let's get lost: thessaloniki

i told you i had wanderlust. now, i'm pondering thessaloniki.

i love how it's quite a modern city, plopped right on top of an ancient one.

and how the ancient one pops up all over the place.

there's something of the inevitability of time's march in it for me.

the fish market doesn't hurt either.

nor does sitting outside, eating lovely fresh food on a warm summer evening.

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these photos were taken in thessaloniki, greece, in july 2007.

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if passports could talk

yesterday, in the flickr group, kristine had a shot of her passport and used it to tell the story of how she was soon moving on to her next assignment. i didn't have any idea what i was going to do for my photo, so i did one of those tribute shots, as they're called when you blatantly copy what someone did and give them credit. i located my old passport and my current one and, as can often be the case with these daily photos, took a little trip down memory lane.

old on the left, current on the right

my passports are fatter than your usual passport. and that's because both of them have had pages added to them. twice. you'll also notice that my old passport was green. it was my first one and i didn't know that most americans have a blue one. i was "lucky" and got the green one during a very small window when they issued ben franklin commemorative passports. it's actually thanks to benjamin franklin that we all have passports at all, as it was his idea. the unusual green passport caused me no end of grief when i was traveling a lot in the balkans in the late 90s. border guards constantly questioned its authenticity and one guard at the turkish-greek border actually said, "green passport, very bad, very bad," and made a slicing motion across his neck. i was quite alarmed, but the conversation stopped there as that was apparently the extent of his english and my turkish was nonexistent. i've survived to tell the tale, so i guess it wasn't really very bad. and i never did ever meet anyone else with a green one.

as an american, you get stamped everywhere you go and you often need visas. the first passport filled up because the macedonian visa took a whole page every time and i had to have a new one if i popped down to thessaloniki for a weekend or up to belgrade for a coffee. it was early days after macedonia found themselves, rather to their surprise, with their own country, and it took them awhile to realize they could issue multiple-entry visas. i eventually got one of those, but not before they had used up ten pages of my passport.

a number of countries - china and india come to mind - think nothing of taking up an entire page of your passport for the visa. and the visas are elaborately colorful and often feature shiny holograms. i guess they want you to feel you got your money's worth. on the bright side, they're usually good for a least six months, so you don't need a new one should you be sent those places again.  i did use up two whole pages on indian visas, as i had to go there frequently enough that one expired and i needed another. (audible sigh.)

the bulk of my travel occurred during the bush administration and i clearly remember standing in lines at passport control, concealing my passport, as i felt a little sheepish about being american during those years. i happened to be in the philippines when obama was elected and i very clearly remember the sense of relief (tho' bush was still president) when i realized that i no longer had to hide my passport while i stood in line. on that occasion, people in line saw it and several actually smiled and gave me a thumbs up. with the incomprehensible debacle of health care reform (who would seriously not want to limit the influence of insurance companies on their personal health?) going on in the US right now, i'm not sure i wouldn't actually begin to conceal my passport again if i were queuing today.

many of the pages are covered in stamps that say "københavn" because i get stamped every time i come back into the country if it's not from scandinavia or the schengen countries. it tapered off because eventually, i knew all of the guys at passport control and convinced them to not to stamp me every time.

i've loved the travel opportunities i've had through my various jobs. the job i'm starting in april will not have so many travel opportunities, but i've been thinking about it and i'm really ok with that. looking at all of these stamps exhausts me a little bit. when i see the dates for the convoluted trip i took from copenhagen to singapore to heathrow to gatwick to budapest to constanza and back to copenhagen in one crazy week, it makes me tired. i hope companies today are using the possibilities afforded by electronic meeting software, rather than sending someone to give a 30 minute presentation in singapore on monday and the same one in romania on wednesday. i remember thinking it was all very exciting at the time (tho' having to switch from heathrow to gatwick was madness and an example of how bad the travel agent was). but today, i wouldn't even want to do it. and i would probably have the good sense to say no, but in those days (sounds like long ago, but it's not even three years ago), i actually quite liked it and of course, felt i had to do all of the things that were asked of me.

