The Confused Angelfish

Easy Life

So, in Turkey, mostly a Muslim country, they have restrained the time when one's allowed to buy alcohol, regardless of the fact that 90% of people living there claim to have never have had a drink in their lives.

In Toronto, Canada, I went to an Indian restaurant. I got in and the waitress asked me if I was thinking of having a drink with my meal. Dumbfounded, I asked why she wanted to know. She explained that I couldn't sit in the Veranda if I was going to order a beer with my meal in order to avoid young people ~ passing by ~ seeing me having a good time and thinking they'd do the same once they'd be grown up.

If I wanted to have a beer with my Indian meal, I would have to sit where I was not facing the street.

In fact, in the whole city of Toronto, one can't buy any sort of alcohol in supermarkets. One would have to go to a place on the outskirts of Toronto, marked XXX, where winos hang around; and one would need a car to get there.

I did manage to find a place near-by selling wine. I bought a bottle of San Giovese for $CAD 10,00.
The same bottle of wine costs me 1,0 Euro at the local supermarket in Milan, Italy. You do the arithmetics.

Then, I got back to Milan. I went to the local supermarket and overheard fourteen-year-old kids talking on their mobiles to their school mates trying to decide what kind of booze to get for the end-of-school party: " Okay then, a bottle of Vodka; some beer;  some Cranberry juice; Martini; Prosecco; Negroni, and some Pineapple juice should do it, yeah?"

Go figure....

Will there ever be a day when women will truly be equal to men?

As I follow the news I can't help but reflect that so many things are just the same all over the world.

I remember my grandmother telling me to always walk keeping my gaze downwards; to smile without showing my gums, and to keep my my mouth close or I'll eat flies ~ difficult thing to do with swollen adenoids.

In fact, my grandma deemed me too pretty not to be morally deformed by it.

My parted lips were obviously a cause for concern as was my sitting by the window in modern-days London, England, in a Georgian house belonging to a white upper-class Anglican family.

" Don't you EVER make me catch you again sitting by the window looking out on the street. My, people will think we are running a brothel in here!" 

So I can't help but reflect:
Is Western society really that different from what we like to consider less-evolved ones?

Isn't it time things changed? It is, after all, 2014....