Greece

I have been told there are many ways to God. I have been told of spiritual enlightenment. I have been told things.

In Thessaloniki there is a tall stone cylinder that stands near the water. Blood caught on the grit of the stone and crusted in the summer heat years ago. But they washed it clean after.

Marble lines the streets.

Pillars and stairs of similar stone fill the hills of Athens. The remaining crumbs of temples poke through rubber soles and pierce the flesh of aching feet.

I have been told there are many ways to God.

No one tells you that animals haunt the streets of Greece, that they roam with bloated bellies and eat salmon discarded by tourists. They are the natives of that place; they sleep in the cool stoney shadows where people hope the Gods once stood.

I have been told of spiritual enlightenment.

I have been told of the Gods they carved each pillar for and I have been told of their crimes. I have seen the heads missing from all the sculptures in Athens. They do not want to be known.

The blood that curdled in the White Tower is a thing of the past. It was washed clean and its sins were forgotten. It was renamed. But the story is still told.

I have been told things.

I have listened to the history and I have seen what remains. I have watched as the pebbles that once built a way to God now kick beneath tourists' feet. I have been told there are many ways to God and I have been told of many Gods. But this way has been destroyed.

writer's block [rahy-ter's blok]

see:
1. breeze through my window, blowing the curtain, showing peeks of the street out front.
2. homemade quesadilla waiting in the fridge to be eaten.
3. the soya yoghurt that's bound to spoil soon.
4. the planning of Greece and Spain and Portugal and an American cross country road trip.
5. the cataloging of things to pack and things to leave for the end of May.
6. the dog I found on a rescue website. his name is Bear.
7. being in Ohio in June.

see: to personify the term
1. demon.
2. is this my desert temptation?
3. devil.
4. bitch. (to be used in a sentence, as in: This writer's block is a bitch.)

I've got a blister on my heel...

...not a big one, just the small kind that appear from an irritation that can only be caused by a pair of new shoes. Fresh and crisp, the color of the water off the Caribbean, a harbinger of spring, these new shoes have worn the skin of my right heel shiny, like the rubber heal of my disproportioned childhood Barbies. These shoes have yet to form to my feet, their mold still holds form to whatever cast they were created from, the standard artificial foot of a UK size four. They are new. They aren't mine yet.

This morning I sat in a park, a rather nice one near my University. It's called Highbury & Islington, and sits between roads lined with rows of Siamese houses, attached at the ribs and shoulders to each other. The temperature boasted proudly to be in the low 70's and everyone in the city of London crawled from the cool, dimly lit recesses of their homes or offices and out into the light. The cloudless, un-caged sun. I took my shoes off, used my purse for a pillow, and watched as a spider crawled from toe to toe, disappearing for a second to resurface on my next appendage. Next to me a couple barbequed. A dog pissed on some Daffodils near the pavement. A group of 20 somethings chain smoked under a tree. Who could say this moment wasn't perfect?

ignore the world's whitest legs and notice the shoes.

I'm at work now, down in a windowless basement. Black shirt, black skirt, black tights. The weather is inconsequential down here. But today, when I changed, I noticed the insides of my new blue shoes were smudged brown, the dirt from my bare feet staining the polka dot interior. Slight indentations marked where my soiled toes had been; the shoes began to form to me. My feet are still dirty, hidden beneath my tights, harboring particles of the spring. I'll spend the remaining hours of daylight down in this steralized basement and will get home well past sunset, when the temperatures dip down into the 40's again. But my feet will remember what the morning held and the ways that the sun brought freckles to my skin, how the ground left dirt on the underside of my toes. I'll go to bed with dirty feet. And I'll dirty them again tomorrow, in a different park under the same spring sun.

