Posts
Having lived in the Baltic States for the last four years I've come to realize what a useful lingua franca Russian still is. Not a popular statement with some, no doubt. But the fact remains, since I've moved between Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn, eaten in enough restaurants, had enough run ins with police for minor traffic infringements (I was never once stopped by the police in 15 years of driving in England; in the first year of driving in Lithuania I lost count once I'd got into double figures) and tried to chat up one or two girls, it's become abundantly clear that Russian language skills are a must have here. Still.
The being held up for half an hour at the Lithuanian Polish border by officials suspicious of my UK passport and LT registered car ('I think he's from the Ukraine' one was heard to say, in Lithuanian) in pre-schengen days could so easily have been avoided; though I could have just spoken Lithuanian to them.
Here in Tallinn it's a bit different 'cos the standard of English is higher than in Riga or Vilnius (both of which were also good) in my experience, and also since Russian has a political connotation to it that's, if certainly present, not quite so seemingly contentious in the other two cities. But there's still a sizeable Russian speaking population here. Only yesterday I was surprised when the Russian shop assistant at my local Comarket perked up and said 'pazhalasta' in reply to my 'spaseeboh'; she had assume I was Estonian and used the standard 'aitäh'... since I'm neither Estonian or Russian it's not an issue for me and I give both languages equal footing.
There are few things more turgid or egregious in my opinion than ex-pats pontificating about Russians, or the relative situations of the Russian and Estonian languages here, seemingly almost always people who can speak neither language.
For the people that live here, sure it's a live issue. For outsiders, STFU. I don't think British people would think much of someone coming over there and gobbing off about Northern Ireland or, Scottish independence or the position of the muslim community in the UK regardless of their views.
So, I'm learning Russian and making really good progress. In fact in some ways my Russian is better than my Estonian already, even after just two weeks of learning (as opposed to a year and a half of Estonian). How so? Well, for English speakers, Russian is easier than Estonian, of that I'm convinced. There are plenty of cognates, and it is a very efficient language. But more than that (all foreign languages are hard in the end!) I've got hold of the Michel Thomas courses. For those not familiar, he was a language teacher who set up a school in Beverley Hills and whose clients were the great and the good, although he'd come from a Polish-Jewish background and fought in the French Resistance during WW2. In fact his discovery of the ability to block out pain whilst being tortured by the Gestapo was something he applied later to the language learning practice, which is effortless and certainly painless. No myriad of teacher's and student's books with catatonically dull or irrelevant subject matter and opaque grammatical explanations, no notes, no memorizing. His method's a bit like marmite, it tends to polarize people between likes and hates and it has its detractors. I'd done the German one some years ago and so was already a fan, and so I tried the Russian course, which is not done by the great man himself (he passed on a few years ago) but uses the same method and has an engaging lady teacher. One of the two students is intensely irritating, sitting a bit close to the microphone I think, and abusing Russian pronunciation horribly, but not enough to put me off. I'll see how I go next time I'm in Comarket....
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Top Ten European National Anthems
'cos Europeans do rousing tunes that put the rest of the world in the dark...
In no particular order...
In no particular order...
- Poland
- Netherlands
- Hungary
- Scotland
- Latvia
- Estonia/Finland
- Portugal
- Lithuania
- Italy
- ...and what should be England's
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Why You Should Invest in Silver Rather Than Equities or Even Property
Mention investing to a lot of people and it'll have them running for the proverbial hills. This can be for several reasons. Some are just afraid; it's risky - I could lose it all. Others don't think they're worthy of it. It's for well spoken people (or alternatively cockney barrow boys) in suits who drive flash cars, I can't cut the mustard with those types. Others still see it as selfish or greedy, or at the outer fringes of this continuum, part of an evil world system destined to be destroyed sooner or later by mass, direct action.
As with most prejudices and mass beliefs, this bears little resemblance to how it really is. I'll look at the above points in reverse order. Investing isn't in my opinion inherently wrong, or evil, or harmful to poor people in itself. Yes, it can be, and ethical investing could be one of the biggest growth areas in years to come as people seek comodities, industries or companies which don't exploit third world labour or damage the environent unduly. A good way to help the poor is to avoid joining their ranks if you can; productive people can and often do create wealth, not just horde it. Certain religions even require a fixed percentage of income to go to the poor and, call me old fashioned, but philanthropy is one of the nicest words in the English language.
