Beer prices in European bars and bricks as reminders

We were celebrating my mentor's b-day in a bar downtown. 0,25l of beer cost €4,5, while 0,5l of beer (more or less a pint) cost around €8,60 and 1l beer cost €16. That's Paris downtown for you. Since it was happy hour I ordered 2 pints of beer for €10, which, according to a floor mate at the Brazilian house, can be considered okay in Paris.

A pint of beer in Budapest costs between €0,85 and €2,50 depending on the bar you're in. At the airport I saw a price label of €3 which made my wallet tremble in fear and then it quickly ran away.

In Switzerland it is more common to order 0,33l of beer. A standard beer bottle you can get in shops contains 0,33l beer, too, but 0,5l beer bottles are also available. On the countryside 0,33l of beer cost on around 5 Swiss francs and 0,5l beer cost 7 Swiss francs in a bar. Pretty much Paris downtown prices. I don't want to imagine how much a beer costs Zurich downtown...

Tell me, how much does a certain quantity of beer cost in your (unmentioned) country?

By the way, in the end I forgot my bag at my mentor's place. If I had carried something heavy like a few bricks instead of a single paper notebook I'm sure I would have missed the weight on my back.

Cultural differences

Wednesday’s update: Nothing special. Had 2 courses, revised my blog entries a little. Oh, right, by the way, I noticed that the café-buffet below my favourite spot at campus to hang on my laptop was open, so I decided to try it out. An expresso (or long coffee) for €0,40. Now, this must be subsidised, too. I asked for an expresso and a caramel cookie and it cost me €1. Please, allow me to show you this one pic of my post tea time meal since I haven’t uploaded any food related pics recently.

Thursday’s update: At home I chatted with a half Japanese, half German girl (by the way, only to be clear, whenever I say that I chatted I mean that I chatted with someone in person. Come on guys, I would never write about some online chatting! Well, only if it’s really really really worth mentioning).

As she was cooking I initiated the topic of the behavioural and cultural differences between the Western world and Japan as I wanted to confirm things I have read in a book during writing my bachelor thesis (the topic was the capitalism model of Japan). Since she is half German she should have experienced the differences and this was indeed the case.

Some examples for the differences: It is considered a challenging act to constantly look into the eyes of the other person in Japan while in the West it is a way to express paying attention to the other person. In Japan having a big smile can mean being embarrassed about something while in the West it's an expression of happiness or pleasure. In Japan people sleep on mattresses that can be folded and stored away during the day to have room for other activities in the same room. The floor in those rooms is softer so the thin mattress is no hindrance to comfort. In the West people sleep on big mattresses on a bed frame. Those take up quite much place.

In the evening I met my student mentor. I haven’t really exhausted him by asking for his help yet (actually, I haven’t asked him anything) but at least I met him now. He’s celebrating his birthday tomorrow and he invited me to come over. Yay! I wonder what I should bring.

Crazy pedestrians, traffic regulation in France and maybe the deal of the year

I haven't written about the pedestrian behaviour here in Paris yet but it is quite an interesting thing. I haven't read the corresponding articles of the French law and I don't know how it should be...but...in my opinion the traffic lights have a different meaning here. I wouldn't write a word about it if some people would cross the street while the traffic light for pedestrians is red but it's mind blowing that people generally cross the street if the light shows red and no vehicle is coming. But they do so even if a vehicle is coming, they simply make haste to cross the street. If the cars stop at the traffic light the pedestrians already start to cross the street en masse while the lights are still red. People even cross multiple lane streets if no car is coming, while in the case of one lane one way streets it's almost as no traffic lights existed in the first place. They cross the street like this even in the presence of the police. In my opinion the red light for pedestrians here means "cross only at own risk!" It would make sense in case of e.g. one way one lane streets but it would be, no, it IS definitely very unsafe on a big scale like in case of an avenue or boulevard downtown with several lanes (even if it is a one way street).

A legal systematic difference in the traffic regulation is the switch order of the traffic lights for both pedestrians and cars. The traffic light for pedestrians changes instantly to red without any blinking of the green light like in Hungary. The car's traffic lights change from red to green without a colighting of red and yellow so the police could fine someone only if he/she hits the gas while the light is red unlike in Switzerland where the police (which is investing a vast fortune to be able to fine as many as possible who break even one traffic rule) fine people whose car starts moving (I hope forwards) during the colighting of red and yellow.

