• India 07/08
• Spain 09
• Central America 11
• South East Asia 13/14
• Myanmar 17

Christmas plans

Till about one week ago, I had no plans for Christmas. Which is, especially in India, very very late. Actually, for ANY activity here: Indians make plans for everything far in advance. For example Christmas holidays about half a year before.
I originally wanted to go to the beaches of Goa on Christmas – all trains are booked. Goa is a very popular destination for Indians to spend their Christmas. Well, screw it. Some other trainees want to go to Nepal (and left today 2:00 AM). But after I had a small taste of the cold in the mountains in Manali, I don’t really want to go to deep into the Himalayas during the coldest season in the year with NO FUCKING HEATINGS in the hotels! Ahem.

And since I can’t be home this Christmas, I decided to go into the desert (Rajasthan)! I go with a fellow trainee from New Zealand, Esther. And perhaps, if we are fast, we can reach Diu. A former Portuguese enclave on a small Island in the South of Gujarat :). (That means beach, dude! BEACH!)
I’ll leave on the 22nd late in the night.

By the way, the parcel my parents sent to me about 2 months ago, finally arrived. I hope my Christmas-parcel for Gisela, Wolfgang and Daniel will arrive before the 24th. Well, actually I hope it will arrive at all but if it is not ripped open and will even arrive in time, it would be a nice bonus ;).
I put the presents in the old parcel and taped it very tight, wrapped it in two posters (so be cautious with that – the motives are very cool) and stitched up textile around it – which is recommended by the Indian post itself. “It’s more difficult to rip it open”. Hi hi.

However, merry Christmas!

Celebrities at an Indian wedding

Oho, normally I have to run after my boss all the time and ask “OK do you have some work for me? I am idling right now” and normally he can come up with something. But this afternoon, he couldn’t come up with anything after I finished a lot of work simultaneously yesterday and today.
So, I can finally talk about my first Indian marriage! It was the marriage of a colleague of a friend of mine, Albane. Indian marriages go on for several days and I visited only on the second day, the day when they are already officially married. And it was big. It all looked like a small fair. A large buffet and a Ganesha idol (“The remover of obstacles”, you pray to him traditionally on weddings), a stage etc. on the fairground.
But actually, I didn’t experience too much of the wedding, the traditions and so on so I can’t tell you too much about it: We were constantly surrounded by locals who wanted to shake our hands, make photos with us, ask the same questions like “Which country you belong?”, “Your good name?” over and over again or just stare at us in one metre distance. This was really exhausting but funny for a time. I haven’t experienced this admire-phenomena so extreme, yet. Not even in slums where Westerners are (even) more rarely seen. Now I know how celebrities feel. Over all, I think we really stole the groom and the bride the show.
But we were really innocent, we just had to stop somewhere and talk to each other (or answer the singleton questions of the locals) for less than one minute or so to see how glaring locals stacked up around us in one meter distance.¹
One guy who could speak a little bit more English than just to ask the standard questions constantly wanted to drag and pull me to dance with him, another small child nudged me the whole time to get some attention.
And there was this old guy who seemed to kinda pity us in our situation but still wanted to shake hands with us. So he came to us several times during the wedding while the walls of people built up around us, shook our hands, asked “Any problems? Any problems?” – “No no, everything is alright.” – “OK OK”, shook our hands again and wouldn’t go away till we shook his hands again and said something like “OK thanks, bye”.
But it was definitely worse for Albane. (And I guess it would have been worse if most of the locals wouldn’t have thought that we were a married couple.) During the ceremony with the groom, the camera with it’s flood light lasted longer on her than on the groom: As soon as the groom finished to do something interesting, the cameraman would immediately turn back to her just sitting there. It all looked really ridiculous to me.

But definitely an experience I won’t forget.

