My first time in a TV live show

Zaira, a fried of mine living here, asked me if I would join her to go to a concert of Nino Katamadze. She said that it is rock music and I thought that there might be beer on the floor and people are jumping around on my toes. I therefore did not dress up and walked to the location. Well, it was this one:

The Tbilisi concert hall.

Most people were well dressed and it turned out that one is seated. First when we sit we realized that it is a TV lives how because of mother's day which is a national holiday in Georgia. The concert was therefore a special one with some guest singers and breaks where reporters were interviewing old people live around the country. These breaks were sometimes shocking because there was for example a retirement home that never had a heating. Sometimes it was funny when e.g. an old woman said her son would innocently be in jail and the minister for justice should release him. Yes, of course I did not understand a word but Zaira and the other girls kindly translated something.

Let's listen to a song of Nino: Nino Katamadze & Insight - Turfa

It was a charity show where one could donate money via mobile phone. To start the campaign the Georgian rugby team went it and people got crazy. They never played good in a world cup but rugby is very popular here. Because the show was broadcasted nation-wide the big companies of that country used this occasion and donated a lot of money. Who donated what amount was announced from time to time. In the end the show turned a bit into a commercial because also some researches were promoted some fundings and internships presented by different companies.

Part of the ladies crew (Magda, Martina, Keti and Keti).

The rugby team.

The awarded researchers.

The music consisted mainly of ballads. As I could not understand the text I was close to fell asleep. But suddenly the whole audience of about 2000 people start to sing with Nino - goosebumps! After the TV broadcasting was over the concert got rockier which is more what I prefer.

All in all a great experience since it was not only the first time in a live show but because it is exciting to see how it works abroad. And what tourist will get such an experience? I am therefore very thankful and was also well entertained.

About the Georgian script

The most read post in this blog was about Cyrillic. For this script I found a relatively easy way to learn it. For the Georgian script it is much more complicated because it is not derived from another alphabet. So one just has to learn it. Here is a transliteration table.

Obviously there fits no song but what about ვაკის პარკი - ბრძოლა წესების გარეშე (The Vake park is close to my location here.)

It took me five days until I could read Georgian and I am still struggling with some fonts. Like in Latin script the normal writing font has serifs. These small strokes ease the reading. For small texts like e.g. headlines or brand names one uses sans-serif fonts. The same is done for the Georgian script but in contrary to Latin the serifs make the difference. Compare e.g. these 3 different letters:
კ ვ პ
Modifying them makes it hard to distinguish them if you cannot understand Georgian. But sans-serif fonts are not the only hurdle. There exists also a short form for some letters. For example the რ can be written as h. (For more information see this article.) Here is an example of a font with simplified letters:

Try to read it using the transliteration table and you will fail. (It means "Procredit Banki").

Since Georgian script has no letter for the Latin 'f' they use for foreign words the ფ like in კაფე (cafe).

Tasty stuff

Continuing the last post, it is of course a long way to become a local and as foreigner you will never fully achieve this. However, the next obvious step is to learn about the local food.

Food comes from nature so let's listening to Fauna Flash - Mother Nature.

Georgia is famous for its filled bread. This image gives an overview about them:

Different types of filled bread.

I still don't know which ones contain what so it is always a surprise. Their taste differs strongly depending where you bought it. In any case it is a good advice to ask the bakers to put them into a microwave. This improves the taste for most sorts. If warming is not good, they will tell you that.
Some of the dumplings only look that way but are cakes. But the kind people here will tell you this.

Khachapuri and meat balls. This khachapuri was the medium version and was
so substantial that I could only eat it with the kind help of Amanda.

I try to eat food made in Georgia. The choice is small because Georgia is a small country. So if I cannot find Georgian food, I buy Russian, Turkish, Armenian or Azerbaijan food. This way I ate e.g. Belgian chocolate made in Russia and it was good.
For drinks the choice is unexpectedly large. There are many sorts of beer which I all liked and many sorts of lemonade. My favorite lemonade here is one with the taste of tarragon. One day I had minor problems with my stomach and a woman in a 24/24 store recommended to drink "real" mineral water. And it is indeed different, it tastes salty and the same time suppresses the thirst. I cannot remember when I only drank litre during one day. (I doubt it also cured my stomach problem.)

