Nice people thread part 4 - sugar and spice and all things

SingleSue

PasturesNew wrote: »

Could be a clever scam, aimed at the wealthier classes.... steal mobile phones and drop them in parks.... only nice wealthy people would contact the owner.... they now have the address of a wealthy person ... they know where you live.

We tend to take found mobiles to the police station....and then ring from there.

Generali

Road_Hog wrote: »

I had a month in Aus Dec 2003. Flew into Sydney, a few days to get over the flight (stayed at Coogee Beach) and then drove from Sydney to Cairns, doing all the stops on the way like the Blue Mountains.

Spent a week in Cairns and then flew back (one way car hire, 3,000 mile put on the clock) to Sydney for New Year's Eve at the harbour.

Really interesting to see the changes as you got further north. Up in Northern Queensland, most people drink their beer out of a 'stubby' holder, a polystyrene cup holder, that keeps the beer cool and they all drink 'poofy' halves instead of pints. It's as humid as hell during the summer in Cairns, sometimes. A complete contrast to being in Palm Springs/Death Valley (America) where it is completely arid and you are as dry as a bone. I've known anything like it, where you can drink (beer) all day and not spend you time in the loo and you get up in the morning and feel no compulsion to head straight to the loo first thing.

I stayed in Townsville on the way up. I remember the aquarium, and the fact that it (Townsville, not the aquarium) had a big rock in the middle of it and I took the wife on a stroll around it. Only we took the long route, went miles out the way, passed through a real rough dodgey looking area and got a bit concerned when we saw signs for the airport only a couple of miles down the road. You know when you get close to an airport that your miles out of town. I think we walked for 4 or 5 hours that afternoon.

A good mate lives in Coogee. It's a nice spot but blighted by the Coogee Bay Hotel. They fingerprint you on the way in on a Fri & Sat night! The other big pub in Coogee (can't remember the name) is nice and it's a very decent beach for a city beach.

NYE on the harbour is lovely. I did that a couple of times on BiL's yacht. Jolly nice!

People in Sydney use stubby holders too. I bought a mate that came over one for a couple of bucks from the dollar shop at Wynyard Station (one of the major stations in Sydney).

I don't drink pints in Aus even when they're available. The beer's warm and flat by the time you get to the end of it. If there's one thing worse than VB or Tooheys it's warm, flat VB or Tooheys!

I've been to Darwin and Townsville. Both are basically 30C every day. The only change in weather is some months it chucks down with rain and is humid as hell. Other months it doesn't chuck it down with rain and it's humid as hell.

The aquarium is great in Townsville, I always recommend it. Those towns you went through (Kirwan?) are fine. They're just industrial towns (or more often ex-industrial). Outside the state capitals it's only the places with big populations of both Aboriginals and whites where you get significant trouble. Whites insist on alcohol being available and alcohol and Aboriginal people isn't a great mix by and large. Alcohol is generally banned or tightly controlled in areas where there are pretty much only Aboriginal people.

Australia generally is a rubbish country for walking. Most roads don't have a footpath beside them and cars most definitely have right of way over cyclists and pedestrians.

GDB2222

Can someone explain this to me, please? Tesco give one clubcard point for every bag of your own that you use. There doesn't seem to be any requirement that you need these bags, just that you use them. You can claim for using up to 100 bags, and I can't see any problem with your wrapping stuff up ever so carefully, with say 20 bags padding each mars bar to protect it from all possible damage short of a nuclear holocaust. So, why haven't I heard about this on MSE?

iB1

GDB2222 wrote: »

Can someone explain this to me, please? Tesco give one clubcard point for every bag of your own that you use. There doesn't seem to be any requirement that you need these bags, just that you use them. You can claim for using up to 100 bags, and I can't see any problem with your wrapping stuff up ever so carefully, with say 20 bags padding each mars bar to protect it from all possible damage short of a nuclear holocaust. So, why haven't I heard about this on MSE?

Most of the checkout staff don't even check how many bags you've used either. Most of them ask "How many bags have you used?" and you say "Err um... 10" and they just punch it in.

Other ones just over-estimate without asking and just add on 12 bags.

You're right though - it's a good cheap way of getting club card points.

Wheezy_2

zagubov wrote: »

I live in the Surrey postal area of SW London

Hiya neighbour :wave:

GDB2222 wrote: »

Can someone explain this to me, please? Tesco give one clubcard point for every bag of your own that you use.

