confusion

I’m doing the “high maintenance Yuppie” thing right now, sitting in Starbucks, with my laptop, attempting to work on my stories. I figure that this week being the first of classes I have the chance to work on other stuff. The only problem is I have class at 9am on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The only day I do not have a 9am class is Tuesday, and that is the day they clean my dorm room so I still have to be up and out by 10 (Well I don’t have to be out, but I prefer not to be in when they clean, they do a better job if no one is there, which I can understand, I would be uncomfortable cleaning and vacuuming if someone was there too.)

Anyway I have been having a lot of fun this week, and even last week during exams. I had a melt down last Wednesday afternoon and my mind shut down… no more studying on my own. I did go to study group on Thursday for six hours and Friday for another five, but no opening that damn Networks book on my own, it hurts my head. So what did I do in the evenings of exam week… I finally found some cool people who do things, P███████ and C███████; a couple of girls who live in the dorms and stay up late every night doing something. In the past week with them I have sat up till six am talking two or three times, gone out drinking and clubbing twice and watched movies once. I am having a lot of fun, and I get to add two people to my list of multinational friends, C███████ was born in Switzerland to Italian parents (and speaks something like five languages! Some times I feel like I am the only person in the world who does not speak more than one language!) and P███████ is Brazilian/Italian. So now my list of international friends looks like this:

• P███████: Brazilian/Italian
• C███████: Italian/Swiss
• R█████: French/German
• P███: Korean/Greek
• A███: Brazilian/Portuguese/Cyprian
• T███: French
• M█████: Italian
• C████: Greek

There are a lot more international people I have met but only hungout with a few times, for instance last night P███████ and C███████ invited me to go clubbing with them and some friends. The group included the two girls, three girl friends of theirs and a guy friend and myself. So we had Brazilian/Italian, Swiss/Italian, American, Canadian, two Greeks and the British Guy. We went to a club called Hombres over between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court. The place was decorated like something out of the 70’s; Strings of ferry lights every 5 inches running floor to ceiling, and the walls where made of mirrors. Anyway, it was a great night; we got there at about 11 and stayed till just before 3. The djing left something to be desired, I think his name way Amtrak, and there was a little too much Hip-Hop for my taste but he played some good seventies and eighties music as well as a little house. I got dragged to the dance floor repeatedly and everyone wanted me to show them how to do the liquid thing with their hands. It was a great night, but hitting bed between four and six am and getting up at eight is starting to ware on me… I need coffee—hence I am in Starbucks (which I had refused to go into on the general principle of not supporting “creping Americanism” till the girls asked me a few days ago and I remembered that Starbucks makes good coffee… Ok I know but everyone here drinks instant so Starbucks is good by comparison!)

I have also been hanging out with one of the guys from my classes last semester, Craig. We and one other guy, Ben, from class went out for some drinks after exams. And Craig and I went to play pool the other night. It’s cool that I have now actually hung out with a British person. Craig even visited my website and signed up for the forum! (Though if someone does not post a topic soon that may have been a futile gesture.)

Anyway this is a very long post and I have not even started to cover winter break! Will at some point do that, but this was more immediate. Ciao.

Well, as of today I am 24 years old. Wish me happy birthday. I know there has not been a post here for a while, but seeing as there are only three people I know about who read this, and one I spent most of the past two of the pas three weeks with, one is on vacation here in Britan, and the other was home for a month for Christmas, I don’t think it really matters. But, as soon as exams end, and before classes really get going, I will attempt to distill a week in Denmark and a week in Amsterdam into a few journal entries. So you can look forward to reading about fights over the Euro, my missadventures in “Sin City” and the Armagedon that is New Years in Amsterdam… Hope you all had a great end of year bash… Oh! Wait. I know what all of me readers did on New Years! :)

Ok, real travel review of Greece; It was cold, the coldest it has been in Athens in winter for 5 or 6 years, the temp hovered around freezing all 5 days. The only day it did not snow/rain/sleet was the day I went to the Acropolis, it was actually sunny, but the wind was a constant 20 miles an hour or so, making it feel really cold up on the Acropolis. I never realized how tall the Acropolis was, I know it was a big hill, but it is really big, more like a mountain than a hill. The ruins on the top are very cool, but (just my luck) all are covered in scaffolding while then do some reinforcement and renovations before the Olympics in 2004. The coolest thing about the whole trip was walking around the top of the Acropolis, walking on streets more than 2000 years old, and thinking to myself, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Demosthenes, Pericles, and countless others who helped to forge Western Civilization walked down these streets and stood in these buildings. I don’t know how to describe it but it made me feel giddy, in awe of everything, and insignificant.

