Random thoughts on exhaust gas smells, welfare states, and language patterns

Still busy, but of course there's some time to procrastinate by writing a blog entry and writing down some random thoughts.

1) Exhaust gas smells
It still striking to me how exhaust gas smells differ between countries. While in Germany many times I don't smell anythink (as long as you are not standing at a busy road, of course), it's different here in Mexico and in many Asian countries. In Mexico, apparently the invention of exhaust filters still didn't have its breakthrough, yet. The cars here blow out such huge smoke clouds, it's incredible. As a side note, my roomies already make jokes about the frequency with which I use increíble (incredible). Mexico still is a country of discoveries for me.

My "second home", Asia, has totally different smells than we have here in Mexico. In Vietnam and Cambodia there are so many "motobikes", so the typical smell can only be their "lawn mower fragrance". Especially in Hanoi and HCMC this can be striking. Together with some strange mixture of Pho and fish sauce...
It might be very stereotyped, but actually Thailand really boasts the smell of "tuk-tuk". Along with the scent of frying oil... aaaah, missing all the Thai delicacies... Now some deep-fried mashed taro roots and tofu cubes would make my day...
Surprisingly, with China I don't associate any certain smell. Despite the extreme air pollution it didn't embed in my memory anything in particular (perhaps because I didn't enjoy my stay there too much, anyway).
Ah, not to forget Japan. As you can expect from a highly developed country, here you mostly don't smell anything, especially in winter time. This perfectly reflects the visual state of the country: Clean and flawless.

2) Welfare states
Here in university to notice a strong influence from United States. Teachers sermonize that welfare states are not a viable solution in a global competition. Pure capitalism, here we go. Ok, so my dear professors, would you please have a look at today's post of Paul Krugman? As we can see in the following picture, countries which have done pretty well during the crisis (read: Germany) have increased social expenditures from 2007 on - in contrary to "problematic" states like Spain:

Source: NY Times blog of Paul Krugman

3) Language patterns
To get some "fresh input", I recently engaged myself in the Thai language (to be honest, I really really miss Thailand...). While working in the country of smile I focused on improving my Japanese language skills, and I didn't make an effort to actively learn Thai. But in seven months of course you pick up some phrases. And that's when I always thought that Thai grammar is not only pretty straightforward, but also much more similar to German than let's say Japanese. Let me give you an example:

"I have good eyesight" in Thai is:
ผมมีตาดี (Phom mi dta di)

This literally translates to:
I have eye good

Yet, in Japanese the same sentence could for example be: 
私は目がいいです (watashi wa me ga ii des)

Meaning:
I *topic marker* eye *subject marker* good is

At least to me, Thai grammar is pretty similar to what Western speakers are used to. Additionally, it has some pretty easy rules, for example a preceding "mai" negates the sentence:
"Chai" = Yes
"Mai Chai" = No

"Au tung" = Could I please have a bag (slightly impolite)
"Mai au tung" = No bag, please (slightly impolite)

The Thai alphabet is awesome. It's like our Western alphabet based on consonants and vowels, but at the same time it codifies the tone and length in which a word has to be spoken (remember that Thai boasts five different tones). Moreover, the vowels' position doesn't coincide with the sequence of pronounciation. This might sound very complicated, but in fact it's not that hard to learn and many rules are really straightforward. Thanks to my experiences with mnemonics for Japanese language learning, it was really fun to remember the Thai alphabet. I modified a coding pattern of an American mathematician, which allowed me to link a character with its pronounciation and tone class.

Thai characters are so elegantly curved and a real feast for the eyes. As I said, it's really a great way to take your mind off all the uni stuff.

And I think alphabets to a certain degree really reflect a nation's mentality. As you can see in the sentences above, Japanese characters (which heavily relies on Chinese characters like 目) are well-ordered, strict and clear.
Thai characters, which are derived from Sanskrit (on which the Hindi Devanagari script is based), are artistic, playful, round, kind of "upside down" and "happy" (just as I am, learning this script). I think these characteristics really reflect some of these nations' overall tendencies.

Ok, enough for today, now back to real work. Have a nice week(end)!