Holidays & Twitter

People on twitter seem to think and act according to some very distinct beliefs. For instance, I’m not the only one who hates it when people brag about their holidays, every small possession or minor detail in their life that sometimes (most of the time) yells pretentious annoying sod.

There’s us and there are people who think there’s nothing wrong with it although it’s really annoying, at least to me, that some people don’t un-follow real life friends because “it would simply be rude”. I’m not sure I see the problem in telling someone their tweets are annoying but they’re a nice person otherwise and I wouldn’t mind if someone said that to me – it’s not essential to me that someone doesn’t follow what I say because so long as I know where to find them everything is good. Even more so since twitter doesn’t let me filter out some words or people. While I do have some very lovely friends on facebook, the overwhelming number of people (not far from Dunbar’s number) produces a lot of information that I simply can’t go through.

Instead people don’t think that maybe their actual updates might be the problem; itt’s obviously the person who unfollowed them: “What is HIS/HER problem?”

If I post a message saying I went to Cancun on holiday, half of them, some of them whom I’ve probably never met will say hey, good for you, that’s awesome, enjoy the holiday; maybe not all of them mean it, but hey. It’s instantaneous, short and superficial. The other half will be the envious, jealous lot to find knots in laces(“oh but think of the air miles” “pollution” “what’s wrong with going LOCAL” and such) while no one thinks hey – maybe I spent a whole year saving for THAT particular trip and I chose Cancun because I love the pictures, I love new cultures, I want to try something other than local (= boring) and the same places I’ve been going to for years. And I don’t go to Cancun every year. As Dan Ariely would say, I’d like to keep that memory in mind and not ruin it by visiting the place more often than I do my own family.

Unless of course, you change the details: if you tell people on twitter every month something like “MAN, I’M SO LOOKING FORWARD TO MEXICO!! I’ve just put aside some money to contribute to the total” everyone will feel like part of your life, somehow (if they follow you for as long or have something to define you by, kind of like imagining what they would say about you to someone who didn’t know you: “my friend who is saving up big time to go to Mexico”).

We say we don’t care but the truth couldn’t be farther away. If I think I know you by some vague detail you have posted online, then I’m less inclined to make negative comments or judge you (sometimes). We engage in the funniest of ways sometimes.

The Gordon Brown TED Talk

Good? Bad? Not what I expected. Notice the blue tie as well.

Pregnancy

Photo by Witness Me on Flickr

I’m not pregnant and thankfully none of my friends are either but this is something I had sworn to write about back when I had no laptop.

Although my dad likes to joke about it and tells me you get spots as you mature, my face was ridden with the damn things for a very long while. I’d hate the fact that every other day there would be a new one, and another one, another one..although some people called me vain and I’m very much aware that trying to look like my face is not a mined field qualifies as vain, it was rather painful and annoying to sleep with. Possibly the best advice I got from a doctor was to ‘get used to it’ because they won’t go away for good – you just get less spots as you advance in age. My skin was never good so I just assumed the worst and shrugged as I left the dermatologists’ office.

I had been given the best solution there was – oral contraceptives. Oral contraceptives would adjust hormone imbalances and I’d have less spots and other hormone-related misfortunes. What they told me then was that oral contraceptives are a hit and miss thing; what works for me might not work for the woman next to me on the train. Fair enough, I thought, and agreed to trial some for a month.

I was very pleased with the result and nothing bad happened. I didn’t lose weight, gain weight, become nauseous or get bigger breasts. Yes, contrary to what others might believe, I was relieved I didn’t go up in bra cups. This is mostly because when I was about 15-16, other girls were desperately trying to get on the pill to have bigger breasts. The second reason was that most of the others wanted to have sex – protected sex, but not by a condom. The usual excuse would be ‘it feels better without one’ and if your boyfriend was 2, 3, or 4 years older then he’d be a very persuasive factor. I trust everyone knows ‘What Women Want‘ with mr. creative director’s daughter who vows to sleep with her older boyfriend on the night of the prom.