these stamps document for me how far i've come not just literally, but metaphorically as well. i think i've learned to say no to such madness today. and i hope that one good thing to come out of economic crisis is that employees aren't asked to do trips like that these days, because companies think twice before spending 40,000 ($7,300) kroner on such a ticket. i'm going to lose my gold status on both SAS and KLM here in the next couple of months. and tho' there was a time, not so long ago, when that would have panicked me, i'm resting quite easily in the knowledge. the world is changing and times are changing and it's no longer environmentally defensible to pop over to london for lunch or take a private plane back from newcastle like we did in the mid-noughties. i loved those times and am grateful for all the places i've been, but i'm quite ready to stay a bit closer to home for awhile. and besides, taking the train down through europe is quite romantic.

5 places i love - #2 stobi

i could have called this week "my favorite ruins," since it's quickly becoming all about ruins. and i actually wrote a little bit about stobi before. but since it's one of the places i love, i simply must write about it again. 

it's an old roman town, first mentioned in writing in 197 BC, that's located in central macedonia, and while once it was just off the via egnatia, now it's just off the big north-south highway leading from central europe through serbia and macedonia, down to thessaloniki. 

when i first visited back in '97, there was no visitor's center, just a shack where there might or might not be an attendant that you should pay your 20 dinars to in order to go in. it's not fenced off and you can wander at will among the baths, basilica, necropolis, aqueducts, pillars and on over to the amphitheatre. when we returned last summer, there was a visitor's center, thanks to a USAID project a couple of years ago. they sold a few gift items and cold cokes and snacks and were very kind and friendly.

we have a habit of visiting ruins during the heat of the day. it tends to be a good way to have it to yourself, as all of the others have the good sense to seek shade during midday. for me, it's the best way to feel the winds of time blowing over you. it's somehow just best if those winds are heated to 40 degrees.  

stobi is blissfully undiscovered. when we were there last summer, we shared it only with a handful of workmen who were setting up the amphitheatre for a concert later that week. i think it's wonderful that they actually use the amphitheatre as a venue for such things. how fantastic to listen to music in such a setting, although we didn't get the chance, as we had to meet our plane home from istanbul and we were still far from there at that point.

there are a number of mosaics at stobi, the best one is this one in what they call a baptistry. but there are others and you can get very close to them and even walk on the mosaic floor of one that must have been a church. i've often thought that these beautiful animal and plant images would be great to reproduce in my own garden or on a table for the garden. i haven't done it yet, but i will eventually.

one of my favorite bits is this example of greek graffiti that you can find on the steps in the amphitheatre. i suppose it's someone's name, but i absolutely adore the thought of some young man (because in my head it must have been a young man) sitting there, etching into the stone. now that's some seriously enduring graffiti.

it's a marvelous place. totally off the beaten path. i like it much better than the more systematically excavated heraclea lycenstis in bitola, macedonia. it's so abandoned and yet so persistently enduring. if you're very quiet, the murmurs of the life that walked the streets and paths are still there on the wind. husband and i once roughly sketched out a screenplay that takes place there. it's a place that provokes the imagination. what more can one really ask?

unexpected lego-related goodness in the mail

look what my bloggy friend ariadne sent to me! we haven't really known one another that long in this bloggy world (we met through the ever-fabulous lisa), but she obviously totally gets me. and she lives in thessaloniki, which is one of my favorite places (and a place i've been many times, always under blissful circumstances). in general, greece is wonderful, and obviously, so is ariadne. thank you so much! it was absolutely the perfect surprise gift for me! and i absolutely adore the tiny houses postcard.

living the right life

living the right life. how can we ever really know? we're so in the middle of living our lives, that how can we ever see if it's the right one we're living or not? twelve years ago, i was living the wrong life. only i didn't know it. i was practically a newly-wed when i headed off on my fulbright. why did i go away to an obscure balkan country, leaving my new husband (he was an old boyfriend, so it didn't feel that new) in a new city (we had moved from arizona to chicago)? i thought i did it because it was an academic/professional opportunity that i couldn't pass up. i mean, who turns down a fulbright, especially for a guy? that would just be silly if not downright stupid.

