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tg's Journal  This is the 22nd day of the cross-country trip I started three Thursdays and more than 10000 km ago. In the morning I had the opportunity to fulfill a 9-year old dream. During what I still consider the best days of my life I had the chance to visit a retrospective on Dali in the Tate Gallery in London. I don't remember whether I bought anything from the museum store that day but I got a match-box with the "Disintegration of the Persistence of Time" printed on one side and the address of the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Back then, I had no idea there was such a town in Florida, of all the states. Let alone that at that time we referred to (and sometimes I still do) St. Petersburg, Russia, with its revolutionary name. But I promised myself that some day I would visit that place and take a tour of the museum dedicated to one of my favorite artists. And that day came after 107 months at the end of a trip that itself was an even older dream. The museum probably hosts one of the biggest collections of artwork by Dali, as its founders were buying oeuvres from the artist for 43 years. It has paintings from his early era documenting his experimentation with impressionism and cubism, goes on to exhibit numerous works from the surrealist years, and also includes 4 massive panels amongst many samples from his 'classic' era (you can also see the white hologram of Alice Cooper). The nice thing was that there were guides going around every 90 minutes or so and were explaining things about the paintings and the artist's life that no casual follower can know. I even succumbed to the temptation of increasing the weight of my already prohibitively heavy suitcases by buying a pretty thick book on Dali and a t-shirt with a print of the "Disintegration...". Now, adjacent to the museum parking there is a deli, which welcomes the likely patron with this very unpretentious invitation: You've seen the Dali, now come see the deli. Having awaken pretty hungry, I decided to prioritize my needs according to the ancient panem et circenses cry, so I headed first to the deli, in order to be able to enjoy the Dali afterwards. Initially, I had the intention of visiting one of the oldest communities of Hellenic origin in the States at Tarpon Springs, a few miles north of St. Petersburg. However, a sudden feeling of an impending cold made me pretty nervous since I wanted the last weekend of the trip to be really worthy of the party town - to use a publicly acceptable description - called South Beach, and I lost any impetus to do anything else othen than driving to Miami. The trip was long, and became longer since I made an unnecessary detour via a jammed highway. But driving through the Everglades was a beautiful experience, especially in that sweet time of the day when the sun sets and illuminates the clear Floridian sky with colors so associated with tropical sunsets. I went through the Alligator Alley at 85 mph without bumping into a single four-legged amphibian, much to my disappointment, but I did manage to take twice the wrong turns a few miles from Miami. I reached my hotel - which accidentally was right next to the one I had stayed in May '00 - about an hour later than my second estimate, and 3 hours later than my initial one, only to find out that my room - costing more than $100/night - was a few stories over the continuously rotating air-conditioning fans (and I'm talking about 2 banks of fans), its windows were dirty, one of the drapes was pulled off its rail and the furniture was more of the $39.95-a-night motel kind. I made my complaints to the front desk and they bumped me 6 floors higher, where the room has clean windows, the noise of the fans is not even audible, the curtains are properly operating and the furniture could be mistaken for being of good taste: a faux Art Deco theme, probably promulgated by the likes of IKEA. Of course, there has to be a cacophony: the phone is out of order. But that's pretty minimal compared to the awesome view of the beach and the Ocean that I have when I am sitting on my bed. So, there I am, at my final destination. The last stop of the road trip, ready to indulge in the nightlife that had me drooling (yeah, right, like anyone's going to believe I was drooling about the "nightlife") three springs ago. Ocean drive with its multitude of restaurants serving happily dinner past 11PM and Washington avenue with its equally many clubs, are just one block away, offering the closest thing to summertime Greece that can be found this side of the pond, in the middle of winter. What's more important, the night is young. Hasta la vista, amigos! Current mood:  grateful.Current music: Come Bambi - Monkey Boy. One more day in Orlando and my last chance to visit one of the most important landmarks in the area: the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. I still remember one day in the very early 80s when a classmate in school (that