Tuesday 13 July 2010

Return of the prodigal son

So I went on holidays with my family last month and forgot to return home.

We went to Greece, to do what common people do there:
  1. Wake up at 10:00, have breakfast
  2. Drive to the beach, swim and tan for a few hours; drink a bit of coffee
  3. Go home, have lunch at 16:00, have a siesta for the next couple of hours
  4. Visit family, have dinner out
  5. Put baby to sleep, have a drink out, watch the world cup together with thousands of Yugoslavian tourists. Paradise!
  6. Go to sleep as the temperature just dips below 30'C
Would be nice wouldn't it. Only this is the life of a tourist. The reality is slightly different for many who live and work there:

  1. Wake up at 7:00, have a strong coffee
  2. Work in an air-conditioned office either making shitty java plugins or selling overpriced clothes to the nouveau poors
  3. Go home to wash and watch some crap on the tv, laced with a million of commercials for things you never needed anyway
  4. Go out to see friends and moan together about the crooked politicians, when it was you who voted them and your parents who, long ago, benefited from this chaos
  5. Go to bed wondering how you can afford one day to have your own children, your own house and your own furniture. Say goodnight to mother who looks after you.

Anyway, the first and last seconds of "Iconoclash" (our assembly demo... remember that?) are copied and pasted from my swimming experiences in Greece. I'll try now to post more often (although I'm going away again in 2 days) and keep you up to date; only 3 weeks left!

1 comment:

  1. It's amazing how many people go to places on holiday and decide they want to live there. No thought of how it will actually work.. they expect they can live the same life they had as a tourist, and still earn the same wages they got back at home. It's a shock when they realise the choice of employment in the holiday town is waiter, cleaner, hotel staff etc., the pay is 80% less than they're used to, and the housing for the people who live there is nothing like the luxury hotel they stayed in before :)

    It's better to think you can work hard in a cold place for 10 months and earn lots of money, then stay in a nice hot place in luxury for the other 2 months to recover (so why did my recent holidays include norway + iceland? o0)

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