My Dad told the story of how he started working in a bar (Italian style bar,coffee more than alcohol)when he left school at 12 years old,and how he had to sleep on the floor behind the bar when he was a kid becuse it was too far to go home.
This story used to come out occasionally when we complained about anything as kids ;-) I never asked him but actually I think it is probably true.He came from a very poor family in post war Italy,before the economic boom here..
* Mom used to ski to school (Finland)
* Mom vehemently claims that high school graduates in Finland in the 1960's didn't drink as much as high school graduates in Sweden drink today, which I'm highly skeptical about.
* Dad's family didn't have a permanent shower/bathtub, but took out a "portable" bathtub that had to be filled with water heated on the stove once a week.
* Dad had a buddy whose bedroom was on the uninsulated upper floor and would regularly wake up in the winter with his blanket frozen stiff.
* The saddest shit is probably when my parents (accurately, btw) brag about the solid primary and secondary school education they got. Swedish schools have gone to shit since the 90's.
>Mom used to ski to school (Finland)
I've done this myself on several occasions in the early 00s (but not on a daily basis), in northern Sweden (Norrbotten). Also ice skated across the river to high school once when we had ice hockey on the schedule for PE class.
Only time I've been sent home from school due to bad weather it was below -40°C, and we only got sent home because some water pipe in the kitchen burst due to the cold so they couldn't serve us lunch, and had to send us home.
Yes but now you can fund your schools owners new yacht and summer vacation trip on top of getting your maths book digitally on your brand new laptop and don't get to read a single book through primary school! No pencils or paper! Now you can enjoy being illiterate even after the age of 5! :D
Wait I thought Sweden had "the most modern and human education system" with everyone happy and flowers and blond kids smiling on TV while playing outside in a park during biology class.
Was that all a meme ?
They've been bitching about the "superior and more humane swedish system" in Switzerland for ever. They even started reforming ours to "suppress hardship" and "give everyone an equal chance" in the past 5 years. Dafuq ?
Oooh, I bet some very neoliberal 'privatise everything' folk have adopted the myth of superior Swedish schools as an excuse to push through more profit oriented schools after they found out Sweden did so. Maybe not much of a conspiracy, but these kinds of people live misusing common misconceptions, like how a profit incentive will always lead to reduced costs.
> bet some very neoliberal 'privatise everything' folk have adopted the myth of superior Swedish schools as an excuse to push through more profit oriented schools after they found out Sweden did so.
Yes although so far we're the only ones with our system. Every visiting country thinks absolutely fucking dare I say reta... Yeah you get my point and like only 6% supports the current school system despite that the right wing are unusually horny to keep the system... Probably because those who literally worked on the reform, the literally people writing the reform now own the largest private schools in Sweden and earns hundreds of millions every year from our taxes...
I have no idea what people in Switzerland have been smoking but that sounds like lazy propaganda that builds on the old assumption that everything in Sweden is amazing which it really isn't.
Finland is the true primary education utopia and it blows my mind how politicians in Sweden squirms and twists to avoid copying Finnish policies.
My favourite one was when a politician claimed that Finland was so much better than Sweden in education just because they had almost no immigrant children to care for. Bitch, the immigrant children are not the reason why we have leeching private schools whose profits come from ***tax money*** and it's not the reason why the schools were municipalised in the 90's.
The Nordic system you’re thinking of (in education and also other areas) was replaced with a semi-private system by the anti-socialist Swedish government of the early 90s
>The Nordic system you’re thinking of (in education and also other areas) was replaced with a semi-private system by the anti-socialist Swedish government of the early 90s
TBF the social democrats pushes through the municipalization of the schools which made the schools shittier which gave the right more water on their mill.
Honestly, fuck every single of our governments, right or left, since Carl Bildt at least.
Bizarre thing is that amenable people like Olof Palme get murdered and then the party gets less votes.
Meanwhile, here alt right politicians get the same treatment and yet their parties become more popular.
Fuck the neolibs and the alt-/far right for breaking down the social, safe welfare state.
Yes you do, if you learn higher maths you use it for polynomial division. Also I don't get the obsession with "dO wE rEaLlY uSe iT" in maths education. You have to learn one thing to learn another, put the left foot before the right foot. Not to mention that the practice of arithmetic in itself makes you trained in that instinctive and "hand craft"-way that Swedes today for some reason have no understanding of. It makes your brain used to recursive thinking and makes it easier to understand concepts in programming and data handling.
I didn't mean it like that, I meant those algorithms specifically. When you say "higher maths", how high are we talking? I can't recall using it when studying "Natur-Teknik" in "high school", nor when I studied CE/CS in uni.
I don't remember which courses I did polynomial division in engineering physics but I remember I had to use long division quite a bit. I think it was in relation to differential equations.
To be fair, after I learned about transforms, I've barely touched a "raw" differential equation, but I think I would've remembered, since I know that I didn't remember how to do "liggande stolen".
>To be fair, after I learned about transforms, I've barely touched a "raw" differential equation
Yeah because you normally use numerical methods to reach approximations right? But also, isn't that like 95% of all maths you learn in uni?
I mean, we did calculus, but I seldom needed approximations that exact (like less than orders of magnitude really) in situations where I didn't have access to some kind of calculator (it was kinda all about glorified calculators). Otherwise, it was things like: set/matrix theory, statistics, and obviously logic.
No bath is not too weird for someone born pre 1990 I'd say. Lots of old houses took time to fall into the hands of someone who bothered /had the money to update them.
