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Interview With an 'X'

The 'X' is definitely one of the most important letters in the alphabet. Not only that, but it is the most valuable variable in all math equations and scientific chases for the unknown, and in the entire history of human riddles, and I mean not always related to math, it always marks the most interesting spot. Sometimes the one with the treasure. It was no coincidence that the old Romans used it for the most important number of them all. 10. The very base of our widely used numeric system. But we are not here to talk about mathematics or treasure hunting per se. It will be more about age. Of ten. My son Viktor is turning this magic number on this year's Earth Day (April 22nd), and I decided, in addition to our previous topic and post Interview With an Expert, to fire another set of questions for him to answer. This time it's more general and within various realms of life and... well, stuff...



So let's start with favorites. I guess they say a lot about personality. And they don't require a polygraph to confirm the truthfulness of the given answers. For some reason, I believe everybody, or most of us, will answer these honestly. Probably because of their benevolence (if this is even a word). Even we adults will not curve the truth with these ones. And yet, answers to these questions probably reveal a lot about a person. In the modern world, it is comparable to the browser history; if you want to learn about your friend's likes and dislikes, just have a glimpse or two of his or her bookmarks and history.

So, let's start the interview in that fashion. Here it goes:

 What are your favorite subjects in school?
Physical education, sports, music, and math—because they are so much fun, and I like numbers and solving puzzles.

 What sport do you like the most, and why?
Basketball: It is the best sport and great for body practice. It makes you stronger and faster.

 What are your favorite regular and comic books? And why?
The best book I've read so far was '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' because it was so mysterious and adventurous. The greatest comic book is definitely 'Il Grande Blek'—he 'and all his friends are very interesting and super funny.

 What are your favorite board and video games? Why these?
Battleship and Connect 4—they are interesting and tense. The best video game is definitely Minecraft, because I can build things and make my own worlds.

What about your favorite movie and TV show? How so?
Avengers for the movies—great fight and smart play. The Flash for TV shows—because they are funny and mysterious. Also Discovery Channel's Mythbusters—they do amazing myth testing, especially what they find on YouTube.

 What's your favorite food?
Rolls, pie, and pastry. Also Milka chocolate and marshmallows.

 What about favorite color(s)?
Something between green and black.

Well, that was easy and nice to warm up the interviewer and interviewee. No big surprise there. To be honest, if I exclude color and food, it could be the same answers I would offer. Then again, back then, when I was around 10 years old, maybe even the food and colors would be the same. Perhaps only the movie would be different, but I have to say he nailed the book. Ok, let's move to more interesting questions and see what happens next. But not to the boring ones yet. Serious questions should be at the bottom of the pit for now... or never asked. So, let's continue with just a couple of those from the realm of movies and games. And fantasy.

What superpower would you like to possess? Don't say to be rich.
Jedi Force mastering and telekinesis.

 What do you think about the greatest mystery of the universe, women?
Well, I think that... wait, what?

 Sorry, it was a line from Back to the Future... But seriously, what do you think is the greatest mystery of the universe?
How did it all start in the first place?

 What part of the world would you like to visit some day?
America and Germany. I would like to visit their museums.

 You like museums? What kind?
Natural museums and museums about fighting machines of all kinds. Old and new.

 Would you rather live at the North Pole or in the desert?
Definitely the desert. (I like warm weather better).

 If you could be any animal, which one would you be and why?
Fox (they are fast and smart) or snake (because they are careful and cautious).

Okidoki, now we are getting warmer. With the exception of the snake, I would easily predict all the answers. However, even though the snake looks odd, when I think about it, there's wisdom in there. Ever since the book of Genesis, we have been taking snakes for granted and always in the realm of evil, and children's thinking is definitely not weighted with stereotypes and dogma. Museums look nice too. Ok, let's go into a more personal area now and see how the 'X' will describe himself by answering these generic questions (I found them online and changed them a little to better fit the age).

 What is one of your greatest talents? What do you do best?
I remember things for a long time.

 What makes you nervous, and what makes you happy?
I am nervous when I don't know what to say or how to answer questions and happy when I do things properly.

 What is your happiest memory so far? 
When I bought the Darth Vader Pig plushy from the Angry Birds franchise when I was 4... I couldn't believe it when I saw it on the shelf in the store when we were on vacation in Greece.

