Oioioiay! Campers, it's about time I spoke to you. Unfortunately, I've moved, and I don't yet know how I might connect my dear Alouette to the internet yet. It might not be possible. This house has dialup, so there's a modem that it needs to go through, and if we can instal the moden driver, I can probably be able to hook her up to the Net, but we haven't tried that yet. We'll get around to it eventually. Probably.
At any rate, this is the entry in which I'll tell you about my trip to Hungary. The teacher who gave the majority of the announcements and instructions always prefaced what he had to say with "oioioiay," give or take a few "oi"s, so I figured I would too. Anyways, Belgian students typically take two trips during their secondary education: one in third year and one in sixth year. Being a sixth-year student, I was given the option of going on this year's trip to Hungary, and I did. IT was pretty cool. We went there by bus, though, which takes about 18 hours to get from MArchin, my school, to Budapest, which was our first destination. So we went there, and the first thing we did was go up to see the Statue of Liberty. This was originally the Stutue of Soviet Victory, but eventually the Hungarians decided to rechristen it. I took pictures of it, but I don't have them becasue my camera decide not to keep them. The next pictures I have are of the next thing we did, which was visit a park full of Communist statues. Breif summary of Hungarian history to set the stage: ivasion, occupation, revolution. They've got this cycle going on. Originally, there were some indiginoius peoples living there, then the romans showed up and colonised the western part of the land, then there was a revolution and they lost it, then the huns showed up, and they left eventually, and then the Magyars showed up. The Magyars are the current ethnic majority in Hungary, and the Hungarian name for Hungary translates roughly to "Magyarland." There were seven big Magyar chiefs, and the students on teh trip were divided up into seven teams, each bearing the name of one of them. Each team had to fill out questionaires at the end of each day of the trip becaue we took this trip during school days, so we couldn't just do nothing. There had to be a school element in it. Anyway,s the Magyars showed up and claimed the place, and then they got invaded by...someone. I forget who the first one was. Then, they got invaded by the Turks. The hungarians were able to fend the Turks off, but then the Turks came back and won. So Hungary was part of the Ottoman Empire for a while, then there was a revolution and it got independant again. Then, they got invaded by the Hapsburgs. The fruit of this was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was far more Austro- than Hungarian, according to what I head. Austria kind of coerced hungary into that one. Then, there was a revolution and Hungary broke away. Then, they got invaded by the Nazis, and while the Nazis had Hungary occupied, they got invaded by the Soviets, who liberated the Hungarians from the Nazis and then occupied the country. Hungary was part of the Eastern Bloc, read behind the Iron Curtain, and while it was not actually part of the Soviet Union, it might as well have been, because it was under Soviet influence and all that. Then, there was a revolution that was brutally crushed, and then there was a revolution that shook the Soviets off, and that is where we find Hungary today. So the Statue Formerly Known as The Soviet Victory was the statue representing the Soviet victory over the Nazis.
Anyway, one of Hungary's unique features is that Hungarians tend not to destroy effigies of their past predecessors. This means that they still have alot of Hapsburg statues and Ottoman statues and Communist statues. I hear that they turned an Ottoman mosque into a church by putting a cross on it. Eventually, Hungary decided to put all of its communist statues into a statue park on the outskirts of Budapest. We visited this statue park. I wish we'd have had more time there, because the soviets had a definite style, and I would have liked to look at it a bit more. You got stuff like this Soviet Soldier, and this All the Classes are Invited to the Proletarian Revolution thing, and this Running Flagbearer Guy, and I really kind of liked them. IT was just another style that I would have been happy to spend a while longer observing. When touring musuems with like tour guides, you never have any time to just look at stuff; you stand in front of the guide and the guide explains things to you, and then you move on, but you never have time to just look, which is like my favorite museum activity.
So the commie statues were cool. The next day, we went to the Basilic of Saint Stephan. Saint Stephan is considered the first king of the Magyars, and is a saint because he christianized the country. Here is a view of the town from the basilic's cupola, which is significantly elevated. This gives you more or less an idea of how the city is organized.IT's all buildings of 5-6 stories with neo- architecture. I say neo- because there are all kinds of neo-: neo-classical, neo-roman, and neo-something else, neo-romatic, maybe, I dunno. It's wierd to walk around the city becasue all the buildings are the same, but different. There all like variations on the same theme. They all have th big blocks on the bottom, the decorated windows, scultures on the thing, decorative collumns, all that good stuff. This is because the city was built mostly after 1830, at which point an evormous amount of money started pouring into the city (I forget why, exactly, it just happened), so all the buildings are build in the neo- styles, which were popular at the time. There are a few "Art Nouveau" facades, but these are called "Art Secession" in the East for some reason. Those are pretty cool to look at, and they really jump out among all the neo- stuff. So that was wierd. We walked around the city a bit, seeing, among other things, this synagogue, which is historical because it's the building in which the Nazi's famous Final Solution to the jewish problem was decided on. It also looks really nice. It had this metal tree in its courtyard, which preportedly has the name of a holocaust victim written on each leaf. We couldn't get close to it becasue ther was a big metal grill in front of it. They charge admission. We walked around the city a bit more and then had some free time.