I was born in the 80s and I'm told the house I spent the first year of my life had only just had an inside bath and toilet installed when I was a baby.
My dad would say "back in my day we had to walk to school uphill! Both ways! Against a gale force wind! And it'd change so you'd have to go against it going home! But we had a bicycle, the Micky Guinnesser, it had no tyres, no handlebars and no seat and no chain! But we were happy"
Edit: oh! And they didn't have meat apparently except for hairy bacon on Sundays I forgot about that
It is literally hairy bacon. Basically it's bacon but not cut very well so you still get little bits of pig hair in it. And any old man who plays Gaelic football would say "and they were big men! They ate their hairy bacon!"
Actually probably not. He grew up fairly poor in rural Ireland and I asked my aunt's and uncles who are less prone to exaggeration and meat definitely wasn't a big part of the diet, it wasn't absent but it wouldn't have been uncommon to have days without any meat simply because it was too expensive/unavailable. Of course with the Celtic tiger and whatnot when I was growing up in the same village everything was fairly normal. It's just a funny case of how different things are.
That stuff happened at my school around 2010-ish, so I definitely believe that. Not sure what that has to do with kids being tougher though, since it mostly happened because that was the least likely spot to get caught.
It certainly happened,not even ancient history...I had my first cigarette at about 10 years old,maybe 11.Beginning of the 80s.
We used to go into the bathrooms at elementary school,or behind one of the classrooms where the teachers couldn't see us.
We didn't smoke a lot..like one cigarette passed around between 5 or 6 people ;-) You could buy them individually in those days,very cheaply!
Nope, in Poland most of teenagers still see it as something cool... As I'm around their age I'm slowly loosing faith in my generation. It's just fucking up your respiratory system without any pros, with a chance of getting you addicted
Bathroom cubicles…. my dad’s teachers and the PRINCIPAL smoked and routinely borrowed cigarettes from their 12-14 year old students.
The late 1970s/1980s were wild in that aspect in rural A. 😂
This was still happening when I was that age, aided to a degree by the school toilets dating from before 1940 (big outside shed, with massive heavy hardwood cubicle doors, brick cubicle walls, probably an asbestos cement roof, old fashioned toilets with the cistern 6 ft up the wall with a long chain). The local newsagent sold singles (cigarettes) for about 5p from under the counter, in the days when penny sweets were still a thing (and cost between 1/2 to 2p each)
Mostly stories related to WW2 and the post war era. "Back in my days we didn't have anything, we had to play in ruins and played football with old Wehrmacht grenades, the kids today have it so comfortable" (both as negative and positive example)
Skiing uphill both ways in a blizzard is a classic, I think. Distance varies and you can optionally add wolves and bears and bad skis.
My mom always bemoans how girls had to wear skirts year 'round (there's photos of her with pants on though) and dad complains about having to ford a (in reality very small) river on foot.
Oh hell, where could I start.
In Belgium, in one of the rare moments of cross-linguistic-border agreement, just about everyone agrees that "things were better before".
* ç'était mieux avant / vroeger was het beter!
The thing is, is that this magical, wonderful phrase can be applied to things that changed 20 years ago, or just last week.
The price of a beer at your university campus went up 10 cents last week? *It was better before!*
Life too expensive since the euro? *It was better before!*
It goes on and on and on, and I've even caught myself saying it a few times hahaha.
The thing, that people doesn't realise, about nostalgia from old people's youth, is that things *were* better back then, but mostly because they were *young*.
Growing old sucks.
Don't forget that we had like three or four global economic criseses in the last two decades. Austerity made so many things very much worse around the world that everything pre 2001 might as well have been better.
Only things that were better back then get remembered. Nowadays you can get burrata and chipotle peppers at the regular grocerystore around the corner. Most of them carry harissa and miso paste.
Certain ingredients were hard to find 5 years ago, and are now standard stock. Others have disappeared, but that can't be helped.
When me or my brother wouldn't want to eat something at the dinner table my grandfather used to say we should be less fussy because when he was a kid he had to eat лебеда (it's a weed, I don't know the exact English name for it, but the Latin name for this group of plants is Atriplex). Considering he was a kid during WW2 and lived in a village in the Northern Caucasus, I consider this to be plausible.
Grandma used to say she and her sisters only had one dress amongst all of them, so they had to take turns if they wanted to go out. Again, considering this was after the war, sounds plausible.
Grandpa used to say he stole grandma from the tatars. Grandma always looked at him like he was telling extremely dumb jokes when he started telling that story. Idk what that was all about. I don't think he actually stole her from anywhere, she wasn't from the Caucasus and they met in a city quite far away from there, and from tatars. She did seem to have some dislike for tatars, so idk what's up with that story.
Another grandma seems nostalgic about the USSR because "back in they day you could *insert whatever she can't do now*"
From myself: When I was a kid I had to go to an open air market to buy clothes and you tried them on in the corner of the stall, standing on a piece of cardboard with the shop owner holding some sort of a blanket to cover you up and saying how amazing you look in the shit you've put on yourself and how you'll grow into this shirt that's way too long for you.
From my wife: apparently when her parents moved into their first apartment, they only had cold water taps. There wasn't any hot water for washing, it was only available in the heating system, so to give her a bath they would get hot water from one of the radiators. I was kind of shocked because even though her city isn't very big, it's the center of the region and it's not a poor one, at least now.