Back to my everyday agenda. On Tuesday I went to make an appointment with a bank officer for next Monday so that I can open a French bank account. I need a French bank account to be able to get cheaper telecommunication services like some decent cellular data. As I wrote earlier, I have bought a SIM card for €5 and a refill card for €10 at a small shop. I used €5 for 400 MB but maybe I should have used €10 for 1GB. A friend got 50 gigs of cellular data for about €3 but he has a French bank account and that deal was some kind of promotional deal.
 In Hungary I bought a refill for approximately €9,50's worth of Hungarian forints and a SIM card for €1,60. I can use approximately 4,90€ for 500MB and approximately 6,90€ for 1GB. Before that I paid approximately €10 for 200 MB and approximately 85 minutes/SMS a month.

In Switzerland I got an offer of unlimited cellular data for 2 Swiss francs (approximately €1,95) a day.

The bottom line: Buying refill cards is much more expensive in France. Since the Wi-Fi at home is...let's call it dissatisfactory I have some incentives to use cellular data more often.

By the way, I can get a partial refund of my rent from the state if I have a French bank account, too. This way the French bank account is financially even more than worth it.

Finally some rest at home...

On Saturday I slept till the afternoon, since fell asleep at around 6 a.m. so I didn’t really do much. I did the laundry and afterwards I fixed up my jeans a bit.

Using the washing machine costs €4 but this is approximately 50% cheaper than the usual price of self-service-laundry in a washing house or call it lavérie in Paris. I don't know about the prices of using a dryer at a lavérie but here it's included in the fee.

It was very pleasant to finally be at home for a whole day (or for as long as I was awake during the day) without having to leave my home.

On Sunday I could finally cook a carbonara sauce with torti pasta (yay!). Afterwards I cleaned a bit.

No, this is not an after-before pic but a before-after pic. It's impossible to make stains like that by cooking carbonara only. Or is it not? Anyway, afterwards I got familiar with my cohabitants on the same floor.

On Monday I made some administrative stuff for my new place of living like taking a picture (of my still unshaved face) at a photo machine for my residency card, doing payments and getting reimbursed due to excess payments.

Collecting phone numbers like a 5aus and the party at the Arc of Triumph

On Friday I went to an event for exchange students called the Crawl Bar. We received T-shirts and had to collect phone numbers from as many countries as possible on our new T-shirt. Back then I considered myself a rather shy person in front of strangers but looking back at that time I can’t repeat this statement anymore as I was literally asking everyone for their phone number (girls, boys, women and men alike), getting into numerous conversations while holding (and spilling and spilling...and of course spilling) my pint of beer. This is a real ice breaker but the problem was that the incentive given wasn’t to get to know new people but to ask as many people as possible for their phone numbers. There were many Students from North and South America and Western Europe but no students from Central America (aside from Mexico), Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Here’s my newly styled T-shirt.

Afterwards we went to a disco. Aside from waiting 30 minutes in a queue to get inside and waiting for another 30 minutes to drop our coats off at the wardrobe we could enjoy ourselves well at the party while we received 2 free drinks as part of the ticket we bought for the Crawl Bar, too. I ordered 2 Cuba libres and received...2 whisky libres. I hate whisky.

After deciding to go home and before getting on the bus I realised that I was next to the Arc of Triumph the whole time! This is the best smile my face could come up with at 4 a.m.

By the way, maybe it's time for me to shave.

Brazilian house and beer in red

After still not having slept even once 7,5 hours straight in Paris and worsening the average time a bit with 5 hours of sleep, after courses finished and after I retrieved my luggage from my friend’s storehouse I finally headed towards my place of living for the next months, la maison du Brésil (the Brazilian house).

Explanation: I applied for a room at the Swiss house of CIUP (abbreviation of Cité International Universitaire de Paris, a dormitory-like campus for master and doctor students and researchers) and got accepted but I was chosen to be a participant of the exchange program between the houses of CIUP and I chose in favour of the Brazilian house instead of the house of the USA. Pictures available on this web site.

Thursday's update: After the first night I had a terrible neck ache because of my unusual pillow. It still hurts while I'm writing this. In the evening there was a piano concert at the Brazilian house I participated in only as a part of the audience (after 10 years of not playing the piano I wouldn't dare to state that I can play the piano). During the concert I met a girl, then two of her friends, then we went to have some beer somewhere downtown (I'm still not sure where we were exactly). I had a hard time to tell which beer I prefer more, a red beer or a somewhat sweetened red beer. By the way, I just noticed that the beer matches my shirt!

At the suburb train station I couldn't believe what I saw at first but there were indeed several equations on the wall of the station. They were about the interdependency of many factors in the context of climate change. Here two examples.

While going home...of course I took the suburb train going into the wrong direction, why would I've chosen the right one anyway? It took me 2 hours instead of 30 minutes to get home. After the night bus had a random terminal station-like stop in the middle of nowhere I ran to the next bus station to get my connection. After I got off the next bus I decided to have some more night time exercise and to run back home, even though I was pretty tired, since I live ridiculously far away from that bus station and I wanted to sleep asap.