The Land that Time Forgot

Welcome to Myddleton Road, or as my flatmate, Tess, so fondly calls it: The Land that Time Forgot. Running perpendicular to the road I live on, Myddleton road really is a forgotten land. It's a high road* of sorts but its hidden away in a completely residential area. So imagine, here you are, standing on the edge of Myddleton Road, staring down past the first block of houses and onto the multitude of chintzy plastic store fronts. You walk down Myddleton and see the mural painted on the locked wooden gate that stands next to the River Walk; to your left you see a small fenced park that doesn't allow dogs and you wonder what the hell else it could be for. And then suddenly, you are in the heart of Myddleton. You are staring at shopfronts, not sure of what they're actually selling, while simultaneously trying to ignore the cat-calls of the hoards of older men and construction workers that seem to spend their lives on the sidewalks. And then there it is, right in front of you, the shining beacon of Myddleton, the shop that was the inspiration for its nickname: George Moore Men's Wear.

A store untouched by time...or maintenance rather.

This picture does the shop little justice, but luckily you are standing right in front of it. You can see through the grimy glass pane that George's men's wear window display has remained untouched for the past several decades. The 70's? The 80's? It's hard to tell. Especially when all you can focus on is the pair of whitey tighties strapped on to a lower-parts-only male mannequin. They're not so white anymore though, everything in the shopfront has been tinged yellow with age, the unluckier objects are brown with mold from what can only be assumed to be leaking water. It's fascinating, really, that someone closed up shop and left everything as-is in the window. But wait...

Then you glance at the front door and see a paper sign, not aged or yellow, taped up that informs you that this building is alarmed so don't even think about breaking in. Who would hang that sign if no one's there? And why would anyone bother to alarm a shop that hasn't been open in at least 30 years?

It's late the next time you walk Myddleton. You're returning from work and the sun has long set. You're shrinking as far down into your coat as you possibly can to avoid the Mary Poppin winds that have made their way to London. And then you reach George's shop. And you hear music. Percussion to be precise. Yes, you are sure someone is playing the drums in George's shop. You look above the front door and notice a light is on inside. Who is playing drums inside? Does someone live there? Is that why there's an alarm? And has anyone bothered to tell George?

It's several months later now, and once again you are walking down Myddleton late in the evening. You are listening to your iPod and humming along when suddenly you notice cars blocking the intersection up ahead. You get close and notice yellow caution tape. And that the cars are police vehicles. And there's people all around speaking to police officers.

You take out your headphones and cautiously approach what can only be deemed as a crime scene. You hear a cop ask a woman, "Did you see the fight?" And then you sigh. Phew! Just a fight? What a commotion. You walk past the crime scene, making sure to stay outside the tape, and once past it, you begin to cross the road. It's only as a result of turtle-ing yourself down into your coat that you happen to notice the POOL OF BLOOD you nearly step in. Right there in the middle of the road. And outside the yellow tape for Pete's sake. Just a POOL OF BLOOD resting in the road, waiting for your foot to land in it. You side step the puddle and then promptly do the only reasonable, rational thing...you run the rest of the way home.

A day later you find out from your flatmate that the crime scene was the result of a stabbing. Welcome to Myddleton Road.**

*high road: does not actually mean the name of the road, but simply means the road with all the shops on it.

**my neighborhood is in fact quite safe, and there is no reason for anyone to be alarmed at all. crime can happen in any neighborhood and from what i've heard, nothing like this has really happened here before and they don't really expect it to again.

A Heat Wave in February

I can see a palace out my kitchen window. Sometimes in the mornings I stand in my kitchen with a cup of tea and stare out my window and over the gardens and look at the glass curved roof of Alexandra Palace. And at night when I get home from work, I stand in my kitchen again and can see the roof of Ally Pally glowing, the light shining through the weather beaten glass panels.

It sounds pretty damn romantic I know, but there's more to it. Ally isn't exactly a Pally anymore. It used to be the Queens estate, the park surrounding it used to be her personal grounds, but now its more of a public domain. The park has a coffee shop and a farmer's market on Sundays, and even the actual building that used to be a palace is now a concert venue, an ice skating rink, and sometimes a convention hall. It's beautiful and it's sprawling and sometimes if you're lucky enough to be there when no one else is around, you can lean on the railings up by the palace and stare down on the whole of Northern London.

Ally Pally sitting above North London

My flatmate Tess told me stories of how POWs were kept in the dungeon-y bits below the palace during war times and how parts of the park used to be racing tracks for the Queen's entertainment. She told me you can see deer there (a rarity in London) and when she offered to show me I assumed we would be going to a more isolated, rural part of the park in hopes of stumbling onto them. What she really showed me however was a small portion of the park, big enough to see from one end to the other, that was entirely fenced in. The deer live in there, she told me, but we never saw them then.

