aliens behind the placement of woolworths stores

One of the funnier things i read todays is that the placement ow Woolworths stores might be planned by the same aliens that planned the location of Stonehenge and a lot of other ancient British monuments…

It’s the mathematican Matt Parker that have found that the Wollworths store are placed to form exact equilateral triangles much in the same way as Stonehenge and other monuments are arranged. Naturally he is just illustrating how stupid the whole argument of alien assisted construction of ancient monuments is. The later according to an article in the Daily Mail a couple of days ago.

Personally i am convinced that if you draw lines in beetwen selected pubs here in Prague you will see a picture of Vaclav Klaus drinking a pint of Staropramen…

drug use or drug abuse

It may seem that i have a hangup around drugs.

And that’s correct i love drinking beer and a occasional Becherovka or Tuzemský slinks down. But nothing else, it just isn’t my cup of tea. But i hang out with drug users, and have no problem with them using drugs. I actually have a much bigger problem with people getting to drunk and violent…

But i have an even bigger hangup of the Swedish system of criminalising and hunting drug users. I think it’s counter productive. And it’s so established that even official translations of EU documents is translated wrong to suit the official stance.

I guess you don’t believe me. Official EU documents being forged while translated? No way!

Ok time for some proof, when an English document says “Drug use” it is translated as “drug abuse” (Narkotikamissbruk or drogmissbruk in Swedish.)

Take for example this site in English and in Swedish.

This is just outrageous! How can this be allowed? Is there any way to complain and eventually get an ending to this?

Also what kind of trust can we have in other more important documents? Is all material rigged in this way?

Big questions i know, but i would like to have an answer. And a stop to this!

By the way i would like to have some feedback from you all. Which other translation of the page above does the same? Please give me that feedback and i will keep this page updated. And only real persons with knowledge in the language, i don’t trust translation engines in this matter.

Wrongly translated:

Swedish: Narkotikamissbruk (Narcotic abuse)

Danish: Stofmisbruget (substance abuse)

Rightly translated:

English: Drug use

Estonian: kasutama (use)

Finnish: käyttö (use)

French: consommation de drogue (consumption of drugs)

Portuguese: consumo de droga (consumption of drugs)
Spanish: consumo de drogas (consumption of drugs)

German: Drogenkonsum (Drug consumption)

Polish: zażywanie (use)

a small report from the drug liberal czech republic

A strange (For anywhere else in Europe besides Holland) incident happened yesterday.

I was sitting with my friends at a local “hospoda” (Czech for pub) chatting and drinking a couple of Gambrinus (a Czech brand of lager) when a police officer came in and ordred a beer. In his uniform… (I guess that is strange enough in most countries.)

He walked over to a table and chatted with one of the local guys and afterward he sat down with his friends. Not so strange maybe, but add the following into the scene:

• Several packages of large rolling paper where scattered around the table.
• Several boxes of cigarettes had pieces torn of to be rolled up as “filters”.
• A number of half cigarettes with that typical twist on the top so the tobacco would not fall out.

To me that is a big indication of what is going on, not to mention the fact that they where going outside for a smoke once in a while. (Remeber here in the Czech Republic there is no ban on smoking in pubs, bars and restaurants…)

A little bit later another local at the pub walked over to the table and discreetly received a small package of marijuana, not bothered at all with the police officer sitting half a meter away.

That how totally open the drug scene is here in Prague. And a lot of downtown bars and discoteques have clean horisontal mirrors in the toilets so you have a clean surface to split your cocaine on. So dope apparently isn’t a high priority here.

I guess the police concentrates on hunting people who actually hurt others or steal, instead of hunting pot and cannabis smokers or people buying sexual services. This liberalisation is going on all over Europe except in Sweden, reports Henrik Alexandersson. I guess the Swedish government will scream like hell when the Danes start opening coffe shops in Copenhagen, only 20 mimnutes by train from Swedens third city Malmö.

By the way, The Economist have a good article about The war on drugs and liberalisation of narcotic related laws.

two sides of a trash problem

The other day i picked up an issue of the magazine “Czech Buisiness Weekly” (CBW) at the Pink Floyd bar in downtown Prague.

It was mostly filled with articles regarding the Czech presidency for the European Union and the economic crisis. But in the editorial i found an interesting side effect of the global economic slowdown. A garbage crisis!

