What’s so great about England?

Having taken enough physical mental and time distance from the island, I can say now officially, I miss it. Don’t start looking at me with those bit eyes full of surprise… or is it something else?
Wanting it or not (mostly not) England was my home for the best part of my adult years this far. It is there, where I learned how to interact with other adults on equal terms, deal with authorities and survive bureaucracy. So now, I have moved worlds choosing as my new planet a place without queuing traditions but with widely know good cuisine, a place that everybody acknowledges as a “great place to be”. So, how do I dare miss England?

Okay, step back for a moment. I don’t miss everything about it. I don’t miss the teenage mums, the dirty streets on Sunday morning, the cold feeling in the gut until I get home Friday night after pub closing time, the train delays, the shops closing at five (or rather the world closing at five). Plenty of things I do not miss.

What do I miss?

First and foremost, I miss that in England, this great little country, everybody knows what to expect. There is a certain order, there is a certain routine, even in the most un-orderly of situations. You know that when you enter a restaurant you have to wait to be seated, while in a pub you have to go find the seat that suits you unassisted. You know that customer service people will greed you with a smile, will be full of thank yous and pleases and I beg your pardons, and they will even be sorry for your inconvenience. Well not really, but they will say so. It is part of the game.

When you enter the country it upsets you, then you get used to it, when you leave you miss it. The world out there is a jungle without these unwritten rules.

I also miss the pubs, the ones with good real ale, some nicely made burgers and interesting customers who can tell you stories from the old days.

I miss the bookstores, that had books in a language I can understand, and that had logically designed sections.

I miss the bbc iplayer. My only contact to pop culture.

I miss the high street shops, where I knew where I could find the things I need, sparing me the time of wondering around for three hours in a tourist invaded city centre.

But above all I miss Indian restaurants.

Don’t get me wrong… Italy is a great place, which I still need to explore to more detail. But England was the awkward place I was used to. And like with bad relationships, habit is the critical factor.

Now, is time I give Italy a chance.

Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch

I am in Florence. I walk alone in the cold.

All this moving around has not changed my habit of talking to myself out loud while I am convinced (and most of the time I am convinced) that there is nobody around to hear me. The empty streets around Campo di Marte make sure that I wont be mistaken (?) for a crazy person.

So, I talk to myself, or to imaginary others. Nothing wrong with this, do not try to make me feel that I am weird. Everybody does it. Yes, even you. But I am weird, I know it. Simply because I can define the language I use to talk to myself. Being me, I understand most of my languages. Mixing and matching them as I walk past traffic lights, supermarkets, and bus stops, makes perfect sense to me. I think though few others would feel the same.

The problem starts when one leaves their country and changes the default language, the one of common reference. The second and most important level is when one starts developing concepts in the second default language that did not exist in the first. Now imagine one makes this move several times…

I ended up in a situation where my default language is not the language of my country of origin, not the language of the country I live, not the language of my significant someone and not the language of the people I hang out with.

I work, talk, dream, write, speak in English, but I buy bread in Italian, read French at breakfast, talk on the phone in Greek, have the occasional drink in German, and overhear conversations in Spanish. The rest of the languages I ignore in an attempt to keep my sanity. The result though remains the same. My head contains a language soup.

My Chinese colleague, who has spent all her adult life in Germany, speaks perfect English, only with at least two German words in each sentence. My only problem with this, is that I do not notice… it makes perfect sense to me, which simply confirms my language soup hypothesis.

I write my shopping list and I catch myself using four different languages. No sane person does this. In the end I will find myself using English words in German syntax with Italian verb endings and French accent: My own Esperanto that nobody shares.

I remind myself of this old pensioner, who lonely and bored with his life, he created a language game. Calling the bed a “table”, the table a “chair”, the chair a “window” and so on… he isolated himself completely from society, not being able to communicate. Nobody understood why he wanted to sleep on the table, eat at the chair while sitting on the window.

Okay, my case is not quite that bad. I still call the table a table, but communicating anything beyond that takes quite a bit of effort. Moving yet to another country might though have fatal consequencies on my ability to use this simple tool: language. Back to the time of the apes.