I will now use this time to talk about the company I kept on the trip. I ended up rooming with a couple of guys who were in a band. They're pretty cool. I spent some time with them, thir fellow bandmate, and the girlfriend of one of them. Now here's the thing; the guy with the girlfriend has an unhealthy attachment to his girlfriend, and vice-versa. They remind me, unfortunately, of Richandamy from Zits. I'm happy that they're happy, but they exaggerate. The couple actually slept in the same bed in one of the hotels. I don't think they had sex; being his roomate, I was in the room, but they slept together. That's just silly. These guys just don't feel the need for intimacy to be intimate. I wouldn't even talk about it if it hadn't attracted so much of my attention. So I spent some time around these guys, and I got the feeling that they were going through a lot of very typical adolescent drama (caused in part by the aforementioned couple), and that made me kind of dissapointed because I would kind of hope that they be above that. I guess they're still cool, but that crap just kind of puts a wrench in life, from my standpoint. Also, I heard a lot about it during the free time we had to walk around the city, so talking about it here serves as a record of my experiences during my Budapest free time.
The next day, we went to a Hungarian public school. The French class of the school we visited had appointed a speaker who read a text in French to us, then we put on a little skit about Marchin that had been finished that morning (we had very short notice), and then some other stuff happened. The Hungarian Public School system goes from 1 to 13 before University, and the divisions are irregular. There are some schools have all thirteen grades in them, there are some divisions 1-6, 7-13, there are some divisions 1-5, 6-9, 10-13, and probably some other stuff, too. There's no definite "Elementary-Middle-High" division like we got in the US. The Hungarians, by and large, were rather introverted. I was surprised at how insular they were. It all started when we Marchinois filed into the lunchroom where the speeches were held; all the Hungarians were seated in the back, and the Belgians all sat further up front on the lunchtables. This made little sense to me; if foreign students are going to visit a school, it seems to me like one of the principal goals would be for some manner of contact to be established between the foreign and domestic students. The least you could do is have them sit together. Put a few Hungarian students at each table, and then have the Belgians fill in the white space so it's a bit mixed up. The segregation is senseless. It kind of continued that way, too. There was a back-and-forth Q&A session wherein the Belgians and Hungarians were supposed to ask questions of each other, and the Hungarians didn't ask very many questions. They really had to be prodded by the proctor. There was also a "guess-the-person-or-place" game in which a slide show of landmarks and people, fictional or otherwise, was shown. There were two of these, one for Belgium and one for Hungary. The idea was that the Belgians would identify the Belgian things and the Hungarians would identify the Hungarian things, and that way there would be sharing. Fine in theory; the thing is, the Belgian things she picked were kind of obscure, so the Belgians didn't know very many of them. Cezar Franc, for instance. He's a composer that was born near Liege and moved to France when he was about 15. I happened to know about him because I like the symphony he wrote and read the CD insert. My theory is that Belgium doesn't have very many famous people or landmarks, so the teacher had to kind of reach. Well, the Hungarians didn't know about Bartok, either, so maybe it ended up about even in terms of obscurity levels. Some of the Belgians felt kind of offended, though, that they should get tought about their own contry while visiting another. Moving on: arts are taught in Hungarian school at a young age. This is part of their cultural education (indoctrination). So the maybe-about-Fourth Graders danced us a dance that symbollically reenacted a traditional Hungarian wedding. Then they sang a song that the Belgians had to try to sing (we all had sheet music with lyrics, so it wasn't too unreasonable). Then, we were all invited down to try some Hungarian peasant dances. That reminded me a bit of square dancing, it wasn't too hard, stuff like "spin your partner round and rouns, now do it in the other direction," but it was hard to try to do it and watch what was coming next, nowing nothing of the program. It was fun, at least. That's more or less our visit to the school. I had a good time. I suyppose it's worth mentioning that the principal languange used among students was not French, though the studenst we were speaking to were studying French, but English. I don't know why, but it was English. Englsih has such global penetration. The Belgians would order their beers from convinience stores in English. So, after the school, we had more free time in Budapest. You've heard about that.