It's easy to be intimidated by the appearance of the 'wealthy' , or at least what many people picture the wealthy to be like (but then again is anyone intimidated by a specky geek in Washington State or an old buffer in Omaha, Nebraska?). But it's OK to swim with the minnows. Swim with the sharks and you'll get eaten pretty quickly but starting small and keeping in the middle of the shoal until you've reached a decent size can be one of the smartest things anyone can do, and possibly a lot of fun too. There's no shortage of help out there with the internet, books etc and, surprise surprise, some investors might actually want to help other people to learn investing too. I don't see my ESL students as competition to my English language skills such as they are and am delighted by any progress that gets made.
Back to the first point, the risk. True, investing can be very risky, if you don't know what you're doing. Hand over your hard earneds to someone who has a qualification which may (as is the case in the US apparently) have taken a shorter time to acquire than official accreditation to practise as a masseuse, to invest in little pieces of paper (not even pieces of paper any more, just numbers floating in the ether) which can be extremely volatile, in an environment which no doubt lends itself to favours, incompetence and downright dodginess, and you could spend a good while regretting it. You wouldn't give your weekly food budget to a stranger and say 'go out and buy me some food' after all.
But there are safer, less or acceptably risky ways of investing if you're prepared to do your homework. Equities are possible, and there are indeed day traders here in Tallinn who, so far as I know, make a good living just doing that, sitting at their computers buying and selling and clearing all their positions by the end of the day .You have to know what you're doing there and of course you need the time. And equities markets can and do crash as we all know. Try borrowing money from banks to invest in equities!
Real estate (with the emphasis on the word 'real') can be a better bet. Speaking from experience, again you need to monitor things closely. Handing over your property to an agency and disappearing overseas can come back to bite you on the arse later on if you don't keep tabs on things. Of course you can't manage things yourself from a distance, and if like me you have practically zero DIY ability you'll need to pay people from time to time for the repairs and alterations which will happen from time to time even if you do live in the vicinity. And there's been a lot of bullshit surrounding the real estate market in the UK; the buy to let bubble in the early '00s attracted squillions of amateurs (like me) who didn't really know what they were doing, on the premise of being able to make a quick buck because they were 'buying at the right time' whatever that means. Suddenly everyone became an expert on real estate and 'knew' when was the 'right' and 'wrong' time to buy (like there's a right or wrong time to buy a bag of potato chips, for example).If only it were that simple. This goes just as well for so-called experts (journalists, surely the lowest in the primordial ooze of the food chain, certainly way below salesmen and women, who at least aren't as a rule bone idle and silly).
There are professional investors out there who know what they are doing, but to join their ranks you need to have a bit of capital behind you for deposits (especially now, since although banks will still queue up to lend you money to buy property, the days of self-cert. mortgages, the UK equivalent of sub-prime, are over) and that's just the beginning. You need to have a good idea of why you're buying a certain property. Just so that you can say you own property like everyone else isn't a terribly good reason. One sensible reason is for capital gains, ie how much it will go up over the years so you can sell it at a profit - and remember the property market can sort of crash too, though not like equities. The other is for the income. If the rent you get from it is higher than the outgoings from the mortgage, insurance, service charges etc then it's a (taxable, probably small) income. You also need to know how you're gonna pay off that mortgage - is it interest only (in which case you're just giving money to the bank) or repayment?; are the tenants gonna be able to pay it off for you through their rent payments (something called amortisation)?, is the rate fixed or variable? (mine is variable meaning it goes up or down with the Bank of England base rate - since that is low right now in an effort to rejuvenate the economy it's nice 'cos the monthly payments are much lower than the rent, but when the economy picks up they'll go up again. It's not possible for me to change to a fixed rate at the moment, that's how tight the banks are right now, they're seemingly not taking on any new business from existing customers; what is the yield? (ie the profit you can expect to make in relation to property value - calculated by total rent for the year x 100 divided by market value, this naturally changes but 5 per cent is considered a benchmark minimum); what you're gonna do when there are void periods (when there is no income cos the flat's empty - I've just had two and a half months of empty flat simply 'cos one of the tenants was a freak who disturbed other residents in the house and caused the co-tenant to move out, thus ending the agreement); what's the plan if the roof caves in or the boiler breaks down?..