Alas, we were a mixture of shy and courageous. The shy were not so sure about the whole thing or too afraid to do things without their family finding out, what with mums cleaning out rooms, drawers and finding pills they don’t know about. The courageous, well, were already far ahead of the game when some of us barely realised what was going on. But no one ever talked, you just assumed a lot. As a friend of mine was telling the other day, years after she left her old class she discovered some shocking truths about her former classmates – the people she was least expecting.

Why is this all important? Because we’d all inevitably end up with the same medicines more or less. At the time the options were limited but the biggest talk was the one about side effects. For whatever reason you got on the pill…did you notice anything? Doctors will tell you to let them know as soon as possible if something is wrong but common advice is that you should finish a blister of 21 pills even if you don’t like them much. It takes your body time to adjust so if you’re going through hell, keep going. It might be better.

I’m pretty sure now that I know another reason why a lot of girls in the UK are pregnant. Apart from the fact that we are not born rational human beings, but we only act rationally because we understand how logic works, the lack of education on the matter should be the least of the worries the NHS has. Some girls do want the children. Other have beliefs on abortion. But what everyone fails to see is that there’s another big hole in the system.

You are a teenage girl and you walk into a clinic and ask for contraceptives. Regardless of your reason, the doctor will evaluate whether you really need them or not but will give you a prescription for a cheap pill called Microgynon. Microgynon, may I say, is the devil itself. Only if you Google it for long enough you get an idea of the horrors women go through. Breats – big, swelling, nausea, vomiting, weight gain, mood swings,  depression. Something that is seemingly easier to use than a condom will bring more discomfort than all the money you will ever spend on condoms. Symptoms appear in less than 2-3 days since the first pill and you start thinking ‘OMG’ and ‘WTF’. You remember your doctor said to go through the whole blister but you can’t. You don’t want to. Stop the bleeding, stop the mood swings from nice person to arsey one in less than 30 seconds and most of all, get that cake away from me. The NHS tells you to go in and change the pill if you are not comfortable with it but here is the next problem: Microgynon is free. NHS pays a feeble amount of money to provide free Microgynon to women while the other contraceptives cost money. Microgynon is as old as the world yet it’s still being dispensed when you could pay £2 a month for something that won’t turn you into evil … person of the world #1.

In most cases, I’d imagine no one returns. Complaining is far easier on the internet and there’s the possibility of being dispensed another pill that does the same. Who would want to go through the same again? No one. I’d also imagine the NHS will never hear from you again but in the meanwhile you can’t buy contraceptives over the counter. I can’t currently go to the UK and say ‘please give me this’ without my doctor prescribing it to me. I can do this in Romania so long as I talk to the pharmacist (who might say the same as a doctor – try it because we don’t know and it depends). Doctors don’t have to keep track of everything and teenage pregnancies are only happening in dare I say, areas with poor demographics. The alarming rate of teenage pregnancies in the UK surely  can’t mean so many people are illiterate or have not been to school (although it is possible) – it could also mean that people are tired of being monitored to see who’s having sex and who isn’t. At any age. It makes no difference whether I’m 40 or 13 which is why I’m never setting foot in a NHS clinic for contraception ever again.

Organised Religion

I’m not one to talk about religion as I’m not very, um, spiritual myself. Perhaps it’s a result of a lot of things that have happened. But I have stumbled across some articles talking about faith in a world that seems to be lacking any.

One of them is a very strange advert from Ogilvy in Bangalore, India:

The somewhat emotional appeal might have to suffer from the fact that a lot of them think those killed are either infidels or probably Westerners, threatening their way of life with capitalism and loose ‘Western’ values. The cherry on top seems to be this other ad that asks ‘what if your God doesn’t exist?‘ (after you’ve blown yourself up). The possibility that someone will sit and wonder for a few minutes is rather low but if that can move mountains according to them perhaps it’s a good use of media space. And if it makes others take notice and act upon that even better.

But it’s one of the reasons I’ve loved to hate religion of any kind: people want it to be true – it gives them the feeling that the world is just and hard work will be rewarded. Which offers a cosy sense of purpose and belonging. Which is what everyone needs in a world where things go wrong and nothing works for you, but against you. To keep some of the dream alive, if we pray something good happens we tend to notice. If nothing happens, we fail to notice the coincidence. Perhaps we’d be nowhere with this biased reasoning or perhaps we’d be in a better, Orwellian place. I don’t know and I can’t possibly think like that – but Aldous Huxley did wonder: “What if this world is some other place’s hell?“

Even Americans, 63% of the ones questioned a while ago said they’d be reluctant to vote with anyone who doesn’t believe in God.

