Found this book used for 10lv at Elephant bookstore in Sofia. This was my first real exposure to fiction by Margaret Atwood, and it was enough to make me think that reading longer works from her will be something I’m going to enjoy deeply.
While looking for the real title of the book on Google, I stumbled upon this review which just so happens to portray my feelings for it pretty much exactly. Allow me then to do the unthinkable and use that review’s words instead of mine. Thank you Kelly EasyVegan.
“The stories cover a little bit of everything: fantasy, mystery, science fiction, speculative fiction, feminism, rape culture, gender wars, dating, death – you name it.
Many of the pieces are hit and miss; my favorites are the scifi stories that hinge on an environmental or animal-friendly theme:
– “Cold-Blooded” – An alien race of matriarchal moth people visit planet earth – or as they call it, “The Planet of the Moths,” a nickname owing to the fact that their moth cousins outnumber us by billions – and find humans sorely lacking in both culture and intelligence;
– “My Life As a Bat” – A series of reflections on the narrator’s past life as a bat, including a disturbing (and, as it just so happens, true) anecdote about WWII-era experiments in which bats were made into unwitting suicide bombers;
– “Hardball” – A piece of dystopian speculative fiction in which humans, having decimated their environment, have retreated to live under a giant dome. Since space is limited, the population must be kept in check: for every birth, one person is chosen to die via a lottery. Care to guess what becomes of the remains?
Also enjoyable are those stories which reimagine classic literature: “Gertrude Talks Back” gives voice to Hamlet’s long-suffering mother, and “Unpopular Gals” and “Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women” celebrates those villains and “airheads” without which fairy tales would not exist.
While at times difficult to read, “Liking Men” is another standout; this is the piece that deals with sexual assault, vis à vis a woman’s journey back to coping with – and even loving – men (or rather, one man in particular) again after her rape.
Έναυσμα γι’ αυτό το ποστ η έξαφνη ενθύμιση αυτού του άρτιου γραφιστικά αλλά γλωσσολογικά εγγληματικά κακού logo.
Ката то “гриклиш”.
Скефтомун рандомли симера оти енас иданикос тропос на грапсис хорис на се пьанун та спайдерз ине поли апла на графис еци. ке 9 стус 10 номизун оти графис росика. ЛОЛ.
Алитя. Та кирилика ине сан то елинико алфавито v2.0. ОК, пяни ихус пу ден ехуме пя емис, ала ден ехи алус, опос то Θ ке то Δ – то латинико ихе експансьон пакс я на лиси афто то провлима ме тис екатодадес глосес пу то иотетисан: тус тонус. Ексу ке то астио пу екана капоте, отан емена сти София, схетика ме то пос проферете и thrash metal ста росика ке ста вулгарика. Канена алфавито телика ден бори на пяси олоклиро то фазма тис антропинис омилиас – имун етимос на грапсо “то IPA ден пянете” ала мета скефтика пос ден име сигурос. То IPA ден ине алфавито яти апо моно ту ден симени типотал. Паролафта ден пянете сан капьо систима, капьо сайфер?
Уф курастика на пликтролого ме тин тахитита тис манас му. Ан та катаферате ос едо, ньосте перифаня, яти и кирилофони (епитрепсте му тон неологизмо) пу ксерун елиника, и идика и елинофони пу дявазун кирилика, имасте акатаноита дисеврето идос.
Some books I only review because of the sort of benign OCD I’ve developed that compels me to write something about every book I read; withothers I can’t stop myself from going all-out, even if I didn’t enjoy reading them enough to award them 5 stars to begin with. With psychology and typology (personality type) books, the latter is almost always the case. Perhaps to a fault, I might add, for the wall of text lying beneath is arguably not the optimal way of transmitting this, let’s face it, difficult information. Still, I’m a reader rather than a video watcher… but I’m not the only one. ♪
As a review this probably won’t work, but that said: what if I finally accept that it’s not me writing a review here, but taking the opportunity to process, share and, in typical Hallographic style, lovingly re-transmit the fascinating information, empathy and communication skills this book filled my mind and attention with, at least for a time?
Some books might not be for everyone or even five-star worthy as far as reading pleasure is concerned, but they do contain valuable ideas absolutely worth spreading, writing and talking about.
Watch me embracing the fact that this is not going to be a review.
