I was Krakow, Poland last week for our Eastern European Leadership Conference. We had a great time, heard some great teaching, and got very encouraging reports from many of the churches all over eastern Europe, especially the churches in Ukraine. Any of the churches that are led by nationals seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, that makes a lot of sense.
We were able to save several hundred Euros by staying in Krakow for an extra day after the conference was finished, so my friend Brandon and I took the opportunity to take a tour of Aushwitz. Aushwitz is located in southern Poland, about an hour’s drive from Krakow, and was the site of the largest Nazi concentration camp during WWII. The weather was very fitting on that day - rain with low clouds, and very windy and cold.
If you’ve ever seen Schindler’s List or read Elie Wiesel’s Night or Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (or studied history), you know some of the details of what happened at Aushwitz. But nothing could have prepared me for the how hard the massive scale of murder that was committed at the Aushwitz complex hits you. In one room they showed us a mountain of 2-1/2 tons of human hair. They started shaving the prisoners before they gassed them, and used the hair to fuel a new industry in textiles. They also had examples of the blankets, pillows, and mattresses that had been made out of the hair. Mountains of suitcases, literally tons of children’s shoes, piles of baby baskets — all reminders of the scale of death in that place. We were led through the barracks, prisons, and high-voltage fences. We saw the wall where “bad” prisoners were shot. We saw the gestapo court. Finally, we saw the gas chambers and the crematoriums.
Brandon asked our guide the question of how many people escaped the camp. At least two hundred escaped Aushwitz, but when you consider that over 3 million prisoners were “processed” there, 200 is hardly worth mentioning. It’s been five days since we took the tour, and I feel like I’m still processing what I saw.
March madness is upon us. Last night I hung out with my buddy Brandon, and we had three video feeds going at once. Through a combination of March Madness on Demand Online, TVU player (a peer-to-peer TV service), and my Sling Box (a box that streams video from my folks house in Arkansas), we were able to keep up with the early session of the opening round (although we were stretching the bandwidth of his DSL line to the max). It was a fairly disappointing session. B’s wife went to A&M, but she’s not a big basketball fan, so it wasn’t going to be any fun to point out that the Penn Quakers took the lead midway through the second half. I was pulling for ORU, just for the comedic value of what Richard or Oral might say if ORU ever makes a run through the tournament. The morning session started at 5pm our time. So I didn’t stay up to watch the evening session (which started at 2am our time). It appears that despite all my disappointment in the games I watched were made up for by Duke losing to that communist school Virginia Commonwealth. I haven’t been a big Duke hater in the past. But this video shows why I’m a Duke hater for at least this season.
This whole Duke hating thing may actually be more about Billy Packer. Why he is still allowed to announce Duke games is beyond me. Does he have a man-crush on Coach K? He would never admit to a Duke player taking a cheap shot. This goes back much farther. In 1994 when the Razorbacks won the national championship, Billy Packer sang the praises of Duke, Coach K, and Grant Hill for the first 39:41 of the game. Only once Scotty Thurman hit a 3-pointer with 19 seconds that put the game out of reach did Packer say anything good about Arkansas. I believe because there was no apology or admission of guilt on the part of Duke, bad karma caught up with them, and they lost their last 4 games of the season. They can blame it all on their cheerleader behind the mic. My hatred of Duke will probably end when Gerald Henderson graduates, but I will ALWAYS mute games that Billy Packer is covering.
Over the past few years, many Americans have been rethinking how we use and consume energy resources. The gasoline price spike after Hurricane Katrina seems to have begun a revival of hybrid and high-MPG cars. Europeans have been gouged with high-road taxes and confiscatory fuel prices for a long time, so they are accustomed to being more resourceful. Usually this just means buying a smaller car (some cars here are tiny).
Another factor is purchasing a car here is that Eurodiesel usually runs 15-20% cheaper than EuroSuper95 (normal unleaded gasoline). So most of the popular car models have a diesel option. The diesel engines in these small to medium-sized autos have eye-popping fuel economy. Two of the most popular here in Croatia are the Volkswagen Golf and the Renault Clio.
The Volkswagen Golf is a full-sized car for the Croatian market (Americans would probably consider it an economy car). The most popular option for this model is the 1.9-liter TDI turbo diesel engine. I have ridden in several of these, and they have a lot of get-up-and-go. But the main reason for their popularity is that you can fit the whole family into a Golf, but it can still get up to 49 MPG! This is not a hybrid car. It’s just a well-designed diesel engine. And the Volkswagen diesel engines have unusual long life.
Another popular model is the Renault Clio. The Clio is definitely an economy car, but you can still get four 6′5″ basketball players into one fairly comfortably (I know because I’ve done it - and I was the shortest of the four). The 1.5-liter dCi diesel engine that the French give as an option on this car definitely does not have the pep of the VW TDI, but it does give you 66 MPG! I was floored when my friend told me the fuel economy of his Clio (of course he told me in liters used per 100 kilometers). Once again this is not a hybrid. It’s a common rail diesel.
Surprisingly, Ford also offers a diesel option on its Ford Focus models. There are 1.6-, 1.8-, and 2.0-liter options on the TDCi engine. The 1.6-liter gets 60 MPG. The 2.0-liter gets “only” 50 MPG, but will be more acceptable to American taste since it can hit a top speed of 125 MPH. The biggest problem I have with the Ford diesel is that is only available in Europe. You can’t buy any of these fuel-efficient Ford models in the US. The only one of these cars that’s available in the US is the VW Golf TDi. Ford like all the other US car manufacturers have painted themselves into a corner by limiting consumer options to flexible-fuel cars and huge diesel engines in full-size trucks. Maybe there’s a problem with using the TDCi in the US since it was developed in conjunction with Puegot and Citroen, but I can’t see what the problem would be.
Croatia has some of the last remaining wilderness areas within west or central Europe. Many Germans and Italians come to the remote parts of Croatia to commune with nature. Mount Velebit, just an 1-1/2 north of Split, is home to the largest population of bears in this part of the continent. Some of the locals run a shelter for orphaned bears and other wild animals. They have a lot of visitors who come to see bears up close but not in a cage like a zoo. The video below shows a German woman who was told by the locals that bears enjoy music.
The woman tourist was fine. She escaped with a few scrapes and bruises. The man who runs the bear shelter jumped in and got the bear off of her, but then it got him. His assistant then tried to run the bear off using a chainsaw. Luckily, another guy from the village happened to be walking by and had a pistol on him. He finally had to shoot the bear to get it off the bear shelter owner.
