Tag Archives: humour

Three Days, Three Quotes Challenge – Day 1

30 Mar

I have been nominated by the brilliant, Basel-based blogger and bookworm Bev (please don’t try saying that after a few drinks, it might get you into trouble) to publish three of my favourite quotes in three days.

The rules are very simple:

1. Thank the person who nominated you.

2. Post a quote for three consecutive days (1 quote for each day).

3. Nominate three bloggers each day.

 

For my first quote, I would like to chose this one:

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.

– Saint Augustine

I chose this quote because it combines two of the great loves in my life: travel and reading. I have travelled a lot and I honestly think that travelling can help us to understand the complicated and, sometimes, random world that we live in. Just as reading booking books can help us to understand and learn concepts, so can travelling and experiencing other cultures help us to understand the world.

I am not sure if Saint Augustine ever said this quote. If he did, his notion of “travel” would be far different to ours. Half of the world had not been discovered back then and maybe he was referring going to a town a couple of hundred miles away, which seems like nothing to us. But I like the way that the quote is still relevant thousands of year later.

I am actually going to break the rules (because I really wanted to join in) and not nominate anyone, because I’m not sure that I know any bloggers that will definitely reply. Will this bring me bad karma or something?

However, if you are a blogger reading this, please feel free to consider this as a personal nomination. It would be interesting to see the quotes that you choose!

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Post-holiday Blues

29 Mar

Since I have arrived back, I have got a bad case of the Post-holiday Blues. I honestly wasn’t ready to come back. I thought after five weeks of moving from one place to another would be enough but I could have carried on travelling for at least another few weeks.

I don’t start my new job until next week and I had more than good intentions that this week I could get X,Y and Z done and use the time wisely and productively. I have no idea when I will next have to opportunity to spend a week doing what I want without any outside pressure.

So far I have only been able to find the motivation to download my photos (but not sort them or make them into a photobook) and to wash all of our clothes, which took the best part of a day.

To cheer myself up, I have decided to make a list of reasons why it is better to be back at home rather than on the road.

1. No daily application of suncream

I don’t need as long to get ready in the morning because I don’t need to apply suncream to every exposed part of my body before going out. I did go out once in Bolivia without suncream on and I was almost burnt to a crisp, even though the sun was hidden behind layers and layers of clouds. In fact, the only part of my body that is remotely brown are my feet. How am I meant to show that off in the office.

2.  I know where things are

On the road, I was constantly searching for things that I needed that had managed to find their way to the very bottom of my bag. It would take me five minutes to find the charger for my Kindle. Broadly speaking, at home I know where things are and they haven’t moved around during transit.

3. I have clean clothes

My bag was organised by using three plastic bags: one for clean clothes, one for “wearable” clothes and one for dirty clothes. At the end of the trip, I was nervous about opening thing bag with the dirty clothes. It really did stink. I was thinking about incinerating it when I got back home because I wasn’t entirely sure if I would be able to cope with the collective smell at the end of five weeks.

4. No mosquitos

Mosquitos are one of my pet hates. The ironic thing is that they really, really like me. No, I mean it. If there is one mosquito within twenty miles of me, it will find me and bite me. I’m like a walking-buffet for insects. This means that every early afternoon/evening I was reaching for the DEET, anti-mosquito wristbands and any other method which is remotely proven to keep mossies away. I don’t have that problem in Switzerland. At least not until the summer…

5. Toilet paper

This seems like a strange one but in a lot of South American countries you aren’t supposed to put toilet paper down the toilet. There is always a waste bin beside the toilet that you are meant to use. My problem with this wasn’t that I forgot to put the toilet paper in the bin but the fact that in public toilets this is just not so hygienic, although I get that the sewage systems in these countries aren’t so good and paper being flushed down the drains would increase the likelihood of blockages. I’m just glad that I no longer have to use a toilet paper bin.

6. Food

Although I did find the food amazing, there are always things that you miss when you are travelling, things that you can’t buy abroad. So it is nice to be back to essential foodstuffs that you are used to. In South America I was surprised by how few vegetables there were. It could have been the time of year that we were there but I’m glad to be back in a place where there is a greater variety of vegetables on offer.

7. Tea

Other countries just don’t go an English Breakfast tea right. I have been drinking coffee, which is not like me at all, and juices. There were “tea” options but the one time I tried it, I was bitterly disappointed. I saw on the menu that they served tea with milk. Perfect! Nice cuppa in the afternoon. Below is what arrived. I just didn’t know where to look. Lesson learnt: lay off the tea until you are back home with a Tetley teabag and just a splash of milk!

