Scribbling #36: Welcome to Earth

It's 4 a.m and I've been awake now for the last half an hour due to Mrs. C accidentally knocking over a glass while attending to JJ, which shocked me completely awake as opposed to the near-sleepy-wakefulness that happens when you're concerned with your two-month old.  The cleaning up and making sure everyone was fine period happened vaguely smoothly, with not even a peep from the baby.  Me, on the other hand, still had that "I'm now wide awake enough to be annoyingly awake so that I can't actually get back to sleep again".  So I turn to my secret weapon.  I turn to BBC News.

I didn't know it was my secret weapon until I used it just now.  That's how secret it is.

So, anyway, I decided, after seeing some worrying Facebook statuses, that I would look up the current financial crisis that's happening in the Eurozone, with a side order of "look how well UK is doing in comparison, see?" or something to that effect.  There was a nice little graph that went with it, and according to that, Slovakia still has the highest GDP growth in Europe.  It's higher than Germany.  Germany. With all their big machines, and their precision, and their chocolate and watc- no, wait, that's Switzerland.  I always get the two confused...

Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised to see this, since a lot of top management are very ambitious.  I teach English at a couple of firms, and there are a lot of nice cars outside the front door... and I mean like Audi R8s, big Mercs, Jags and the like.  It's good to see, and half of these guys don't even have a degree, it seems.  It's mostly just the will to work long hours and getting on with the job at hand, and of course, having the right connections, which is all part and parcel in this bit of the world.

Swinging lazily from one extreme to another, the other one is bears.

The conservation of bears in Slovakia has really taken off in the High Tatras, according to some charity groups (like Bear Project), and they're now taking interest in the goings-on and the food in the local villages.  I mean, the bears are now taking an interest.  Not the charity groups.  Although both are probably true. Most bears are now going home with new fashion accessories, sporting the latest collars, which was a far cry from the 80's where the latest gadget to have given to you by a human was basically a space shuttle clamped to your forehead.  Wife bears wonder where the heck their husbands have gone to, rummaging through Mrs. Olgarova's rubbish again and coming back to the forest at all hours of the morning.

I'm getting tired.

Good night.