It’s been news for some time now that I’ve started working for Spotted by Locals, but seeing that I just finished my first round of articles and that I had neglected to post about it until now, I thought that this would be a good time to share the links to my work.
Spotted By Locals is a site whose ideals and goal are rather self-explanatory: have locals from all over the world write about their favourite places in their hometown and help make them known to people who have never visited before. It’s a decentralised travel guide to the awesome places, aiming for the sense of familiarity and wonder you get when you CouchSurf with someone and they show and take you to all the spots they love in their city.
My first contact with them was when I wrote them last year applying to be a Spotter. Back then they politely refused my offer, telling me that they were not in not need of any new ones but reassuring me that whenever they’d require fresh blood they’d contact me. So they did: in March I received an e-mail from the couple running the site, Sanne and Bart, in which they were getting back to me on my application. I did a test article, they seemed to like it and sure enough, next thing I knew, I had become a Spotter!
My main starting obligation as one was to post 20 articles within 6 weeks, a goal I reached just yesterday (right on time too). Here are the links for these first 20 articles.
I sit for a coffee with friends. Sluuuurp! Up the straw it goes before anyone has even touched their own beverage of choice. It’s worse with alcoholic drinks… I don’t ever seem to realise that when it’s over, it’s over! And I just sip, sip sip the night away. I also eat and smoke faster than most people when in the company of others. It’s only then that comparison with others’ still full plates/glasses is possible and my worried, thoughtful scratching of beard is only natural. My solution? I just steal from the others’ food and drink.
22. I don’t know anything about Greek Music.
It has happened too many times to count: I’m with a big company at some taverna or place that is suitable for accommodating a number of people in the double digits. Everyone’s having fun, talking vividly and eating more vividly. Then, when everyone’s feeling cheerful, someone, somewhere, utters the words to the first song. And everyone catches on; and everyone sings along; and turn-in-turn everyone butts in with their own favourite Greek words and everyone else follows suit. It’s like that when there’s a live program as well. Guy playing the guitar, singing his songs that everyone knows. It doesn’t take much to take it out of you if you’ve drunk sufficient quantities of alcohol. “All together now!” And we all sing together.
Except me.
These songs… How should I put it. Yes. I might have heard them, I might even remember one or two lyrics just from sheer repetition (this kind of thing happens to me quite often), I usually remember the melody but I can never join the fun. Friends or acquaintances might know every single song by heart but I’m just left there to look around silently trying my best to have a good time but failing miserably, always thinking “wow. This feels so awkward. It sucks.”
Alas, such behaviours never go unnoticed. When everyone’s singing and they catch wind that I am not, they try to encourage me to join them. In the wake of their inevitable failure they look so disappointed in me, so… how should I say. There’s a certain Greek word that roughly translates into “party-pooper” and “killjoy” but lacks any of the playfulness of those two words. It’s kind of a brutal word, now that I think of it. It’s ξενέρωτος. Oh I’ve got that a lot throughout the years. I also get “you don’t know these songs?? You’re not really Greek”. I’ll let the look on my own face by this point to your imagination.
It feels as if knowing about Greek music is such a big part of our culture here that you can’t help not stick out like an alpine fox in the mud if you’ve kept well away from anything that has to do with the domestic musical product for pretty much your entire life. It’s not that I hate Greek music. I want to come to terms with it, explore and discover artists I’m bound to like or already know I like but haven’t bothered looking into more (Pavlos Sidiropoulos, Thanassis Papakonstantinou, Alkinoos Ioannidis, Lavrentis Maheritsas, works by Kavadias turned into songs). Some people in my life have helped me somewhat with discovering and getting to know some Greek music but never decisively and never beyond the realms of satisfying some of my polite curiosity. It’s that it’s polite curiosity at best.
What can I say? Maybe I’m not really Greek after all if I can’t, for the life of me, get into it all. Which is a perfect intro for my next hatred entry:
23. Nationalism.
Some Greeks call me Australian. Some (most?) Australians would call me Greek if I returned to OzzyLand. I’m really both and neither. My national identities sort of negate eachother but at the same time create a completely new existence, like a Yin and a Yang that alone are whole but together are whole-er. This may be the reason I could never exactly or comfortably identify with national ideas except for when I was only little (funny how “nationalist” children can be, or we’ve all been as children).