On the front size of the Acropolis the Theater of Dionysus and the Odeon (amphitheater) are very cool. And on the back side you can walk down the old streets past really tiny ancient churches into the street market district. It goes on forever and is very crowded.

As for other things, I went to a monastery (can’t pronounce the name) that dates from the 6th century. That was very interesting, I have never actually been in a Eastern Orthodox church, lots of paintings of saints, lots of paintings of saints! At this monastery there is a place called the “hidden school” where the monks educated children during the Turkish occupation in the early 1800’s, in secret. It’s all dark undergrounds rooms with small alters and benches made out of granite.

I was going to spend a day at the museums, but that ended up as a disaster… The museums are not centrally located and the subway does not get very near them, and since I cannot read the bus signs it was decided that my host’s mother would drop me at the Benaki Museum on her way to work, and then after a few hours she would pick me up and take me to the national museum. So at 9am she dropped me in front on the Benaki and said she would pick me up at 12 to go to the National. OK, sounds fine. So she drove off and I went up to the Museum, but when I got there I found out that it was not the Benaki, it was the Museum of Cyclidic art. Oh, well I said, I will just explore this one for three hours and then go to the National. The museum was cool, there was an exhibit of all the stuff they dug up when they built the metro last year. Very cool. Anyway, when I left at 11:30, (the museum was not too large so I actually got to see it all in less than 3 hours.) I went out side into the rain/sleet to wait for my ride on the corner of the street. At 1:00 I got a little worried and went back inside to try and call my ride, I could not get a hold of her, but got her office and they said that she was looking for me. I tried to tell them that I was not at the Benaki but, looking back, I don’t think their English was good enough to understand what I was saying. I think they just heard Benaki and went with it. Well I went back outside to wait under the false impression that I had explained that I was not at the Benaki but at the Cyclidian Art Museum. A 2:30 I decided that something was really wrong, and I went to make another phone call, but the Museum closed at 2… Damn so I walked down to a convenience store and managed to get a calling card for the pay phone. I tried my rides cell phone again but no luck (I think she gave me the wrong number!) so I called my friend C████ at home, and spent the next 10 minutes trying to explain where I was, which is not very easy when you cannot even pronounce the street names because they’re in Greek! Finally he said he knew where I was and would send his mom to get me. So I wondered back over to the street corner and waited another 30 minutes in the snow. Finally, just after 4 my ride showed up! I was cold, wet and tired after 4+ hours in the cold, rain, and wind! And it turned out that I was three blocks from the Benaki and that my ride had been running around the block the Benaki was on for 4 hours and has even called the US embassy, she was so worried about what happened. We drove around the area and she realized that she dropped me in the wrong place! Aaaah! Anyway I have been quite sick for the past few days because of that! Oh well, c’est la vie!

Anyway, Greece was fun. I hope I can make it back in the summer on my inter-railing adventures.

Ok, just got back from Greece, must sleep!

Greece in 60 seconds or less:

1. Old Shit!
2. More Old Shit!
3. Random Headless Statues everywhere (see also 1 & 2 for more info on statues)
4. Things that look like words but have strange symbols in them… like math equations!
5. Dogs everywhere, even sleeping at the Acropolis!
6. Rules of driving:
   1. control lines are just general guidelines.
   2. stop signs are suggestions.
   3. stop lights are for decoration and can be ignored.
   4. Offense, Offense, Offense…

Must sleep now, will write more latter…

[The internet] is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea—massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

Gene Spafford aka “spaf”, originally speaking about just the Usenet part of the Internet