The hedgehog of discontent

I took this blurry photo of a little frightened hedgehog last evening, while driving home after a really pleasant barbecue for the first of May with friends...I had to share the hilarious dialogue that was being carried on while trying to take it...We saw the little guy crossing the street and we stopped our cars instantly to get down and look at it...I had a camera so yeah, let's take a pic of the cute animal! The cute animal though hid in complete darkness by the wall of a block of flats...I and Crina, a friend, followed it. I couldn't see a thing so my first shot was that of a white wall, when a voice from above (turned out it was coming from the second floor) asked:
"What are you doing there?"
"We saw a hedgehog and we're taking a picture of it!", I said automatically in the most angelic voice...
"Please step away from the building!", the voice continued and it sounded like we were part of a bad, bad movie...
"Damn!" I said, furious at the first shot I took, "it's just the damn wall! I can't see a thing!"
"You can photograph hedgehogs at the Zoo!" the voice carried on, starting to really piss me off. I was thinking one can't really photograph hedgehogs at the Zoo anyway...
"We'll be gone in a sec" added Crina. "Why don't you carry on with what you were doing?" she suggested....
I was thinking yay, now we'll have an argument with a guy on the second floor and all the people in the building will witness...Fun! lol
And that was the moment I took this shot, the second...and right when I was getting ready to take just the perfect one my battery went dead..
"Damn! My battery's gone! Shoot!" I said and I was thinking that it was all in vain...

That's why I'm posting it here now...And that guy...I know there are lots of paranoid people out there...but to guard one's building wall from your window instead of spending your evening with the wife it's pretty desperate...We laughed like there was no tonorrow in the car remembering the exchange of words we had with the guy (some were left out from this dialogue for obvious reasons...;)) Maybe they hate tourists...or maybe that's the way they are...sad!

RIP forever with the angels...

Today a student in our school was killed. She was run over by a garbage truck that was was going backwards...She wasn't my student, but I knew her sweet face, I've often met her on the school stairs, she was always struggling to climb...she had a disability at one leg and she had had several surgical operations on it...I would always admire her for the determination she had in regards of her disability...She was a 7 grader and she looked so sweet...This tragedy has just left me speechless. These kind of things should never happen...I don't know what Turkish people say in such circumstances (she was of Turkish descent and a Muslim)...I'll just say rest in peace, sweet child, fly with the angels...

My necessity room

This is me back in 1994. It feels like it was taken ages ago, worlds ago and so many mirrors ago...which have kept intact through the years but have been blackwashed somehow and stored in an attic where I can't seem to be able to reach anymore...Sometimes reflecting flashes show me the way to that attic where all my mirrors found refuge. I never look for that attic even though I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could...because you see that attic is some sort of a Necessity Room, like the one at Hogwards (pour les connoisseurs), all you have to do is really wish to be there and bang! You're there!:)

Lately I have been reminded of things I did and said in the past and even though they're all ME it still feels like they all belong to someone else whom I admire but who's seemingly lost forever...somehwere while working, while trying to become conventional, shallow, boring, polite, a face in the crowd, while trying to fit in, while worrying about money, my job, while shopping, buying mobile phones, losing friends, making friends, loving, getting my heart broken into a million pieces, while moving on and walking on with no apparent time for old or new mirrors for that matter...well, during this so natural and commonest process I've lost my way to that attic...It's definitely time to find it. I've had enough of this mirrorless me.

The silent caller

Well yes, dear readers, I've got a silent caller and I've finally decided to take the most adventurous voyage  and explore my two mobile phones options in search of a rejection method for calls generated by unknown numbers...And that's not easy for a non-technical person such as myself...

I can't really remember when these phone calls started, maybe last fall...Anyway, I answer when anyone calls me, the only reason I don't pick up is when I can't hear it ring or when obviously I can't pick up because I'm in the middle of a class and the phone is set on silent mode. I always turn my phones off during the night, bad past experience taught me that too...So I answer the phone, especially because an unknown number could mean a payphone or even a call from abroad...Sometimes I don't even take the time to check who's calling on the phone screen...

