Monday, 11 June 2007

Learning to fly in the third world

This post will be a bit strange, but I think it's funny.

Flying is supposed to be the safest means of transport.
Until you try learning to fly in the third world.

Things are a bit different between different countries, as I've stated in my previous post. Unfortunately, everything I'll write here will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

First, let's talk a bit about radars. Or lack thereof. If you are learning to flight in small airports or airfields there won't be a radar. Most probably, there won't be a radar in large airports either (just check a bit in Google, about Beijing and Ezeiza). OK, since they are small planes, are quite maneuverable, and you can depend on the well-trained controllers.
Except when these controllers tell you to land in the same runway where a plane is about to take off at the same time.
And of course, the planes' airworthiness is carefully checked; for instance, in my case, when I realised that the oil gauge looked a bit strange, as if it didn't really belong there. When I asked my instructor he answered:

"Certainly, it belongs to a Citroën; but they both use oil, don't they?"


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Friday, 8 June 2007

The transvestism of the Sun and the Moon

Another obvious attempt to rank-up in Google, isn't it?
Well, what I was thinking with this post is to see how funny it is that words have different genders in different languages. Of course, there are obvious cases where the gender is, well, obvious (you would never say that Julia Roberts is an actor in any language). On the other hand, in Spanish the Sun ("el Sol") is male and the moon ("la Luna") is female as the links show. However, in German, it is exactly the other way around, "die Sonne" and "der Mond".
Right now I have managed to turn fairy tales in R-rated stories! That's the power of the Internet!

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