"real" mineral water
 

Tarragon lemonade. It doesn't actually
contain tarragon but I like it nevertheless.

Fruits are sold in almost every small shop. One can only buy seasonal food which is in my opinion sensible. Apples are therefore the most offered fruits. The fruit market is in front of the central station. It is not a nice market since the fruits are sold directly from the trucks. The upper floor of the hall is used like a normal market hall. 75% if its area was unused and the dozens of unused vitrines had a thick layer of dust on them. So something must have happened with the market. I assume that people prefer to buy their things in the small shops or in the new supermarkets. However one can buy there still fish, meat and sweets.

The fruit market.

Unused vitrines.

One of only two stands selling fish.

A specialty of Georgia are Churchkhela. In the fruit market are some stands offering different types and letting you taste before you buy something. I bought one filled with walnuts and can recommend it.

A Churchkhela.

The same one opened.

For more information about Georgian food see the this article.
There is of course also a dark side - German food! German food is obviously the cheapest one in the world and I have never been in a country where food is cheaper than in Germany (despite Germans have a very high salary). But why do people want to eat this? The supermarkets for the richer people advertise German food as something special but offer only the cheapest sorts. Every German supermarket brand has their own brand for cheap food. And these things are sold here for the double price. One can find here also more expensive German brands, for example for fruit juices. They must be able to sell their products so cheap that the long transport with trucks is still cheaper than the local or e.g. Turkish juices. This is not good for the environment and also not for the local companies.

The Schwarzwälder Schinken cost in Germany
about 1,6 € and here about 4,8 €.

How to become a local as quick as possible

Being a tourist is nice but being recognized as a tourist is uncool, isn't it ;-). Here is my semi-ironic receipt of becoming quickly a local in a new town with Tbilisi as example:

1.  At first store your luggage in the hotel and then go out dressed like the locals. I mean if nobody wears sunglasses then also don't.
2. Got to the next metro or tram station and buy a ticket.
   In Tbilisi they have the same system like Santiago's Transantiago: You buy a cheap card which you can recharge every time on demand. In Tbilisi's the card is named Metromani (MetroMoney).
   Now organize a map with all the lines or google it.
   This is an easy task in Tbilisi because there is no network map. There are 150 city bus lines and more than 200 minibus lines and no normal person can have all of them in mind. Moreover, the route of the lines change quite often. What the Tbilisi Transport Company offers is a real-time information and also an impressive trip planner (only for the 150 city bus lines).
   Important note: The minibuses and the city buses use the same numbers but minibus line 61 will not drive the same route of city bus line 61!
3. Get a local cell phone pre-paid card or contract.
   I decided in favor of Geocell. Al I needed was my passport because anonymous numbers are not allowed in Georgia. I got a SIM card put it into my phone and that was it. Whenever I like I can recharge the card. For example 2 GB Internet volume with my phone costs only 7 Lari. A minute calling costs only 10 Tetri and - I am not joking - a minute to Europe only 25 Tetri. This are 11 Cents while I would have to pay with my German contract incredible 3 €/min.
4. Now that you have got the basics use them to explore the city. The normal way is to try to buy something special. Imagine for example that you need a new battery for your camera (for your phone would be too easy).  It doesn't matter if you really need it or if you have a camera or not, just imagine this and go on. You might need the whole day and perhaps eventually fail. But this way you will travel wildly in the city, you speak to many locals and learn how everything works.
   If you are super lazy there is another way: Go to the nearest metro station (in cities without a metro use the tram instead) and drive until the second to last station of the metro line. There walk a bit around and find your way back home without using the metro or a taxi.
   In Tbilisi I did not have to imagine anything. At the end of the first day where I shot about 50 images without any problem, my beloved camera refused to work. I really tried everything.
   My Casio Exilim EX-H10, you were the best camera I ever had and I traveled with you around the world for 5 years without any problem. All images in this blog were taken by you and I never needed to photoshop any of your images before I uploaded them. RIP!
   I asked some people in the streets (many of them speak English) and could only find some small electronic stores. In one of them they sent me to their headquarter and this way I was in the Saburtalo area. It was a pain to buy a new camera because they are all so much more expensive than in Germany. Because Georgians are usually not very rich they either use their noisy smartphone camera or buy cheap ones which are noisy too. The only camera I found  with acceptable test results in the Internet was the 4 year old Nikon S8100. I could reduce its price by 50 Lari but still paid a horrible price. Now, 3 days later, I found out that the central rail station contains 5 large electronic markets offering many models and acceptable prices.
5. Buy your daily stuff where the locals do.
   In Tbilisi these are the thousands of small stores on almost every street selling water, bread, cosmetics etc.. Many shops are open also on Sundays and holidays and there are "24/24" stores which never close. Note that a "24/24" is not necessarily also a "24/7" store.
   To buy bread go to the many small bakery stores. They bake there the bread behind a glass wall allowing you to see how they make it.
6. Pay your stuff like locals. If everybody pays cash then don't use a credit card.
   Here in Tbilisi they have a very convenient system called PayBox or ExpressPay. These are automated machines which you can find almost everywhere in the streets. They allow you to pay all kind of stuff that could be paid like transport tickets, fees for water and waste, fines if you parked in a wrong way, mobile phone bills etc.. For example to recharge your Metromani card, just press it into a card reader and then insert some money.
   Now we have the right topic for the music: I:Cube - Cash Conv