I have to admit, as it seemed, these questions gave Viktor a hard time. He did think a lot before answering, and I had to help him a little with offering answers in the form of A, B, C... It looks like with him and probably lots of children his age, happiness is not the same as with us adults. It's more about moments and great times they enjoy the most. I guess they live in present time more than we do. Ok, that indeed was something interesting, so what is next? Oh yes, if those questions up to now were describing a young boy indetail, the following ones will go even further. Like they say... To the bone... The time is now for hard questions.

 What age do you look forward to—and why?
22

 Really? Can you be more precise than that?
Because I was born on the 22nd...

Ok, I give up. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Game designer and software developer in general.

 What do you think you will be doing 10 years from now? 
Programming. And making more successful YouTube videos.

 How do you think Earth will look when you grow up?
I am not sure. Not so different than today. Maybe there will be lots of robots?

 What is God? 
There are many gods—the sea god, heaven god, and hell god (I like the sea god the most)—and I saw in Greece lots of sculptures and monuments. People say they lived long ago, and they created animals.

 Who created people?
Monkeys. Over time, they rose up, lost their fur and hair, and became humans.

Ok, thanks for all the answers. Do you have anything to ask me?
Not really... Maybe on your birthday.

 For the end, what advice would you give to your parents?
To play with me more often.

 So there you go. I know I could have been more thorough with this interview and created more serious questions for the last section, but I thought that this post should stay in the entertaining thread on the blog and represent just one short and funny conversation between a father and son and a small generation gap in between. For the very end and to get back to the post opening, Viktor's birthday and Earth Day (unofficial Earth's birthday) are celebrated on the same day every year, and for this special occasion, I want to give them both the same message:

 

Streets of Corfu

Long ago I started to experience that one extremely memorable dream. One of those that doesn't fade out with the first morning sunshine. Instead, it was regularly popping to the surface of my mind, making me wonder if these vivid images, haunting me every now and again, were just a product of my imagination or perhaps there was something more hidden beneath. In the dream I wander the narrow streets of an unknown city, one after another, and after a while I stumble to the big square with large monumental buildings decorated with dark reddish bricks with no signs or any familiar markings I can recognize. I was always wondering where all these colorful images originated from and somehow always had that feeling that I am probably missing an important link to fully understand the whole picture.


Recently this final link suddenly appeared, and during our vacation last week I accidentally found my dream site, and all missing pieces finally placed together, forming a memory almost 40 years old. Somehow, subconsciously, I have always known that it wasn't the dream at all and all the streets and buildings were very real and instead represent one of those almost forgotten recollections hidden deeply in my memory banks. What I saw in my night vision was the lost memory of the city of Corfu.

It all happened when I was the age of my son today. I was about 7 years old when my parents chose to spend vacation on the island of Corfu in the northern part of the Ionian Sea, just about 100 km away from the southern cape of the famous heel of the Italian peninsula. While waiting for the ferry in the early morning, we took a walk to the empty streets of Corfu (Greek: Κέρκυρα), the main city named after the island itself, and what was once one small walk under the morning sunshine now is just one almost faded memory for some reason refusing to die and from time to time reminding me of a beautiful site I experienced so long ago.

A couple of days ago, almost four decades after my last encounter with the island, I decided to take my wife and son on the tourist cruise to Corfu. The ship was medium-sized and filled with approximately 300 people of different nationalities and a not-so-small group of Serbian tourists. During the final two years of World War I, the island of Corfu served as a refuge for the Serbian army that retreated there on Allied forces' ships. More than 150,000 soldiers, royal government officials, and civilians established Serbian administration in exile during 1916-1918, while in Serbia under occupation of Austrian and Bulgarian armies, only women, children, and old men stayed. We started browsing the city in the street of Moustoxidou, where next to the French Consular Agency lies the honorary Consulate of Serbia, or simply the Serbian House, the museum completely dedicated to the WWI events that happened on the island and the island of Vido (Greek: Βίδο) across the harbor (first three images above).