So I can't remember when the calls started because they didn't really bother me. They were coming once a month, maybe sometimes every two weeks...First I thought they might be that type of silent phone calls automatically generated by some companies that don't have enough personnel to deal with all the calls...That's because there was no noise in the background, no anything whatsoever...Yesterday I got one of those calls the minute I got to the countryside where I spent most of the day. I had just gotten out of my car and entered my aunt's yard when the phone rang....I felt annoyed because my phone does not ring very often, especially during school breaks, the people I usually talk to are just a few...So I was annoyed, thinking "I surely hope it's not work related!" Then I saw the number was a private one and thought "Come on, maybe this time you'll have the guts to speak!"...I said hello twice or three times, no one spoke as usually...My aunt's dog started barking though, he must have felt there was a stranger on the phone!;)

So  getting that phone call didn't bother me. Instead I was thinking...whoever that is, I trust one of these days they'll come out clear and state their name...or at least use articulated sounds put together in words like "Hello"...I know, what planet do I come from? I wouldn't know, I can't remember...

Today I was pissed though. Where in God's name are those two weeks break between the calls? All the other calls came during the day, I remember one time I was on the school corridor during the break and when the phone rang I was wondering how was I going to hear what the other person was saying? Not a problem, it was just the silent caller. Boy, he had  the unique chance to hear the kind of mayhem children make during breaks...ha, that is sweet revenge!;)

So no speaking today, but a definite background noise, it might have been a train, tram or even underground...Constanta doesn't have trams anymore, not to mention we don't have subway. Whatever, I hung up. It called back the next second, I picked up and asked in Romanian "Who is on the phone?" thinking "yeah, sure, and pigs fly, they won't tell ya, silly!" And then wow, like in the bad horror/thriller movies I heard THE breathing! bwahahahahahahha! For Christ's sake! Duh! So yeah, after several months, they finally got to my proverbial calm, I'm slightly pissed, hence this entry. Now I need to find someone to show me how to set both my mobile phones to reject these calls...Oh yeah, the weird thing was that the last calls came on my other mobile phone...and not many people know that one!

Anyway, if my silent caller gets to read this (which I really doubt) I would like to say that there are so many wonderful hobbies he could choose from....bird watching, for instance!;) It's a beautiful world out there. Get out of your box and enjoy it. Seriously.

Healing Spring

The first Friday after Easter we celebrate here the Healing Spring day, a very important religious festivity. It reminds Christians of a healing spring in Constantinopolis the waters of which used to heal people, with at least one documented healing. The Healing Spring started being celebrated the second half of the first christian millenium and people go to churches and especially monasteries that have a spring nearby to take away water on this day and drink it so they can be/stay healthy...The significance of the celebration is deeper though, it comes within the week after Easter when Christians have eaten and drunk too much to remind them that the spirit is more important than matter represented by their stuffed bodies...

Anyway, part of my family chose to spend today outside Constanta, at an aunt's house who lives near a small new monastery which has a spring nearby:

Then we had a nice barbecue and talked and laughed...It was sunny and they had a swing and I swang in it looking at the bright sky and imagining I was touching it, just like when I was a kid...It was a rare occasion to see all four sisters (my mother and her three sisters) together...It's a long story, maybe I'll tell it some other time...here are some snapshots of flowers, cows and geese I took today...I really enjoyed a day in the countryside...:)

people here call these easter bells

short irises

wax cherry tree flowers

the most peaceful cow

we went to buy some flower seeds from an old lady and she was leaving on this dusty lane, it seems a photo taken a century ago...

neighbour's geese

Happy Easter everyone!

Guess who's hop, hop, hopping your way?

To wish you a hap, hap, happy Holiday.

Loaded with goodies made just for you.