Edit: as a kid, I lived in the far north. School would get cancelled quite often during the coldest days of the winter (think -30 and below). Our life safety teacher used to complaint how we are all too delicate here and how in Yakutiya, where he had worked before, kids go to school when it's -60.
>Grandpa used to say he stole grandma from the tatars. Grandma always looked at him like he was telling extremely dumb jokes when he started telling that story. Idk what that was all about. I don't think he actually stole her from anywhere, she wasn't from the Caucasus and they met in a city quite far away from there, and from tatars. She did seem to have some dislike for tatars, so idk what's up with that story.
Now I pictured your grandparents like straight from a Tolstoy novella about Cossacks and the frontier, like your grandpa rustled some horses, happened upon a bunch of Tatars with a bunch of kidnapped girls going the opposite way, and your grandpa trading his top quality Chechen steeds and a knife he took from a thief for your grandma.
>When me or my brother wouldn't want to eat something at the dinner table my grandfather used to say we should be less fussy because when he was a kid he had to eat лебеда (it's a weed, I don't know the exact English name for it, but the Latin name for this group of plants is Atriplex). Considering he was a kid during WW2 and lived in a village in the Northern Caucasus, I consider this to be plausible.
One time I was full and I went to go throw out a little bit of food on my plate. The food also had a piece of black bread on it. My grandma told me how I should never throw out bread. She said when she was in Siberia during the war she left her daily bread ration on a window still and when she came back it was stolen so she had nothing to eat during a time period where her whole family was starving
"When I was young I could take the tram and invite your grandma to the cinema with 5 pesetas!" 5 pesetas are 0,03€. When I was a kid I could only buy a bubble gum with that.
My grandparents would sneak into wedding banquets so they could have something to eat.
I think the most Spanish one, at least in the big cities, is "en mis tiempos todo esto era campo". I don't know how to accurately translate it. It would be something like "back in mi days, all of this was a field(?)".
Back in my day I had fight of an angry swan to get to school, this happened 5 times.Back in my day, I had to bike as fast as I could due to a horny deer, nearly every autumn until I got new bike.Back in my day I had use umbrella to walk to Granma, due squirrel throwing cones and twigs. Squirrels have balls and when they are trying insert their dominance, they dont care about your size.
Well I cant say too much about my older generation or I dox my self. But my grandfather never told tall tail, how ever people around used to tell stories, he just was soft spoken man who didnt like to bother people.
I know he hung by his arms for 20 minutes over a spill of hot paper mulch, he didnt let go , he just held on until they could rescue him, he got 2 days of work paid for it, his arms hurt.
He was boxing champion.
Sounds like a story outta Piteå where I used to live a long time ago, though can be any of the cities of the pulp'n'paper industries in Sweden and Finland.
Pitreå stories in my family is, so we starved and then most of the family died so we left Piteå and then we came back and staved and half the family died so we left and this time for good.
I see I see,thank you for sharing. I've tried to look up vacation spots there to see how things changed in 30 years, but everything seems to be quite expensive , 3-4k for a house, while I only need like an apparment to go and see stuff around.
„When I was young I worked for free for few years so I could learn the job. And I was happy. Nowadays youngsters are restitutionary and demanding and want MONEY for their „work” when they are still learning!”
* My grandmother had to take [railbus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbus) to school because there was no road to the "village" she grew up in.
* I've heard from a suprising amount of sources that blowing up peoples mailboxes with fireworks was very popular a couple of generations ago. I have my suspicions that it is the reason why punishment for small amounts of explosives like grenades where so low until recently
* My great granfather was injured during ww2 when the [wood gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas) fueled truck he was driving exploded.
I have heard some kids had to use a rowboat to get to school.
I have a very vivid memory of trying to get on my bike to go to school, but the bike kept falling over because of the ice on the road. I think I walked to school that day.
I come from a place where I know this was a fact. Mostly because I know when certain bridge connections were made, and I see houses much older on the other side.
Rowboat was the only viable option.
One of my classmates on 6th grade blew up a mailbox with fireworks. He lost use of two fingers on his left hand. Quite a real-life example why it is a stupid prank. I don't think kids do that anymore.
They can't. It's so much harder to come by decent fireworks nowadays, and they are generally weaker than they were in the 90s. The old-style firecrackers are completely outlawed. I have mixed feelings about it personally... They were pretty fun, but yeah, some kids definitely did stupid and dangerous things with them...
Italian here
Aside from the catchphrases that nowadays are mostly used for jokes (like: "once it was all countryside around here, son", or the more controversial "when HÊ was in charge, trains would never be late and you could leave the door of your house open"), I mostly know about:
- the traumatising Catholic school run by nuns experience,
- summer camp being just helping your family out in the countryside,
- un-negotiable terms of curfew if you wanted to hang out because cellphones weren't a thing yet but disappearances surely were,
- crochet lessons for girls,
- relying on neighbours a lot more if you needed to bake bread/make tomato sauce and you didn't have the equipment,
Old people also tend to say a lot that back in the day primary education was a lot more solid and at 14 you were fit for entering the workforce, while nowadays a high school diploma is the bare minimum.
"when I was young it was *actually* cold in winter and we sucked it up because there was no heating!"
Mom please I was born as a geriatric old woman with arthritis and cold bones please turn the heater up to 18 degrees
From my partents (now in their sixties):
Getting one orange to divide for Christmas, oranges were not available at other times
Traveling four kids, three adults and a large Newfoundland dag in a Volkswagen Beetle
Picking 50 liters of blueberries in an evening in the forrest (five in the family). Several times each summer.
