That's Really a Lot of Snow

This week in human relationship history:

On January 17th, 1997 the courts of Ireland granted the first divorce in the country’s history, following a 1995 referendum approving the practice to become an option for married couples under Irish law.

Twenty-two years later, the procedure remains one of the most difficult in the Western world; among other measures, Irish couples need to prove that they have lived apart for four of the last five years in order for a divorce to be granted.

Possibly as a result of such barriers, Ireland also maintains one of the Western world’s lowest divorce rates at just 13%. By contrast, fellow Roman Catholic countries in Europe have rates of 25% (Italy) 27% (Poland) and 61% (Spain).<p>

For context, other divorce rates internationally (as of 2016) include India (1%) Chile (3%), China (22%) Belgium (71%) The United Kingdom (47%), The United States (52%), Mexico (15%) Turkey (20%), Finland (45%) and Russia (51%) and Ukraine (42%).<p>

Sources:

https://bit.ly/2CwISv9

http://chartsbin.com/view/42185

Just six days left before Election Day...very glad to have my absentee ballot on its way. The above was taken during a protest of the U.S.-Russia summit that drew a crowd of roughly 2,500 this past summer. That’s a reasonable size for a turnout considering neither of the protested leaders have jurisdiction over the city where the protests took place.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-summit-protests/finns-rally-against-trump-putin-ahead-of-helsinki-summit-idUSKBN1K50P8

( Helsinki, Finland )

( July 2018 )

Sending out a warm congrats to the shores of the Baltic Sea for a very efficient month of defrosting and melting...now, four weeks after this moment, it's pretty tough to spot a morsel of snow in the streets.

Even if the sky is white again and we're now contending with sporadic rain, this transition is still pretty remarkable in a locale where breaking past 20 C / 68 F in April is scorching enough to make national news.

https://yle.fi/…/finland_basks_in_first_20-degree-…/10170440

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz-n4KPRhkk

Meanwhile, another wish of patience for anyone in North America on the shores of the Great Lakes who is eagerly waiting for their own snow supply to meet a similar fate.

Sentimental greetings from an immodest land that makes it extremely hard to feel like you've ever really left. Looking forward to seeing the natives and transplants who make this internationally celebrated coastal cultural monstrosity possible in the days ahead.

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"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND3I0h0RUbI&list=RDND3I0h0RUbI

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( Sevnica, Slovenia )

( Berlin, Germany )

( Novi Sad, Serbia )

( Bolzano, Italy )

( L'viv, Ukraine )

( Varna, Bulgaria )

( Zielona Gora, Poland )

( Amposta, Spain )

More than 4,500 photographs in three days...in 21 years of carrying a camera, I can safely say that has never happened before. This place may be a stimulus overload, but is probably the best possible kind.

http://gifmaker.cc/PlayGIFAnimation.php?folder=2017010619VVwjjbbbDor6Euab3yqUZF&file=output_hmzOVt.gif&music=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPUmE-tne5U&start=18 ( best viewed on laptops and tablets rather than phones )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PCIqSHcRoY

The bottom of a small staircase at the former site of a statue of Vladimir Lenin, one of approximately 4,200 that have been dismantled here above the Black Sea since the fall of the Soviet Union. This one stood here for more than two decades thereafter until the country's most recent revolution in February 2014, during which locals commissioned the driver of a semi-truck otherwise used for transporting the region's mail to let them harness the statue by the neck to the truck and have him use the truck's power to bring it off of its pedestal. The damage to the staircase took place during its removal. The pedestal is now home to a memorial featuring names and photographs of locally born soldiers who perished during the revolution. Here's to a week often characterized by swiftly changing things that displease us that we have tolerated, perhaps for an inordinately long period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb-cIt4o2QQ

( Zhytomyr, Ukraine )

Praising peace and promoting poignant, powerful, pacifying podcasts for a plurality of the planet's population...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAS-JSfjWg

( Zhytomyr, Ukraine )

I've kept a pretty tight schedule while in transit recently and have made it to the points of departure of my last four transport connections by under five minutes (and in the case of one airplane, by under one minute). I am pleased to report this after an unfortunately high frequency of missed (usually non-refundable) transport in the first half of 2015.

My best guess on the changing trend is that I watched some very educational films on international travel and learned that I need to stop using elevators when I'm in a hurry; it turns out, they only slow me down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLt7lXDCHQ0

( Venice, Italy )

INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TERMINAL, morning:

Airline passenger: Is there something going on with all of the little pieces of paper on the ground?

Airline check-in desk representative: Yes, the cleaning staff of the airport is on strike.

AP: Oh wow, how long have they been on strike?

ACDR: Since Monday.

AP: Hmmmmmm...all of this trash has accumulated just since Monday?

ACDR: Well, no.

AP: You mean the cleaning staff had some hundreds of bags of trash stored in a closet somewhere and decided to break them out and distribute their contents throughout the terminal to make a statement when the strike began?

