Tag: shopping

The New Year is making its way across the planet. To some it has already come. Time to sum things up, to look back at what was important for me. The year will definitely be one to remember. It had changes, both good and not so good. My views on life changed, my values shifted.

On the whole, the year turned out positive, with changes, even though there was bad too. But on New Year's Eve you shouldn't be sad, you should have fun. I see that many of the people I know don't like the holiday atmosphere. I wish that everyone could welcome the coming year the way they want to, so that this kind of night could be spent pleasantly. Happy New Year, coming and already arrived!

I read the reviews, couldn't resist, and bought myself an Amazon Kindle Latest Generation Wi-Fi e-reader, the one without 3G. The price together with shipping came to about $160, or almost 1280 UAH. With a price and specs like that it was hard to hold back, all the more so since I'll be able to read e-books bought on Amazon without any hassle. I know that new e-books already cost more than paper ones, but factoring in shipping it works out cheaper, and the old ones come out something like half the price. The only catch is you have to buy through an American proxy to the right address, so it's cheaper and so you don't pay an extra $2. After all, I have the model without 3G, so I'm within my rights, and I hope they won't fight this too hard.

I placed the order on Tuesday, and they only processed and shipped it on Thursday. The package spent the weekend in Germany, and by Monday it was already in Kyiv. I got lucky with customs — they didn't hold it up, though they could have demanded a bank statement, which costs 50 UAH, but that's for residents of Kyiv; everyone else still has to travel to the capital if it gets held up there, or pay the UPS delivery service to sort the matter out, and they can charge up to $100 for that.

Around midday Monday the package set off further on its way, judging by the scan code. On Tuesday I couldn't resist and called the delivery service; they told me it would be there in a day or two and that they wouldn't be able to deliver it to my work or home, since they deliver to the city center, so I'd have to go to them almost at the river port and pick the package up myself.

And the next day in the morning they called and notified me that the package had arrived, asked whether I would be home. I said I'd be at work all day and gave them the address. In the end, around midday the courier delivered it to my work.

At the end of the post I'm putting up all the stages of the package's movement with scan codes and times, in case anyone is interested in the exact delivery time and approximate meanings of the UPS code statuses, the meanings of which I wasn't the only one looking up on the internet. Nobody called me about any of these statuses, and nothing was required of me.

Two and a half weeks ago I placed an order at a Ukrainian online bookstore, then a few days later I ordered three books from the American Amazon, and a week ago a game from the English ShopTo. In the end all three parcels arrived at the post office today at the same time. The Ukrainian store took its sweet time, though I suspect that after my order they were shipping the book in from Russia. Either way, it turned out to be funny.

Got my hands on the English version of the film. It was made jointly by Bink Films, Animal Planet and BBC. So in the US it was released by Animal Planet, and in the UK — by Bink Films. I already wrote about the American version of A Lion Called Christian earlier. Now I've finally watched the English one and compared it a bit. Since the same footage was used, the films are practically identical, except for a few scenes that didn't make it into the final versions. The voice-over is also the same, though in the English version it's read by a woman, and in the American one — by a man; the narrators probably have different accents, but that's hard for me to catch.

So everything said about the American version applies to the English one too. But the DVD edition itself is better. Here there's just one film on a single-layer disc, rather than 4 on a dual-layer one like in the American edition, where the bonus materials only had deleted scenes, as far as I remember. And the Bink Films edition has a bit more bonus video with separate interviews and, most importantly, it has English subtitles, thanks to which you can understand everything that's said, or at worst you can pause and translate the moment you're interested in.