Yes! My Erasmus is on, I’m writing this using some stolen unlocked invisible waves from a nearby dorm… And I’m sick. My throat is killing me and I must have a fever. Must be from sleeping everywhere I found a suitable surface in Prague airport (where I had an 11-hour stopover) and in a park in Prague itself, so sleep-deprived was I… I don’t know where I caught the bug but right now it’s killing all of my energy and fun. Anyway…
I’m in Denmark two days already. I like it VERY much. The area in which I live is in the middle of nowhere, almost 10km from the centre of Århus, but that means that it’s really quiet with lots of beautiful nature everywhere. It’s also in a side of town which is considered a “ghetto”, and so yesterday when riding home on the bike I rented from Studenterhus Århus I saw lots of Muslim and black immigrants. I also found a few local supermarkets run by immigrants that had all sorts of spices, Turkish products, an aroma from the Middle East and shopped at a couple of them. I can’t shake the feeling that they overcharged me because they realised I was a foreigner but then again that might be my subconscious little anti-multiculturally indoctrinated side speaking. From what I found out by visiting another nearby supermarket today, things are expensive everywhere. Three bell peppers of various colours: 15 kr. A little can of Somersby cider: 20 kr. Pears: 2,95 kr per piece.
By the way, 1€ =~ 7,5 Danish Kroner. Do the math yourself. 😛 Yes, things here ARE expensive.
The University in all of its grand location in the middle of a large park and in the city centre, complete with lakes etc has been a big help already and I can feel that they’re really caring for the exchange students, what with organising the language and culture course that’s taking place in the next few days, ensuring everyone is OK etc. On arriving they gave me a big bag with merchandise, including a raincoat! Even though the weather as long as I’ve been here has been excellent, something tells me I’m gonna need it!
God! I feel terrible. I so want to continue writing, there’s SO much to share already but I’d rather just lie in bed… Some pictures (from my Denmark flickr set):
I’m sitting on the floor aboard European Express, one of the worst ships of the line that connect Athens with Mytilini. Very few seats, the lounge has some weird round tables that are useless and it’s almost entirely made of huge spaces with lights too bright. Never mind. I’m travelling to Mytilini with a mission.
Get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
The past few months I’ve been preparing, mentally and practically, for the next big thing in my life. That is my Erasmus. I’d been dreaming of doing it for many years now but this year was my last and best chance since I’m also moving out of the place I’ve called home for the past five years.
So I did pursue it. I sent out requests, I got denied, I meddled with bureaucracy and had my share of incredible stories anyone going through this brutal procedure no doubt have as well. My big thanks to the Aegean University International Office who helped a lot along the way while also tolerating my sluggish ways with filling in applications, agreements, doing this sort of paperwork thing.
In just 14 days now, in the early hours of July 26th, I’m flying to Denmark and I’m going to be living there for the next six months. More specifically I’ll be studying at the department of Information and Media Studies in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. The first few weeks of August I’ll be doing a language and culture course and September will see the beginning of my three courses! I’m so very excited about all the things I’m going to experience and learn there, the different cultures I’ll witness and sink my teeth into, the trips I’m going to make, the sights I will behold, the parts of me I will create and explore all at the same time.
But here I sit, comfortably numb from it all. When changes come creeping closer I never find myself ready to deal with them and flow along as I typically do. In fact, the closer they come, the less active I become. I find myself getting lazier and lazier (and I’m not THAT lazy under normal circumstances) instead of taking advantage of my countdown. I hate it when I do that but it’s very strong with me, for some reason. It’s something I’ve come to call προθανάτιος μηδενισμός in Greek, something you’d call pre-mortem nihilism in English if you’d want to sound especially obnoxious (it sounds obnoxious in Greek too but sometimes the minimum common denominator is not fit for the very truest of verbal expressivenesss). There, I did it again.
That is part of the reason I haven’t written anything about all this until now, the reason I’ve been writing less on here in general. Another reason is that I was afraid of writing this in particular because it is, inevitably, a sort of farewell post. If I’m not good –nay, if I get really nervous, anxious about– at something, it is farewells. Is anyone…?
It’s a farewell post to the five years that changed me from deep inside. The place that was chiefly the background for this change and my coming of age. It has been the equivalent of discovering the New World for myselves. It is a chunk of spacetime, the kind that burns itself into our memories really close to our scent centres, wherne I can say I had the most fun and significant experiences till now. Of course, I met lots of good people during this period some of whom became my friends, others something more, yet others something less. With certain people (I wouldn’t be able to point them all out yet) “Mytilini was the first chapter”. For most, as it happens, it’s also going to be the last chapter. I’m not sure how I feel about that — at least for now.
Now my mission, as stated above, is to push on, pack in and move out of Mytilini in the minimum number of days in order to buy some time to see friends, family and everyone that, if I won’t be seeing for over six months, I’ll miss (in case they don’t visit me in Denmark, of course ~^,) Truth is, I’m not really feeling it. Maybe that’s the reason I’m comfortably numb. It’s the difference between having played a new game for ten minutes and having only read the manual: knowing something and knowing about something…
Who knows? Maybe the empty boxes and the sight of things lying around as they do when a change of residence commands it will kick my ass into (emotional) action. It’s just as possible I’ll only realise the gravity of the impending change when I’m already in Athens, Denmark or somewhere else…
Great, obscure Danish ’70s prog. This, along with The Wall and Calling All Dawns, is the soundtrack of my last days here… Thanks Villy for sending me this.
4 days later
After four days of more lazying around and finally “accepting” what lay ahead I did what had to be done. The empty card boxes I gathered from around town I filled with my stuff. Most of it anyway; I’m leaving a lot of things behind, such as cutlery and kitchenware, dead cockroaches and all of my furniture. If I had the time I would have tried to sell it but it seems its destiny is to stay here waiting for the next resident of 1, Lavyrinthou St.