The following day, we went out to the "Buckle of the Danube (litteral translation fro mthe French)." There, we saw this church, which was huge and important for some reason. I think that Saint Stephan was originally crowned. There's that statue there, at least. We also saw a castle that was previously the capital of Hungary during some of its earlier days (in order to impress his visitors, the King actually had the fountains flow with wine during celebrations) adn a little town; a "typical village." WATCH OUT! Any time somebody tells you that some little dot on the map is a "typicall village," that means it's like a Disneyland village. I doubt that anybody actually lived in this place, it was just 100% shopfronts designed to cater to tourists. I got the feeling that the place was completely deserted at night. They had a musuem, though; it was a museum that had basically the entire oevre of some ceramic sculpter. I'd never heard of her before, and neither had anybody else, I believe, but some of her stuff was pretty good. I liked it. WE had some free time later, and I stuck around in the musuem cause I didn't have enough time during the first go-around. Sturgeons Law, of course; since the museum had like everything she did in it, it showed all of her misses as well as her hits. I'm still glad I saw it, though, I was able to take some stuff away from it.
Now here's something that I find kind of hilarious. My year abroad has a hot springs episode. Hungary is known for its hot springs, which are typically transformed into Turkish Baths, heritage from the Ottomans. So, as faithful tourists, we went to one. It was great. They had three big pools, a hot pool, a cold pool, like typical swimming pool temperature, and a warm pool. There was a whole complex, they had some other stuff there, too, like saunas et al, but I didn't bother with that. I spent the whole of my three hours rotating hot-cold-warm. It was great. I felt so good after that. You get really tired from all the swimming, but you're so relaxed it really doesn't matter. School trip, hot springs episode, and it leaves you feeling great: I'm happy. We walked around the town a bit more, guided by our guide, and then retired to the hotel. I guess I'll take this oppourtunity to say that I was surprised at how many of my fellow students smoked. The majority does, I'd say. Smoking age in Belgium is 15, I think. Whenever we went walking, I felt like ther was this kind of cloud of smoke that we took with us. People were just lighting up all the time. I was surprised, but smoking is really popular at Marchin.
The next day, we visited the region around the lake Balaton. The lake Balaton is apparently very importnt for some reasons. It's the biggest lake in Hungary, so it's notable for that, and I guess that historically it's attracted humans cause it's water. It's surrounded by extinct volcanoes; we climbed up one of them to see the lake and a village better. Oh yeah, there's a lot of wine cultivation in the area. We were able ot see how the vinyards were laid out. Apparently, the sunlight that reflect off the water hits the grapes and puts more sugar in them, and that makes better wine, or something like that. At any rate, we tried some of this wine. We went to some vineyard and sampled some of the product. By all accounts, it was good. I have no taste for wine. It all tastes like wine to me. I can't tell a good wine from a mediocre wine. I can taste bad wine. That's easy. But if a wine is at all decent, it all tastes the same to me.
We had one more day in Hungary, and we used it to tour the city of Gyor, which is also historically important. A bunch of stuff happened there and it was a prosperous mercantile city on the Danube. We just had a bunch of free time there. I wandered into a bookstore and was surprised to see Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes on the shevles. Well, it was actualyl Dilbert and Klezmer es Huba, but close enough. They didn't have any Cardcaptor Sakura, but they did have Ruroni Kenshin and some other stuff that I forget. Gyor seemed like more or less any town. It had its richer neighboorhoods and poorer neighboorhoods and construction sites, but there wansn't really anything notable there. That night, we packed up and left Magyarland. We slept on the coach and ended up in Belgium the next day.
So those are my adventures in Hungary. Next time, I'll tell you about Greece, which I visited right after visiting Hungary. See you next time, space cowboy.