Ich will von einem alten Mann erzählen, von einem Mann, der kein Wort mehr sagt, ein müdes Gesicht hat, zu müd zum Lächeln und zu müd, um böse zu sein.

For the brave among you, children’s (of all things!) story by the Swiss Peter Bichsel.
Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch

(Ask google to translate if your German does not help you)

Weddings: Chicago

I first noticed the cold, and then anything else. The second day of 2010 the temperature in Chicago reached minus Fahrenheit. You can imagine how bad it was in Celsius.
And here I was, in my green summer thin dress posing for pictures in a rainforest themed conservatorium. My only thought was: at least I am not outside in the snow.

The day started for me at 5.45am, the alarm went off to wake the bride-to-be, who was sleeping next to me. So my duty started, taking pictures of her inability to wake up. The she rushed here and there. Hairdresser, make-up artist, bride’s maids, family paraded through my room in the early hours before 7am. Armed with coffee and bagels we all got pretty in our green dresses and saw Jane transforming from a rugby girl into a beautiful bride.

To me this was the first wedding I attended that I actually cared about the couple. A true friend got married, and I ventured all the way to the other side of the Atlantic to witness it. Jane is the first of my Elmstead girls of the Essex gang to say ‘I do’.

The ceremony took place in the back room of a Korean restaurant somewhere north of the river in Chicago. It was very emotional, touching everybody’s heart, as two young people from different continents got over the hurdles posed by geography and USA immigration agency and finally managed to be together.

Jane, an American girl with strong Korean background and Lee an Englishman with Irish roots, finally found home in each other. And people from three continents came to celebrate.

This wedding taught me a lot:
If you believe in something and you work on it really hard, it can come true. (Quite handy for my low moments).
Even with a small budget you can create a truly memorable moment for the people close to you. (Also handy for my academic salary)
There must be at least six different kinds of cake. (If you know Jane that comes as no surprise)
I don’t hate Korean food. (Now that… nobody expected)

Be mobile and freeze your eggs

As an overall note for fellow nomadic academics I feel like reporting from a conference I recently attended. The hot potato topic was careers for young researchers. The first panel stressed the following points:

There are lots of grants out there for brilliant ideas, you just need to be aware of them.

The paradox: You need to demonstrate your ability to get grants for your research in order to get a tenured position in a university, BUT you need a position in a university to be eligible to apply for a grant (catch-22 situation… as a fellow researcher pointed out).

The advice: Be mobile! Spend the whole of your late twenties and thirties hopping from one country to the next wherever you find an available research job. A strategy that resembles seasonal agricultural workers, who follow the harvest map: oranges in Spain, strawberries in England, olives in Italy, grapes in France… and so on…

In the meantime we have to forget we are human. That we have families and social networks (more sophisticated name for friends and drinking buddies), partners and above all our favorite bakeries, coffee shops ect… From the outside our jobs look very glamorous (if someone has not looked at our paycheck that is), traveling around the world, researching stimulating ideas, meeting other brilliant (although often sort of autistic) people.

The tradeoff is that we never have one stable point of reference. We constantly need to build new social networks. Our best friends are normally in another country, if not spread around the globe and our family most of the times lives in a place without accessible universities. Our partner is having the same career path, which means (s)he is changing jobs and countries more often than a shirt, and we never (or rarely) are lucky enough to be on the same side of a river (or the Atlantic ocean come to that). Being on our productive age we need to focus on our career… but simultaneously being on the re-productive age too… we need to make some choices. The potential parents have about a thousand km or more between them, which does not constitute a healthy growing-up environment for any child.

So we are faced with a clear choice. Reject that post-doc position in the other side of the continent from your partner or freeze your eggs!

