Uh…this one I don’t know, though I highly doubt it, considering the very high taboo against death and death-things in India. There is a high instance of crime, so I suppose people do die often, but I doubt they are just left there to rot. However, someone else may have to answer.
What is there, in Delhi at least, are cows-dogs-pig-motorcycles-three wheeled motors-kids-pedestrians-trucks-buses and of course, cars. The roads are seriously crazy and it’s about 10x worse when you go to Old Delhi. I have a clear memory of my uncle leaning out of the car and knocking on another car and asking very respectfully to be allowed to move his car forwards.
No, I was in ETA’s list of targets, along with all my family - everybody who shares my first lastname as either first or second. The youngest family member to appear was Littlebro, at age 2 months. The same list included two other cousins born that same year, one of them with a double whammy (the other side of his family was also included in full).
When I found out I thought “well, I hadn’t even considered whether to become an independentist, but it looks like it will be a ‘no’”.
Something else I thought of about the American fast food chains abroad:
they may not have exactly the same menu or prepare things exactly the same way in every location; a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger and a Whooper is a Whooper, but the range of sauces or the “non-core” dishes may be different.
OK, so that’s why someone can say “so-and-so is very bright, PBK you know!” and you immediately know they’re a high achiever.
Ah, from this I learn they’re called Honor Societies, and they are not attached to a particular university! Thanks for the link, I should have thought to look that up.
A few years ago I was in India for a month touring around. In Varanasi I saw at least one body in the Ganges (and possibly another further out from the shore).
For what its worth (again from Wikipedia, about the Ganges)
According to our guide, if a family is very poor and can’t afford firewood for the cremation they will sometimes place the body into the Ganges as an alternative.
I didn’t see any human corpses on the streets while there.
Most organizations you’re likely to hear about with three Greek letters for a name are fraternities/sororities, but Phi Beta Kappa is an academic honor society.* There are a number of others, some linked with specific majors, but Phi Beta Kappa is probably the most famous.
There are other honor societies with Greek letter names, some associated with a particular academic discipline, although I work in academia and I’d only recognize a two or three other honor society names. As far as I know there’s no real formula behind the names, sometimes they stand for a slogan in Greek but I think often they’re picked just because the founders liked those letters. If you’ve never heard of an organization before there’s no way to tell from the name alone whether it’s an honor society or a fraternity/sorority, which are primarily social organizations.
This isn’t totally clear from the Wikipedia article on Phi Beta Kappa, but membership is limited to students with liberal arts/science majors. So for instance a brilliant Engineering or Business major would not be invited to join, no matter how good his or her grades were.
*To make things really confusing, it is a fraternity in the sense that the members are supposed to regard each other as equals and the selection process is kept secret, but it is not a fraternity in the way the term is commonly used in the US. It isn’t a social organization, its membership is not limited to men, and new members are typically selected by university faculty who are themselves Phi Beta Kappa members and not by other students.
American expat in Australia checking in.
A question that probably never occurred to Americans about Aussie toilets, or vice - versa: how much water is in the toilet bowl, normally?
Aussie toilets have just a little water at the bottom of the bowl, whilst American ones are about half full of water.
So far as I can tell, Aussie toilets don’t get dirty any faster than American ones, if you were wondering. We do flush regularly, after all.
Speaking of, most Aussie toilets have two flush modes; half-flush and full. Half-flush is half a tanks worth, and good for number ones. American toilets, as I recall, are almost all solely full-flush.
How about in Europe, Asia, etc.?
I’m curious about grocery shopping in Europe. I remember years ago it was always said that the French in particular shopped every day and as a result only had teeny refrigerators, not like the big whopping ones we have in the US. Is this still the case? If I had to shop every day I’d be exhausted.
Speaking of toilets, it comes up every now and then that in Asian countries (I think) they squat over either small toilets or holes or something. I think of this occasionally and it also exhausts me. Heh. Sometimes ya just wanna relax and read a magazine, ya know?
I’ve never been anywhere in Asia except Japan, but a Japanese squat toilet looks sort of like a urinal set into the floor. It’s not just a hole, it flushes and everything, and it’s not a smaller version of a Western style toilet* either. I avoided squat toilets when possible because the necessary position was really awkward for me, but I did use them a few times without mishap. However, I never even attempted to do #2 in one. Didn’t seem worth the risk. I just held it 'til I got someplace that had a Western toilet. This wasn’t too difficult. In public restrooms in Japan then if there’s a handicapped stall that will typically be a Western style toilet even if the other stalls are squat toilets.
