I Really Don't Care

It's been ages, I know. And I really can't be arsed to do anything about that now. Therefore I will give some kind of summary. Since my last post I have..

1) realised that I work too much
2) been to Lebanon
3) been to Syria
N.B. Lebanon was cool, Syria was super-super-cool
4) got slightly drunk (just now)

I really want to write a long, rambling piece full of praise for Syria next time I'm sat as the computer and NOT just about to conk out. Watch this space and thank you for your patience. I'm off to bed.

EDIT : I wasn't slightly drunk, I was rather more than that.

Being organised

It's not all it's cracked up to be. I myself find that being completely disorganised and useless can be immensely frustrating but it gives you a lot to look back on. A few years back, for instance, I was going back home from university for the weekend and, knowing that British Rail was likely to let me down, I took the train before the one I should have. Turns out I should probably have left a few days earlier just to make sure I got to the airport on time. I missed the flight and, being an impulsive kind of guy, I just did the first thing that came into my head. That was to call my sister and ask what she thought I should do (error number 1) - she called the parents, reported that they said I should get a Eurostar (which apparently was completely false) and so I went down to London (error number 2), took the Circle Line in the wrong direction (error number 3), got my pocket picked and lost my phone (error number 4) and eventually arrived at Waterloo station at around midnight which was obviously far too late for the Eurostar (error number 5). Without these, I wouldn't be able to recount the story of that night I spent sleeping on a newspaper in a train station in London. It's a bit annoying at the time but I wouldn't change it for the world.

The latest incident came in Kaunas last weekend. The plan was simple :

1) Walk from the football stadium to the hostel
2) Sleep
3) Get up at 6.30
4) Go to the coach station
5) Get a bus to Riga and wander around there
6) Get on the plane and fly home.

1) and 2) were excuted flawlessly but then we were brutally taken down by that hideous tradition of putting the clocks forward 1 hour. Hence we innocently woke up at 7.30, missed the bus and had to take a 70€ taxi ride to Panevezys on the Vilnius-Riga highway and hope to get a bus from there. As it turned out, all went swimmingly and we got on the plane without any problems (bar spending too long over a beer and having to be called personally over the loudspeaker system and then taking a bus out to the plane when everyone else was already seated). This reminded me of that time back in 2004 when I tried to get onto a plane headed for my first African trip and lost my passport, boarding pass and yellow fever certificate, all within the space of about half an hour. The advantage with this kind of history is that when shit does happen, you're entirely prepared for it and very rarely let panic cloud your judgement, and I got all of them back from various places.

Once again, I've let horrendous time management get the better of me and I have the majority of my thesis to write in about 5 weekends before it's due to be handed in on May 11th. Consequently, I'm sat here in all serenity writing this. There are, admittedly, small voices in my head saying "maybe you should stop blogging and actually get on with it ?" but my level of experience speaks for itself - I did get back home for that weekend (albeit 17 hours late), I did get on that plane to Africa, and I did get back from Kaunas in perfect time. And this is why I am sure that, some way or another, I'll get my thesis completed on time too.

Yesterday I decided that, with my little expedition to the Middle East on Wednesday, maybe I should get a backpack after my last one sadly expired in January. So after a 20 minute shopping spree I emerged with a new travel buddy - it's black, it's big, and it cost me 135€. All I need to do now is get onto the plane...

For Sale to Highest Bidder : The Soul of Riga

I witnessed a rape on Sunday - not a physical rape by a person on another, but a slow, gradual rape, where the soul of a city has slowly been eroded and is disappearing at quite a pace. I first visited Riga in 2004 when the old city was still quaint, quiet, with a scattering of bars with a local feel about them. It was all in all a Latvian experience. The people we shared the hostel with were mostly passing through on longer trips. Sure, they were interested in going out for a beer or 3 when they were there but the main point of being in Riga for them was to see the city/rest of Latvia. There were a few hostels in town and a few more being set up and you could tell from this that the tourist flow was increasing. It still felt a bit like a corner of Europe which retains its identity, where people took pride in their Old Town and where you could discover things at your own pace. Since then, seemingly, the invasion has started. The occupying force is mostly British booze-tourists and their vehicle of invasion is the cheap Ryanair flight from London Stansted.

