Friday, April 25, 2008

Dirty

This city is dirty - dirty air, dirty streets, dirty water, dirty people, radiating female creatures, sometimes emerging from within their hidden towers and armored HMMVEE-limousines, to hunt, to feed, to do whatever these creatures do, -dirty clothes, dirty bums, dirty бабушки selling very clean clothes in the переход, -dirty nice helpful people, dirty rude mean people, dirty beggars in the clean city center, clean well dressed businessmen in the dirty outskirts of the city, dirty bodies, dirty minds.
While sometimes you can get quite fatigued by some characteristics of this city, there are indeed moments that brutally remind me of what there is in Moscow that is so appealing to me. There is a story by Tove Jansson starring Knyttet (might not actually be his name since he is a knytt)- the little creature living alone in this huge kind of hostile city kind of place. That is the exact feeling that I absolutely adore when I live here. That you can be a knytt, and all around you is this huge city full of extremes, hostilities, gigantic titans (Morran), but also of excitement and joy. To make you understand why you must compare to my home country - the land of the mellanmjölk. If Russia is the home of Knyttet, then Sweden is the children's corner at McDonalds with a pool of plastic balls.
Yesterday was such a day, or night might be more true + early in the morning today. Some places, some coincidences and some people just exist here. And to be here without suffering all the pains of the modern cramped Swedish culture, without its want-to-be-aristocratic mellanmjölk-ish hypocritic population (not judging everyone of course), is heaven. But as a good Swede I know when things are too good for me and had the fine etiquette to leave in good time. One can hope for improvements in character until next opportunity comes.

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