..so the key word is control., how much influence you have over what goes on at the property. If you've not done your sums and continued to do them, you'll slip up sooner or later. As I'm overseas I have very little control over what goes on and so have to pay fifty quid every time a lightbulb needs changing (I'm only half joking) and I didn't do my sums in the beginning, I got an IFA (read: salesman, same as for equities) to do them instead. He told the banks my income was twice what it actually was. So I'm selling. Fortunately even in the downturn there's capital gains there so all is not lost, though this is largely down to chance.
An alternative is to do the same here in Estonia, and I may well do in future, but again, knowledge, control and, here, contacts are necessary if you wanna minimize risk, along with ideally Estonian language skills, and I don't have these fully yet.
Which brings us to the silver thing. If you'd mentioned this in the past it'd have conjured up images of pirate mapes with little Xs on them or shrewd, one eyed (not necessarily Jewish) dealers looking at things under magnifying glasses, but things have moved on since then. You can buy actual physical silver in the form of coins or bullion bars, but of course need somewhere safe to keep them. You can also invest online, for example here. Be sure to check out the credentials of the website beforehand of course (the aforementioned is kosher). So you don't need any physical silver in your home, they'll store it for you...at a cost, naturally.
But why silver? It's often dubbed the 'poor man's gold' and that's seldom if ever been truer than today. Silver has been hovering around the 17 USD per ounce (about 28 grams) mark in recent weeks, whereas the yellow metal is as high as 1100 USD for the same amount. So if you've got that kind of money lying around then go for gold, but otherwise, you don't need to be rich to start investing in silver. Furthermore it's a precious metal, of course, so it's never going to be worth nothing. Not ever. The only crash I'm aware of was in the early 80s after changes in regulations following the aptly-named Hunt brothers' attempts to corner the market led to a hugely artificially inflated price. Gold's price seems way high right now and we may see something of a downturn there in the future.
Silver is also likely to become scarcer. According to one figure I read, 95 per cent of silver has already been mined, so unless they suddenly find a whole load more, supplies will dwindle Add to this the fact that, unlike gold, silver has an industrial application. So a lot of it gets used up (compare that with gold - most of which that has been mined is still in existence somewhere). Photography is still an important use, even with the advent of digital cameras. It's value seems likley to rise more, although over the last ten years it has seen a steady increase from a little over 4 USD per ounce 10 years ago, to around 17 today (though the peak was in December 2007 at about 21 USD). So put simply, if you bought silver ten years ago (as I'm fairly certain, no less a man than Warren Buffet did) you'd have seen more than a quadruple return if you sold it now. Which sounds pretty good to me. Compare that with real estate in the UK at least, where over the sane period you'd be looking at less than double your money at current prices, depending on when and where and how etc. Then you'll have to deduct the mortgage debt from that.
There are potential pitfalls with silver too. Not everything that's called silver really is silver, rather like those silver stars you used to get as a schoolkid for a reasonably good essay; this is where the one-eyed magnifying glass person comes in. If you're buying physical silver coins or bullion you wanna look for something like Ag 999 which means it's practically all silver (but technically still an alloy). If you're investing in virtual silver you don't need to worry about that as noted above.
Another downside is environmental damage. Silver mines in places like Papua New Guinea, Indonesia or Peru, operated by the big mining companies such as BHP Billiton or Rio Tinto can and do cause environmental damage (silver is rarely found on its own but often along with other metals like lead). And I doubt the miners get paid all that much.
But on the plus side, today's price is today's price, not some wishlist price that can be the case with real estate either 'cos the owner gets greedy and believes they can get an overinflated price, or were hooked in by an estate agent who wanted the business and so overvalued the property, only for things to get protracted for long enough for the real value to drop further than was really the case in the beginning.
