Of Exhaustion and Volcanoes

I feel like shit. I have been feeling like shit, actually, for a couple of weeks now. Constantly exhausted with a heavy head and dizzy spells. A 'I must be ill' kind of exhausted. Since I seem to be almost always tired, I can easily recognise the various kind of tirednesses. And this is not a simple 'I need more sleep' kind of tiredness. (Not that I couldn't always use more sleep.)

I took some basic blood tests, and my blood is the same as usual: borderline low red blood cell count. I have anemia so that's normal for me. I let my grandmother (I never seem to learn from my mistakes!) take me to her general doctor for a check-up. He turned out to be old, useless and rather offensive. I left very annoyed after learning that my heart is in perfect condition (I knew that!) and I have some sort of nervous tick in my intestine (didn't know that, but it didn't really surprise me either). He also gave me a list of ridiculous tests to do.

As soon as I work up the energy, I'll do the tests (he thinks I might have a thyroid problem, I beg to disagree). And then I'll go to a couple of doctors that I'll pick out from my social security list. There's no way I can end up with anyone worse!


But I didn't really want to whine about my health (or lack of it). I wanted to share with the world (or at least the tiny part of the world that might read this journal) what my crazy mother has been up to today.

My mother was flying to London today to visit her mother. She found out last night, to her great dismay, that the taxis would be on strike all day today, as would public transport from 11.00 till 17.00. (Don't get me started on the hell I went through to get home from work today!) Since my parents don't have a car and didn't know anyone who could give her a lift, my mother took the last bus before the strike to the airport (Athens airport, by the way) to wait for her flight.

She arrived quite a few hours early prepared to sit around. Since neither our parents, nor us, bother watching the news, we hadn't heard about the volcano eruption in Iceland. So she was shocked when she was told that all British airports have been shut down for at least three days.

Instead of demanding the airline to change her flight dates and trying to find a way home, she thought that since she was at the airport, she might as well take a plane. So she took the first available flight to Paris! (She called me up at work to tell me what she was doing. I was too stunned to try and reason with her.)

Once in Paris, she goes to the Gare du Nord to get the Eurostar to London. Obviously the Eurostar was all booked up, because everybody had the same idea, and she couldn't get a seat. Not to be put off from her goal of reaching London, she hopped on a train to Calais to get the boat to Dover. And from Dover I assume she'll get a train or coach to London. She said she'd call once she finally reached London, but I haven't heard from her yet.

I always knew my mother had a one-track mind, but this is ridiculous! And to top it all, I just found out that the day she's supposed to be flying back to Greece, there a BA strike! Some days things just never seem to go your way!

What I did in London

So, I'm back! I went to London and now I'm home.

Things I learned/remembered:
• central heating is a wonderful thing - the house I was staying in didn't have any, and it was cold cold cold!
• proper public transport is lovely, especially trains - I was staying in the miserable godforsaken way-out area of Croydon (don't move there if you can help it!) and yet it only took about half an hour by train to reach civilisation, err... Victoria station I mean.
• travelling by yourself is lonely - everybody else seems to travel in pairs and groups.
• if your friend is a miserable anti-social hermit, he will not change his ways for you, no matter how far you travelled to see him.

Places I visited/ Things I did:
• I meandered around the centre of London, were I visited art galleries, bought books both second-hand (Dylan Thomas' collected poems and a book on how to watercolour) and new (Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness).


• I went to Covent Garden where I bought shampoos 1, 2 and face cream from Lush and and looked at shoes (and out of all the strange original shoes I saw, I ended up buying these gorgeous campers that I'm sure I could have found in Athens too).


• I visited Camden Town, curious about the renovations to the stables. What a confusing warren they've turned them into! Unfortunately Camden is not nearly as exciting anymore as I remembered it being. I did end up getting more second hand books (Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude and Tom Wolfe's From Our House to Bauhaus - both books I've read but didn't have) and some second hand clothes (especially a pink 70s summer dress I plan on wearing once it gets hot enough).

• I checked out the new Darwin Centre in one of my favourite museums in London - the Natural History Museum. If you're even in London, you should definitely visit it. The Darwin Centre is an ultra modern extension to the beautiful old Victorian musem.


• I went to the theatre. My annoying friend turned down all the plays I proposed and in the end we compromised with Private Lives. You know, the one with Kim Katrall in. It turned out rather funny and amusing - it was Noel Coward after all - but all in all rather average.

• I dragged my unsociable friend to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew. Even though it was cold and none of the flowers were in bloom, it was lovely. We spent hours walking around the huge grounds and visiting the hot and humid greenhouses. We ended up sitting on a bench in the gardens eating chocolate fudge cake out of a box with plastic spoons (don't even ask!).


• The last day I enticed my stay-at-home friend to visit the Horniman Museum with me. With a name like that, how could he refuse? It's a so-so Anthropological museum with gardens and a rather good cafeteria/restaurant.


And then, after I spent all my money, I took the plane back home to Athens, and here I am!