Hakan sending me the very best of travel tips I ever received. In fact, it's precisely the kind of information that is truly relevant for me on my travels, but nobody ever tells you these sort of things: Neither people, nor books.
So if you ever want to make me very happy when giving me travel tips for a place where I have never visited the airport, here's what information you can compile. Quoting some of Hakan's Enormously Useful Chisinau Airport Tips. The most impressive is the "right side doors of transfer bus" tip - it's the sort of thing that I know in most airports I'm using, and I've always found myself a little neurotic because of it.
"- It is better for you to print your return ticket before you come even it is an electronic ticket. Since passport police is a bit tricky and may give you some hard time, just in case.
- Try to stay in first 10 rows in the plane (thru online check-in) to be fast for the passport control queue, otherwise it may take some time to pass. Also in transfer bus, right side doors are better for quick exit.
- If they ask how much money you have, don't say 'I've no money' or some big amount. 200$ should be ok i guess.
- At the exit door, there are freelance taxi drivers. They will try to hook, but when you manage to get out, there is a taxi station on the right side. About 100lei, you should be able to reach city center."
So if you ever want to make me very happy when giving me travel tips for a place where I have never visited the airport, here's what information you can compile. Quoting some of Hakan's Enormously Useful Chisinau Airport Tips. The most impressive is the "right side doors of transfer bus" tip - it's the sort of thing that I know in most airports I'm using, and I've always found myself a little neurotic because of it.
"- It is better for you to print your return ticket before you come even it is an electronic ticket. Since passport police is a bit tricky and may give you some hard time, just in case.
- Try to stay in first 10 rows in the plane (thru online check-in) to be fast for the passport control queue, otherwise it may take some time to pass. Also in transfer bus, right side doors are better for quick exit.
- If they ask how much money you have, don't say 'I've no money' or some big amount. 200$ should be ok i guess.
- At the exit door, there are freelance taxi drivers. They will try to hook, but when you manage to get out, there is a taxi station on the right side. About 100lei, you should be able to reach city center."
I've noticed by now a stunning four people I know in Latvia being very strict about compressing PET bottles before throwing them into the garbage can. And that is stunning because a) it's four out of the four people I noticed handling garbage, and b) they all seemed indeed strict about it. It didn't look like "ah, it's just something you do when you stand in the kitchen, throw stuff away, and have nothing better to do"; it looked more like "this is important, it has to be done!". You should've heard the annoyed sounds that our cleaning lady just made when she discovered that there were two uncompressed PET bottles in the garbage...!
(You, reader from abroad, might rather be surprised that we throw them into the garbage in the first place. But lacking any proper recycling alternatives, the garbage can is where almost everything ends up here: Paper, glass, PET bottles, and all the rest. Only batteries go to special boxes that can be found in some shops, one of them luckily next door from our office)
I just wonder what's the reason for this PET bottle compressing to be considered so important, at least by my small and statistically irrelevant sample group.
Is it about saving space in the garbage can or bag? But in Riga, you'll never be carrying it around town, you either throw it into a container near your house or you wait in front of your door for the removal car. It doesn't make a difference, in most cases you'll walk just as many times. And the weight of the garbage will be higher with compressed PET bottles, because then they make space for more garbage - while the uncompressed bottle will simply occupy some space for air.
To waste less garbage bags? When at the same time, there's no recycling system to speak of, so that almost everything ends up in these bags, and the environmental factor of the additional use of maybe two, maybe a dozen garbage bags per year will not significantly change the situation, especially with that average bag containing two glass bottles, two PET bottles, maybe an aluminum can, and the read newspapers of last week?
I can't figure out anything better than that, so my personal guess is that it's a habit. To be precise, a habit that's been born out of the need to "do something that gives the feeling of personal activity in regards to environmental pollution". And since there's not really a lot you can or are ready to actually do, such a habit is a nice act of compensation. It's nothing specific, you'll find similar compensation acts everywhere, which then become habits, and once they're habits they're here to stay, because they won't ever be questioned. Not all of these habits are originally compensation acts, but usually you can't tell anyway, because the moment you discover these things, they're already habits and most people wouldn't know why they do what they do there.
Now that whole bottle compressing story might be totally different, and maybe there's a really good reason for it. In that case, I hope someone will enlighten me, and maybe I'll be a bottle squeezer soon.