I remember laughing at some younger kids of a family friend who, upon visiting them, boasted about their 'real money' that they had, before producing a small gold bullion bar each, but they were right and this is the real reason you should invest in silver (or gold if you can, or why not Platinum, or Rhodium, or Palladium...) - it is real money. The cash we carry round with us, or (in some cases) spend ages squirrelling away for a rainy day, is forever losing its value. You need to spend it on something concrete really. This is why it's called currency. What do currents do but move, if they're any good? I remember as a kid being confused by the wording on UK banknotes about promising to pay the bearer on demand the sum of...however many pounds it was. I hopefully thought it meant somebody had to give me another ten pounds for the one I already had, if I demanded it, that was. This in fact derives from the days when a note was just a receipt for ..... a precious metal like gold or silver! Someone kept your gold for you safely so Dick Turpin or whoever didn't get it and you or the person you paid (or who robbed you) could retrieve that gold or silver at a later date by presenting this promissory note. Over time, it just became easier to pay and be paid in notes but the physical precious metal to back it still existed somewhere. These gold or silver standards have come and gone, but the final coup de grace was delivered by Richard Nixon who removed the US dollar from any kind of gold standard and made it free floating in December 1971, surely his biggest fuck up after (or even ahead of) Watergate.
Most other currencies followed suit if they hadn't already which means we now have'fiat' currency, which essentially means it's the monetary equivalent of the cars, if that...there's nothing backing the currency and government are free to print as much as they want when they feel like it. In the most extreme cases this can lead to crises such as that of the Weimar Republic when, as the story goes, someone going to buy bread left a wheelbarrow full of notes unattended and came back to find the wheelbarrow gone but the money untouched, or more recently, the million trillion dollar notes, or whatever they were, in Zimbabwe.
I wouldn't normally pay any attention to 'survivalist' extremists in the US and elsewhere as such people have an agenda that goes far beyond a mere desire to survive come what may, but I think they are right in their reported practice of storing silver and gold for the very reason that in a currency collapse, as real money, this could be the difference between life and death; at least if the hordes of lowlives streaming out of the big cities don't get their hands on it.
Don't just take my word for it, I'm just a humble part-time ESL teacher with an 11 year old Toyota Corolla diesel after all; good advice and information can be found here and here. And just to show I am trying to practice what I preach, I got myself down the Bank of Estonia Museum (much more interesting than it sounds) on Friday to make my first silver investment - 850 kroons (a bit less than 50 quid) on a couple of commemorative coins. These are the kind of thing I used to thing so boring as a child, or something that geeks collected. The 100 Kroon one actually costs 500 Kroons! Shit, I hope my address isn't anywhere on this blog - never mind, there are lots of Puumajas in Tallinn!
As with most prejudices and mass beliefs, this bears little resemblance to how it really is. I'll look at the above points in reverse order. Investing isn't in my opinion inherently wrong, or evil, or harmful to poor people in itself. Yes, it can be, and ethical investing could be one of the biggest growth areas in years to come as people seek comodities, industries or companies which don't exploit third world labour or damage the environent unduly. A good way to help the poor is to avoid joining their ranks if you can; productive people can and often do create wealth, not just horde it. Certain religions even require a fixed percentage of income to go to the poor and, call me old fashioned, but philanthropy is one of the nicest words in the English language.
It's easy to be intimidated by the appearance of the 'wealthy' , or at least what many people picture the wealthy to be like (but then again is anyone intimidated by a specky geek in Washington State or an old buffer in Omaha, Nebraska?). But it's OK to swim with the minnows. Swim with the sharks and you'll get eaten pretty quickly but starting small and keeping in the middle of the shoal until you've reached a decent size can be one of the smartest things anyone can do, and possibly a lot of fun too. There's no shortage of help out there with the internet, books etc and, surprise surprise, some investors might actually want to help other people to learn investing too. I don't see my ESL students as competition to my English language skills such as they are and am delighted by any progress that gets made.
Back to the first point, the risk. True, investing can be very risky, if you don't know what you're doing. Hand over your hard earneds to someone who has a qualification which may (as is the case in the US apparently) have taken a shorter time to acquire than official accreditation to practise as a masseuse, to invest in little pieces of paper (not even pieces of paper any more, just numbers floating in the ether) which can be extremely volatile, in an environment which no doubt lends itself to favours, incompetence and downright dodginess, and you could spend a good while regretting it. You wouldn't give your weekly food budget to a stranger and say 'go out and buy me some food' after all.