I don't like nor believe in flags but this could well be the flag of whatever my real nationality is. Designed by me.
This open-mindedness by default comes with a cost, however. A multicultural background always helps you break through the wall of deceit but at the same time alienates you from any and all cultures you might have some heritage from including the one you were born in. You start to inhabit your own space in the cultural web, at first as little more than a means to survive but eventually enjoying this uniqueness of yours, weaving your own new threads and connections, keeping the best from both worlds and inevitably creating a new one while you’re at it.
It’s all very nice and postmodern of course but other people look at you suspiciously. You’re one of them but not exactly. Everyone must belong, granted, but you can’t seem to decide whether you belong somewhere or nowhere. An ultimate decision is unlikely. And then there comes a day when you, tired of all this vagueness, ask yourself: why must nationality form the end-all be-all criteria of “belonging” in the first place? Aren’t there more important aspects to a person?
Nationalism might be one of the things I hate the most. I’ve come to hate it so much, so deeply, I find it hard to express myself, to find words that might accurately portray how deep this hatred goes. I’ll try.
To me, nationalism is a bit like football teams (another of the 99 things, can’t be a coincidence). You support an idea or a group of people just because you belong to it. Also called ethnocentricism for us social scientists. ~^, Having a concrete sense of national identity isn’t a bad thing on its own but most usually, just like with football teams and religion for that matter, it comes with denying everyone else’s right to do exactly what you’re doing: love their country above all else. Of course, again just like football teams and religions, nations are so self-centered they believe they are the only ones in the right, that there’s only enough room for none other than themselves at the top. Nations see everyone else as threats, as others, and that alone creates a self-fulfilling prophecy; when everyone sees everyone else as a threat some kind of threat is indeed created out of thin air. Just like when two people want to trust each other but because they’re afraid that the other will not want to comply, they keep to themselves, wholly generating their own image of untrustworthiness. It’s an endless loop.
Most nations have been founded on lies we now take for granted, unshakable truths, but this isn’t the time for me to go into detail on that. I hope you can understand what I mean. Nations have only served to distill fear, isolationism and hatred into people’s hearts. As a concept they encourage people to look for differences among themselves, not similarities, at least as far as inter-national relations are concerned. The similarities that can be found in the people within the borders of the nation-state are imaginary, arbitrary and never well-defined. Naturally, universal truths like love, friendship, global or special (species-al) co-operation are the first to die for the sake of national integrity and identity. It’s not much different than the ridiculous idea of loving your video game console so much you automatically hate, out of fear perhaps, anyone who might love another console. With the difference that people have died, killed others and created complex and perfectly valid — in social terms — historical narratives to support this madness in theory as well as in practice.
It’s everywhere, from the Olympic Games and Eurovision *spit* to wars of the past and lingering ideologies. In the name of your country you might be made to feel like it’s your duty to protect it against aliens and immigrants, secure your cultural traditions and history including religion and language, avoiding to look out to the world, because you were never taught that such a thing might not be such a bad idea after all. It might be dangerous. People out there are bad, they wish nothing more than the downfall of youand your country.
I’ve seen too many people get obsessed with lies about “racial” traits (I’m tired of listening to Greeks think they’re Ancient Greeks or their descendants… SO tired…), looking back and jerking themselves off with their nonsensical grand histories so that they can avoid looking at the awful present and the grim future while still feeling as if they’re something important or special. It enables people to feel good about themselves when they’ve been good for nothing. How can ANYBODY feel special about something they never earned or fought for themselves? I suppose unhappy times call for such sad measures.
If world borders, nation-states’ cornerstones, were torn down tomorrow, it’s probable that great wars would erupt, everyone still with their mind on national interests battling it out for a better place under the sun. A world without borders would require a world without ownership, another can of worms altogether. But in a world with no nations people might eventually discover the beauty of not having to fit in, of not being caged by your parents or what part of the earth you were born in but by what your actions are.
I wish people could feel the airy and open-mind they could have instead of the musty, dark closed-mind they’ve had since forever and take sick pride in.
