Category Archives: Around the World

Watching the English

… is the title of a book by a British anthropologist I read last summer before visiting the UK. The author, Kate Fox, takes a close look at her fellow countrymen, and to this foreigner at least, her observations were both interesting and amusing.

Of course, queuing is a particularly English habit which I’ve often observed. The English do it everywhere and consequently get cross if someone tries to jump a queue. What I have never seen, though, is what they do if someone actually jumps a queue, but MeFi user garius explains it in this comment, which I urge you to read:

“If you ever want to see British queuing at its best, go to Victoria Station in London during the rush hour… “

Hilarious!

The rest of the thread about queueing is worth a read if you are interested in queueing habits around the world.

How do you pronounce…

It’s not always easy to find out how to pronounce something in a foreign language. If you don’t know a native speaker you can ask and are not familiar with the phonetic alphabet, you can try the Acapela Text to Speach Interactive Demo. You can enter words or a sentence (or use their demo text), and the software will read it to you. There are 24 languages available, from Arabic to Turkish, and they’ve got the most common ones like English, French, Spanish and German, of course.

Found in this Ask MeFi thread.

Kranichzug

Jeden Herbst höre ich die Kraniche, die nach Spanien unterwegs sind, um dort zu überwintern, in der Luft trompeten. Das erinnert mich immer daran, dass der Sommer vorbei ist und der Winter kommt. Interessanterweise höre ich die Kraniche nie im Frühjahr; vielleicht fliegen sie dann eine andere Route?

Den Zug einiger Kraniche kann man auf Kranichzug.de verfolgen; dort kann man verfolgen, wo beringte bzw. mit Sendern versehene Kraniche gesichtet wurden.

Around the world

You know this website that lets you check all the states and countries you’ve visited and shows them on a map? Well, Douwe Osinga has improved the interface since I’ve last been there, and I’ve visited another country and a few more states, so here are my updated maps as of August 2008.


visited 16 states (7.11%)

Not very surprisingly, I’ve mostly been to European countries. But I’ve also visited two countries in Africa as well as the US and Canada in Northern America.

In the US, I’ve mostly been to the Western states. (New York and Kentucky may not really count because I only changed planes there and therefore just saw the airport.)


visited 13 states (26%)

Create your own visited map of The World or of The United States!