But there are safer, less or acceptably risky ways of investing if you're prepared to do your homework. Equities are possible, and there are indeed day traders here in Tallinn who, so far as I know, make a good living just doing that, sitting at their computers buying and selling and clearing all their positions by the end of the day .You have to know what you're doing there and of course you need the time. And equities markets can and do crash as we all know. Try borrowing money from banks to invest in equities!
Real estate (with the emphasis on the word 'real') can be a better bet. Speaking from experience, again you need to monitor things closely. Handing over your property to an agency and disappearing overseas can come back to bite you on the arse later on if you don't keep tabs on things. Of course you can't manage things yourself from a distance, and if like me you have practically zero DIY ability you'll need to pay people from time to time for the repairs and alterations which will happen from time to time even if you do live in the vicinity. And there's been a lot of bullshit surrounding the real estate market in the UK; the buy to let bubble in the early '00s attracted squillions of amateurs (like me) who didn't really know what they were doing, on the premise of being able to make a quick buck because they were 'buying at the right time' whatever that means. Suddenly everyone became an expert on real estate and 'knew' when was the 'right' and 'wrong' time to buy (like there's a right or wrong time to buy a bag of potato chips, for example).If only it were that simple. This goes just as well for so-called experts (journalists, surely the lowest in the primordial ooze of the food chain, certainly way below salesmen and women, who at least aren't as a rule bone idle and silly).
There are professional investors out there who know what they are doing, but to join their ranks you need to have a bit of capital behind you for deposits (especially now, since although banks will still queue up to lend you money to buy property, the days of self-cert. mortgages, the UK equivalent of sub-prime, are over) and that's just the beginning. You need to have a good idea of why you're buying a certain property. Just so that you can say you own property like everyone else isn't a terribly good reason. One sensible reason is for capital gains, ie how much it will go up over the years so you can sell it at a profit - and remember the property market can sort of crash too, though not like equities. The other is for the income. If the rent you get from it is higher than the outgoings from the mortgage, insurance, service charges etc then it's a (taxable, probably small) income. You also need to know how you're gonna pay off that mortgage - is it interest only (in which case you're just giving money to the bank) or repayment?; are the tenants gonna be able to pay it off for you through their rent payments (something called amortisation)?, is the rate fixed or variable? (mine is variable meaning it goes up or down with the Bank of England base rate - since that is low right now in an effort to rejuvenate the economy it's nice 'cos the monthly payments are much lower than the rent, but when the economy picks up they'll go up again. It's not possible for me to change to a fixed rate at the moment, that's how tight the banks are right now, they're seemingly not taking on any new business from existing customers; what is the yield? (ie the profit you can expect to make in relation to property value - calculated by total rent for the year x 100 divided by market value, this naturally changes but 5 per cent is considered a benchmark minimum); what you're gonna do when there are void periods (when there is no income cos the flat's empty - I've just had two and a half months of empty flat simply 'cos one of the tenants was a freak who disturbed other residents in the house and caused the co-tenant to move out, thus ending the agreement); what's the plan if the roof caves in or the boiler breaks down?..
..so the key word is control., how much influence you have over what goes on at the property. If you've not done your sums and continued to do them, you'll slip up sooner or later. As I'm overseas I have very little control over what goes on and so have to pay fifty quid every time a lightbulb needs changing (I'm only half joking) and I didn't do my sums in the beginning, I got an IFA (read: salesman, same as for equities) to do them instead. He told the banks my income was twice what it actually was. So I'm selling. Fortunately even in the downturn there's capital gains there so all is not lost, though this is largely down to chance.
An alternative is to do the same here in Estonia, and I may well do in future, but again, knowledge, control and, here, contacts are necessary if you wanna minimize risk, along with ideally Estonian language skills, and I don't have these fully yet.
