Vlodkowic 222

One of the most rewarding feelings one can come across...Sun coming through your large windows, the ones you usually curse at when you want to sleep in the morning and the shades are not enough. Listening indifferently to music and suddenly...padam!!! One of the most beautiful songs you have ever heard (or at least so it seems at that moment), lying all these months in your hard disk waiting for your Columbus instinct to be activated. And some of the most strong, true this is, chorus's you have ever heard....

 Some of us laugh, some us cry
Some of us smoke, some of us lie
But it's all just a way that we cope with our lives

From today, I am a devoted starsailor...I hope I find some of us there as well...

P.S.:I wanted to write something about the Italian elections, where fortunately the eclipse wasn't full, but this master thesis paranoia didn't allow me.   

Back from the European Capital...

After comsuming all the frites and gauffres of the world I am in my room again, facing a huge pack of different papers, articles, books and coffee-cups! With 3 papers and a Master Thesis to complete in the following month, accompanied by classes, compact seminars and all kinds of conferences, I fear that the deadline has already elapsed...I am sure this is something to which even the birds chirping outside my window would agree on...

Yap! Spring is coming, even in Narnia, and despite the random chilly nights, the campus starts to take again the shape it used to have when I first came here...I don't know if it's the time to start a philosophical discussion about how time passes by really quickly, and how things that you always pushed to a remote and uncertain future suddenly appear in front of your eyes, threatening your internal tranquillity. And it's a bit of a shame, cause we are currenty spending our last days in this unique place (last being highly relative), and instead of cherishing the people and the life here, we have this inhuman feat of finishing the workload before us.

You could notice that in the study trip as well, where everyone seemed caught in his own considerations, desparately trying to grasp material for his MT's, doing job interviews and making every effort to network himself in this huge land of opportunities named Brussels. Not much of a group thing, this study trip, and I guess it is understandable(after all I did the same thing exactly).

Nevertheless, and despite the depressing effects a cloudy Sunday afternoon can cause, I will try to add a pinch of optimism, which is relatively odd for my type of posts. Despite the individualism that is an aspect of the current situation here, an underlying respect for a lot of people is always apparent. It need not be expressed with words, or even actions, but it's there. It is also manifestly reflected in my Skype contact list, which has proudly grown to 54 people...

Skype, apart from being the most effective type of communication here (even in the not so unlikely but originally bizarre event of chatting with your next door neighbour), is also the official internal relationship stock exchange of the Campus. It pretty works as follows: You like someone, with days going by respect between you raises (without necessarily being followed by a change of attitudes i.e you don't really start to hang out with him), and one fine morning, u or him find the well-known dialogue box of "Add me in you contacts". Easy, simple but to-the-point, this dialogue box replaces the childhood all-time favorite "Do you wanna be my friend??", without the uncomfortable repercussions this type of human behaviour normally has.

In this sense, the study trip served exactly the cause of raising the respect between everyone, a subtle but well-felt emotion. Before a month of nerve-breaking studying, seeking a bit of asylum in the capital of Europe with your friends is always welcome....

The last weeks, I repeteadly find myself in a nationalistic delirium. I have put up in my wall a "Wonderful Greece" poster that Anna brought me from Brussels, I suddenly organize National Days in which I have fun with the barbaric customs that usually apall me back home(yap, I'm talking about the plate-breaking), I constantly ask from my friends to send "any Greek song" available, I call my parents more frequently than I did when I was in Thessaloniki, I spend hours showing Anna pictures of Athens and Greece. Some days ago I even put a small Greek flag in my room, that I took from the Greek restaurant we went on Satuday...

What is wrong with me?

First sleepless night after January's insomnia crisis...Beer opened, radiators cold as an iceberg since the administration probably thinks that it's not freezing anymore because the snow is melting...And an irritating cough to wrap it all up... What a wonderful occasion to revive my blog! 

Truth is, I wanted to do that quite some time ago...Now what refrained me from doing so I can't really tell, since mere laziness is far too undramatic to be mentioned as a reason. Maybe it was also the fact that I always want to write everything in detail, my idea of blogging being an accurate and extensive report of my life. Call it blog-inexperience, that idea got me stuck.

Life in our stranded island is going on, as interesting as ever, and I can't stop being surprised by the creativeness people here show to colour our otherwise repeated everyday life. Outstanding national days, our own personal Natolin Olympic Games (to which I proudly represented the birth place of Olympic Games by winning two medals!!), different birthday celebrations and mere excuses to get drunk, visit from our (somehow) stiff-nosed brothers of Brugges,a highly addictive ongoing negotiation game that's taking over my life, in other words, a community in motion... 