…
I read Please Understand Me II on my Android on .pdf. It is David Keirsey’s definitive 1998 update to his original 1984 Please Understand Me. He himself was (he died in 2013) the personality psychologist who created the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (link to the test as it appears in the book, it’s worth the manual effort to complete) and the Four Temperaments typing system. It shares its name with Hippocrates’ and Galen’s original four temperaments theory, which has for millennia sorted people’s personalities into choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic and sanguine.
This archetype has survived to this day in its original form and has thus proved rather durable, along with various other ancient and medieval derivatives, albeit few people consider them as valid typological systems anymore (I’m of two minds about being a Nymph, according to Paracelsus). From Wikipedia’s article on the Keirsey Temperament Sorter:
Keirsey’s Artisan, Guardian, Idealist and Rational types have come a long way indeed since the time Hippocrates classified people by their over-secretion or lack of certain human bodily fluids: the system was developed upon many decades of research, observation, counseling and comparing the behaviour of his clients. It is not the only typology system to have been built on observation and the scientific method, but it differs from others in the fine points.
To be exact, whereas the Enneagram on the one hand—to name my favourite such system—separates people into nine categories based on their preconceived deficiencies of character, sources of insecurity and ambitions, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator on the other, probably the most well-known and used such system around the world, sorts people into sixteen categories by the order of preference of their eight types of Jungian cognitive functions, it is a person’s outward behaviour that goes to determine their Keirsey temperament.
Because Keirsey worked with Myers and Briggs and his system of typology is understandably an extension or “expansion” to theirs, his four types are basically the sixteen MBTI types divided by four. He noticed similar behavioural patterns between certain types and identified the connectors as the common letters in the types’ names, e.g. the INFP and the ENFJ are both intuitive and feeling types, which makes them both Idealists, while Guardians are SJs, meaning ESTJs, ISFJs and so on.
If you’re at all familiar with Jungian cognitive functions, you might know that the four core cognitive functions (thinking, feeling, intuiting and sensing), farther multiplied by two by being either extraverted or introverted in nature, are fundamentally separated into the perceptive ones, the ones we use to take in information about the external world (sensing/intuiting) and the judging ones, the ones we use to make decisions (thinking/feeling). The two letters comprising the name of the Keirsey temperament denote the combination of an individual’s preference in both perception and judgment.
Thus, for instance, NFs primarily take in information from the external world by using their iNtuition, and they mainly take decisions using their Feelings. NTs, respectively, also take in information about the world using their iNtuition. However, they do not primarily use their feelings to make decisions as the NFs do, but rather use their Thinking function.
It would follow that the four Keirsey types should be NF, NT, SF and ST, and indeed, before Keirsey came along, Myers and Briggs used to separate the sixteen types as so. Nevertheless, Keirsey did come along and observed that SPs and SJs bore far more behavioural similarities to each other than STs and SPs did. He incorporated his findings to his four temperaments theory and thus drew the blueprint for what I believe to be the MBTI 2.0.
Actually, maybe not an MBTI 2.0, because by itself the MBTI is still quite usable. In case however one wishes to combine different systems of typology in order to make more complete or nuanced profiles for people— combining the Enneagram with the MBTI so as to have an overview of both a person’s ambitions, fears and behavioural patterns, for example—i.e. for the purpose of synergy, the Keirsey Type Sorter works far better than the MBTI and in any case it can be a very effective, hard and fast way of identifying a person’s type; you can usually tell fairly easily and intuitively which temperament a person is, whereas with the MBTI and its sixteen whole different types it can be difficult and in any case requires a lot of experience.
The benefits of typing people themselves and why one would want to do it I’ll leave for another time, but I’m sure you can fill in the gaps depending on your own needs for better communication.
What I still haven’t got into at all is how this whole Keirsey thing works.
As mentioned earlier, Keirsey’s theory is only indirectly focused on cognitive functions. Rather, he speculated that, on one hand, people’s behaviour can be separated into two categories according to their use of language and expression: either specific/concrete or generalising/abstract. This often translates into “detail-oriented/pragmatic/moving from the specific towards the whole” and “big-picture/theoretical/moving from the whole towards the specific”, respectively.