It's the Easter Bunny

That's who!:)

Online Friendship

When I woke up this morning I had a friend request on my Facebook account that filled me with joy and actually made my whole day. I felt so happy that I forgot about everything that is not going really well in my life right now. I'm sure you are so familiar with the feeling...It's that kind of joy children feel, when nothing else matters but that particular thing, that special state of mind and soul that makes you smile the widest smile and lights up your whole persona, when your own identity is somehow lost to leave place to the "unbearable lightness of being", as Milan Kundera so beautifully expressed it...

It wasn't one of those "usual" invites I always ignore, from people whom you don't know and who have the personal ambition of adding up friends to their list as a sort of personal prove of "popularity"...
It was an invite from an old friend I had met while blogging on Yahoo 360, and then on Multiply...I had always admired his entries, his beautiful literary writings which were flying on fantasy wings like leaves so naturally float in the air and that were so similar to my own fruit of imagination...So I felt happy he had found me and dignified me with an invite...

And this brings me to the title of this entry...I've been so fortunate to find special people while blogging on Yahoo, who were there for me when I needed them, maybe more than friends in my real life, which is quite understandable...In writing I think we've got the opportunity to be far more open and frank about many things in our lives, and it's more likely to find keens while writing than we'd have the opportunity in our real lives, limited by space, time and routine, as we are...And reality can be so demanding that maybe we can't find the time to hold someone's hand, laugh with them, enjoy the good times and find simpathy during the bad times...and even though we part for a while, we continue carrying each other in our minds and souls and when we find each other again it's like we had never been apart...While browsing through my previous blog in order to look for the San Gimignano one, I had the chance to read some of my old entries and the comments left by friends there and I realised how much those helped when I was most in need. Even on the "routine" blogs, I found comments of encouragement and simpathy and I remember how that made me feel...

Maybe it all sounds so...idealistic, naive and a bit pathetic, but this is how i feel and I've always felt privileged to be able to find amanzingly beautiful people in this seemingly chaotic Universe...:) I love you all!

Fairytale land - San Gimignano, Tuscany

This is a repost for my new friends here on Blogger who love Italy...I think I've got one or two more on my old blog and I'll gladly repost them...I was watching some little videos I posted on Youtube and found one from San Gimignano, one of my favourite places on Earth, this little Medieval jewel hidden among Tuscan hills...That year (2007) I had lost significant weight and was going through a bad time so a friend in London had the idea of me visiting there. I said yes, especially I hadn't visited England before...And my friend Erca and my cousins Dana and Dan wanted to visit Tuscany so I did that too at the end of August...It was a great year for travelling and that worked miracles for me...Anyway, here's the repost, it's more like a note with photos and videos. I think my post about Florence was better...I think...ha ha ha!:

"VIAGGIATORE DI PACE

e' qualcosa che sei

che costruisci

che dai agli altri

anche qui

ora"

TRAVELLER OF PEACE

is something that you are

that you build

that you give to the others

even here

now

These are the words that welcome you when you go up the Rock of San Gimignano, one of the most wonderful little medieval towns that have survived history...I had been here a few years ago, on a beautiful afternoon, right at sunset and the image I had of it was that only fairy-tales can give you...So I went back there this year to see if the time passed over me will make me change my mind...And no, it didn't...It's all there...the towers, the little streets, the magic...Not even the too many tourists could distract me from my thoughts and constant wonder...

We witnessed two weddings too...the first couple was British...:)

We discovered there are lots of British and American visiting this place, as they do with the whole Tuscany and when we entered the church of Sant'Agostino we saw an add saying they celebrate mass every Sunday at 11 in English...:)

I would go back and stay only there ...definitely so...Oh, I loved a jeweller's shop...all hand made...so beautiful!
Here's a little video I took at the Rock there...forget about my voice...(actually it's kind of funny cause I say at some point "we've arrived here...pause...pause...pause...by bus...ha ha ha!)...I took the video because of the lady playing the harp. Sorry for the quality of the video...:(



After one year, in august 2008 I returned to Italy because my mother hadn't been there in like 15 years...and I found the same lady....I did have the chance to make a short video out of her playing...and I bought one of her CDs...

The perfect road

There was this road I knew

happier than a bee in spring around a vergin blossom.