I was in Riga again on Sunday for a few hours on my way to the airport from Lithuania and was pretty shocked at what I saw - the amount of tourists cruising the streets were more reminiscent of the crowds on the day cruises from Tallinn than what I saw in 2004. Every bar I walked past in the Old Town had abandoned the feel I got 5 years ago in favour of an English style psuedo-modern look, the barstaff said hello in English rather than Latvian and the windows were adorned with Sky Sports stickers. Yes ! you, tourist, can come to Latvia and take advantage of the cheaper beers without even feeling like you've changed country ! I eventually found a bar without a Sky Sports sticker in the window and walked in, expecting to find an oasis in the unLatvian desert, only to be greeted in English by a bargirl under a big screen showing England playing against Slovakia.

My Latvian friend told me that people there are tired of the "staggers" getting trashed and representing their own proudly by doing things such as pissing on Latvia's independence monument but, she asked, what can we do about it ? The answer is not much, I suppose, and especially in an economic climate like this, the bars are doing the sensible thing by cashing in on the invasion - my beer in 2009 cost nearly 5 times more than it did in 2004.

It's a difficult situation I guess - tourism is an enormous money-spinner and in the same way that you can't blame a homeless man striking up a superficial friendship with a millionaire, central Riga's bar owners can either welcome to booze cruisers or sink into the abyss of bankruptcy as the drinkers head elsewhere. Latvia has the unfortunate situation of being close enough to London (and I don't want to be overly harsh on the Brits - boozers do come from other places, although the main culprits come from the UK), accessible with cheap flights, sell beer cheaply, and be populated by a large proportion of attractive women, which proves to be a good magnet for tourist money but a deadly cocktail when it comes to preserving the soul of any place. All in all it means that I'm less likely to go for a weekend in Riga when I have a few days off but, given that I don't spend a week's wages on beer during that time, I suppose I am less missed than others would be.

Exam

After 4 weeks and 3 days - I'm back ! You haven't missed anything - stuff is exactly as it was. The world is still rotating, I'm still working the same jobs, there's still snow on the ground, Finns still like beer, and the kitchen in our flat is still half covered in trash.

Saturday, however, heralds a bit of a change in my routine. Normally on Saturdays I like to perfect the art of slobbing, mainly because it's the only day of the week where I don't go to work (except for last week when I did). It's great because you can get up late and you also don't have that Sunday feeling where you know it's the last time you'll be getting up late until the next weekend, which results in you getting up a bit earlier because you want to make the most of the day, and then being utterly unfulfilled because you end up doing boring crap like food shopping, or going to do the laundry.

The change will be that I'll have to drag myself out of bed at the crack of dawn to go and have my second pop at the last university exam I'll ever have to do. Before then (and it's Thursday afternoon now) I'll have to read 4 books, plus do all of the things that people do when they're studying for an exam and they don't want to read the books. We've all done it - checking your emails once every millisecond, smoking more than you should, reading news stories so irrelevant and uninteresting that you'd never read them otherwise, smoking and checking your email again, wondering who you could send a constructive text message to, failing, sending a pointless one to someone anyway and then sitting watching your phone waiting for a response, which usually never comes. I failed the last crack I had at this exam because I was overenthusiastic - I stayed up on the Monday night until 3am reading this mind-numbing theoretical rubbish which is in most cases just an overly complicated ego boost for the author (after all, why write things in regular language when you can write it in a way that no one can understand and realise how clever you are in the process ?). This led to me being a complete wreck for the rest of the week, not being able to take anything in and making an absolute hash of the exam when it came around. This time, I just can't focus on anything. I've smoked, checked my emails, watched the Simpsons, read about last night's football, eaten an entire bunch of bananas because it allowed me to take the skins to the trash and even checked the use-by dates on food in the fridge to see what should be eaten tonight. And I NEVER do that.

As it is now, the exam is 40 hours away and I have another 3 books to read. And as you can tell from the fact that this post is full of long sentences and inane twitter, I'm just using it as yet another "something to do" while my books just sit idly on the table, waiting for me to fall asleep on them when I finally manage to peel the covers back and see what bland speculation lies within. I don't get drunk very regularly at all these days but the day I graduate, I've promised myself that I will. And once Sunday comes around I'll liberate my brain, observe the world again and who knows, maybe even have something to write about.

180 days until the grand departure.

Finland : I Like

Regular readers may have noticed my slight penchant for dishing out some stick to Finland for various reasons (for further information, see most of my posts) although I'd like to put that on the back burner in order to let rip with some gushing praise.