That is, the Czechs used to export a lot of garbage to China! And now due to the economic crisis China, the worlds biggest buyer of “secondary raw materials”. Have stopped buying and transporting garbage to China. I guess they don’t expect to refine so much Czech trash into Chinese trash and export it back to Europe.

Strangely enough a couple of days later i read as they used to do about the opposite problem in Gothenburg, Sweden. During the last six months the Swedish garbage production has dropped by 20%. So now there isn’t enough garbage to feed the remote heating system in Gothenburg. According to Dagens Industri they have started to import garbage from Norway and Holland to keep the Swedes warm.

So Swedish tourists visiting Prague, please bring your garbage with you back home and you will help two nations

Water cheaper than beer!

I’m in a state of chock!

The Prague rule that beer is always the cheapest drink on the menu dosn’t apply any longer!

I have found that the sky bar at hilton prague called cloude 9 is selling water for less than their beer. Their price for a 33cl. bottle of mattoni mineral water is 60 CZK and the equal amount of beer would cost you 90 CZK. And their soft drinks cost about the same as the beer.

So watch out, ordering the cheapest on the drink list could result in you getting served water

Btw. 90 CZK is really expensive for a beer in this country but i guess it’s the normal price at an international hotel.

Vinyl gramophone records to usb and SD or MMC

Living in Prague i didn’t really expect to find a technical gadget that i never seen or heard about before in my local grocery store!

Today it happned! I found a gramophone that is able to copy the a record in MP3 or WMA format directly to USB, SD or MMC flash. It also have a built in AM/FM radio and amplifier and loudspeakers. Strange little thing, that seems perfect for those who want to convert their old pieces of plastic to something more modern.

What suprised me even more is that Aftonbladet (A major Swedish newspaper) wrote about a similar product today here. Much more expensive (with less features) than the Czech product i found. The Ion “LP 2 flash” apparently costs 1600 SEK and the Czech product SMARTON costs 1999 CZK (118 USD, 66 GBP or 790 SEK.) wich is approx. half the price quite a bargain in my opinion.

Ill try to dig up a link for the product so check back in a little bit for updates.

(And if anyone wants one drop me an email and i’ll see what it would cost to ship it to you.)

And naturally, if you have any experience of any of these products please give us some feedback in the comments section below.

Transportation from Prague airport Ruzyne to Prague city center.

This article is going to save you money, so read it now!

Friends are visiting all the time and when dropping down in a strange country with a language they don’t understand most tend to go for the easy choice and take a taxi to their downtown hotel.
But in Prague the public transport is excellent and downtown is really small! And even when they are doing maintenance on the transport system it’s much better than public transport in Sweden, and much cheaper!

Take a look at your options:

• Taxi about 700 CZK
• Minibus < 4 persons about 600 CZK
• 24 hours of unlimited public transport 100 CZK
• One journey less than 75 minutes 26 CZK

This means taxi is almost 30 times more expensive than public transport (This is if you go with the reliable AAA service, others quite frequently rip off tourists even more…), and what does a saving of 670 CZK mean?

Well maybe not much in your own currency, but in buying power here it is about a dinner for four including excellent Czech beer to your meal… (A beer here costs in beetween 18 and 40 CZK, in most cases less than the bus ticket!)

But isn’t it difficult to go by public transport in a strange city you might ask?

Not at all! Here is what you need to know:

When you walk out from the customs area to the lounge area with all the people waiting for the arrivals, look left (Or walk left if there is a loot of people obscuring your way.) and there you will find a booth selling tickets to the public transport system. Buy a single ticket or a 24 hour ticket if you think you will use it.

Please note! If you arrive from a non Schengen country (You arrive at a different terminal) look and walk right instead!

Then just walk out of the terminal and look right for bus 119 (Chances are that there already will be a crowd there waiting) this bus will take you to a metro station called Dejvická (End station, everyone will be thrown off!) leave the bus and walk 20 meters and walk down into the metro. It is the end stop so just take the first train down town which would be 3-5 stops depending on where in the center you are heading. Now just walk a couple of blocks to your hotel. (Check on google maps how, perhaps even print out the page.)

If this feels like a big adventure, drop us a mail and we will pick you up and escort you to the hotel, for this we normally charge a dinner. We choose establishment depending of you income and if it’s on the low end dinner is at the sausage stand 10 meters from the tourist ones, in those ten meters the price drops by 50%…

Now please help us help others to save some money. Tell your friends about this page and link to it if you have your own site! (Or for that matter use the bookmark and share option below, or why not both?)