Back at home, nothing surprising or extreme, Greece continues it's enthousiastic race to the bottom having the privilege of enjoying the services of the most incompetent government of the last century, but somehow I miss the whole thing and I would love to just have a weekend in Thessaloniki to remember a way of life that seems a bit fading away. Mind you,I still remember the conservatism and kitsch and ugly parts of the city, my all-time favorite Mayor that we deserve and the open-minded Prefect that has a habit of burning insulting to religion books and believes that the Dictatorship was a revolution...Nevertheless, I do miss one long walk by the seaside on a misty autumn Wednesday, the bars, tavernas and restaurants I used to go or (more usually) to order from, my small picturesque neighbourhood in Neapoli where old women still gossip from balcony to balcony, my car and the sense of freedom it gave me when I was driving back home late listening to the radio, the humidity that cuts your breath in the summer and keeps you chained in bed in the winter, my faculty and the endless hours spent to put posters for the upcoming student assembly, needless to say the people...

Probably I am influenced by the organization of the Greek Day Out on Saturday, and I got a bit sentimental. And homesick. It happens from time to time, even if this place already feels like home. It all comes up to that. I spent four years in that city, complaining all the time about things that infuriated me. Seems like a guide for here as well. Because I will certainly miss this strange place, and the equally bizarre way of living here. Needless to say the people..... 

...or a series of unfortunate events

Ok I admit it...I must be Greek. Otherwise how can u explain all the similarities with my alleged ancestor, Ulysses...

I left Natolin with a cold heart (afterall it was snowing heavily outside and had the usual -3), trying to stuff successfully 7 large suitcases in Jan's car, who had the goodwill to take Johan, Paul-Antoine, his sister (who has an Sicilian name which I don't remember, despite her being French), and yes, u guessed right, me, myself...

On the way to the "Frederyka Chopynka" (I'm not sure I'm getting this right...probably not-Pawel??), I was already feeling the effect cars usually have on me...something like a hypnotizer...The time was 3:45 and everything seemed on time. I could doze off a bit.

Ha!Not so easy mister. Right after Mokotow, renowned to the female population of the Campus for its flashy "do-it-all in 9 hours" shopping mall, we ran into the ugliest traffic jam ever imaginable. Bring in mind those classic scenes from global destruction movies like Armaggedon or Deep Impact, where the frantic citizens of (preferably) New York evacuate their city waiting for the gigantic tidal wave that will surf them strraight to allmighty Creator's arms. Now double it. What we were facing was an image of a complete civil disorder, with car horns, useless policemen, snow, and some effective reckless driving from Jan to get us to the airport on time.

It was the first, in a series of many unfortunate events that lead me spending a night in Milan instead of enjoying a long-awaited, home made dinner.

I rushed through the gates of the airport, a pathetic figure really, holding: laptop that kept on slipping off my left shoulder, a 20kg sac-voyage without a strap, that almost cut off my fingers, scarf threatening my body balance as it wrapped around my -already soaked- sneakers(why on earth does Massimo Dutti makes its scarfs ssssooooo long?) and a 10kg backpack from the 2004 Olympic Games that made me resemble more to a soldier before D-Day than to a traveller.Only to find out that my flight had been delayed for 45 minutes...

Relaxed as I was from this development, I quickly checked in, bought presents for my big fat Greek family and waited at the gate. And I waited and waited and waited....So much for the 45 minute delay from Warsaw. More like ...welll...2 hours!And when finally I sat on my seat, ready to sing halellujah with a gospel voice I don't particularly master, I looked outside... 

The ground was completely frozen, thus forcing Pilot Cristallini or whatever his name was, to run circles for half an hour..And the noises!!!Oh my god those noises...All this weird stuff coming from the deep-ends of the plane, the ones that you can never be sure if it's a sign of normalcy or a free ticket to panic-land, no return thank you I'm staying there!!As we were taking off, I swear, I bit my lips...Last thing I wanted before Christmas was to become a live marketing product for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Torino...(In Torino...even our planes can skate!!!Torino 2006 Winter Olympic Games..Slide to them!!)

Arrival at Milan on time, fortunately enough we didn't find any traffic, although given my bad luck of the day, even that wouldn't surprise me... Hectic run to Alitalia's information desk, the same pathetic figure as described in paragraph 6, only enhanced with several bags full of memorabilia from Warsaw, that kept clinging together, driving successfully my nerves crazy...

"Buona sera signorina. That flight to Athens? Have you seen her by any chance? I was dying to meet her..."

end of 1st part..... 

My window is stuck from the snow. Background music the sound of metallic suitcase rolls on the iced ground. And me whispering that I'll always be in this place, watching others come and go.

In fact, my departure time from Poland is coming tomorrow. In 30 hours I will be back in Athens, in a completely different environment, with completely different things to do and to say. New faces...(now, how can your relatives and your friends from -basically- primary school can be considered new faces is yet another repercussion of the Natolin effect that I don't even dare to confront..)

And yet what do I leave back that makes me half-depressed? People I have known for something more than 3 months, with which I will be eating, drinking and studying together again in 3 weeks. Endless hours of studying and printing big parts of the Amazon, to help me understand the "inner functioning" of this endless labyrinth that is called European Union. 113 days of the same food in the campus cantine. A big room. A forest. So, what's the big deal??

Wait, have to light a cigarette. Oh shit, I'm out, I'll have to go to Sylvia...or to Michael...if they weren't on their way back home right now....