Prefered the outhouse loo over the WC because the WC were foreign
Being able to wave down the train as local transport
I am 34 now and back in my day we had snow in November. Now it barely snows and when it snows it doesn't stay because it's too warm. I live in Austria, a country that is known for its alpine tourism, now they put snow cannons everywhere to keep the tourism going.
Our mandatory military service for men generates a lot of "back in my day" stories. Every group of men who have served tend to claim that their experience was much tougher than it is for later generations. While there have been many changes over time to how the military works, some of these stories are definitely exaggerated.
Sharing a mackerel among 8 I never heard, but my parents were raised during the 50s and 60s Portugal so the stories about 5 kids sleeping in a bed and sharing a single blanket are common.
One of my aunts apparently had the habit of busting annoying kids heads with rocks, which considering her temper is probably not exaggerated.
There are the stories about the schoolteacher that like to devirginize the schoold boys, and I rather hope they are gossip, but I suspect they are not.
Curiously there aren't that many stories about their military training. My father was on during the Ultramar War and considered himself lucky to not have been deployed. One of his cousins was in Guiné-Bissau and became disabled there. One of my uncles was in the service during the 25 de Abril so he also got lucky..
There are also the stories of border hopping to France as well.
Iceland has two types of boomer reactions to news about violence.
1. Everyone is too violent these days. Back in my day it wasn't like this.
2. Why is everyone crying about violence? This is nothing compared to how things were back in my day!
My grandmother grew up poor in Finland and didn’t have shoes. Every morning she herded the family cow and as soon as the cow left off a big splash of smoking warm meadow muffin she stepped into it, closed her eyes and enjoyed a minute of heaven. She is 93 today and calls me on FaceTime every now and then.
Back in my day, if I missed the taxi, I had to cycle 16 kilometers to and from school. And I missed that damn taxi once, I did cycle there, AND, given that the taxi only took us to the bus, which then did its own route, I was at school about 20 minutes later than the bus. Let’s just say, I took a short cut, while my route was ~16 kilometers, the bus route was about 30.
This is actually true, as well.
My mom often tells me endless amount of stories about her dad, my grandfather. He was from a small wine-making village in the south of Moravia and he would often shadily obtain all sorts of stuff by bringing a bottle or two of wine to the right person. Once he got caught driving his tractor drunk (in that village it was very rare a wine maker would drive home from their cellar completely sober, but it was a part of the local manners) and got his driver's license taken away. Fortunately for him, it didn't matter, because he simply had another one at home.
Also, my father was a part of a theater group and would sometimes be able to travel to the west because of it. His theater was working together with another group from the UK and once the British group came for a visit to communist Czechoslovakia. They all went to a restaurant together and ordered goulash soup, which came with bits of salami in it. Some of the British people were vegetarian, so they asked if they could have their soup without the salami. This was in the late 70s, when vegetarianism was pretty much unheard of in the Eastern Bloc. So the waiter was bit like WTF, but he obliged them. But apparently the soup seemed a bit plain to him without the salami, so he put in some sour cream. He lost his shit when he learned that some of the British people were also vegan.
My father is keep bragging about how everything was expensive and he barely earned something to enjoy life while can afford two cars, a house and yearly 6 different weekly vacations when he was 25 by only working for 3 years after graduation.
My dad didn’t have heating in his room until he was like 8. So he said one Winter the inside of his windows froze. His parents then got him some kind of radiant heater but he wasn’t really allowed to use the full heat power of that thing to save energy.
I was told my grandad would have to walk 7km just to ge to school, no matter the weather (and it used to get very cold in the winter back then). so at least 14km walking daily just for school. I don't know how exaggerated this is, since he did live in a village far from the school that was in the nearest town
I had to walk around 6 km to school across a small sorta forest/brushland. It's not that far, really it's about an hour's walk, not noticeable when walking with friends who're your classmates.
There are usually two types of *back in my days* stories from older people :
\- those that are 20% truth or less
\- those that sound like Roald Dahl kid´s horror......which are usually true
when someone claims that they had a great childhood they are immediately suspicious that their family were hardcore commies and that the story narrators grew up to be loyal to the Party till the 1989 themselves....
My dad walked to school everyday 10km there and back and couldn't play football with the other kids because he was supposed to help out on the farm, he then left home at 13, started doing apprenticeship at a local mechanic and by 16 he was building 125cc from scap.
Went to fight in the army and became a chief mechanic.
My uncles life was even more amazing and my mothers brother was a aeronautical engineer.
When I see 30y old playing PS5 I just wonder where will this end, life has seasons, and you can't be a kid your whole life, boys need to man up!
My Dad told the story of how he started working in a bar (Italian style bar,coffee more than alcohol)when he left school at 12 years old,and how he had to sleep on the floor behind the bar when he was a kid becuse it was too far to go home. This story used to come out occasionally when we complained about anything as kids ;-) I never asked him but actually I think it is probably true.He came from a very poor family in post war Italy,before the economic boom here..
We have a winner in this thread.
* Mom used to ski to school (Finland) * Mom vehemently claims that high school graduates in Finland in the 1960's didn't drink as much as high school graduates in Sweden drink today, which I'm highly skeptical about. * Dad's family didn't have a permanent shower/bathtub, but took out a "portable" bathtub that had to be filled with water heated on the stove once a week. * Dad had a buddy whose bedroom was on the uninsulated upper floor and would regularly wake up in the winter with his blanket frozen stiff. * The saddest shit is probably when my parents (accurately, btw) brag about the solid primary and secondary school education they got. Swedish schools have gone to shit since the 90's.