Its white long stripes glowing

in the sun,

at night,

under the rain...

whispering to the other drivers:

Look at me, just look at me...

I am so perfect, so smooth, so...linear...

Look at me...

my four lanes go back and forth,

straight ahead to your leisure destination...

to everywhere, anywhere...

Look at me...

One night I got lost on that perfect road

and I turned back, leaving my car behind...

After some time

my car came back.

"Too bad that perfect road,

that tiny piece of Universe...

was going nowhere".

Do I need to leave again?

Morning

It's been a glorious sunny day today, so much energy coming from the sun that all of a sudden I could feel it rushing through my veins like precious vital gold, like the last magical ingredient I have longed for, that final glitter making the whole of the receipe perfect. So I went out for a walk by the sea, the only place I could have been...What I felt was exactly whatt Ungaretti must have felt when he wrote "Mattino", perhaps the finest poem ever written:

"M'illumino
d'immenso"

So beautiful in Italian that it almost seems a sacrilegy to give it a translation, any translation...I light up of immensity, or , as I found it on the internet "I flood myself with the light of the immense"...but none of these...sentences...can describe what this little infinite poem can generate when read outloud: M'illumino d'immenso...horizon opens even wider, light invades every cell of one's being, serendipidy settles and freedom seems such an easy target...

After having posted this I went on visiting my friend Tina's blog only to find out today is World Poetry Day! Wow, I did choose my timing posting Ungaretti's poem...:)

Communist Times - a personal experience

In December last year 20 years since the Romanian "Revolution" were celebrated on many TV channels world wide. A French friend on my Facebook list asked me to tell him how living in a communist society was like. I started writing everything that was passing through my head, in a memory dance that was going faster and faster and so I ended up writing a lot. I split that in two parts. I'll post here the first part, since another friend of mine had suggested I did...It's my personal perception based on my personal experience, which I am sure is very similar to many...Here it goes...

I haven’t been writing much about the communist times and the Revolution on my blogs because it seemed so vast and so hard to describe things to people so they can understand, or at least so they can get a vague impression of how things were…I’ve read many books of people who got the chance to write about their experiences in the communist prisons, and I think that should be a mandatory reading for everyone on this Earth. My grandfather was imprisoned in a communist jail. Fortunately only for two years… He was innocent of any crime of course, as most people killed or imprisoned by the communists who destroyed intellectuals and rich people, the most “dangerous” to their political regime. And to think that everything was decided by three people after World War II, slices of Europe being divided between them…people waiting for the Americans to come and free us, building a Resistance in the mountains…how ironic, a Romania who was pro-West and wanted to be democratic became communist and an Italy who wanted to become communist became a Christian-democratic country…

But I should stop with the historical background that you already know, I’m sure, and which can be found in any history book…

“1984” by George Orwell? That was so close to what we had here in the ‘80s…of course he exaggerated things a bit to gain full impact on people, but that was pretty much how everything worked….”Animal farm?” Right to the point! "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." People should also read books by Alexander Soljenitin (“one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” is one title, thin book as number of pages), Nicolae Steihardt – “Journal of Happiness” (that he wrote after his experience in the communist prisons) and so so many others…

Anyway, I’ve heard many stories of what happened before I was born but I’ll talk about my personal experience. I was born October 1st 1972 and only when I was in the fifth grade I was told my maternal grandmother was Italian. I haven’t known that before even though it felt strange to hear her talk Italian and listen to Italian music and everything, passing it on to me…Because it was so dangerously “bourgeois”…for this kind of thing, or for being related to former rich people got many youngsters to be rejected from attending Universities in the ‘50s and ‘60s…and you definitely couldn’t leave the country with such a “breed”.

My parents received permission to visit Italy in 1979 October, I had just started 1st grade and they left me with an aunt for one month. It was not allowed for entire families to leave, generally children had to be left behind so they can have a card against you if you chose to defect. Generally people used to recover their kids after one or two years, and even though my dad’s Italian uncle offered to help him if he had chosen to stay in Italy, my parents refused because of me. Now I think they should have chosen otherwise, even though I still can remember how hard it was without them for a month…By the way, my Italian grandmother was not allowed to visit Italy until 1965, after World War II.