The Tbilisi metro doesn't have the beautiful stations
like in other former Soviet Union cities.

In every station is a clock showing in
green the arrival time of the next train.

The metro stations are very deep in the
inner city because of the hilly geography.

The important bus stops have real-time information.
They are also displayed in Latin letters (switches from time to time).

 

The Metromani (MetroMoney) card.

View into one of the small bakeries.

An ExpressPay machine.

Its main screen. To recharge your Metromani
card press the upper left button.

A city bus.

A minibus.

Welcome in the land of the Lari

Yes, I finally made it to go to vacation. One month longer at work and I would have gone crazy.

Thus Gnarls Barkley - Crazy fits perfectly.

But where to go in March? One option was to fly to a tropical region e.g. to Latin America to polish my Spanish. But that would have been the easy way. I therefore decided in favor of Georgia.
The flight from Frankfurt via Warsaw (using LOT airlines) to Tbilisi was also very cheap.

I arrived here last Sunday very early in the morning. A friend of mine living in Tbilisi ordered a taxi for me to drive me to a hostel. Unfortunately the driver tricked me and I had to pay (50 Lari) twice as the official maximum price. So welcome in the land of the Lari (1 €= 2.3 Lari). (I write here Lari because its sign is brand new and therefore not yet available in standard fonts.)
It rained at 6°C and the hostel was closed. I also had no mobile access ("your location is not supported") and could therefore also not call the owner. But hey, I am in vacation and have time. I stored my luggage on the stairs of a house and started a first trip through Tbilisi.

It turned out that the hostel is directly at the famous Rustaveli avenue. This street was the heart of the Russian quarter. The vice king of Georgia in the 19th century was the governor of the Russian tsar and the avenue was therefore built as a boulevard with beautiful houses showing the power of the Russians. I'll write more about that in another post.

A House along the Rustaveli avenue.

The former building of the Georgian parliament.

The Kashveti church

I am still impressed that so many buildings are illuminated the whole night long. As soon as I find the time I will make some more night images.
I was also impressed that even at 8 in the morning the city was almost quiet. No buses no cars, even the McDonalds was closed. Now I learned that life starts here between 9 and 10. The official bureaus are the first at 9 and the rest follows until 10. Well, that fits perfectly with my intrinsic time!
At 8 in the morning I could ring the owner of the hostel out of bed and he said I cannot enter it until 14.He kindly allowed me to sleep in the living room on the floor.

As I only had 2 hours that night I slept most of the day and then run around wildly to get an overview where I am:

The building of my hostel.

Its backside.