would be 4th of 5th grade) had told us that he had flown to Florida (from Greece) to watch live the virgin launch of the first Space Shuttle (Columbia). I don't think anyone believed him then and we still regard this incident as one of the most ludicrous lies ever told. The credibility of our classmate wasn't aided by his claim that he was drenched by the water that was poured during the launch, either. At least he could have insisted that debris from the tower fell somewhere near him; but water... Anyhow, I followed one more of those Orlando highways where you have to pay tolls every five minutes all the way to Kennedy Space Center. It was a shiny bright day (not exactly your typical winter day in, say Boston) and the sense that I was driving on the stretch of road travelled by people whose deeds belong to humankind's most glorious pages was quite awesome. Of course, having arrived pretty late I missed the chance to get on one of those special tours that get you in restricted areas or the launch platforms of the now defunct Apollo and Gemini programmes. However, the standard tour was good enough as it went by the huge Vehicle Assembly Building (which can fit more than two Liberty statues one on top of the other) and we got a chance to see the tractor stage that moves the Space Shuttle along with the huge fuel tank and the boosters in an upright position from the VAB to the launch pad at the breathtaking speed of 1 mile per hour. Using the word "impressive" to describe all these things may seem an understatement but indeed, the scale has to be seen to be fully appreciated. We also managed to get a glimpse of Launch Complex 29B which will send the shuttle to space sometime next week. The next stop was a facility hosting the last remaining Saturn V rocket, possibly the most complex machine built to date. I believe that was the second time in my life when I was overwhelmed with respect for the engineering profession (the first being when I saw the Eiffel Tower from up close). The structure is made up of 2 million individual components, some of which were designed to be flown to the moon and then come back while carrying humans. Words are just too weak to do justice to this feat, accomplished with rudimentary - for today's standards - technology. But experiencing the size of the rocket with one's own eyes, watching a recreation of the Apollo 8 launch in the same room where the launch control was stationed with all the equipment and furniture of late 60s in place as if the launch happened the day before, watching the audio-visual transmission from Apollo XI's lunar module in the final minutes before moon landing, can help one appreciate why putting a man on the moon had made people believe that anything is possible. It also sheds light to the actual meaning of the oft-used phrase: "rocket science". Having seen all that I still find it almost incomprehensible that those folks were able to do all that with the means available to them in the 60s. The end of the visit was kind of anticlimactic as instead of heading to the IMAX screen to watch a 3D feature on the International Space Station, I opted for a visit to the Space Shuttle replica and I missed the movie for 5 minutes. So in order to kill some time (totally unnescessary as I had decided to leave that day for St. Petersburg) I strolled into what was advertised as the largest Space Store in the world. Well, largest in the world when the competition is possibly an outlet in Baikonur, Kazachstan. That's a tall order for a place where everything that can be sold (can you say "Pet Rocks"?) is actually sold. But I have to grant it to the Space Shop that it's probably the only place in the world where you can buy an actual meteorite. It will set you back half a Boxster (that's $20000 in current prices), and you'll probably need to pay for shipping, too, as it's pretty hefty. I left the Space Center right after watching the gorgeous Florida sunset in the Rocket Garden. On my way to St. Petersburg I had one last lunch with Raj and Cecilia in Universal Studios, the theme park with the largest parking structure I had ever seen in my life. I think there's no other place where corporate commercialism is so ubiquitus: everything is part of one big chain or another. Anyhow, the dinner was good and plenty and supplemented with Sangria. For the road, I guess. So around 9:30PM I left the suburbs of the "City Beautiful" to go spend the night in St. Petersburg. I cruised in St. Petersburg around 11 hoping to find a motel with a familiar sounding name to spend the night. But all the motel chains had their outfits by the highway and I was already downtown and not in a posh neighborhood either. Eventually, I saw three motels, kinda shabby looking, but I said what the heck, I'll try one of these. I stopped at the one named Monticello which offered something Mediterranean, as advertised by its Neon sign. It turned out that the owner recognized that my first name was Greek, and moreover he was from Yugoslavia, and