Funny French Situation

I'm not much into talking about personal things in a permanent support, but this is pretty funny and I think it deserves to be published here.

First, I'm deeply ashamed for my lack of French spoken skills. I like this country a lot and I always talk about how immigrants must assimilate, but I'm very bad with languages (you can notice my crappy English just by reading this blog) and French is particularly difficult. Indeed for me it's almost like 2 languages, as the way you pronounce has nothing to do with what you write. Its written form is pretty complex (even more than Spanish), but the spoken form is just like quantum physics to me (its phonetics is so rich, and much more when your native reference is a language with such simple phonetics as Spanish).

The thing is that SNCF (the railways company) owes me 40 euros since 6 months ago, when their payment passarelle crashed just in the middle of purchasing some tickets. I first went to their offices, they asked me to call some number, then I was redirected to a mail address. After 6 months of waiting, and a last angry email, the guy told me that he could not do anything else, that he had created an incident months ago and if I had not received my money I should call another number.

So I called that number (expecting to ask one colleage to translate for me when they answered). It was the typical mess of "press 1 if... press 2 if..." I suddenly heard a nice "press X for English Service", great!

I was welcomed by a female voice (FV), and the conversation went like this:
FV: Bonjour, qu'est ce que je peux faire pour vous? (Hello, what can I do for you?).
Me: Bonjour, eh, do you speak English?
FV: A bit
Me: Ah, OK, mais, c'est le English Speaking Service?
FV: Oui, mais c'est la France!
From that point on the conversation continued in a mix of English and French, but the girl seemed not particularly willing to help.

So the thing is pretty funny and bizzarre. As I've said I'm deeply ashamed for my pitiful French skills and I would accept that after all this time being here some French people were angry with me for this. Indeed I think I really deserve a kick in my lazy ass for it... but well, if I call to the "English Speaking Service" of a huge company I expect to talk to someone that speaks English!!! This reminds me that months ago, when calling the first number that they had given me at that time, I ended up in the "English Speaking Service" talking to a girl that seemed to speak Italian!!!

This said, when I go to buy tickets directly to the station, the guys/girls there are always pretty helpful and nice. They'll smile to my clumsy attempts to speak French and we will end up speaking "Franglais" :-)

I think there are certain misconceptions (at least I had them) regarding the French people and foreign languages. There are more people that can speak English (mainly among younger generations) than I expected (and in Southern France many people can speak some, or even quite good, Spanish) and there is not a general rejection to speaking a foreign language, people will try depending on their knowledge (but yes, unfortunately many people just can't cause they never learnt). I guess the reason for this "never learnt" is a mix of several factors. In the past (as in Spain) the level at school was very minimum, so you should learn on your own (paying an academy, self-learning...). As it used to happen in Spain, if you didn't need it at work, you coud just get by without it. French (like Spanish) has a big enough community of speakers that most films or books you can be interested on will have been translated, and in the past people did not travel abroad so much. I guess for some people the idea of the lost of importance of French before English also caused a certain and reasonable rejection.

The interesting thing is that with the Brexit on one side and my lack of appreciation for the USA, I'm starting to question this idea of "English as the universal language". Unfortunately, I think there is no easy solution to this. What other "lingua franca" should we use in the EU? French, Spanish, German, Italian? So far I'd never seen much sense in using an "artificial language" like Esperanto, but well, maybe this could be the solution for future generations in order to talk a common language that is not "the language of 'the others'".

Make me a German

Make me a German is an equally funny and informative BBC documentary. The curiosity for understanding why the German economy is doing so good while the economies of the rest of the European Union are doing so dramatically bad, compels a British family to move to Germany and try to convert themselves in the average German family in an attempt to understand the country from inside.

