United Statesian

Ethics book on top of a recycle bin...green irony? Dear Citizens of the World! While walking through Tel Aviv on my hunt for a new home, I saw this garbage bag sitting on top of the recycling container. A few Ethical questions came to mind: Isn't it ironic that this student decided to photocopy the Ethics course book instead of buying the original? Would you fail the course because of this? Is it Ethical to recycle it...wouldn't it be better to reuse a few times before recycling it? --It honestly does not look like it has been read. Would it be Ethical to reuse an Ethics book without paying royalties? Would the environmental ethics outway the economical, property-rights ethics? The bag of recyclable materials was deposited on top of the container...no effort was made to put it inside--even though there was plenty of space. How ethical is this half-ass recycling? Just some food for thought. What do you think? The United Statesian

Sabbath elevator...it just keeps going and going and going... Dear Citizens of the World, One of the great wonders of traveling is to see first-hand how people live. Something that seems logical to one person would be odd for another. Case in point: Sabbath elevators. Sabbath (Friday evening to Saturday evening) has some basic rules to live by. One rule has to do with not using machines. But wait...what if you live on the 14th floor of a highrise building?...ahhh, Sabbath Elevators solve this problem through an ingenious loophole. The trick consists in not touching anything; therefore, the elevator goes up and down for 24 hours while stopping and opening on every floor. Thus you can get on, touch nothing and wait for the elevator to stop on every floor until you get to your destination. Saturday we plan to rest a bit and continue looking for an apartment in the city, have lunch downtown and then see the sunset on the beach. We will have to go down 14 floors to get out of the hotel, bu...

An artistic rendition of the United Statesian flag at the Smithsonian Museum in DC. Dear Citizens of the World! The United States has landed and it has been a bizarre few weeks. Reverse Culture shock, after seventeen years away from the homeland, has hit hard. Culture shock is normal when you are going to a foreign country and it is expected. Reverse culture shock affects people differently. Basically, an expat who has been away for a long period of time is shocked because they do not "fit in" with their home culture. My personal experience has been that I find myself staring at people and I feel awed by the most mundane aspects of being back. My fellow United Statesians hear my accent and ask me, "where are you from." I in turn look at them and wonder why MY country is so different from me on so many levels. The shock does lessen, and there are many aspects of the local culture that I do like, but I think that my experiences abroad would always make me feel like a ...

After reading Chris's most recent blog " Lost in translation " I decided to continue the conversation on translations that could be added and expanded. The true problem with translations comes when no cultural equivalent exisits... Bad English or just avoiding copyright problems? There are thousand of cases of mis-translation that have made me laugh and cry over the past sixteen years as an expat...but I will limit this post to the most recent signs I had the time to photogragh during our three-week, whirlwind tour of China and HK. Future posts should bring more anecdotes and bad translations - part of the fun of being an expat; you always know that there will be a chuckle around the corner, or in the toilet... Signs do not need to include bad English to be of interest - differences in culture are usually enough to make a sign interesting: A dog toilet...Hong Kong style: Perfect English, but not the type of thing I would see in Madrid: "Entrance to the right". ....