Friday, January 26, 2007
Misc.
A pamphlet was shoved under my door: "Citizens of Cologne! How we are going to prevent the building of a huge new Mosque in the center of our City!"
There are plans to erect a huge central Mosque for Cologne's Turkish population, actually quite a sensible idea given the numbers that live in the Ehrenfeld district. But (understandably) there is local resistance... I think not on religious or racial grounds, but because this would make the district more or less offically Turkish, and thus drive down local property values.
The pamphlet goes on to say: Es drohen gravierende Lärmbelästigungen, Massenaufmärsche, Parkplatzprobleme und lautstarke, sich ständig wiederholende orientalische Lautsprecherdurchsagen sowie eine Menge sozialer Sprengstoff. (There will be unbearable noise, mass marches, a paucity of parking spaces, and extremely loud Oriental loudspeaker announcements, repeated over and over, as well as a whole range of potiential social problems).
One of the things I like about Cologne is that there is such a mixture of cultures here-- and unlike other multicultural European cities, there is very little ghettoisation. My neighborhood is about 2/3 German, the other third being mostly Turkish and Italian, with a sizeable Russian component (the American population here is less than negligible, myself included).
I can understand the concerns of the local people, but of course as an Ausländer myself, I don't want to get involved in racial stereotyping. My concerns are not over the number of foreigners in the city, more that I resent that smoking is still allowed in our tiny cafeteria in the opera. And because it is a municipal building, any municipal employee has the right to eat (and drink) there, so we are a welcome retreat for not only the visiting opera stars, but for the local firemen, meter maids, and sanitation engineers. I almost always refuse to go into the cafeteria, so me and many of my like-minded colleagues are reduced to standing in the hallway during the rehearsal and performance breaks, where (ironically) our only table is the top of the cigarette machine...
There are plans to erect a huge central Mosque for Cologne's Turkish population, actually quite a sensible idea given the numbers that live in the Ehrenfeld district. But (understandably) there is local resistance... I think not on religious or racial grounds, but because this would make the district more or less offically Turkish, and thus drive down local property values.
The pamphlet goes on to say: Es drohen gravierende Lärmbelästigungen, Massenaufmärsche, Parkplatzprobleme und lautstarke, sich ständig wiederholende orientalische Lautsprecherdurchsagen sowie eine Menge sozialer Sprengstoff. (There will be unbearable noise, mass marches, a paucity of parking spaces, and extremely loud Oriental loudspeaker announcements, repeated over and over, as well as a whole range of potiential social problems).
One of the things I like about Cologne is that there is such a mixture of cultures here-- and unlike other multicultural European cities, there is very little ghettoisation. My neighborhood is about 2/3 German, the other third being mostly Turkish and Italian, with a sizeable Russian component (the American population here is less than negligible, myself included).
I can understand the concerns of the local people, but of course as an Ausländer myself, I don't want to get involved in racial stereotyping. My concerns are not over the number of foreigners in the city, more that I resent that smoking is still allowed in our tiny cafeteria in the opera. And because it is a municipal building, any municipal employee has the right to eat (and drink) there, so we are a welcome retreat for not only the visiting opera stars, but for the local firemen, meter maids, and sanitation engineers. I almost always refuse to go into the cafeteria, so me and many of my like-minded colleagues are reduced to standing in the hallway during the rehearsal and performance breaks, where (ironically) our only table is the top of the cigarette machine...
# posted by vailian : 9:30 PM