when i was in that balkan backwater, i encountered a lot of lost souls and i silently thanked my lucky stars that i wasn't one of them. because i didn't think i was. i even had a conversation with a friend one evening about how so many of the people around us seemed to be running from something...responsibility, loneliness, boredom, relationships (or lack thereof), a picture of themselves they didn't have to face when there were there outside of their "real" life. i remember that we decided we weren't running from anything. and i meant it at the time. i felt not so much like i was running away as running toward. towards a career that i could see on the horizon and to which a fulbright was an essential component, just like presenting at conferences and scholarly publication.

but, about halfway through my time there, i realized that i was in fact running away from a life that wasn't working. i had gotten married for all of the wrong reasons. it was a combination of a lot of factors...peer pressure--all of our friends were getting married, even the ones who hadn't been together as long as we had. his residency was ending. we'd been together for years. people thought we were a great couple--being with us was like hanging out with paul and jamie from mad about you, only even funnier and wittier and not at all annoying (or so we thought). he was a doctor, so i didn't have to explain what i was doing studying russian literature. he was funny and nice and i liked him. key word being liked. i wasn't in love with him and never had been, but the time was simply right, so we got married.

but i didn't know, or at least didn't admit, any of this, especially not to myself, until i actually had met the person i should have been spending my life with. he too was funny and nice and so cute, but was so much more than that. he challenged me--i remember a heated discussion about postmodernism at a cafe high on the hill in thessaloniki, warm summer breezes wafting in from the aegean, him waving a forkful of cool honeydew melon at me while telling me that postmodernism was just laziness, it wasn't possible that everything was equally good. and in challenging me, he took me seriously in a way that my starter husband never did. he indulged me, but never took me seriously. and in taking me seriously, i realized that j-p respected me. and he made me laugh and do silly things (stealing fries from some friends of ours who were standing in line in bull's (a greek equivalent of mcdonald's) even tho' we didn't even know one another at the time. we immediately started in on the practical jokes together, already then. it was destiny that we would be together. meeting him made me feel like i'd been holding my breath for such a long time and could at last breathe for real. it was the great love that i had stopped believing could exist outside of big-budget hollywood films.

we had to go through a lot to be together. it's one thing to meet one another and fall madly in love when you're both out of your element, away from your everyday life and your everyday responsibilities. but we knew we wanted to try to be together back in the real world as well. we talked openly about how we had each been living the wrong life up to that point and we didn't want to wake up in another twenty years and realize that it was too late to correct it. so we went through the pain of divorces and not having much money and transporting me to a new culture to which i am still at times resistant. but we were always resolved in wanting to have lived the right life and to treasure the great love we had found together.

and today, we've been married for ten years. what a life it's been. i didn't end up the academic i expected to be, but then i would never have traveled the way i have, nor had the experiences i've had career-wise. and today, on our tenth anniversary, i'm completely sure that i'm now living the right life. and we still have the great love that we found in one another back in that balkan backwater. it's deeper and more sure than ever.

we still discuss deep issues like postmodernism and social theory and evolution and the shockingly aphoristic, crap-like quality of business/leadership-related books (even those from harvard university press), if not daily, then every other day. sometimes we have these discussions in bed at night, giggling in the darkness as we elaborate on bourdieu's notion of cultural capital or whether the next steps of evolution are taking us into cyberspace. and these discussions keep us vital and engaged in one another and in the world.

he builds me things, like my beautiful kitchen and my writing house/atelier/studio/building-in-the-garden-that-i-don't-know-what-to-call (so he had the help of a wonderful polish guy named rafy on that one). we have a style together that we've developed over the last decade. it encompasses everything from our home to our cooking to our music collection (admittedly, i influence that rather heavily because i'm the one with iTunes and have banished his 18 supertramp albums to his workshop--didn't they only have the one song, you ask? yes, and they did it over and over on many albums, but i digress). but we have come to a place, after ten years, where we know who we are as us.