he had been to Greece many times for vacation and had knew people in Macedonia. I didn;t ask which one of the three. He also didn't accept credit cards, but it would be only a week until the machine would arrive and he could start offering this feature. But the price for the night was almost right at $30. So I enter the room, in front of which the motel owner had parked his Mercedes - an S Klasse, mind you; the small one, but still an S Klasse, which brought to mind memories of the past watching those huge Mercedeses with Yugoslavian plates driving on the local highways in the summers in Northen Greece (or shall I say Macedonia?) and us being certain they belonged to weapon merchants or mafia dons who had come to spend their vacation on the Greek beaches - and I see another first: the room has three doors! The main entrance, a back exit to an alley (you can never see too many movies about drug trafficking in Florida), and a door that used to connect the room with the adjacent one. I am saying used because of the insulation wall that was placed behind it. Anyhow, you get the idea, that isn't exactly Sheraton :-) Still, it could have, if not a phone device, a working phone socket. But no such luxury. It does have however, two - not one - small fridges that I unplugged because they are too noisy and a microwave oven. (Do you need to warm drugs over?) Tomorrow I am planning to visit the Salvador Dali museum a few blocks away. For the record, there are enormous quantities of water released during the Space Shuttle launch to provide insulation against the acoustic waves produced by the Solid Fuel Booster engines. Current mood: deeply impressed. Yesterday, I didn't do much. Finally deposited my severance check, extended the rental of the Mormon car for another week - which means that I have grown skin thick enough so as not to be ashamed of being seen in that car while in SoBe -, and booked the wrong hotel in Miami. But today I felt I had to do my duty as a tourist and visit one of the theme parks in the greater Orlando area. My extreme indecision led me to choose Epcot instead of Seaworld or Universal Studios, especially since I was leaving Raj's place around noon and would have only 5 hours to roam around the parks. I hopped onto 417 which was the shortest way to Epcot but at a ridiculous cost. Every few miles I had to stop to pay tolls ranging from 25 to 125 cents. It is plain stupid that they force everyone to stop while on the highway instead of charging tolls at the exits. At least the weather was sunny, albeit chilly according to Floridians who don jackets when temperatures drop to 15 Celsius, and Orlando apart from being a sprawl worse than the greater L.A. - without the smog, mind you - is pretty beautiful with numerous lakes and great expanses of green. Of course, it's not a "city", so I don't understand why they call it "The City Beautiful", but beautiful it is. Epcot was nice. I still believe I should have chosen Seaworld, but I got to see the Segway (actually I saw someone ride the Segway in front of me), I caught a pretty nice 3D featurette in Kodak's pavillion, drank a refreshment with Guarana from Brazil, saw the evolution of the Coke bottle, resisted paying $40 to get a full set of miniature bottles documenting said evolution, spent at least 10 minutes in front of the most unbeliavably spectacular LCD monitor I have ever set my eyes upon (9.2 megapixels can make you believe that a picture is worth much more than 1000 words), witnessed HDTV picture in a ultra-high-end home-theater, and spent a couple of hours touring the pavillions of Canada, Morocco, and China (and briefly Norway and Mexico). The pavillion of the Great Civilized Boring White North had a 360-degree feature, filmed with 9 cameras, each spanning 40 degrees, and showing a spectacular view of the awesome Canadian landscape and cities. (Well, the cities were nice, not awesome). The Chinese pavillion featured a group of pre-pubescent acrobats who did unbelievable things and another 360-degree theater showing a film which was fully approved by the People's Party, yet unabashedly showed the Tien-An-Men Square at the moment it was raving about the freedom to enter the Forbidden City given to the common people after the Revolution. It failed to mention the freedom to assemble in the Square, and how this freedom has been treated for the last 13 years. Quite interestingly it did mention Shanghai and its "cosmopolitan" character, oblivious probably to the "secret charm of the bourgeoisie" and the decidely counter-revolutionary thought disseminated by said character. The visit ended with a truly spectacular fireworks show, which I partly caught on camera, but enjoyed the climactic culmination with the unaided eye. I still find it amazing that a fireworks show can bring such elation! Current music: Superstring - Cygnus. As I said, I was really excited to have the opportunity to see the sun rise out of the Ocean. But before going to sleep I turned on the TV and bumped