Category: Around the world

There are a few differences between “the old world” and the “new world”. In the old world the coffee is much stronger, the content on the television has much racier content but violence is much rarer on public the television regardless of the time of day. In the new world a hot cup of tea is more heard of than drunken, extreme efforts are taken to ensure that no part of the human body is exposed on public the television regardless of the time of day, and alcohol is not tolerated on the street – unless it is in a brown paper bag.

It is this last dictate that is also somewhat different in the old world. It might not be a sign of class but it is not illegal to be walking around with a bottle of beer in your hand. I hadn’t been living in the windy city all that long when one night a bunch of us decided to go to a bar reasonably¹ close to my apartment. I guess I had one too many and it was actually fairly late, so I decided to walk home. It was summer and the area was safe. Yet I had forgotten to leave my glass on the table when I left so I found myself walking up the street with a glass in my hand.

I really somehow doubt that this would have been a problem if I had just kept on walking but there was a convenience store right there and I thought it might be a good idea to pick up a snack. It still wasn’t a problem, I stopped in and was looking for some beef jerky when a pair of policemen came looking for some beverage to keep them going through the night. It was only then when I had realized where I was and that this might be a problem. So I grabbed my snack and went to pay, however, I did have to set my glass down and that is when those nice policemen happened to be right behind me.

Perhaps it was the clink against the glass but then they asked me what exactly I had in my glass. I picked the best thing I could think of – I came up with lime juice. Well, there was no law against carrying around a glass of lime juice but we both agreed that perhaps I should leave this there and continue on my way.

1Well, walking distance if you find a mile to a mile and half a reasonable distance.

I was visiting Berlin for the weekend. All the fun came to an end and it was time to go back to Stuttgart. We were sitting in the airplane when an announcement came over the loudspeaker.

Ladies and Gentlemen due to weather conditions we have been informed by the Brussels air control that we should not be going this afternoon. We will be going for it. However, if conditions do not allow we will have to come back.

In the history of mankind there have been instances of people ignoring the existing rules of the official economy. This usually translates into doing things to avoid paying money to the government. This may be employment taxes, sales tax, or any other official fees or costs. Sometimes this is referred to as the black market or underground economy.

Obviously the government doesn’t like this as they loose out on taxes. Goods paid for in cash may magically cost 10 – 20% less mirroring the cost of not paying sales tax. Uzbekistan currently uses a method to eliminate cash in transactions. Salaries, pensions as well as the purchase of goods and services are done using electronic cards. The cash is deposited in your bank and there it sits, you cannot even take it out for obvious reasons.

The there even exists an official exchange rate for foreign currencies that is used if you are required to exchange your currency. The problem is that there underground economy works well with currencies too. It seems that there are always plenty of buyers of foreign currency at rates that differ from the official exchange rates. It is a combination, of the government doesn’t trust the people, and the people don’t trust the government to spend the money in a reasonable manner. Well, this and the people are finding their purchasing power being eroded by inflation, which in Uzbekistan was 7% end of 2012.

I didn’t understand why Internet connection kept disconnecting. I could work anywhere from one hour to half a day before I would lose my connection. Due to the nature of the problem it didn’t seem to indicate any of my equipment was at fault it really seemed to be a problem from my provider – Deutsche Telekom. So I gave their service line a call and although they were actually quite friendly but they couldn’t actually diagnose the problem either.

Their support person ran a diagnostic program which indicated some unusual problems that needed their 3rd level support to investigate. Over the next few weeks our DSL problems increased so I had more and more telephone calls but no actual success with the problem at hand. We finally agreed to have a visit from one of their engineers to checkout our service.

The visit was to occur during the day while I was at work but I was lucky that my mother-in-law could be there when the technician came to check out our service. He told her that he could find no problems with our service. This unfortunately did not equate into better DSL service so it was back to discussing my problems with their customer service personnel.

Up to this point, this story is probably quite similar to anyone who has had problems with Internet, cable, telephone or perhaps even a cell phone.

The final support call with Deutsche Telekom was a bit embarrassing, we agreed that there didn’t seem to be a problem with the physical connection nor was it a problem with a single device. All of the facts seemed to point to a the DSL router, which was provided to me by Telekom.

My favorite part of the discussion was when their support person asked if I knew someone who had a router that I could borrow. This way we could rule out if the router was the problem or not. It is an excellent way of determining the problem but it places all the work on the customer for a computer part that your buddy never will have sitting around unused. It is not too dissimilar than suggesting can you borrow the engine from your friends car to see if that solves your problem.

I did purchase a new router to see if it would help and as luck had it it did cure all of my problems.

While at a bar-b-que we had started to swap stories about this and that when one of the guys showed us the tag inside of his suit coat.

Made by really really pretty blond girls

I was sold, after all who doesn’t like blond girls. How could we be certain that this statement was not quite accurate? Well, the jacket was made in Turkey. Yes, they also have pretty girls in Turkey as well but usually not blonds. I guess that is the power of marketing.

I thought how you teach about “the birds and the bees” to your children would be reasonably consistent set of lessons. You certainly don’t want your daughter to come home pregnant, but likewise you don’t want your son to get his girlfriend pregnant either.

When I was young my sisters and I sometimes got impromptu reinforcement about the dangers of unprotected sex after dinner. At that time I never understood what triggered these lucky discussions but when I was older I found out the trigger for this was when a daughter of a friend of my father got pregnant. It was then we all got the “talk”.

