Attempts at Countrification

23 November 2011 at 10:16 pm (Britain, Greece, Nature, Places, Plinky Prompts, Self, Wellbeing)
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I was born and raised in Athens. A sprawling metropolis of about four million souls, spectacularly magnificent in places and spectacularly repellent in others. I guess it spoiled me for any smaller place.

Athens

I used to say that, as a dedicated city girl, I couldn't see myself living in a smaller place. Well, I'd jump at half a chance to live in Edinburgh, despite it being about 1/10 the size of Athens, but beyond that, I'd only leave for an even bigger place, like London, Paris or New York. I couldn't even imagine then that I would end up in semi-rural Essex, coping with life out in the fringes of a modestly sized town. And really, coping is the word.

You see, I'm definitely not cut out for life in the wild. Even if that means a housing estate a short bus ride from town, as wild as a domesticated mouse. I miss being able to pop out to the shops at a moment's notice, or finding myself among people with a few minutes' walking. We're on a dorm estate, where I can go for half a mile or so without meeting a soul on the street, and I resent having to plan a bloody journey on the bus to get into town. The local lifestyle is heavily skewed in favour of drivers; walking is a desolate experience and public transport combines extortionate fares with unreliable timetables. If we didn't have a huge supermarket, that allows lots of browsing, close by, I wouldn't have anywhere at all to go, outside town limits. I'm still wondering at a retail estate with several furniture, furnishings and DIY stores, but no bookstore.

I've spent long periods of time in the real countryside, in a house without hot water or an indoor bathroom, where we still gathered our dinner ingredients from the garden. I know I'd make a lousy farmer's wife; I've even lost the feeble interest in gardening I used to have, much as I would like a chance to grow some of our own food. But I'm no good even in the faux countryside of the boonies. I just miss people too much. It's bad enough that there is absolutely nothing to do in town once the shops close. (By 6pm. Which, in high summer, means long hours of empty streets in broad daylight. Creepy.)

I know now that I could live in an even smaller town. I'd just have to be smack in the middle of it all.

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Aaaarrrgh! Spider!

6 January 2011 at 9:18 pm (Animals, Nature, Reading, Wellbeing)
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Kiddie book? Cute. For reals? Not so.

I don’t like spiders. I don’t go into screaming hysterics at the sight of one (though I might even do that if one drops on me from high *shudders*), but I don’t care to share living space with them. Big ones pack much more ick factor, but small ones can be sneakier and more harmful. Like the one that, apparently, got caught in the hem of my jeans and left me a ring of bites all around my right ankle to remember it by. Mind you, I never saw it; I only noticed the bites when they started itching like crazy, and pieced together what had probably happened from there. There was no actual harm done to me, but the days until the bites healed were certainly not fun.

The area I live in has much more greenery than I grew up accustomed to, from grass to trees and everything in between, and naturally, the industrious little critters are everywhere outside. There are some impressive webs appearing to be suspended in mid-air, and you have to get the viewing angle just so to see where the ends are attached to – as often as not, to a tree or shrub several feet away. They are fascinating pieces of work, and they become even more fascinating if you catch the weaver there as well, whether actually working or lurking for hapless dinner to fly in. But, you know… fascinating from a distance. I will not disturb the webs of field spiders, but inside the house, any arachnid that comes close to me gets whacked, no questions asked.

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There and Back Again?

15 October 2010 at 10:16 pm (Nature, Places, Plinky Prompts, Self, Travel)
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Hint: To come back from somewhere, you have to go there first…

White moon, bright moon, pearling the air

When asked whether I would take an offer for a free trip to the moon, my first thought was to be snarky. Oh, moon holidays, that’s so last century. How about a plot of land up there instead, something to keep, something that so few others can possibly have, all mineminemine!

If you are suspecting already that my answer to such an offer would be no, pat yourselves on the back and grab a cookie. Mind you, my reasons for declining are probably different from what you imagine, or what most people would say.

