Cyberbullying

This is just a link to an article of the guardian. I don't even want to say much about it, check it out if you're interested. It's about a boy who bullied anonymously a girl via the web until he thought he had driven her to commit suicide. 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/06/experience-i-was-an-internet-troll?CMP=fb_gu

CIA fail!

One of the funniest, even though craziest, methods how the CIA tried to spy is the operation Acoustic Kitty that took place in the 1960s. A surgeon implanted a microphone in the kitty’s ear, a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull and weaved a thin wire antenna along her back hidden in the kitty’s grey and white fur.

Scientists tried to train the kitty to sit next to officials in order to spy for them. They tried to transform the kitty from a cute pet into “a living, walking surveillance machine”.

The first official test should take place in a park where the kitty should capture a conversation between two men sitting on a bench. But then happened something unexpected – the kitty ran away onto a street where it was immediately squashed by a taxi. Bad luck, CIA!! 20 million!

This was of course not the only animal, the CIA tried to turn into a spy. They for example constructed cyborg insects and cyborg rats which were called ratbots!

In some kind of way, this makes me feel even more uncomfortable when I find insects in my apartment. I keep asking myself whether this is a usual insect or a cyborg.

No, just kidding. I assume that I’m not such an interesting person that the CIA would really want to know what I am talking about with my friends.

However, I find it absolutely shifty and unacceptable that the CIA does not only spy, which is totally against human rights, but that it does even waste animal’s lives in order to get more and more information of which the major part isn’t useful anyway! This is a real waste of life for nothing at all without any qualms!

Funny Facts!

Surfing the web, I found a site collecting funny facts about the world. Here I collected the most fascinating, stunning or funny ones:

• You’re more likely to die from a falling coconut than a shark attack
• Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants
• The chance of you dying on the way to the lottery is higher than your chance of winning 
•  Cows have best friends
• Before colonial rule, Africa was divided in 10,000 different states with distinct languages and customs
• The phrase “to get fired” comes from an old clan’s custom. Instead of killing people they wanted to get rid off they burnt their houses.
• Around 2500 left-handed people die a year because they’ve been using equipment designed for right-handed people (I couldn’t really believe this and therefore proved it here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/scientists-calculate-odd-ways-die-282884 ; it’s true!)
• In a statue dedicated to a person:

Ø If the horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle

Ø If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died of the wounds received in a battle

Ø If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes

(When I tried to prove this, I found out, that this is hardly ever the case!) 

• Otters sleep while holding hands

• Russia classified beer as a soft drink until 2011!

--> I proved all these facts on the web; if you want to know more funny facts, check this link: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/522487994241292423/ 

Stockholm - Venice of the North

Visiting Stockholm was not only a great opportunity to explore a new city but also a nice chance to 

 meet new people.

We saw the old town, the wonderful harbour with its even more wonderful ships, the VASA dating back to the 17^th century etc. For all these things I (and I think I can claim this for my friends too) liked best that we met so many new people from all over the world. When we arrived in our hostel we first of all saw an Iraqi doing the vacuum cleaning and an elderly, nice Swedish woman waiting for us at the reception to hand us over the room key.

We spent the first afternoon in the park of a church nearby our hostel. We were just enjoying the fresh air of the harbour and listening to the numerous seagulls, when suddenly a man asked if he could take some photos of the three of us. He then explained that he was taking part in a photo competition and needed to show the difference of winter the upcoming summer. As we all fancy photography we were very pleased to serve as photo “models”. It was great fun first sitting there with our jackets, pretending to freeze and in the next moment sitting there without shoes, only wearing a t-shirt pretending to enjoy the hot sun (that in fact was not there, it had something around 15°C !).

This may sound lazy, but the best time of the day was always the evening. No, not because we went out so many times but because we always prepared tons of food in the kitchen of the hostel and were always having a delicious dinner. The later it was the more people started to meet in the kitchen (which was also kind of a living room) starting to talk about their home country, about their culture, their experiences in Stockholm... And so did we. We met people from Germany, France, Sweden, GB, Finland, Italy, Iraq, Egypt, Colombia, States .... While having a good time with all those people playing card games or something, we also had the chance to practice our language skills in Spanish, English, Italian and even Norwegian! We are still in touch with some of those people, which makes the whole journey even more valuable as we gained friends.

 

One especially interesting man was a 34 year-old Vietnamese. One morning I couldn’t sleep anymore and went to the kitchen. He was already sitting there, having noodles with beef as breakfast. We started to talk about our cultures and how different Asians and Europeans are. At some point, he told me about foodstuffs in Vietnam. And this was completely new, I would even say a little bit weird (not negatively) to me. For example, men in Vietnam don’t eat food containing mint, soymilk or cinnamon because otherwise it is believed that men would turn into rapists! On the other hand, women aren’t allowed to eat watermelons or chocolate as this would cause infertility. Quiet different to European culture, right?

One day we took part in a free guided city tour through the old town leaded by a Swedish girl. She told us a lot about Stockholm’s history and facts, but what I found especially interesting was when she told us that the Swedish are very patriotic. They would always pretend that Sweden is such a great country to live and that Sweden has lived in peace for over 200 years. But – and that is something none of us knew – the Swedish are one of the biggest arms dealer countries in the world. So, I ask myself – do they really live in peace?! They support wars just to get money, does that mean to be peaceful? It’s not only the tour guide who answer this question with no, but also me.