into a History Channel programme on the "Most Famous Raids" which was somewhat of an inaccurate description since it was mostly concerned with Mossad, their specatcular raids in the late 60s and early 70s to save hostages, and their terrorist activities throughout Europe after the massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich during the '72 Olympics. That was it. My sleep was gone and the ultrasoft matress along with the ultrathick pillows did not help it come back. So when my alarm clock went off at 7:00AM I had gotten only 5 hours of sleep but still I got up stumbling and rushed to the living room to check out the sunrise. The sun was still beneath the horizon, so relieved I went back to bed, trying to sneak another 30-40 minutes of nap. But that did not happen since I was stressed I was going to miss the sunrise. At 7:25 I finally got up and rushed again to the living room. The sun was looming over the vast mass of water... Damn! I must have missed it by less than 15 minutes... So, all that extra driving along the infinitely long patch of I-40, the huge detour from my final destination, the deprivation of sleep, the excitement, all these for nothing... Well, not exactly nothing, but I missed the "money shot" and I firmly believe that the "money shot" is "all the money". In any case, short of staying another night I couldn't do much. I wasn't on Little Prince's planet, where a few steps towards the West would let me experience the missed sunrise so I pulled out my camera and tried to make the best of the situation, which wasn't actually bad, and had I had enough sleep I could have been more mentally alert. Still, I managed to complete a number of journal entries and shoot the best footage I could. In a few hours it would be 11:00AM and I would be hopping once more in my trusty American excuse for a car in order to drive towards Cape Fear and then reach I-95 going through what seemed innumerable acres of lumber-land. During this stretch I reached the 5000 mile/8000 km milestone. I reached the border after a couple of uneventful encounters with highway patrol cruisers - in that sneaky blue-grey color which makes them indistinguishable from the asphalt - and after at least a dozen of huge billboards advertizing Pedro's South of the Border which was like a huge Mexican theme park right, well, ...south of the border with the staunchiest of the former Confederate states. As you might know, the Confederate flag - made known and popular to us non-Americans by the Dukes of Hazard TV show in the late 70s and early 80s - is no longer flown in South Carolina, the last Southern state to proudly bear it in public buildings right below the Star-spangled Banner and right above the State flag. But who knows, perhaps the "South Will Rise Again" :-) I don't know what those folks in Manhattan, KS, were thinking about proclaiming their city the "Trailer-home Capital of the World" But most likely they haven't traveled to South Carolina. Let me just say I got the impression that in this state the regular houses are the exception and not the rule. 'Nuff said. Another thing that impressed me was the penalty for littering the highway: $1000 fine and ...imprisonment! But then again, that's the same state that punishes certain types of sexual intercourse. Talk about the long arm of the Law... Finally, in South Carolina I found the lowest advertised rate for a motel off the highway: $21.95 per night. That's less than parking in downtown Chicago for a couple of hours. Let me not forget to add that the room includes free HBO. At some point I had to stop to put gas in the car and some food in stomach. By that time the battery of my mobile phone had died and I hadn't checked my email for ages (something like five hours). My stop was at a service center off I-95, featuring a Wendy's, a Huddle Kitchen and another store, as well as gas pumps from some unknown to us West-coasters oil company. Now, I am pretty sure you have the impression that S.C. is a pretty backwards state. Well, imagine my surprise when upon entering the service center I come upon a row of payphones with a bunch of wrecked stools in front of them and I realize that the payphones have slots to accept credit cards! That is something totally uncommon in the U.S. of A. Heck, I've been to airports stateside that don't have this kind of payphones. However, I strongly doubt that your imagination can grasp my elation when I realized those payphones had data-ports! That was it: total bliss. I could make phone calls, check my voice-mail, check my email, surf the web, whatever! So I rush out and take out of the car my aluminum briefcase with the Titanium inside. But I realize I am really hungry, so I first head to Wendy's to grab some food, and as I enter Wendy's I take notice of the sockets on the walls next to the tables! Could this be heaven? I could even charge my cell phone while eating! So I exit the restaurant and head back to the car to get my charger and the phone. And I enter