Happy Easter!!!!

Happy Easter to all of you who celebrated it over the past weekend!!! Here in Sweden we were lucky to have super sunny weather but very cold - my friends who came from Switzerland and Ireland froze to their bones... Sweden lives up to its reputation of Kingdom of the North :)

Despite the cold winds, we walked around Lund, a completely deserted town during holidays, then went to Malmo where the weather was sunny but so crisp that we ended up spending more time in restaurants and cafes than actually walking. In yet another trip we went to Copenhagen, one of the loveliest of European cities - it was so very nice!!!! Spring was showing its face so we could have a drink on the side of the Nyhavn, one of the central canals in the city. We even ate icecream! Lots of it,in fact!! A very nice holiday now just before I will start teaching.

Elephants and other animals

The other day I received a beautiful postcard depicting an elephant as seen by our ancestors in the middle ages: a hairy animal, big and long-trunked, with bear-like feet - not a very close resemblance to the real thing but quite imposing. It had a gentle way about it, a kindness, even in the eyes of the artist of yesteryear, who must have seen it with more scared feelings than us.
I guess this is what I like so much about elephants - their strong but calm and tender outlook. They are gentle giants, with a temper but also with some form of wisdom (I know, I am attributing human qualities to an animal, not a fair practice).
In the same line of judgement, I cannot say I like monkeys, like another friend of mine does. I find them a caricature of humanness, an incomplete form of ourselves - I cannot get away from our too close resemblance...
If I were an animal, I guess I would be an elephant. Maybe to compensate for my small stature in this life :)

Film/Music: The Last Waltz

Yesterday evening I saw the music documentary about the last concert of The Band, a rather famous classic rock group of the late 1960s and early 70s. The film, entitled "The Last Waltz" was directed by Martin Scorsese and included besides large chunks of the concert itself some interviews with The Band's members. The most interesting part is that no one was the leader of the group; everyone, including the drummer, would be singing and even be the lead vocal - a true commune spirit :)

The music was pretty good, heavily influenced by country, bluegrass and blues - it got you going! The list of guests counted names like Joni Mitchell (I don't know why I never got to like her, really), Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison (who looked like a piglet), Bob Dylan (in his very Christian phase), Dr. John (a guy dressed like a clown but who sure knew how to play the piano), Emmylou Harris (I barely recognized her), and Neil Young (looking kinda stoned, if you ask me).

Overall, I enjoyed very much the music but would have preferred to get more talking out of The Band members.

Something new every day

Well, here I come and join the world of bloggers... After having read all those reports from Iraq under occupation and so on, my contribution to the global debate certainly looks minimal. If I don't get to live in such exciting places as Baghdad, Beirut, or Belgrade! But hey, I was born in Bucharest and lived in Boston for a while, those are pretty cool "B" places, no?
Anyway, I'll just give it it a try, see if I can keep it up.
Tcha!

Daily Political: Georgian Women

On Swedish TV there has been a short reportage about a bus of travelling Georgian women who where apparently intent not so much on sightseeing but on trying to escape the harsh postSoviet realities. Apparently, a travel company organized bus trips from Georgia to both North and South Europe and most of the travelers (in their majority women of a certain age) were let's say lost along the way. What a reputation these women have to face! Finnish police on the alert intercepted the trouble bus and now are holding the poor Georgians for interrogation. Maybe indeed they wanted to get away but still - women from this part of the world are always under suspicion of being more than what they show... Those Eastern Europeans...
And to add to this, also in Swedish news, I find out that two brothels were discovered in Skåne (Southern Swedish province) and both of them were managed by and offered the services of ... guess what? Romanians!!! Only the best...