24. Getting distracted for hours on the net doing nothing I set out to do.
“I’m going to log-in. I’m going to check my e-mail, see Kalionatis’s site, download the notes, after that I’m going to see Tsekouras’s site and download his notes. Then I’ll do a little bit of Delphi, after that I’ll send some e-mails to my beloved friends and check out Helix’s workcamps; I really want to take part in some of those programs!”…
*Escapist* *Hotmail* *MSN* *Matador* *Cubimension, writing* *Hotmail* *Game 2.0* *XKCD* *Cubimension, reading* *MSN* *Facebook stalking — I KNOW I DON’T HAVE A FACEBOOK!* *Goodreads* *tvtropes* *Wikipedia hopping* *Random site about some random new interest of mine* *Steam offers* *IMDB* *Flickr* *Some porn site* *MSN* *Couchsurfing* *Various interesting blogs* *Youtube* *Looking into all about that new interest of mine* *Grooveshark, discovering new bands I found out about on progarchives.com and allmusic.com* *MSN* *
Dayum… what’s left to re-check and re-re-check?*
What was it that I wanted to do again?
25. Loose handshakes.
“Oh hi… I’m *insert name here*, pleased to meet you”.
Oh, how many times have people made a bad impression on me just because that first greeting was accompanied by a loose handshake and a fleeting glance? Seriously people. Look at others in the eye when you meet them. Squeeze their palm like you mean it, NOT as if you couldn’t care less. Which is probably true anyway.
26. Moving deadlines.
“OK I’ll have it ready by then”. But “then” never comes. Being a person of the absolutely utter last minute, that means that I can never get anything done, doesn’t it?
27. Delays on booting.
Black screen. Reboot. Black screen. Reboot. BIOS startup holds up at memory testing. CTRL+ALT+DEL, nothing happens. Hard reset. BIOS completes startup, then computer freezes when loading Windows. Hard reset. BIOS startup insists there’s no more than a single core in my dual-core CPU and thus refuses to continue (out of spite?). Hard reset. At last, at some point, Cuberick decides to open his eyes, sweep off his waking grogginess and serve me, more a result of luck than anything.
The funny thing is that when it’s up and running there’s no problem whatsoever. Heh. Maybe it’s like how it’s with cars where you’ve got to get the engine all warmed-up first or something. Hermes knows how on Earth I’ve resisted beating Cuberick to a pulp time after time. Not that it matters. He’s already managed to beat himself to a pulp with no further assistance needed from me.
28. Facts caught up from Wikipedia.
-“Did you know that blah-blah?” *where blah-blah, insert your favourite fact you yourself have already read on Wikipedia but know plenty of stuff about it from non-Wiki sources*
-“Yes I did, but it sure doesn’t sound like anything you spent too much time looking into. What you did is you just presumed you’re the more informed of the two of us just because you’ve happened to have read the Wiki page. So, you see, Mr/Ms. Smartass, I’m afraid you’re not the only one around here reading and skimming pages on that site more than necessary”.
Asking further questions usually results in disappointment and less-than-accurate answers. And when it doesn’t, it feels so sterile I can almost smell the Dettol in the air.
29. It’s raining and my clothes won’t dry indoors!
I guess it happens everywhere. But my experience from Lesvos has taught me that, if it starts raining, oh, you can be certain that it won’t stop for at least the next few days. If my clothes are caught hanging to dry on their line outside during this humid time, you can foresee the rest. But if I leave them to dry inside, they may well take even longer to reach their rightful place inside by drawer! I recently wanted to wear one of my favourite sweaters. It had been hanging there to dry for at least a week on a drying rack Garret has lent me months now– I doubt he wants it back. I grabbed it, only to find that its hood was still moist! I threw it back to its place in disgust and hatred. Go to hell, humidity.
30. Losing progress in games.
Power cuts. Ancient game design. Human mistakes. “Retry” instead of “Save”. Forgetting that “this game doesn’t have autosave”. A patch destroying the previous versions savegames. Glitches and Blue Screens Of Death. Blue Screens of Death. Screens of Death.
Death.
Loss of progress in games, you’ve sent many good hours of life’s charms to gaming purgatory, to the nether-realm of human entertainment. You’ve made many a player blind with rage, unable to accept that their efforts and pain have only resulted in a mockingly not-up-to-date version of their save files. You’ve destroyed vast amounts of perfectly good faith in an equally good game, sent it down the drain, never to return, never allowing the player to give the perfectly good game another chance due to pure frustration. It’s the synonym of amnesia for gamers, the very meaning of oblivion.