Which brings us to the silver thing. If you'd mentioned this in the past it'd have conjured up images of pirate mapes with little Xs on them or shrewd, one eyed (not necessarily Jewish) dealers looking at things under magnifying glasses, but things have moved on since then. You can buy actual physical silver in the form of coins or bullion bars, but of course need somewhere safe to keep them. You can also invest online, for example here. Be sure to check out the credentials of the website beforehand of course (the aforementioned is kosher). So you don't need any physical silver in your home, they'll store it for you...at a cost, naturally.
But why silver? It's often dubbed the 'poor man's gold' and that's seldom if ever been truer than today. Silver has been hovering around the 17 USD per ounce (about 28 grams) mark in recent weeks, whereas the yellow metal is as high as 1100 USD for the same amount. So if you've got that kind of money lying around then go for gold, but otherwise, you don't need to be rich to start investing in silver. Furthermore it's a precious metal, of course, so it's never going to be worth nothing. Not ever. The only crash I'm aware of was in the early 80s after changes in regulations following the aptly-named Hunt brothers' attempts to corner the market led to a hugely artificially inflated price. Gold's price seems way high right now and we may see something of a downturn there in the future.
Silver is also likely to become scarcer. According to one figure I read, 95 per cent of silver has already been mined, so unless they suddenly find a whole load more, supplies will dwindle Add to this the fact that, unlike gold, silver has an industrial application. So a lot of it gets used up (compare that with gold - most of which that has been mined is still in existence somewhere). Photography is still an important use, even with the advent of digital cameras. It's value seems likley to rise more, although over the last ten years it has seen a steady increase from a little over 4 USD per ounce 10 years ago, to around 17 today (though the peak was in December 2007 at about 21 USD). So put simply, if you bought silver ten years ago (as I'm fairly certain, no less a man than Warren Buffet did) you'd have seen more than a quadruple return if you sold it now. Which sounds pretty good to me. Compare that with real estate in the UK at least, where over the sane period you'd be looking at less than double your money at current prices, depending on when and where and how etc. Then you'll have to deduct the mortgage debt from that.
There are potential pitfalls with silver too. Not everything that's called silver really is silver, rather like those silver stars you used to get as a schoolkid for a reasonably good essay; this is where the one-eyed magnifying glass person comes in. If you're buying physical silver coins or bullion you wanna look for something like Ag 999 which means it's practically all silver (but technically still an alloy). If you're investing in virtual silver you don't need to worry about that as noted above.
Another downside is environmental damage. Silver mines in places like Papua New Guinea, Indonesia or Peru, operated by the big mining companies such as BHP Billiton or Rio Tinto can and do cause environmental damage (silver is rarely found on its own but often along with other metals like lead). And I doubt the miners get paid all that much.
But on the plus side, today's price is today's price, not some wishlist price that can be the case with real estate either 'cos the owner gets greedy and believes they can get an overinflated price, or were hooked in by an estate agent who wanted the business and so overvalued the property, only for things to get protracted for long enough for the real value to drop further than was really the case in the beginning.
I remember laughing at some younger kids of a family friend who, upon visiting them, boasted about their 'real money' that they had, before producing a small gold bullion bar each, but they were right and this is the real reason you should invest in silver (or gold if you can, or why not Platinum, or Rhodium, or Palladium...) - it is real money. The cash we carry round with us, or (in some cases) spend ages squirrelling away for a rainy day, is forever losing its value. You need to spend it on something concrete really. This is why it's called currency. What do currents do but move, if they're any good? I remember as a kid being confused by the wording on UK banknotes about promising to pay the bearer on demand the sum of...however many pounds it was. I hopefully thought it meant somebody had to give me another ten pounds for the one I already had, if I demanded it, that was. This in fact derives from the days when a note was just a receipt for ..... a precious metal like gold or silver! Someone kept your gold for you safely so Dick Turpin or whoever didn't get it and you or the person you paid (or who robbed you) could retrieve that gold or silver at a later date by presenting this promissory note. Over time, it just became easier to pay and be paid in notes but the physical precious metal to back it still existed somewhere. These gold or silver standards have come and gone, but the final coup de grace was delivered by Richard Nixon who removed the US dollar from any kind of gold standard and made it free floating in December 1971, surely his biggest fuck up after (or even ahead of) Watergate.
