How I hate this. Taxes, insurance policies, bills, forms, credit card statements. My ex-wife had a system where she kept everything in a box, and then once a month she would throw the box contents on the table and do all the paperwork in less than 60 minutes. I am now trying to teach myself the same trick. I am at 60 hours, and I don’t see any progress. Still, I think the stacks look nice, I have it sorted on “sender” and it gives an orderly look.
Three girls on MSN. The one in the middle is my daughter and she says she has multi-tasking capabilities unlike boys her age. Indeed, she is reading MSN and checking her SMS inbox at the same time.
Shadows in the new shopping center in Almere. This new shopping center really upgraded the city. Used to be one street with the standard shops, barely suitable for 30.000 inhabitants, and Almere had grown to 180.000. The new city center is nice, clean, modern, and there’s a huge underground parking area. But it’s still windy, and not quite like Amsterdam. Oh well… in 500 years maybe.
Metro station in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Just a little further to the west is Spandau, where Hess spent a good part of his life in prison until he commited suicide in 1987 at the age of 93. After his death the British demolished the Spandau prison and today there is a Mediamarkt.
This is where I used to work. Something with chemicals, ships, trucks, barrels, depots, near Rotterdam.
About one mile of the old Berlin Wall is still intact, the East-side Gallery, home to graffiti artists. I heard they recently removed the graffity in an effort to tidy up the place. A pity, there were some real masterpieces there. But there is the usual garbage also. Someone wrote “Catalonia is not Spain” on the wall. Quite ironic to write this on the Berlin wall. Maybe they would like to to have their own wall in Catalonia?
The Ukraine is full of contrasts. Small villages with no gas or water, no phones, delapidated houses, horse ploughs, gravel roads with potholes. And Porsche Cayennes. Kiev has fifteen McDonalds, and then when you leave Kiev you travel back in time, 50 years in one hour. Bad economy, corruption. No wonder many young Ukranians want to leave for the west. But the west means Poland, and Poland is Schengen. Not easy to cross this border, you need to have a lot of paperwork done and then you need to be very patient as five hours waiting time is the norm.
I was thinking about the difference between the metro in Kiev and the one in Berlin. But there is not much difference. The Kiev metro was build in 1960, the one in Berlin is from 1910, and Paris from 1900. In Paris you can see the age, but not in Berlin.