"Im Westen nichts Neues“ means „ All quiet in the West front“

This title comes from a German book I intend to read in the coming months. I fancy the title and apparently the content might be quite interesting as well; it is about the physical and mental stress of soldiers during World War I.

In the last weeks I have been doing well all in all. Most people would think this is an optimal status, but it is sad for me and for the sake of my blog…actually, as I write this lines, I am slowly realising I am a life masochist. I kind of enjoy suffering and also finding the funny side in my accidents, weird situations and heartbreaks.

But not everything is lost (I never thought I would quote Coldplay in my blog), there is a hidden secret I will reveal in the next two entries (I feel like Peter Jackson announcing two films at once).

Dear reader, think of this entry as a signal saying "I am blogwise boring as a pair of old socks", but also as a sort of press conference announcing that even though all is quiet in the west front (Baja California is the West in this analogy), I will write news of myself facing the worst physical and mental stress...oh yes...there will be blood*

Please wish me bad luck, truly yours,

Oscar

*if you are not a film nerd, “there will be blood” is the title of Paul Thomas Anderson´s fifth movie 

fishing buttons

Three weeks ago I flew to Innsbruck for some days. I interrupted my educational leave to train people from DHL and SOS on a method for collecting oral data. The workshop went well and I used the occasion to meet my friends, eat cheese and enjoying Grüner Veltliner (a wonderfully refreshing Austrian white wine).

After all this eating, meeting friends and work colleagues and getting slightly drunk on Gru Vee (I always wanted to write “Gru Vee”, that is the way New Yorkers call the Grüner Veltliner), I travelled back…but as usual, I experienced some situations during my trip.

It all started in with the transatlantic flight: Out of 44 rows in the plane, I got the worst one ever. Towards the end of the plane (it was an Airbus 340), each row no longer has the following number of seats 2 – aisle - 4 – aisle – 2, but it has one seat less: 2 - 3 – 2. My rwo was the worst because my seat was not right behind another seat, but between two seats. This means that the entertainment system (the small tv) was not in front of me but to my left…so, after watching the first half of “The Hobbit” my neck was already aching as hell.

Imagine how my neck felt after three movies

Then the food…yes, it is very often about the food. I completely forgot to tell the Lufthansa guys that I wanted a Vegan, Halal or Gluten-free meal. So, when they offered me “Beef or Pasta” I said pasta without hesitating - not because I don´t meat, but because I have serious doubts on the quality of airplane meat, even if it is from Sky Chefs, the guys who prepare Lufthansa´s meals. Long story short: I got for the first time in airplane history “pasta with beef-sauce”.

Menu 1: Beef, menu 2: Pasta with beef! Great idea Monsiuer Sky...

When I take long-haul flights, I always ask for an aisle-seat, so I can stretch my legs nicely: one to the aisle, the other one below the seat in front of me. This time, there was a metal box below the seat in front of me. I don´t know what it was, but it was as big as a Sony Playstation. When I got off the plane, I carefully watched all the seats I could to see who else in the plane could not stretch his/her legs because of this metal box: Nobody. I was the only one out of 300 passengers who had to stand up every 30 minutes to do pilates in front of the restrooms! And dear reader, believe me, people stare at you like if you are from other space when you do pilates in front of the plane´s toilette.

My weird seat and the f*cking metal box below the front seat

The cherry on top of the pie appeared just after landing…I will not narrate the happenings in that airport toilette, please judge only by what you see…trust your eyes. Let me tell you only two things: I really loved the trousers I was wearing; they have a special cut and I bought them last year in Buenos Aires, second thing: Before the button was on my fingers, it was somewhere else…a place you can see perfectly in the photograph.

Enjoy the picture…I can´t…I simply can´t…

Don´t you ever ask me about this buttos...ever!

I feel like being three things: old, nerd...and something else I forgot

Opening statement: This week I am starting to feel old, but I a way I always knew I was kind of a nerd.

I decided to work on my thesis at the faculty´s library. If you are one of the eleven readers of this blog you should know that- I am not kidding, on the left side of this age you can se there are 11 members in this blog and 8 out of them are not afraid to show their identities! RES-PECT!

Well, at the University, I have lately experienced two very awkward things:

1. The students at the University don´t look like the younger girls and guys I am used to see in the bars I usually go, they students at the University look like kids. I really mean it, they all look like teenagers. I have the constant feeling I am surrounded by dozens of Doogie Housers. Has the education system improved so much that now 16 year olds are college students? 

2. They call me “Señor”. Nobody ever called me Señor. That is freaking weird. They also talk to me saying “Usted” instead of “Tu” - Which is the German “Sie” instead of “Du”…and in English…is something like a polite “You”, but normally people dont respect me, it feels weird! They should stop respecting me!