Don't know...we always ask for throwaway bags to line the little bin under the kitchen sink.

vivatifosi

misskool wrote: »

wow, my town has over 28,000 people (says wiki)

i'm between London and Brighton (am sure this is pretty common knowledge) and it's a general enough indication

missk and fc, have you ever been to Choccywoccydoodah? DH and I are planning a day trip to Brighton. We're looking to include a tea and cake at Choccywoccy and a burger at Grubs, which reminds him of his student days. Last time I was there I had a veggie burger with peanut butter and chilli sauce, which sounds disgusting but was yummy. Hopefully we'll also do a lot of walking it off in between!

zagubov

Generali wrote: »

Australia generally is a rubbish country for walking. Most roads don't have a footpath beside them and cars most definitely have right of way over cyclists and pedestrians.

The US, likewise. In some states, if a pedestrian steps to the edge of the pavement the cars have to stop to let you cross! In practise, it never happens because nobody just strolls about.

Further, as even poor people in the US often live in detached houses you can quickly wander into rough areas before the clues sink in and you realise you're in trouble.

SingleSue

Wheezy wrote: »

Hiya neighbour :wave:



Don't know...we always ask for throwaway bags to line the little bin under the kitchen sink.

We also get the free bags and put them behind the kitchen bin...mind you, they are used again for school projects, P.E kit, taking items to my parents, to bag up to ease taking the recycling out to the recycle bin (no, the bag doesn't go in the bin as well, it is taken back inside to use again) etc.

We use the bags until they die pretty much....

The bags we pay for (i.e. the special bags you buy at the supermarket etc), we use for the posher uses, the bigger bags aka Lidls, we use for weekends away or for our speedway bag, the smaller but still good quality, for cookery ingredients for school, overnight stays anywhere etc as they are more hardy. One Lidl bag has been going two years as our speedway bag, not bad for 70p or whatever it was.

Road_Hog

PasturesNew wrote: »

I have a certain air about me: lost/clueless/naive/not from round here.
I wouldn't be safe wandering around on my own in a furren country.

You get used to it after awhile. I'm the sort of person that wanders around Jo'Burg or Cape Town city centre (I don't mean the waterfront/V&A).

South Africa is tame in comparison to Kenya, I've never been so scared in my life as there. You fly into Mombasa and then if you go south, you have to use the Likoni ferry. Now there's a government sign there that says filming or photography of the ferry is a criminal offence, which is mainly because they don't want anyone to see it.

Now you can only use ferry in the loosest sense of the word, floating flat top barge would be a more accurate description. When you get to the ferry you get kicked off the coach and join the locals and only return the the coach after the crossing. To say that the 'ferry' is overcrowded is an understatement.

The guy in front of us was winding his mates up that the ferry had capsized recently (this is 1995).



A couple of days later, we went back over on the ferry on our safari and were in a camper van type vehicle but fitted with seats. We asked the driver why we didn't have to get out this time. He said because the ferry recently capsized and you could only stay in your vehicle if you had immediate access to a door, so much for the wind up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likoni_Ferry#Mtongwe_Disaster

It's good to see that they still haven't sorted it out 15 years later.

http://nairobichronicle.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/impending-disaster-at-likoni-ferry/


There were a couple of other beauties as well. Like the time on safari that we were out in the sticks and guarded by two guys with spears, from the Masai Mari. I'm not sure what would have happened if four guys with spears had turned up to rob us.

Or the time we had the armed guard with the AK47 because we were travelling near the border of Somalia and tourists on safari had recently been killed by gunmen. The problem was that our armed guard sat in the front seat with his gun hung over his shoulder and talking to the driver, not keeping a lookout.

tomterm8

vivatifosi wrote: »

Re Kindles... There's a big debate at the moment as to whether they will go the same way as in US. Currently you can't borrow a library e-book and read it on your Kindle as they are incompatible with Adobe ePub format. However earlier this year they did a deal in the US, allowing libraries to offer ebooks in Kindle format. We have yet to hear whether a) the same deal will be offered in the UK, or b) whether libraries will accept it, given it could impact on data protection.

I read a lot of non-fiction and ebook readers aren't there yet for what I want to read as they aren't good with diagrams, charts, pictures etc. Give it another five years though....

It may not be kindle, but paper based books will migrate to eBooks rapidly in the UK. As will readers. I think we are between two and four years behind the US... but it will happen.

At this stage, it has become a near certainty, because of economics.

( at this point, someone usually says, "But I like the smell of paper", but that is irrelevant, in my view. eBook sales are mirroring US eBooks, but a couple of years behind)

It's economics. Paper Books work at a margin of 4%. You don't need many people to transfer to eBooks before the cost of printing increases, and it becomes a vicious circle, with more and more books becoming uneconomic to print in paper.

That has happened in the US... where fiction paper book sales are down 40% on the year. Economics of scale will mean the process goes faster in the UK than the US, since the technology is already developed to do it, and print runs are much smaller in the UK than the US, so there is much less room in the mathematics.