Wendy's once more, with the aluminum briefcase over my shoulder and the charger in my pocket. And then I realize I need cash for the burgers and I have left my wallet in the car. So I exit again, grab my wallet, and re-enter for the third time the fast-food joint. I am sure people must have begun feeling suspicious: a guy dressed unlike anyone else in a 300-mile radius - orange knit sweater and blue-tinted glasses, what's up with that? -, carrying a metal briefcase - at least I didn't use handcuffs to secure it on my wrist, a la "Ronin" - in a truckers service center in the Deep South, enters and exits three times in a row a fast-food joint examining carefully the walls and asking whether the cashiers accept credit cards (as if there is a fast-food place where you can pay by credit card). To cut a long story short (not exactly), rarely have I felt so out of place in my life. That did not prevent me from plugging the charget to the outlet next to my table at Wendy's. It did prevent me however from sitting in that derelict corridor and pulling out my jewel of a laptop in order to check my email. The next state south was Georgia, where the highway patrols have the awful habit of parking their cruisers (always in pairs) just after any small hill along the highway - on the median of course - and I am sure they must enjoy immensely the "D'oh!" moment every driver experiences as they stumble to reduce their speed below the posted limit without making it too obvious. Maybe there is one more of those syndromes, much like the stress of the goalie before the penalty kick, or the loneliness of the long distance runner. It must be called something like the helplessness of the highway driver against a cruiser ambush. And then, I entered Florida, which meant that I still had a couple of hours of driving before I reached the suburban sprawl that is Orlando. My GPS managed not to send me in an alligator pond but was of little help when I entered the huge apartment complex my friend was living in: it crashed as soon as I entered the complex premises. To make things worse I had no cell phone as I managed to spend my battery trying to unsuccessfully download my email while on the road. But in the end, I found the apartment having completed 10 hours on the road and driven 1000 km. Raj and Cecilia took me out to dinner, and because I was very hungry - but did not want to eat in a chain restaurant - we drove 20 minutes to get to a nighborhood where everything was closed; at 11PM. That was no New York :-) Anyhow, we drove another 20 minutes and we had dinner by the complex. Returning home, I fell to sleep and I don't think I moved at all until I woke up next morning. Current mood: numb. Current music: Wollt Ihr Das Bett In Flammen Sehen - Rammstein. I woke up just in time to get everything ready in order to check out at 11AM, and not a minute earlier. God, I hate the 11AM checkout time. Well, I opened the door just to realize that the bad weather had followed me all the way to the Bible Belt. But that was OK, because it only made firmer my resolve to move south as soon as possible. So, after one more breakfast at a Denny's - which I think is the greatest gift to a highway traveler - and an attempt to guesstimate how many liters of coffee are poured in all the Denny's restaurants across the country in a year (great question for a first round interview in any management consulting company, BTW), I hit the road once more. After Virginia I entered the northern of the Carolinas, home of the purveyors of death: Philip Morris, Inc. Passing by their headquarters, marked by a huge column bearing the Marlboro insignia, I felt I had to pay tribute to the cancer-causing commodity and I lit a Gitane (in general, I hold US cigarettes at a similar esteem with US cars and US beers, i.e. not very high). About 90 miles to the south I stopped at what was being advertised by huge billboards all the way from the Virginia border as the biggest cigarette mall on earth. And I think I am ready to believe them. I had never seen so many cigarettes in a single place in my life. Shelf upon shelf upon shelf, replete with 20-packs of brands I had never heard of, some of them as cheap as 12 bucks a carton. Tucked in a corner there were some imported brands, too: the Canadian Players and the French Gitanes (both the filtered and the unfiltered kind) and Gauloises, spelled in veritable Southern fashion as "Galousis". Not bad for a place once owned by the French. But there was more to come. The store had a cigar section, which, you may have guessed, was the bigger cigar store in the world. And it may very well be. Dimly lit and filled with that distinctive scent of tobacco leaves, I am sure it qualified as a cigar-lover's paradise. They even had an old dude rolling cigars on the spot, while some other dude, who looked like a prison guard of some sort, was sitting next to him all the time. I forgot to mention there were uniformed guards by the entrnace and the exit. I am not sure whether they