This screenshot might help with developing the concept of abstract vs. concrete speech in your mind (pardon the peculiar white balance; I was reading in bed at that moment and had Twilight activated):
People who are cooperative pay more attention to other people’s opinions and are more concerned with doing the right thing. People who are pragmatic (utilitarian) pay more attention to their own thoughts or feelings and are more concerned with doing what works. There is no comparable idea of Myers or Jung that corresponds to this dichotomy, so this is a significant difference between Keirsey’s work and that of Myers and Jung.
The pragmatic temperaments are Rationals (pragmatic and abstract) and Artisans (pragmatic and concrete). The cooperative temperaments are Idealists (cooperative and abstract), and Guardians (cooperative and concrete). Neither Myers nor Jung included the concept of temperament in their work. Jung’s psychological functions are hard to relate to Keirsey’s concepts.
In Please Understand Me II, Keirsey goes through not only the fundamentals of his theory and the characteristics of each type, he also has separate sections and detailed overviews for each subtype (the following is for INFPs/Healers);
breakdowns of each type’s strong and weak skills:
further breakdown for best-suited job in “diplomacy”-oriented fields, the NFs’ specialty (which include teaching, counseling, championing, “healing”, doing reconciliatory, cross-disciplinary work, e.g. between science and metaphysics, to name a pertinent example that fascinates me personally, etc):
A little clarification is in order here: NFs are natural diplomats and horrible tacticians — that could be why I love the big map in Total War games, enjoy Diplomacy (the game) and Dixit, tend to royally suck at the tactical battles in Total War and am absolute garbage in StarCraft II. SPs, on the other hand, are the complete opposite, and you can tell how SPs are poor at diplomacy, since they’re usually the types who most refuse to seek common ground or look at things from a different perspective, but are very good at looking at things practically due to their concrete/utilitarian duality. Conversely, NTs are great strategists and poor logisticians, while SJs are the opposite.
The following analysis goes on to portray common interests for each type (notice how Idealists “will be drawn to the humanities and might dabble in the arts and crafts but rarely stick with that sort of thing long enough to become more than enthusiastic amateurs“—professional artists are, more often than not, Artisans, due to their sensory, present-oriented nature):
or the way in which the different types have completely different orientations connected to time, the past, present and future, and which of these they favor. Note that Rationals understand time as intervals: “for them, time exists not as a continuous line, but as an interval, a segment confined to and defined as an event. Only events possess time, all else is timeless.”
What distinguishes Please Understand Me II as an actually usable book is that, on top of everything else, it has detailed, separate sections on temperaments and parenting, leading people and romantic relationships. The latter I found particularly interesting: Keirsey writes that one of the major reasons many romantic relationships tend to fail is that partners make Pygmalion projects of one another, that is, we consciously or subconsciously try to make partners into mirror images of ourselves. If we first understand, then accept our partner’s temperament, Keirsey suggests, the relationship could only benefit from it and remain stable.
Furthermore, compatibility between temperaments vary: apparently Idealists and Rationals are natural fits, because we can understand each other’s abstract way of communication and perception intuitively—deep conversations, big ideas, little appreciation for small-talk, that sort of thing. However, due to both types being rarer than concrete Guardians and Artisans (for reasons unknown, concrete communicators are roughly double in numbers than abstract communicators—we’re precious little flowers, we abstracts), those types usually have a hard time finding well-suited mates.
I, for one, have been told that if some of my male Rational friends were female I’d fall for them hard, so there’s that…
Moving on, the chapter on temperament and parenting I found interesting as well, i.e. how parents value different things in raising their children depending on their own temperaments. For example, an Artisan parent will want their child to possess many different useful skills and will try one way or another to transmit them to it (long hours at language schools and martial arts classes?); a Guardian parent will value security and stability above all else (urging their child to settle), whereas a Rational parent will try to inspire in their child a sense independence from other people and external influence.
Where this often goes wrong is that parents not only make Pygmalion projects our of their partners, they do so for their children as well, and so typically fail to take their child’s own temperament into account when it comes to its upbringing and relevant important decisions. This can and will alienate the child and make it feel unloved or that it has to constantly prove itself, among a slew of other avoidable psychological complications and complexes.
Interestingly, as far as we can observe and Keirsey claimed, temperament is not hereditary: it is determined at birth, does not follow parental patterns and is permanent for life. It is sort of arbitrary, selected at random at “character creation”, you could say. I find that little fact absolutely fascinating: that a big part of who we are is “predetermined”, despite the term being taboo in contemporary psychology and behavioural science.
