World Water Week 2015 - Being the face of SIWI

Since i arrived in Sweden last Wednesday everything has been like a snowball, moving forward and gaining momentum like a fist ready to punch through concrete. I did not imagine in my wildest dreams on May 21st this year what would happen during the World Water Week 2015 where i was selected from the cream of the crop of applicants to be an ambassador for Sweden and the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) from the 23rd of August until the 28th.

Norra Latin, one of the two main buildings of the conference.

As i arrived last Saturday for the meeting of the volunteers and the staff of SIWI i knew something special was brewing. We were briefed for 3 hours about our duties and given a quick look of the premises which consisted of two main buildings, Norra Latin and Folkets Hus. It is a change of venue from the previous years and a welcome change for the 25th anniversary of the World Water Week conference that has been held since 1991.

We would host important people like ministers from all over the world and Africa, the prime minister of the Marshall Islands and Jordan, the prime minister of Sweden and mayor of Stockholm and the Water Laurette Winner from India. Who is a fantastic person i might add.

The exhibition area with a lovely view near the fountain.

Sunday came and we got off on a flying start. I held my posts proudly and with an aura of positivity that accompanied my never ending beaming smile. I was strutting around assisting people, saying hi and chatting with them in every opportunity. 3500 people registered for the event and i have talked to most of them and it still staggers me that i can remember so many faces and names.

The volunteers are awesome people from all over the world. Africa, Mexico, USA, Spain, Germany, Sweden, the UK and other amazing countries. I have met and talked with most of them and everyone is so warm and receptive, though i probably look a little bit odd to them. But i am Mediterranean, that is what i am supposed to do right?!

Long story short until today i have been snowballing relentlessly with every day being better than the previous one. My confidence is building so much and i have made valuable friends everywhere. From my partner in crime in shitty jokes Amanda to Clair from the Australian Murray-Darling Basin and everyone in the Finnish Ministry booth. Today we had some wonderful chat with Nynke and special credit goes to Esther for the fancy outfit she wore today and the awesome pictures we took with important people.

Left to right - Yvonne, Amanda, AwesomeMe, Anna, Constantin and Nynke.

My most valuable memories are so many it would take me hours to write them all down. It has been an engrossing and immersing experience that i recommend to everyone. Not only you network and improve your visibility to the job market but you also assist in a great cause, whether it is for water, for land, for poverty or for sustainability.

I met a managing director in Sweco that sent me an SMS with her details, i got an invite to the Finnish Environment Institute and have won the affection of everyone and that makes me so unbelievably happy that i cannot express myself right now. A whirlwind of emotions has taken over me and even though i am tired from commuting every day from 5 am from Uppsala to Stockholm i am able to find the strength to power through and give my best self as the image of SIWI.

And i haven't even talked about the SIWI staff yet. The other day Gabriella, the woman in charge of the logistics came to me in the SIWI sofa booth and told me that everyone loves me, from staff to people. I felt such joy and pride that i completely forgot how sore my feet were. Irina, the project organizer is always so busy yet she approached me today and remembered i speak Russian and we had a wonderful exchange of words. Ingrid is a Duracell-Powered robot that never runs out of battery and she walks from end to end managing and fixing things. Erik, Adrian, Sofia are more busy people that we don't talk to them so often but they are always approachable and receptive. Lastly there is Yvonne, the event and volunteer coordinator who even though i know her for like 4 days i would stick my neck out for her blindfolded. She is awesome and deserves credit. WWW is her baby too.

Did someone say the city hall is made of PURE gold?!

I can go on and on and on. I can talk about the people i met from HSBC and their work with WWF, WaterAid and Earthwatch or about the wonderful Finnish lady Oona Rautiainen, a junior expert in the Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Energy of Finland treating me with unprecedented respect and friendliness.

And the best thing of them all is i never asked them for anything. I just was myself, doing my job and always smiling. I seized my chance by the hair. You can do it too! Volunteer for anything you can! Volunteer for WWW 2016! In the meantime my flatmates have arrived, Dimitra with a lot of Tsipouro and Ruta with a lot of Harry Potter lizard jokes. Oh lets not forget Marta. Her memory is getting worse. Sort of like the Greek economy to quantify it.