And even when I stand in my kitchen and stare out my window, whether its after the sun has risen or hours after it has set, my romantic view necessitates peering through the plastic cling film that hangs taught around our windows to keep the winter wind out. Our house is old, most of them are here, and the plastic beats the alternative of paying a higher heating bill.

So there is this magical piece to it all. There's a palace out my kitchen window that's roof glows at night for my own personal amusement. But there's reality in it all too. Modern day has caught up with the romanticism of the place. Living in London means removing your rose tinted glasses and seeing that the palace that you watch at night is really a run down convention center where local kids go to learn the basics of figure skating. Living in London means realizing that most times nature here is merely and illusion and that deer will never be something you stumble upon and catch by surprise. The palace isn't only a palace, London isn't only the London you see on postcards and the travel channel.

This all may sound incredibly depressing but really I don't think it is. Ally Pally gets to be more than what is was originally intended to be. London gets to change and morph and reinvent itself any moment it chooses. The streets are dirty and the tube is crowded and good for you if you ever find a bin to throw your trash in. Its the realities that make this place more interesting, it's the ways that the city fails to be on par with my expectations that keeps me guessing. Of course there are things that I can't stand and times when I wish I could be back in Columbus walking down Grandview Ave eating Jeni's Ice Cream, but this city is layered and grimy and colorful and frustrating and stifling and inspirational all at once.

Today the sun shone and a light breeze blew and there was no need for a jacket. London surprised us all by being nearly 10*C hotter than the average February day. So today I wore sunglasses and let my shoulders meet the sun and when I got back to my flat this afternoon I stood in my kitchen and stared at the roof of Ally Pally and thought how amazing this life is that I get to live so close to the giant, dirty, worn down, oversized shack, and how even more amazing it is to live in a city that's always changing and never quite what you expect.

You thought I'd quit this, and I probably should have, but...

There's been a lot of writing done in the last few weeks. Words have formed piles in my head and come out through tremors in my fingertips. Poetry and fiction, dialogue and exposition, and one well hated paper. I've typed until a distaste for technology grew in my mouth, I sat in the library until the comfort of book dust choked my lungs. And then I finished.

I'm down to my dissertation. I'm 16,000 words away from the finish line and the red tape that awaits up ahead in June is coming into view. I'm nearly there. But there's still adventures to be had yet. I've spent the fall and winter working insane hours surrounded by the toned bodies and perky voices of pilates instructors and sitting in classrooms discussing the craft of writing. Yes, I'm only 197 words into my dissertation but these four months of near freedom shouldn't be wasted just writing. They should be spent wasting money living. Plus, if I don't live then what do I have to write about anyway?

So next month Dailey will be visiting and in one week we will visit more places in England than I have managed to get to in the entire year that I've lived here. Liverpool, Durham, Oxford. No one deserves a holiday more than Dale, and no one is more excited for her impending visit than me...except maybe Dale herself.

The end of April will be spent in Greece. Five glorious days in warmer weather where the sun shines and the ocean is never far away. It's a girls weekend of sorts and I absolutely cannot wait for sandals and no coats and not caring if I look like an American tourist.

There's a week in Spain with mi amor Jaime in May. A week of tit cheese and tuna for vegetarians and the no pasanada mentality. And a weekend excursion that is sure  to prove as adventurous as my last visit to Spain, if the emails from the elderly Spanish men in my inbox are any indication.

And then I will be coming home. Ohio is close at hand and I think I'm excited; it's strange to be nervous about the place you're from. I miss the trees and the summers that drown you in heat and voices that sound like mine. I miss my city and will be glad to be back in the heart of it all. Ohio is close, but it's not here yet. I've got four solid months to make the most of being this close to the rest of the world and I plan on doing just that. I'll save the nerves and excitement about home until the packing starts, for now I've got empty pages in my passport that need stamping.

I'll be home soon Ohio. Just give me a little more time. To travel. And live. Oh, and write my dissertation.