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/ 23 December 2005
Hundreds of young men decked with tinsel wander before mostly Muslim Senegal’s mosques, hawking plastic Christmas trees. Women pray to Allah beneath an inflatable Santa Claus suspended under a bakery’s eaves. While Muslims recognise Jesus Christ as a prophet, they don’t generally celebrate the date of his birth.
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/ 23 December 2005
In another life, he would have been a cocktail wizard or a mad scientist. Instead, he’s Barcelona’s culinary king of canned food. At Quimet and Quimet, one of Barcelona’s best tapas bars, Quim Perez not only turned the idea of tapas — Spanish finger food — on its ear, but he did it by using nothing but high-quality goods preserved in metal.
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/ 23 December 2005
Paris pastry chefs are outdoing each other this holiday season in reinventing the most kitsch of all French desserts, the Christmas yule log cake, dressing them in ivy, marshmallows and snowflakes. More traditional than turkey, more feted than foie gras, the buche — literally ”log” — has crowned the French Christmas table since the 19th century.
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/ 23 December 2005
Close your eyes and think about war veterans, demobilised soldiers or ex-combatants. Chances are the images will be those of violent or menacing men. Soldiers coming from the world’s battlefields and trying to adapt to civilian life tend to get bad press and not much else. Mozambican ex-combatants who set up Propaz in 1997, insist that there is more to their story than this.
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/ 23 December 2005
Democratically elected presidents in Burundi and Liberia have presented at least two indisputably positive developments in Africa. Given the war-torn state of the countries they’ve inherited, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia and Pierre Nkurunziza in Burundi probably need regular reminding of this.
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/ 23 December 2005
There have been ferocious battles over banning adultery or outlawing headscarves. Now drink has become the battleground in Turkey’s struggle to define the country’s values. Turkish liberals and secularists are angry about the efforts of the conservative government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to limit and ”ghettoise” the supply and consumption of alcohol.
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/ 23 December 2005
”The colonisation of the Cape really messed me up. I was raised in the ‘Cape Malay’ community, but could decide my identity more easily if my ancestors had not been shipped to Africa by the Dutch. A complicating factor is that I don’t believe that I am purely descended from the Indonesians and Malaysians,” Yazeed Kamaldien.
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/ 23 December 2005
Kamboja Street is so close to the sea that the tsunami all but levelled it a year ago. Most of the fishermen’s villas, with their red-tiled roofs, fluted columns and verandahs, were shaved off the earth by the great cutthroat razor of water. A year on, the first replacement house has only just begun to be built, by the American charity Care.
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/ 23 December 2005
Most tourists in the Maldives are still sleeping when swimming lessons begin at 6.30am. Christof Langer is one of the lifeguards from Germany who have been teaching their skills to a group of people from the Maldives. Lessons begin early because weather conditions and the sea currents are usually at their best then for swimming.
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/ 23 December 2005
Christian expatriates in the Gulf enjoy increasingly more freedom to worship and celebrate feasts, especially Christmas, except in Saudi Arabia, where non-Islamic practices still lead to jail and deportation. The law in the United Arab Emirates continues to ban any preaching activities outside churches.