ACDR: [ Nods in the affirmative ]

AP: I think I like their leader.

Outdoor voting booth in the Žumberak Mountains, where I can pleasantly report that A) my California state ballot arrived on time and B) that the post office to mail it from was a 30 second walk from the restaurant where I voted.

Meanwhile, I couldn't help but to notice that, while shifting from web-searching one candidate for an office to their opponent, Google would auto-complete the name of their opponent well before I'd finished typing the person's name. I passed it off a...s a coincidence based on a series of uncommon names until I noticed that Steven Schreiner, a candidate for California Superior Court Judge, was the first auto-complete result in Google (after I'd just searched for his opponent minutes earlier). With all due respect for Attorney Schreiner, he is clearly not Google's #1 Steven. On behalf of the Avery, Tyler and Spielberg families, let me say, stay creepy, Google(!) and here's to a memorable U.S. Election Day.

---------------------- In celebration of progress and release from custody: Bulgarian: съдебна палата / English: courthouse

http://gifmaker.cc/PlayGIFAnimation.php… ---------------------

In 2005, a colleague and I had a day off from a project in southern Romania and decided to use the time to make a trip to a town in northern Bulgaria, 65 km (~40 miles) away for an afternoon.

Journeying through some December snow in low visibility, we eventually reached the border station and handed a Romanian officer our passports through my colleague's car window. The officer had a look at both and approved us, waving us to the next checkpoint, a Bulgarian border guard.

The Bulgarian border guard asked us which countries we were from and asked for our passports. He then took them into his office for several minutes, returned and asked my colleague what we were planning to do in the country. My colleague shared that I had never been to Bulgaria before and we wanted to go to a border town to enjoy lunch and some shopping. The officer walked into his office again, returned and shared that we could cross the border if we gave him 150 euros (at that time ~200 US dollars) EACH. My colleague clarified that we only intended to go for the afternoon, but the 'price' for our entry into a country where neither of us needed visas to enter remained the same. We politely declined and turned our car around back into the afternoon snowstorm, hungry.

For nearly 11 years, this was my only face-to-face impression of a country in which I'd never set foot in spite of having once been 4 meters (13 feet) away. I suppose if my reaction to being summoned into a police station for innocent street photography is not one of outrage, it's because those officers not gouging me for an under-the-table fine to me represents progress.

As for my first meal in this town after 11 years of curiosity, it, like those of the rest of the cuisine of the country, was fantastic.

Below are the last two things I saw before my first encounter with a Balkan police force. Ten minutes off a bus to a tiny town, one of them called to get my attention from the steps of her precinct and proceeded to summon me over. Her uniform was so plain, undecorated and shapeless that I needed an extra ten seconds to process that she was a member of law enforcement and not just a brash, judgmental local.

After complying with her request to come across the street, her and her colleague asked for my ID and asked why I would take pictures in her tiny town when there were much "better" towns for tourists so close by. Rather than launch into my "It's not so special for you because you see it every day, but it's special for me" response, I gave her my passport and Finnish residency card, keeping my responses to one or two words each and waited for her English-speaking colleague to arrive.

Following a longer interview about my citizenship, place of origin, itinerary in the country and the like, one of them disappeared with my identification into their office for close to 15 minutes, during which I stared into space and listened to an officer with gigantic hands discuss my presence there with the occasional passing colleague. Very pleased that they then gave my ID back without asking for an under-the-table fine, I then listened as they revealed that they stopped me in part because they had had issues with illegal immigration lately and it didn't help that the building behind the sign that I was photographing was their main police station. I cannot imagine that having an American passport with an expired Russian visa inside, a Finnish residency card and a story of having flown to the country from Spain while answering their first questions in Polish got me on and off of that staircase any faster.

#suspicious

Apparently while I spent the whole rest of my life paying attention to the other three corners of Europe, the southeast of the continent has been clearly neglected for attention - for, among other things, some of the oldest cities that have been continually inhabited (not just in not Europe, but in the entire world) and the first U.S. education system established outside of America (1860).

http://gifmaker.cc/PlayGIFAnimation.php…

Add this to a 100% perfect record of great meals (a distinction I've only experienced previously in the Czech Republic and Hungary), safe to say that once the maps and travel schedules can be sufficiently analyzed, the rest of this region is going to get a longer look than originally planned.

Safely my favorite phone charging pit stop of 2016.

...from a field in Jackson Park, recently announced as the future site of the Barack Obama Presidential Library.

"Michelle and I are thrilled that the Obama Presidential Center will be developed in the heart of Chicago's South Side, a community we call home and that means the world to us," Obama said in a statement released by the Foundation. He added: "We are proud that the center will help spur development in an urban area and we can't wait to forge new ways to give back to the people of Chicago who have given us so much."

http://www.npr.org/…/its-official-obamas-presidential-libra…