I will go die now as i am in dire need of rest and as usual i work tomorrow. I will keep you updated!

Until next time, Goodnight Sverige, Goodnight World!

I'm sexy and i nose it

I think i know how it feels to die and resurrect now.

I dropped dead on my bed for 10 hours with tiny garlic bread leftovers all over me after the last day. My biological cycle has been obliterated lately. I don't sleep well and i definitely don't sleep on time. I end up pulling off all-nighters only to crash in my bed the next morning or afternoon.

Well at least i am making some progress with hydrochemistry and statistics, which is encouraging seeing that i had a panic attack last week from the difficulty.

I am not sure where should i begin now. Should i write about the impending doom of my 26th birthday this Sunday? Or for the boring stuff i did last week? My hallucinations in the bus today? Or simply the wonderful things about my relationship with Carita?

Maybe i should start with the freshest memories. Which, at the time of writing are not so fresh even if they happened this morning. After such deep sleep my memory seems fragmented and i am like in Assassin's Creed trying to gather the fragments and piece them together. But in the end it's like Assassin's Creed Unity on PC. That is, full of bugs.

Fresh from calculating the total concentration of lead in sea water (Pb2+) at 5am and with a 7 hour lecture/lab cycle incoming in 3 hours i decided not to sleep again. So i ended up killing people in CS:GO with slower reflexes than my grandpa, watching 3 episodes of Psych season 2, failing in clan wars in Clash of Clans and then messaging good morning to my little Finnish angel.

The alarm clocked rang like a drum in my ears. It was 7:30 and i had to ride the bus to class. I had 4 hours of statistics lab. Oh dear...

When i got in the bus the hallucinations started. Almost everyone that came in looked strange to me and i was making weird comparisons and thoughts in my head. I was in total limbo and i think i was giggling inside with a devious smile all along the way. 

Asshole alert incoming. This is about to get heavy, i just settled all my lawsuits.

There was this little asian girl around 12 years old that was sitting near the window and next to her there was a slim black man around his 30's with a leather bag and an over-sized blue jacket. He also wore glasses and he had his left hand lifted up touching his mouth all the time like he was pretending to think or look serious and philosophical. It was so funny i thought he was a failed marathon runner turned into the philosoraptor with a touch of Doctor evil.

It reminded me of this.

The little girl looked so scared when that man sat next to her and she literally ran towards the exit when it was time.

Then there was Ron Wesley. My god i kept what's left of my dignity and tried not to laugh. It was a man with different shocks and a jean around his 40's with 2 little kids, ginger fire-red hair and a resemblance to the famous character wearing a knitted reindeer woolen shirt. And of course to make things worse he stood right next to me.

Christmas mood.

What else? There was a girl around her 15's that in other circumstances would look cute to me. But no sir, her nose was like a potato today. And she was driving a potato with a burned out fuse. Does it make sense? Of course not.

Pun intended.

Then as i was about to get off the bus there was this woman around her 50's, really tall and robust with a Hagrid like body type and short hair. She was standing above a woman that was sitting in front of her with her back turned playing on her smartphone. Extra sauce, in front of her was an old lady around her 75's playing tetris in a smartphone the size of my fist. So the poor woman was writing a message somewhere and Hagrid was standing like a vulture above her, watching totally discreetly what she was typing with such an evil smile carved into her cheeks like the joker. And she was doing it for 2-3 minutes straight.

"I am spying on people...and everyone can see it!"

I needed coffee. Black like the plague. I rush in the university. The cafeteria is not open yet. Kill me now please. I enter the computer room and we start the exercise. 4 hours of pain ensue with me trying to understand matlab. I did manage to finish up first again around 12. I had a one hour break until hydrochemistry lecture though.

So i just tried to sleep on the couch like Holger used to do it. No way. Time passed and i had to go to class. My eyes were so red like i was punctured by a thousand hot needles while i had to dance argentinian tango with 2000 people watching, a lake of crocodiles underneath and me having to incorporate chemistry into this mayhem.

I remember that girl in class that was assigned one of the homework exercises going to the white board to explain it. She did it in a horrible way and i looked lost with an expression of total oblivion. Eyes still, mouth wide open like the cow when it's staring at the passing train.

