline.
  4. Happy – The other day a colleague said to me when I passed him after work “Must be a very satisfied woman!” and explained that I was smiling the whole time. How was that even possible? My stomach was begging for mercy and my brain was practically on strike for being deprived of food, and he thought that I was full of content? Maybe the thought of having doing all the above in addition of doing something so secret yet so interesting and no-one else around me has a clue.
  5. Keep busy – Another trick to forget about the food is to keep busy. I stopped procrastinating and started on pending and new tasks immediately and finished them asap.
  6. Social – If I have no meeting or things to do, I intentionally sought out other people for chit-chat to distract myself from the food. Instead of being subdued and lethargic, I became even more hyper with all these meetings with people I wouldn’t have met if I didn’t fast.
  7. Independence of food – Now I know I can be perfectly fine for hours without food. Beside the main meals that I ate, the rest was often from craving.
  8. Eliminate junk food – For the entire seven days, I have not touched any junk, sodium and sugar loaded food. I can only eat one a day; I can not afford to weaken myself with high-calorie and low-energy food.
  9. Prepare food slowly – With the odd hour of dinner, I can’t stay at work until 8, and then eat a quick dinner nor can I prepare a quick 15-minute dinner before I eat which I usually did. I thus stay at work longer, go home and then slowly prepare my meal. By the time I finish, it’s also about time for me to eat. Also, why hurry to prepare food if I can’t eat it right away anyway. 

I am throwing in the white flag next week and reconsidering whether I should continue until the end of the month.

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