You sleep too much, or Our culture will kick your culture's ass!

Imagine it is (finally!) Sunday and you are sleeping. It's 7:30 in the morning and the alarm is turned off... when suddenly some terrible din throws you out of bed. That would be your good neighbor from upstairs or, to be more precise, the workers he hired to remodel his flat.

You see, there's thing in Ningbo called hezu. It's equivalent to the cubicle farm, but done with living space instead of office. You take the flat with only bare necessities (a toilet and a poor excuse for a shower), partition it into small cages and put twelve people in the space that was designed for three. It's popular with migrant workers and pays the mortgage (leaving a hefty profit for the owner as well) and you get to evade taxes (no written contracts!) as a bonus.

We had one of these upstairs populated by hairdressers and ladies of certain, ahem, profession. Then one sunny summer day the owner decided to marry and evicted everyone. Nightmare started shortly after that.

During the first week they tore down all the cubbyholes. With sledgehammer. Working in the morning only - I mean like 8 AM. Then they removed windows... and disappeared. Flew south for winter, I guess. As we had no such h option, our apartment was even colder than it was the previous winter. After the workers came back with the birds and installed new windows  we thought our troubles were almost over... and then the drilling started.

Now, I understand that it comes with the remodeling. But the bastard who owns the place upstairs kept changing work crews and the last one... well, they work only on weekend mornings. Starting at 7:30 AM.

So being roused from my bed I naturally went to complain and suggest they work on weekdays or at least start a bit later. What did they tell me? You'd never guess...

"Ningbo is a city of high culture so we don't give a shit about goddamn foreigners who sleep too much."

High culture indeed...

Wings at the speed of... snail?! or, Will it fly?

Imagine that you need to go halfway across a decently-sized country, like China. As the only train that goes to your destination takes twenty-something hours to get there and the ticket price is the same anyway, you buy the plane ticket. Two hours sounds better than twenty for the same price, right? Or so you think...

Well, maybe it works for some people out there, but looks like it's broken in the 'cultured city's of Ningbo.

I have booked the flight with China Southern on Saturday. Fly to Guangzhou, arrive around 5 PM, have some rest and go to Hong Kong Sunday morning was the plan. Well, as you must have guessed it didn't work out.

First of all, the plane was late and we took off 3 hours after scheduled departure time. Two hours later we arrived. To Wuhan, which is about the same distance from Ningbo but to the West. OK, they told us we will have to wait half an hour... an hour, tops... and off we go to our destination. Three hours later they let us off the plane. Three hours after that they cancel the flight despite the fact that the weather have cleared in Guangzhou (turns out we were stupid to get off the plane - they wouldn't cancel the flight were we still on board).

Now I know where my taxes go, or Appeasing the unsatiale?

I really should stop reading news. Reading this article have confirmed what I always knew: The taxes I pay are used in many ways... almost none of which is beneficial.

You see, Ruud Gullit is considered a star. And why should a veritable star choose to train the backwater team in bandit-infested place? Ok, the challenge may play a big part in it, but he would expect the adequate compensation for it. Chechnya isn't exactly the safest place in Russia.

But surely they can afford it, right? Well, the answer is: Yes. The industry in Chechnya was destroyed during the wars, many of the people who stayed there seem to forget how to do honest work, but there are money in Chechnya. I have heard tons of stories from my friends about Chechens coming to China and buying stuff like furniture, expensive lighting fixtures, gilded toilets (yes, they make these here) in quantities that make the palaces of Tzars look like a woodsman's cabin. But how do they get the money?

The first answer that comes to mind is crime. When there's war, drug trafficking and slavery (yes, some of these Chechen 'freedom fighters' did keep slaves) – some people are bound to get rich. But again, as my sources have told me, the people coming to China for gilded toilets were nothing of the kind, they were no murderers and slave drivers. Some of them were sometimes arrogant and pompous, but no drug traffickers between them.

Quite a lot of Chechens have fled to the interior Russia, or have moved there long before the war started. There are prominent businessmen of Chechen persuasion... but they are not the ones buying 50-meter Jacuzzi pools in China (they order them from Italy). So how come these men are so rich?

Well, after the war they decided to rebuild Chechnya with the idea that if Chechens had honest work to do, homes to live in and some peace they will stop killing schoolchildren and taking people in hospitals hostage. It almost worked (there still are terrorist bombings, but that's what you get with radical ideology – radical Islam in this case – infiltrating your country). But the plan did not work as planned, it seems.

But the policy of appeasing the Chechens has some rather spectacular failures. Every nation on Earth has it's share of jerks. Chechen jerks sometimes are being rather loud, what with "Chechen Pride parades" that were popular some years before (all the stupidity of Gay Pride parade, but with gun firing and reckless driving) and firing guns in the center of Moscow now and then, but the cases are often dismissed in courts as they claim it to be "the national tradition". But again, the jerks are a small (although loud) minority, and "being a jerk" is in no way a defining characteristic of Chechen people in general. And again, the people building palaces in Chechnya are not of this sort.

The answer is simple. Russia have been pumping money into Chechnya from the moment the Kadyrov clique took power. Right now everyone with any influence there is swimming in money and they build palaces and equip their motorcades with Porsches, as their mentality is on the feudal level. So it's our tax money that pays for the football hobby of Kadyrov, for the palaces with garages filled with Porsches and gilded human waste receptacles. And their appetites are growing...

There <em>won't</em> be a vigil in UK, or Sometimes people are <em>almost</em> sane...

Ok, here's the follow-up to the previous piece. According to the news on BBC's site. Far as I can see, there's no outcry condemning "those evil communists" over this execution. Now maybe I will beleive in humanity a bit more... I do not beleive that the little turd deserved to live after what he'd done, and I do hope that more little turds will take this as a warning. Sadly, human race seems to understand brutality much better than kind words...