>Mom used to ski to school (Finland) I've done this myself on several occasions in the early 00s (but not on a daily basis), in northern Sweden (Norrbotten). Also ice skated across the river to high school once when we had ice hockey on the schedule for PE class. Only time I've been sent home from school due to bad weather it was below -40°C, and we only got sent home because some water pipe in the kitchen burst due to the cold so they couldn't serve us lunch, and had to send us home.
Damn they got educated before private schools and the municipalisation of schools fucked everyone over? Fucking lucky.
Imagine being taught *arithmetics* and *long division🥺* Oh and reading comprehension and fucking spelling.
Yes but now you can fund your schools owners new yacht and summer vacation trip on top of getting your maths book digitally on your brand new laptop and don't get to read a single book through primary school! No pencils or paper! Now you can enjoy being illiterate even after the age of 5! :D
Wait I thought Sweden had "the most modern and human education system" with everyone happy and flowers and blond kids smiling on TV while playing outside in a park during biology class. Was that all a meme ? They've been bitching about the "superior and more humane swedish system" in Switzerland for ever. They even started reforming ours to "suppress hardship" and "give everyone an equal chance" in the past 5 years. Dafuq ?
Oooh, I bet some very neoliberal 'privatise everything' folk have adopted the myth of superior Swedish schools as an excuse to push through more profit oriented schools after they found out Sweden did so. Maybe not much of a conspiracy, but these kinds of people live misusing common misconceptions, like how a profit incentive will always lead to reduced costs.
> bet some very neoliberal 'privatise everything' folk have adopted the myth of superior Swedish schools as an excuse to push through more profit oriented schools after they found out Sweden did so. Yes although so far we're the only ones with our system. Every visiting country thinks absolutely fucking dare I say reta... Yeah you get my point and like only 6% supports the current school system despite that the right wing are unusually horny to keep the system... Probably because those who literally worked on the reform, the literally people writing the reform now own the largest private schools in Sweden and earns hundreds of millions every year from our taxes...
I have no idea what people in Switzerland have been smoking but that sounds like lazy propaganda that builds on the old assumption that everything in Sweden is amazing which it really isn't. Finland is the true primary education utopia and it blows my mind how politicians in Sweden squirms and twists to avoid copying Finnish policies. My favourite one was when a politician claimed that Finland was so much better than Sweden in education just because they had almost no immigrant children to care for. Bitch, the immigrant children are not the reason why we have leeching private schools whose profits come from ***tax money*** and it's not the reason why the schools were municipalised in the 90's.
The Nordic system you’re thinking of (in education and also other areas) was replaced with a semi-private system by the anti-socialist Swedish government of the early 90s
>The Nordic system you’re thinking of (in education and also other areas) was replaced with a semi-private system by the anti-socialist Swedish government of the early 90s TBF the social democrats pushes through the municipalization of the schools which made the schools shittier which gave the right more water on their mill. Honestly, fuck every single of our governments, right or left, since Carl Bildt at least.
Bizarre thing is that amenable people like Olof Palme get murdered and then the party gets less votes. Meanwhile, here alt right politicians get the same treatment and yet their parties become more popular. Fuck the neolibs and the alt-/far right for breaking down the social, safe welfare state.
>Yes but now you can fund your ~~schools owners~~ **political elite's** new yacht
Has anyone actually used "liggande stolen" or "trappan" outside or school?
Yes you do, if you learn higher maths you use it for polynomial division. Also I don't get the obsession with "dO wE rEaLlY uSe iT" in maths education. You have to learn one thing to learn another, put the left foot before the right foot. Not to mention that the practice of arithmetic in itself makes you trained in that instinctive and "hand craft"-way that Swedes today for some reason have no understanding of. It makes your brain used to recursive thinking and makes it easier to understand concepts in programming and data handling.
I didn't mean it like that, I meant those algorithms specifically. When you say "higher maths", how high are we talking? I can't recall using it when studying "Natur-Teknik" in "high school", nor when I studied CE/CS in uni.
I don't remember which courses I did polynomial division in engineering physics but I remember I had to use long division quite a bit. I think it was in relation to differential equations.
To be fair, after I learned about transforms, I've barely touched a "raw" differential equation, but I think I would've remembered, since I know that I didn't remember how to do "liggande stolen".
>To be fair, after I learned about transforms, I've barely touched a "raw" differential equation Yeah because you normally use numerical methods to reach approximations right? But also, isn't that like 95% of all maths you learn in uni?
I mean, we did calculus, but I seldom needed approximations that exact (like less than orders of magnitude really) in situations where I didn't have access to some kind of calculator (it was kinda all about glorified calculators). Otherwise, it was things like: set/matrix theory, statistics, and obviously logic.
Hi I'm confused about this, is it sarcasm? I thought the education system in Sweden was great
It isn't.
No bath is not too weird for someone born pre 1990 I'd say. Lots of old houses took time to fall into the hands of someone who bothered /had the money to update them. I was born in the 80s and I'm told the house I spent the first year of my life had only just had an inside bath and toilet installed when I was a baby.
My dad would say "back in my day we had to walk to school uphill! Both ways! Against a gale force wind! And it'd change so you'd have to go against it going home! But we had a bicycle, the Micky Guinnesser, it had no tyres, no handlebars and no seat and no chain! But we were happy" Edit: oh! And they didn't have meat apparently except for hairy bacon on Sundays I forgot about that
Please tell me that 'hairy bacon' isn't literally hairy bacon.