“I am very interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.”

Recession Hotdog

I was reading through Esquire the other day and one of their features was a list of about 58 things that haven’t happened yet but will soon; film releases, anticipated events, the NFL and everything else but among everything else was the ‘recession high-end hotdog’. Apparently this hotdog is going to show up in classy restaurants as a cheap alternative to make people carry on believing there is a recession.

Apart from the obvious (times aren’t good) the psychological effect of the recession hotdog worries me; it was Rory Sutherland who pointed out that we could bring in the kittens..

“At the moment, it doesn’t really matter whether you are paying £20,000 or £10,000 for a full page in a British newspaper.  What matters is that 50% of your £10,000 is being spent on paying journalists to write doom-laden articles discouraging consumers from doing anything except to cower inside their homes waiting for redundancy and repossession.”

I won’t go into a waffle about economics as it would be at its best amateur-ish and make me look like an ass. But the recession hotdog made me think of all the other ‘offers’ that never would have appeared had it not been for this downturn. Of course HMV is still having £3 sales and Tesco may have still rolled out some Aldi-like brands in order to become the major discounter but something tells me everyone else would have carried on as if spending £10 for supermarket lunch in one day is perfectly acceptable. Now, you obviously have the choice of spending £2 in M&S if you so wish.

The hotdog, thus, seems like a bit of a forceful push – you must buy it because times are bad, y’know, and they’ll carry on being bad. Hot dog is going to stick with you for a while… But what I don’t like are the excuses that go by these descriptions more or less: “we have launched this in order to help consumers spend less” or my second favourite “because more and more people prefer to stay in”. Drink more at home, watch TV 24/7, eat out less, and what’s worse, a 15-yo with an internship at Morgan Stanley telling us no sane teenager will pay full price for a cinema ticket and they never watch TV. I’d never get a tattoo either if my nerdy brother was asking. I don’t have a nerdy brother. Thankfully.

But what if some people are actually thinking ‘THANK GOD I don’t have to pay £60 so my friends can binge on korma and Foster’s and then forget it was their turn to pay?” At last I don’t have to change my car every year, I don’t have to get a pedicure worth £50 every month to keep up with what my loan friends are doing, and most of all I don’t have to change my hair colour because someone finally finds it acceptable to just, you know, be yourself, rather than think “I have to see what my friends say first”.

After Paris

When I went to Paris some of the biggest misfortunes happened to me, one at a time. My laptop was collateral damage on this trip when it fell out of its open bag sitting on my suitcase. My suitcase is fairly big. It took a heavy fall and my screen suddenly became dark and dark it’s been for the past few months – this was all happening around the 20th of May.

After this laptop malfunction, my suitcase fell victim to some abuse in an airport, possibly in Frankfurt while on my way somewhere else; arriving home, the lock was jammed and I had to force open my own suitcase to take stuff out of it since the lock combination refused to work. It went through therapy and now it’s no longer missing a wheel and shockingly enough I can close it properly.

I won’t detail Paris because I’m not a travel blog and I’ve been there before; it’s not my dream city to live in as I’m not the hopeless romantic to wander the streets of the Quartier Latin or sip my coffee on the hills surrounding Montmartre. My life is nicer with macarons but it’s just as good without them. And frankly, I don’t like unknown French people in large numbers. They have scary habits.

It was raining – no, it was pouring when I left Manchester. I was amazed that the French people on the flight were all nicely dressed, well groomed and generally impeccable. The locals on the other hand were in jeans and tshirts but I have to say it was 1-0 for the French as far as flying attire goes.

I didn’t fly KLM but this is about how bad the weather looked when I left Manchester.

Arriving in France was far more painful – nearly 30 degrees outside and I was wearing a sodding coat. I will never learn.