Hey there, Hi there, Ho there, fellows and felowesses. I hope you're all doing fine. I am. I want to talk about the present before I start talking about the past today. You see, I saw a movie today, Altiplano. It, apparently, has won a few awards and is making the art theater tour (look for it at Boardman's, I guess). Actually, the school took me to see this movie, which was awfully nice of them. A bunch of students were taken to see this movie as part of our cultural edification, I guess. Here's the thing; I thought it wasn't very good. Well, I thought it was almost good. I thought it was too artsy-fartsy for its own good. The movie is about an Indian village in the mountains of Peru near a mine. There's also a Belgian who gets involved, and it's wierd and kind of complicated. The film suffered from oen major shortcoming, I thought, and that was that its scenes were too long. Now, that's kind of bizarre comming from me, because I tend to like older-type movies lke Gone with the Wind, Spartacus is my favorite movie, and one of the reasons I cite for that is because they tend to have longer scenes with fewer cuts. The next movie you go to, try to count ten seconds before a camera cut; it doesn't happen very often. In older films, you tend to get tens of seconds, even minutes, of the same scene continuously filmed by the same camera. I like that. In general. Altiplano went off the deep end with this one. It spent minutes just, for example, rotating the camera or showing us more of the same thing that we've already seen. I think that the movie could have easily been 3/4 as long. In fact, I think that the movie should have been 3/4 as long, because those really long shots started to tire me out by the end. I just stopped caring by the time the camera decided to show me something else. There was one notable scene that was just like a minute, no joke, of the camera following a really long dress's veil in the water. I didn't care. Okay, the veil is in the water. I get it. What's next? Also, I would have tried to make the narrative a little tighter. There were a couple elements that seemed kind of sloppily handled, and could have been made more coherent with jsut a bit of reworking, and at least one character that seemed superfluous to me.
Now, I've whined a lot, but all in all, the movie wasn't actually bad. I can't bring myself to condemn it outright. It screwed up the execution a bit, but at its heart it was good. One thing that it did really well was just having neat images. It had a lot of neat images that really made an impression. I saw this, and I kept on thinking to myself, "wow, that;s a really cool image. It's a shame they can't use it right." By that I just meant that because the movie, as a whole, didn't quite hold itself together in my opinion, the images lost a lot of their power. Here's another thing; I'm still on the fence about this film becasue one of the principal, I dunno, directors? producers? was there and answered soome of our questions. During the course of the Q&A, she ended up saying, "This isn't a movie that you're supposed to analys and decode the symbols and understand, the symbols are supposed to hit you and make an impression. It's the kind of movie that you're supposed to keep inside you and digest." Seend from that point of veiw, I can kind of understand it better, and I'm now torn between wanting to give it the benifit of the doubt and relying on my own judgements. Really, I kind of want to see the movie again so I can properly re-evaluate it because relying on other people's artistic judgements is something that I really don't like to do. But, what's more, she turned around and almost just the next thing she asked, "Does anybody have any ideas about the symbology? Does anyone want to try to interpret the ending?" so I'm getting mixed messages here; am I supposed to let the images hit me and then digest them later, or pay attention and try to "figure it out?" I don't know! fundamentally, I think that's the movie's problem; it's unbalanced. there are enough things in it that can and should be thought about an analyzed that it makes the hit-you-now-digest-them-later images distracting. I felt while watching it that the film should have more motion; it was t o o s l o w. But the images demand a bit of time for themselves. It's the combat between the narrative and the neat images that made the film disharmonious in my opinion; I think the elements of a film should work with themselves, not fight each other. But I still want to watch it again. If it's still too slow, I'll stop. One thing's for sure: it managed to defy my expectations. I never would have expected a film to be like this one because I expect films to work a bit differently. And that's the thing; I'm still torn between granting this film its own idiom of existance of hacking it into a shape that I think is closer to the Platonic Form of a Movie. Psycologists call this a state of "cognative dissonance."
Amd now for Greece. I'll start by saying that my camera is going through a very difficult period of its life right now. I took 88 or 87 pictures in Greece (I forget which), and when I tried to import them, my computer hung up on nubmer 21. I tried a few things, and it seems like numbers 21 and 74 were corrupt or something. So, right when I said, "Okay, well I'll skip 21 and 74," my computer told me that there were files on my external device that were currupted or something, would I like to run a scan&fix program? This sounded good to me; I figured it might fix my corrupted images. No such luck; instead, it put 108 .CHK-type files on a new folder in my camera and gave me a 32 KB file with the name of the folder that had all the pictures in it that has no extension and whose file type is listed as "file." I hope I can somehow recover my Greece pictures, but we'll have to see. I don't know if this is a problem with me, my camera, or Windows 7, but with any luck I'll figure it out. So, I've been able to choose from the first twenty photos I took, which are all from Delphi, the first place we visited.