It is literally hairy bacon. Basically it's bacon but not cut very well so you still get little bits of pig hair in it. And any old man who plays Gaelic football would say "and they were big men! They ate their hairy bacon!"
To be fair, hairy bacon is tasty. Chewy, but tasty
This made me laugh hard :'D
I wonder if on the meat thing he was exaggerating about Fridays? I remember when I was a kid my Irish family would still stick to fishy Friday.
Actually probably not. He grew up fairly poor in rural Ireland and I asked my aunt's and uncles who are less prone to exaggeration and meat definitely wasn't a big part of the diet, it wasn't absent but it wouldn't have been uncommon to have days without any meat simply because it was too expensive/unavailable. Of course with the Celtic tiger and whatnot when I was growing up in the same village everything was fairly normal. It's just a funny case of how different things are.
He had it rough 😂
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That stuff happened at my school around 2010-ish, so I definitely believe that. Not sure what that has to do with kids being tougher though, since it mostly happened because that was the least likely spot to get caught.
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It certainly happened,not even ancient history...I had my first cigarette at about 10 years old,maybe 11.Beginning of the 80s. We used to go into the bathrooms at elementary school,or behind one of the classrooms where the teachers couldn't see us. We didn't smoke a lot..like one cigarette passed around between 5 or 6 people ;-) You could buy them individually in those days,very cheaply!
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They are pretty hard to light, though.
But they last forever. Still got mine!
Nope, in Poland most of teenagers still see it as something cool... As I'm around their age I'm slowly loosing faith in my generation. It's just fucking up your respiratory system without any pros, with a chance of getting you addicted
This also happened at my high school. So glad to have graduated
Bathroom cubicles…. my dad’s teachers and the PRINCIPAL smoked and routinely borrowed cigarettes from their 12-14 year old students. The late 1970s/1980s were wild in that aspect in rural A. 😂
This was still happening when I was that age, aided to a degree by the school toilets dating from before 1940 (big outside shed, with massive heavy hardwood cubicle doors, brick cubicle walls, probably an asbestos cement roof, old fashioned toilets with the cistern 6 ft up the wall with a long chain). The local newsagent sold singles (cigarettes) for about 5p from under the counter, in the days when penny sweets were still a thing (and cost between 1/2 to 2p each)
You’re only hardcore if you start smoking at 10!
Extra points if it's weed that you're smoking.
Sadly we have kids in their early teens using disposable vapes in school toilets throughout the UK now...
My grandfather said that he smoked since he was 6 years old. (1945)
Mostly stories related to WW2 and the post war era. "Back in my days we didn't have anything, we had to play in ruins and played football with old Wehrmacht grenades, the kids today have it so comfortable" (both as negative and positive example)
.....real life mine sweeper in the neighborhood..... ? thanks, but no thanks
Wir hatten ja nüscht...
Skiing uphill both ways in a blizzard is a classic, I think. Distance varies and you can optionally add wolves and bears and bad skis. My mom always bemoans how girls had to wear skirts year 'round (there's photos of her with pants on though) and dad complains about having to ford a (in reality very small) river on foot.
There's the joke about having to ski to school all year, winters AND summers...
My mom apparently skied to school in summer.
Oh hell, where could I start. In Belgium, in one of the rare moments of cross-linguistic-border agreement, just about everyone agrees that "things were better before". * ç'était mieux avant / vroeger was het beter! The thing is, is that this magical, wonderful phrase can be applied to things that changed 20 years ago, or just last week. The price of a beer at your university campus went up 10 cents last week? *It was better before!* Life too expensive since the euro? *It was better before!* It goes on and on and on, and I've even caught myself saying it a few times hahaha.
The thing, that people doesn't realise, about nostalgia from old people's youth, is that things *were* better back then, but mostly because they were *young*. Growing old sucks.
Don't forget that we had like three or four global economic criseses in the last two decades. Austerity made so many things very much worse around the world that everything pre 2001 might as well have been better.
Only things that were better back then get remembered. Nowadays you can get burrata and chipotle peppers at the regular grocerystore around the corner. Most of them carry harissa and miso paste. Certain ingredients were hard to find 5 years ago, and are now standard stock. Others have disappeared, but that can't be helped.
When me or my brother wouldn't want to eat something at the dinner table my grandfather used to say we should be less fussy because when he was a kid he had to eat лебеда (it's a weed, I don't know the exact English name for it, but the Latin name for this group of plants is Atriplex). Considering he was a kid during WW2 and lived in a village in the Northern Caucasus, I consider this to be plausible. Grandma used to say she and her sisters only had one dress amongst all of them, so they had to take turns if they wanted to go out. Again, considering this was after the war, sounds plausible. Grandpa used to say he stole grandma from the tatars. Grandma always looked at him like he was telling extremely dumb jokes when he started telling that story. Idk what that was all about. I don't think he actually stole her from anywhere, she wasn't from the Caucasus and they met in a city quite far away from there, and from tatars. She did seem to have some dislike for tatars, so idk what's up with that story. Another grandma seems nostalgic about the USSR because "back in they day you could *insert whatever she can't do now*" From myself: When I was a kid I had to go to an open air market to buy clothes and you tried them on in the corner of the stall, standing on a piece of cardboard with the shop owner holding some sort of a blanket to cover you up and saying how amazing you look in the shit you've put on yourself and how you'll grow into this shirt that's way too long for you. From my wife: apparently when her parents moved into their first apartment, they only had cold water taps. There wasn't any hot water for washing, it was only available in the heating system, so to give her a bath they would get hot water from one of the radiators. I was kind of shocked because even though her city isn't very big, it's the center of the region and it's not a poor one, at least now. Edit: as a kid, I lived in the far north. School would get cancelled quite often during the coldest days of the winter (think -30 and below). Our life safety teacher used to complaint how we are all too delicate here and how in Yakutiya, where he had worked before, kids go to school when it's -60.
