Saturday 1 December 2007

The waiters of Tajikistan

The waiters of Tajikistan have long been considered the best in the world. The main reason for their superior waitering skills is their vigorous training which closely resembles the training of indian tabla players where the student is trained by a master from a young age. The Tajik waiters tradition is as old as the country itself and is believed to have originated in a small village near lake Zorkul in the Pamir mountains. The village priest, according to myth, had all the young men undergo a series of tests that helped him filter out those that had the best sense of balance and a willingness to learn. These select few were brought on to a kind of floating hut in the middle of the Zorkul where they spend the next years of their lives mastering the art of serving so that they may better serve the gods in the afterlife. Tajik waiters are not easily spotted in the worlds restaurants and cafés because they have taken their art on to an other level altogether. They are the waiters that you don´t remember as part of their skill is to minimize their presence and thereby giving you a sense of direct contact with the chef. The Tajik waiters are sometimes called "the invisible ones" and have always been surrounded by a cloud of mystery and traditionally don´t marry as females normally don´t notice them. Next time you have a particularly enjoyable meal at a restaurant your waiter just might have been one of the waiters of Tajikistan.
The end.

Pyramid Island


In 1483 a small island state, somewhere in the southern hemisphere, decided that what it needed was it´s very own pyramid. "A pyramid is a sign of a civilized and developed culture and every mordern people should have a pyramid. It can be used for many different things and gives it´s surroundings a sense of history and dignity.", the rulers/government said to it´s people. The people decided that this was true and that they should begin building it no later than now. They immediatley ran into some rather serious problems. What materials would they use? All they had was a small patch of vegetation and the rocky island itself. Work on the pyramid was halted before it had begun and the pyramid was never mentioned again and completely forgotten. A hundred years later, c. 1590, the rulers recieved an anonymous suggestion. "What we need is a pyramid." The rulers, unaware of the previous pyramid idea and it´s immediate failure, decided that this was a good idea, presented it to it´s people who agreed and started working on it immediately. They ran into the same problem. This time they decided to use the island itself as the building material and started slicing up the rocks. As time went by, the island grew smaller and taller with the small patch of green dissapearing gradually, but this did not seem to concern the islanders. The pyramid was completed by the last islander left on the pyramid island. He, like all the others, died of starvation shortly after completing the pyramid. The remains of this pyramid island can still be found today but there are no traces of the people who built it or their culture.
The end.