although we each have a professional life that is individual, we are definitely living our life together and it feels like the right life, even more so ten years in. and i hope it goes on for several more decades before that plane crash, but today, we will celebrate that first decade.

oh, and it's also husband's birthday. that way he couldn't very well forget our anniversary. clever, eh?

husband, you are my life.

memories of funny things we said in the past

i was editing my facebook profile and found a old list of quotes i had there...i tried to add one and it wouldn't save, so i thought i'd save them all here - they uncharacteristically for this blog have capital letters, but i wanted to preserve them:


"Fart is not the f-word." --Owen & Finn, 11/06.08

"London is the opposite of Copenhagen." --Sabin, Munich, 22/5.08

"The fanny pack is like a modern chastity belt." --Megan, Munich, 22/5.08

"Can't you hear I'm screaming in myself?" --Sabin, Munich, 21/5.08

"He didn't even have the decency to pick a leaf..." - Richard, Batangas, 8/8.07

"Say things that are not true in the name of humor." - Monica, Batangas, 8/8.07

"I was in Hawaii and became friendly with the Canadian Navy." - Christell, 31/10.07, Hornbæk

"I taught myself to swim. I'm no good at it." --Richard, 15/2.07

"You can always recover in a Starbucks--from heat stroke or a hangover or whatever. It will fix you. Thank god they're everywhere..." --me, thessaloniki, 28/7.07

“Work hard, laugh when you can and don’t dwell on things you can’t change.” - Land Girls by the BBC

my dream assignment

the ever-fabulous tangobaby directed me to a new distraction yesterday after i went to bed (there's a 9 hour time difference, ya know). so, this morning, i went to check it out. apparently, there's a new photo contest, wherein you can win $50,000 to travel and fulfill your dream photography assignment. although i am just a titch uncomfortable with it being sponsored by microsoft and lenovo (that is a seriously dumb name for a computer company--in russian, it means LAZY and who wants a lazy computer?). ok, i probably just guaranteed that i will not win, but i'll leave it because it's true.

but, you can help. if you click the little dream assignment widget thingy over on the right, you can go in and vote for my dream assignment. as i write this, i've only put one there, but no doubt others will come to me. for now, tho', i want to take pictures of the small details of the world's cities. everyone takes pictures of the eiffel tower and big ben, but how many pictures have you seen of the details of those monuments? here are some examples (see, i've already started my assignment):

detail of kronborg castle (the hamlet castle) in helsingør, denmark

detail at the castle in ljubljana, slovenia

old city wall in thessaloniki, greece

i'll no doubt be thinking of others. you should sign up too! what's your dream assignment?

mental tricks and mind games

i had to take a logic assessment this morning. it was timed and i knew i had to be in the right frame of mind for it. the results are important to a potential job i'd like to have. i'm good at this sort of test - the kind of questions where you're presented with a series of figures and asked to choose the next one in the sequence or where you're asked to display your knowledge of shades of meaning by choosing opposites from a list of abstract words. so, fortified with a cup of tea and sitting up straight in my chair, hair pulled back neatly, i donned a pair of pretty high heels and took the test. yes, you read that correctly. and yes, i believe it helped me. my inner feminist would like to say such measures aren't necessary, but i believe they are. dressing the part - smart, businesslike, put together - is important to setting the right frame of mind, getting in the zone. and if it takes a pair of heels? so be it.