¹ It is a very little known fact that the favorite sport of Indians is not Cricket but Glaring

Manali

My usual travel plan to decide on Friday where to go on the same day, basically just toss a second t-shirt¹ in my backpack and go to the bus stand totally backfired when I went to Manali.
We were four, Flavio from Brazil, Jakub from Poland, Costas from Greek and me. And well, apart from freezing my ass of, it was otherwise a very nice and funny weekend trip.
For example there were those saffron-street-sellers. I know, it’s easy to get hashish in Manali… but saffron?! One approached me exactly in the same way I expect hashish sellers to approach me. But he did not pull out a bag with small packets of brownish powder. Instead, he pulled out a bag with small packets of red powder, urging me to buy his “good quality” saffron. I met several of those people during my stay – no people trying to sell other stuff on the street… So, of all things you can possibly huckster on the street, WHY SAFFRON?? I asked the saffron-seller if he perhaps sells salt, curry, pepper, too. But he didn’t. Too bad. Hashish neither. I’m still not sure if this saffron-selling is just a cover to sell drugs?
Whatever. I bought a lot of CDs on my last trips and these are really not very cheap. But I found a cheap way to acquire Indian music: Search for music on the PC(s) in a cyber cafe (Internet cafe) and copy it to your USB-Stick. Or: Ask the owner of Chopsticks if one can borrow a CD for 10 minutes. :>

We went to visit some nice temples, Solang Valley to do paragliding, Old Manali & Vashisht and a small fair which turned out to be a fair graveyard, a toilet for dogs and garbage pile. :)

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¹ plus camera, travel guide and my notebook and NO TOWEL

The world capital of yoga

On Friday, after extensive reading of Harry Potter, I started to see a small aura like before having a migraine headache (Not around trees though, that is to note ;-P). At the same time I got a heavy headache but I was quite sure that it was no migraine because the aura didn’t advance but stayed there. That worried me and I decided to stop reading. After a few hours of hanging around bored, I fetched my backpack and walked to the bus station, got a (ordinary) bus to Rishikesh. (It took about 9 hours to arrive and cost me 130 Rs = 2 Euro) The travel was not too bad because I got one of the front seats with more legroom and my neighbor could speak proper English.
Before I reached Rishikesh, I met some other Westerners that turned out to be practitioners of Yoga. I am really glad that I met them, I learned a lot and attended one Yoga class with them and they told me a lot about Yoga and that it is much more than stretching. Now, I bought a lot of books and am eager to read them through. There are a lot of Ashrams and course offers in Rishikesh, the atmosphere is unique.¹ It invites you to stay and learn more about spiritualism, meditation, yoga etc. and it is hard to just leave there again in such a rush. (Only spent one and a half days there.)

Of course, for such a religious person as me, it’s sort of difficult to believe in things other than science. But I am trying my best to be as tolerant and curious as possible. After all, it is not about the ultimate truth (whatever that is) but about what I want to believe and how I want to live my life.
Spiritual things like mystic energies, chakras, waves contradict mostly to modern science for it can be scientifically proved that there are no mystical waves flowing through the body etc. However, I think you can’t take those things literally. You have to view them as (abstract) models (every software engineer or natural scientist should know what I am talking about). They just attempt to describe certain processes and reactions (inside our body) and make predictions. Just as models in “proper” science, these can turn out to be more or less correct, exact and useful. For example it is proven that Isaac Newton was not right with his classical mechanics – You can’t go faster than light. Nevertheless, it is considered as sufficiently precise to describe most movements.
If we try to describe our body physically, we will end up with a big and complex biological machine whose exact mechanics are yet to discover (because it is so complex). That is a pity but shows us that we still got a lot to research an learn about our body in the future.
But well, as said, there are partly ancient sciences that have researched the human body, describing it effectively by various models. I think it is no wonder that sciences like this already existed in so early times (see the Vedas) of human history. The center of all science should be the human, after all.

Ah, and by the way, the auras either vanished or I learned to ignore them.

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¹ A bit – but only a bit – like certain parts of Altona or Schanzenviertel in Hamburg only that it is more “alternative/esoteric” than “alternative/punky”.

LASIK, Thanksgiving and Harry Potter

No update for quite some time now and this had quite a good reason. I am surprised why no one thought it was odd to see the inner of my eye in the last post… :) The reason was my lack of vision for I had gone for LASIK!
About a month ago, another German trainee, David, who works at the Chandigarh tourism department told me about tourism here. He told me that medical tourism is very strong here because it is whilst with the same standards, much cheaper than in Europe.¹ I wanted to do LASIK anyway but planned to do it later when I earn (more) money since I can’t afford it right now. However, I can afford LASIK in India – a great opportunity since I am already in India :-)
I informed myself about institutes which do LASIK in Chandigarh and settled for the Grewal Eye Institute which has a very good reputation.