The habits thing, by the way, is much like placing a spoon into an open champagne bottle (by my best knowledge, this would indeed preserve some bubbles if it was a silver spoon, but who has silver spoons these days, so we stick in there whatever we find, and it even works, because bubble amounts in champagne are to a significant amount a perception matter, just like every "mental comparison" of different beverages).
Oh, and by the way, I just looked it up, and it turns out: Me (with my silver spoon thinking) am as much subject to a habitual belief as "them" (who'd put regular spoons in there, in what I thought to be a habit change due to the lack of silver spoons in our cutlery drawers).
See for example this article (a nice read!), or this (nice reasoning), and this (which is where he copypasted the nice reasoning from, or vice versa).
(You, reader from abroad, might rather be surprised that we throw them into the garbage in the first place. But lacking any proper recycling alternatives, the garbage can is where almost everything ends up here: Paper, glass, PET bottles, and all the rest. Only batteries go to special boxes that can be found in some shops, one of them luckily next door from our office)
I just wonder what's the reason for this PET bottle compressing to be considered so important, at least by my small and statistically irrelevant sample group.
Is it about saving space in the garbage can or bag? But in Riga, you'll never be carrying it around town, you either throw it into a container near your house or you wait in front of your door for the removal car. It doesn't make a difference, in most cases you'll walk just as many times. And the weight of the garbage will be higher with compressed PET bottles, because then they make space for more garbage - while the uncompressed bottle will simply occupy some space for air.
To waste less garbage bags? When at the same time, there's no recycling system to speak of, so that almost everything ends up in these bags, and the environmental factor of the additional use of maybe two, maybe a dozen garbage bags per year will not significantly change the situation, especially with that average bag containing two glass bottles, two PET bottles, maybe an aluminum can, and the read newspapers of last week?
I can't figure out anything better than that, so my personal guess is that it's a habit. To be precise, a habit that's been born out of the need to "do something that gives the feeling of personal activity in regards to environmental pollution". And since there's not really a lot you can or are ready to actually do, such a habit is a nice act of compensation. It's nothing specific, you'll find similar compensation acts everywhere, which then become habits, and once they're habits they're here to stay, because they won't ever be questioned. Not all of these habits are originally compensation acts, but usually you can't tell anyway, because the moment you discover these things, they're already habits and most people wouldn't know why they do what they do there.
Now that whole bottle compressing story might be totally different, and maybe there's a really good reason for it. In that case, I hope someone will enlighten me, and maybe I'll be a bottle squeezer soon.
The habits thing, by the way, is much like placing a spoon into an open champagne bottle (by my best knowledge, this would indeed preserve some bubbles if it was a silver spoon, but who has silver spoons these days, so we stick in there whatever we find, and it even works, because bubble amounts in champagne are to a significant amount a perception matter, just like every "mental comparison" of different beverages).
Oh, and by the way, I just looked it up, and it turns out: Me (with my silver spoon thinking) am as much subject to a habitual belief as "them" (who'd put regular spoons in there, in what I thought to be a habit change due to the lack of silver spoons in our cutlery drawers).
See for example this article (a nice read!), or this (nice reasoning), and this (which is where he copypasted the nice reasoning from, or vice versa).
After careful observation and countless experiments with variations, I think I have finally discovered the most effective way to get up and get started into a day here in this apartment:
1. Wake up
2. Walk to main room, switch on laptop
3. Walk to kitchen, press the heating button on the tea kettle
4. Walk to bathroom, brush teeth
5. Back to main room, where the computer is by now waiting for me to choose the user account and enter the password
6. Back to bathroom, do whatever else there is to do in these early minutes
7. Back to kitchen, add coffee to cup, sugar and milk if needed, pour hot water into cup
8. Back to main room, where computer, coffee and me are now all ready to go
All that takes less than four minutes if executed properly.
1. Wake up
2. Walk to main room, switch on laptop
3. Walk to kitchen, press the heating button on the tea kettle
4. Walk to bathroom, brush teeth
5. Back to main room, where the computer is by now waiting for me to choose the user account and enter the password
6. Back to bathroom, do whatever else there is to do in these early minutes
7. Back to kitchen, add coffee to cup, sugar and milk if needed, pour hot water into cup
8. Back to main room, where computer, coffee and me are now all ready to go
All that takes less than four minutes if executed properly.