But the story starts before Delphi, because we had to get from Belgium to Greece. That started on the 5th, when I got on the bus at Brussels. We spent the rest of that day of the bus, upon which we slept. The next day, we woke up in Italy. We rolled through Italy and even ate lunch at an Italian restaurant before getting on a boat. Even just rolling through Italy, I really got an impression of how beautiful the Italian countryside is. It is simply a really beautiful country. So we got on the boat, a huge boat; it was so huge, th ebus got on the boat too. It's a type of boat that's used a lot to transport trucks, so it's a trucking boat. They let the bus on, too. It was around this time that Kakeru started following me. Kakeru is a Japanese kid on exchange, who's not in my district, so I don;t see him very much. I got the distinct impression that he had a strategy to follow someone so as to not get lost, and he chose me kind of arbitrarily. That ended up being fortunate for the both of us, because I'm interested in Japan. He didn't talk much, but he understood French pretty well. I was able to learn some Kanji off him. I'd show you what I can write, but I don't have the internet right now, so I can' tgo look them off Wikipedia right now or anything like that. Maybe later. Anyway, I had to find some way to occupy myself on the boat. We had a meeting at the restaurant; while looking for the restaurant, I found a placard with information on what was on which decks of the ship; alongside "restaurant," ther was written "video games." Problem solved. The boat must have had a deal with SEGA or something, because they had a lot of SEGA properties there. They had three different Virtua series present: Virtua Strikers (soccer), virtua Tennis (which wasn't working) and Virtua Fighter 5, on which I spent most of my time. They also had a Time Crisis 4 machine, but I don't like rail shooters. Oh, they also had an Outrun 2 machine, which is another SEGA property. Time Crisis is Namco, for the record. So I played Virtua fighter 5, and Aoi ended up being my favorite character. Virtua Fighter really improved my opinion of 3D fighters. Beforehand, all I was familliar with was the Tekken games and Dead or Alive 3, with exceptionally brief stints on Soul Caliber II. I thought that 3D fighters tended to be button-mashin'; this is definitely the case for Tekken 3 (I'm so good at Tekken 3 on the Playstation) and Dead or Alive. I actually watched a little girl playing virtua Fighter, and her strategy was to button mash; it got her past stage 1 and 2, but stopped her short on stage 3. I was able to figure out some combos, not all of them, of course, and it was good. It turns out that 3D fighters work a bit differently than I thought they did, and it was good to learn about that. In the evening, I ended up playing cards with Kakeru, Manami, a Japanese schoolgirl from my district, and Han-Yo, a Thai girl that I don't think I've ever seen before. We played Egyptian (I won) and Hearts, and then slept. Not together, of course; well, Kakeru and I slept i nthe same cabin, but the girls went elsewhere.
The next morning, there was a meeting after breakfast. The Rotary folks were upset about student conduct; apparently, the students had fait un peu trop de fête, which had led to a bit of a scene and the fact that, at curfew, only four students were in bed. Earllier that morning, there was a Canadian going around saying that she was "so sorry" (the o in sorry was conspicuously Canadian) for her drunken conduct the previous night, and she was apparently not alone. I had been hearing some stories going around. So the Rotary folks censured the student body in general, and we went away warned. It's late and I have school tomorrow, and I've wasted a lot of time talking about a movie that I have an uncertain impression of (it was too slow), and you won't see this until I've written the other part, too, so Im'a sign off now. I've always gotta leave folks hang, anyway, if I want them to come back, so I'll tell you this; what I've told you about the voyage so far is but a preview of what was to come.
'Till next time, my name is Ozymandias.
Sorry it's been taking me so long. As you can tell, I still haven't figured out how to connect Alouette to the Internet. The problem with the website isn't so much the files, I could migrate them easily enough, I'm sure, but the client. I cant upload the files without putting my Alouette on line. I'll find something eventually, even if I have to take her to the library or something. You'll probably have this stuff on the net before I leave. Anyway, a bit of current events before revisiting the past, my memories of which are getting staler by the second, so I'd better do it now or never. Anyway, you might have heard that Belgium is in a state of mild political upheaval right now. Its prime minister resigned a third time, for good this time, and has left the country without a government. I don't quite understand why the prime minister's resignation forces everybody else to resign, but apparently it does. I've been talking on and off about how useless I think King Albert is, but right now he is holding Belgium together as litteraly as possible without actually lying on the ground and pulling two tectonic plates towards each other. I don't think there are any faultlines in Belgium, anyway. So Belgium currently has no government, and special elections are to be held the fourteenth. The basic problem is regional tensions. I think I've already said that Belgium is split in two halves: Wallonia, the southern, Francophone region; and Flanders, the northern, flemish-speaking region. Linguinsts are currently in debate over whether or not Flemish and Dutch are two different languages. Anyway, there are some Dutch extremists currently pushing for constitutional reform that would, in short, favor Dutch-speakers and disadvantage French-speakers; the Waloons aren't okay with this. So, because constitutional reform is really long and difficult to effectuate in Belgium, the Walloons blocked it without much difficulty; they've been doing so for some time now, actually. The Flemings (the extremists active in the government, at least) have gotten pretty angry as a result. Now, the Flemings are a