Dear Diary,
Our vacation to Turkey was very relaxing. We had some rainy days also but we spent them sleeping, reading, eating... I do like that all inclusive concept for a one week vacation. Not for any longer, though, I think. The hotel was very nice, the service was good, food was very good - oh those deserts! :-)
Unfortunately, I caught a virus right after we came home. Thursday night my voice was almost gone so I went home from work early on Friday. On Saturday I could only whisper. Now that is really tough for me... It's coming back now slowly. And since I had a mole removed last Thursday I could not even take a hot bath. Very bad timing!
Oh, of course - Stefan's sister Eva and her boyfriend came to visit just before we went to Turkey. We had some very nice days with them. She did tell me, though, that she still blames me for the fact that her brother does not live in Sweden. She said that she wants to just call him and have him come over for coffee or something whenever she feels like it. And that it's my fault that he lives in Germany. Well, I understand that she misses him. But that's his choice. My brother left Germany more than twenty years ago. I miss him, too. But I know that he wants to live in the US and not in Germany. I want him to be happy.
Otherwise, we had a good time. And then Stefan and I went to the Iron Maiden concert the night before we left for Turkey. That was really good. I was surprised. We spent half the night at the airport. Very interesting...
I hope you're feeling better urs!
Thanks, mac 11! I am! My voice is back. I had the stitches removed yesterday. And I just cough a little bit. So I am well enough to help our friends Katja and Brian tomorrow who are moving to their new house.
My friend Nicole bought her first very own appartment yesterday. She's planning to move in by the beginning of February. That's very exciting.
For me this week was very uneventful. I worked, went home, drank lots of tea and fell asleep. Of course the cats liked it. They are still very cuddly after our vacation :-)
Well getting things together to drop down to the baja of Mexico in about 7 days, excited to go see old friends and just plain visit.
Dear Diary,
My goodness, 7 days since the last posting...guess I had better come out of the shadows.
In NW Georgia, 70 degree+ weather has made a mockery of our winter flannels...mmmh. On Tuesday, B. and I will venture up I75 to Cincinnati, Ohio. We will spend Thanksgiving with my daughter in her new rental home...she is soooooo happy to be out of the apartment. Dinner will include my exwife
, our son-in-law's parents... Maybe a visit to the casino on the river...then onto Anderson, Ind. to celebrate the second birthday of my sister's twins. Followed by a day in lebaneon, Ky...with my wife's best friend. We try to see her friends several times a year.
Dear Diary,
I wish I could go back to when I was 18 and I had a LD relationship. I mailed your very first decendent to that boyfriend so he would know that I LOVED him and I TRUSTED him and i wanted him to KNOW ALL ABOUT MY PAST and he never sent your GGGrandma back to me. I should probably let it go, and not think about it anymore, but I used to love lying in bed re-reading my memories the way they were when I wrote them down - fresh and all that. Now, I really only have memories. I guess, in retrospect, that's all life is isn't it? A slew of memories hanging on a thread. I have tried several time since then to keep up writing journals and such - but since I lost that first one....I've had no such luck at keeping as up to date as that. Wonder if I'm subconciously afraid of losing my private thoughts to someone else? I imagine, that could only be my husband now....but ,...well....I guess even some things I don't tell him....
Anthony Dudley - you seem to be everywhere on the internet - popping up where you're least expected....if you EVER see this...you better find me and SEND ME MY DAMNED BOOK !!!!
hmph, another monday morning. I'm not particularly excited about going to work this morning, and i'm having non silent-silent treatment at home..... Lord Lord Lord. *sigh*
Thursday
Had to go to Greece with a new colleague, an intern, to talk with our Greek partners about a website. Had not been looking forward to it, would rather have staid at home. I like Greece and I like the people in Greece, but I've had it with meetings and travelling and the stress that goes with it. Plus the price of tickets meant we had to stay there a day later and return only on Sunday. A day extra to be spent in Thessaloniki. It’s a beautiful city, for sure, one of my favourite cities. But I've been there a few times already, once or twice chose to stay there an extra day or two, and those times happened to coincide with times of relationship storms. So the place is fraught with emotional connotations. Plus - well, you see - I havent really been doing very well, lately - well, better than before, but still I have this inner sense of hovering at some precipice (and whether there is actually reason for me to feel that way is neither here nor there) - and that feeling sharpens when there's some meeting.