were armed. And then I saw a handwritten sign which was at least as memorable as the "Galousis"; it read, and I quote verbatim, "Genuine Cuban Counterfeit Cigars". I believe that any attempt at a deconstruction of the sign's semantics is hopeless. Of course, there were some Genuine Cuban Cigars that were simply "Countefiet". I forgot to note price differences between the two kinds. I am telling you, this was the funniest and weirdest store I have ever set my foot in. Not least because it had a huge department for ...dolls. Yep, you read correctly: dolls. I am talking about two hundred dolls, small and large, of the old kind, dressed in southern fashion of the century before the last. I don't think I can comment on this, not in a public forum at least :-) The store also had a CD section. No titles from Blutengel or Terminal Choice seemed to belong to its collection, so Virgin Megastore need not fear loss of customers to this outlet. But there was a prominently displayed Samantha Fox CD, and I kid you not. Further inside the store, there was an apparel section featuring an extensive collection of Stetson hats - easily the most expensive items in the store, bar the $500 humidors in the cigar section -, a bikers section which I briefly perused in vain hopes of finding a tough leather backpack to fit my urban laptop, and a "dress sweaters" section which wasn't exactly comparable to the Neiman Marcus equivalent. In any case I had to buy something, and since no Stetson could make me feel comfortable and I didn't need any biker boots (I am still wearing my Dr. Martens since Christmas eve) I got two Zippo lighters and two metalsheet advertisements, one for Boopsie Cola ("Perky, Punchy, Peppy") and one for Vitameatavegamine, or something like that, featuring Lucie Ball urging you to "spoon your way to health". BTW, Lucie is smiling at you from a huge billboard in SoHo these days. Anyhow, having enough of Southern pop-culture, I ate a Subway, filled my tank with cheap gas, resisted any temptation to buy a 60-dollar suit (I am not sure whether it was a three-piece) from another retailer aptly named "Carolina Fashions", and then I bolted. And then the highway started to fill with signs for motels as cheap as $30 per night, making me feel utterly stupid for shelling twice that amount the night before. At that point, in a cheap attempt to mimick de Niro in "Heat" I went off I-95 and on to I-40 with the intent of following it to the east end. And so I did, reaching and going past Wilmington to find myself in Carolina Beach, at the Atlantic Towers, on the 11th floor, overlooking the Ocean. Tomorrow I will wake up to see the sun rising from the waters. Current mood:  giddy.Current music: Clean - Depeche Mode. Leaving White Plains I decided to depend on my GPS to guide me in a failsafe way to Upper East Side, just 20 miles away. And the stupid software managed to get me lost again 5 miles from my origin. I had to spend another 10-15 minutes trying to get back on the right parkway that would lead me to the right highway, and all that because for the second time I had decided to eschew human directions for machine directions. Perhaps, I will learn, sometime. I spent only 8 hours in Manhattan and these were among the best of the year so far :-), not least because I had some delicacies in a great cozy eatery on the West Side and had the chance to get some footage of Broadway by night with Times Square gleaming in all its LED splendor. After having one last drink with my koumbaroi off some NJ Turnpike exit, overwhelmed by that "drifter" feeling that got the best of me las week in Chicago, I decided to get back on the road again and postpone watching "Analyze that" for another time. Frankly, I am not sure why I get that sudden desire to drive off from a place when I am having a great time, and I don't believe the pressing need to cover more miles is the only cause. I followed I-95 for a few hundred miles to the south, past Philly, Baltimore - which I thought of as a wonderful place before coming to the States and in '96 I discovered it was just another blah town, and the nation's capital (which, I think, is an incorrect phrase: nations do not have capitals, countries and states do), and tried to find a motel to spend the night in Virginia. I am sure there was something wrong with the general area, because I had to pay almost $60 for a subpar room in an EconoLodge, after a Quality Inn wanted to charge me $85 and a Comfort Inn night receptionist did not even bother coming to the fron desk. By the way, all three motel chains are owned by the same company. Current mood: content. Current music: Situations like these - Icon of Coil. At last, I left Boston. I was planning to walk around the Harvard campus but today the weather was as bas as the first day I arrived. Actually, it began snowing again. Well, it took me about a couple of hours to pack up everything again so I didn't hit the road until 5PM! I chose White Plains, NY, as my first destination in the