Last weekend witnessed a delightful long-weekend visit from my mother and, rather than staying here in Helsinki in the slush and greyness, we dragged her out to Koli National Park in Eastern Finland. It's a wilderness with lakes and forests (much like the rest of the country in fact) so it's hard to see why this particular area of lakes and trees was set out for national park status. There are wolves and lynxes and bears hanging around there although we didn't get to see any. Given that bears have a tendency of hibernating in pits around this time of year, I'd venture a guess that this was probably a good thing. Wandering around in show-shoes was fun, as was watching the absurd fashion sense of the Russian tourists who were wondering around in the forest with glaring fluorescent tracksuits and enormous designer label handbags. The countryside is definitely Finland's best feature in my opinion, and in Koli there are rare appearances from hills which you can climb up and enjoy the spectacular view across (guess what ?) lakes and trees. All of this covered in snow in a scene you would struggle to find anywhere else. The only problem with a Finnish winter is that it gets light rather late and gets dark very early, meaning that you don't really have much time to admire this natural beauty. But once the sun goes down, you can return to the cabin in the forest, listen to the sound of absolute silence, cover your ears from the -30 degree temperatures and wander off to check if the sauna has heated enough yet for people to go in. On the way back to the cabin you can see more stars than in most places on the planet and, once you've got back in, stick some sausages on a stick and grill them in the fire which is nearly always lit.

It's not the kind of life I'd like to live permanently I suppose, but it's a great break. I suppose you can see the difference in that doing nothing in Helsinki is boring, but doing nothing out in the forest is great.

Report of Glorious Travel !

I've had Transnistria on my "places to visit" list for a long time now. As with most places on my "places to visit" list, it's not really as mass-tourism destination. It's a state unrecognised by any other in the world; it's poor, openly corrupt, and is far away from anywhere else that anyone would want to visit; since declaring independence from Moldova in 1991 it has been sitting and waiting for the resurrection of the USSR; and it's not easy to get to. This fabulous combination meant that I wanted to go and visit. Earlier this month, I got the chance. Armed with an InterRail ticket, very little money and a coat that was completely unsuitable for the winter temperatures of the Eastern Balkans, I headed with M from our temporary base in Chişinău, Moldova, to the city's cold and chaotic central bus terminal. It seems that Moldova doesn't really like tourists visiting Transnistria : "Are you going to Ukraine ?" is asked at the border - this means transiting through Transnistria - and there is no Moldovan border post between the territory and Moldova proper. This means that if you enter Moldova through Transnistria, you are entering without an entry stamp and therefore illegally. However, from Chişinău there are minibuses every 10 or 15 minutes to the capital, Tiraspol.

We were directed from one ticket desk to another, told off for smoking near the kiosk (unexpected in a country where people breathe more cigarette smoke than oxygen) and then directed to another ticket desk where we picked up our tickets to Tiraspol for 2€ each and hopped onto a minibus. On arrival at the "border", we were greeted by a bear in a Russian style hat, who gave us a Russian-style greeting by snatching our passports and the immigration form we'd filled in without a word and then directing us towards a building a bit further down. There, the occupants of about 5 buses and minibuses crammed themselves into a room the size of a small car to try and get their papers stamped and enter legally into Transnistria. One guy from our minibus took us under his wing - he was from Tiraspol but his parents had lived just near Brussels and he also had a Belgian passport. He spoke a bit of English and explained to the official that we were only there for the day, to avoid us paying anything. "No one knows the point of this registration" he said. "Unless it's an exercise in improving relations between neighbours !". Moldova and Transnistria fought a war between 1991 and 1994 and relations aren't exactly warm. Neither was the weather that day and, having eventually got ourselves to the front of the queue with liberal use of elbows and stubbornness, we got back to the minibus and our new-found friend showed us the sights through the window. Before long, the minibus was stopped for a bribe-extraction exercise. The driver got back in and muttered something in Russian before driving off again. Our friend smiled and translated "he called him an animal who eats from the asphalt. With foreign license plates you can't escape the traffic police here". Apparently it is quite a common occurrence as I saw 3 other Moldovan-plated cars getting the same treatment during the 10 minutes we were stopped. We bounced our way through the potholed streets of Tiraspol, got off at the end and our friend drew us a map in subzero temperatures and explained the sites to us before wishing us a pleasant stay in "the open air museum of Communism" ! We wandered off down Lenin Street as per his instructions and at the third intersection (the first two were Karl Marx street and Karl Liebknecht street) we turned into 25th October street. The date of an important event in Transnistria ? Maybe its independence date ? Nope - the official day of the Bolshevik Revolution.