Now this one is the easiest of the "four difficult weeks" I'd been bracing myself for - and I had a breather since week 4 was in fact postponed to week 6, with two weeks of "normal" work in the middle (be it that normal work, due to an application deadline, involved overwork last weekend and till midnight and 2AM, respectively, on the two evenings before going to Greece). But what I was "looking up against", as we say here, is that - normally, as long as meetings (and work in general) go on, I'm fine, but then when its over, I kinda collapse (into fatigue or sheer incoherence) - so I prefer to get the hell outa there. Preferably no additional social engagements for me. And now I had an intern - M. - who'd never been to the place, with me for an additional day in Thessaloniki. Great.
The trip, in the end, tho, turned out to go fine. Not so, however, the first day. After some 4 hours of sleep, I showed up just in time at Central Station and together we went to the airport. Trains were in time, we were in time, I happily remarked on it to her. My bad, she'd remind me later, admitting she was superstitious: the plane to Budapest turned out to have delay b/c of fog. The delay meant we would miss our connection, so we were sent back to transfer desk.
They got us two replacing flights - both via Milan - which would get us in Saloniki at 11:30 PM and 1:30 AM, respectively. Sucky thing is that we had to travel on from there to another town, and there would be no public transport there anymore at that time, whereas all hotels in Saloniki were fully booked (we'd already found out) b/c of congresses and the film festival there. So off we went to the WTC to inform about using our tickets a week later, instead. But by the time we got there, the Greeks wouldn’t be able to meet us the week after, and there also was a rates-problem using the tickets for the dates we preferred. So back to the airport, to catch the plane to Milan after all.
Milan airport is, my colleague explained me (she's from around there), the last monument to the age of corruption, before the anti-mafia judges came in the early nineties, to momentarily clean up the system. Many millions of $$ were spent on the airport, but most of them were pilfered and the resulting construction looks and feels in all ways like 1976 - even though it was only finished in 1990 or so (and dubbed the "millenium" airport). It is so kitschy and out of date in everything from colour schemes to the smallest logos (oh! cocktail bar! <grins>) that it is almost cute and trendy again - what with the ironic loungy retro trend dominating at the moment. We had to wait for six hours there. I missed the big event though. I noticed that some soldiers stopped me from using some transit way, but it was an hour later that M. came to tell me that they'd found and carried off a bomb, and had evacuated the main hall for half an hour, with the passengers there obliged to turn in their luggage to be checked. A Milan-London flight got cancelled. Ah well - I was reading the paper ;-).
Arriving at Thessaloniki airport we took the cab to the other town, some two hours' drive, got there at 1:30.
M., by the way, may still not be someone for whom I have an instant liking, but she does know a lot, has some cool interests, and has great anecdotes to tell, about places she's been, things she knows. Someone with whom you can nimbly switch from talking about movies you've both seen to discussing Jewish history in Central Europe to debating Bush and the war to talking travelling experiences. Now that’s the kind of thing I've really been missing with other colleagues, who are great organisers but not necessarily with in-depth interests - it helps!
Example. One time, she had ended up with boyfriend out in Croatia, when late at night they'd found no place to stay - in a castle-like residence. They'd been sheltered there after the friendly services of a hotel owner who'd sent them walking up there from three miles down the road, and were given a huge suite equipped with everything, though it was oddly anachronistic somehow. She had laid awake worrying about what price they might have to pay the next morning … But that next morning it turned out that, a) they hardly had to pay anything and b) this building was the former Tito residence …
She couldn’t help wondering whose room exactly they'd spent the night in … after all: it had had an elevator up directly into the room …
Friday
Meeting went fine - that is, I mean - it hadnt been anything to worry about in the first place. In fact, I'd kinda been only half-convinced of the need to go there (hence being a little pissed off at being pressured into going anyway, first, and then into taking someone with me, too). We explained what we needed our new website to be able to do, they explained what the model we were opting for could do, we figured out some ways how to solve the bits in the middle. They explained how it all worked and we agreed a timetable. That’s about it. Good thing was that the "they" are C. + C., a guy and a woman whom I've met a few times now and I like 'em a *lot*. He's very Greek, all boisterous, "my friend"-this, "my friend, let me tell you"-that, masculinity; she's no-nonsense and gives back as good as she's got (especially when they start talking politics, as he's left-wing and she's right-wing). And together the two of 'em are like brother and sister, rapid-fire mock-fighting dialogue as if they've been perfectly attuned to each other since years …They're cool.