What a parent can do to make sure that their child will thrive and not develop insecurities and low self-esteem because it feels as if it cannot fulfill its parents expectations, is identify their child’s temperament early on—it’s usually quite obvious from the 3rd or 4th year—and move with the temperament’s forces, not away from them or even against them: encourage their child to be itself, not what the parent would like it to be.
I can easily imagine a Rational parent, for example, being hard on their Artisan child for not being logical or even clever enough, or an Idealist parent trying to make their Guardian child more “alternative”, when the child just won’t stray from the mainstream. What the parents could be failing to see is that their children might have green fingers or a well-developed sense of honour and duty, respectively. Oh, the woes of an Idealist parent when their Guardian child wants to uphold the law for a living!
I’ve gone on long enough already. I will conclude this little here review/essay/introduction to Keirsey by saying that if psychology, communication and human relationships interest you at all, Please Understand Me II and Keirsey’s work in general is a must-read. Together with the Enneagram, typology can be a very powerful tool for understanding people, living and working better with them and, as important as ever, understanding and identifying one’s own worth and learning to go with, not against, one’s own temperament—one’s own nature.
PS: At some point while going through this book, I realised that my room-mates and colleagues in Sofia City Library and I were all different temperaments. An Idealist, a Rational, a Guardian and an Artisan all under the same roof! My memories of Zanda, Vicente and Maria and living together with them for nine months have been useful for imagining each temperament’s traits more concretely. Thanks guys!
10 μήνες μετά αυτό το επεισόδιο! Τουλάχιστον δεν κλείσαμε χρόνο. Το γράφημα ημερομηνία λήψης/ημερομηνία δημοσίευσης ξαναπήρε την κατιούσα (αυτό είναι καλό, κι ας ακούγεται το «κατιούσα»–katyusha?–σαν κάτι το κακό)!
Σε αυτό το επεισόδιο που ηχογραφήσαμε σε ένα μπαράκι του Βελιγραδίου με τη Δάφνη, συζητήσαμε και αναρωτηθήκαμε:
γιατί οι Έλληνες σνομπάρουν τους Βαλκάνιους γείτονες και αδερφούς τους.
γιατί αξίζει σαν προορισμός η ευρύτερη περιοχή, και ειδικότερα με το Balkan FlexiPass.
πόσο ειρωνικό που σε κάθε χώρα το μόνο σίγουρο είναι οι εθνικιστές και ότι παντού πιάνονται από τα ίδια αστεία πράγματα.
τι κοινά έχουν οι Βούλγαροι με τους Σέρβους και πώς η Βουλγαρία θα μπορούσε να είχε γίνει μέρος της Γιουγκοσλαβίας.
πέτυχε ο κομμουνισμός της Γιουγκοσλαβίας του Τίτο;
ανήκουν τα Βαλκάνια στην ΕΕ;
γιατί δεν είναι η Σερβία στην ΕΕ;
συγκρίνονται τα τραίνα του ΟΣΕ με τα τραίνα της Ρουμανίας;
γιατί το Βελιγράδι είναι από τις ομορφότερες πόλεις ever.
γιατί η ζωή στα Βαλκάνια μας έκανε να δούμε το κομμάτι της Ελλάδας σε αυτό το μεγάλο παζλ διαφορετικά.
τελικά πού πέρασα καλύτερα, στην Δανία ή στην Βουλγαρία;
πώς μια πολιτική ένωση των Βαλκανικών λαών ή των Νοτιοευρωπαϊκών λαών φαντάζει πιο λογική απ’ότι μία όπου από την μία έχεις την Δανία, την Γερμανία και την Ολλανδία κι απ’την άλλη την Ελλάδα
..και πολλά άλλα, στο πιο πολιτικό επεισόδιο μέχρι τώρα. Απολαύστε! Ο τίτλος σημαίνει «Βαλκανικά αδέρφια», btw. Α, και η λέξη που δεν θυμόμουν: legacy στα ελληνικά: υστεροφημία, θα μπορούσε να είναι μία μετάφραση.
Για περισσότερα, ρίξτε μια ματιά και στο ποστ που έγραψα αφού γυρίσαμε από το ταξίδι μας, Balkan Flexpress.
