September 26
Sunday went ok. Terrible weekend for football (both NCSU and Panthers lost). I woke up earlier and tidied up the room more. I also read more of the book Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which is our primary book for the Role of Religion in the Middle East class. I’ve read 150 pages so far and it’s fascinating reading. Really really good stuff about the development of the conflict with a lot of first hand interviews about feelings and events with people who live there. It was published in 1986, so it is not colored by the 2001-02 Second Intifada. The edition I have includes comments by the author at the end of each chapter which reflects on the recent happenings. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking more information about this terrible bitter conflict. So far, it has been sort of depressing to read; you learn about so many bad things that the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs have done. We in America often see the Israeli side of the conflict painted in move favorable tones (perhaps the contrast has been greater with the Second Intifada) but reading about the Israeli cover-ups, easy sentencing for Jewish terrorists, and censorship makes the situation reek of irony that the Israeli government was doing the same kind of things that governments which have persecuted them did. There was a very loud Canadian girl in class today which I’m already annoyed with. She talks VERY LOUD and made the following remarks today in class: “Is Iran a democracy?”, “…well in countries like France and London…”, [and this to the teacher while I waiting to buy the compendium from him] “…I, like, have a problem with listening and like, writing at the same time so I get behind. Should I or can you, like, ask about maybe having a designated note-taker I can get copies from later? Oh ok I’ll do it…”. Ugh. Maybe I’m just being academically elitist, but she has this naivete about the way she approaches delicate subjects…with no sense of tact or consideration.
Last night I made some teriyaki stirfry with vegetables and rice. Tonight I fell back on the old staple of spaghetti. I need to go tomorrow to buy groceries. I went over to Tim and Nancy’s place (two Canadian students that in my digital communications class) to work on the pre-lab. Apparently we were supposed to sign up for a lab sport last week but I didn’t know. I’ve been saving all my receipts so far and did some expense tallying. So far I’ve spent about $700 for groceries, household goods, traveling, etc. This does not include the rent though.
Other observations:
- Here in Sweden they round bills to the nearest 0.50 cents, due to the fact that the smallest unit of currency available is the 50 öre coin. I never quite noticed it until I started looking at the grocery receipts.
- In France, there are far fewer minutes of commercials on the television compared with the states. For example, they would see an episode of Lost as 42 minutes of uncut video. If a 2 hour movie comes on TV, they might get 10-15 minutes of commercials, and that is usually just at the end of the program. Their sport matches also only show commercials either during halftime or at the end of the game. The idea of showing 2-3 minutes commercials every 10 minutes is strange to them, and actually having ‘TV timeouts’ during sports game is downright shocking.
- In France and Germany, it is often the intellectuals (associated with the university) who go on to run for political office. Angela Merkel, who ran for the chancellorship of Germany with the Christian Democratic Union party, is a practicing physicist at the German National Academy of Sciences.
- Norway is perplexing. Have I already ranted at this? The country has 4.6 million people and is incredibly wealthy due to oil exports. It funnels the extra money into a Petroleum Fund that is valued at $150 billion. The fiscal debate in Norway is not “how are we going to balance the budget this year” but more like “how are we ever going to spend our surplus?”. Yet, despite all this, the country has crazy taxes. With so much money you can’t afford to give people a break? There is a sugar tax so Norwegians living near Sweden cross the border to buy chocolates and sweets. The cost of living in Norway is higher than in Sweden. Yet the ‘quality of life’ is so high that it often ranks top 3 in the world. Maybe for the citizens who can take advantage of the extensive social welfare system, but for exchange students and visitors it hurts the wallet.
It’s close to 1am today. I gotta go to a problem session for digital communications tomorrow (that class freaks me out…2 weeks to the exam and the exchange students have had approximately only 10 hours of professor-led instruction. That’s maybe 1/4th of what the Swedish students have had. And for those engineering oriented, -6 dB! It’s nuts.) and I gotta sign up for a lab. Sigh. Peace everyone.