The moving company came this morning and picked everything up to take it to Athens.
After I’m done writing this, I’m packing my remaining stuff, shutting the windows, locking the door and leaving. I never locked the door.
Did you know that every bamboo in the world flowers simultaneously once every few years? Had you ever imagined that if you pulverised a sponge the cells would gather together again to form the initial form in a perfect reconstruction? Had it ever occurred to you that, unlike other species like dogs, horses or chickens, people keep cats for no practical reason? Have you ever thought about the relevant speciesist implications? Did you know that elephants mourn their dead and visit elephant graveyards (yes like the ones in The Lion King) to pay their respects? Would you imagine that about 20% of the world’s oxygen comes from a kind of oceanic bacteria? Did you know that smallpox hasn’t really been eradicated — in fact, if unleashed today, it would eradicate a great percentage of the human population? Would you have ever known that most wheat — the basis for a great lot of our food today — cannot even reproduce naturally anymore because humans have bred it to have seeds so large they cannot even leave the ear and thus must be manually assisted?
“What on Earth Evolved?” and its 400-page insight into humanity’s and Earth’s organic history is full of such facts that are definitely going to stick with you. Just ask any of my friends or other people in my social circle if I haven’t been annoying them with jaw-dropping factoids about any of the one hundred species involved in this book, 50 that made their impact before humanity emerged and 50 that affected, and were affected by, us self-proclaimed owners of the Earth throughout our history. This unlikely menagerie has it all: from chickens to the supposed HIV virus, from roses to dragonflies, from cannabis to sharks, from dogs to eucalyptus trees, from ants to bats and from chilli peppers to trilobites.
Just like “What on Earth Happened?”, the sequel promises to change or add to your perspective on things. Humanity’s “special privileges”, our relationship with the rest of the world, the holistic importance of everything there is and all that is no more but once reigned supreme. This book will make you think, it’ll make you look around at life out there through a different eye. This is the stuff children would learn at school in a perfect world (the artistic design in fact, would be deceptively compatible with such a science class at school: minimalism meets cute drawings? Yes!).
This is “On the Origins of Species” on cultural steroids, it’s Darwin for Dummies and I could not mean that in a better way.
“Conspiracies are real and by no means necessarily the product of a paranoid imagination. If this little book has a single message, this is it. But, as the Kennedy assassination showed, there is not just one big over-arching conspiracy. There are many smaller conspiracies, some of them competing, interlocking, overlapping…”
Insightful little book that shows how conspiracies are run-of-the-mill popular politics. Research into them, however, is undermined by the “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” stereotype which has been fueled by deliberate government disinformation and distraction tactics (such as alien abductions and a great part of the UFO conspiracy paraphilology: who’s going to care about the real and very obvious conspiracies when there’s aliens out to get us?), propaganda and your standard simplistic, absurd, “over-arching” conspiracy theories: Jewish bankers, Illuminati, Masons etc.
This was a book I bought through a 3-for-£5 deal when I was in Dundee last year. It was a £1.6666 very well spent indeed.
Anyone who might have ever owned, lived with or generally loved cats will see so much truth in this little memoire. The very notion that individual animals of certain species possess varying personality traits is something we don’t really acknowledge. We might say “this cat is lazy” or ” How often haven’t we all generalised when talking about “vengeful, selfish” cats or “trusting, loyal” dogs?
Birmingham, or Brum, is proof that animals can have spectacularly, or should I say, catastrophically different personalities than anything anyone might have ever expected! Brum is so unfeline it’s surprising he’s a cat at all. The list of things this tabby has achieved is not short of extraordinary and even though living with such a cat could be dangerous to everyone involved, I think it would be a remarkably fun experience. I admit I’d pay good money to overhear a Yuki-Brum conversation or just watch them at play. Maybe they should do a Big Brother kind of thing with deviant pets instead of human sociopaths and see what happens!
A Cat Called Birmingham is a very funny book. It gets 4 and not 3 stars just because it made me actually laugh out loud more times than I remember any other book recently doing. Chris Pascoe hits the nail on the head a lot of the time with cats and how they can be such a great source of comedy. In fact, the book made me even more of a cat lover. You may be wondering: is that even possible? I thought it wasn’t; I was wrong. Such awww-inducing personal stories can’t but reinforce any sense of proximity and love there may be between the races of humans and felines.
‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society…’ […]
‘From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors or misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to us all, and the Earth itself to nobody.’
Ο πρώτος άνθρωπος που, αφού εσώκλεισε ένα κομμάτι γης, σκέφτηκε να πει «Αυτό είναι δικό μου» και βρήκε άλλους ανθρώπους αρκετά απλόμυαλους ώστε να τον πιστέψουν, ήταν ο θιασωτής την κοινωνίας των πολιτών…» […]
“Από πόσα εγκλήματα, πολέμους και φόνους, πόσες φρικωδίες και δυστυχίες θα μπορούσε ο καθένας να είχε σώσει την ανθρωπότητα αν είχε ξεριζώσει τους πασάλους ή είχε μπαζώσει το χαντάκι και είχε φώναξει στους συντρόφους του: Μην ακούτε αυτόν τον απατεώνα. Θα καταστραφείτε αν έστω μια φορά ξεχάσετε ότι η καρποί της Γης ανήκουν σε όλους μας, και ότι η ίδια η Γη δεν ανήκει σε κανέναν.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1754)
Ζαν-Ζακ Ρουσώ, από την Διατριβή για την προέλευση και τις βάσεις της ανισότητας μεταξύ των ανθρώπων (1754)