The first ad to greet me in a bus stop was for a McDonald’s milkshake of some sort for a ridiculously low price. What struck me is what it says right underneath it: “For your safety, maintain regular physical exercise”, pointing to a website called mangerbouger.fr, inviting people not to be full-time slobs but to get off their bums and exercise more. If I’m not mistaken, in the UK the only recommendation is to maintain a regular diet. Eat this, eat that, eat less of this but the focus is mostly on food rather than exercise.

The wonderful thing about Paris is that it’s aesthetically pleasing: the buildings are all around the same height and nothing pokes out more than it should at eye level. For anyone going up the Eiffel Tower or on the Funiculaire de Montmartre, it’s the first obvious thing. If you spend enough time in Paris thinking about this, it strikes you as very clever architectural planning.

If you revisit Paris, and spend even more time wondering about its architecture, you discover more interesting things: the main boulevards have all been built really wide in order to accommodate  heavy artillery rolling down the streets for better defence if need be. What happened is obviously history but since no one has invaded Paris in a while, traffic seems fluid even at its busiest. Whether this is the actual cause or not I don’t know – but it does help. I don’t think the UK ever expected a lot of foreign tanks..

I won’t waffle on about how pretty everything looks because we all know it does and I hated school literature for descriptive passages and swore never to write any artistic descriptions of things ever again. It’s just nice. It has its downsides too: owing to the celebrations on the 14th of July, some people decided it would be a good idea to set fire to a lot of cars. Most would argue France is sometimes a nice country, shame it’s inhabited. Other sad events include a punch-up in the RER witnessed just before the Eiffel Tower stop. Italian with foreign girlfriend gets mugged by some individuals in a train, train is packed with tourists and the only thing they can yell is ‘HELP’ rather than ‘Au secours’ or ‘A l’aide’, ‘voleur’ or whatever. Panicking, you realise that violence gets things done but depressingly enough, police is reactive rather than proactive. It is your fault, monsieur. It is just what les pique-poquettes do. You live with it. This is Paris! Do you know how many people get mugged here?

Everything around seems to slow down in Paris. As the Lantana blog ‘Scrambling Eggs‘ says it,

“I never could understand why Britain, a country surrounded by such gastronomic meccas as Italy, Spain and France, managed to develop such a chain store food culture. It seems bizarre that anyone could find it acceptable, even preferable, to eat highly processed, pre packaged food and patronise bland formulaic food and coffee chains.”

I can’t not mention the cheese. It’s great. I was introduced to a very tasty cheese called ‘mimolette‘ – the bright orange thing in the middle of this picture:

Apparently there’s bread made with two types of cheese as well. I doubt there’s much chance of finding anything like that around these parts but it makes me wish Britain would sit down more often than just for scones and cream tea or cricket and strawberries with cream.

The Library Debate

As I caught up with two old classmates for a few good hours today, we talked a lot about our very own mundanities: university life. Exams. Is it better where you are? Is it worse here? Do we really care?

During those hours I heard of people I used to know in school; some haven’t changed, some have to the point where I think I wouldn’t be able to recognise them while others were lost (predictably or not) in a whirlwind of drug and alcohol abuse. Such is life I guess. There’s no point saying I feel bad because I do, although some years back I’d have said I don’t. And even so, it was still at the back of my head somewhere.

But the library debate – one of our major conversation topics was the dissertation. The good, bad, ugly, and horrendous of it all. The emails I get from people asking me about planning books as if I’m some authority on the matter; but it seems some were actually fooled into thinking I know stuff. I got one of these emails a while back with a guy asking me (again, emphasis on the funny of it) what books to read if he wants to get into planning.

I sat there for a few seconds wondering whether I should say something or not and asked if he had read anything – and if he did, what it was. At the time said guy was doing work experience at various agencies but that he’d never heard of ‘Truth, Lies, and Advertising’ – my recommendation back then. It’s a good read overall and still very up-to-date if you ask me (I re-read it for my own dissertation) but it shocked me that he hadn’t read it; cue a ‘I have been looking into this for a couple of years now’. Ok, maybe it’s unfair to pick on him or the fact that maybe he’s been doing something more useful with his holiday than reading but something was definitely wrong.