Here's a summary of what an average evening in our hotel night club is like, based on observation on two or three evenings, and admittedly by extrapolating and guessing some of the data.
Bigger (readable) image under "read more".
Bigger (readable) image under "read more".
Watching Sarah Silverman, eating fish fingers, talking on the phone.
Discovery 1: Sarah rules.
Discovery 2: Fish fingers are boring without mayonnaise. I ran out of Thomy mayonnaise. I'll try with ketchup now. Ketchup goes with everything.
Discovery 3: It is possible to have more than five phone calls on a single day, all of them about the same topic, which isn't really a topic, because the topic is "just chatting around because it's so boring here" (not here; in another here).
Discovery 4: We don't really do phone calls for "just chatting around" these days. We have mobile phones. Since then, we always have a reason when we call someone. It's actually quite refreshing to have a phone call for "just chatting around".
Discovery 5: Ketchup can actually rot.
Discovery 6: You can replace ketchup by taking tomato sauce and sprinkling sugar all over it.
Discovery 7: I need to reconsider my nutritional habits.
Discovery 1: Sarah rules.
Discovery 2: Fish fingers are boring without mayonnaise. I ran out of Thomy mayonnaise. I'll try with ketchup now. Ketchup goes with everything.
Discovery 3: It is possible to have more than five phone calls on a single day, all of them about the same topic, which isn't really a topic, because the topic is "just chatting around because it's so boring here" (not here; in another here).
Discovery 4: We don't really do phone calls for "just chatting around" these days. We have mobile phones. Since then, we always have a reason when we call someone. It's actually quite refreshing to have a phone call for "just chatting around".
Discovery 5: Ketchup can actually rot.
Discovery 6: You can replace ketchup by taking tomato sauce and sprinkling sugar all over it.
Discovery 7: I need to reconsider my nutritional habits.
I have been waiting all my life for an opportunity to use this poor pun in some context. My day has come.
My muesli bowl is too big, and my Axa Strawberry Muesli is too tasty. The consequence is that with each serving of this delicious cereal, half a pack vanishes into my digestive tract. Two servings, and a pack is gone.
What a waste of packaging materials.
Or of muesli.
My muesli bowl is too big, and my Axa Strawberry Muesli is too tasty. The consequence is that with each serving of this delicious cereal, half a pack vanishes into my digestive tract. Two servings, and a pack is gone.
What a waste of packaging materials.
Or of muesli.
In a cafe in St Cloud in Paris:
Buying food and wine for a dinner and get-together before the night song festival in Tallinn.
Big shop. Big wine shelves. All of them look normal, except the one where the Georgian wine stands: Totally empty, one or two bottles left, standing alone on a big shelf.
Lovely.
Later the evening, in the song festival, all the people with Georgian flags.
Lovely.
Big shop. Big wine shelves. All of them look normal, except the one where the Georgian wine stands: Totally empty, one or two bottles left, standing alone on a big shelf.
Lovely.
Later the evening, in the song festival, all the people with Georgian flags.
Lovely.
Today is Israel's independence day. Well alright, the territory was previously under British administration, but again the word "independence" seems a strange choice.
A quote from the Eurovision Song Contest website, which I found rather confusing: "After Montenegro voted for independence from the State Union, Serbia proclaimed its independence on the 7th of June, 2006. Nowadays, Belgrade is the capital of an independent Serbia."
How exactly do you become independent of what's pretty much you yourself? Particularly once the other part of the union (Montenegro) had left the union already two days earlier?
Was there any less independence before? What were they dependent from? Yugoslavia, which Serbia had tried to keep in existence? Or the statue union with Montenegro, which was merely the last remnant of the small empire that had ceased to exist in the early 1990s?
As said earlier: History is marketing.
And copywriting. Since I guess the only alternative to "declaring independence" at this moment would've been to say "damn, we're all that's left". And that sounds less impressive, indeed.
How exactly do you become independent of what's pretty much you yourself? Particularly once the other part of the union (Montenegro) had left the union already two days earlier?
Was there any less independence before? What were they dependent from? Yugoslavia, which Serbia had tried to keep in existence? Or the statue union with Montenegro, which was merely the last remnant of the small empire that had ceased to exist in the early 1990s?
As said earlier: History is marketing.
And copywriting. Since I guess the only alternative to "declaring independence" at this moment would've been to say "damn, we're all that's left". And that sounds less impressive, indeed.
Older items