Good, too, was that we could add a second short meeting with some colleagues upstairs, to talk about another project that organisation is involved in too, and for which the Greek part hadnt been going so well thus far. Turned out that they had a big thing coming up next September involving producing TV programmes, newspaper articles, public campaigns etc, and that the March events we are proposing fitted right into their timetable. Cool.
Even after that we still had time left and wandered downtown - its a small town - and it struck me again how quickly its picking up, this town. The first time I was there it was all old-world Oriental, with endless sidestreets with dusty little shops selling just the one improbably specialised product - chainsaws, safes, doors - or containing not much more than the one copy-machine and two chairs, waiting for that third customer of the day - I loved it. I had some trouble when C + C insisted, back then, when we were sitting on a terrace in the sun at the end of the day, that "of course, you can see, you must admit, Greece is much more like Germany than like Turkey, it's a European country!" - when in fact it reminded me of nothing as much as of Istanbul and Tirana - but how was I to explain that I thought that was a good thing? This was the third or fourth time, tho, and its some four years later, and downtown is looking ever smarter. They've also picked up on that loungy clubby style that gotten all the rage these past years in a big way, leaving me wishing that Utrecht had that number of cool, retro-ish places to chill at - and wondering how bad one's town is when you're eyeing up provincial Greek towns in jealousy.
At the end of the day we went back to the office cause they all have a drink at the café down the street. Eh. Once C. (the guy) arrived it was cool tho. The place, in fact, is just one of those near-the-station places with bright lights and basic furniture where a few old men sit and drink something strong while rattling their rosaries through their fingers. But they decided to "invade" it once a week - overjoying the owner - here's people who actually eat, too! Still, the food - though good - definitely serves as zakuski - i.e., to windowdress the intake of alcohol ;-). In the end the three of us stayed there till we were kicked out by the owner at one in the morning, involved - unexpectedly - in heated political debates about a whole range of stuff - it was fun. Dutch friends would, in such discussions, have subtly suggested that, you know, perhaps it might also be true that … none of that here - big gestures and passionate assertions instead. Heh. And some unexpected revelations.
One angry story of M.'s about Italian professors and nepotism and bureaucracy betrayed a bad personal experience of what one needs to do to get a particular job there … that made me sad. Its just that its the umpteenth story I've heard. I sometimes wonder if there are any women out there who have not gotten reason, say, to fear or resent what men can do. Another story was one of violence, too, though of quite a different kind. We were talking about demonstrations and memories and all that, M. told of what happened in Genova - and then C., our IT-specialist colleague, "outed" himself as an anarchist. Told us of the Saloniki demo in which he'd marched along (skimask and all), when the military police attacked from both sides and blocked all the sidestreets through which they could escape - and how he'd thrown back the tear gas grenades they'd shot at them, and a molotov cocktail too … well, well.
now there's a diary entry!
Dear Diary:
Yesterday was awful; we're currently practicing the Duchess of Malfi for a play, but the person meant to play the Duchess threw a strop about the innuendo in one scene, and so I had to learn both my own lines and the Duchess'. Worse, someone whom I had considered a very good friend betrayed me, in favour of some random French guy. It's pouring down, I have a cold, and it's just so miserable, especially when alone...
I'll explain more later, in more detail, especially about the ill-fated Malfi trip and the fiasco at the Russian History seminar.
there'll be more ... i decided to try to start doing this. see how long i'll keep it up. kinda wary of giving away too much but i dont think much anyone is going to read all that, anyway, so ...
Aboard, nimh, you will find voyeurs of only the very highest quality...tasteful, attentive, non-judgemental and who lead personal lives reminiscent mostly of Descartian brain-in-a-vat metaphors. So, go crazy. We've little else to do.
blatham wrote:Aboard, nimh, you will find voyeurs of only the very highest quality...tasteful, attentive, non-judgemental and who lead personal lives reminiscent mostly of Descartian brain-in-a-vat metaphors. So, go crazy. We've little else to do.