In the 80s life became hard. Food was rationalized: for a family of three (which was us) we were allowed to have:
- 2 liters of milk/week
- 1+1/2 liters of sunflower seeds/month
- 150g butter/month (which was really watery)
- half of loaf of bread/person per day (which was sour, so sometimes we made bread if we could find flour)
and some other things I can’t remember. They used to “bring” other “goodies” like meat, chicken, cheese, oil, flour, candies, oranges (around Christmas – btw, they had made that tradition communist too, since religion was forbidden and changed Santa’s name in “The Old Frost”) and when that happened there were huge queues, and even then they were forced to rationalize it per person so more people can get some…that’s why you could often see grown ups (neighbours) offering kids in my block some money so they can go queue so they can buy more goodies…

That’s why black market was flourishing…you had to know someone working at the dairy factory etc…they use to steal and sell products…You even had to know someone working in a books store or a stationary store…or in a pharmacy…sometimes you couldn’t even find toothpaste or toilet paper…not to mention tampons by the way…cotton wool was just fine (that’s a sordid detail, but you have to be fully aware of things)….You could always find cans with salted fish, olives and lemon juice, bad chocolate (which I swear I’d love to eat now, as Proust’s Madeleine)….Clothes…whew…horrible, so then you needed to know someone who used to sail for a living because they used to sell coffee, jeans and all kind of other “rotten” western goodies…

Electricity cuts…oh yeah…the whole night (from midnight to 5am) and two hours every day, one day from 4pm to 6pm, and one day from 5pm to 7pm, or more…so I used to write homework at oil lamp or candle light…I used to study in the afternoon (too many kids, the little ones – primary school- used to study in the morning, the others in the afternoon from 1pm to 4/5/6pm…at high-school even 7pm – actually this is still how it’s still done here) so during power cuts in winter we had to have torch lights…and usually we used to write with gloves on many times in winter because the heating was absent…Heating was also absent from our apartments…have you seen people so desperate that their kid is freezing in the house in the dark (that was me) that they lit a fire in some pot in the middle of the living-room so that the kid can warm her hands?

I was a happy kid though, we all were…we used to read so much since there were 2hTV a day (the latest years 3hours), from 8pm to 10pm, and then from 7pm to 10pm – of which one hour was represented by the news about our dear president and our country’s accomplishments in agriculture…All kids used to watch the news because after the news there were 10 minutes of cartoons. 10 minutes!:) And on Sunday we used to have an afternoon TV programme, but the feast was at New Year’s Eve, TV programmes all night long…They used to broadcast movies too…yeah…like Korean, or Russian or Romanian (propaganda)…sometimes we were lucky to get an American music hall or even a western movie (from the wild wild west! Wooooow! In the cinemas the offer was wider…American comedies, Indian movies too, Japanese (the 7 samurai – gosh, I must have watched it so many times!), Elvis Presley’s movies…Thank God for living in a harbour city and thank God for video players…We used to go watch movies in people’s houses who had one…sometimes in strangers’ houses paying a fee like at the cinema…

OK,. I only want to write about one more thing…school and working as an agricultural worker every year for 3 weeks…and then about where I was at the revolution and what I felt…hopefully that will be shorter….Now I need to go get that bath because they might take away hot water at midnight or earlier…yeah…I live in a neighbourhood where that happens on regular basis because of the still old structure…But I am thankful, in communist times we had hot water a few times a week…for a few hours…

Tell me if this is boring, I'll continue writing after my bath...

Friday Fill-Ins

Reading some entries posted by old blogging friend Gal Friday (http://hotkerfuffle.blogspot.com/) I've realised how much I've missed blogging in the first place. My account on Multiply is still on, but I haven't used it either, it seems that great connection people had on Yahoo 360 is hard to be found again...Anyway, she has always had these lovely "Friday Fill-Ins", so I've decided to fill in one, even though it's not Friday.

