This is a video of a plane making a landing on an island in the Caribbean.This is just how I thought it would be, looking from the outside the plane when I went to Puerto Rico.

But I have come to conclusion that life is not a holiday, and the things that  you accept or don’t notice on holiday can not only be quite annoying if you have to deal with them on a daily basis, they can actually degrade your quality of life.

Take for example living here in Spain and having to deal with the so called “customer service”, (or lack thereof) on a daily basis is basically a pile of crap. On holiday you might not notice such things, because you are not there long enough or you just never get to experience their unique brand of customer service. Well to be fair that isn’t the whole story, but the people that work don’t help matters by the way they act.

From all of this I have come to the conclusion that Spain is great for holidaying, or if you are so rich that you can just pay someone to deal with the crap of daily life for you. But for the rest of us normal people, having to work and live everyday, I think there are much better suited places in this world.

Anyway you live and learn.

This might seem logical. But I was thinking about it yesterday, and it only makes sense if the knowledge of person you are making an example of a reaches its entended target, i.e. other people that would do the same as the person in the wrong.

So my point is that unless they actually combine the “making example” with making sure that this info reaches as many people as possible. Then for me it is a bit of a wasted opportunity.

How they would go about doing that though,  is anyone’s guess.

But since this trip I have had another to London in which I bought speedy boarding, which meant that I was one of the first people on the plane. And let me tell you, this made all the difference in the world. And anybody out that who has the same leg room problem I have, I would seriously advise you to pay the extra £4 or how ever much it is and get the priority or speedy boarding. That way you can go and get one of the seats by the exit, or at the front of the plane that give you ample leg room.

Now if you are super tall, I am not sure that it will fix it for you, but if you are between 6′1″ and 6′5″ I think this will help you out a lot.

So while I still think that the airline industry is heightist and us tall people shouldn’t have to pay extra just so that we don’t feel constricted in our seats, there is a solution, it costs a few pounds more, but makes the world of difference.

I originally wrote this post about one and a half years ago. But I feel that I am in a better position to write this again. Seeing as 1. I no longer live in London, 2. I have had a long time to think about it, and 3. I deleted the original post by accident.

So what am I talking about? London of course. The irony of course being that I did live in London for the first 27 years of my life. But it is also the reason that I feel that I have the authority to talk about it.

Now when I left London in the October of 2007 I said that I would never live in that city again. And this still stands. But to clarify my position I will expand.

When I say that I will never live in London again, it is because of 5 thing that I see wrong with the place. And while these things could change I doubt they ever will in my lifetime and therefor unless less there is something big that happens in my life (and life has a way of doing that sometimes) I will never live in London again.

So what are these things that I think are so wrong with the city of London.

1. Almost everything is so expensive. And I mean everything. To live, to eat, to travel, to go out. And for me the only reason for this is because it is London, and it has some sort of coolness associated with it and its name. Nothing else. And after living in Berlin for a year I can see just how expensive London is, in contrast to Berlin, which is super cheap. Cheap but good. And I enjoyed living in Berlin many times more than I did in London.

Oh I should say that was a time that I did enjoy living in London, but that was more than ten years ago. Since then I have become a lot more wise to the ways of this city, and also many things have changed.

2. For the amount you have to pay for everything you would think that the public services would be the best in the world. Not so. Travel on the underground is now a experience that I could do the rest of my life without having again. The roads are congested. And to drive into or through the center of London during the day costs about £8 a day from what I last remember. People say the NSH is a great institution, but again from living in Germany for a year I would say that the system they have over there is far superior, and it cost about the same as I was making in NHS contributions each month.

3. For the size of the city, there are just way to much people in the city. The services and size of the city are just not built to handle the amount of people that reside in London. And the worst thing is that the government is always encouraging more and more people to move into London. I mean, the place is bursting at the seams and they want to pack more people in there. This has become more and more evident in the last ten years that I have gotten tired of London, and it one of the major contributing factors.

4. The government, over the last few years especially, has adopted a worrying trend of following the US government in whatever it does and seemingly without question. For me this means a reduction of human rights, liberties and privacy. And all predicated on lies, and misinformation through the media. I don’t want to live somewhere where the people in charge have scared the people they govern so much that they freely give their freedom away. Which in my opinion is what has happened in the US and what is slowly happening in the UK. And the thing is, by the time the people realise what has been taken away from them, it will be too late to get it back. The only way after that would be revolution, the last resort for any people with their backs to the wall and feeling their voices are not being herd.

5. The weather just does not inspire happiness. Now this is something that only God can control. But in combination with the rest of the factors just makes London not an attractive proposition. When I lived in London I used to say to everyone I knew that I wanted to live in a country that was hot all year round. I think this was just a knee jerk reaction to living in a city where the weather was terrible all year round. I have since discovered of myself that I do not need to live somewhere that has good (or sunny and hot) weather all year round. It is just as good to know that when it comes to summer I will have a summer and sunshine, and not just gray.

Anyway, there it is. My reasons why I won’t/don’t want to live in London anymore.

I have been living in Madrid now for almost 5 months and I have figured out the fashion culture here, or what it takes to be considered a Madrileño.

And that secret combination is a cigarette and sun glasses.

Not in all my travels on this small planet of ours have I witnessed a nation that smoke so intensely and with such passion as the people here do. And it is everywhere except the metro and work spaces.

So forget anything else. If you want to live in Madrid and be considered a Madrileño then get yourself a pair of Ray Bans and a box for Marlborough.

I got a pair of sun glasses, but wait, no cigarettes. I guess I will never be a Madrileño.

I now use www.ebid.net, they have been around about twice the amount of time that ebay has, and seem to be a much better looking and run site. I have also given up on paypal because of their insistence of one paypal account per country that you want to do business in.

I mean, common sense does not seem to be an asset that ebay and their subsidary companies have. Ciao ebay, hola ebid.

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/08/21/7-random-acts-of-office-violence/

People that put work ahead of the mental/phsyical health think of this…

How much work are you going to be able to do when your health fails??

That’s all I wanted to say.

Philly Mac

I have always been a fan of communism, the thought that no one man is better than another, and everyone is equal, should earn and have the same as everyone else, and everything is shared between everyone. A nice thought isn’t it?

The problem is that this is the ideal, in practice this is never the case, and can never be the case. And why? Because it is human nature to want to have more than others. This is not the case for everyone, but it is for enough people that it means that communism is, and can never be a reality. Those countries that claim to communist are actually practicing some sort of “one rule for the people and another rule for the people that rule them”.

Remember, the love of money is the root of all evil, and as long as money exists so will people that love it and will do evil to get it.

Communism, nice idea, poor execution!

Philly Mac