If I could, loss of progress in games, I would slap you till your cheeks were raw and your voice not fit to cry for help.
It’s 7:30AM. Me and Mordread are sitting in my futon couch, going though the last, epic stages of The Force Unleashed, watching the final twists and turns of its plot unfold. Outside it is raining. The gentle sound of the drops hitting the street outside is audible even through the soundproof aluminum windows. It manages to reach our ears, as well as the lightsaber hums, Darth Vader’s iconic scuba breathing and the sound of lightning coming out of Starkiller’s fingertips. The sky is not entirely grey; in fact, its colour would be best described as a kind of dim pink. Soon I would witness what should have been the tie-in between the original and the prequels, the old and the new, the successful and the perhaps disappointing. My drowzy mind, amidst all this, was thinking that the line had been crossed; a new blog entry was finally at hand.
More than 3 hours later, the time is now 11:05. October 3rd, 2008. Rain sporadically cheers my ears but the sun has decided that its no time for playing hide-and-seek. The result is a wonderful colour of the sky. A fantastically unusual bright cloudy grey. Isn’t it strange that I often choose to write when my mind is working in ambiguous ways, powered by the strength of overnight determination but deterred by sleepiness? This fact could mean many things, quite controversial in their own right. Is it because I deem blogging so important a task that only the special moments of sleeplessness can truly get it going? Is it because writing is a time-consuming activity, best left for when my time constraints are only limited by my fatigue? Is it just because I’m bored and feel somehow special that I want to share my thoughts with the world (surrounding me)? I digress…
It’s been almost 3 months since my last blog entry. 3 busy, important, fascinating months. My last entry was written just hours before our journey to Europe had begun. Now, in mere weeks 2 months will have gone by since we returned from our trip. I won’t go into much detail about how it was, what it meant to me/us, if it was interesting or if I have any pictures to share. Answer to last two questions is yes. To the first two it is… well. I just can’t do it now. When I first came back from the trip, I was eager to tell everyone about it! Trying to remember every little detail so that it doesn’t get lost somewhere in the mists of memory lest it isn’t readily available so as to tell anyone who might be interested or write right here in Cubimension. But my enthusiasm was quickly discouraged. Not all that many people, especially friends, were genuinely interested in what I had to tell or show (I might write something else on this subject one day. It’s a deep matter). A lot of them will never read these lines either but the sentiment remains. It does sound too self-important, (as much of this particular entry, forgive me!) but I think it does have some right to be. Anyway, to not sound too melodramatic about something that doesn’t deserve it, if anyone would really like to ask me anything about our experience out there, I’d really gladly discuss anything! YEAH! But as it is now, I just can’t bring myself to summarise 38 days of travel for a questionable audience. Alexandra says that if we write all that happened down (something we did try to do…) we’ll remember it much easier. I kind of agree but writing it down isn’t exactly easy in the first place (hell, visit this topic on MyAegean and maybe you’ll catch some of all the previous feeling: http://my.aegean.gr/web/ftopict-991.html. But when it comes down to it, for whom do I opperate this site anyway, is it just to showcase what I do and am all about or is it too more like a personal dia… ANYWAY! My apologies for this nervous breakdown! 😀
OK after this last bit my post has lost the aethereal tone it had in the beginning. Fudge it, it was taking too long to think of all the difficult words anyway! What else has been going on? Well on August 23rd I first walked through the door of my current home. It was the week I was looking for my new place to stay. I was with Kira/George/Darthy. I’m not sure he had a good time, since I had to wake up early every morning just to take care of all the sudden obligations and do some new-home-hunting. We did have our very fair share of nargile and WoW discussions though (yes I was always the debunker! Sort of…) August 23rd was also Mordread’s 20th b-day. This can’t have been random cause now he’s my new neighbour! Walks in for gaming sessions, brings Pepsi along, takes care of the cat when I’m away — everything a good neighbour should do! Thanks Mordread, you’re a star! 🙂 After another week in Athens, IKEAing, meeting up with long lost friends and celebrating Alexandra’s nameday, it was time for me, her and mum to come back to Mytilini armed and ready! September 3rd-8th was the moving to brand-new home preperations. The two girls helped me a lot and I do so love them for it, even though one of them worked significantly more than the other, oops shouldn’t have let that one slip! 😀 It was a great time us being together, had some talks, some good breakfasts and stuff. And I can’t forget mention: whut!! We played Rock Band all together. Mum played a video game. As we say in greek, many bakeries fell in ruins on that day…