I had no chance to post anything during the first days, so I’ll post the things I wrote into my notebook in the first week:

Friday (16.11) – Surgery

The surgery was at 8:30 AM. I had to swallow a lot of medicine and apply some eyedrops the day before the surgery. I decided to do Epi-LASIK. As I understood it, LASIK was not egible for me since my cornea is too thin. In LASIK, they cut into the front layers of the eye with a blade and then just open it like a cap before applying the laser. After the surgery, they would just close the cap again. However, this cut would have been too deep for my eyes. The alternative (Epi-Lasik) which takes longer to heal (3-4 weeks instead of 2-3 weeks) is to scrab open the surface of the eyes before applying the laser. After the surgery, I’d receive protective contact lenses as a patch for the eyes to avoid an open wound.²
This sounds painful and yes, it is. Imagine a graze in your eyes.
During the surgery and some hours after this, my eyes were numb of course. I was awake during the surgery and my eyes were hold open by some kind of metal ring (This was the only thing that actually hurt). It took just about 10 minutes or less per eye.
There are nice videos and descriptions of the techniques in an article on “The eye digest”.
After the surgery I had to lie down for 4 hours were I should keep my eyes closed. I took a short glimpse and was astonished by the already much better view than I was used to without glasses. :-D
Only later in the evening, my eyes started to be not numb anymore. It didn’t really burn yet but was very discomforting – I could hardly open my eyes without the reflex to close at once again.

Saturday – Day one

Uff, I had the worst night of my life. I got into bed about eight o’clock and just couldn’t sleep because my eyes burnt like hell and I had such a big headache that I could have hammered my head against the wall all the time. I tried to get up at 8:00 AM to meet the next appointment on 9:00 AM in the institute but couldn’t open my eyes at all. My eyelids were so heavy that when I tried to open them, they’d immediately fall down again – I guess partly because of reflex. How was I supposed to get the eye drops (2 eye drops four times a day, 1 eye drop every wake hour) in without being able to open my eyes?? I still felt horrible and even caught a cold (which added to my headache and closed my nose).
However, after some calling around, I found out a number for a cab service and finally got to the institute at 10:30 AM, nearly blind cause I couldn’t open my eyes for longer than a second and was extremely sensitive to light (The cab cost me 50 Rupees < 1 Euro ;-)). My eyes were examined and they figured everything is OK so I could go home. The doctor told me a trick to insert eye drops when you are not able to open the eyes: Drip it onto the lacrimal gland (where the tears come from).
When I got home, I immediately fell into bed and actually managed to sleep till about 4:00 PM. And – I could open my eyes! Happy happy!
My fellow housemates were very caring, Sally even cooked something for me :-). I hadn’t eaten since the day before so this was even more delicious than it was anyways.

Sunday – Day two

I got a lot less difficulties to open my eyes then, even though it was still too blurry to read anything and I was extremely sensitive to light. My head and eyes still hurt but on a scale one can bear up against. Normally when I am ill and have to lie in bed all the time, I read something – now this was not possible. I was so bored that I started to first develop a turn-by-turn strategy game like Dark Crusade and later a general 3D engine for Clonk in my head.

Monday – Day three

I feel a lot of better now and can even write (with big letters). I slowly recover from the cold and eat more regularly again. No complications were found on the examination on this day.
Now, the key difficulty of the 3Dengine is really the order in how to draw the objects, which objects are in front and which are behind these. Not to do it at all but to do it fast. Clipping and collision detection is not so much of a problem if I don’t make it too complex or precise.
After all, I guess it will boil down to having a list of all objects for each camera in which the objects are ordered in the distance to the camera. This list has to be updated on even the slightest movement of an object. If the camera itself moves, even all objects have to be updated. To use an array instead of a list would be fatal since for every reorder of an object half the array would have to be re-sorted. The bad thing is, that I’d have to code a list for Clonk first without using (too much) objects since objects have a huge overhead in Clonk.
I really wished to write that down then, but I couldn’t yet.

Tuesday – Thanksgiving

Today, my protective contact lenses were removed. It was really a pain in the ass to remove them since I have so small eyes. But in the end (after 20 minutes of pressing and pushing my eyes), he got them out. The burning of the eyes now turned into itching which is nearly worse than hurting – I constantly have to resist the urge to rub my eyes.
Today, our Americans in the house, Shannon and Dave organized a Thanksgiving feast and told us about Thanksgiving, the history and what it means to Americans. Really really nice, gotta do this for Nikolaus, I just have to sneak in everybody’s room in the night before ;-). I helped with the cutting and cooking and the food was delicious – chicken, carrots, mashed potatoes and green beans, pie and ice cream after thatm. Mhh.
However, my in-head-development of the 3D engine has finally found it’s way into my notebook… now I long for really coding it, hrm. My fingers itch.

