karmicdragonfly

This is actually sort of related to the San Francisco trip.

While I was wasting time surfing the web on the iPhone in the airport, I stumbled across this tip on how to take a screen shot on the iPhone.

You press the Sleep button at the same time as the Home button. The screen will go white for a millisecond, and the screen pic will be saved to your camera roll (on the iPhone) and to the recent photos (on the iPod Touch).

Norway

Now, I don't have an iPod Touch. So, you might wonder how I know the buttons work on that as well? The reason I know it works on the iPod Touch is because of the Norwegian guy next to me on the plane back from San Francisco. I got him to try the buttons on his iPod, and it worked for him as well.

I was talking to him -- evidently, Norwegian keyboards have 3 extra keys -- for 3 extra vowel sounds they have. I didn't realize that Norway had been ruled by Denmark for several hundred years, so that Norwegians can mostly all read Dutch. And most can understand spoken Dutch. Norwegians can also usually understand Swedish as well, although it might not be the reverse that the Dutch or the Swedes can understand Norwegian.

His hair was not blond...a point that I noted. He said that that was mostly true for the Swedes, but Norwegians were more Celtic.

I asked about the Finns. Evidently, their language is closer to Hungarian. I was surprised!

He spoke of the "customs crap" that visitors go through coming into the US. He made the point that it is not best practice to treat people who are trying to come into the US to spend money like crap, the way that US customs treat visitors.

I agreed with him that treating visitors like that does not curb terrorism. I mean, really, if the terrorist is intent on his/her job, then he'll be very nice as he/she goes through customs, right? The legitimate visitor is the one who is most inconvenienced by the ugly fingerprinting and waiting in lines policies.

He was a nice guy, easy to talk to. He was going back to Norway to attend graduate school (free to Norwegians).

Brooklyn

I also had a decent time talking to the woman to the other side of me (yes, unfortunately, I was in the middle seat!). She was retired to Florida. I asked where she was from originally, and she asked "Can't you tell?" I told her that yes, I could tell she was from New York, but that I was being polite, lol! She was from Brooklyn originally.

I told her that if she had tried to pass off that she was from someplace, like say, Savannah, then I might not have believed her. At that point, she launched into a really, really (really) bad imitation of a Southern accent, lol!

She had just come from a Shakespeare theater festival in Oregon that she and one of her children and his family attend each year.

Nice woman.