So I sent lzh this article about average salaries or wages or whatever (I could never remember the difference, except that ‘salary’ is allegedly derived from the Latin word for ‘salt’ (sal? sel?) and it came to mean “money you earn” because Roman soldiers were often paid in salt, or some such bullshit) and her response was words to the effect of:
But that isn’t so different from what we earn here!
So basically, even with me as just another foreign teacher and her having just started her career, we’re probably better off in Beijing than in NZ. Or in other words, here in Beijing it’s not so much us not being worth our salt, as our salt not being worth us, and in New Zealand, it’d be even worse.
And on the subject of news from the NZ Herald (meaning: yet another tangent):
Alinghi has decided to shit all over the culture of one of the world’s strongest yachting nations (and that ‘strongest yachting nation’ bit isn’t an idle boast. NZ has always been near the top, if not at the top, of the sport). Sure, it’s only the America’s Cup, which is really just a bunch of rich bastards wasting money, but still, the least they could do is try to come up with a legitimate excuse…. Oh wait, America’s cup, which has a history of fighting things out in the courts and other inappropriate places for all sorts of bullshit reasons as much as actually sailing. I say that when Team NZ wins, they change the rules to make it a series of waka races around the Hauraki Gulf.
And why the hell does Switzerland even try to pretend it can have a yachting team, anyway?
