The new chat thread - now with bitter arguing

i've been in liptovsky mikulas between the 15th and the 20th of august, and in trstena from the 20th to the 25th, the latter was the one i liked most, the places, the food :p, the people were very nice :)

Yes, the north-west and north parts of Slovakia are the most beautiful, and also people there are much friendlier than, say, in south-west (basically the closer to Bratislava, the worse :) ). I like Liptovsky Mikulas quite a lot, but Ive yet still to explore the parts around Trstena. Did you go to High Tatras? They are the best we have here imo. I have not been there this year, but I plan to during indian summer.
 
I passed my exam, one of the bigger ones. :D I haven't felt this happy in quite a while. Oral tests are trully evil, since my shyness and nervousness plot against me and whenever i'm asked a question they shut my brain and my mouth down. But i did it this time, so yay! Now i'm something between happy, extremely stressed, sleepless, with stomach aches and zombie eyes.
 
congrats, siren! in Belgium, I always found it somehow better when we had oral exams in high school, because when you are stuck somewhere, the teachers can give you a hint and then you can find back what you need. Exept when it was oral exams for foreign languages, because i am always afraid of speaking in an other language than french.
Here in Germany, i only had one oral exam, and it went as bad as it could go...
 
@marduk: i actually have a friend who went hiking in the tatras two weeks ago. he didn't come back yet, but i hope he will eventually. :p

@siren: superstardom! congratulations. :)
 
@hyena: thanks! :D

@D_S: thank you! we never had oral exams in school, except for the usual every day questions that didn't feel like exams at all. in uni we only started having orals in the last years, and i did my best to avoid them for as long as possible. i always do better in written exams cause i have more time to think and i don't feel any kind of embarrassment or "i have to answer immediately" pressure. and somehow in writtens everything i have read seems to magically come to me, as if i have better memory channels for this.
 
nf: slow. i was stupid and left my mobile phone at the gym last night, so now i need to go and retrieve it (thanking the heavens, i go to a posh club where stuff does not get stolen, and the moment i called to ask whether they'd found it they told me they had and also they already had turned it off until someone claimed it). and then i have to proceed to work, where a disaster simulation for payment systems awaits me with malicious glee - i need to have the thing finished, along with a paper describing what it does, before october 1st, and it's really going to be a close thing.
 
@marduk: i actually have a friend who went hiking in the tatras two weeks ago. he didn't come back yet, but i hope he will eventually. :p

@siren: superstardom! congratulations. :)

Hmm, Tatras can be really dangerous, so I also hope he is ok. The highest mountain has "only" 2655m, so people tend to forget they are already in the high-mountain chain, be it the smallest one in the world. He is not Czech by any chance? Because 95% of fatal accidents in the Tatras are Czech people. Their highest "mountain" has 1602m, but when they come here, they behave like natural born alpinists, and eventually fall down like plums.

@Sirenoulitta: My big congrats to you!!! The only nightmares (meaning bad dreams looking and feeling totally real) I have are related to my time at uni, so I really know how you are feeling now. Enjoy the relief! :)
 
the other night a nail about an inch long decided to get to know one of my tires better, ironically enough the mechanic said that that kind of nails come from newer vw golf and my car is also a (old) golf.

Yes, the north-west and north parts of Slovakia are the most beautiful, and also people there are much friendlier than, say, in south-west (basically the closer to Bratislava, the worse :) ). I like Liptovsky Mikulas quite a lot, but Ive yet still to explore the parts around Trstena. Did you go to High Tatras? They are the best we have here imo. I have not been there this year, but I plan to during indian summer.

unfortunately i didn't go there, i went to the low tatras though, i'm not much of a hiker, so i took a lift and admired the panorama :p
i think of going back anyway, possibly with a car, those areas are beautiful but, being all small towns, not very accessible.
and the people quite surprised me indeed, try going in a small town here where i live and put up a little pictionary show to buy meat, :p oh the looks you'd get.

@siren: congrats! i have many oral exams in my course, a good part of my exams have a written, an oral and a practical part, so i know what you mean, i'm always terrified of that moment when all i learned disappears and the akward silence that follows :ill: though the exam i think i've done better in the whole course was oral, and also a tough one, one of the professors actually told me she loved me :p . i think that, if you studied and manage to overcome the shyness a bit, oral exams allow you to express yourself better, especially if you're interested in the subject and do some additional research on the matter.
 
@marduk: my parents too have nightmares about exams and uni, but i haven't had any yet. i suppose they appear after the ordeal is over, right? in that case i'm screwed... and i was hoping i had escaped (the nightmare). :p


@hiljainen: thanks. :) i think that the only way (for me at least) to do well in orals is to have studied very well. that way there will hopefully be more information readily available to be spewed to the prof, after the first shock subsides. :p
 
@plintus: when i mentioned patrick bateman in relation to you i was doubly right. i was re-reading bret ellis' the informers tonight and all the talk of cars made me think of you. aside from this, i have a question for you in a professional capacity. you're at least partly in real estate, right? how is the market faring with the subprime crisis and all?
 
Haha, I've got to get my hands on that one, then I'll be able to tell you how accurate that is :)

As of real estate: yes, I'm more or less related to it, but I'm not a realtor per se, and I can just give a general impression of how things are going. However even I know that market sucks ass at the moment, and such things are promising to stay this way till 2009. South Jersey was hit pretty bad, and even though I wanted to get into specifics with a realtor I know, after I found out he was about to sell his house and was on a verge of not paying bills, - I refrained from that, as it didn't seem like a good idea any longer.

Sales in the region (South Jersey resorts, $1+ mil homes) are very low, even on lower end (cheaper homes), haven't heard anything about massive foreclosures or anything like that (yet!), but professional realtors are suffering. This state is crawling up to Philly, even though it still depends - they are about to build something amazing in the neighborhood: a tower with single units on each floor (i.e. one floor = one unit, no idea how many bedrooms, but that's gona be high-end).

Anything particular you'd like to know? I could try connect with an expert before he does anything to himself :S
 
thank you. i was browsing through foreclosure sales sites today (california, LA region) and some deals looked extremely interesting, wonderful seafront places in malibu or santa monica being sold for RIDICULOUS prices. so i was wondering when the lowest of the low points would come. i don't have any leverage possibilities right now, but in 2 years the situation might change. so the question is - why did you mention 2009? is there a consensus about the crisis being bound to last 2-3 years and if so why? i don't see why it should be that long, given the reaction of the federal reserve and the US government, but i'm looking at things from afar and might miss some fundamental detail.
 
Real estate market has these waves - past several years (before 2006) were extremely good, but now it's all falling back to suckage again. Reasons? This time it's some new rules and regulations I just heard of some time ago, which changed can turn everything around in some time... or not.

2009 was mentioned by some market researchers (I saw a reference in real-estate related tech blog) as the latest, when everything should start going back to normal. No guarantee it will happen sooner (or later). At the current date it could be the lowest point (however LA might be a different story, all data I'm working with is NJ/PA area).
 
Since i'm completely ignorant regarding real estate, can someone explain what good and bad market means? Who is it good and bad for?
 
@siren: normally "a good market" is good for the sellers: high prices, lots of demand. a bad market is: prices fall, nobody wants to buy houses anymore