Και κάτι σχετικά με το μετρό της Αθήνας που αναφέρουμε στο podcast: η Αττικό Μετρό είναι ιδιωτική εταιρία αλλά ήταν απ’ότι φαίνεται μόνο η εταιρία κατασκευής, δεν το διαχειρίζεται αυτή τώρα. Το ερώτημα πάντως παραμένει: θα έπαιρνε λεφτά από την ΕΕ για την κατασκευή της γραμμής 4;
Christopher Tin. He’s the guy who composed Calling All Dawns, one of my favourite albums of all time and whose first track is Baba Yetu from Civilization IV, the song that was Tin’s claim to fame.
I was looking for an older post where I must have written something about Calling All Dawns but I could find nothing. Now’s the time then! What I adore about Tin’s music and what makes it unique is that every song is sung in a different language and has a different style. At the same time, however, it’s all miraculously held together by something as straightforward as a classical symphonic orchestra. I find this blend quite fresh and satisfying.
His new album, The Drop That Contained The Sea, another concept album of classical music mixed with ethnic, adds another level of metaphor by bringing in the circle of water. There are songs in Ancient Greek, Old Norse, Brazilian and other languages in there, some of which I don’t recognize. It’s quite good, almost as good as Calling All Dawns.
From the whole album, Темен Облак stands out for me (at least for now, because my favourite songs from individual albums tend to go through circles). It’s in Bulgarian which is a heavy bonus, but anyway I find it incredibly powerful! Lots of choir or vocal-heavy songs are dominating my earworm garden lately.
Maria, my former Danish colleague in Sofia City Library and fellow EVSer/roomie, suggested I give this one a shot after she had given me The Tale of Despereaux to read. With that book, we both agreed that it was horrible. We were in agreement about Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, too; with the only difference that this one was actually good. Very good.
Here’s a beautifully illustrated children’s fairy tale inspired by Chinese legends and folk stories. It’s been a few months since I read it now so I don’t remember very well–I’m finally writing this review since I’m currently right here in Denmark visiting Maria and so was inspired to stop postponing it. What I do remember is that the stories themselves are excellent, well-written and with messages I would like my children to come away with, were they ever to read this book (and, first things first, come into existence).
Maybe I’m rating it so highly because after reading Despereaux I was… ahem, desperate for a good book and a good story. I couldn’t have hoped for a greater contrast between Despereaux and this, which only fueled my flaming dislike for the former. This is what children’s books should be like: inspiring multicultural folktale curiosity, well-illustrated, well-meaning, well-everything. I have only praise for this exquisite book. Bravo, Grace, and thank you. Excellent cover too.
In the beginning of October, Daphne and I got a Balkan Flexipass for travelling around the Balkans as a small end-of-EVS celebration and in order to take advantage of Sofia’s good position for travelling in the Haemus peninsula before leaving, or at least for the time being; it’s “for the time being” cause I’m certain I’m going there again soon, and not just to visit the friends I made there who now chose to stay. There’s something about this country… but that’s for another post coming soon.
Anyway, the Balkan Flexipass is a fantastic way of travelling in the Balkan countries: it’s something like InterRail but it’s only valid for… you guessed it, the Balkan countries, including Greece and Turkey, but not including Croatia for some reason. You can choose five, seven, ten or fifteen days of unlimited train travel within 30 days, which is how long the ticket is valid for. The cheapest 5-day ticket, the one we’d been abusing with Daphne to travel between Bulgaria and Greece last summer, comes for 56€ for youth <26–at which age apparently young people stop being young and no longer deserve discounts.
To reiterate: you can travel from Greece to Bulgaria and back with the five-day ticket twice (if you do it in the same month) and still have a day to spare–all for the price of what you’d normally pay for the bus just one-way. It’s an amazing deal and it’s not well-known, so I would strongly, strongly recommend you check it out. Even if you’re over 26, the price would still be about half of what you’d have to pay for taking the bus.