Now that's hitting the nail on the head
Dear Diary
I'm torn. Ecuador is delightful but godawfull expensive compared to Colombia.
We landed in Quito of course and stayed at a hostel/restaurant in "New Town" ("old Town" is the colonial section. All the cabs at the airport were shiny new Puegeot station wagons, rather elegant. My first impression was how orderly the traffic was not the kill or be killed style in Cali. The hotel was off Avenida Amazonas which is Quito's showpiece modern sector geared to tourists. Every street was lined with restaurants and internet cafes or more often the two rolled in to one. I had to translate the various signs in the hotel for my wife since there wasn't a word of Spanish anywhere. Obviously there were tourists everywhere, the downside of not having a functioning guerrilla army. I was really surprised by the whole thing. I'd thought it would be a bit dingier and gloomier than Lima but quite the contrary. It's cool (or make that cold by my wife's standards) in the morning and evening but the sun actually comes out and mid day can be downright hot. Unlike Lima the city is full of attractive modern buildings and in Old Town well kept and photogenic colonials.
Next we flew to Cuenca the third largest city. It's an all day journey by bus and although some say it's a great way to see the country I find the sites go by too fast to be very rewarding. Cuenca is almost completely colonial and has a main plaza filled with beautifully kept flowering gardens. It's small and you can see mountains at the end looking down any major street in any dirrection. The weather was only a degree or two warmer than Quito and I couldn't sell it to my wife. We did look at a nice two story house for rent for $300. It seemed like a good deal in dollars but when I converted that to Colombian pesos it was more than twice what I pay in Cali in a better neighborhood. And so it was accross the board. I had to keep converting the prices to pesos since by my habitual way of thinking in dollars everything seemed deceptively cheap by US standards.
Not being able to sell Cuenca we took the half day bus ride (I'm willing to give up half a day of what remains of my life to a bus ride now and then but there I draw the line) to Loja further south and lower in altitude. It's either a very small city or a darned big town depending on how you want to look at it. For my sales pitch I chose "small city". I still had to listen to constant complaints about being frozen but it's lots warmer than Cuenca and Quito and if we move to Ecuador that's where we'll go. A half hour out of town is the huge Podocarpus National Park where a gringo can hike, backpack and bird watch in perfect safety to his hearts content. Loja also has two universities, a public (hard to get in to) and a private (you just pay and you're in). My rational is that here my wife could attend university with a career in English as she would like to do and I can occupy that time with day trips to the national park whereas in Cali I have nothing to do by myself besides visiting the cottage in Dapa (which is now contested since she thinks I have a "mosa" or girl on the side up there but that's another story). Anyway somewhat to my surprise my wife is agreeable to the plan should I wish to carry through on it.
From Loja we went to nearby Vilcabamba to spend a few days at Cabanas Rio Yambala in the jungle. At least that's what it sounded like from the web page and Lonely Planet guide. Vilcabamba is lower still than Loja and therefore warmer and almost just about right for you know who. It's a village that for the weather I suppose has drawn a permanent young hippie contingent. There are also a number of adult American ex pats I'm told. Well the jungle wasn't. The cabins were located in a narrow valley with a very cold creek and trees and the riparian vegetation one would expect but just up the mountainside a bit it all changed over to dry desert conditions with cactus etc. (and one bird). No jungle, no cloud forest. Turned out to be quite uninteresting and we left after a day returning to Loja.
The one destination that my wife was really interested in seeing was Guayaquil. It's the second largest city and is down in the lowlands at the end of a huge bay on the pacific. The temperature midday climbed to 40. She was in heaven, I was in hell! The downtown area of the city is really quite spectacular in fact quite a bit more so than Quito with beautiful huge plazas around every corner and striking tall modern buildings cheek by jowl with freshly painted and scrupulously maintained colonials. There's about three kilometers of Malecon along the wide Guayas river that the city must have spent millions and millions to build. It's really impressive with gleaming wooden boardwalks, huge sculptural lookout towers in nautical theme and a kilometer of spectacular gardens and pools. There's even an IMAX theater, you know the movie in the round that makes you dizzy. We saw one on the Galapagos and felt like we were soaring with the sea birds. I was told later that the latest mayor instituted a zero tolerance policy in the downtown area which explains the police on every corner and the complete safety. People were out on the streets in droves at all hours. Before the current mayor it was supposed to be the most dangerous place in Ecuador or so I hear. The outskirts are a different story and we passed through them to get to Guayaquil's botanical garden which is not very impressive but has a nice orchid collection as you would expect. So I told my wife fine, we can make occasional weekend shopping jaunts to Guayaquil. It's only twenty-five minutes by plane or a half day by bus from Loja.
