i am going to greece!
The company trip this year was a hilarious clusterfuck of west European ignorance. (Lest anyone think Americans have the monopoly on that.)
Our company is headquartered in Switzerland, and everyone working out of that office earns obscene amounts of money for doing the same jobs those of us in the budget satellite offices do. By far our biggest satellite office is in Macedonia. So where did our Swiss friends decide to book our company trip this year? Bulgaria.
I mean, from the outside, seems logical. Nice cheap location. Relatively safe compared to other cheap locations. And - bonus! - right next door to Macedonia. They even speak the same language, almost!
Oh deary me. What a shitshow erupted.
Apparently Macedonia has been trying to join the EU for two decades, and first they got stonewalled by Greece who refused to recognize the name of the country, because i guess they thought it was some kind of cultural appropriation because the "true" Macedonia is in Greece. Like. Literally right next to the "fake" Macedonia. God forbid people from the same region of the world have the same name for the place they live. But that finally got resolved a few years ago when Macedonia renamed themselves to North Macedonia.
Think they can join the EU now? Nope. Because now Bulgaria is throwing a shit-fit. I still don't exactly understand what the big deal is, but it's something like Bulgarians think Macedonia is historically theirs, and Macedonians aren't even a real ethnicity, and the language is basically just Bulgarian. Same kind of nonsense Russian nationalists are peddling about Ukraine. Never mind the country has now existed as an independent entity for over a generation. I think Bulgaria is requesting that Macedonia publicly proclaim their Bulgarian heritage in return for getting the stamp of approval to join the EU. Or some equally petty shit.
Anyway, the Macedonians were pissed. Drama ensued. CEO got involved. Eventually the company trip got moved to Greece, which i am sure still pisses off the Macedonians to some degree, but at some point you gotta take the W.
So that's it, right? Drama over!
No. Because then the original flights booked for the Taiwanese office involved a transfer through China. Another political shitshow erupted.
One of the most obnoxious things that the Chinese government does to humiliate Taiwanese people and try erase their nationality, is require a special Chinese passport/ID even if they are just transferring flights in a Chinese airport. This involves money and background checks, and being forced to pretend you are a different nationality than the one you actually are every time you transit through the biggest country with the most hub airports in the region. Never mind we also have people from other nationalities working in the Taiwan office who don't have visa-free transfer rights in China.
Needless to say, half the office promptly decided not to go.
Eventually the Swiss office relented and decided to route through different, marginally less cheap, airports. Although, to be fair, getting from Taiwan to Europe on the cheap involves a veritable minefield of shitty fucking authoritarian countries. (Fuck everyone who fly through UAE and their Putin and Xi fellating asses, btw.) Singapore is the least worst option, followed by Turkey, unless you want to spring for a Taiwan carrier that does direct flights to Europe, but what company is going to pay for that?
All that said, i booked my own flight anyway.
I have learned from previous company trips that having to be "on" for breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks plus regular work hours plus weekend team building... it's too much. It completely destroys me. Coming back to Taiwan after the last one we still had to quarantine so i got a week to myself working from home, but this time it'd be right back to the office, so i asked if i could add a week.
So, i fly into Athens, then it's up to Skopje for a week for departmental meetup, then over to Thessaloniki for the whole company meetup, then a week of my own to make my way back down to Athens again.
Last time i was in Greece i didn't have a lot of time. I got off the boat from Italy in Patras, then i spent a night or two in Galaxidi and visited Delphi, then on to Athens, made a short pilgrimage to the Poseidon temple, on to Piraeus and the boat to Taiwan.
The thing was, i never expected to like Greece. I thought it'd be touristy and tedious, but i think i underestimated how much getting to walk around sites from the age of antiquity gives me a buzz. It helps that the weather is really nice too. So i resolved to go back and visit some day, not expecting to ever get the chance, and now i can!
Completely coincidentally, around the same time all this was going on, i read an article about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and then i went down my usual wiki hole reading about the canonical gospels and the non-canonical gospels, and historical Jesus and bla bla bla. I've always been interested in this stuff, to the point i applied to work at a seminary and semi-seriously considered studying theology... even though i am not a believer.
I am especially fascinated by how this apocalyptic prophet who was an absolute nobody in Roman Judea somehow managed to inspire a religion that swept the Roman Empire and eventually the world. It is infuriating that we don't have any records of the gap between Jesus' death and the first Christian manuscript, which was just a letter from a missionary in what is now Turkey to a church he set up some time earlier. Like, there's not even any gospels written down before the letters, so everything written after that is influenced by this one missionary's preaching about something he didn't even witness. We're missing the most important part of the story!
