Even Bloggers Need Some Time Away

Dear all,

Even bloggers need some time away far away from every day blogging. For the next ten days will be on a mysterious faraway island generating ideas for future exciting posts.

Have a nice weekend and then week!

A Week Aside or a Short Escape to Halkidiki

Two weeks ago I had to go to Skopje, Macedonia for the launch of the national environmental investment strategy to which I modestly contributed last year. It is very strange when a past project which is already silent suddenly comes to life. Your mind has already moved ahead but then you have to switch to reverse gear and go back in time.

Never mind, this was an opportunity to go back to my beloved 'Skopje Desire' hotel where I spent so many weeks in 2008. Skopje Desire hotel is not a brothel: it is a normal hotel with a name which means 'pleasure' in Macedonian and 'kind of sexual desire' in Bulgarian (the original name is Skopski Merak). So much for the proximity of Bulgarian and Macedonian languages. Anyway, 'merak' is a Turkish word which has had separate semiotic trips in two different regions of the Big Empire (the Ottoman Empire).

This time I did a crazy thing: I took my son Boris with me intending to go camping for some days in Greece close to where some of my friends were staying for a week.

However, first Boris had to spend a day with my colleagues in the office while I was busy with the launch of the strategy. It was funny to see the surprise on his face when he first heard Macedonian language. Boris is a trilingual Bulgarian-Serbian-Hungarian and nothing can scare him linguistically but at first he was a bit confused. Later things got better and he had a great day with Marina at the zoo watching the monkey pee and the tiger eat.

On the next day we woke up to the sound of thunder and heavy rain but nothing could stop us from hitting the road to the sea, the Aegean Sea. It is a short two-hour drive to Thessaloniki along the beautiful Vardar River. We were supposed to meet my friend Zhulieta who arrived by train from Sofia and while waiting for her we had a nice walk in the centre of the city.

The centre of Thessaloniki is quite chaotic: it is one of these ancient cities which have seen everything, where everybody is just passing and where the ethnic map changes every hundred years or so. It is like an old attic full of bric-a-brac which simply cannot be orderly. It is also a city where the erotic index is so high - streets are bustling with life, people are drinking, eating, kissing and selling stuff.

Here is a charming abandoned house. This is Prometheus street where I parked my car, parallel
to Odisseus (Ulysses) street, parallel to Aristotle street. That's Greece after all.

Abandoned House, Thessaloniki

A cool structure very common in the Ottoman Empire. It is the precursor of the modern mall and hosts a number of small shops.

Bezistan, Thessaloniki

This is a large renewed pedestrian street that leads into the sea.

Seaside Feeling, Thessaloniki

Vourvouru is a charming little village on the Sithonia leg of the Halkidiki Peninsula. I fell in love with the place last year and wanted to come back soon. That's the bay at dusk while the fresh fish is on the grill and the fresh salad is being cut.

Peaceful Evening

Another angle to the bay - the drinks are already poured, Boris is playing hide-and-seek with half a dozen kids and an evening of talking and joking has already started.

Sunset

Last year Jelica and I escaped from the kids for an afternoon to a secluded beach that used to be called Porto Paradiso. There was a great beach bar where one could sip the omnipresent Frappe while listening to Cesaria Evora. I really wanted to go back there but I couldn't find it. Then I realised that it was rebranded to Banana Beach.

Banana Beach shortly after Rain (ex Porto Paradiso)

This is my friend Zhulieta with Boris on a boat which he called the 'dead boat'. Boris features his newly learned monkey signs. Yes, I forgot to mention that in the Street University of Skopje (i.e. from my Macedonian friends) he learned the art of winking and the art of doing monkey signs. What precious knowledge!

Zhulieta and Boris by the Dead Boat

During this man-to-man week Boris was very attached to me and didn't want to go swimming on his own. Finally, he dares to do it the last day of our stay.

Boris finally dared swim on his own

So we had a great week two of us: we didn't bother about anything and we lived the days without initial planning, we ate when we were hungry, we slept on the beach, we moved between different cute bays, we ran a kite, we talked with our friends and we listened to good music with the car windows open. We only came back to the tent after midnight when we collapsed undisturbed even by the noisy Greek wedding that was raging on the last night.