Most of the old houses in Tbilisi need a general refurbishment. Even the beautiful buildings along the main avenues are only repainted. Of course Georgia had hard times and other problems than to refurbish old houses. They now start doing this slowly and it will be interesting to come back in a few years and to see how it will look.

Even beautiful houses are abandoned in best locations.

Still at the Rustaveli. The building with the tower is
used by the Georgian National Academy of Sciences.

The opera and ballet theatre is currently under renovation.
 

View from the Rustaveli up to the TV tower.

Also at the Rustaveli are some huge hotel buildings.
The church in the middle is the Holy Trinity Cathedral.

A first view over the town.
 

Later on, in the hostel I met Amanda from the US who live in Prague but had to leave the Schengen Area to get a long-term visa for the Czech republic. Yes, the world is complicated. We went out to a bar she found in the Internet and ate beans in the pot:

Skeptic Amanda with her beans.

Since then many things happened and I could at least write 10 posts. Please forgive me, I cannot write down everything right now and I need some sleep to be fit for the cycling tour tomorrow to Mtskheta.

მადლობა და მშვიდობით

Blackberry OS 10

Nachdem jeder kostenlos für sich wirbt und gegen Bezahlung auch für Andere, kommt jetzt die Neuheit: kostenlose Werbung für Andere.
Den Auftakt dieser einteiligen Werbe-Serie macht BlackBerry OS 10.

Zur musikalischen Untermalung empfiehlt sich Le Grand Uff Zaque - Cliché.

Ich war und bin mit der Hardware meines Outdoor-Smartphones Motorola Defy+ recht zufrieden. Das Problem ist hingegen dessen Betriebssystem Android 2.3. Motorola hat für das Defy+ nie Updates zur Verfügung gestellt, so dass das Telefon sicherheitstechnisch offen wie ein Scheunentor ist. In letzter Zeit hängte sich das Betriebssystem immer öfter auf und einige Apps begannen Android 2.3 nicht mehr zu unterstützen. So habe ich also ein eigentlich voll funktionstüchtiges Gerät und kann es nicht mehr richtig benutzen.

Verärgert habe ich das Internet durchstöbert und bin als benutzbare Alternative auf Apple iOS (iPhone) und BlackBerry OS 10 gestoßen. iPhones sind toll, aber doch arg teuer also habe ich mich für BlackBerry entschieden. Das Blackberry Z30 hat in etwa die technische Ausstattung wie ein iPhone 5 und hat mich neu nur 250 € gekostet, statt neu 430 € für ein iPhone 5.

BlackBerrys Telefone kannte ich nur vom Hörensagen als Geräte für Geschäftsleute und war überrascht, was deren Betriebssystem (OS) so alles kann. Da BlackBerry aus der Geschäftswelt kommt, ist das OS perfekt auf Produktivität zugeschnitten. Die Eingabe von Text begeistert mich immer noch. Ich habe noch nie so etwas Effektives gesehen. Das System lernt unglaublich schnell die Wörter, die man mal getippt hat, so dass ich schon nach einer Woche Emails zu einem Großteil fix schreiben konnte, indem nur noch die Wortvorschläge nach oben "schnippte".

Das Texteingabesystem; Bildquelle

Das System erkennt dabei bis zu 3 Sprachen gleichzeitig. Man kann also ohne Probleme in einer spanischen Mail englische Fachbegriffe schreiben. Statt Text einzugeben, kann man ihn auch einfach diktieren. Das Ergebnis ist zumindest mit Deutsch wirklich gut. Man muss nur wenig nachträglich korrigieren.

Wie die anderen Handy OSe hat BlackBerry 10 auch einen Sprachassistenten und Apps im Überfluss. Der gravierende Unterschied ist jedoch, dass BlackBerry 10 ein Echtzeitbetriebssystem ist (QNX). Dadurch laufen verschieden Prozesse wie Apps parallel ohne sich gegenseitig zu behindern. Das ganze System läuft daher flüssig ohne irgend welche Ruckler. Davon abgesehen haben die BlackBerry Entwickler die grundlegenden Funktionen wie Kalender, Alarme, Mail, Musik, Browser usw. sehr gut ins OS integriert. Zudem kann man seine Daten im OS auch verschlüsseln. Das funktioniert ohne dass man sich damit beschäftigen muss und scheint so sicher zu sein, dass es für die sichere Kommunikation von Bundesbehörden zugelassen ist. Wenn man das Telefon dienstlich nutzt, kann man den dienstlichen Bereich klar vom privaten Bereich trennen.