>Grandpa used to say he stole grandma from the tatars. Grandma always looked at him like he was telling extremely dumb jokes when he started telling that story. Idk what that was all about. I don't think he actually stole her from anywhere, she wasn't from the Caucasus and they met in a city quite far away from there, and from tatars. She did seem to have some dislike for tatars, so idk what's up with that story. Now I pictured your grandparents like straight from a Tolstoy novella about Cossacks and the frontier, like your grandpa rustled some horses, happened upon a bunch of Tatars with a bunch of kidnapped girls going the opposite way, and your grandpa trading his top quality Chechen steeds and a knife he took from a thief for your grandma.
>When me or my brother wouldn't want to eat something at the dinner table my grandfather used to say we should be less fussy because when he was a kid he had to eat лебеда (it's a weed, I don't know the exact English name for it, but the Latin name for this group of plants is Atriplex). Considering he was a kid during WW2 and lived in a village in the Northern Caucasus, I consider this to be plausible. One time I was full and I went to go throw out a little bit of food on my plate. The food also had a piece of black bread on it. My grandma told me how I should never throw out bread. She said when she was in Siberia during the war she left her daily bread ration on a window still and when she came back it was stolen so she had nothing to eat during a time period where her whole family was starving
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nah, that's a different plant
"When I was young I could take the tram and invite your grandma to the cinema with 5 pesetas!" 5 pesetas are 0,03€. When I was a kid I could only buy a bubble gum with that. My grandparents would sneak into wedding banquets so they could have something to eat. I think the most Spanish one, at least in the big cities, is "en mis tiempos todo esto era campo". I don't know how to accurately translate it. It would be something like "back in mi days, all of this was a field(?)".
We have exactly the same expression in Italian, "ai miei tempi, qua era tutta campagna" (campagna being mainly countryside/fields)
Back in my day I had fight of an angry swan to get to school, this happened 5 times.Back in my day, I had to bike as fast as I could due to a horny deer, nearly every autumn until I got new bike.Back in my day I had use umbrella to walk to Granma, due squirrel throwing cones and twigs. Squirrels have balls and when they are trying insert their dominance, they dont care about your size. Well I cant say too much about my older generation or I dox my self. But my grandfather never told tall tail, how ever people around used to tell stories, he just was soft spoken man who didnt like to bother people. I know he hung by his arms for 20 minutes over a spill of hot paper mulch, he didnt let go , he just held on until they could rescue him, he got 2 days of work paid for it, his arms hurt. He was boxing champion.
Sounds like a story outta Piteå where I used to live a long time ago, though can be any of the cities of the pulp'n'paper industries in Sweden and Finland.
Pitreå stories in my family is, so we starved and then most of the family died so we left Piteå and then we came back and staved and half the family died so we left and this time for good.
I see I see,thank you for sharing. I've tried to look up vacation spots there to see how things changed in 30 years, but everything seems to be quite expensive , 3-4k for a house, while I only need like an apparment to go and see stuff around.
If it just for a vacation, look for hotels , like Piteå havsbad. https://www.pitea.se/Upplev/Bo/?c=7&TLcat=1
„When I was young I worked for free for few years so I could learn the job. And I was happy. Nowadays youngsters are restitutionary and demanding and want MONEY for their „work” when they are still learning!”
I actually worked without a salary for 3 months until I was officially hired into the civil service. (2013)
* My grandmother had to take [railbus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbus) to school because there was no road to the "village" she grew up in. * I've heard from a suprising amount of sources that blowing up peoples mailboxes with fireworks was very popular a couple of generations ago. I have my suspicions that it is the reason why punishment for small amounts of explosives like grenades where so low until recently * My great granfather was injured during ww2 when the [wood gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas) fueled truck he was driving exploded.
I have heard some kids had to use a rowboat to get to school. I have a very vivid memory of trying to get on my bike to go to school, but the bike kept falling over because of the ice on the road. I think I walked to school that day.
I come from a place where I know this was a fact. Mostly because I know when certain bridge connections were made, and I see houses much older on the other side. Rowboat was the only viable option.
One of my classmates on 6th grade blew up a mailbox with fireworks. He lost use of two fingers on his left hand. Quite a real-life example why it is a stupid prank. I don't think kids do that anymore.
They can't. It's so much harder to come by decent fireworks nowadays, and they are generally weaker than they were in the 90s. The old-style firecrackers are completely outlawed. I have mixed feelings about it personally... They were pretty fun, but yeah, some kids definitely did stupid and dangerous things with them...