Back today – my friend was telling me she can use all the help she can get her hands on. I offered to share any relevant article I see on the internet or not in order for her to write a good dissertation and then she asked what my university library looks like. Bit puzzled, I thought that we have a really big library. The one on my campus is filled with business books to suit any accountant or marketing student but the interesting ones are off-campus where the social studies ones are located. Nevertheless, we have a solid collection of books despite lacking some recent ones but it can’t be perfect. Except people aren’t reading them. I follow some of current interest and they still look brand new and lack any markings.

She was shocked to hear that no one ever touches these books; when you don’t have them available but wish you did, they’re a real treasure. When you pay a lot of money for university every year but still don’t touch them, they’re as good as invisible or non-existent. I didn’t have loads of books I wanted to read on my bookshelf. I read a lot of them at work; the useful and the not-so-useful ones too, it was a good waste of time when everyone was out of the office and it saved me a lot of money for things that were relevant but would have cost me too much at the time. I’d love to collect them now but the process is still expensive and takes forever.

So I can’t think of what’s worse: not to have those books but desperately need them or have the books but not even look in their direction. Obviously both but the latter makes me somewhat sad when people I know say they want smaller tuition fees.

Sampling the Local Flavour

A while ago when I watched a documentary on wabi sabi I remember having read somewhere on the side of the subject that the inhabitants of our humble island and Japan’s have tea, gardening and horrible weather in common. The other day in Turkey my sister got somewhat confused as to what country we were in (she’s small) when her existence is divided between two countries. Without much further ado, she’s at an Anglo-American School in Sofia, Bulgaria at the moment – which will naturally confuse anyone who’s read my about page. What in the name of everything sacred and saintly are we doing spread across Europe? We’re doing capitalism I suppose. And if life gives you capitalism, you squeeze it in someone’s face. Or just get the best of both….three worlds. I rarely have enough time to see all the things I want to see in Romania and Bulgaria; visiting anything else feels like a bit of a culture surge. Mr. Colman’s and Griffiths‘ entries on Romania along with Mr. Terrett are enough to convince anyone that people over there are good, the food is crap, everything is quite strange.

Romania’s had so many UK shops open, it confuses me too. There’s Gap, Tie Rack, Debenhams,  Peacocks, Marks and Spencer, Next, Oasis, Karen Millen, you also have the Royal Bank of Scotland in case you feel lonely and find yourself an expat. Starbucks and Costa are also part of the local landscape. I know some are just a sign of Globalisation and you might confuse Germany with the UK too if it weren’t for all the blonde people.

People drink a lot of beer, some might even put the English to shame.

Tea would lose the battle against coffee and the curry is replaced by the kebab house.

I often wonder where the hell I am when people around me speak strange languages (my transit airports are regularly Frankfurt and Munich, sometimes Amsterdam) and frankly, it becomes tiring to think about it after a while. I hate waking up to an alarm in the morning and saying something in a foreign language to a very confused boyfriend. And repeating the same thing, in case he didn’t get it the first time. Till I look around and think…wait. This is the UK! WHERE AM I? (Cue the ‘bad dream’ jokes here)

One day, if Romania were to detach itself from the continent and become an island in the middle of the Black Sea, then I’m sure it would look a lot like Britain but with more people hugging and kissing and less gardening. What I don’t understand is how come the UK has never warmed up (in a manner of speaking) to ICE TEA, this wonderful invention.

Apart from the fact that Pepsi distributes Lipton and Coca-Cola took care of Nestea, it’s a shame there’s barely any ice tea in supermarkets or any iced tea in places like Starbucks. Starbucks in Romania, as far as my knowledge goes, serves iced green tea and other such (or it used to). In the UK, someone looked at me funny when I asked for tea…with ice in it. Now I love my tea and would consider a sacrilege to put icea in Yorkshire or anything delicately flavoured but on a hot day, some ice tea is fantastic. Naturally I could do it myself but convenience and destroying the planet one pet bottle at a time is hard to beat.

Here are two (empty) samples of ice tea flavours from brands that had initially started with peach and lemon flavours only:

A mango-pineapple flavoured Nestea and a raspberry flavoured Lipton drink:

Sorry, the content has no fancy colour but the taste is just great (hence the empty bottles). I believe I shall smuggle some into the country next time. For the language nerd, ‘raspberry’ in Romanian is ‘zmeura’ but it’s so hard to pronounce I won’t even try to explain.

