roofs of sofia & streets of paris.

1.
photos by bistra boshnakova
of places loved by me too.

nostalgia comes as synaesthesia. i could smell the ink of the pages of my preferred magazine where these were published. in my mind's eye i also hold the touch of sofiiski smog and rain against my skin.

in the front plane you see the university of sofia. rumour has it that one of the domes hosts a full standing mamooth skeleton. the second done is the archaeology department library. and the third dome is the indoors climbing wall where i go bright and early to strain arms and legs, and listen to climbery tales. there's a little window you can climb out of and walk on the roofs, but now it's blocked by iron bars.

i started exploring roofs in the middle of a serious english exam for a serious certificate. it was held in the building of виас (the architecture institute). marina and i wondered around in the break, we found ourselves on the easily accessable roof with a gorgeous view over sofia. then the security guards made us come down and finish our exams. marina now studies architecture and i know nothing else of her.
the picture above is hilton, i think. hotels are useful because they're generally too polite to stop people from roaming aimlessly on their top-floors looking out of windows, unlike educational institutions.

the last picture is the structural opposite of the view you get if you lean unsafely out of the window of our living room. my street looks the same mosaic of sun-kissed bare bricks and yellows, alternating with greys. looking south, you can see the snowy top of vitosha mountain. looking north you should theoretically spot the fumes comming out of tall chimneys in the area of zaharna fabrika ('sugar factory') near the central station.

2.

streets of paris, populated by
the 2-D souls created by ernest pignon-ernest

i think i fell in love with the streets of paris a. because it's easy and b. because i didn't have any friends for a long time there, so i befriended my camera, my map, the musea and the pavements and went on long long walks. i think many other people do the same and leave their signatures here and there on the walls, so i collected them with my camera, and watched them change, like a letter addressed in the writing.

they say telephone boots are disappearing with the advent of the mobile phone, so they will survive only in photos and archaeologist's books.

and defenestrated - a cool street photography / city art blog i found randomly.

още чернилка и мастило.

(more bad news from the bulgarian media, related to green activism this time.)

Уволнен е Тома Белев, директор на парк "Витоша" - един от малкото директори на паркове, на страната на природозащитниците. Моите приятели се боят, че ще последват уволнения на ключови хора в управата на Странджа и Врачански Балкан.

....и това ако не е чистка!

Много силно се надявам протестът утре да бъде успешен, да се вдигне шум, гръм и трясък, та задаващата се чистка да бъде прекратена преди да се банализира и заобяснява с "кризата".

Болно ми е, че ме няма да участвам по смислен начин. И още повече ще съжалявам някой ден когато се прибера за постоянно и знам, че не съм направила каквото е било нужно на времето.
Понякога някои избори особено горчиви. Понякога това се проявява след като ги преглътнеш и остава.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WORNG WITH YOU?!

it's far too shameful and enfuriating to translate. fortunately i don't have the nerves nor the time to try at the moment. but in a nutshell, Capital (a leading newspaper) made a survey which concluded that bulgaria is overpopulated with fucked up people. in figures,

• half the population would never participate in a legitimate demonstration, a protest, or even sign a petition, even if a cause affects them directly.
• 87% of the people think that when there's a shortage of employment opportunities, men should have priority over women
• nearly half of the people can not 'forgive' attraction to one's own sex.

at first glance this makes me never want to set foot in my dear motherland again. on the other hand it motivates me to work hard and go back with a fighting spirit to fix this bloody wrong world in which nearly 60% of the people feel 'happy'...

----
прочетено при петя и в капитал

• Половината от сънародниците ни никога не биха участвали в законна демонстрация, още по-малко в окупация на сгради и фабрики, неофициални стачки, бойкоти и дори не биха подписали петиция в подкрепа на косвена или пряко засягаща ги кауза
• 87% от запитаните са на мнение, че когато не достигат работни места, мъжете трябва да имат предимство пред жените.
• Идеята за сама жена, решила да роди без намерения за обвързване, звучи зле според всеки трети.
• Обществото е почти категорично - за да се реализира, жената трябва да стане майка.
• Почти половината от българите категорично не могат да простят влечението към собствения пол.

и най-страшното е, че мога да повярвам. срам и яд.

давайте да го мислим и да го поправяме тоя сбъркан свят, който явно не иска да има нищо общо с разни шумни протестиращи идеалисти, бисексуални, невярващи в брака и - опази боже! - дето са се родили жени и искат работа.