The center of the city is a labyrinth of narrow streets, and it requires great orientation skills to remember where you are or where you were in order to find the place of interest. While we waited in front of Sorbonne's office of the French consular building, I got the idea to use the extremely elongated portrait size of the 16:9 aspect ratio of the digital format and start taking photos of small stone alleys. Generally I don't like this format compared to its landscape counterpart just because the image looks too narrow in the vertical direction, but in the case of the streets of Corfu, I could say this is an ideal combination. We didn't have much time until the ship departure time, so I chose the "Scene Selector" feature on my Coolpix camera (which is a somewhat improved automated mode in Nikon's software for digital cameras) and started clicking at the beginning of each street we crossed. After little post-processing (mostly minor changes in brightness, contrast, and sharpness), this blog post is the result. I included on this page 36 images of beautiful small and narrow streets, all taken in the center of Corfu.

When I was 7ish years old, I was a lot smaller, streets were empty, and everything looked large to me. This is probably why I remembered the whole site and its mystical appearance in the early hours. Especially when we stumbled upon big city hall with loud church bells echoing through the streets. Today tourism changed the scenery a lot, and streets are full of various stores, coffee shops, and restaurants. Compared to the 70s, now walking the colorful streets full of people and friendly salesmen brought a familiar environment of other Greek towns. However, the unusual city's topography, with up and downhill streets oriented in all directions, provides Corfu with little authentic feeling and a small glimpse of the old times when civilization was still knocking on the doors of all Greek coastal towns. My wife chose some small, authentic Greek tavern run by an old couple where we experienced even further travel to the past, where traditional Greek hospitality was still not influenced by modern times and Wi-Fi hotspots and where time flowed much slower.

Our free time in Corfu was between 2 and 4 PM, and photographing empty streets or scenery was mission impossible. Still, I managed to find a couple of empty streets and alleys or ones with not too many people inside. These photos (in the above last segments) ended probably the best, showing Corfu's special mixture of Venetian, British, Italian, Greek, and Byzantine architecture that mainly originated in the 18th and 19th centuries.

At the very end of this special photo story, I can only recommend this part of the Balkans highly, along with Parga—a small town where we settled for 10 days in a family villa next to an amazing olive-tree forest. I am sure this part of western Greece hides many more interesting places to visit and photograph. If you add the crystal-clear waters of the Ionian Sea and friendly faces wherever you look, I am sure spending just one vacation on the island is way too little time. I will definitely come here again in the future, and this time I am not going to let new memories fade again to the point of haunting dreams like before. I have to say, though, that when I was walking the same streets again after a long time, I didn't experience the typical déjà vu feeling like I described in the blog post last year. Even though there were some glimpses that looked familiar, too much time passed, and I guess I wasn't able to recognize exact spots and views, probably due to the fact that children and adults experience events and scenery differently, and not just because of different points of view but also because a child's mind is a lot emptier, and they simply don't have much data to compare with, especially if they are experiencing something for the first time. Nevertheless, the whole experience with my lost memory was at least unusually unique, and I doubt I would encounter many more like it.

Streets of Corfu (Full Photo Album):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TLw83qgV8ZmMe1Gi8

Parga:
https://www.mpj.one/2013/08/parga.html
https://photos.app.goo.gl/vSM1DFFafrfvMxU96

Corfu (Wiki and Web):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vido
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Campaign_(World_War_I)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serbs_Corfu1916-1918.jpg
http://www.greeka.com/ionian/corfu/corfu-architecture.htm
http://www.pargagreece.co.uk/
 

Childhood

I am watching my son grow up every day, and from time to time I can't stop thinking about how childhood occupies a special place within all memories acquired in everybody's life. I tend to think that this is not because we memorized childhood better than any other period of life; it's more that, compared to adolescence and later times, those moments are pure and clean, with not much tension, conflict, or seriousness of adult life. This is all about playing, learning new things, and enjoying pleasurable moments and events, and we are simply programmed to maintain nice memories better, while others not so pleasurable are stored deep in remote regions of our brains with a tendency to be quickly forgotten.