Most other currencies followed suit if they hadn't already which means we now have'fiat' currency, which essentially means it's the monetary equivalent of the cars, if that...there's nothing backing the currency and government are free to print as much as they want when they feel like it. In the most extreme cases this can lead to crises such as that of the Weimar Republic when, as the story goes, someone going to buy bread left a wheelbarrow full of notes unattended and came back to find the wheelbarrow gone but the money untouched, or more recently, the million trillion dollar notes, or whatever they were, in Zimbabwe.
I wouldn't normally pay any attention to 'survivalist' extremists in the US and elsewhere as such people have an agenda that goes far beyond a mere desire to survive come what may, but I think they are right in their reported practice of storing silver and gold for the very reason that in a currency collapse, as real money, this could be the difference between life and death; at least if the hordes of lowlives streaming out of the big cities don't get their hands on it.
Don't just take my word for it, I'm just a humble part-time ESL teacher with an 11 year old Toyota Corolla diesel after all; good advice and information can be found here and here. And just to show I am trying to practice what I preach, I got myself down the Bank of Estonia Museum (much more interesting than it sounds) on Friday to make my first silver investment - 850 kroons (a bit less than 50 quid) on a couple of commemorative coins. These are the kind of thing I used to thing so boring as a child, or something that geeks collected. The 100 Kroon one actually costs 500 Kroons! Shit, I hope my address isn't anywhere on this blog - never mind, there are lots of Puumajas in Tallinn!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Don't Think Too Much, Or At All
Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Aaron... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. With a career spanning over half a decade, he has enthralled readers with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You and Become a Millionaire Whilst On The Toilet.
Hi, it's Walt here again, with a few thoughts for the day...How come people say 'meteoric rise', when meteors go downwards, through the earth's atmosphere? Where did all the gruntled or ruthful people go? Why can't I have dain for something? Where is Old Zealand?
Well, if you're gonna spend time thinking about these things you're not gonna get rich and successful, like me. Thinking is a useful skill, I know I do it from time to time. But sometimes it's better just to act without thinking about something, and just see what happens. It's bound to be something good. When you get an idea or an urge, remember the adidas slogan - 'just do it now, you prick', whether it's making an impulse purchase, crossing the street or firing someboday. Just do it now, you prick.
Here's hoping you won't be thinking too much today, it's for losers who become perpetual students and earn less in a year than I spend on lattes with cinnamon to go.
Walt.
Hi, it's Walt here again, with a few thoughts for the day...How come people say 'meteoric rise', when meteors go downwards, through the earth's atmosphere? Where did all the gruntled or ruthful people go? Why can't I have dain for something? Where is Old Zealand?
Well, if you're gonna spend time thinking about these things you're not gonna get rich and successful, like me. Thinking is a useful skill, I know I do it from time to time. But sometimes it's better just to act without thinking about something, and just see what happens. It's bound to be something good. When you get an idea or an urge, remember the adidas slogan - 'just do it now, you prick', whether it's making an impulse purchase, crossing the street or firing someboday. Just do it now, you prick.
Here's hoping you won't be thinking too much today, it's for losers who become perpetual students and earn less in a year than I spend on lattes with cinnamon to go.
Walt.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Talented Estonians
Came back from teaching yesterday evening to find my neighbour constructing what I thought was a bed (it was actually a shelf) in the hallway. What a useful ability to have! I recently bought a crap flatpacked wardrobe for my flatmate, which was about on a par with one of those Nicholas Owen Priest holes in its complexity but without the aesthetic value, and even then the doors don't shut properly. And I don't wanna think about how much it cost...
..my neighbour tells me that under the old system, if you wanted something quality like that you really had to make it yourself hence learning such skills but, and all of us westerners who live here in the baltic states probably feel this, it makes us look like a load of feeble, spoilt incompetents, especially when it comes to home improvement matters! Maybe I'll ask him if he can make me one.
For some reason mozilla doesn't like aljazeera.net, at the moment, I don't know why. Have to access it through IE.
..my neighbour tells me that under the old system, if you wanted something quality like that you really had to make it yourself hence learning such skills but, and all of us westerners who live here in the baltic states probably feel this, it makes us look like a load of feeble, spoilt incompetents, especially when it comes to home improvement matters! Maybe I'll ask him if he can make me one.
