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I did something for the very first time in my life this past week, and you’re going to laugh at me. “What,” you’ll say, “it was her first time?” You see, I may be relatively radical and I do love to experiment and try things out, but there are some things about modern life that just rub me the wrong way. And so I’m incredibly conservative in some ways.
I’d like to share my conservative side with you in this week’s podcast… and I hope you share yours with me and the other readers, too.
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6 Responses
I don’t think you are being “conservative” when you hate the Malls, but then i am European.
Isn’t “being conservative ” doing what the majority do? in which case conservative is GOING to the mall.
Or have i completely misunderstood and it was your going you are confessing.
In which case i would have to confess dropping into Mc Donalds twice this year, in the same week.
i don’t know what came over me, but the second trip put me off for another 5 years or more.
I’m pretty reactionary when someone cold calls, advertisers, they always ask for me by name or for the owner. I politely say – hang on i’ll get them and leave the phone dangling for an hour whil i do something more interesting.
By the way, i’d like that quilt!
Ah, that was helpful. My confessional went somewhat pear-shaped. Preservation-minded is closer to the mark. My declared US roots seem different from those of many of my dear colleagues from the States. When they go home they look forward to going shopping, finally; I head for downtown in the hope that cafés and city life have taken root. Up until a year or two ago things were really looking up. But now the malls and fast food joints are the liveliest meeting places, it seems.
I like your dangling phone trick, though I feel unduly sorry for the poor bastards. I’ve received the weirdest cold calls here from callbots who were exceedingly human-like and people who were more robot-like than the bots and just kept talking over my protestations. I suppose the bots and the humans went to call center training together.
I came across this site;
http://www.delocator.net/
which although it won’t eliminate the malls does help you find an independent coffee outlet and i think it works for book stores too.
A question people sometimes ask me – i’ve been living in France for 17 years – is would i ever go back.
Would you?
Could you imagine living in the USA again?
Where?
I just don’t know, Chris. The people here just charm my socks off, so I find myself homesick for them when I’m back in Germany, where I’ve been living – quite happily – since 1981.
Aside: BTW, just found out that the quilt maker is clinically blind.
and what about the opposite, do you get homesick for Germany?
Sure, all the time 😉 I grew up in an exceedingly Germanophile household on a steady diet of “Europe is better”. Now I have a blog called “Island Outpost” where I think about my rough-and-tumble neighborhood in Munich and how I can find my feet in that real, rather than ideal, German neighborhood. http://annehodgson.posterous.com