Queueing in the Czech republic

I remember that one of the first times i visited the Czech republic (Or actually Czechoslovakia as it was called back then) i needed to buy some salami and cheese for a picknick.

So i went to the store and kept an eye open for anyone watching in my direction, and nodded back when i spotted him. This was the Czech way of forming a line. Now my responsibility was to look out for the next customer and nod towards him so he knew that he was after me in the queue. And in the same time trying to keep track of the one in front of me that could be walking around in the shop…

Ok, he’s up to the till so i know its my turn next. When he’s done i walk up and place my order, the clerk writes how much i owe and gives me a note. Now i walk over to the cashier, and queue up to pay my goods.

And yes now i have to queue again to get back to the till and show the receipt and pick up my cheese and salami. Oh by the way can i have a plastic bag? Shure he says and hands me a note with the price for the bag…

You can imagine how interested i was to stand in two more lines just for a plastic bag, so i dug down into my pocket and asked if i couldn’t pay him directly? Found a German mark (About 25p) and handed it to him, he just shaked his head and said sorry i don’t have any change. I responded “No its all yours.”. He looked at me and when he realized that he had heard right he almost shouted out loud, and it was clear that i had made his day.

Lets put it this way i had given him enough money to buy five pints of beer… 5×3 pounds make the equivalent of 15 pounds for a plastic bag, and he can just drop it into his own pocket…

So how come i bring up this old story today? Well i needed to buy some computer stuff, and being a bit on the high end (at least compared to what people use here in Prague) i couldn’t buy it in one of all the Dataart stores that are virtually everywhere here. So i headed out to Alza one of the biggest computer stores in this end of the world. What i found wasn’t at all what i expected…

First i arrived to a big room filled with computers, here i had to queue for a terminal so i could browse their webstore.
Then after placing my order i was supposed to walk over to some cash machines (As in depositing cash) to pay for them. To my luck they had an ATM so i could withdraw some cash, a shame it couldn’t reach my bank…
Ok, over to the machine where you could pick up numbers to get service from the clerks. Ooops 8-10 different options in Czech… Luckely i have picked up some of the language already and noticed the words for credit card (Platebni karta) and picked that queue ticket.
Well done, after some more queueing i managed to pay using my visa card. Now over to the next stop where i had to wait for my number to be called so i could pick upp my stuff.

The story would have been over here, if it wasn’t for the fact that i had received the wrong item… Yes you guessed right, more queueing. This time to reclamations who noted that yes i had received the wrong part and that they didn’t know when they would be restocked. So now he gave me a note to bring with me to the cashier and…
Here i think the clerk noticed the desperation in my eyes so he said “Don’t queue, just walk up to the service desk!”.

So things are improving here inch by inch! Clerks are finally getting service minded!

Or maybe thats what the czechs do all the time, it just took me almost 20 years to understand the system…

Flyers with a beat

Flyers isn’t a new concept. And it is a pretty boring task trying to fend off people who just have to to squeeze one in your hand while you are trying to exit the metro. Until today when i experienced a new and fun way for bringing attention to your event.

Standing in my own thoughts looking at that strange tram arriving (it was covered in posters) and then i could hear the music, bongo drums playing African beats.

Apparently there is an African music festival coming up here in Prague, and what a great way to market it. (At least it resulted in a blog entry and a link.) So they had rented a tram, covered it with posters and filled it up with drummers and people leaning out thru the windows giving away flyers to bystanders at the tram stops, and they even seemed to have fun. Something you cant say about the regulars handing out flyers outside metro stations.

For those interested the link on the flyer was: http://www.plesafrika.cz

Find five errors, The herna bar.

Me and Linda have a little game here in Prague, find five errors. Thats is when in a new location or situation we try to find stuff that just wouldn’t be so in Sweden.

This time im alone in a herna bar looking around and realize there is a lot of errors here…

1. It’s five o’ clock at night.
2. Two persons are sleeping in their chairs, other guests are carrying on as usual.
3. The barmaid are working alone.
4. The barmaid leaves the bar to do something in the store room.
5. The cash register is unattended!

Well i guess that is pretty unique, not only compared to Sweden…