Wednesday to Friday

I’m on the way to be better, really. I don’t wear my sunglasses all the time anymore and I can read already. I went to the AIESEC office and wrote some of my notes in text files and got a virus on my usb-stick (which does not affect my usb-stick). This virus which spreads through removable devices has been on one of the two AIESEC PCs for nearly two months now and some idiot managed to transport it to the other PC to. They got no awareness at all for viruses at all! They even access their Gmail accounts, AIESEC network etc. from the infected PCs even though they know that there is a virus! And of course, nobody knows the Administrator password, no Windows CD in the office and no one cares anyway. I tried to explain to them that viruses are not just there to mock a little (virus prevented me from opening firefox, taskmanager, msconfig, even cmd together with a nice comment), they are programmed for a purpose!³ However, I don’t have any motivation to reinstall the systems for them when they don’t care (and I don’t have time), anyway. This ignorance just makes me angry.
Anyways, while the others troded off to the Pushkar Mela, a huge camel market and the biggest festival in Rajasthan, I stayed back home because all that dust in the desert and on the big bazaar might not be good for my eyes right now. A pity, for I’d have really like to have joined them! But I started to read the last Harry Potter book and have the best chances to read it through in 2 days time. :-)

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¹ I met a German eye doctor at the Grewal eye institute who spent his vacation to study at this institute for some weeks. He told me that with those standards and know-how, I’d pay about 4000 Euro in Germany. About 5 times the price I payed.

²There is a third technique which has just (September 2007) been introduced to this institute as the first in this region: Intralase. The corneal flap is created with the help of another laser, so no blade is used at all. The eyes will regain 100% eyesight in 3-4 days (as opposed to 3-4 weeks) and it is (almost?) painless. However, I couldn’t afford this technique for it was double the price and Dr. Grewal assured me that the outcome will be the same. There are no additional risks in EpiLASIK as opposed to Intralase.

³“Imagine some stranger breaks into your house and just lives there from now on. Every now and then he punches you in the face and whenever you try to open the fridge, he bangs it shut and shouts ‘DNT U DARE U DUMB!’. Would you leave the house knowing that he is in there or even write mails and do you bank business while he looks over your shoulder? Are you hoping that this virus is a fellow nice chap after all?” – “laugh… I’m not in the office so often anyway. I just access my google mail and the AIESEC network from here.” – “OK forget it…”

My home

I stayed back in office today to have a bit of online life again and now it’s 21:30. That means that the last bus already left so I can even stay longer ;-)
Just chatting with Felix who remarked that I only write about my travel and not really about the office, the daily life, AIESEC and the trainees. He is right, I should write more about it. So since I can’t get home now anyway, I can start right now ;-)

I live in a house in sector 21 with fifteen other trainees. But sector 21… well, basically sucks. The only good thing is that it is close to the center (sector 17) and the bus stand, but since it’s so near to the center, it’s pretty expensive while the house is pretty bad. There is only one 3mx1.5m kitchen and the house is not in a good condition. For example we got power cuts (more than the neighborhood ;-)) all the time until recently when an electrician came by. What he did was to re affix some cables that were hanging loosely in front of the main door by hang it on the holder for the (non-working) lamp over the door. It’s not that bad as the cable salad in Delhi but I realized that the cables hanging around on that image are actually as much in use as the cables hanging over our front door! Ohmygod. But a good example for Indian care for proper maintenance.
But I stay there because I got good company there and don’t want to waste the time on the weekends to search for new flats. I’ll rather travel.
There are almost no interesting shops in sector 21, only biker shops, some sweet shops and workshops. I don’t understand the tendency for equal shops to pile up all at the same place: If you opened up a shop where one can buy helmets, would you go to a place where there are 5 other shops or rather to a place where there is no helmet-shop? Anyways, there are some useful shops that I can easily reach on foot, too. Just around the corner, there is a barber shop and something like a telephone box and copy shop. OK, the barber shop is actually a mirror hanging on the tree with a chair in front of it but honestly – it does the job, right? I got used to those kind of shops ;-). The telephone box is the front room of a flat where there are 5 telephones on the table and one copy machine in the back – that’s the place from where I have been calling you guys.
So I normally go shopping in Sector 22, there is much more. Even a (for Western standards) very very small super market which is… CLEAN (Oh my god)! Other department stores literally stink of dirt, if you’d see such a shop in Germany, you will never ever go shopping in such a shop. The good thing about that super market is, that you can buy fruits and vegetables there. No other department stores sell such things, I’d have to cycle to the vegetable bazaar in Sector 20. In (the middle of) Sector 22, there is a big clothes bazaar where you can buy reaally cheap clothes and other textiles if you bargain¹.