Back in Cali now we find we can not apply for visas at the consulate here but instead must do in Quito. Hmmm...
Wow... I'm glad you had a good time; are you certain on moving to Ecuador?
I went there once, at the start of an slightly ill-fated plan to do the Pan-American Highway- ill-fated because only two people, not ten, signed up, and so we had to stick with doing the North of South America. I liked Ecuador, although the weather really played around with my mind. We went to Isla Puná, Portoviejo and Esmereldas... I liked the country, but my favourite place by far was Colonia in Uruguay; I fell in love with it, and was certain that I'd buy a house there after finishing my doctorate... which is another age away.
Ecuador is a happening place - the Exchange Student of my good friends is from there and I met a guy that owes a cybercafe on the Baja from Ecuador.
Saturday
Greeks are absolutely insane about Christmas decorations. I didn’t know that. Well, learned something new. Every two blocks you'll find this hastily furnished shop with only the very cheesiest, kitschiest and most outrageous Christmas lights and decorations - beyond your wildest dreams (or nightmares). I just stood there, pointing at an inflatable plastic waist-high Father Christmas (with some weird tube-shaped Smurf-thing going on on the top of his head), and looking at the shop assistant who was smiling at me - and gawking. I'm all, this can't be true! But it was 5 euro. They had one with a miniature Father Christmas riding on the back of a red-and-white spotted (rein)deer, too. It was the most mindboggling thing I saw - well, except for the green-and-white, rather obscenely shaped, cuddly Christmas tree toy perhaps.
Of course, I bought the plastic inflatable Father Christmas. How could I not? It’s the perfect gift. Tuesday we celebrate Sinterklaas at work. This is a Dutch tradition (Sinterklaas, not necessarily celebrating it at work). Sinterklaas is actually Saint Nicolas, who, according to age-old tradition, comes from Spain every year on a steamship with his helpers the "Black Petes" (derived from chimney sweeps, not negroes, so the Dutch assert to disgruntled Afro-Dutchmen every year). The kids cheer when he arrives, for soon he will ride the roofs on his grey and the Petes will leave presents through the chimney, and when there's a knock on the door and ginger nuts go flying through the room, you know it's time to get your gifts! Well, that's the short version, anyway. There's also a bit about getting sweets if you've been good but getting "the rod" and, at worst, being carted off back to Spain inside the Saint's big bag if you haven't. Not much is made of that anymore nowadays, though.
In any case, your Sinterklaas present goes with a rhyming little poem which "Sint" conveniently uses to 'playfully' remind the receiver of the present about everything he's been 'naughty' about - great fodder for the ever moralist Dutch. And/or it goes with a 'surprise' - some inventive, preferably complicated or messy DIY bit of packaging handiwork which the receiver has to struggle through to get to his present. I opted for the poem.
In fact, Friday night, after coming home so late, I couldn’t sleep, and once I thought of one line I had to keep turning the light on, write down the next line I had thought of, turn the light back off, try to sleep, turn the light on again when I nevertheless … etc.
In Thessaloniki the biggest-ass Christmas tree I've ever seen lorded over the main square, looking a little dreary in the autumn rain. On the other side of the stage that was erected there something a little more horrific (still) loomed: a veritable ship of lights, sails and everything, at least twenty meters high (that's about twelve of me). Behind it - the sea.