However, as we were missing the other half of the team, i.e. Jelica and Andrej, we set sails to Budapest - 15 h of driving through Macedonia and Serbia. Of course, what can one do on such a day? Visit a beautiful and peaceful monastery for a quiet hour. Days after that Boris was telling me: 'It was so quiet in the yard of this monastery, wasn't it?'

Gate of Prohor Pcinski Monastery, Serbia

And that's the quiet yard where cats chase the shadows of the walnuts and the linden trees.

Prohor Pcinski Monastery, Serbia

Going away from the monastery and the beautiful Pcinja Valley.

Prohor Pcinski Monastery, Serbia

David versus Goliath or Underdogs Have a Chance

What type of person are you when it comes to choosing whom to support in one-to-one contests in sport or elsewhere? Whom do you support: the stronger team or person or the underdog? Because of some strange psychological phenomenon I always support the underdog. It might be because I am secretly thrilled by the drama following the defeat of the stronger or because life would be too boring if the stronger one always won or because of trusting the biblical 'the last will be first' (Mathew 20:16). It might be also because there is justice in the defeat of those who think themselves invincible.

Recently I came upon a very inspiring article in the New Yorker by an author called Malcolm Gladwell. For those who don't know him, Gladwell is a very interesting and intelligent author who published several best-selling books: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers (previews available on his website). I only read the Tipping Point (recommended by my dear friend Todd Schenk) but I also read many interesting articles by Gladwell in the New Yorker.

The point of this article is that actually underdogs (who understand and accept that they are underdogs for objective reasons) may adopt strategies and optimise their chances of cutting Goliath's head, i.e. winning.

Like that....

David against Goliath, Rubens

What Davids have to do - according to Gladwell - is to choose an unconventional strategy. This means that Goliaths should simply be attacked where their weakest points are or where they do not expect an attack. In the biblical story David does not go for the conventional sword and shield battle of the time but chooses a sling and stones strategy, i.e. agility, speed and lightness. And...apparently that's what Goliath is missing. He is strong but heavy and slow.

I just read that besides the Bible the David versus Goliath story is also mentioned in the Quran. In my opinion it simply means that an unequal battle, in all senses, is such a common pattern in life that three major religions (also Judaism) have highlighted it in their holy texts.

And indeed, don't we often find ourselves in one of the two roles? How do we act then?

It seems that research has shown that almost 30% of the recorded war battles in history are won by underdogs, i.e. armies that are smaller or less armed. That's a huge percentage and it seems that underdogs have higher chance of winning than we might think. For example the winning armies simply chose the unconventional strategy, use the surprise factor or have higher speed.

For me this means that no battle or fair cause we engage in is lost in advance no matter how hopeless the situation is. However, it also means that our Goliath heads may roll in the dust one of these days if we get full of our superiority in a certain field. Because.....the first will be last and the last will be first.

Watery

The month of June was dominated by the element of water. We've had incessant rain, followed by an oppressive combination of heat and humidity. And some more.

On the upside, I've seen some pretty impressive clouds and I've felt, at moments, like living in London again (the London of old, when it used to rain all the time; now, it seems, they are having stuff like heat waves--go figure).

Menacing sky just before the rain--you can feel the storm building up in the air. This one was fairly mild, but just a few days before we had a really big one, with gushing winds and hale that pounded on our windows. I'm not afraid of thunder but I find all those sounds that accompany a storm much more frightening than the actual wind and rain.

This strange gray color is not a result of faulty camera or Photoshop-ing gone wrong--I tried to capture the rain. It's funny how everything looks as if covered in smoke.

On my way to the French Institute I made pictures of the Danube flooding the lower road (Rakpart). It doesn't happen often--once in a year or two--but when it does it becomes a magnet for tourists and natives alike. There is something strangely fascinating about Danube spreading like that onto a territory that should be off its limits--a kind of controlled damage.

More of the same, except in direction of Margit, rather than Chain Bridge.

From where I stood, it looked like the Parliament was floating on the Danube.

Danube, up close, neither blue nor particularly beautiful now that it's swollen and murky. These past few days I've seen countless people sitting by its banks and dipping their legs into the river. Why would you want to do that at any time, let alone now, is beyond me, although I appreciate that beach-y feeling I get just by looking at them.