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¹ A dialog. Me: “OK, honestly: This is not original, it’s a copy right?” – Seller: “Haa, yes, it’s an original duplicate copy!” (in a tone that suggests that this is a very good thing) :-)

Happy New Year!

Right now I sit in the nighttrain back from Bikaner, Rajasthan. I was there for just three days but got a lot of impressions and much to tell.¹

On the 9th of November, Diwali was celebrated throughout India. Diwali, “The festival of lights”, is as important as for them as Christmas for us. It marks the victory of good over evil and the time when Rama came back home after defeating the evil ten-headed demon Ravana, King of Lanka (today: Sri Lanka). A week or so before Diwali, the Indians celebrate Dusshera, the Defeat of Ravana.
They built huge statues of Ravana and his evil demon sons out of cardboard, wood etc. and filled them up with firecrackers. In the evening, somebody dressed up as Rama would come and shoot burning arrows at the statues that were up to 20 meters high. Boom. :-D

According to the legend, Brahma granted Ravana the right to be not be able to be killed by any creature on earth (including the demigods). The demigods then pleaded to Vishnu to set an end to him, so Vishnu reincarnated himself as a human (Rama) to kill Ravana ².
However, Diwali is celebrated with loads of fireworks, too. It’s basically like our Silvester in Germany but with more fireworks & firecrackers and more blinking light strings in all colors and sizes. And the market is as full of people as on the evening of the 23rd December.
I spent Diwali in Bikaner. Unfortunately, when it got dark and more and more kids started to blow up the streets and turned them into a sulphur pit, I got lost in the alleyways of Bikaner (again). So it was not so nice for me. But eventually, after lots of misdirections by locals, I found my way to an auto rickshaw.

Apropos legends and demigods:
Thirty kilometers from Bikaner there is a temple of a local demigod – Karniji. As I understood it, Karniji didn’t want that Death gets the people of her tribe – so villagers who died were directly reborn as rats and after that were reborn as members of the tribe, again.
So, the Karni matra temple is full of thousands of rats. However, I think this place looks pretty disgusting. The ground is not only full of rats but also full of leftovers and scraps, dead rats and shit. To have to enter that place without your shoes (which is common for Hindu temples) doesn’t make it any more pleasant. Overall, the rats don’t look any better and healthier than if they lived in a sewer. I really wonder why. Is it in the nature of rats, do they find against each other, …?

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¹ And I’d be really happy if more of you would start to give some feedback to it.

² There is of course more to it than just this. The full story includes – amongst other things – that Ravana kidnapped Rama’s wife before, that’s why he attacked Lanka (Sounds familiar, eh?). But there is even much more to it. ;-) This is all part of the ancient Sanskrit epic called the Ramayana.

Tattapani

Tattapani is the name of a village in Himachal Pradesh. It’s located in a beautiful valley two hours north of Shimla (See Google maps or Google Earth KMZ file!). There are palmtrees all around and a crystal clear turquoise but rapid river goes through the valley. There are many beaches stretching at the river that offer an amazing view. Overall, it looks very tropical.¹
Anyhow, I only reached Tattapani by pure chance. I originally wanted to go to the Kullu valley but as it turned out, when I finally reached Shimla, I had not enough time to get there. Because I only wanted to wander in the mountains, I just got on the next bus that was going to some valleys and villages around Shimla.
It is amazing how many people can travel with a bus with just 20 seats: I counted 80. (About 20 on the roof) :D

