Translating 老徐 (Greece, I've arrived in Greece)

Translating 老徐's 希腊希腊到希腊 entry:

I've journeyed for 25 hours 10 minutes now, going via Doha, Athens, finally arriving in Greece's second biggest city, Thessaloniki (萨洛尼克), as soon as I got to my hotel I went to wash and rinse myself, one hour later the film festival opening cermony started.

Before, two of the people who were doing the same thing as me found out at the airport that their visa wasn't enough and went back home. Unexpectedly, there are people as confused as I am. When people sympathesize they feel gratified inside, the thing that's the most pity is that they struggled to follow their plan all for nothing.

The first stop is Doha, you need to stay for about 8 hours before you can transfer flights, we three girls just went and strolled round the main streets, we encountered a private Arabian driver who followed us poor young people in a small sports car, on the other hand he didn't necessarily come to annoy us, it's just that he continuously went pass us, he was ogling at us. At that time it was 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning, this guy was seriously boring.

We were a bit scared, I heard that Arabian men don't treat women well …… in my heart, I'm scared if one of them will take us three girls to be sold off. But then whoever buys us will regret it, we're skinnier than anything, not even enough for one meal and we don't know how to work. They're better off finding someone fat, for instance a single girl who's waiting to be married like one of those students would be much more profitable.

There's a deep and calm, blue-green sea with a vague sea smell, there're a lot of people fishing, a kind old Arabian man proudly displayed his trophy fish to us, as expected he had a lot of fish. On the street, once in a while we occassionally see an Arabian woman hiding her face with a tightly wrapped, black piece of cloth, only leaving the eyes bare but still wearing sunglasses. There were also some faithful Indian women accompanying their husbands to their early morning exercise, quietly sitting on the side. There were quite a few foreign people exercising in the morning, wearing a small vest and shorts, looking like a pair of people striving hard, dripping wet from the sweat.

I took some photos, my camera's still charging, a little later in the night, I'll copy them here. It's now 8:15 in the morning local time, I need to go wash my face before I go for a walk.

Yesterday I had a really bad nightmare, I rarely wake up crying, in my dream, someone dear to me passed away, that friend came back to life, and said a well-known saying: don't feel bad, you should respect life. This is a completely reversed dream. When I woke up, I continued to cry for ages, my eyes became swollen from the tears. One by one I made the phone calls, everyone was alright, my heart was at rest.

Respect life. Is that respect life in itself? Or respect life's choices? According to my understanding of the friends who die, I reckon it's the latter. Of course, life in itself has choices of existence. Just leave the grieving to other people, after all other people are other people, while they're alive they are other people, when they're dead they mean even less. If there're a lot of egotistical people, then the chances to choose death are a lot fewer right? Moreover, after they've gone, will they come back? This is a worthy problem to carefully think deeply over.