Note: the above links are for 1st class tickets, unlike the cheap tickets we got which were 2nd class. You can get the cheaper tickets at your country’s rail service’s international offices, e.g. OSE’s office at Sina 6 for Athenians. You can also have a look at this .pdf issued by BDZ (БДЖ, Bulgaria’s rail service) that has the complete price list which is the roughly the same across all countries. Note that the price list is in leva (2lv≃1€). Some useful translations: младеж = youth, възрастен = adult, Сеньор = senior, 2 класа = 2nd class
We set out on October 9th and returned back to Sofia on the 18th. We visited Varna, Bucharest, Timisoara and Belgrade along the way, spending two nights in each city apart from Timisoara, where we only stayed a single night, and another two nights on night trains; out of those seven nights spent in cities, we couchsurfed on four of them (props go to Nikolae and Georgii for their hospitality, thanks guys!) including the night we were hosted by Mela, a Romanian girl we got to meet in November last year in the youth exchange Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in Ommen, Netherlands. It feels so good getting to see people from youth exchanges again… It’s the only way to show that it really isn’t “goodbye”, but rather “see you soon”, the way we reassuringly like to tell ourselves. Still so many people around Europe I’d like to see again as soon as possible…
A small personal observation: nobody’s good at saying goodbyes, but everyone’s comfortable admitting to the fact. Maybe it’s a dying skill, lost in everyone but few in today’s liquid life, like cursive hand-writing or film photography.
I’d like to write a lengthy post about all the things we did and all of our experiences, not least as an opportunity for me to write them down and in this way reinforce my memories of them, but I suppose it would be counter-productive and nobody would read a long essay on my travels. Instead, here’s a small list with highlights:
Varna
The beautiful and super-long early-20th century-style beach park on the Black Sea coast (with a dolphinarium that made me sad by its mere existence). The lighthouse and the looong breakwater reminded reminded me of Mytilini; the high-rise residential buildings and the industrial port on the other side didn’t, though.
The giant falafel place (the falafels were giant, not the place) in the central square: 400g of goodness for 4lv.
Our tech-savvy and collector extraordinaire newbie couch-host Nikolae who bought us food and tickets for getting around the city and refused anything in return!
Timisoara
Just spending the day with friendly and familiar faces was deeply enjoyable. That pizza though…
Belgrade
Amazing people! Everybody knew English, was happy to help and… gasp… they smiled at you!
Sun Hostel. Recommended! We have a 25% discount for the next time we stay them and for anybody we might be bringing along with us. What are you waiting for then?!
Such history, much fortress! wow!
The city felt a little bit like Athens, only prettier. Let’s face it: if Athens didn’t have Plaka and the area surrounding the Acropolis, it would be a bleak city indeed.
Be careful: everyday costs, eating and going out etc can feel deceptively cheap with all the prices in dinars and 120 dinars roughly equaling 1 euro. Beware, however: it’s no cheaper than Sofia. In some cases it’s even slightly more expensive.
Intergalactic Diner! We had dinner (veggie burgers and milkshakes) and breakfast there. Daphne absolutely fell in love with it.
Belgrade was hands-down my favourite stop in our little Balkan tour and I’m already planning to return for millions of tiny heart-warming reasons.
Finally
Each of us spent around 200€ for this trip–in my case less cause Sofia City Library paid for my Balkan Flexipass: the final destination of my ticket back was my home city, just like the EVS protocol says, so who cares how many stops there were in between? MANY thanks go to our hosts who fed us, gave us shelter, treated us well and helped us keep our budget low. They will probably never see this post…
If it wasn’t for Daphne, you wouldn’t be seeing most of the videos and the following beautiful photos from this trip. She bothers with pictorial documentation when I… *gasp again*… don’t feel like doing it so much anymore. But then, later, after the trip is over and our boots made for walking are lying on the familiar floor, I’m happy that the pictures are there. And I’m even moreso because they’re pretty to boot. So… Go Daphne!
Seriously, everything you know about the Balkans is wrong–even if you live here.
We did a qbdp episode about this (in Greek) but who knows when it’ll be out? When it’s ready (and it’s ready when it’s ready!) I’ll post a link over here.
Setting out for a 1000-mile journey takes but a single step. Or a stupid face.
Booyah!
Treme drakokyra!
Varna Central Station. Much better than the Sofia one.
Sometimes people just restore my faith in humanity.
YoHoHostel kitchen sink.
Mytilini? No, but close.
Looking through the wall.
Varna Breakwater Grafitti
I wouldn’t mind having a dog like Georgii’s adorable Encho.
<3
Georgii’s Paradise
Bucharest
Materials
Kateritsa
In case you’re feeling anti-social, the iBench is for you.
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What is it with post-communist countries and beautiful parks?
I forget where this is from!
Nikola Tesla Museum–Tesla Coils + Lightsabers = <3
Mr. Testosterone 2014
My rainbow ass-pointer.
It’s dangerous to go alone, Daphne! Take this rainhat!