People of antiquity believed a lot of crazy shit, but what surprises me is how this one incredibly audacious claim somehow hooked so many of them. Like, the story of Jesus per se is fine, everyone likes kind people who do magic, but then there's this jump from a guy who was a miracle-performing prophet that died and briefly came back to life, to actually also this guy was King of the Jews, and also he was the Son of God, and also in addition to that he is God as well (what the fuck?!) and also, somehow, because he died, that means everybody else in the world no longer has to worry about being punished for their shitty behavior, just as long as they believe that he died to absolve them!? What? It doesn't even make any sense! Doesn't religion at least have to have some kind of internal logic? And this, hundreds of years after the birth of western philosophy! You gotta wonder what the hell these Roman leaders were doing that got everyone so desperate to find comfort in a weird, absurd faith from the dusty ass-end of the empire.
And that's the sort of stuff that goes through my mind when i wander around the Med. That, and imagining the triremes of Phoenician traders cruising by, seeing the landscapes that inspired stories of bravery that are still loved thousands of year later... It's a part of the world steeped in the history of humankind. I was talking to one of my young colleagues who has never been to Europe about why Greece is important to people raised in western culture, and he said "oh i know all those stories of Zeus too, i learned them through Japanese anime". I mean, that kind of impact! It's awesome to be there, to imagine the millions of humans who have come before, and try to understand the way they lived, the way they thought, and how different they must have been from us. Or how not different! Because ancient literature shows we really have always been the same, everywhere in the world, at least since writing began. It's supremely comforting to me.
I am excited, even if it's only another short trip. I think i am going to try get to the Peloponnese. Sparta! Argos! Corinth! Not sure if it will be viable on foot, but we'll see. This time around i am going to try get fully comfortable with the alphabet before i go.
Suppose i better try learn Cyrillic too since that's what they use in Macedonia.
Two months to stock up the flashcards. In between that time i am going to take a couple weeks off for a Taiwan holiday. Today i cycled to a beach out past Taoyuan and it was great. Normally i would post a selfie to close out, but since this was the first time i used my new phone camera, i didn't realize Chinese-style beautify filter was on by default and the selfie is mirrored, both of which annoy me because then it doesn't match my memory of the place.
Well, alright then. Manual flip.
Our company is headquartered in Switzerland, and everyone working out of that office earns obscene amounts of money for doing the same jobs those of us in the budget satellite offices do. By far our biggest satellite office is in Macedonia. So where did our Swiss friends decide to book our company trip this year? Bulgaria.
I mean, from the outside, seems logical. Nice cheap location. Relatively safe compared to other cheap locations. And - bonus! - right next door to Macedonia. They even speak the same language, almost!
Oh deary me. What a shitshow erupted.
Apparently Macedonia has been trying to join the EU for two decades, and first they got stonewalled by Greece who refused to recognize the name of the country, because i guess they thought it was some kind of cultural appropriation because the "true" Macedonia is in Greece. Like. Literally right next to the "fake" Macedonia. God forbid people from the same region of the world have the same name for the place they live. But that finally got resolved a few years ago when Macedonia renamed themselves to North Macedonia.
Think they can join the EU now? Nope. Because now Bulgaria is throwing a shit-fit. I still don't exactly understand what the big deal is, but it's something like Bulgarians think Macedonia is historically theirs, and Macedonians aren't even a real ethnicity, and the language is basically just Bulgarian. Same kind of nonsense Russian nationalists are peddling about Ukraine. Never mind the country has now existed as an independent entity for over a generation. I think Bulgaria is requesting that Macedonia publicly proclaim their Bulgarian heritage in return for getting the stamp of approval to join the EU. Or some equally petty shit.
Anyway, the Macedonians were pissed. Drama ensued. CEO got involved. Eventually the company trip got moved to Greece, which i am sure still pisses off the Macedonians to some degree, but at some point you gotta take the W.
So that's it, right? Drama over!
No. Because then the original flights booked for the Taiwanese office involved a transfer through China. Another political shitshow erupted.
One of the most obnoxious things that the Chinese government does to humiliate Taiwanese people and try erase their nationality, is require a special Chinese passport/ID even if they are just transferring flights in a Chinese airport. This involves money and background checks, and being forced to pretend you are a different nationality than the one you actually are every time you transit through the biggest country with the most hub airports in the region. Never mind we also have people from other nationalities working in the Taiwan office who don't have visa-free transfer rights in China.
