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Malbork is a very beautiful castle indeed, both inside and out… well worth visiting,if you like castles and haven’t been there.
Extremely interesting history too.And the setting is great.
I also found a really nice ‘restaurant’ which is basically a family that set up a barbecue in their garden, with a few tables and chairs, they grill meat and serve very cold beer with it 😉
My bao buns were so good! They always end up a bit thin on the bottom and bit thick on the top, I theoretically know how to make them even but practice is a bit harder… I made pork belly and kimchi, Swiss chard, tomato and feta, apricot, and apple cinnamon with walnuts 😁
What’s your language’s equivalent of “don’t shoot the messenger” (am I asking because of Trump? That’s… irrelevant). We say “elçiye zeval olmaz” (no harm may come to the the envoy/ambassador). I don’t know if Germans have something like that.
The other day I decided to go into a Communist bookshop. Now communism isn’t really my thing, but my job is related to Mars exploration and I’ve been thinking about ideas of future Mars colonisation that are global and democratic in nature and don’t involve a small minority of oligarchs having personal monopolies over entire space colonies. So I wanted to research more left-wing visions of the future that were antithetical to the whole Peter Thiel tech bro feudal dystopia that’s currently in vogue right now.
So I start talking to the owner of the bookshop. Turns out it’s not just any old Communist bookshop, but a bookshop dedicated to the teachings of Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA who seems to have built some kind of bizarre cult of personality around himself. She assured me that all the answers to my questions would be solved by reading about said Bob, “the greatest thinker of our time”, since he’d worked on integrating the scientific method into the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Whatever the fuck that means.
Me: “Well you know… I’m looking at more kind of leftist literature in general. Communism isn’t really my thing cause I mean, I grew up in Germany and heard about all the stories about living under travel restrictions, shortages of consumer goods and authoritarianism and stuff and…”
Her: “Oh, but I wouldn’t call Stalin and Mao authoritarian. I mean, just because they put everyone who disagreed with the party line into concentration camps doesn’t make them authoritarian”
Me: “Ummmm, I dunno, that…sounds pretty authoritarian to me?”
Her: “But no! It wasn’t authoritarian. It was a *dictatorship of the Proletariat*”
I’ve met a couple of communists my age and the usual justifications they come up with are along the lines of oh, Soviet communism wasn’t real communism, or oh it wasn’t the kind of communism I believe in, or oh, it came in the wrong place at the wrong time, or oh, it really wasn’t as bad as Yankee pigdog propaganda made it out to be and everyone having guaranteed housing and employment was actually really based, etc etc. But *this*? This takes being ideologically dogmatic to another level.
Summer vacation was five weeks. Been back to work for a week. Weekends feel so short now.
First world problems.
I’ve worked at my company over 10 years so received a sabbatical leave of 4 weeks. Which I used to go to Korea/Japan. Came back this past Sunday. Will share random thoughts throughout the week!
There is an annual athletics competition called the Finland-Sweden match, where athletes from both countries compete in track and field, they get points based on how they finish and at the end the points are tallied up and whichever country has more wins. I was wondering how and when it started, so I read up on it. Turns out it was held for the first time in 1925, so it’ll be 100 years this year.
But what grabbed my attention was the name of one of the people instrumental in first orchestrating the competition. A man named Aksel Ek. I know short names like that are common in other cultures, but I have never heard of a Finn having such a short surname. Just two letters. I don’t even know if the name is Finnish or Swedish. Pretty cool name, though.