It is 13:00. I rush outside to take the bus. This time i end up in the mall near home to make a final effort and buy a pizza, a Pepsi and garlic bread for a quick snack before i die. After all what can go wrong, it would take me 5 minutes right?

Wrong. It was Lisa in the counter again. She is cute but she is slow like a snail on a highway. She was killing my brain cells, one cell at a time. And there was this guy in front of me. I wish he twists his penis today. It took him 10 minutes to get his stuff out of the basket, 10 more minutes for Lisa to process them and 5 minutes for him to pay. Good grief. But the funny thing is in his basket he had like 50 kilos of potatoes, diapers for old people with bowel problems and canned squids. He bought 27 cans of squids. I actually counted them.

I finally got home. I bake the bread, eat it in 30 seconds and die in bed. from 15:00 to 23:00. Which is sad again because i have class tomorrow at 10 am. I hope i can sleep again.

Other than that two things happened.

Last Sunday i went with senorita Maria in a "Greek" event in a house that looked like an Amish church. Until she arrived i went in with 3 other Greeks, George, Iliana Tripidaki (literally means "full of holes") and Katerina Poulou (which literally means "cock taker"). The names are fictional to preserve their anonymity. I am going to fuck them up in Facebook anyways :D

To give you an idea, Katerina thought a green light from a projector in the sky was some sort of northern light, while we had fantastic conversations with Iliana about her beige bra that was damaged and she couldn't wear it.

And then we arrived at the house. Absolutely hilarious. Old classic Swedish house. We can see disco lights inside and really distasteful music coming from the depths of that dungeon. We get greeted by a guy that speaks with an accent from the mountains of Mount Doom. In English. In a greek only event. Get where I am getting at??

So he gets us to our table, which has a traditional cover made from white paper like we are in a tavern ready to eat. And then the genius understands that we are greeks. Good job sherlock!

We sit there and we survey the room and the people. It was SO funny. Let me give you an idea. Apparently the sponsor was the local greek football team and the actual footballers seemed to work as DJ, staff and waiters there.

Right next to us sat what looked like the manager of that team, the scouter, the president, the bouncer and the most depressing cheerleader i have ever seen. She looked swedish with an expression of "why do i exist i have no purpose in this world" wearing a white woolen jacket probably made from sheep.

Then there was the toilet signs that said "do not throw paper in the toilet". And the world's loneliest DJ playing tunes from the 80's. And the disco lights almost gave me epilepsy. People came and we saw classic greek women. In heels, going to the hairdresser before they came and those diva fake blondes that put cement in their face to hide the craters in their faces, the ones that you don't want to wake up next to in the morning and are accompanied by a mindless baboon with muscles the size of my head and creatine coming out of their nose and eyeballs, screaming "I TAKE STEROID SHOTS IN MY ASS, EVERY DAY!".

Kill me now.

 Then i left around midnight to catch the bus. Before i left i was scarred for life from this.

I'm (NOT) sexy and i know it :D

Enough with being horrible. Let's add a couple of pretty Uppsala pictures from the botanical garden and the duck pond to pretend to be nice.

View from the botanical garden.

And some ducks.

Yay i feel like a better person now.

I am done for now. There is only one thing left to write before i try to sleep again. I came to a conclusion these days after my adventure in Finland. I know completely understand the difference between being in love, which happened recently and loving someone.

The first involved too much enthusiasm, lack of self-control, stress and it wears out fast. It was unnecessary and it brought with it lack of judgement. I am grateful i escaped.

The second one, the one I am going through right now with Carita is the real deal and the one to look for. It involves dreaming, caring for the other person, thinking about him all day as well, the future. It's like sleeping with a box of kittens right next to you. And she is so wonderful, like a little diamond. My diamond. It also involves enthusiasm in a healthy dose and I catch myself smiling alone when i think about her during my sleep, my rest or simply when I am day dreaming. Thank you for this. Olet rakkain.

Time to wrap this up. It was a pretty big post. As usual, comments, bashing, sharing is always welcome!

Goodnight Sweden, goodnight world!