The Subtle Benefits Of Being Born In The Wrong Place

I was born and raised in Romania. For many years, I thought I was born in the wrong place. From a certain point of view, I still believe this. There are just too many things going wrong around here: we don’t have proper roads, our politicians are notoriously stupid and it’s almost impossible to get … Read more

A Winter Tale

Last Saturday I was to a party. Yes, I do this from time to time. It was a rather informal meeting in a Bucharest club, 10 people at most. I only knew the organizer, a close friend of mine and partner in my blogging workshop. I don’t know if it was the music, the quality … Read more

The Trip To Switzerland – First Impressions

As I already mentioned, we planned for a longer holiday in Switzerland for this year. This trip involves also a Christmas holiday in the Alpes, near Gstaad, and some other activities, most of them related to my personal life. One of the most important is getting in touch again with my sister, who’s living here for more than 8 years now.

We got here by plane, on 20th December, flying Swiss. We’re in the full formula, meaning my wife and my daughter. We enjoyed a good and silent flight, shorter than the average period you need to cross Bucharest from one side to the other. That’s around 2 hours, by the way. We landed in Geneva and checked in to a hotel. Haven’t had any difficulties on the logistic side. We didn’t had any schedule made in advance, we adjusted things on the fly. Each afternoon or evening we are at my sister’s place, enjoying family life, and the mornings are set for some spontaneous activities.

Yesterday, for instance, we tried to do some shopping at IKEA. What should be a regular ride to a store in my country proved to be completely different in Switzerland. IKEA Switzerland is outside the city, at around 40 minutes by train, in a small city called Allaman. Getting there was funnier than we thought, we had to switch buses and trains only to got there. But it was fun.

Life Cost In Switzerland

The thing that surprised me the most was the unbelievable high price of the life in this city. I knew that Geneva was one of the most expensive cities in the world. I had a previous trip here in 2005 to the Auto Show which is held at Palexpo, so I already had some insight. But seeing this again in the light of a regular tourist, the city is simply unaffordable. Especially the transportation and the food costs are too high… I know this is one of the most important cities in the world, and setting a price barrier is one way of keeping it safer, but things are simply not justifiable. Whatever.

On the other side of the high price I must reckon that the quality of the products and services delivered is over the average. Way over the average, so I have to admit that there is some justification for the high prices, after all. Especially the food is looking and tasting much better than in other cities and the public transportation is on time and clean. Extremely clean. Taxis are unaffordable, we paid 10 EUROS for a 3 minutes fare. Clothing is ok as long as you don’t shop from the fanciest boutiques downtown.

Read more

7 Things About Me

Well, it seems is that time of the year. And I don’t mean Christmas, but tagging and meme games. This time is Stephen Smith from Productivity In Context, and it’s about 7 things about me. Tracking down the beginning of this meme was a little over my time but I can tell for sure that … Read more

Personal Milestones

Do you have personal milestones? I do. By personal milestones I understand those times when you sit down and replace the “doing” in your life with the “seeing”. You stop doing whatever you planned to do and start to stare at your life. Right, just stare at whatever it comes to your focus and try … Read more

Happy birthday, Diana!

Today is my wife’s birthday. We’re both Scorpio so our birthdays are really close. I write this without really planning – one of the things Diana taught me being to enjoy life without too much planning. But that’s not the only thing that she taught me. There are plenty of other things she taught me … Read more

Journaling versus Blogging

Back in 2004 I started to keep a journal. It was basically a folder on my Linux powered laptop, with a bunch of unorganized files floating around. Everything was written hastily using vi, an editor which may be considered somehow cumbersome by the average computer user. Those were the days when my programming skills were … Read more