u/Ramses_IV

Hi all,

I will be in Mostar for a day in mid-September (arriving late Monday evening then getting the early morning train to Sarajevo the following Wednesday). I know Mostar is small enough that you can see the whole old town in a couple of hours, but I was wondering if something like Blagaj Tekke would be accessible enough to be worth visiting too?

Obviously if I had more time I would try and do everything Mostar has to offer, but since I've got limited time there I'd like to know what people think are the most important things to see/do so I can plan my day in advance. Any recommendations much appreciated, many thanks!

I'm thinking of doing a city-break in December with my family, and was considering somewhere with a decent Christmas market. I always thought Strasbourg looked nice in pictures, and apparently it has a famous Christmas market, but I've also heard it gets very crowded and was wondering if it might be better to go at a quieter time of year.

While the old town itself looks charming and quaint (love all the half-timbered architecture), I can't really tell from pictures if the market is for me. My family like Christmas but in the slightly snobbish clove-studded-oranges sort of way, so prefer "authentic" markets with artisanal crafts and local vibes etc. to tacky and commercialised Disneyland-esque shows for tourists. Has anyone been to Strasbourg in December who can vouch for what it's like and if it's worth a trip, or recommend anywhere else that would be more up our alley?

Thanks

I've tried making aloo keema twice now, and both times the IP hasn't liked the potatoes. The first attempt I pressure cooked everything except the potatoes first, which worked fine, then added the potatoes at the end and set it to pressure cook for a couple more minutes, but then just took forever to pressurise and got a food burn error. It came out alright but the potatoes were undercooked of course.

The second time I tried adding the potatoes in with everything else and a bit of water so it would only have to pressurise once and hopefully would have enough liquid to pressurise properly without burning. But again, before it pressurised I got a food burn error, and the mixture was still as liquid-y as most things I cook in it but the potatoes were undercooked and hard and chewy.

Has anyone had this issue with cubed potatoes before and been able to fix it? It seems like it gets hot enough to cook everything else but the potatoes are just stubborn. Any advice for more seasoned cooks would be much appreciated, thanks all!

I'm planning a city break with my family and Sarajevo is the first choice, but I've read that the air pollution can get bad in the winter months. Searching the sub I've read some conflicting things about whether October is a nice time to visit or if the cold weather and smog set in by then. Can anyone vouch for what Octobers have been like in Sarajevo in recent years?

Thanks!

The Dzungar genocide appears to only be encountered (in English at least) in an academic/academic-adjacent context, despite its apocalyptic scale and intensity rivalling the most extreme episodes of asymmetric mass-violence in world history. While Native American genocides have collectively (if belatedly) entered wider public consciousness with sensitive and controversial discourse about acknowledgement and reconciliation, I have never seen the annihilation of Dzungaria discussed by anyone other than historians and laymen with a particular interest in Qing history.

Is there a different story in China? Are there Qing-era sources indicating that any Chinese people at the time saw something unprecedentedly brutal or beyond the scope of "normal" warfare in what Qianlong had ordered? Did Republican-era Chinese ever evoke the genocide as evidence of the barbarity of the Manchus, or would acknowledgment have been too damaging to the Republic's claim to Xinjiang?

And on the other side of the coin, is there any evidence of continuous memorialisation of the catastrophe by descendants of Dzungars (apparently these include modern Kalmyks and Olots) or were survivors too dislocated and dispersed to have retained a shared conception of "national trauma" that descendants of survivors of other genocides have?

I just got an instant pot and so far really like it but I've seen a couple of recipes that don't seem to work properly because they require two "phases" of pressure cooking with additional ingredients added between them.

So for example I might be cooking a curry sauce with the standard base ingredients (onion, garlic, spices, mince, tomato etc.) but want to add potato towards the end so that the chunks come out soft but without breaking down completely into the sauce. Online recipes will say to pressure cook for five minutes, then QPR before adding the potatoes and pressure cooking for a few more minutes, but then in the time that it takes to repressurise the base sauce is still cooking at a high temperature and ends up overcooked.

Is the trick to just add more water so that the steam builds up quicker? And preheating for the second round of pressure cooking doesn't take too long?

Thanks

I just moved to Baltic Triangle and am looking for a decent gym in the city centre. Ideally something that has a fair bit of good equipment as opposed to 800 treadmills and two benches. I've mostly used commercial gyms before so it's not a deal-breaker, but if better options are available I would prefer that.

After a bit of googling the Gym Group in Liverpool One would be the most convenient location and is open 24 hours but I'm not sure how good it is. Does anyone go there or know of somewhere else in the area that's better? Cheers

From an anthropological standpoint it seems difficult to come up with an analytical definition of human sacrifice that includes everything that is generally considered such and excludes everything that isn't. Almost every society in history has at one time or another practiced some form of ritualised killing, and in pre-secular contexts these had a religious dimension more often than not.

One potential conceptual distinction is that the classic image of Aztecs offering up hearts to the sun was seen as directly providing sustenance to a god (if indeed that bears any resemblance to what they actually did), but that excludes any ritualised killing that was intended more to appease than to nourish, like the tophets/child sacrifice mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and with some archaeological attestation in the ancient Near East and Carthage. Divine appeasement also gets awkwardly close to including the burning of heretics in the name of God in early-modern Europe. The term sacrifice also implies that the thing being offered is of value to the one performing the ritual and its loss would be missed, which fits for the tophets but doesn't square well with the fact that the majority of Aztec sacrifices were prisoners of war.

Historians of Mesoamerica are often the first to point out that human sacrifice as it pertains to Mesoamerica is a Eurocentric notion - and as with the tophets is pejoratively applied to an 'other' - but did Mesoamerican societies recognise "human sacrifice" as a salient category of killing? Are there historians who avoid the term altogether due to the Eurocentric baggage?

I'm aware the question is broad and West Africa is not a monolith, but some cursory googling tells me that leaders of Benin and Ghana, as well as some regional leaders in Nigeria, beat their European counterparts to the milestone of official apology for historical participation in the slave trade.

In Europe this can be a politically sensitive issue despite the obvious fact of European powers' involvement. The idea of a formal apology has been oft-floated in Britain but is yet to be implemented as officially acknowledging responsibility is seen as an embarrassing (or woke) concession that on top of stinging national pride risks coming across as governments seeking re-election telling the voting public to accept culpability for atrocities committed centuries before they were born.

It's surprising then that African leaders would be willing to take this step given that their countries status as perpetrators is more ambiguous - most African states are colonial/post-colonial creations that did not exist during the transatlantic trade, and while indigenous polities certainly enriched themselves through slave-trading (often brutally and enthusiastically), modern West African populations also have a viable claim to victimhood in that many of them descend from communities that were pillaged for human capital by African and European powers alike.

How then did the legacy of the slave trade factor into post-colonial nation-building and political discourse? Was slavery highlighted as an anti-colonial grievance, admonished as a national shame, or ignored as an uncomfortable piece of history too awkward and sensitive to dig up?