between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Books 2012: 59


59. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Liaden Unibus Vol. 1. Baen Ebooks.

A collection of short stories set in the Liaden universe. Mostly entertaining, but uneven.

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Today I went to the Piraeus - ugly port town that it is - to make sure I knew where the ferries depart for Aegina. I want to make a daytrip soon, you see, and get out of the city: I'm developing a full-blown wheeze from the air here. (Running in it is like getting kicked in the chest, as I discovered tonight.)

Apparently the combination of diesel fumes and pollen gives me one irritating headache. Which was gone by the time I got back to Exarcheia to dine on tasty tasty Easter lamb-from-a-spit (arni souvlas) which was gorgeous.

Anyway. Maybe I will take daytrip tomorrow. Maybe not.

There are ripe oranges on the trees that line the streets. I have discovered why no one harvests them: they're bitterer than sin. Probably they would make a good marmalade, or with the application of copious amounts of honey, juice. But they are not for snacking on, sadly.

(Yes, I tried. Thick peel, gorgeous scent, what is this, sour lemon?!)

I walked up Lykavittos hill again today, this time with my camera. I took pictures. Perhaps I will even upload them, eventually. It was about an hour and a half's walk, maybe two, and on the way back down Kallidromou, towards Alexandras, my calf-muscles started to complain. ("Didn't we walk across the world yesterday? Huh? Didn't we? What's with all these hills?") So I think more walking is indicated. Up more hills.

So, I think I said a while back that I'd been watching Rizzoli and Isles, the copshow springboarding off Tess Gerritsen's characters of the same name, Det. Jane Rizzoli and Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Maura Isles.

Mainlined it, actually, the first weekend I was here. See, here's the thing: it's a fairly standard buddy-cop show: the plots aren't incredibly innovative, and while the dialogue and character background is witty and well-done, and the acting is solidly, understatedly good, it shouldn't be anything out of the ordinary.

But both of the buddies are women.

And that makes a difference. Not only are Rizzoli and Isles women who talk to each other, and argue, and stay friends through disagreements, but there are other women, too - most notably Rizzoli's mother, but also Isles'. Rizzoli is part of large and loud family - mother, father, two brothers - while Isles is an adopted only child from old money with distant parents. This works. This works really well, as copshows go.

So yeah. You find other things like this? Please point me at them.

I walked up Lykavittos hill this evening. It is a very steep hill, but worth it for the view of the whole of Attica spilling out before you once you rise above the trees.

All the spring plants were flowering in the woods. White woodruff, and camomile, and rosemary and sage, and mint with white flowers, and yellow toadflax, and purple deadnettle, and a yellow flower that looked like a cross between gorse and laburnum, and a tiny deep blue flower, and a scattering of little red ones. Ferns, too - black spleenwort, mostly, with some bracken. Some juniper bushes. And many other things which I cannot identify even with the aid of the googlemachine.

(Dear universe: I wish I had a handbook for the flora of Greece. No? No? Okay, then. No it is.)

It's so freaking beautiful. I wish I'd brought my camera, but just walking was wonderful.

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I believe I have figured out how come I am breathless and not so great at the running thing since I've been here. The air quality in Athens is pretty shit, even compared to Dublin's city centre. (It is somewhat worse than street level that one time I was in Manhattan, by me. Not much worse, but somewhat.) And I do not live in the city centre, at home. I has the country air, and the sea air.

So I think I may be walking mostly. And maybe hiring a bike, if I get out to Aegina.

The internet here kept dropping off yesterday and the day before. I hope it's better now - it seems to be working, at least.

So, yesterday. I spent the late morning and early afternoon in the library of the Ecole Francais, making my thesis grow some more. Making the thesis grow is tiring. It takes much concentration.

Then there was dinner with several Irish archaeologists. An evening that went on for six hours and culminated in an orange-fight between the road and our hosts' balcony as we were leaving. I haven't laughed so much or had so much fun in a donkey's age, I swear. I'm still slightly breathless from it.

I should try to get back into an exercise regime. Which means going for a walk, at the very least. (I cannot simply sit inside all day.)

So, the state of me: slightly homesick for my cat, missing the convenience of a gym, stressed about my thesis chapter, unable to maintain work-work-work-life headspace separation due to sleeping right beside the Institute's office, and annoyed that my instructions as an intern are more along the ah-we'll-see axis than the here-is-a-list-of-your-responsibilities axis of the graph.

But apart from that, I'm doing just panicky I mean peachy, of course. Fine. Completely shiny.

Ah, hell. Who'm I kidding?

Tonight, embassy party. Strange. Very strange. Although the Hungarian First Secretary for Commercial Affairs is altogether a very well put-together sort of man, and the archaeological contingent were all very friendly, it was weird.

Very weird.