Tag Archives: personal
Amerika ist Wunderbar! ;-)
You know you haven’t been in the USA long enough, when you…
- still answer, when someone asks “How’re you doing?”
- can’t get used to not knowing how much you are going to pay, “thanks” to all the taxes and fees applied at the counter, or checkout.
- passionately hate being charged for incoming calls and messages on your phone.
- frown at wannabe security guards everywhere.
- wonder why you received a platinum card with your bank account, when you didn’t ask for one.
- mentally cheer whenever you buy something that would cost you triple the price at home. The import from China to Europe must be dreadfully expensive.
- try to figure out where the catch is, if you are allowed to return the goods you purchased in 30 days for money back, no questions asked.
- develop conversations such as “So you are an Italian, right? Hmm, you’ve never been to Italy and can’t speak Italian at all? Oh, I see.”
- aren’t yet used to how low the taxes are.
- inquire how cash-backs work and what they are good for.
- don’t really enjoy baseball and American football, and keep correcting people that football isn’t what they think it is.
- have difficulties understanding why are there people around you in a graduate level class, who can’t grasp the stuff you handled in high school.
- are regularly amazed by the quality of customer service.
- consider utterly ridiculous those lawyer ads that tell people to sue, because Maggie from Texas got $25000 when she did.
- drink soda with ice, instead of ice with soda.
Why English…?
People keep asking why I’m blogging in English, if that’s not my native language. The answer is quite simple actually. I want to make it possible to read and understand for as many people, as I can. There are plenty of friends of mine abroad who might care, and writing this in a minor central-European language would amount to simply ignoring them.
So, instead of leaving them out, I chose the lesser of evils, not favouring those who can’t speak English, washing my hands with a thought that it’s their own fault anyway. ;-) Several years ago, I didn’t make this decision while coding my homepage, and have regretted it several times since.
So please, if you would prefer reading about this stuff in Slovak, bear with me. Besides, I figure that reading some extra English can only do you good. :-) If you have serious difficulties understanding, don’t worry, my ramblings aren’t worth that much anyway.