*I did find that Western style toilets in Japan tended to be slightly (like maybe 1-2 inches) shorter than American toilets, presumably because the average Japanese person is shorter than the average American. This was weirdly disconcerting – on multiple occasions I wound up sort of falling onto the seat because it was lower than I subconsciously expected it to be.
You would think this would take a lot of effort, but it doesn’t.
When I lived in Berlin, there were shops in every neighborhood - bakeries, butcher shops, cheese shops, flower shops, etc. Everything within a short walk. You go in, see what is on special or what strikes your fancy, and buy for the day. Sometimes you might buy for two or three days, but mostly just for the day.
Quite pleasant, actually - decide what you want to eat when you see it/smell it and are in the mood for it. Buy what you need, take it home and make it.
I know this seems really odd for us here in the USA - not shopping for an entire week in one fell swoop - but trust me when I say you would take to this method of shopping like a duck to water.
Did they charge for it? We went to a McDonald’s in Vienna, Austria and were utterly scandalized to be charged €0.25 per packet of ketchup. They may have also rationed the napkins, I can’t recall clearly. Now, in theory I totally understand and possibly even agree with the rationale for this, but coming from a country where the condiments and paper goods are either just left out for anybody to take as much as they want, or you just ask at the counter and get a whole fistful, we were like “What? You have to PAY for ketchup?”
They also had bins for recycling, compost, etc. I’ve since started to occasionally see these in American fast food restaurants (this was back in 2002), but never in a McDonald’s.
Spain has gone “full/half” for years, by legal requirement - mind you, you still may find yourself in a location with a hole in the ground, but the last time I saw one was in the 1970s. Pullchains and single-button toilets are going the way of those holes in the ground: you can still see them occasionally, but they’re rare.
Shopping: in Spain it depends on how much time people have and where they live: my mother has four supermarkets, a butcher’s, three bakeries, two greengrocers’ and [del]a[/del] two sundries stores* within 100m of her flat, half of them without even crossing a street - for her, running down to the store is a lot easier than for someone who lives in one of those residential areas with no stores (which are a new thing, most places didn’t have any areas like that until the housing bubble).
We’re currently suffering a phenomenon which other countries had a couple of generations ago: the “pristine kitchen”. Pristine because hey, breakfast doesn’t need any cooking beyond coffee, lunch is at work/school, dinner is microwaved, and who wants to cook in the weekend? Outside that group, weekend runs are becoming more and more common, but usually they’re complemented during the week: most people still buy their bread daily, for example. Any family where there is a parent or grandparent who is able to buy piecemeal will go for that model, under the absolute convinction that fresher is better; at the same time, people still make their own preserves, specially in rural areas (which may mean cities of half a million people). I used to work in an area in Madrid which was on an edge between an industrial-business area and a bunch of “hive-houses”: the supermarket which was on the way to the subway station saw brisk business when the jobs left out, as people did some last-minute shopping.
One of my recent jobs was with the world’s #1 toilet makers. Another consultant, whose mouth is larger than his IQ, laughed when someone talked about toilet sizes. Eventually he realized that the whole room had gone silent and everybody was staring at him. Someone eventually said “what, you’ve never found yourself sitting in a toilet taller or shorter than you’re used to? You musn’t travel much.” I can certify that I have found myself both being hit on the back of the knees by a bowl which was higher than expected and going down, down… but where the hell is this bowl, is this supposed to be the child’s stall?
There are models which are designed specifically for a certain market and there people whose job is to propose markets certain models may do well in, based among other things on the model’s size. And models which have different names in different countries to avoid offending the locals: it is very, very important to make sure they’re being shipped under the right label.
Hermano, how could this be anything other than a joke? The only other things I know about Chile are Pinochet and the three biggest copper mines in the world (Neither of which make good joke material.)
Right after I had finished language school in Vermont (August 1990), I was waiting with a classmate for the coach that would take me on the first leg of my journey back to the Midwest. Both Leif and I had spent an academic year studying in Moscow (mine was 1989–90; his, '88–'89).
A bunch of “average” Americans was waiting alongside us. Their talk turned to a relative who had recently visited the Soviet Union.
“Oh, no,” said one woman. “They don’t have toilet paper in Russia. Mike says they use plastic scrapers instead.”
This was absolute nonsense. They have toilet paper in Russia. Even in the darkest days of glasnost, when everything was in short supply, you could buy toilet paper if you were willing to stand in line for it.
Some public toilets might still supply you with butcher paper or newsprint, but never plastic scrapers.
Leif and I didn’t say anything; we just looked at each other in amused disbelief, trying hard not to laugh.
To this day, I wonder what instrument poor Mikey found in his hotel room and assumed was to be used scraping the crap off his ass. :rolleyes:
American toilets, as I recall, are almost all solely full-flush.