The experiment is pretty funny, and brings up some interesting points, at least for someone like me, that in spite of having an obsessive fascination for Berlin, having read quite a lot about German history and society and counting some German artists (Caspar David Friedrich) among my all time favorites, has never had a too intense interaction with locals (I've been to Germany quite many times, but as a solitary person with not much significant social skills... I've hardly scratched the surface of the German mind). I'll list below some of their findings:

• Germans really work less hours than most Europeans (at least British and Asturians), but they work so focused and hard that they are much more productive. It's astonishing how outraged one German lady felt when talking about her experience in U.K. in an office where people where checking their personal emails or talking about their private life during the work day. Quite hilarious.
• There seems to be a very strong sense of community at work, and also an identification with the company. You are part of a team and as everyone in the team is working hard you can't fail them. I guess most people will appreciate this, but notice that taking to the extreme this feeling of unity and belonging and the denial of individualism helped set the backdrop for the Nazi regime. I'm a very individualist person, so I'm a bit biased on this point.

• Germans are cautious with money and save more than the rest of Europe. This can be easily traced to the brutal crisis after WWI and WWII. Germans are quite little fond of credit cards (hum, that's a rather Germanic trait of mine). This background also explains something that I pretty enjoy when being there, Supermarkets are cheap, indeed it turns out that German supermarkets have the tightest profit margins in Europe.
• It's easier to be a mother in Germany. Families with kids get enormous fiscal advantages, Kinder Gartens are really cheap, and there's a sense of pride in being a mother that has left her job to take care of her little kids and the house. It's so common that mothers that decide to carry on with their jobs are generally seen with a certain disapproval. What seems odd to me is that having all these advantages the birthrate continues to be so low.
• I'd never noticed that Sundays as a rest day were so important to Germans, well probably it's cause they're not that sacred in Anarchist Berlin as they are in Christian southern Germany. Combine this with that almost genetic obsession with abiding by the rules and civic behaviour, and doing some more noise than expected in a Sunday morning can end up with the Polizei paying you a visit and giving you a fine. On a personal note, the unruly Astur-Gallaecian in me can't help enjoying the bad looks I get there each time I cross a red light :-D (and what to say about travelling without a ticket in Berlin's BVG)

It quite caught my attention that a British family were looking at Germany as a better place. For an Asturian like me, that lives in a place with 27% unemployment, where youngsters are much more ignorant now than they were 100 years ago, having as their main aspiration in life to turn into a TV crap celebrity and partying as hard as possible, where politicians are mainly a bunch of thieves, where "picaresca" (that is, getting whatever you want by means of tricks and cheating rather than by effort) is a chronic illness... it's normal to perceive Germany as a better place and look at it with a certain sense of inferiority (though based on culture, history and geography Asturies is NOT Southern Europe, in the end we share and suffer too many traits with the rest of Southern Europeans), but I also perceive UK as a better place/society, so it seemed funny to me seeing the Brits envious of the Germans. Who knows, maybe Swedes are also envious of Norwegians or Danes... but for us, they're all just "first class countries".

Asturian politics, the largest brothel you've ever heard of

There's an Asturian (and Galician, and Spanish...) expression that says: "X ye una casa putes" (X is a brothel) meaning (sort of) that X is a fucking senseless messy chaos full of corruption (sorry if the expression exists in English and this introduction is unnecessary).

Asturian politics have been a big brothel for decades, with two hyper corrupt political parties (psoe and pp) (managed by illiterate thugs pissing on the idiotic masses that rose them to power) allegedly alternating in power (though in fact they had a covert pact to share power an bounty) and bringing about the total decline of our economy, identity and collective moral. In the last year things got even worse, cause when a new party (apparently rather more respectful and more concerned about the problems or our land) entered the game and overthrew them from power, both parties joined ranks to preclude the new party from governing and force him to call early elections. These elections have been a complete catastrophe, probably the last nail in Asturies coffin, resulting in a far right political party (upyd) being the new key for misgoverning our land... the day after elections I felt deeply ashamed of being Asturian... along with a feeling of frustation and anger that I think not only won't fade with time, but will get deeper and deeper as these ultranationalist far right thieves plunder the country, deny our history and humiliate our culture and collective memory

This said, I thought I should share this hilarious image, if you can't fight something, at least try to laugh out loud at it. In the picture below, we've got a billboard for these last elections (unfortunately it's for one of the few parties for which I hold some respect, but in fact this makes the whole thing even more absurd and surrealistic) surrounded (the green and pink ones) by two adverts for 2 of the most popular brothels in Asturies. Funny and disgusting, isn't it? :-D

Developers will have their say

I guess I'm not the most appropriate person to do predictions about the PDA-smartphone market (I'm using this now almost forgotten word, PDA, as my personal homage and because it's the Multimedia-PDA functionality what is really interesting to me, the Mobile Phone functionality has little interest for someone that some months spends less than 1 euro in calls), I just have my own very limited experience with a few of these gadgets and some theoretical knowledge.