Serbs love their Putin.
I could look at historical maps of the Balkans all day long.
Meanwhile, in Belgrade…
Omelette with truffles. Daphne’s choice.
Intergalactic Diner Jukebox
Daphne can make everything prettier.
The view from Belgrade fortress.
Serb felines Mao and Blacky. Cats are a universal language.
If you wanna feel rich, go to Serbia, where they even have a 10 dinar note (~0,08€)
Maria, my former Danish flatmate and co-volunteer at Sofia City Library, recommended this book to me. She was disappointed that a lot of people on Goodreads were knocking it as too melodramatic or for “forty-year-old housewives” (or something like that) but she thought I might enjoy it.
I never knew I was an unemployed forty years old, let alone a woman. Wait; I am unemployed…
It was short, well-written–especially the parts describing Eddie’s early years at the amusement park, or his time at the war–and made me feel as if I was right there as part of the action. I have a soft spot for books that manage to get this right: not having too many details when describing a scene or situation, instead carefully disclosing the right ones that will most effortlessly evoke your imagination. Scents, colours, bodily sensations, random observations or the protagonist’s train of thought (that one doesn’t even have to be relevant to the plot) and metaphors work particularly well.
I didn’t take away from it any kind of profound message. It doesn’t seem to have changed my life in any significant way as it seems to have done for some people who include this title in their relevant lists of life-changing books. Nevertheless, it did make me go through the obligatory and entirely foreseeable process of pondering who my five people I’d meet in heaven would be and conversely who it would be that I would hang around for a while waiting to meet. The idea that I might not have met some of them yet, or even never will, seems comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. I wonder: is it necessary for us to die in order to have a good hard look at our time on the physical plane and what it taught us?
I’ll stop here. This is going too deep too fast and I’m not prepared to responsibly go on–supposedly–unknowable philosophical musings.
On a final note, reading this made me feel very calm. Maybe it’s because I went through it almost exclusively while travelling on trains.
Golyam Beglik is a lake in the Rodopi mountains that didn’t exist before 1951.
Since 2008 it’s also been a gathering place for people who believe in change and new possibilities and who want to have a good time surrounded by beautiful nature. Enter Beglika Fest, which has become one of Bulgaria’s biggest and most important summer festivals.
We hitchhiked to Beglika and back and camped there for a few days with Maria, Zanda, Miro and Daphne. Apart from a couple of stormy nights we (and our 20lv tents with the water resistance of my towel) had to endure, and the fact all the interesting workshops they had going there were almost exclusively in Bulgarian, we had an unforgettable time. Plus, it felt like we were part of something important, something ground-breaking.
I mean, dry toilets, hammocks, seed exchange, Suggestopedia, sailing, astronomy, kung fu, yoga and tasty vegetarian/vegan food all in one place – I will never forget that chocolate pancake and the vegan kyuftechta, never! What more can a person ask or hope for?
We didn’t get a chance to listen to all of the bands because of the bad weather during most of the nights, but also because the spatial and temporal layout of the stages made it difficult, at least for me, to follow everything. One band in particular, though, made an impression on me. Traditional Balkan sounds together with beatboxing and dubstep, you say?!
The following is a video I made out of all the videos I took from Beglika. It’s small and humble, there mostly to give you a small taste of what the Beglika experience was for our small international group.
As you might’ve been able to tell from the video, however, I’m definitely happier with our selection of photographs. Credits go to Daphne, Zanda, Maria and yours truly – can’t bother to do it for each one separately:
Hammocks over water.
Signs to where the find the good stuff.
I love this picture
Weird thing about Beglika: at night they had the “chill” music and during the daythey had all the pumping beats, especially at the chill station.
Miro introduced us to the concept of dendrophile and nothing was the same again…
Looks interesting doesn’t it? Само на български!
BEGLIKARTA
At the MMUUZZAA tent.
…all kinds of crazy things…
Maria and Zanda got their henna tattoos.
Sharing is caring.
Занда и кончето
ВЕДЖИ КЮФТЕТААА
“At night it can get cold”, they said…
Tent City
Foggy mornings.
Kung Fu for dummies at sunset.
Where we got most of out sunburns.
Ghetto water resistance!
Haide, next time in Beglika let us be volunteers with perfect knowledge of Bulgarian! Or we could be the ones with the game corner…
Bones & Murder by Margaret Atwood