The second adjective in the blog´s title is “nerd”. Yes, I went to pilates today and if you don´t know pilates, let me tell you it IS NOTHING LIKE yoga, it may look similar, but it hasn’t the meditative part, there is also no incense and at pilates courses they don´t play Enya (I hope Kathrin is not reading this…she is a yoga instructor).

Once more, if you are one of the eleven readers of this blog, you may remember what Matteo taught me about touching things: It is physically impossible to touch things! We can only feel a magnetic shield around them. The charge on our hands has the same value as the magnetic field around the things on our hands, like a pencil or a mobile. So, we actually cannot touch things, we only feel magnetic poles of the same charge which reject from each other.

Well, today, our pilates teacher went very, very esoteric. Instead of starting the lesson by exercising our backbone, she asked us to walk around the room “feeling our feet touch the ground” and also “the ground touching our feet”. The nerd part of me started to talk in my head saying “well…as a matter of fact, my feet are NOT touching the ground and the ground is also NOT touching my feet”, but I remained calm.

Then, the instructor asked us to touch the walls with our hands and asked us “Can you feel the wall? Can you feel the wall touching your hand?” This is the point when my nerd part almost went berserker. I just wanted to tell the instructor “I am sorry Lucia, but you are saying lots of bullshit! The wall is not touching my hand and my hand cannot touch the wall! It is all a magnetic poles rejecting each other!”I did not know how irritating it could be to know some basic physics on a pilates lesson.

There was a third thing on the blog´s title, but I forgot what it was. Maybe it was today´s backpack incident at the library. You may know this photo from facebook but if not, take a look to it: It summarises the relationship of my life with that thing people call “good luck”.

I realised I was traped at the very moment I wanted leave the library

Am I a chicken?

This is my third week of educational leave and I have only written one e-mail to my professor telling her about what I pretend to do in my thesis. She answered this morning saying she liked my idea. I did want that to be today´s only achievement, so I immediately headed to the library to start working on the first chapter.

By the way, I own no laptop, so I borrowed one to write my thesis.

The library where I am right now offers free wireless internet, but since I am not good with computers, I cannot connect this laptop to the World Wide Web (it is not my fault that this computer has windows vista…yikes!). And even though my recently Galaxy III works again (the damage caused in the toilette incident was repaired), I forgot the USB cable home, so I cannot download the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and send it to my laptop. I know…apple users may probably be laughing about this right now.

So, instead of working on my PhD thesis, I will tell you a scary story

My sister and I always make fun of my brother because he is afraid of birds. We would understand his fear if he would have seen Hitchcock´s “the birds” when he was a little boy, but this is not the case. The bird that Tomás fears the most is the chicken.

Some days ago, I went to a very good restaurant, but more than a restaurant, it is a farm where two people cook. These two guys grow the products they use in their restaurant. So, they produce meat, eggs, vegetables and fruits to make their own chutneys, main courses, bread, desserts and even liquors.

This restaurant serves food outside.

There were five guests that day (they only serve lunch twice a week) and this day only one of us had bad luck…

We were enjoying a fabulous cilantro-mayonnaise on freshly baked bread (outdoor wood-oven!) when I felt something painful on my right elbow. I screamed immediately and as I turned my head, I saw the beak of a horrible and giant flying hen. I don´t know where she came from, but she flew to furiously attack me. After thinking about it, I know that the only reason for this attack was violence. This was the most brutal chicken I ever saw.

Since that very moment, I share with my brother the fear of birds…the fear of chickens…

do you also see the evil in this bird?

P.S. I am not telling the name of that wonderful restaurant, because the owner bought my silence with a bottle of home-made limoncello.

I use this limoncello to forget that day

Black Sabbath - "Black" because of a tea and "Sabbath" because of a sabbatical

The reason I started to write this blog in 2009 was the social vacuum I had to experience when I moved to Nicaragua to do field research for my work and for my PhD thesis. Now, three years and over hundred blog entries later, I am ready to finalise my thesis…and I am doing this in Latin America.

Before leaving Innsbruck last Thursday, someone recommended me to order halal food in the transatlantic flight (halal is the way of preparing food according to Islamic law).

This year, Easter Monday (which is a public holiday in Austria) was also April Fools’ Day…and it all started that very Monday…I was cleaning my room and doing the laundry when the kitchen flooded. The water from the laundry machine was coming out of the sink. I called the plumber and after repairing the pipeline I heard him saying “shit”. That is the last the word you want to hear from a technician repairing your drainage. The plumber said that because he lost some tool in the pipeline and he had to again to get it out. 

Tuesday was supposed to be the first day of my “PhD-sabbatical” and I was looking forward to sleep until late, but the plumber rang at 7:50. It took him two hours to find the cable he lost…120 minutes of the most abstract and loud mechanical noises.