majority; there are more Flemings than there are Waloons. This means that with the Fleming's increasing insistance on the legislation they want (I'd like to elaborate, but federal Belgium in kind of complicated. We went over it in History class, so I more or less understand the issue, but it's complicated), tensions have been rising on the governmental level for some time now, and the prime minister decided he couldn't take it anymore. He reisgned. Something happened, I think the King made him come back, and he resigned again, and then, about a week ago, he finally did it for real. Third time's the charm, huh? So now people are pretty uneasy because people suspect that the Flemish extremeists might use this oppourtunity to seek as much as a scission between Wallonia and Flanders, rendering them seperate countries, thusly annuling the existance of the country of Belgium. This owuld pose numerous problems: firstly, Brussels. Brussels, in addition to being the national capital, is currently also the capital of both Walonia and Flanders. Brussels has long been sited along with the King as an element keeping Flanders and Walonia together. In addition, Brussels is the seat of the European Council, an important legislative body for the whole of the European Union. There are boatloads of international institutions and embassies, so much that it's commonyly called the "Capital of Europe." If Belgium turns into Flanders + Wallonia, what happens to Brussels? There's been talk of turing it into a kind of Washington DC, a semi-autonomous "Capital of Europe." The feasibility of such a solution has been questioned, and the impact it might have on Straussbourg and Luxembourg, the other two "Capitals of Europe," as they both host EU bodies, has also been raised. But a bigger problem than Brussels is Belgium's diplomatic history, which has been quite active since the end of WWII. Belgium is a NATO and EU member nation, it has numerous economic and diplomatic treaties with a lot of people, and if it splits in two, how valid are those treaties? They were signed in the name of Belgium, not Flanders and Wallonia. If Belgium splits, how much of those treaties apply to the two resulting states? How much applies to all the rest of the signing nations? Do brand new accords need to be drawn? These are serious questions, but at this point they're happily hypothetical; we'll see what the June 14 brings. I don't know what kind of coverage you guys have been getting over there, but you'll have my eyewitness, ground-level wiew of it all. Belgium has finally gotten kind of exciting.
As far as my personal current events go, I visited the Atomium, a notable landmark in Brussels and remnant of the World's Fair hosted in that town in 1958, and the neighbooring "Mini-Europe," which assembles a lot of scale-model monuments, at least one from each of the 27 member states, in a large park (scale 1/25). That was pretty cool. I spent a lot of time with a Floridian nerd named Shanon. I took pictures, but every time I booted my camera up, it told me that the picture I had just taken was picture number 1, even though that ws not the case. So, sorry. Also, I went to a Rotary meeting, and got three months' worth of pocket money, for a total of 195 Euros. The next day, I went to Liege to buy comics. Mom, Dad, I'm definitely going to need to send some of these comics back before I get on a plane, because they will not all fit in the luggage I have. They'd just weigh too much, anyway. Just letting you know. And now, the past.
Last time, on "Kevin in Greece," we had almost landed on this ancient, hot, sunny archipelago. So we landed, and the first thing we did was get on a bus. The same bus, actually; we put the bus on the boat and took it across with us, so we had the same bus for the whole trip. So we got on the bus and went to Delphi. WE got ther ein the evening, so we just moved in to the hotel and spent the night there. I was invited to the room next to mine, where the kinds were drinking. I think that, between five or six kids, they emptied three bottles of vodka. I don't know how big the bottles were; maybe a third to half a liter. I actually got invited over because someone from next door knocked on my door and asked it I had soda, or anyhting that could act as a chaser for some vile brew he'd consumed. I had some candy in my bag, so I offerd it to him, and he invited me over. I figured, "what the heck?" and went. After they finished their vodka, they went out drinking. I don't think they did anyhting too exagerated. It's interesting to note here that we crossed a school from Huy that was on its senior trip; there were some Rotary students that didn't go on the Rotary's trip, but went there with their school, so we got to see each other anyway. I got to see Emma, the host sister from my first host familly, the Pirards. Anyway, next morning, Delphi. The Oracle. That was cool. My pictures stop just after Delphi; here is the famous Temple of Apollo, god of divinaiton. Piles of old rocks. I got a serious "Look on my works, ye mmighty" vibe from this place. It must have been majestic at one time, but it's all ruins now. This is a treasury, I forget which; there were numerous treasuries at Delphi, as it was an important trade center as well as a religious center. Even MAsilla had a treasury there; Masilla is better known these days as MArseille, a prominent town in southern France, where a lot of French rap comes from. It started out as a Greek colony. The Oracle isn't the only thing in the neighborhood, though; there was also this gymnasium and this nearby Temple of Athena. I think the temple of Athena was used as the image for the oracle in the game Civilization 2. So we visited Delphi and the adjoint museum, and then...got on the bus. We drove until we got to Athens, and then it was too late to do anything, so we went to bed (I forget how drunk people got, it must not have been too bad). You might notice that we spent a lot of time on the bus. We did. It seemed to me that it was really, "get on the bus, ride to some ruins, get off the bus, go see some ruins, get back on the bus, be on your merry way," because it was. At this point, I wrote in my journal, "trip feeling thin." It did feel thin. I would have liked less bus time.