I'm illustrating this entry with the photo of a cover book I've ben meaning to buy and read ever since Christmas, even though the list of books bought waiting to be read is quite long (not enough time or energy, so I need more discipline on that). I started reading it last night and I love the style.

Autobriographies and memories have always interested me very much, especially when that public figure had been one of my favourites (see Chanel). Actually my degree thesis (which was a nightmare to document and write) was entitled: "Il Settecento, un nuovo modello umano: Vittorio Alfieri, Giacomo Casanova, Carlo Goldoni, Lorenzo da Ponte" (title suggested by my professor) and was based on the autobiographies/memoires of these 4 great men.

So here it goes my Friday Fill-In:

1. I am so looking forward to _____________read more of Chanel's biography, even though I don't think I'll have much time this saturday, but I'll have definitely more on Sunday.

2. "Enjoy yourself, it's _________ your only option!:)

3. When you get __________to a turning point, look both ways.

4. Friendship _____________ is a big part of my life.

5. "If you need anything ______________ I'm here."

6. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to _____reading about CC and watch a movie, today my plans include _____visiting a musician friend to help him with some lyrics in English, and Sunday, I want to _____sleep late, hang around more on Facebook, read and take a walk by the sea if it's sunny and at least 5 degress centigrade.

Femminine obsession

No, I won't start making a list of all the femminine obsessions out there, I'll just talk about how I deal with the most common one, weight...According to standard measurements I'm right where I have to be right now...but this means 4 extra kilos which I didn't have before Christmas and which I have carefully and quite happily accumulated. Stress at work made me gain them, mostly, but that's not an excuse...And even though I consciously know that I look just fine and there are trully no reasons for me to panic, I don't feel comfortable, especially seeing myself in all those mirrors while I'm attending my ballet training...and they're on my mind when I get dressed, when I have a shower, a bath, when I change clothes, while working on the street, all the time! I need to lose them, and that means finding the right frame of mind for doing it....

Women! tz tz tz!

No rush

Winter song , by Nichita Stanescu

You are so beautiful in winter!

The field stretched on its back, near the horizon,

and the trees stopped running from the winter wind ...

My nostrils tremble

and no scent

and no breeze

only the distant, icy smell

of the suns.

How transparent your hands are in winter!

And no one passes -

only the white suns revolve in quiet worship.

and the thought spreads in circles

ringing the trees

in twos

in fours.

From the book "Bas-Relief with Heroes"english translation by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru.

I've posted this poem because winter is back and I've remembered it from a past life. The snap is the Black Sea sometime in February when we had really low temperatures...One of those terrible cold days I chose to walk back from work for about 4 kilometers in the snow, through a park and the silence there should be enough for yet some time. It's only the "snow of the lambs", this snow in March, as the elderly say...This year I've got no rush to breathe spring. Winter's good.

When swans die like Phoenix birds

We started ballet training on Wednesday evening after almost one year pause...Better late than never, that's what my 4 extra kilos and I think. My muscles agree, sore as they can be right now but happy...and I've started watching some of my favourite ballet videos on Youtube...Maybe the most well-known piece ever is The Dying Swan, by Camille Saint-Saens, from the Carnival of Animals.

Ive always adored this piece, ever since I was little. It's so condensed, pure and unique...It tells a whole story in just a few minutes...I'm sorry Ana Pavlova's swan is altered by the way they used to film back in the age of "mute" motion pictures, but fortunately another Russian ballerina brought her personal approach to this piece, one I consider the best ballerina ever, Maia Plisetskaya. She danced almost her entire existence and I found this piece from when she was 61 years old! I find it so extraordinarly, I've heard she performed this piece for her 70 years old birthday in a gala they dedicated to her!!!! Here's the video of her performance at 61:

Now when I listen to this piece with extreme pleasure, remembering sunny London back in 2007 and a cello player performing it every day, incessantly, by the Thames, smiling at fugitive long lost memories...:)