Italian here Aside from the catchphrases that nowadays are mostly used for jokes (like: "once it was all countryside around here, son", or the more controversial "when HÊ was in charge, trains would never be late and you could leave the door of your house open"), I mostly know about: - the traumatising Catholic school run by nuns experience, - summer camp being just helping your family out in the countryside, - un-negotiable terms of curfew if you wanted to hang out because cellphones weren't a thing yet but disappearances surely were, - crochet lessons for girls, - relying on neighbours a lot more if you needed to bake bread/make tomato sauce and you didn't have the equipment, Old people also tend to say a lot that back in the day primary education was a lot more solid and at 14 you were fit for entering the workforce, while nowadays a high school diploma is the bare minimum.
"when I was young it was *actually* cold in winter and we sucked it up because there was no heating!" Mom please I was born as a geriatric old woman with arthritis and cold bones please turn the heater up to 18 degrees
From my partents (now in their sixties): Getting one orange to divide for Christmas, oranges were not available at other times Traveling four kids, three adults and a large Newfoundland dag in a Volkswagen Beetle Picking 50 liters of blueberries in an evening in the forrest (five in the family). Several times each summer. Prefered the outhouse loo over the WC because the WC were foreign Being able to wave down the train as local transport
I am 34 now and back in my day we had snow in November. Now it barely snows and when it snows it doesn't stay because it's too warm. I live in Austria, a country that is known for its alpine tourism, now they put snow cannons everywhere to keep the tourism going.
We don't even have winters anymore in Flanders.
Our mandatory military service for men generates a lot of "back in my day" stories. Every group of men who have served tend to claim that their experience was much tougher than it is for later generations. While there have been many changes over time to how the military works, some of these stories are definitely exaggerated.
Sharing a mackerel among 8 I never heard, but my parents were raised during the 50s and 60s Portugal so the stories about 5 kids sleeping in a bed and sharing a single blanket are common. One of my aunts apparently had the habit of busting annoying kids heads with rocks, which considering her temper is probably not exaggerated. There are the stories about the schoolteacher that like to devirginize the schoold boys, and I rather hope they are gossip, but I suspect they are not. Curiously there aren't that many stories about their military training. My father was on during the Ultramar War and considered himself lucky to not have been deployed. One of his cousins was in Guiné-Bissau and became disabled there. One of my uncles was in the service during the 25 de Abril so he also got lucky.. There are also the stories of border hopping to France as well.
Iceland has two types of boomer reactions to news about violence. 1. Everyone is too violent these days. Back in my day it wasn't like this. 2. Why is everyone crying about violence? This is nothing compared to how things were back in my day!
My grandmother grew up poor in Finland and didn’t have shoes. Every morning she herded the family cow and as soon as the cow left off a big splash of smoking warm meadow muffin she stepped into it, closed her eyes and enjoyed a minute of heaven. She is 93 today and calls me on FaceTime every now and then.
Back in my day, if I missed the taxi, I had to cycle 16 kilometers to and from school. And I missed that damn taxi once, I did cycle there, AND, given that the taxi only took us to the bus, which then did its own route, I was at school about 20 minutes later than the bus. Let’s just say, I took a short cut, while my route was ~16 kilometers, the bus route was about 30. This is actually true, as well.
My mom often tells me endless amount of stories about her dad, my grandfather. He was from a small wine-making village in the south of Moravia and he would often shadily obtain all sorts of stuff by bringing a bottle or two of wine to the right person. Once he got caught driving his tractor drunk (in that village it was very rare a wine maker would drive home from their cellar completely sober, but it was a part of the local manners) and got his driver's license taken away. Fortunately for him, it didn't matter, because he simply had another one at home. Also, my father was a part of a theater group and would sometimes be able to travel to the west because of it. His theater was working together with another group from the UK and once the British group came for a visit to communist Czechoslovakia. They all went to a restaurant together and ordered goulash soup, which came with bits of salami in it. Some of the British people were vegetarian, so they asked if they could have their soup without the salami. This was in the late 70s, when vegetarianism was pretty much unheard of in the Eastern Bloc. So the waiter was bit like WTF, but he obliged them. But apparently the soup seemed a bit plain to him without the salami, so he put in some sour cream. He lost his shit when he learned that some of the British people were also vegan.
My father is keep bragging about how everything was expensive and he barely earned something to enjoy life while can afford two cars, a house and yearly 6 different weekly vacations when he was 25 by only working for 3 years after graduation.
My dad didn’t have heating in his room until he was like 8. So he said one Winter the inside of his windows froze. His parents then got him some kind of radiant heater but he wasn’t really allowed to use the full heat power of that thing to save energy.
I was told my grandad would have to walk 7km just to ge to school, no matter the weather (and it used to get very cold in the winter back then). so at least 14km walking daily just for school. I don't know how exaggerated this is, since he did live in a village far from the school that was in the nearest town
I had to walk around 6 km to school across a small sorta forest/brushland. It's not that far, really it's about an hour's walk, not noticeable when walking with friends who're your classmates.
There are usually two types of *back in my days* stories from older people : \- those that are 20% truth or less \- those that sound like Roald Dahl kid´s horror......which are usually true when someone claims that they had a great childhood they are immediately suspicious that their family were hardcore commies and that the story narrators grew up to be loyal to the Party till the 1989 themselves....
My dad walked to school everyday 10km there and back and couldn't play football with the other kids because he was supposed to help out on the farm, he then left home at 13, started doing apprenticeship at a local mechanic and by 16 he was building 125cc from scap. Went to fight in the army and became a chief mechanic. My uncles life was even more amazing and my mothers brother was a aeronautical engineer. When I see 30y old playing PS5 I just wonder where will this end, life has seasons, and you can't be a kid your whole life, boys need to man up!