Friday, June 23, 2006

Moving, cleaning, and Arabic flag

The young whippersnappers who sold me the apartment were a bit unfamiliar with the concept of cleaning it first, which led me to buy and use more cleaning fluids than during all my previous life. Hmm, maybe it's all for the better.

I am not sure why one of the closets was full of soil, but being a mostly charitable person I should assume that they were growing roses in there.

The packing is in full swing, 23 boxes packed, 27 to go. 6 terrifying torture devices purchased, on the off chance that one of them might be installed in the living room ceiling to hold the lamp. The final lamp solution for the bedroom has not been found yet, but there is no way I am having the ceiling lamp over my bed, since changing the lightbulbs would be hell.

Today in the Stockmann bread department there was a saleswoman who was obviously an Arab (she had an Arabic name and spoke Arabic with a customer) and I noticed that there is no flag on her advertising this fact. (Stockmann employees usually wear flag buttons so that the customers know which languages a particular employee can speak.) Then I remembered that the guy in the fish department who seems to be an Arab too does not have a flag either. And then I realized: which flag? There are about 20 Arab countries. You can use English flag for English, Spanish for Spanish, etc. just because that's where the language originally came from, but something tells me that using the Saudi flag by the same token might be unpopular.

Now I feel like calling Stockmann and asking them which flag they would use if they had to. If I were them I'd use the flag of the country whose dialect the particular employee speaks, but that's just me.

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