Anyway, we saw Athens the next day. That was cool. We got up and saw the Acropolis. That was neat. They're doing reconstruction on it right now, so there are still a bunch of scaffolds, but whatever, the Parthenon is still cool. They've replaced some of the missing marble chunks, and the new marble hasn't yellowed yet, so you can see the new patches and it gives you an idea of what it would have tooked like back in the day when it was entirely brilliant and glittering. Wis hI could have seen it. WE went to visit the adjoint musem, too, and guess what? I didn't have enough time to look at the statues. Never do. Then, we had five hours of free time in Athens. FIVE HOURS. Maybe six, I forget. WE were given fifteen euros for lunch that day and the next (not eating lunch, I saved some money) and told to meet back at the restaurant at 20:00. It was 14:00 or 15:00, I forget. One of the Rotary guys said, "We're not going to hold you by the hand," to which I thought, "Gee, I kind of wish you would, becuase I have absolutely no business in Athens." So, accompanied by Kakeru, we set out to wander aimlessly about Athens. WE just walked and walked and walked. There's a huge touritows in Athens, just blocks filled entirely with souvenir shops and such. I wanted to get out of there. I understand that a lot of people stayed there and just shopped for the time. Kakeru and I went out and wanrdered, and we found some pretty nice views (Greece is very mountainous; this, Delphi looked at from below, might give you an idea), and we were able to get a bit into the inhabited part of Athens, and that was good. We found a really nice park where we rested a while. Greece had very desert-like flora; they had cacti and scrub brush and stuff that reminded me a lot of stuff I associate with Arizona. They had palm-like trees (don't know if they really were palm trees, they prably were) in the park, and that was good. We also ended up in some dark and kind of creey alleys that had a lot of bike shops in them. There were pirated merchandise dealers all over the place. They'd come by selling DVDs and PS3 games in platic sleeves with printouts of copies of the game covers on them. There were also guys selling electronics, iPods and the like, which I got the feeling were being fenced on the street, but hey, what do I know? I also saw a guy who was actually running a shell game. He had three little boxes and one ball; he'd scramble the boxes and then people would bet on where they thought the ball was, minimum wager 50 euros. Watching, I was able to keep track of where the ball was pretty easily (video game training), but wasn't foolish enough to gamble on it. Che Guavara is popular in Greece. I saw a lot of Che posters and silk-screen-type hang-posters around in the souvenir shops. So after our interminable free time was over, we ate not enough food at a restaurant and headed back to the hotel. There was much merriment, and I ended up talking to two Argentinians. They had some really good conversation; they atually said that they were making it a point to talk to people they hadn't talked to before, and that's why they had deliberately engaged me in conversation. They had some good things to say, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear them say, "You have some really good things to say. WE don't get that from many Americans. They're always like, 'whoo, we're gonna party cause mom and dad aren't there,' and they jsut come off as kind of stupid. Why do you think that is?" This was not simply a compliment, as it was, but reaffirmed my perception of most of the other Americans, so I was doubly happy. The only explanations that I could hypothesize were that first; Belgium, having a reputation as a party country, attracts party students, but the Argentinians said that Belgium is almost never anybody's first choise and second; that Americans tend to be stupider in groups than one-on-one. The third explanation that offers itsself up is that the other Americans are just stupid, and I'm better, but I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. In all honesty, the "group-stupid" theory is the one that I find the most plausible according to my own observations. Anyway, that all happened amidst much merriment.