The Lonely Planet has just a quarter of a page to say about this village but it is a really nice place to hang about for a few days. I stayed at spring view hotel which is directly at one beach and has it’s own hot sulphur springs just next to the hotel. The owner of the hotel organizes small rafting tours, too. I didn’t do that but on the next weekend in Rishikesh. Instead, I walked to the Shiva cave (about 2 hrs up the mountains if you walk slowly).
The cave was not that interesting, there was just one old guru living in the cave who murmured prayers (I guess) all the time and rebukes strangers that enter with their shoes on. He was looking so grumpy that I didn’t dare to disturb him in his prayers by making a photo of his appearance.
But it was fun to communicate with some farmer girls I met at the small stream near the cave. I couldn’t speak any Hindi and one only spoke very basic English… a pen and a big notebook are really worth gold. :-)

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¹ which is not normal in Himachal Pradesh. The landscape there more reminds one of the Alps and Austria.

For freedom fighter

The title sounds familiar? Right, I’m writing about buses again!
I have the impression that I didn’t make myself clear about buses in the last post because it’s hard to imagine that some buses actually go faster than the rest of the traffic. But I tell you, some buses drive originally like in a Hollywood action movie here…
I got on one of those Shimla to Chandigarh buses again and I nearly laughed all the time. Imagine the scene: Bruce Willis jumps into a taxi, shouting “Follow that car over there!”. At least the next ten minutes of the film are usually devoted to a long chase, including awesome speeds and stunts, many (nearly) accidents, squealing tires and a lot of shouting and much cursing.
Well, just this taxi would have been either overtaken by or more probably rammed away by that Indian bus. He did not care at all – just during the ten minutes I was on that bus, the driver nearly ran over two bicycles while running the redlight and drove about 70-100 km/h in the city. Other cars were just bluntly shooed away with light horn, real horn and many curses. Of course, they quickly hurried out of the way.
Some minutes, a police car with sirene on drove besides the bus, trying to get faster through the city than the bus….
All in vain (but OK, sirenes are not so well respected here). Eventually, we lost the police car. I guess it could have been faster if it had driven just behind this bus.

And I got home in record time :-)

About advices

Now, this has less to do with India but I started thinking about this when I considered whether or not I should give advices to the lads that will visit me in India in March and if yes, which. There is certainly enough to warn about in India but I decided to not give any advices that go further than telling solely about my experiences, nothing in a “do” or “don’t” manner. And I’ll tell you why:

First, I don’t like to receive advices like this for myself because it takes away my freedom of choice and own consideration. I can only either decide to refuse to act according to that advice or to conform to that advice. Of course there is justification for those kind of advices in most cases but they offer only a very limited and refined view of the true situation. Just think about how an advice comes together:
It’s just the experience of one person who interpreted the situation in his certain way and eventually learned a lesson. When he makes an advice out of it, he tries to generalize this experience and the lesson he learned – including his values, opinions and views – for everyone. He cuts out possible other experiences and most importantly even the experience itself! Moreover, he doesn’t take into account that the advice may not applicable for everyone. For example “Drink more milk (because it is healthy)” is clearly not applicable for everyone. (Especially not me ;-) )
Some advices are even passed on. So, when you hear an advice that has been passed on like “Don’t eat raw vegetables in India” and ask for the reason why, the person who told you (and only heard and followed that advice by himself) will make up something reasonable to not loose his face, for sure. (So, the answer would be that “raw vegetables are full of germs, bugs and/or diseases there, obviously”).
It is fatal to leave out the actual experience because what is left then is just a command. It leaves the person who follows it unexperienced and dependent, limited in his view. Even if you just hear an advice without actively following it, you will still be biased because you have this in mind in these situations.

So, as a conclusion, I think those kind of advices have more in common with a command than actually honestly sharing an experience. However there are sometimes situations where even I appreciate those kind of advices from people I trust – when I just can’t decide about something. :-)

I heard so many advices from AIESECers, co-workers and my boss since I am here, people of I am sure that they just want the best for me and have some experience. Some said I shouldn’t trust strangers, I was told not to buy any food from the road because it is unhygienic, to not go to those tree-barbershops because of the same reason, not take a bath in the Ganges, not travel on the roof of a bus and never never hitchhike… Been there, done that. I know, these advices are just meant well, but sometimes I wonder if the they go sometimes even out of their houses?
Overall, I value my common sense, my cautiousness and own perception over advices like this and I advice everyone to do the same ;-).

“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia; dispensing it is a way of wishing the past from the disposal—wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

- Baz Luhrman in the song “Everybody is free to wear sunscreen”. See Lyrics.

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