Needless to say, half the office promptly decided not to go.
Eventually the Swiss office relented and decided to route through different, marginally less cheap, airports. Although, to be fair, getting from Taiwan to Europe on the cheap involves a veritable minefield of shitty fucking authoritarian countries. (Fuck everyone who fly through UAE and their Putin and Xi fellating asses, btw.) Singapore is the least worst option, followed by Turkey, unless you want to spring for a Taiwan carrier that does direct flights to Europe, but what company is going to pay for that?
All that said, i booked my own flight anyway.
I have learned from previous company trips that having to be "on" for breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks plus regular work hours plus weekend team building... it's too much. It completely destroys me. Coming back to Taiwan after the last one we still had to quarantine so i got a week to myself working from home, but this time it'd be right back to the office, so i asked if i could add a week.
So, i fly into Athens, then it's up to Skopje for a week for departmental meetup, then over to Thessaloniki for the whole company meetup, then a week of my own to make my way back down to Athens again.
Last time i was in Greece i didn't have a lot of time. I got off the boat from Italy in Patras, then i spent a night or two in Galaxidi and visited Delphi, then on to Athens, made a short pilgrimage to the Poseidon temple, on to Piraeus and the boat to Taiwan.
The thing was, i never expected to like Greece. I thought it'd be touristy and tedious, but i think i underestimated how much getting to walk around sites from the age of antiquity gives me a buzz. It helps that the weather is really nice too. So i resolved to go back and visit some day, not expecting to ever get the chance, and now i can!
Completely coincidentally, around the same time all this was going on, i read an article about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and then i went down my usual wiki hole reading about the canonical gospels and the non-canonical gospels, and historical Jesus and bla bla bla. I've always been interested in this stuff, to the point i applied to work at a seminary and semi-seriously considered studying theology... even though i am not a believer.
I am especially fascinated by how this apocalyptic prophet who was an absolute nobody in Roman Judea somehow managed to inspire a religion that swept the Roman Empire and eventually the world. It is infuriating that we don't have any records of the gap between Jesus' death and the first Christian manuscript, which was just a letter from a missionary in what is now Turkey to a church he set up some time earlier. Like, there's not even any gospels written down before the letters, so everything written after that is influenced by this one missionary's preaching about something he didn't even witness. We're missing the most important part of the story!
People of antiquity believed a lot of crazy shit, but what surprises me is how this one incredibly audacious claim somehow hooked so many of them. Like, the story of Jesus per se is fine, everyone likes kind people who do magic, but then there's this jump from a guy who was a miracle-performing prophet that died and briefly came back to life, to actually also this guy was King of the Jews, and also he was the Son of God, and also in addition to that he is God as well (what the fuck?!) and also, somehow, because he died, that means everybody else in the world no longer has to worry about being punished for their shitty behavior, just as long as they believe that he died to absolve them!? What? It doesn't even make any sense! Doesn't religion at least have to have some kind of internal logic? And this, hundreds of years after the birth of western philosophy! You gotta wonder what the hell these Roman leaders were doing that got everyone so desperate to find comfort in a weird, absurd faith from the dusty ass-end of the empire.
And that's the sort of stuff that goes through my mind when i wander around the Med. That, and imagining the triremes of Phoenician traders cruising by, seeing the landscapes that inspired stories of bravery that are still loved thousands of year later... It's a part of the world steeped in the history of humankind. I was talking to one of my young colleagues who has never been to Europe about why Greece is important to people raised in western culture, and he said "oh i know all those stories of Zeus too, i learned them through Japanese anime". I mean, that kind of impact! It's awesome to be there, to imagine the millions of humans who have come before, and try to understand the way they lived, the way they thought, and how different they must have been from us. Or how not different! Because ancient literature shows we really have always been the same, everywhere in the world, at least since writing began. It's supremely comforting to me.
I am excited, even if it's only another short trip. I think i am going to try get to the Peloponnese. Sparta! Argos! Corinth! Not sure if it will be viable on foot, but we'll see. This time around i am going to try get fully comfortable with the alphabet before i go.
Suppose i better try learn Cyrillic too since that's what they use in Macedonia.
Two months to stock up the flashcards. In between that time i am going to take a couple weeks off for a Taiwan holiday. Today i cycled to a beach out past Taoyuan and it was great. Normally i would post a selfie to close out, but since this was the first time i used my new phone camera, i didn't realize Chinese-style beautify filter was on by default and the selfie is mirrored, both of which annoy me because then it doesn't match my memory of the place.
Well, alright then. Manual flip.