It has nothing about lunar mystique and ruining it by seeing what a dusty, barren rock of a world it is up close. Seriously, who hasn’t seen photos of the moon by now? Where is the mystique to be shattered? Yes, it’s like a pockmarked face; what’s the big deal? Most things on earth are ugly on close inspection. Mystique is created by distance, peppered with some legerdemain. That’s why when something is dissected into the bare facts, it is ‘demystified’. On the other hand, I very much doubt any astronaut who has walked on the moon has lost their liking for watching it from earth for knowing what it is truly like, instead of the bright body of light we perceive it as. I’m no different. I would still ooh and aah over red and blue moons, try to capture it dotted with shadows at dusk (like the pic up there) or faint and winking early in the morning, and watch eclipses progress with fascination.

No, the issue is that virtually anyone offered such a trip would do it just for the experience, so they could boast to anyone who would stick around long enough to listen, back home. Me, I’m not big on travelling on my own homeworld, let alone going off through space into another – so the money isn’t a big lure either. I’m not an experience collector; the experiences I go after are important as landmarks to myself, and are at least indirectly connected to people, not places.

I’d take the Trans-Siberian railway, to trace the Russian culture from the fringes of Europe into the Far East. I’d go on walkabout in the Dinétah, to immerse myself in the spirit of a people more primordial than my own, growing out of the bones of the earth. The desolate, inhospitable rock that is the moon… what does it have to offer me in way of understanding the earth? A lot… but through lighting my way through the night here, not up there, where the equipment that would keep me alive would also isolate me from the real experience. Thanks, but no thanks.

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Miles in Siberia

7 October 2010 at 3:44 pm (Education, Entertainment, Nature, Places, Plinky Prompts, Travel)
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Railroads are roads too.
Trans-Siberian Railway 1990. Barabinsk Station.

I’ve never been a big fan of travelling. Or rather, there are a lot of places I want to see, but I wish I could just teleport to my destination, without the hassle of packing and tackling mundane means of locomotion. (How long until transporters are finally functional, eh?)

However, there is one particular destination, or group of such, that I wouldn’t mind accessing normally at all. Rather, the destinations are just dots along the way, pit stops through the ride, which is the purpose of the journey itself. That is the very essence of road tripping – does it matter that the particular trip doesn’t use roads?

The Trans-Siberian railway has fascinated me for a long time; since I was in primary school, in fact, and bought myself a book on the Soviet Union culture from a school book fair. Today, the journey from Moscow to Vladivostok takes six days; six days to cross the largest country of the world almost from end to end, and that’s just the time moving. No reason why I couldn’t step off somewhere, stay overnight, and continue on the next train, making the whole adventure last two or three weeks.

There are so many places along that mighty railroad I want to linger in. Vladimir, the city of cathedrals and that famous icon style, Our Lady of Vladimir. Nizhny-Novgorod, still called Gorky on the railway, one of the world’s 100 top cities of historical and cultural value. Kirov, the city of twins, with its ghost river port. Yekaterinburg (still Sverdlovsk for the trains), the gateway to Asia and the place where the last Russian royals ended their lives. Omsk, where so many rhythmic gymnastics champions seem to come from. Krasnoyarsk, where the lowest ever temperature in inhabited areas was recorded (-70 Celsius, if I recall), but also reputed to be the most beautiful city in Siberia. Irkutsk, the flagship city of Siberia, if there ever was one, and the setting of Mikhail Strogoff, a fascinating read about a fascinating time. Ulan-Ude, a piece of the Far East that was closed to foreigners until 1991. Birobidzhan, the heart of the Jewish community in Russia. Not to mention the nature along the way, which is not so much larger than life – nature is always like that – but more impossible for me to imagine. Endless steppes, mountains like the Urals, lakes like the Baikal, rivers like the Volga and the Amur dwarf everything I have known as plains, mountains, lakes, and rivers so far.

It’s not going to happen any time soon, I know that; it’s not the kind of trip you take young children on. I will have to wait until the younger generation of the family is grown enough to be safe somewhere else. I just hope it doesn’t become impossible to travel those regions as a foreigner by then.

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