Smoking Ban in Greece: Three months on

Passing from completely compliant England on to nagging but obedient Italy, I had assumed that oxygen inside confined space was my natural right, especially since it is generally considered vital for survival. I had taken it for granted that I could happily breathe inside bars, coffee shops, public buildings and other protected spaces. For me, the small crowed outside each bar was a group of socializing smokers, and my flatmates standing on the balcony for a smoke without previous arrangement, only natural.
My trip to autumnal post-smoking ban Greece was about to shake my smoke-free world.
Some history first: Greece reluctantly adopted the smoke ban law on July 1sr of this year. Initially nobody took notice as the fun was outdoors and outdoors smoking was allowed.
As the cold creped in so did the numerous amendments and interpretations of what started its career as a total smoking ban.
So the total ban that I saw was far from being total…. With the following amendments:
1. Small bars (like very small) can choose to be for smokers or for non-smokers. So ALL small bars I know are for smokers, since this is the dominant trend.
2. Large bars and coffee shops can divide their area into smoking and non-smoking, and divide the two with a two meter high glass wall (which was a state of the art, hey, as you could literally step through it! … It did not exist! Anywhere!)
3. Big nightclubs, with the traditional bouzouki where in the old days the best clients broke some plates reaching maximum entertainment.
4. Universities, being a police-free zone, once upon a time to ensure freedom of speech, now ensure freedom of smoke of equally academics and students (we are all equal in smoking!). This includes lecture theatres and seminar rooms.

This covers bars and coffee shops. The restaurants I have not tried yet. Let’s hope that the government has been a bit more successful there.
The best result of the smoking ban was the new discourse on discrimination. Apparently smokers who are the majority of the adult population feel discriminated against… Their rights are suppressed not because the government cares about their health, but because some insurance companies have lobbied far too well and refuse to pay for the operations needed to cure (or slow down) the diseases caused by smoking alone. We pay all our lives, they say, damn straight they have to pay for the operations!

The irony....

Walking back to Florence

Some say this was the last summer day of the year. I’d say, we were lucky having it mid-October. Golden light, warmth, and off we went to the very north of the Chianti region, the village of Impruneta. Legend wants its famous terracotta stones to cover the roof of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Duomo of Florence. I doubt any of us noticed it. What we did notice was the St. Luca’s fair that spread all around the small village. The dominating feature was the smell of hog roast. Nobody could overcome that.

So even before starting our hike (which later proved to be just an afternoon walk, but that is a different story) we engaged in watching, smelling, tasting and finally just wolfing down this lovely pig that was roasted for the believers of St. Luca.

The hike was mainly rolling down a Tuscan hill, but with undeserved, spectacular views of the valley below. Our first target: La Certosa.

On the top of a hill (because monks always choose well, as spirituality and good views go hand in hand) we found the monastery of Galluzzo, named La certosa from the order of monks it serves. These carthusian monks, live in silence, and only train their unused voice cord once a week for a whole hour, gossiping with their fellow monks. The rest of the time they live in their small cells, the size of a one bedroom central London apartment, with food service. A plate of food appears once daily through a small window in their room, as a reward after a hard day of prayer. Being there with a bunch of economists, we debated about the waste of material and human resources in this spiritual business, concluding that, it would have been better if the monks wrote PhDs. (The priest blesses first his own beard, say the wise Greek folk)

The most impressive finding of this walk was the monk who gave us the tour of the certosa. Father Benedicto was very grumpy at the beginning of the tour, giving us “efficient” information (This painting, this year, by that painter, represents this, moving on… boom boom boom!). Slowly, he warmed up on us, especially to the ladies of a certain age in the front of our group, always complimenting him. In the end - what an audience we were - he did not want to let us go. Our tour, supposed to last an hour, was dangerously passing the one hour and a half threshold, and he was violating his weekly speech quota by thirty minutes! And on top of that, he was flirting with the ladies, whose age should inspire him to chant his funeral hymns. Maybe he could smell paradise close to them, who knows. Fatigued after our tour, he removed his hat, only to reveal a glorious head bump, benign tumour I was informed. But I could not help but thinking it was a horn being hatched in there…. A hybrid devil, identical to the one of Salman Rushdie’s imagination in the Satanic verses.


After these thoughts, and sure that the catholic church would had burned me in purifying fire, we continued our scroll to Florence. We arrived at piazzale Michelangelo exactly at the time the sun was setting. Florence below our feet and the sky in purples and pinks. All I could think about was my blisters… F**k the sunset. My feel are hurting!

Είπαν... (just a quote...)

Έφυγε για αλλού και αλλού.
Όπως κάθε παιδί που αφήνει τον τόπο του, μα όχι ο τόπος το παιδί.

Ζ.Ζ.
(She left for other places. Like every child that leaves her home town, but never does the home town leave the child.)