 

After the plumber left, I tried to sleep again…in vain, so I tried to do the flight check-in. I flew with Iberia, but my ticket was issued by American Airlines, so I couldn´t order my halal-meal.

 

I was very disappointed because I knew I was going to eat either chicken or pasta, instead of halal or kosher. But when I was in the waiting room in Madrid, I realised the transatlantic flight was a code-shared flight with  the airline “El Al”…and “El Al” is Israel Airlines.

So, there I was, two Jews sitting in front of me, one on the back, a whole family in the centre row and two rabbis 150 centimeters behind me. All of them eating from their sealed kosher-meal boxes (by the way, they do not meditate before eating). I was relieved to have a nice old French-speaking lady next to me.

When that old lady told me she was from Morocco, I understood I was lucky for ordering pasta instead of kosher or halal.

However, the bad luck continued when I arrived: none of my two bags arrived. When my baggage arrives late, I kind of like it, because I enjoy shopping for free with the voucher you get. However, this time was different; I was worried for something illegal I had in one of my bags: queso…yes, lots of queso.

My bags and the cheese stayed overnight in Miami, and the average temperature in April in Miami is 28ºC and that is not good for cheese.

After claiming my bags, I went to the city centre and tried to relax with a cup of black tea. I went to a wonderful old-fashioned café. The waiter got me all this on a silver tray: An empty cup with a tea bag in it, a small pitcher with hot water and an extra steel-glass with more hot water to refill the pitcher. Everything looked so nice! …until the moment I discovered the tag of an old teabag inside the small pitcher. I thought…ok, this can happen… but then, I found a second tag of an even older teabag (that means even more brown) inside the extra steel-glass.

But that was on Friday, today is Tuesday and nothing shitty has happened today. I think my Black Sabbath just turned into a normal sabbatical.

the plumber said shit right after I took this picture

this galaxy does not irradiate any kind of light anymore

Matteo, my flatmate, knows what he says when talking about physics - He is writing his PhD in Astrophysics.

Once, Matteo told me that we cannot really touch objects. That the feeling we experience when we press our fingertip towards a surface is only the feeling of two electric charges of the same value (negative or positive) repealing each other. Like magnets.

If we could really make contact with objects, we would “mix” with those objects. The molecules of our fingers would combine with those from a ring, from a mug, from our gloves. We would stick to objects. The electric charges around all objects come from the atoms and prevent objects of this weird interaction with everything around them.

Some weeks ago, I wrote of me being not ready to have children, but mature enough to switch to a smartphone. Well, 5 weeks ago I got a Samsung Galaxy III. Once Hannes told me his first smartphone “was not a mobile phone, but a temple”. I started to discovery my dual-core-mobile-temple last week. Everyday, I went to bed with my new mobile and after turning the room light off, I had a final check on my social-media updates.

Facebook: Check!

Whatsapp messages: Check!

SMS Inbox: Check!

Only then I was ready to close my eyes fall asleep.

The next step of this infatuation was to take my mobile to the restroom and perform this check while in the toilette.

Facebook: Check!

Whatsapp messages: Check!

SMS Inbox: Check!

Put mobile on the water tank: Check!

Flush the toilette: Check!

Wash my hands: Check!

Then, it happened: SMS received...vibration mode was ON...mobile vibrated...

...and there was only one place around the water tank where my smartphone could fall.

According to physics, my mobile did not touch the water, but this galaxy does not irradiate any kind of light anymore.

When I was 17, I was the un-coolest guy in the whole universe

One of the things you should now before reading this blog, is that my mother drinks no alcohol...really, no alcohol at all.I

In the summer of 1996, just before I traveled to Austria. I had a situation with my mother: I was cruising with my friends on my mom's car until 11 o'clock, even though I had only permission until 10:30 p.m.

At some point I called my mother to tell her I was going to be late, but she wouldn't listen. She was more than mad. She yelled at me screaming I should drive home immediately, and so did I. Then she drove my friends to back to the party we were before.

If you are a teenager driving a car with your friends and suddenly your mom steps in the car and drives all of your friends back to a party, then you are the un-coolest guy in Chihuahua, no! You are the un-coolest guy in the whole universe...

I am 34 years old. I have lots of gray hair. I left home 16 years ago and I am economically independent since 2005.

My mom called me today, but I was at a concert, so I texted her back and wrote the following “Sorry mom, I am at a concert and couldn’t hear the phone ringing. How are you? What are your plans tonight?”

I still cannot understand why I asked that. First, my mom drinks no alcohol, second, I don't talk ofter with my mom about her night life.

She surprisingly answered this “Hi! I will go for a walk and then I am meeting your aunt Ana and we are going for a drink”

Back in 1996, asking my mother about her social life was a “no go”, but now it is so weird it is almost cool. Is being un-cool, kind of cool now?