The sea was absolutely beautiful that night, in the dark, as we walked back from the film festival that turned out to have movies with subtitles as well. Centred in its black canvas, the sea cradled a ship dark red and with a gracious curve, like a Chinese dream, lit up just enough to see its colour and shape. Better still was when the brightly lit square block of a ferry to one of the islands departed from the harbour and slowly moved away into the distance while we walked aside the seaboard - a veritable vision of light dividing up sky and sea into two distinct halves of a different shade of black, the water below lit up in the oily black of undulating waves, the air above lit up more diffusely in a matt, liquorice-like black. I kept looking at it in awe, stealing glances at it while half-listening to M., who kept on talking herself after throwing just the one brief glance at the dim horizon and muttering, "oh - pretty". Much in the same way I had, earlier that day, stolen away my attention from the conversation she was keeping up in the bus, when we dived into the gorge cut out as if with a knife from the dry, highland plains above, its rocky innards laid bare. Perhaps she's used to it, she comes from a beautiful area it seems.
Not that she didn’t have any interesting stuff to say, let me be fair. She told another hilarious anecdote. Her town, a maverick village where the locals speak a language related to Rhaetoroman, had unexpectedly fallen for the rhetorics of the "Padanian" nationalism of Bossi's Lega Nord - that's the party that wanted to make the North of Italy independent, so as to rid the hard-working Lombardians from those tax-sucking leaches in the South, and which is now in government with Berlusconi, earning its votes with anti-immigrant rabblerousing. The new Lega Nord mayor of the village was an enthusiastic young man, who'd been in her high school class. Once elected, he quickly picked up on a particularly grievous abuse: all the benches were red. Well, all park benches are painted red in Italy, apparently. But the mayor wanted no truck with these commie benches, and ordered them all repainted green. Fine, so it was done. But then, the work finished, an audacious acquaintance remarked that, did he know green was the colour of Islam?
The benches, it should be noted, are now brown.
Her tale of Tito's residence, the other day, reminded me of another anecdote, by the way. I heard it at some lunch seminar in Amsterdam, featuring, amongst others, the Serbian director Zhelimir Zhilnik (and I could have sworn I posted it here, but apparently not). Digressing into an aside from the actual topic of European identity, he talked about a movie he had made, about Tito. It had been a bit of an experiment. They found someone who really looked like Tito, dressed him up in a replica of Tito's uniform and everything, sent him on to the street in downtown Belgrade, and filmed the reactions. This was around 1990 or 1992, Tito had been dead over a decade, Serbia was at war or was about to be, the population had instantly been impoversihed by freak inflation and every socio-political paradigm had just been turned upside down. And here was Tito - and he was asking people: what has happened? What was done to my country?
The reaction was instantaneous, taking the film way beyond its intended conceptual joke. People, instantly cowed, started explaining Tito in fits of embarassment what had happened, apologising, kissing his hand. A crowd quickly gathered, then swelled, until a traffic jam had blocked the streets and hundreds of people had rushed up to see Tito, resurrected. In the end the police arrived on the scene, "Tito" fled, and cops arrested a cameraman or production assistant for creating unrest, taking him off to jail.
That’s not the end of the story though. At a loss what to do next and eager to act quickly before anyone higher up would hear of it all and intervene - the director had been in trouble with Milosevic before - the crew thought up a bold plan. They went to the police station - Tito out in front - cameraman up next. The effect was baffling. Confronted with the Marshall himself, demanding an explanation, and the camera rolling, the neighbourhood cops folded immediately, saluting yes Marshall, of course Marshall, apologising profusely, and opening up the celldoor to let the film crew member go, at His personal request.
This is where totalitarian psychology and folkloric superstition come together, I guess: they believed! Or at the very least didn’t dare run the risk of betting on the wrong horse … who would contradict Tito?
The Thessaloniki filmfestival was a brilliant solution to my conundrum, by the way, even though we got off to a false start, being able only to get tickets for a Greek movie that night, which turned out to be quite inane. Luckily we agreed on that, and so got to LOL about it together after hurrying on out of the cinema halfway through. Before that, I'd gotten to look up some of my favourite cafes in town again, using the "gotta find an internet café" excuse, and read the newspapers (Athens News and a local mini-edition of the New York Times) while observing the people there. It’s a cool town. Its also a town with the prettiest people. Well, OK - women. Funny, that. Greek men look positively Balkan, perennially undershaved, chubby and a little grubby - whereas the women have Mediterranean class and damn, are they beautiful.
Hey, ya gotta love a country where high boots and short skirts seem to be the national uniform …