Mir gefällt als zentrales Feature der sogenannte Hub. In diesem Fenster werden zentral alle Meldungen wie Mails, SMS, Anrufe, Facebook-Neuigkeiten, Alarme/Termine uws. gesammelt. So hat man alles im Blick und kann zudem einstellen was wann wie angezeigt werden soll. Hat man z.B. laut Kalender gerade eine Sitzung, werden (wenn man das will) automatisch alle Anrufe unterdrückt und eine Entschuldigungs-Mail oder SMS geschickt.

BlackBerry Hub; Bildquelle

Wenn man sich im Netz umschaut, liest man oft, dass die BlackBerry Telefone eine gute Hardware und meist die beste Sprach- und Empfangsqualität haben. Aber es wären ja "nur" langweilige Business-Phones. Das ist jedoch eine Auszeichnung. Denn um produktiv zu sein, braucht es ein sauber und sicher laufendes System, bei dem man sich auf seine Arbeit konzentrieren kann, ohne am System basteln zu müssen. So ein System kann man für alles einsetzen und ich habe noch nichts gefunden, was ein BlackBerry gegenüber einem iPhone nicht kann. Wer viel facebookt oder twittert wird die Texteingabe genauso lieben wie jemand, der viele Mails schreibt. Videos und Spiele laufen ohne Einschränkungen und die beiden installierten App-Stores von Blackberry und von Amazon bieten alle erdenklichen Apps an. So verwende ich eine App, die die Lautstärke der Umgebung messen kann, sowie ein Metronom, Offline-Wörterbücher, Karten- und Navigationsdienste. Also alles was man benötigt, kann man haben.

Eine Stärke von BlackBerry ist dessen Politik. So haben kürzlich alle Geräte, die mit BlackBerry OS 10 laufen, die neueste Software bekommen. Man kann sich also auch ein Mittelklasse-Gerät kaufen und hat trotzdem dieselbe Software wie beim teuren High-End Modell.
Die meisten Anwender brauchen keinen High-End Prozessor oder eine Kamera mit riesiger Auflösung. Wenn man ehrlich ist, reicht ein Mittelklasse-Gerät für den Alltag vollkommen aus, wenn die Software alles kann was man benötigt.

Mehr zu den Funktionen von BlackBerry 10 gibt es hier.
Sehr detaillierte Tests aktueller Geräte gibt es hier: Z30 (was da zur Software steht, ist nicht mehr aktuell), Passport, Classic

Fazit:
Wer sich ein neues Smartphone zulegt, sollte auf jeden Fall auch mal ein BlackBerry-Gerät probieren. BlackBerry war früher Marktführer bei Smartphones und muss sich nun anstrengen um zu überleben. Dadurch muss es gut auf die Kundenwünsche eingehen und innovativ sein. Beides habe ich bei Googles Android vermisst. BlackBerry OS 10 steht Apple iOS in kaum etwas nach. Mit einem BlackBerry lässt sich hingegen Geld sparen und man hat mehr Geräte zur Auswahl als bei Apple.
Übrigens kommt mit dem BlackBerry Leap demnächst auch ein Mittelklasse-Gerät ohne Tastatur auf den Markt.

Mal wieder die Anstalt

Die Anstalt ist mittlerweile Dauergast denn sie spricht mir so oft einfach aus dem Herzen.

Ich hatte ja kürzlich einen vielleicht etwas unrunden Eintrag über Satire geschrieben. Die aktuelle Die Anstalt-Sendung ist hingegen professionell und mal wieder grandios, von Anfang bis ganz zum Ende!:

Die Anstalt vom 3. 2. 2015

Genug gelobt, anschauen!