Hairdresser Shop

Today one small visit to the hairdresser triggered the extraction of some really nice memories from my childhood. This morning I took a walk downtown for some errands and decided to take some shortcuts through a couple of blocks where we lived most of my childhood. It was an old house my grandfather and his father built a decade or so after the Second World War, where we lived in a ground-floor apartment while my grandparents were situated a floor up. It was a house with a very nice front yard full of trees and flowers, and in the back were small ancillary buildings, garages, a workshop, and a miniaturized chicken roost where my grandmother produced nice, fresh, domesticated eggs. Chickens too. She was a master of preparing chicken soup from prime ingredients, meaning killing the bird, taking off all the feathers, taking out all the inner organs, and cooking the dish at the end. I remember once I had to catch a runaway chicken that slipped out of my grandmother's hands and escaped to the front yard—all that without its head. Ok, that wasn't one of those nice memories I wanted to share in the first place, but still a proud boy's experience not everybody can share. That said, let's get back to the main story. Our house was, not so long ago, torn down, and a new residential building was built on its foundation. This morning, following my route to downtown, I walked into the street where our house was and saw a new hairdresser shop in front of a new building along with a new bakery shop next to it. My hair doesn't require much maintenance, but yesterday was also the summer solstice, also known as the day when I cut my hair to summer length, so after little hesitation, I decided to stop by.

The main room was located (coordinately speaking) in the same spot where our living room was 40 years ago when I was the age of my son now. All the memories all of a sudden started to emerge, even those vivid images of the room back in time. I was the only customer, and I sat on the chair in the same spot where our old black and white TV set was placed, and perhaps one of the immediate emotions was created by the memory of the day when my parents bought a brand-new, state-of-the-art color TV set. I remember it barely fitting the old TV spot in the large living room cabinet. This was a change comparable with nowadays switch from old small CRT television sets to large flat LCDs, only with more enthusiasm simply because today we take modern innovative gadgets for granted more than was the case in the past.

Then and Now

In the middle of the haircut, the hairdresser was interrupted for a couple of minutes, and instinctively I glimpsed the rest of the room in all directions, and maybe even for a moment I was able to see the past. All the mirrors, the hairdresser gear and tools, chairs, waiting room, and photos on the wall started and faded out in front of my eyes and morphed into our small table, two armchairs, and a couch my father made along with many other pieces of furniture in other rooms. I also saw the kitchen, the big dining table, the old big telephone in the corner of the hallway, and the iron bunk bed for my sister and me, positioned exactly 5 meters away from my current position and located in the bedroom or within the next-door bakery shop, as in today. I was proud of my upper bed, where I spent lots of time as a boy, especially during winter times. This was also the playground for us kids, where we were doing homework and also performing Johnny Weissmuller's jumps from the upper bed down to my parents double. Summers were different; almost every suitable moment we spent outside in the front yard garden, where we used to have dinners and meals at the big round stone table under the cherry tree higher than the house itself. I was able to cross from one tree to another like a small monkey, and later, when I got a little older, this was my clubhouse where I used to read comics and magazines. I remember once I twisted my ankle in school and got myself a leg immobilizer for three weeks, which I spent entirely under the cherry tree in the special temporary bed my mother made for me. I was deeply touched when my complete class from school came to visit me the first day of my school absence.

We moved to a new house when I was about 11 years old, but that first decade of my life will always stay the most memorable of them all so far. The plot where the front yard was located is still intact next to the new building, but all the trees are long gone along with all the magic I experienced in there. One of the events I also remembered today was a night we spent in the open in that very front yard after a big earthquake happened in Romania back in the year 1977. There are lots more memories of that period in time, but I will stop here. After all, this is not a book of memories or anything; just a small flashback popped out of my head today. I also didn't include many covering photographs in order not to spoil the words, just these three portraying the place now and then. The first image above is the hairdresser shop taken by my smartphone, and I am sorry you can't see my state-of-the-art and ultra-fashionable haircut because of the flashlight, but I kind of did that on purpose. However, I will be returning here and not just for memories from my past but also because of great service, and I mean it fully when I let somebody carry scissors and sharp tools so close to my head. Seriously, I once had a bad experience with a sharp razor having a close encounter with my right ear, and from that time I am always having chills and goosebumps when I need a haircut. The second photo I made out of two images of the same spot. Left is me around the year of 1972 (perhaps a year or two later, but I can't be sure), and in the background you can see part of the house with two windows that are now hairdresser and bakery shops (shown on the right).

Batteries not included

So there you go, I might have been a little bit emotional in this post, but having a public journal like this is maybe why I started this blog in the first place so I could be able to remember and write about interesting events in my life I stumble upon from time to time.