Architecture of Happiness

It’s another book by Alain de Botton I’m reading. Hoping I’m not getting brainwashed by him just like I feel is happening with Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, other books that could be resumed in a few paragraphs or blog entries (so it sounds less cruel). He might waffle on forever about some topics but at least in every two platitudes or ‘yes, and?’ facts there’s something new and interesting about our bourgeois existence on this hot, small, and crowded planet.

Obviously the key isn’t to read a lot of books or to take all of them seriously but to discern what’s good and what pages you can skip. I tend to read the ending first and if it’s not interesting then I won’t read the rest of the book either. For Alain de Botton’s sake, I won’t call him pretentious because he actually offers a (sometimes) unbiased perspective on why women always want to change the curtains and redecorate and men have to push ugly sofas up flights of stairs. Anything in the domain of the hausfrau is interesting to me, so why not. I could never understand cluttered houses, therefore reading about why people obsess with stuff inspired by the rococo movement might actually enlighten me a bit.

Never Enough Food

I’ve returned from a wonderful holiday in Turkey. While it would be a bit arrogant to say it wasn’t exactly my dream holiday, I am allowed to say that it was a tad forced on me by the family who gave an ultimatum: we’re not going there next year and this is your last chance. With nearly not enough time to decide on plans for the summer, I found myself booked for Turkey before I knew it.

Anyway. I terribly enjoyed the all inclusive services – which is common practice on the Turkish seaside, in pretty much all their resorts. You pay, you sit down, they do the rest. Eat at any time you want, drink at any time you want, however much you want. For all they care, you can do anything you want so long as you don’t explode from stuffing yourself.

The Mediterranean turns itself into a host for Europeans of all sorts over the summer. Turkish hospitality is something I have never seen anywhere else and with creating an ‘all inclusive’ service, they’ve also created the desire for things you never thought you could get on holiday. A chalet, a golf caddy, 24/7 food, babysitting services and everything bar the servants to feed you grapes. Hoards of tourists are met by armies of employees who are more efficient than worker bees in my opinion. I remember someone dropping a plate and smashing it into bits and by the time I look back, someone had already picked it up and cleaned.

Although I could go on forever with the praise, it’s remarkable they’ve thought about all these things (so we don’t have to, as an advert would say) but what was truly great about this holiday was that it took me on a very strange tour of European customs. Seated at a table in the restaurant, the waiter would politely ask you where you hail from and while Russian and Romanian tourists made up a vast majority (dare I say), there were people from the UK, France, Belgium, Albania, Hungary, Holland, North Cyprus, pretty much every country under the sun minus Greece and Spain who, for very special reasons, will probably never find their way into Turkey.

Food customs are particularly amusing, nevermind all the other clichés and ideas. Like the French are arrogant, that we butcher any foreign language or never learn things about countries visited, that the Germans drink a lot of beer and the Swedes are all blonde and slim.  Some are true, some more than others but some random things I have picked up, in no particular order:

• The Russians seem to have the old queue system ingrained in their brains. One person will hold the queue for 7-8 others who travel with them. This happens for everything, from Turkish visas to food. Each will bring a plate topped up with food to the table and leave a lot behind because no one can eat that much. My best guess it goes back to when food was rationed in communism and if you weren’t the first to queue in front of the shop at 4AM, you’d be left without. You need to make sure you’re first and that you have your food and eat it.
• When faced with an overwhelming amount of choice, no one will ever eat healthy for breakfast. Not in the first three days. In an all inclusive system, you pig out the first 2-3 and then decide to cut back when you realise that the abuse just isn’t worth it. When the pancakes and pastries are just waiting to be eaten, the ham and cheese sandwich will sit lonely in a corner.
• Mostly Brits and Russians will sit all day long on the beach, probably to enjoy their later-to-come skin cancer or sunburn. Because we don’t see the sun all year long, we’re just going to have a lot of it now. Yep.
• There were barely any smokers in public although to my knowledge it was permitted nearly everywhere. Rooms were a totally different territory.
• Other families with children are hell.

I really think it’s true now when they say that no one needs a holiday more than the person who has just returned from one