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speaking of mind games, what's going on in greece, with their resounding rejection of EU terms for restructuring their debt and this morning's resignation of finance minister yanis varoufakis is a fascinating game of cat and mouse. or perhaps it's more like the roadrunner and wile e. coyote - with the anvil crashing down on merkel's head as greece races free and looks back with a grin. maybe it's just that i tend to admire the underdog, but i can't help but think greece was right to push back. 

nearly two decades ago i spent a lot of time in greece as the euro prepared to launch. even then, on the streets of thessaloniki, it was an open secret that they had fudged their numbers to make the cut. everyone knew, including and especially the powers that be in the european union, but they let them join anyway. what's happening today is just the natural progression of those early decisions, for which germany and the greater EU bear as much responsibility as greece does. it will be interesting to see how the mind games unfold, tho' if the bullied resignation of the truth-telling varoufakis is any indication, it's going to get ugly before it's over. he was the only one of the whole lot of them who actually had an education in economics.  for more, go read krugman's analysis. i also liked this piece about him in the guardian.

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have you seen my latest post on #stuckinplastic?

it seems like every time i write for them, i take a trip down memory lane.

flickr meme

i've been seeing this meme all over the place and so i finally decided to give it a whirl.

what you do is answer these questions, using the search function in flickr:

1. What is your first name?

2. What is your favorite food?

3. What high school did you go to?

4. What is your favorite color?

5. Who is your celebrity crush?

6. What is your favorite drink?

7. What is your dream vacation?

8. What is your favorite dessert?

9. What do you want to be when you grow up?

10. What do you love most in life?

11. What is one word that describes you?

12. What is your Flickr name?

Then you do as follows:

• Type your answer to each of the questions above into Flickr search.

• Using only the first page of results, pick one image (this didn't prove possible for me, I must admit, I went to page 2 a couple of times)

• Copy and paste URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab's Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.

1. Nachtigal, 2. i'll take this end of the boat ok?, 3. Driving to Eastern South Dakota - 7, 4. purple colored black butterflies, 5. Bill Clinton 7, 6. Hendrick's Gin, 7. stellenbosch_delheim 240, 8. Delicious Cheese, 9. Underwood, 10. J-P and Sabin in Thessaloniki, 11. From above...12. Diana+ bookshelves

note: i cheated on the first one, as all of the "julie" ones were something i couldn't really identify with. also, it takes much longer than you think. at least for me, who spends little or no time on flickr. i like the mosaic tool tho', it's cool. have a go if you have the time!

the last "bottom of the barrel" (including uncharacteristic capital letters)

From the Bottom of the Barrel - 26/11.2014 

Gulp. Deep breath. These are some very big shoes to fill. My dad bought the Platte Enterprise in 1965 and he’s written a weekly column in this very space for nearly 50 years. I’ve done the odd guest piece over the years, but this is the first one where I really feel I have to fill his shoes. Because those shoes are so sadly empty now. 

We lost my dad just after midnight on November 22, just a few weeks shy of his 81st birthday (it would have been December 7). I live in Denmark and I was entirely too far away when the news of his hospitalization came through. It took me way too long to get to McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls from my home in Denmark. I missed a lot. Friends and family came out of the woodwork and gathered at his bedside. And although I wasn’t here for all of the visits, we are so grateful for this - for your stories, for your laughter, and yes, for your tears. Because my dad, Ralph Nachtigal, meant a great deal to all of us. It was awe-inspiring to see how much he meant to so many.

Ralph wasn’t an easy person or a simple person - he could be hard on you (my rule growing up was “win or don’t come home”), he assessed the blame, his humor could be ironic and a bit harsh, he was unafraid of discussing politics and he had a competitive streak (and he would have hated how long this sentence is getting). He was an avid gambler and could place bets on everything from football to his next putt.  But, he was also probably the funniest person I ever knew. He could laugh about anything and make any situation, including being picked up by an FBI agent and taken for a little drive and a chat around Platte Lake, into a humorous anecdote, even while he admitted that he was completely crapping his pants at the time. He was ornery, but he had a heart of gold and I know he helped many more people than I even know, in ways of which I was never aware, through the years. 