As fair as my father was, this was one topic that he treated his children just a little bit differently. All of us did get a small talk on this topic together but after a short while I (the son) was dismissed and it would continue with my sisters.

I do remember one of these conversations and as I was walking away I did have a small smirk which was not seen by my parents but was seen by my sisters. I am not sure which thing upset them more, that I was dismissed or that I was laughing about it.

A bunch of us were sitting around swapping stories and we ended up speaking about legal drinking ages in various countries. I asked what was the legal age in Germany.

Me 16? Really, that means that I can take the boys to the pub at 16?

My wife Yes, you can look but don’t touch

I was a bit confused by this particular answer and so I tried to get some sort of clarification. In the end, it was her girlfriend who clarified it for me. Your wife just gave you a free pass. For some reason she thought I was speaking about 16 year old girls when in fact I was asking when I could go to the bar with my sons.

Free pass or not, this information was more than useless as what 16 year old girl wants to be with an “old man”.

My grandfather was “old school”, back in his youth there was love but it was expressed a bit differently but definitely not as open as today. I suspect that there was also sex back then too but also not discussed openly.

Well, the funniest situation that I can remember with my grandfather occurred between him and my sister who was no longer a child but now a young lady. Well, during one visit he ran into my sister and without any real context he asked her what the magic word was. This was not much to go on so she said “please”, and as someone who is raising a couple of young children that would be my answer too. However, what my grandfather meant was the answer is no, or “just say no”.

I think that this was his way of trying to reiterate that as she was getting older that she shouldn’t be experimenting with with “birds and bees” and that she should just say no.

It took a couple of decades but George Lucas did deliver, we finally had the three prequels for the original three Star Wars movies. I remember this one most as my wife was pregnant and I was a bit worried about the sound. I had fears that the loud movie would deafen my unborn son.

The funniest moment was not while watching the commercials before the movie, nor was it during the movie but actually it was after the movie was over. My highly pregnant wife had to visit restroom, but as she walking back to join me she overheard a couple of teenagers talking to one another.

“I can’t believe that Anakin went bad”

This pretty much proves that they are not Star Wars fans.

Roommates can be a pain in the behind as they tend to be someone who may have raised up with different morals or cleanliness standards and most importantly a roomate is not (usually) your partner. It is easy to get upset with them but as they are not your significant other there is no love to taper your feelings towards their behavior. I am glad to say that not all of these stories are mine.

Don’t move in with your friends

Three girls who had been friends during high school found themselves at the same college and decided to share an apartment. They found a four bedroom apartment and found one other girl to share the lease. I am not sure where exactly things broke down but I think food was eaten, messes were made and common supplies were used by all and replaced by one.

Not sure how it got so much out of control. My buddy and I decided to visit my sister to find out things were a bit rocky, I had a lot of bad ideas pretty much designed to make things worse, while Greg had some pretty good ideas. I am pretty sure that things didn’t really improve as over time I heard little things here and there. However, the wildest thing I did hear was that everyone had their own toilet paper which was brought in when you used the toilet. After the lease was up, they all went separate ways.

Don’t move in with someone wilder than you are

Unless my sister changed, and changed a lot, she most likely wasn’t the party animal of the 3rd floor. Actually, all of her roommates seemed pretty sedate to me, but looks can be deceiving. It seems that one of the girls was quite the party animal and the rest of the building found out one Saturday about 3 in the morning.

Someone came and knocked on the door asking to come and pick up Julie. I guess it wasn’t because she was too wild but actually because she was busy throwing up and that was a bit of a downer. So my sister and one of her roommates went down to fetch Julie.

Don’t move in with a practical joker

James was actually a nice guy but he was a bit pretentious. Not only that be he was more often than not a pain in the behind. Well, it didn’t take too long for tensions to build in the apartment until eventually Marcus didn’t really like James any longer. James wasn’t going to get murdered in his sleep but Marcus was out to get him.

I don’t remember all of the ideas that he had for James but I remember the worst one along with the one that was actually done. The evil idea was that we should get some dehydrated milk powder and sprinkle some in his underwear. No idea where that one came from but it seemed too out of proportion response for the James eccentricities.

What actually happened was James had his own plates and cups that he used instead of the more mundane plates and cups Marcus and I used. I guess food and drink simply tasted much better on this old china. The plan was to take one of the cups and saucers and hide it in plain sight. One afternoon when the dishwasher was emptied the china was placed up on top of the cupboards behind one of the other less used dishes. Oddly enough, despite all of James efforts and questions it was not found until the end of the lease when he was packing to leave at the end of the lease.

Don’t move in with a girl who isn’t a girlfriend

Back in the day I pretty full of myself and didn’t seem to lack confidence and seemed to have an opinion on a lot of different topics. I am fairly confident that I was shooting my mouth off on some topic or other but later in the evening my roommate Laurie seemed upset.

She was either cleaning up for the evening or hiding in the bathroom and so I asked her if everything was ok, only to be assured that it was. Not satisfied I asked if there was anything I did or if she was angry at me.

No, everything is fine.

Not being a ladies man I wasn’t able to translate this sentence. It was a few days later that a friend of mine who was dating my roommate confided in me that no everything was not fine. I guess what I said had apparently belittled her field of study, she had confided to him that lied to me that day “He asked if I was upset but I wasn’t going to tell him!”.

I never did understand it, upset yes, but why not tell me. I guess I learned a bit more about women.