Our group of the Stockholm tour

Back to funnier stuff, we took part in the pub crawl. Some of you might have already done this in some city and I would really recommend to do this whenever you got the chance! Sweden is a very expensive country, particularly when it comes to going out. For the pub crawl we only had to pay €20 and got free entrance to 4 pubs and 1 club (the entrance fee for the club usually is something around €25!). But not only that it is cheap but also that we again met people from all over the world again. In the very first bar, we met 3 Swedish guys who actually didn’t take part in the pub crawl. But as we got along so well with each other, they bought a ticket and joined our group even though they live in Stockholm! Besides that, there was a men having his bachelors party and had to fulfil 20 exercises. Unfortunately, he was a bit shy and did I think only 5 them. The best one, however, was when he asked a female police officer to have a photo with him. Surprisingly, she said yes!

Pub craw!!;)

However, after six days of having one experience after the other and meeting one interesting person after the other, we were quiet happy to go home again. Still, I am already looking forward to our next trip. – Helene! -> Sarah and me are going to see you in Spain next year!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. I’ll do a post that focuses more on Stockholm itself, no worries ;)

Correction of homework "The most disastrous meal ever"

The most disastrous meal ever

The most disgusting meal I ever had was definitely “vegetable soup“.  I was invited to have dinner at one of my friend’s place, who was supposed to cook a nice, creamy soup with exquisite vegetables from the local food market. The soup was served with pumpkin seeds coated in crusty breadcrumbs and fluffy bread as a side dish. He let the soup simmer on the stove over an hour, so that the soup would absorb the taste of the pumpkin. Afterwards he garnished it with fresh chives. With excitement I took the first bite. In that moment, when the soup reached my tongue, I tasted a sickly and at the same time piquant liquid and had to spit it out again. The soup was absolutely inedible and both of us didn’t have a clue why. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw the rest of the “pumpkins” peel – in that moment, I realized, it hadn’t been a pumpkin but a cantaloupe!

rewritten house swap letter

Dear Lana, 

I am writing to you in response to your last letter. I am glad to hear that your neighbours will be there to show us the house! We will go there by car, so I’d wanted to ask if there is a parking lot or maybe even a garage at your house? If no, is there anywhere a car park nearby? It would also be good to know if there is a monthly season ticket for public means available or if we would anyway be better off going everywhere by car. Lastly, is there any restaurant serving Danish delis near to your place? Maybe some little, cosy place where they sever Smorebröd or something like that? Other than that, everything seems to be fine! So here is all the relevant information for your stay at Saalbach-Hinterglemm.

As I already told you in the last letter, my grandmother will pick you up at the airport Salzburg. It would be great if you could wait at the main entrance of Terminal 1, so that she can find you easily. She will take you directly to her, or actually your, place, where you are going to have a bedroom and a little bathroom on your own. That means, you will only have to share the kitchen with her. No worries, she’s a nice old lady; you can really use the kitchen at any time of the day as long as you clean it up after cooking.

Unfortunately, the next supermarket is around 15 minutes walk. It would probably the best to do one big shop to fill the fridge. You can ask my grandmother if she can bring you there and pick you up with the car, so that you don’t need to carry everything the whole way home.

I think I’ve already told you that the apartment is a little bit up on the mountain. The huge advantage is that it s only three minutes away from the slopes, which is great, as you won’t need to drag your ski gear a long distance. After a few hours’ skiing, you can enjoy some après ski (after skiing) in one of the various alms. Après ski does always take place between 4 o’clock pm until something around 7 o’clock pm. If you are in favour of having a great time with meeting a lot of people from more or less all over the world, this is where you have to be! After that, you will probably hungry so I’d advise to book a table in one of the cosy, very rural cottages that are situated all around my grandmother’s place (I would particularly recommend “Kohlmaisstuben”; it’s around 10 minutes walk).

In case you get fed up with skiing one day, I would recommend a trip to Salzburg. The old city is definitely worth a visit with its cute, little shops and the paved streets. If you’re lucky, there will still be chestnut selling vendors who give the city even more flair. In the afternoon you could visit the castle of Salzburg (Burg Hohensalzburg) because there are always impressive exhibitions. If you are generally interested in arts you could also give the Mönchsbergmuseum  a chance (it is at the foot of the mountain where the castle is built on). Here’s a little description of how you can get there easily: There is hourly a bus leaving from Saalbach to Zell am See. It stops right in front of the train station where again hourly a train sets off to Salzburg. From Salzburg train station it would be the best to take bus line 24 to the inner city and get off at Mönchbergstation. From there you can reach everything by foot. I will leave a map of Salzburg on the kitchen table – just grab it!

If you need a day off to relax and maybe get a massage, you can go to Kaprun. There is a SPA where you can enjoy quietness after an exhausting day of skiing. Maybe you can combine this with a fruity, refreshing cocktail in Zell am See which is the biggest city near to Saalbach. You can also finish off one leisurely evening with ice skating on the romantic, muted illuminated lake of Zell am See.

Should there be any questions left by now,  just get in touch with me! In case you need anything or have any questions while you are here, my mum and my grandma are happy to help!

Kindest regards,

Carla