Well...Interdependence....If you are looking for one word to characterize our life here,that's it. I really don't know if it's due to the climate here, the strange way of living, tradition or that green thing they put in our food...But it's as obvious as a storm in summer.And the thought of how intensfied this feeling will come back in June...let's just say that it's enough to shed a small group of tears...Damn, and it's been so long since I've done this...

"Summer in winter,
Winter in springtime,
You heard the birds sing:
Everything will be fine.

I spent the summer winter wasting,
The time was passed so easily.
But if the summer winter's wasted
How come that I could feel so free?
I spent the summer winter wasting,
The sky was blue beyond compare.
A photograph of myself
Is all I have to show for

Seven weeks of river walkways,
Seven weeks of staying up all night.

I spent the summer winter wasting,
The time was passed so pleasantly.
Say cheerio to books now!
The only things I'll read are faces.
I spent the summer  winter wasting
Under a canopy of

Seven weeks of river walkways,
Seven weeks of reading papers,
Seven weeks of feeling guilty,
Seven weeks of staying up all night.

Summer in winter,
Winter in springtime,
You heard the bird say:
Everything will be fine"

Belle and Sebastian, A Summer Wasting

To all of us....Not because we did it, this has happened before. Because we did it without eating eachothers' flesh, without competing who will write one sentence more in a paper, without hesitating to share and to help each other, without having to head to the forest for night wood-chopping inspiration, without getting crazy and hysteric, without big fights and dramatic faint scenes, schizophrenic crisis' and suicide attempts....  Good work Natolin!!

I first heard of blogging a year ago.

A friend of mine in the University was writing her thesis on the subject, which for me seemed considerably stupid..For me, you see, any kind of scientific paper that did not include politics, foreign affairs, the European Union and other physical phenomena like that, is plainly, not serious (having spent a mere semester delving in the core of European politics has surely made me question though, bit by bit, the extravagant allure of the field).

And then, it was the idea behind it.."But delivering your soul (wannabe journalists always, for a strange reason, refer to their writing as their "soul"...) to a bunch of ignorant, usually critical to the bone, ironic, severely perverted techies that you don't even know?" I kept arguing with her, while stiff-nosedly finishing my glorified thesis on the Europeanization of the Greek Foreign Policy..Prize for silliest comment ever, I must admit. Please be kind enough not to remind me (at least in public), that basically this is what journalists do for a living...Superior as I felt, I boarded on a plane to Brussels, then boarded on another plane to Warsaw (to the antihellenic smartasses of the world, there is a direct flight from Athens to Poland, the two flights had a 3-week difference. In Brussels I improved my french, as it is apparent so far from my blog...and drunk a lot of beer, as can be clearly seen by my successfully growing beer-belly)

And then I met Natolin...

Meaning not the wonderful park in which our campus is situated, but the people in Natolin. And suddenly, the whole concept of blogging changed completely in my mind. Coming from an Internet-easy deprived area like Greece-btw thanks to our enlightened government that decided to double prices in Internet connections, the aforementioned deprived area will probably remain deprived, successfully justifying the title "the dark side of the force" with which my colleague Michael has christened the right- it was difficult to understand the implications of a stable 24/7 broadband connection. And they were severe...

(Intermission: Love will tear us apart is probably the most inspiring song to write your blog-God bless Joy Division and their mysterious ways...End of Intermission)

Back to blog colleagues. Really suprised by Michael's blog, I ended up being his best reader-almost at the point of groupie. Was he so good? Definitely yes, but the reason for my obsession had to be looked elsewhere. In fact, I needed the insight. Not by him necessarily, by people in general. How they think, how they react to the same experiences, how they assess they same problems and hopes and dreams and "shortcomings". Korina's "ΑΣΥΔΟΣΙΑ" coming from an office environment in Athens, seemed genuinely contradictory:an essay on how u can be inspired to write the most abstract and uncomprehensible sarcastic comments on everyday life in the most boring of environments,  oozing a spirit of "I get knocked out, and then I'm up again, u'll never gonna keep me down" straight from the time of Chumbawamba...And my condition got worse. Hours of trying to decode strange Catalan inscriptions in Berta's "Sentada al borde de mi"gave me some of the most enjoyable headaches I ever had, showing me that artistic talent is something that is not missing even from a white-collar "EU lab" like the College. And suddenly, they sprung like mushrooms, to quote Kathrin and her first post (still waiting for the second though). And with Asun in Natolin, I found interaction...On her first post she was picking on me based on a conversation we had some hours ago...

What do we need to talk about? Our lives, our schedule, our shopping, our courses and exams, our infatuations and friendships, our thoughts on the "great beyond", us...So, little by little, I surrendered.  Probably I had to go through the process of accepting something new and innovative in my life. Rationalise it, bring it down to my own measures, get acquainted with it and, respectively, fall in love with it. The rest is history written right before your very eyes...

Now that I think about it, I am really glad of the advice (one more in my life) that I didn't follow. "Be careful, don't get stuck with it...". Said with a blinking eye, even though through MSN. Thanks...