For some reason mozilla doesn't like aljazeera.net, at the moment, I don't know why. Have to access it through IE.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Why I'm Not Sure About Teaching English Anymore
It's not the crap pay (measure for measure - it's possible to receive something halfway decent for your teaching hours but then one has to prepare and, if you're like me and have a little bit of OCD regarding these things, that's a lot of time consumed where you're working for free)...it's not even, in this part of the world anyway, the surly, uncooperative students (sometimes, not the majority of the time)...it's the fact that English seems to be the linguistic equivalent of the cane toad, or that green slime that you get on ponds that gets everywhere and chokes everything.
In the way that, I understand, when cats were introduced to the Antipodes by the Europeans, it had a catastrophic (feeble pun intended) effect on the local ecosystem, since there was no equivalent predator of that size endemic there, English seems to have a stranglehold on the rest of the world's languages.
From tacky loan words, something that Russian got an early start with (the story behind the Russian word for train station being particularly poignant) to hilarious websites with Chinese 'Engrish', to the Basil Fawlty-like expectation that 'there must be someone here who speaks English' that virtually any native speaker of English seems to have, it seems to be everywhere.
I must say it's great that there's a lingua franca that might at times iron out misunderstandings between people and nations (and on the other hand probably causes them too) and it's even better when that language happens to be your own mother tongue, but I'm not sure if I want to be a part, however small, of the global tide of language hegemony.
On the plus side, for the rest of the world anyway, this may not last forever. If you'd said to medieval man that Latin would be a dead language understood only by a handful of people in a few centuries' time, he might have laughed at you. What the next lingua franca might be I have no idea; Spanish seems to be the only one that comes close in terms of 'ease', or so they say, and ubiquity. I can't see it ever being Chinese whatever happens with the country's status in the world.
In the way that, I understand, when cats were introduced to the Antipodes by the Europeans, it had a catastrophic (feeble pun intended) effect on the local ecosystem, since there was no equivalent predator of that size endemic there, English seems to have a stranglehold on the rest of the world's languages.
From tacky loan words, something that Russian got an early start with (the story behind the Russian word for train station being particularly poignant) to hilarious websites with Chinese 'Engrish', to the Basil Fawlty-like expectation that 'there must be someone here who speaks English' that virtually any native speaker of English seems to have, it seems to be everywhere.
I must say it's great that there's a lingua franca that might at times iron out misunderstandings between people and nations (and on the other hand probably causes them too) and it's even better when that language happens to be your own mother tongue, but I'm not sure if I want to be a part, however small, of the global tide of language hegemony.
On the plus side, for the rest of the world anyway, this may not last forever. If you'd said to medieval man that Latin would be a dead language understood only by a handful of people in a few centuries' time, he might have laughed at you. What the next lingua franca might be I have no idea; Spanish seems to be the only one that comes close in terms of 'ease', or so they say, and ubiquity. I can't see it ever being Chinese whatever happens with the country's status in the world.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Quality Soda Street
This video, which Seth linked to in his blog, is, as people used to say in England (or maybe still do, I've been away 4 years) quality - it speaks for itself so I won't, but needless to say I wish there was a store like this in Tallinn, particularly as I'm now on the waggon indefinitely...
Introducing The Puumaja Crew's Latest Addition
Tim Flowers is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher based in the capital city of one of the baltic states. He is 42 years old. His previous job was working for the Post Office (main sorting office - as a superintendent) and this excellent and relevant background has given him a good grasp of the fundamentals of the English language, and the art of teaching it to others.
He hails, as he likes to say, from Northamptonshire in England, a very glamourous part of the world indeed, and so is not at all out of place mingling with the gliterati of the Old Town where he hangs out on a Friday or Saturday night.
He likes beer.
We join Tim's diary of an ESL teacher just as he is emerging, pumped and swearing, from a successful lesson...
He hails, as he likes to say, from Northamptonshire in England, a very glamourous part of the world indeed, and so is not at all out of place mingling with the gliterati of the Old Town where he hangs out on a Friday or Saturday night.
He likes beer.
We join Tim's diary of an ESL teacher just as he is emerging, pumped and swearing, from a successful lesson...
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