The following day was Island Day. We went to a souple of islands and had three hours of free time on one and like one on the other. There was nothing to do on these islands. Well, Hydra had a nice hill to climb, so I climbed a hill and looked down from a park bench for a while, and that was good and pretty and all, but it didn't take three hours. Three hours was too much. The other place was more reasonable and also less touristic. At Delphi, I think it was, I heard somebody say, "Yeah, I just keep thinking about how it would be better with a lot fewer people there," to which I replied, "Yeah, wouldn't it be nice to have the tourist attractions without the tourists?" It would be nice, honestly, By that, I mean it would be nice to have no tourists but ourselves. Anyway, the islands were just big tourist traps. Not too much fun. That night at the hotel, however, people had lots of fun. Many people equate alchohol with fun. The thing I heard mosst often in Hungary was, I think, "Oioiay." The thing I heard most frequently in Greece was, I think, varations on, "I really want to get drunk tonight." So I encountered a number of drunkexchange students there. I got the impression more than ever that the Rotary students regarded the Rotary rules as mere suggetions that could be ignored practically on a whim. Everybody just seemed really eager to trash themselves, which is a violation of the "do not drink to excess" rule that is made very clear. I have a hard time figuring out why being drunk is fun. I actualyl asked someone, and he/she (I forget) said, "Well, yeah, the first time you get drunk it's just like, 'oh, I'm dizzy, why is this fun?' but after that, is great because you just don't care." You just don't care. I don't need alchohol not to care. If I want to forget my worldly problems, I have far more constructive mechanisms not to care about them, like prose, comics, video games, and anime. Why consume alchohol when I can consume art? People were really drunk that night. So drunk, in fact, that the Rotary decided they'd had enough and cut some points off of some students' "good conduct" card the following morning. thank heaavens someone passed to action. I don't know why people have fun waking up and discovering that they have scrapes and bruises; I don't know why it's fun to show them off to one another like they're battle scars. It's stupid, drunk people are wretched, and I can't dig it. Can you see my halo?
I should mention also that two of our hotels were beachfront hotels, and I got to swim in the Mediterranean. That was great.
The day after everyone was colossally drunk, we visited Epidaurus. This place is known for its theater. It has acoustics practically unrivalled. So they had a couple of students sing, and I was one of them. I was singing to myself (as I often do) on the bus, and some students noticed and called for me to sing louder so they could hear me; I sang louder, and a rotary dude heard me and thought I was pretty good, so he had me sing. I am so glad he had me sing. Single best moment of the trip: singing at Epidaurus. I sang "Omina sol Temperat" as written by Orff, because it seemed appropriate given the setting and it was the song the rotary guy heard me sing on the bus. Afterwards, another Rotary person told me that she was very moved by my performance. That made me happy. Later that day, we visited Macenae. This is an absolutely ancient stone castle/fortress/city, it's like the oldest in Greece, and that's pretty old right there. It's the city that's written of in The Illiad, the one that goes to war with Troy. That was realy great. I really enjoyed walking around that place. Like I say, I get a real Ozymandias vibe from that kind of stuff. It was really neat. Then, we went to a nearby town, and I climbed an old castle with KAkeru and some Rotary guy. The castle istelf was closed, but the really long and steep staircase was open, so we just climbed the staircase and went back down again. It was our excercise for the day. That was that for the day.
The next wasn't much. We saw the ruins of Olympia, but it didn't manage to make much of an impression. They had really pretty trees all around and in bloom, but the piles of old rocks didn't interest me much. It was just another ancient quarry with crowds of people wandering through it. I guess I was just burned out on Ruins. Anyway, after that I got back on a boat and we headed back. This boat, however, had Tekken 5 on it instead of Virtua Fighter 5. I like Virtua Fighter better, but I ended up playing more Tekken than Virtua Fighter, time-wise. I played mostly Raven. Like I said, 3D fighters work differently than I thought they did. It was good for my Gaming education.
There's not much more to this story; in a French convinience store/road restaurant, I saw some American comics on sale, four assorted issues for five euros, so I picked two of them up for a total of eight comics. I'll throw the names out there: Witchblade(+ Tomb Raider crossover), Ascension, Cyber Force, Weapon Zero, Shi, The Darkness, and two re-issues, one of an old Spiderman, and one of an old DareDevil. I should really look into DareDevil more; I remember reading an old Joe Quesada DareDevil that was reprinted in the back of the first colleciton of "The Ultimate DareDevil and Elektra," and it was awesome. The old one I have in French Translation was a Frank Miller, and I enjoyed it. Those comics effectively reinvigorated my interest in Superheroes. It was really hard for my to see how that Joe Quesada DareDevil could turn into "the Ultimate DareDevil and Elektra," beacuse the old one was so incredibly good and the "Ultimate" was so bad. It was quite remarkeable. But then again, the whole "Ultimate" line is something of a marketing gimmick and can't hold a candle to the real deal.
I think that just about wraps it up for Grece, and I think we're all caught up now. If there's something you feel I should have talked about and didn't drop me a line.
Once more,
Peace out.
