Europe upside down

Once upon a time Athens was known to be in southern Europe, and Stockholm in northern Europe. Nowadays the weather over the past few days indicates the opposite. Take a look below, from Stockholm (via webbkameror) and Athens (via cosmo.gr) respectively, photos taken on Sunday February 17th 2008:

While it is not so rare for snow to cover the Greek capital (it happens once every 2-3 years), for the Swedish capital it seems that this year’s winter will be the mildest in the past 250 years. At the moment (2008.02.18 at 08:17 AM), according to weather.com temperatures are -5 for Athens and +3 for Stockholm . It’s an interesting contrast between two very distant regions of Europe and maybe an indication of climatic change?

I’m watching you, I know all about you…

Christmas is at the front door, the most joyful time of the year. Usually, during the holidays, I travel back home to Athens and spend some time with my family and friends. However, last year I decided to visit London for Christmas and then head back home. London is supposed to be The place to visit during Christmas. So I did! Along with some friends, we spent 4 days in the capital of the British Empire, including Christmas day. We had a really great time, visiting a lot of the must see places the city has.

The funniest thing came up later in Greece while describing my London visit to friends. I realized that one of things I didn’t fail noticing (a memory well preserved today as well) was the great number of monitoring cameras, located almost everywhere. I can’t forget when I entered a bar, somewhere near Hyde Park (in Paddington), the advisory notice indicating that the place was monitored by CCTV. And literally, that was everywhere.

I had read about CCTV in the past, but it’s another thing to experience it at first hand. At the time, and me being a tourist, I didn’t care much about it, however, on an everyday basis I think I would mind a lot. The saddest thing is that peoplein the UK seem to have accepted this as a fact.

World Investment Report 2007

As a graduate of the American College of Greece (class ’05), I was happy to be informed that the school is going to host a press conference at which the World Investment Report 2007 of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development will be released to the media and participants. The press conference will take place on October 16, 2007, 11:00 a.m. at the American College of Greece, (Deree College main campus in Athens) Upper Level Library. More info can be found here.