Being a rather pro-Microsoft guy (that also loves open source, I don't see any contradiction on this, but it would be long to explain...), it would be natural that I felt rather attracted to Windows Phone 7, but that's not the case because my rather lame experiences with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 have made me quite reluctant to any Microsoft offerings in this sector.

Currently I have a jailbroken (thanks black rain!) iPod Touch 2G, that for 180 euros seems absolutely unbeatable value for money to me. My main problem with it is that my specific model only admits tethered jailbreaks, and well, that the idea of being forced to resort to jailbreaking for having a really useful gadget is shitty, if I'm paying for the hardware, why don't you fucking Apple give me full control over my legitimate purchase???

Because of this I've been following with growing interest the evolution of Android, waiting for the release of affordable (prepay card is an absolute must for me given my minimum consumption) gadgets, and it seems we're almost there, with some models around 300 euros that seem rather acceptable. I was dreaming of Android as some kind of open source iOS, that as such would be fully accessible to tech-aware users.
These dreams have almost vanished as I've realized that with regards to Freedom, Android is little better than my Iphone OS. I mean, you get an open source OS, but tainted by each manufacturer so that in the end you need to root it (sort of jailbreaking) to get full access to it...

So, when I found this excellent article today, I could only add new variables to the equation that sooner or later I'll have to solve before buying a new toy...
I absolutely agree with almost everything said in that article, Microsoft has been treating us (developers) really (and increasingly) well. Things like Linq, C# 4 and the DLR, COM (using it, not creating it) should be in the Tate Modern of Software Development... and programming for the Windows Phone could end up being so fun that would make us (developers, wow, it's good to feel as if we had power over those masses of programming-unaware poor sheeps) change trends...

The article reminded me of this crazy video of Steve Ballmer gone nuts (I think I had first watched it on this interesting Swedish documentary against consumerism).

This Ballmer's video is also great :-D

Stalin and Hitler in a Viennese café

Until watching this interesting documentary about Hitler and Stalin I'd never thought about the fact that both monsters never met in person (at least officially). All the contacts and negotiations between the Nazi Germany and the USSR (yes, both governments were "good friends" until Hitler decided to invade the USSR in 1941) were done by other people, never by the Heads of State.
For example it was Molotov and Ribbentrop who signed the Non-aggression pact (including the division of Europe between both superpowers), it was German and Russian officials who gathered together between 1939 and 1941 to discuss how their respective occupations were going, it was Russian soldiers who handed out Jews to the German soldiers...

So, it's strange that they never met together, could it be that there were some hidden hatred between them (mainly from Hitler to Stalin, it was Hitler who broke the pact, he was obsessed with wiping out Stalingrad...)
Could it be that they ran one into another in Vienna in 1913? (hey, this is not my investigation, it's mentioned in the documentary and in Wikipedia):

In January 1913, Stalin was sent to Vienna by Lenin and spent six weeks there writing an article "Marxism and the National Question".

Hitler, after being rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907 – 1908), tried to make a living as a painter, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. He left for Munich in May 1913 when he received the final part of his father's estate.

So, I'll let my imagination fly for a while (it's something I'm rather good at). Can you imagine Stalin and Hitler each one sitting alone in a Viennese café in a cold winter afternoon, both staring at the same chick? and then it's the Russian who picks up the girl. Can you imagine Hitler's raving hatred when seeing an "Aryan fecundity goddess" choosing the (in his supremacist rotten mind) "Slavic subhuman" over him... And then, can you imagine 25 years later the fanatic German leader preparing his revenge against the Russian flirter?

And, what would have happened if these two shitheads had turned friends just by chance?
Maybe Hitler would have considered Slavic people as the "true Aryans" and changed all his Norse mythology for old Slavic cults? Would the Atlantic Europe had turned into the "living space" for "GerRussia"? Would I be writing this post in German or Russian?

OK, enough rambling for today...