More signs of the orientation of this pseudo-state come from the flag - which is the old flag of the Moldavian SSR, complete with hammer and sickle - and the coins, which also bear the old emblem of the glorious Soviet worker. The walk to the centre is periodically interrupted with giant slogans singing the praises of the city or of fellow unrecognised states - one has the flags of Transnistria, Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia with the slogan IN UNITY IS OUR STRENGTH ! and over the road is the Abkhaz embassy. The main square is impressive - large, concrete, empty. It's the only city left in the world with a statue of Lenin on its main square. There's a Soviet tank as a memorial of the war against Moldova, complete with a cemetery and a memorial to the unknown soldier. As we arrived the Orthodox Christmas celebrations were just unfolding but sadly, because it was a holiday, the minibuses back to Chişinău were stopping early. Not to be deterred, we stopped off at the (supposedly) state-run supermarket on the way (the same company also runs most petrol stations, owns the biggest hotels in the country, the biggest football team and the national printing company) and bought some of Transnistria's famous [sic.] "Kvint" cognac. It was only 4 hours in one of the world's last fortresses of Communism (albeit with some fabulous splashes of capitalist thrown in for good measure) and enough to get a taste, but it's still on my "places to visit" list, just to have a better look.

Here we go again..

I got back home last night at 1.30, promptly gave up smoking again and settled back into the hamster wheel.

What was great about the trip was that it wasn't in Western Europe where some semblance of human warmth was still on display. It came from Alina and her mother who taught us (or tried to teach us) Moldovan on the way to Chisinau, and the warm welcome in the hostel/apartment we stayed in. It came from the guy who took us under his wing at the Transnistrian immigration post, showed us the sights of Bendery and and drew us a map of Tiraspol in sub-zero temperatures before disappearing off to see his family. It also came from the two old ladies on the Iasi-Timisoara night train who fed us like kings with homemade sausages and bacon, and insisted on always talking to us in Romanian and smiling at us despite our confused looks. It came from Georgiana who turned those noises into words we could understand and taught us us how to eat roasted pumpkin seeds. It came from those who smiled at the fact we were tourists in Moldova but couldn't really understand why. It came from the big difference I noticed in Vienna, Dusseldorf and Helsinki, all of which seemed completely sterile and lifeless by comparison to what I had seen over the last week and a half. So thanks to all of you...

It wasn't all beauty and sunshine and relaxation - the temperatures weren't exactly high apart from a beautiful sunny day in Mostar, and the early, early mornings dragging ourselves and our bags off night trains into dark and wet cities were tough, but it was all worth it. Travelling isn't really travelling in my mind unless there is some aspect of suffering to it as well. Without lugging my stuff uphill at 6am in Belgrade with no feeling in my hands or toes and mucus streaming down my face, there is no way I would have enjoyed my cheese burek for breakfast quite as much. If we hadn't travelling for 48 hours straight we wouldn't have got to see Moldova and Transnistria, which were pretty cool. Without any of this, I wouldn't have had the sense of achievement from the trip. I don't like touching down at the airport and getting a taxi to the beach. I like to earn what I get. There'll be more gushing praise and merciless bashing soon - I've got another 3 months straight here before my little adventure to the Middle East so I'd better get back into the swing of office life...

New Proposal : Make Mondays Part of the Weekend

Why is it that things always happen on Mondays ? It's not just that things appear worse because it's Monday - more bad stuff actually happens on Monday. It's 24 hours long, just like every other day of the week, yet more crap seems to be thrown at you on this particular day. I went to bed at midnight after being shattered all day and was suddenly hit by a bout of insomnia which lasted until 4am. At 7am I woke up, tired and confused and, in a moment of weakness, broke my cigarette fast. It wasn't anything special actually so I don't really want any more, which I suppose was a good result. But I have been kicking myself half the day in case this becomes the "just one" which breaks the whole effort. Seems I've got away with it though. Secondly, got to work to be instructed that this was to be a hellish week with far too much to do. Given that I've got a train to Turku to begin the long trek home on Friday afternoon and have to escape from work early for that, it means I'll have even less time to work on what I have to do. This wouldn't be a problem if I could stay later at work to finish this off, but I also have to complete a statistics course project on SPSS. For those of you who haven't become acquainted with SPSS, it's a horribly pointless piece of software which is being lumped on poor unsuspecting students in a worldwide conspiracy to make us think that we're far more stupid than we actually are. I went through an emotional rollercoaster over 6 weeks to try to complete this course with a modicum of understanding for the complexities of this programme - how it works, what those numbers are supposed to mean, what the point of it all is - and after much psychological torture I finally emerged unscathed with one task left - complete a term paper by Friday in order to get course credits. I did nearly half of it last week. Today, I came to the library to continue it and noticed that for some reason the version I was using no longer has a valid license on the school computers. There's a newer version and it doesn't understand my saved work. In weeks gone by I would have stepped outside and furiously puffed on a cigarette while muttering under my breath. These days I'm limited to muttering under my breath and I have to say, while it's much better for my health, it doesn't feel quite as satisfying.