greater NYC metro area and off I went. But I-90 was so terribly backed up due to an unknown reason that I got impatient and changed my route. That involved getting lost at an intersection and wandering off on some of the many local highways around Boston in fairly bad weather conditions (frozen snow on the pavement and the like). It also involved missing again the intersection with I-95, and generally it cost me an hour until I was back on my intended direction: Southbound. Snow followed me for quite some time, and then it was replaced by heavy rain. Around Providence, RI, the conditions were just awful. Ice on the road, and heavy rain, and innumerable truckers taking up the 2nd lane and causing havoc in their wake. And then I managed to get lost again. Somehow I got on the wrong branch of I-95, the one that ended near the Ocean, and I found myself in the middle of nowhere, out of gas, and in a bad need of a restroom. The only gas station in the area had a port-a-potty at the back of their junkyard, unlit of course, and in quite a bad shape. Let's just say I didn't use the port-a-potty. Down the street I saw a sign saying that I should take a right to get back on I-95 again. And so I did, only to find myself driving for what seemed like an eternity through non-descript Connecticut backroads. By the time I had reached Iraklis' place in White Plains I was already exhausted. But that didn't stop us from discussing the latest developments in the film business, Usenet bandwidth, shower facilities in Thessaloniki, and the function of the subconscious while having a couple of drinks amidst a tense crowd watching the Bowl game between Ohio State and U. Miami. Current mood: tired. Current music: Sepulnation - Sepultura. I don't even remember how the short day that was New Year's went by. We had a dinner at a mexican restaurant in Harvard Square with excellent margaritas and a delicious Chimichura and then watched two more Greek comedies ("Safe Sex" and "Female Company") on the 15.2" screen of my TiBook drinking the last cervezas at home. Eating, drinking, and watching movies. Not a bad way to start a fresh year! (Not to say there are no better ways to do so, as I can recall :-) But today I had to find time and what I had not done in the 3 times I visited Boston in the past 4 years: walk around the town. So I boarded the T from Harvard Sq. and got off at Park St. at the far side of the Boston Commons, armed just with my Canon camcorder as I had decided to resist the temptation of carrying my TiBook with me just to use it in a Satan's cafe (you know, the Starbux kind) with a Wi-Fi internet connection. Shooting outdoors however, wasn't easy. I felt my fingers go numb with the cold everytime I was taking off my gloves to get some finer control of the zoom lens. Painful. Anyhow, I crossed the snow-covered Commons and found myself at the beginning of Commonwealth Ave. which is something like the Park Ave. of Boston, but with a distinctly New England twist and without the traffic of NYC. Beautiful street, and actually beautiful neigborhood, as the equally elegant Marlborough and Newbury streets are only on block away. After not finding a WaMu branch to deposit the checks I was carrying with me I decided to walk Newbury street in its entire length. Now, 7 or 8 years ago on Newbury street I would be delirious: it's filled with boutiques and cafes and galleries in a way that I haven't seen stateside, and since in the mid-90s clothing was my favorite way to spend money I would have found total bliss on that strip. But I began this trip having placated my seemingly insatiable apetite for consumption and moreover I have really no room in my luggage for extra stuff, plus I might be moving to another continent shortly, so I didn't feel the need to enter a single clothes shop. I didn't even peruse their windows. But there's something I can never get enough of. And I mean (for the purposes of this journal ;-) printed matter. So I found the Trident "Alternative Bookstore" Cafe and got in to get some shelter from the cold and take a look at the magazines and the books. Before sitting down at the cafe I had already bought a magazine and a book (the latter one focused on editing written word). I ordered scrambled eggs with salmon and a "chocolatino", a concoction made of espresso and hot chocolate that reminded me of a similar drink I had in Venice last February in Cafe Florian. Now, Boston isn't Venice (and that is not entirely a bad thing) and Trident is by no means Florian, so the "chocolatino" left a lot to be desired. After eating the belated brunch and reading the first part of an anarchist review of Samuel Huntington's most famous book, I took on the streets again only to find myself in a bargain CD shop two doors down. As soon as I saw the 3rd Sopranos season on DVD I knew that I had to get it even though at $70 it was not exactly sold at a bargain price. But the latest Sepultura live album was, so I felt equally justified to pay 8 bucks for that. The mini