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19/01/2004: "Welcome to the real world"

Today was full of funny encounters. It started by meeting a tampax on the floor near my pigeonhole at uni. I wasn't able to take a picture of it, which I now regret.

Then, I saw this ad, written in Chinese, on the bulletin board at uni. I wonder: do we have that many native Chinese students to justify putting an entire ad in Chinese? If they make all this effort to come over here, they are all that much keen to learn everything that they learn German and English in no time! Like this Chinese student I know who came up to me one day and instead of speaking English (like he used to) he suddenly spoke German. He told me he had recently decided to learn it. I told him I was learning for me finals so he said: "Du hast es im Arsch", which roughly translates as, tough luck, in somewhat more liberal terms. I told him he had been learning very well!

Later in the day, I had been thinking about a friend who has some personal challenges at the moment and was wondering how to tell him he could count on me despite my working on my exams all the time but not wanting to bother him for that, when suddently I saw his number flashing on my mobile phone. I quickly picked up, but it was his sister who was ordering me to go to the cinema with her to see Lord of the Rings one more time. She was angry at me for my polite declining, saying I was insensitive to her pleas and merely pretending that my finals require so much commitment. How sensitive of her...

And this strange funny day is concluding with a radio show asking for call-ins about whether demos are a good thing (the World Economic Forum in Davos opens in 2 days). Some people are calling in saying how our corrupt society is led by evil people and how advertising is a terrible thing, how Switzerland is an imperialist power, etc etc.

My comment:
    Je visitais l'ancienne prison du KGB à Vilnius (Lithuanie) le 22 Novembre dernier, dans laquelle nombre de résistants ont été torturés et exécutés. Ce même jour, les gens manifestaient dans la rue en Géorgie pour demander le départ du président - qui a démissioné. Et sans les manifestations anti-sovétiques en Lithuanie, qui sait combien d'années encore les pays Baltes auraient dû souffrir des persécutions de l'Ex-URSS.

Manifester pour la liberté et contre l'oppression peut changer l'histoire, même aujourd'hui. Mais les manifestants du dimanche qui croient que Woodstock n'est toujours pas terminé et campent au Bout-du-Monde en fumant de l'herbe et en proclamant la fin du capitalisme n'ont que ce qu'ils méritent: de la pub et encore de la pub (surtout pour les produits d'épilation).