Ritalin Smoothie

If I hear one more person moving overseas who claims that living anywhere but downtown deprives him/her of an authentic cultural experience, I will reach into the screen to slap that person silly. Traditional old town/downtown is often filled with tourists and, worse, tourist traps. I would actually prefer to live somewhere less hectic and more residential. The outlying residential areas where most natives live offer even more authentic local experience, I'd argue. I suspect that all they could afford was the one with the awkward layout that they chose, and that the other two apartments were picked for the episode just for show.

Could someone on this board enlighten me as to what possible medical condition (other than Tourette's) may cause a person to tremble/shake uncontrollably? Seriously though, when I saw Talia last night jerking wildly, my first thought was that she had some phyiscal issues. I also remember another constestant from an earlier season who was holding the buzzer behind his back but still visibly swayed from one side to another. He annoyed a lot of posters on the forum with his appearance back then, but I susptected that he was trying to control his trembling by keeping his arms behind his back but couldn't manage to do so completely for the entire episode.

Oh, so many things to say about the Playa del Carmen episode. When the son-in-law said that he and his wife came up with the idea of buying a vacation home and therefore should get the master bedroom, I turned to Mr. RS and said, "He isn't a very good actor--can't even deliver the line fed to him decently." More power to couples who can vacation with their in-laws. And even more power to those who BUY a vacation with their in-laws. (That tells you how much I do things with my in-laws.) Even though they say the costs are split 50-50, somehow I still think that the parents are paying for more than half the condo. When people buy an overseas vacation home, do they really treat it as a second home? Unlike, say, a lakeside cabin that you can easily drive to, it seems to me that you can't realistically (moneywise or vacation-time-wise) fly down there more than 3 times a year. If that's the case, do you treat it more as a pied-a-terre or a hotel room? That's why the discussion about the master bedroom seems silly to me. If the 2 couples really synchronize their vacation schedules so all 4 stay in the condo at the same time multiple times a year, then yeah it matters; otherwise, what's the big deal? But if I visit the place at most 3 times a year, to me it's still just a hotel room rather than a second home.

I also thought their sing-songy Scottich brogue was very charming, but the longer I listened, the more I found the cadence of their speech very familiar to someone else's on TV and I couldn't figure out who it was. It bugged until I realized that their intonation was like Raj's from Big Bang. And 6 months of winter in Bergen? That may make me jump off the funicular.

Methinks this couple comes from pretty well-off families or they themselves are trust fund babies. The sense of entitlement/expectation just oozed from their pores: second bedroom, second bathroom, AND a study area for two underemployed people. Of course they chose a riverfront apartment; of course he wants a toilet in the bathroom and doesn't understand why a whole country prefers a WC; of course she has extra money to go to culinary school and dreams of opening up her own café (if she only realizes she'll have to wake up at 3 every morning 7 days a week to run that thing); of course they expect to live a charmed life. ETA: And his French accent left me unimpressed.

And how the hell can a couple with a federal government housing stipend afford a US $4K+ apartment in Paris? I don't think our government is THAT generous paying foreign service employees . . . right?