повръща ми се.

distractions.

i've spent much of this week in the university library, the haddon and the new hall library. the labyrinths of the UL are good for taking walks to the 6th floor, around the map room and back to the reading room. the haddon is near to the river. but for the rest of my breaks i wander around the web - a few nice places:

zana briski might be comming to do a SocDocSoc event. talk about exciting!

the social production of indifference by herzfeld. looks like an amazing read. first because he articulates the reasons for my disdain for bureaucracy with nuanced insight. second because his approach makes public policy a part of the phenomena like mythology, ideology and religion, suitable for symbolic and interpretative analysis. and third, because he reaffirms by trust in social anthropology as the best tool for understanding of human beings and the worlds they create.

chekhov's three sisters. i'll try to read through a bilingual version before seeing the play, designed by georgia next week. there's not a great chance of getting to the end, but worth the practice. my brain works differently when i don't switch languages for a long time, like now because i'm overwhelmed with reading, writing and thinking archaeological jargon in english.

solidarity forever has been stuck in my head for a few days and at least now i've got the lyrics right.

some delicious eat to live recipes to keep my ocd and blood sugar up.

xkcd again and again. because i'm doing a statistics module which follows the same logic as the second strip, projecting numeric patterns on the social relationships of people in the past.
and because i often worry about closing brackets with emoticons (it's a really good way to convey that a smile only refers to an interjection :), geeky though it is.

out of touch

recently i've been so bad at communicating [deleted rant rant excuses excuses why i'm an ungrateful egoist, but it runs in the family.] i've gone beyond the line where excuses make any sense

but on an unrelated communication note, this is what a bulgarian post office can look like. to specify, this is the customs post office where you (go and queue and queue and wait and haggle until you) get your recommended packages like from amazon. long live online shopping.

another curious observation: english institutions weirdly ask you to post passports as if they were just pieces of paper. i've been slightly worried and excited to see what happens to the documents i sent to the home office in the uk. not in terms of their reply but in terms of will i ever see my national id card again? and if i don't who will find it and pull it through a criminal novel scenario? how many hands will it change? how does an understanding of the 'cultural biographies' of objects (my id card) contribute to an understanding of agency and / or identity in the past / accross societies? time to stay with just that one last question.

sweet short dreams.

inclement weather

Last night the winds colliding just under Adam's window, at the corner of King's Parade and Benet Street were blowing so hard the snowflakes lost their sense of gravity and all snowflake decorum. They floated in spirals and whirlpools so it all looked like a particle simulator. They crashed against the glasses of many rooms which were lit in the middle of the night whose inhabitants had left their coffee go cold at the desk by an unfinished paper and had stuck their pale faces and ther camera lenses to the window to marvel at the event.

We ran outside to make snow angels, snow fight and run around the forbidden grass. There were already about 50 people and as we left more came to keep up the enthousiasm. True, this would be a complete non-event in Bulgaria as Fiona pointed out, but here even her northern blood caught some of the fascination. It's such a fairy-tale site - the multicentennary colleges' stones covered with a layer of icing.

This morning snow was a different affair.

"The A2/A4 heritage lecture today at 12 noon has been cancelled due to the inclement weather and will be re-scheduled at a later date."
Natasha hopes you all see this message in time and apologises for the inconvenience.

The fairy-tale sight completely paralysed the town. People precariously step along the pavements, as if they're made of glass. The bus was driving slower than my bike.

In the rush hour before 9, the whole traffic was in slow motion. The bike-shop was full of fresh accidents.

As pathetic and funny as this is to me, it means people do not know how to move through snow. We are losing a kind of kinesthetic knowledge and the ability to take care of ourselves in changing conditions. We are becomming prisonners of our comfort zones and fears, living in symbiotic dependency with our overheated houses, shells of plastic and asbestos that will not last functional for long but will remain a fossil for our civilisation.

This goes for snow but also for unmeasured political correctness, fire hazards and all the bloody infuriating handicapping fears of this risk-obsessed society. Disciplining fears spread along a capiliary network of peer pressure and mould every individual to conform to the group's unreasonable amplified anxieties. OK, rant over.

40 years ago children skated to school along a frozen river Cam. What would it be like in 40 years when snow is even more rare than now? We will have aged more than we should, because we suffocate our planet and our sense of wonder.