When I was at school (UK) there was a German girl and a Swiss girl talking in German and one of them said “Scheiser” really loudly, the teacher turnes and glared at them and slowly they realised why and had to apologise to the teacher, as they hadn’t really thought that while he couldn’t understand, he still knew the swear words!

Wasn’t a big deal was just funny and everyone laughed (incl teacher), needless to say they were a bit more cautious after that.

Excellent analogy

All airports fly to Rome

If it plays music, it will play adverts

I thought so too before moving here, but there’s two cities, and a lot of empty space (in the north in particular) with lots of towns and villages, it’s not like Monaco or the Vatican City in that regard.

That being said, it’s still all very close together, you can drive from the northern most point to the south in about 1.5-2 hours.

The funniest thing I’ve learned about the geography is that there is a North/South divide where people from either don’t trust people from the other.

Schengen - the village in Luxembourg where the Schengen Agreement was signed. The population was 5196 in 2023 (appears to be the last census quoted on Wikipedia) and the “Schengen Area”, covered by the agreement represents 450m people.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

deleted by creator

Caution CW: contains simulated road accident resulting in death - was considered safe for TV in the UK

https://youtu.be/mKHY69AFstE

I think OP was picturing a situation like this.

A Choose your own Adventure Rejection

Edit: didn’t remember strikethrough formatting correctly

I’d never really thought about until now, but do Chinese (specifically mandarin speaking) 3 year olds use Ma in place of the English speaking equivalent of “why” (repeated ad nauseum until the adult being questioned snaps!)?

Ooooohhh…it’s a scythe

It’s Latin for “a person not welcome”

Thank you for sharing this. I’m going to try it out on my Italian friends :)

Yes, particularly as I get older the equipment doesn’t drain fully and needs a little help.

There’s a rhyme about it “no matter how much you shake and dance, the last few drops go down your pants”, well I choose to wipe instead of relying on the absorbance of my pants or trousers (the original saying is American so means trousers really).

Unfortunately masks are most effective when the person with COVID wears them, rather than people who are trying to avoid COVID, but human nature is such that people with COVID (ones who go out in public) are often ones least worried about it so least likely to wear a mask in the first place.

I had a similar experience where I went to a conference and masked up religiously around groups only to catch it anyway while my colleagues didn’t mask and didn’t catch it.

Sometimes you can do everything right and still fail (paraphrasing Picard).

I agree, the job of politicians is to reframe Trans rights as policies that benefit everyone. If everyone at a negotiation feels like they are winning you have a successful negotiation. Who cares if the new policy disproportionately benefits one group, we are all better off because of it, and in the case of Trans rights give them the same (non-codified) protections as everyone else.

(This is if course ignoring the oft used tactic of the far right which is to do the opposite and reframe beneficial policies (eh. ACA) as something that only benefits one group by calling it a funny name (eg. Obamacare), so it’s easier said than done, but that is what the democrats should be doing more of, imho)

Gedit

First visit to the vet plays out like an Abbot and Costello sketch!

45 and 47

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

(The more things change, the more they stay the same)