Hence I am proposing making Monday the last day of the weekend, which will leave us an extra 8 hours to deal with all the crap that gets thrown at us.

An Alternative Method

A while back I claimed that "Today I'm taking my first step in quitting smoking". That was October 30th and, once again, it amounted to not much as I tried to slow down, cut down one day at a time, eliminate the post-metro fag or the out-of-work fag without much success. In any case, if I didn't have it one day I just had it half an hour later when I got back home. I also realised that I would spend about as much money between now and September as I did on my flights to Lebanon and Syria. The result of this was that, by my own twisted logic, if I quit smoking now, the holiday to the Middle East would be my reward, and it would be free !

For this and other reasons, I went cold turkey two days ago. I've been clean for 38 hours now and, although I've had some close calls, it's been relatively plain sailing. The funny thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of mind games going on that I'm playing with myself. As I'm walking down the street and not smoking I find myself thinking that I can always have a cigar instead and that won't count. Or trying to work out if it's possible to have a cigarette every x days or weeks without being considered "a smoker". Last night, I tried to reason with myself in order to justify having one on the balcony. It just takes a moment of clarity to realise this and tell myself to shut up and keep pushing forward with this but in the heat of the moment I don't really realise that this is what's going on and I'm hoping I don't slip up. I still have nothing against them and would have no problem having one from time to time but my main priority here is to be free of them, to be able to look at a cigarette the same way I look at a beer - as something that's nice to have from time to time but which will cause me absolutely no grief if I don't have it. I'm not there yet but I've got into the swing and I think I've got over the first difficult wave. I'm anticipating one or two more and then, as I claimed on October 30th, I would be smoke-free by the new year !

I haven't noticed any differences yet but, like the mind games my subconscious is playing with me to justify sneaking one in, I'm playing games with it too. When I walk, I breathe in heavily and tell myself my lungs are filling up more than they used to. I run up the escalator coming out of the metro and tell myself I feel better that I would have last week. I make myself look down on people smoking, telling myself they are going to be stuck as slaves to the Marlboro corporation. All the while, I'd quite fancy one myself but with some intense concentration it's possible and I'm quite honestly surprised that it hasn't been more difficult.

Again, watch this space !

Impulse Purchase

I'm not usually an impulse purchase fan. It seems to me to be the epitome of "shop for the hell of it". Given that I'm an enormous hypocrite, of course, I tend to do it quite a bit myself. Usually, though, it's been limited to chocolate bars while queueing for the shop check-out and the like.

Today though, I impulse purchased a holiday. M's going on a girly trip to Paris and, given that I'm not a girly, I'm barred from the trip. In a fit of jealous rage and in order to not be sitting around bored all weekend, I decided to go see some friends in Poland at the same time. Flights weren't easy to hunt down when I looked at them yesterday (meaning that they were very easy to hunt down, but not for cheap) so I extended my horizons slightly. Half an hour later I was drooling over a cheap deal to the Middle East. Today I asked my boss for some days off around the Easter weekend and tonight I whipped out M's Visa card and bought it. It's come so quickly that it hasn't really sunk in ! So on the 8th of April I'm hopping on a plane to Beirut. 6 days later, my return will be taking off from Damascus. It seems I'm going alone and I really don't know what to find there. It's the first time I'll have really travelled by myself (aside from little overland A-to-B trips in Europe) and my first time in the Middle East (or indeed any part of Asia) so it'll be an interesting trip - both in terms of discovering a new part of the world and maybe discovering myself a little.

Very cool. I'm very happy. And excited. And, most of all, I'm wondering how to break this news to my mother.