That’s the list. Now that I’ve written it, I do feel bit better. Experiencing amazing things each day makes you forget the little things that you miss. What do you miss when you are on holiday?

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What has annoyed me most this year

23 Nov

What has annoyed me most this year is perhaps not so surprising. I have spent a lot of time in airports and travelling. It isn’t the actually travelling that has been annoying. Although at one point, I was longing to stay at home and just relax in my own environment. The thing that annoys me about travelling is other people.

If I could get to the airport, board a plane to myself and not have to interact with anyone at all during this time, I would be over the moon. Other people just make travelling more stressful.

It isn’t even other passangers that irritate me. But there is always more than one person, wheeling a trolley behind them with no ide how to control it. People wheeling luggage also forget the concept of other people and think that ambling along without a care in the world, while blocking the way for people trying to get to their gate, is a completely acceptable state of affairs.

Then there are the people who can’t possibly have been on a plane before. Nor have they read any of the 100 signs in the queue for security that say that any fluids need to be in a transparent, plastic bag. The look of surprise on their faces amazes me when they realise that they now have to rout around in the bag to get the contraband out and in the correct bag to be inspected. How can anyone not know the regulations and not ready themselves for it well in advance?

Then there is the person at security with the tray who asks, as I am unzipping my bag to get out my already-prepared, plastic bag. Once I almost turned round and said, “Give me a bloody minute will you, love?” But I didn’t know how to say it in French so I decided to give it a miss. And then she asked me if I had an iPad. I pointed to the iPad which was already sitting in the tray, waiting to be scanned. I’m sure that these people are so bored that they are trying to make conversation

Nothing irritates me more than when I finally get on the plane and someone else have take all the space in the locker above the seat. I have seen people get on planes and put their luggage in the first available locker even though they are sat at the back of the plane. Do not be these people. It is so unhelpful and a huge pain in the ass because it means that your luggage is not next to you when you come to get off. So you have to wait until you can go to the back of the plane to find it.

Taking of leaving the aircraft: where exactly do people think that they are going when they get up before the seat belt sign has been switched off. Everyone has been expressedly been told not to take off their seatbelt but people do at the first opportunity. What advantage do they think that they can gain on their fellow passangers when the crew are still strapped into their seats? Planes aren’t like buses or trains. If you don’t get off on a bus within 30 seconds or less, you have missed your stop and will have to get off at somewhere that you don’t want to. With a plane, everyone has arrived at their final destination. If you don’t get off now, it doesn’t mean that you have to wait for the next stop which is in 13 hours and is in Hong Kong. It does annoy me that people can’t take listen to instructions and do what someone else tells them to. If this is how adults behave, how can we expect children to behave any better?

Rant over. That is until I head off to the aiport again, which, knowing me, won’t be too long at all.

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Signs of Singapore

13 Nov

During my trip to Singapore, I found some extremely funny signs. This is a bit of an obsession for me. Some of the signs in Singapore seemed to have an underlying hint of sarcasm which I thought was great.

Can you guess what this sign was meant to be telling you?

It was actually the sign for the ladies toilets. The sign for the toilet was similar, except that the man had, what I can only describe as, a Mexican-style moustache. At first I had no idea what the sign was meant to be indicating. I think I make this pose when I am deliberately being shy and coy, like after receiving a compliment and feigning a false modest. Like, “Oh, you shouldn’t have said that. I feel all embarrassed now!” Do you see what I mean?

I saw this sign in a bar and all I could think was, yes, finally someone has had the courage to, not only say it, but to make it into a sign! For those of you who don’t know, PDA means Public Displays of Affection. 

I wish that they had had this sign in the restaurant where I ate the hot curry. The seats were on the floor around a coffee table sized table and there wasn’t a lot of space between the tables. Because they clearly wouldn’t be able to survive an hour long dinner without pawing at one another, they both sat on the same side of the table and he was virtually sat on top of me. All the kissing and cuddling almost made my stomach turn. It was a wonder I finished that curry in one piece. Seems like everything is not perfect in Paradise though because after about 10 minutes, he got his iPad out and they were playing word puzzle games for the remainder of the dinner.

This sign was in a Buddhist temple that I visited.