The real fun started when mum left, which was right on the day we moved! For another week, it was just me and Alex taking care of the brand new home. We painted every room in crazy happy colours, pondered on what should go where, watched sick and crazy funny movies, cooked some tasty food (I tell you, squeezing meatballs isn’t nearly as disgusting as it once seemed… nor is chopping turkey), quarreled for a little bit just to break all the happy tension, played lots of Geometry Wars (and Alexandra made a brave new footing into the world of Hexic! A round of applause for our would-be hardcore please), explored the new surrounding area, discovered that afternoons are sexy too (sometimes sexier than evenings), quarreled a bit more to keep things balanced, and had to keep Yuki’s teen sexual heat under contro as well. Shut windows, air-condition. Yeah. This is what brought that happy week to a close. I did something I will never forgive myself for doing which was nevertheless necessary… *read on*
I had to have Yuki neutered. I wasn’t happy that I had to keep windows shut to keep her tomcat-seeking skills at bay and neither was she. But having little Yukinos around wasn’t the problem here. The problem was that there’s the bloody busy road just down the street. One sexy night out for Yuki could be her last, as she made a perfect white contrast against the cold, hard pavement . They’d be one in their lifelessness… Nightmare inducing, I agree wholeheartedly. So for us to be both happy (or for me to be happy and at least hoping she will be happy rid of her sexual distractions or at least indifferent to their absence — pleasure or pain) it was a tough, not to mention costly decision. Seeing her dizzy from the anaesthesia was a cruel pleasure though, have to admit! She also bit her stitches out, had an open wound Mordread thankfully treated while I was away in Chios visiting good old Fanis, ignorant and blissful about Yuki. We had her second stitches removed yesterday. All is well with Yuki now. She’s as playful, active, cuddly, hungry (for “milk” and more serious food) as ever! Minus her uterus.
While Alexandra was here I tried another first. I pursued the foundations of some career as a waiter/barman at none other than Mousiko Kafeneio. Yes, the one and only! It took no less than 2 weeks of me trying to make coffees and other beverages, failing, drinking my concoctions and always looking somehow confused to realise that I was not entirely suitable for the job. Not because I wasn’t any good at all at it but due to new emergency weekend tactics by me and Alexandra that can’t allow any weekend work obligations. No less, of course because of Piscean inherent looking-for-excuses when being in situations I don’t particularly like, behaviour; that woman pulled no punches when it came to rookie training. She demanded I took full care of bar and service within my second week! Negotiating unacceptable. Hey, at least now I have some experience. And hey, I did eat and drink for a few days for free. That’s something! And now I can set out for some less stressful work solution. English teaching here I come (?!).
If we undserstood something together with my little sugary crabby (believe me it sounds better in greek) these weeks, it’s that we cannot manage to be apart for more than a few days. Meaningless misunderstandings through MSN (which is the DEVIL!), general dysphoria and everything just proves that. We couldn’t not meet last weekend (even though there were more fights last week because I didn’t have any money, which by the way made me cook some truly good but thick chickpeas (name sucks in english, revythia all the way) but it was urgent so I could just find some but it doesn’t work that way and and and and it wasn’t hard for things to just settle right. Last weekend in Athens was just made in heaven. Everything was so great! We had such a great time within such few hours. If our emergency weekend plan ends up like this, it’s going to be grand.
Well. It’s 13:05 straight! Hah, I’ve been writing for 2 hours straight. And now again, it’s all stuff that only interests me in the end. Maybe Alex as well. But I feel very satisfied that I finally came down to writing something! If you’ve reached this end, dear reader, we should hang around more!
Next blog may be (but it may also not be) about all the new games, movies, music, books and cool stuff that has come to my attention recently. It’s going to be big! Don’t expect it soon! 😀