shopping spree ended about an hour later in the nearby Virgin Megastore where my hard earned dollars fattened the pockets of the recording industry for one more time and my small collection of Sepultura titles tripled overnight. I was trying to find a Terminal Choice or a Blutengel title but the neat searching kiosk with thousands of music samples they have at the Megastore was not coming up with any. And with some effort I refused/resisted (extremely esoteric pun intended) buying any title from Apoptygma Berzerk, Assemblage 23, or Apocalyptica. Going out of the Megastore the alarms at the doors went off but I did not flinch. I walked out with a steady pace waiting for someone to come after me and ask to see my bags. Nothing happened. I went in the T entrance just a few yards away and mixed with the crowd thinking that perhaps I shouldn't have paid for those CDs (not really, I just made this up). Anyhow, upon returning home, I popped in the first two DVDs of the Sopranos sequel and spent almost 6 hours in front of the box. (But it wasn't TV, it was HBO :-) Before closing let me qualify my characterization of '02 as one of the toughest years of the past decade. Actually, had 2002 ended around October 10 it would have been one of the greatest years ever: my editorials were published in a Sunday paper, I had a family reunion in Florence, got a promotion, visited Greece after three years, saw my sister getting married, even married one of my very good friends. These things are all rare and great. But the undesired events that followed in a personal, professional, and daily level really upset my sense of balance and managed to shatter any feelings of accomplishment, so the year crawled to an end having that sour aftertaste I talked about. And for some reason we tend to remember mostly what happened most recently and thus develop an opinion based on the recent important events. Maybe in the future, the temporal distance will rectify the perspective of each individual event and a more "objective" opinion will be formed. Something like that has happened before, sort of. 1994 was such a year of tremendous successes and milestones and periods of utter satisfaction but its last third was marked by my biggest disappointment as of then. Still, 8 years later, I think that 1994 had overall a positive score ;-) Tomorrow, I will be moving back to the 40th parallel. Current mood: good.Current music: Inner Self - Sepultura. The slo-mo pattern goes on and on... I woke up just before noon in order to make a phone call to the VP of Engineering of a firm I wanted to interview with. I had told him I would give him a call in the morning. Well, now he knows what I mean when I say morning. On the same token, I know what he means when he says "I will call you back in ten minutes". I received a call from him about 3 hours later, when by almost sheer chance I was right outside the premises of the company. So I had an informal talk with him and a Russian engineer who knew St. Demetrius of Solun, and also knew that Solun was in Greek Macedonia. Things looked OK; not terrific, but OK. (Of course, in case I do end up at this company this entry will be heavily edited :-) I also had a chance to appreciate the amount of construction going on in the MIT ueber-campus. Quite a reality check for me, since I thought that the construction rate in the Stanford campus was phenomenal. In any case, I ended up in the CambridgeSide galleria to stock up on DV tape and tiramisu cheesecake for the night ahead. The last night of 2002, arguably one of the On the trip front, I am getting ready to roll again: as early as the 2nd of January I will be heading to warmer climates. Current mood: hopeful.Current music: Better Than You - Metallica. No stupid hotel managers today. I slept in until I had to get up to get food. And then, I did something I hadn't done in years: I packed my dirty laundry and walked to a nearby coin-op facility to wash and dry my clothes. Of course, I have been doing laundry for 8 years now, but since 98 the washing machines have been in my building, or on my floor, or lately in my apartment. It felt like those Stanford years, carrying an overflowed laundry bag to the coin-op machines around the corner. At least I didn't have to scavenge for quarters. And this time I used my carry-on luggage to stuff my clothes in. Cambridge is pretty deserted these days. Most students (I stay in a place between Harvard and MIT) are apparently on vacation and there's hardly anyone walking on the sidewalks where there's filthy snow getting packed and frozen since a week ago. The rest of the day was spent having dinner at a Thai place in Harvard Sq. and chatting about career objectives and drinking Heinekens at home. I went to bed past 2:00AM after a really, really long phone call (it was like the early nineties... multi-hour phone conversations at no charge). Current mood:  lazy.Current music: And Then There Were None - Exodus. |
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