Surely if you do nod off in a temple and you get caught, the obvious excuse is that you weren’t sleeping but meditating and reached another level of consciousness. Seems reasonable, right?

Everyone loves a bargain. Here is one that you can’t possibly not snap up on the spot. It’s that incredible deal of buy 1cocktail and get 1. Surely too good to miss?

This sign is translated into several languages but I think the picture in the middle says it all and there is no reason for translation. Basically, it you enter someone is going to pull a large gun on you so it is probably a good idea not to enter. Maybe this is what is meant by actions speak louder than words.

I saw this in a bar in Arab Quarter. Every bar needs rules. I agree with almost all of these rules. Sexual discrimination has no place in today’s society and Spitting is a disgusting habit.

However, why can there be no flirting with the cashier? I bet they have a high turnover of staff. When I worked in bars the only thing that I had to look forward to was the occasion flirt with a customer. But maybe the staff turnover isn’t that high. The staff can also sleep in the toilet! Wow, what a perk that is! Forget the private health insurance and the extra holidays, what staff really want is to sleep in the toilet.

And finally, because I have seen this a few times on hotel phones and it never fails to make me laugh:

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In case of emergency, please phone Switzerland. Those guys are pretty good in a crisis and they will know what to do!

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Autumn sickness

11 Oct

Although I love the colour of autumn and the cooler days, it definitely is time when all the bugs and sicknesses are coming out.

I didn’t feel well at the weekend and I spent most of the weekend in my pajamas feeling sorry for myself and thinking that I really should do something productive, but then not having the energy to do anything. It felt like a complete waste of a weekend, but I did manage to watch a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory on More4 that I haven’t seen before.

Quite a lot of people are starting to get sick. It doesn’t help when people come into the office when they are clearly unwell. I don’t want to hear your mucus-y cough or your sniffles, so please stay at home! All this means is that the sniffles get past around the whole office. You can recover far more quickly at home and stop yourself from becoming unpopular at the same time.

I used to feel so guilty about not coming into work sick. With age comes wisdom and I have slowly realised that it’s not worth it. You can recover at home a lot better and I can be unpopular in the office without using bacteria warfare. I once worked for a company, who had a policy, that if an employee was sick, they would drive you home so you could recover. If you drove into work, someone would drive your car, while another member of staff followed, so that your car was parked outside your house and you didn’t have to worry about collecting it at a later date.

One thing that, in my opinion, increases the rate of autumn and winter sickness is that sometimes the weather is deceptive. It might look sunny outside, so you don’t put on a huge number of layers. Two seconds after closing the door behind you and you have already turned into Frosty the Snowman. Autumnal weather especially makes it very difficult to decide what items of clothing are weather appropriate.

Another issue that crops up around this time of year in Switzerland is the temperature in the trams. For some unknown reason, the woman-698964_1920thermostat is cranked up to a level that would make the Devil feel a little too warm. Outside the tram, the temperature is mild but bearable. The minute you step on the tram the heat smacks you around the face.

Desperately trying to remove your scarf and undo your coat, it feels like you just stepped into a sauna fully-clothed. What makes it worse, especially during rush hour, is a tram full of people, whose combined body temperature pushes up the mercury even more. It won’t be too long before the trams in rush hour have condensation streaking down the windows. Yuck!

This is obviously one of the cons of using public transport. Of course, if one person in the humid atmosphere of the tram has a sniffle, then we all get it. It might be best just to stay at home.

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The Good, The Fake and The Ridiculous

23 Sep

We live in a world where we are surrounded by news. It’s virtually impossible to stay away from current affairs. There was a time when our only source of news was news bulletins in the morning, lunchtime and in the evening. Now, news is available 24/7. There is no getting away from know what is happening in the world with smartphones, tablets and the internet.

In my view news comes in three many forms: The Good, The Fake and The Ridiculous. Good news is something that, hopefully, we are all familiar with. Fake news is a relatively new phenomenon, in which news stories with questionable reliability quickly spread over the internet and social media sources. It can be hard to spot these fake news stories and lots of people take them at face values. This can be very dangerous ground, especially during election times where the general population can be more susceptible to believing things that they want to read.

By far my favourite type of news is the ridiculous news; the news that seems like it has to be made up because there is no way that could happen in real life but actually turns out to be true. This type of news has me howling with laughter.