He studied agricultural journalism at South Dakota State. While waiting for his assignment for Associated Press, the Enterprise came up for sale and he bought it, sealing his future in the little town where he had grown up. He’d been out to see the world in the Navy (coming close to, but not really that involved in the Korean War). He once hitchhiked from San Diego to Platte and those adventures were apparently enough for him, so after stints as a sports reporter at the Watertown Public Opinion and the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, he settled down again back home. 

He and Mom and their friends made a yearly winter pilgrimage to Las Vegas (that was, in retrospect, pretty dumb of them to leave their teenagers home alone, each with an empty house (hello, party for the last episode of M*A*S*H!)) that seemed to satisfy his wanderlust. He was content to do his part to make the small community where he grew up grow and thrive - and he wasn’t afraid to get involved, as a state legislator, chairman of the school board and then the later of the hospital board. He knew that if you want a little town to thrive, you have to get involved. 

He was a lifelong Democrat (one of about 12 in South Dakota, at last estimate). He always said that he hoped that one day he would have enough money to become a Republican. Alas, that didn’t happen. He served two terms in the South Dakota State Legislature (1976-79) and during that time, tacked an amendment onto a particularly absurd bill to make the fence post the state tree, to further underline the absurdity of the bill. It failed and the Black Hills Blue Spruce is still our state tree, but he made his point with humor. That was definitely a trademark. 

When I studied in Russia in 1994, he and Norm Huizenga came for a visit. We took the 13-hour train ride out to Kazan and back and explored Moscow and he met all of my friends. We stayed with a grand elderly lady fittingly called “Aunt Kate” in Moscow and we drank a bit too much vodka on a couple of occasions and generally had an awesome time in post-Soviet Russia. I heard him say, for the first time (and last) in my life, “get out there and buy something!” at a middle-of-the-night stop where workers from a crystal factory sold their wares somewhere between Moscow and Kazan.

I went on a Fulbright to Macedonia in 1997 and Dad and Monica came there for a visit as well. We toured ancient ruins in Macedonia and hung out in Greek tavernas eating octopus and drinking ouzo and the most fabulous cold Nescafé frappés. We laughed and laughed together amidst the ruins of ancient Thessaloniki. And although I don’t think he ever said so, at least not to me, I know he was proud of me and that Fulbright.

He and Monica had a couple of trips as well. When they left Macedonia, they explored the pubs of Vienna. And a year and a half ago, when they came to see us in Denmark, they went home via London, the beaches of Normandy and Paris. Monica even made him go to a Pink Martini concert at Royal Albert Hall in London. Pretty cool for a 79-year-old. And he was the kind of person who always had a song lyric for any occasion, so taking him to Pink Martini concert wasn’t really that far off.

Now we may never know what really happened with the Ole Horn Incident (it got him kicked off as Editor of the Collegian) or that time his legislative roommates got caught temporarily appropriating saddles from a tack store late at night (he swore his innocence in both until the bitter end and probably he even was innocent). But, I do know this, it was a privilege to have him for a father. He showed me that there was a world out there and that I should go explore it. He raised me to be confident and unafraid, but to remember my roots. I am privileged to have had him for a father and I hope that you all feel privileged to have called him a friend. He will be missed. Sorely missed.

I know there are many other stories to tell and that Dad’s friends in the Platte area meant the world to him, and we heard many of them on Monday evening at the Lake Platte Golf Club. A big thank you to everyone who came and told their stories! I know that you all will miss him as much as we do. There is a big, gaping hole in our hearts right now that no one else can ever fill. Ralph Nachtigal was really something - larger than life, full of life, truly one-of-a-kind. This little corner of the world is forever changed by his having been in it. 

———————

As Dad wanted his body to be donated to the University of South Dakota Medical School, there will be a memorial service in lieu of a funeral at 3 p.m. on Saturday, November 29 at the Platte Community Building. We ask that instead of flowers, you make a donation to the Platte Health Center Avera in his name.*

*originally i suggested that folks contribute to the Ready for Hillary campaign, but since there are only a handful of Democrats in SD, i changed that. tho' it does make me chuckle to think of all those R(h)INOS (Republicans In Name Only) contributing to Hillary....