I have spotted two examples of this type of news this week. One of them involved a family calling in the RSPCA, an organisation who protect animals within in UK, because they thought that a rare type of lizard had nested under a bed in their house. Terrified at the prospect of an unusual beast taking refuge in their home, they called to ask for it to be removed. The RSPCA were baffled. Approaching the lizard very carefully, they soon realised that it was, in fact, a dirty sock.

I cannot imagine how embarrassing it would be to be the person who made the phone call only to discover that they had called about a dirty sock. You can read the full report here. If you look at the photo, I don’t think it could have possibly looked like a lizard under the bed. How many red and white striped lizards have you seen in your life? And what is the likelihood that a lizard would survive in the milder climates in the UK.

This did remind me though of the type of embarrassment that we all must have endured on occasions when we are convinced we have lost something, only to find that it was in the first place that we looked. I regularly do this with my bank card. I turn the flat upside down because I have already looked in my handbag, my coat, my trouser pocket and every other logical place. Just when I am ready to call the bank to report it stolen, I look “one last time” in my coat and there it is in the pocket. It’s almost as if someone has placed it there while I was searching the flat madly because it definitely wasn’t there when I looked 20 minutes ago. Sure, this situation is embarrassing but not as embarrassing as calling a third party to remove dirty washing rather than a potentially dangerous reptile.

The second story I read this week was about a group of tourists who were rescued from a forest. Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? Where exactly were they? In the Amazon jungle? Some remote part of Africa? No, they were in a rhododendron forest in Killarney, Ireland. I’m not an expert on gardening and flowers but I don’t think that rhododendrons grow all that big. Apparently the group became disoriented and a helicopter and boat rescued them. I am glad that they weren’t somewhere more treacherous, like a butterfly house. You can read the story here, if you don’t believe me.

I guess this type of ridiculous news puts life into perspective. Reports always seem to be about bad things happening in the world. Wthout these amusing stories to lighten the load, would modern life seem too horrible to bear? Deep down I think that they strike a chord because we could imagine these things happening to us or, at least, someone that we know because we all know one person who would find themselves lost in a mass of rhododendrons.

 

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New vs old banking trends

14 Sep

A bank in Switzerland has recently launched a new way for children under the age of 12 to save money. They have launched a digital piggy bank. The children put the coins into the piggy bank and the value is automatically added up and the children can see the total in an app.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. It is good to get children into the habit of saving from an early age. I always had a piggy bank when I was younger. It was always a tough choice of whether to spend my pocket money straight away or to spend it on sweets at the village post office. My piggy bank, which was transparent, sat next to my brother’s on a shelf in the kitchen. Whenever I was thinking about going to buy sweets I would have a sneeky peek through the clear perspex box and see roughly how much money he had and to make sure he hadn’t got more than me. That and that alone decided if I bought sweets that week.

The best thing about having a piggy bank as a kid was being able to empty all the money out and count it myself, whenever I wanted to. Sometimes I felt rich. I had almost £6! This was back in the 80s/early 90s when I could get a 10p mix from the post office or really splash the cash and get a quarter of midget gems for 45p. For my younger readers, a quarter is 113 grams.

I even had a slip of paper where I would note down how much I had saved each week. Yes, even from an early age I was showing indications of my future career as a finance professional. It was exciting to see how much more money I need to save in order to buy a new CD or my favourite magazine.

Young people are criticised a lot when it comes to money. Older generations complain that they buy things on credit and don’t understand the real value of money. I am inclined to think that having a digital piggy bank will not only take away that excitement of counting your own money but also convert money into a virtual rather than a real concept for the next generation.

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We have probably all been in the situation when the credit card bill comes that we are horrified at how much is owing. I have on more than one occasion been convinced that I have been a victim of fraud. I have definitely not used my credit card that much this month. I am an innocent victim of crime. Then after reading the itemised bill, you realise that you can’t blame a fraudster – you have spent that much but because you weren’t physically handing over money to a cashier, you have lost all sense of spending and now you have to eat bread and water for a month in order to pay the bill.

Of course, we are moving towards a money-less culture, in which all transactions are conducted virtually. Apple watches have been around for a while and more and more apps and gadgets are coming on the market to make purchasing goods easier.

Maybe I am just stuck in my ways and I’m showing my age but I don’t think that children should be denied the opportunity to count their pocket money themselves and have that feeling that this week they are richer than they were last week. In fact, I still occasionally do this now.

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