In crucial need of updates. #ConnectingCities
Greetings
My name is Marianna Lianou, I was born in Germany and I was raised in Greece. With my parents, during my childhood we moved quite a lot but settled down after a while in a small village near a small town, on the southwestern part of Greece called Hanakia. For the last three years I have been lining on my own, in Athens, where I study at Panteion university, Communication, media and culture and I attend the Ad and PR Lab. I love telling stories and that is how I want to explain to you how I feel about the Project Connecting Cities. Having grown up in Greece by a mother raised in Germany I have always known that there are many differences between different cultures. But my recent trip in Spain for a European Voluntary Service was extremely eye-opening on that aspect because I lived there with 25 different people from 11 different countries. So my following story takes place at the guesthouse we have all been living together.
I had just entered the kitchen in the guest house we were living in Spain, my polish friend following me. As soon as we entered the room I heard her shouting excited, ‘Oranges!’ I followed her gaze and I saw a big bowl with many nicely ripped fruits, mainly oranges. My eyes had just skimmed over it without noticing. In Greece there are oranges everywhere. But my friend was Polish and for her so many oranges just placed there was a rare sight. In Poland, as I was soon to discover, they don’t have many oranges. They are rather rare. In Greece we have orange trees even on the pavements, every season burdened with a plethora of golden fruits. We eat them all the time, they are our main fruit. To further engross the paranoia, she called her parents, who excitedly advised her to eat as many fruits as she can, now that she is in Spain and they are fresh and good.
Upon further inquisition I found out that in Poland their main fruit was apples. They had apples decorating their everyday scenery and most of the other fruits and vegetables are imported and they are pretty expensive. That is when I realized how many things I didn’t know. As Socrates said, I only know one thing, that I don’t know anything. I was, admittedly, so engaged into my own reality, that I could never imagine a world without oranges on pavements. A world where you don’t have to be afraid of stepping on rotten fruits or hitting a tree because you weren’t paying attention when you were walking.
As me and my Finnish friend walked on Athens for the first time since her arrival, she asked me buffled, ‘Why are there trees in the middle of the sidewalk?’. I had never questioned that either. Why are there trees where we should walk? She asked me how do the people on wheelchairs move around? I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen people on wheelchairs more than one or two times on the street moving around.
Why hadn’t I ask myself all that before and how many other questions, that I should have hovered on, I haven’t even gotten around to subtly idealise them?
How can we come to contact with more questions? How can we get a better idea of our reality and other realities and grow the tools to ask all the questions, without restrictions in our minds, formed by ideas that we have always taken for granted? How can we challenge our idea of normal?
When it comes to anything other than our own experience we rely on others for enlightement. Which is our main source of data however for other countries, cultures or the cradle of all human activity, the cities?
Politics, Economy, Media, History, they are all currents of information, forming and creating ideas in our head about other cities, but without grasping the gist, they all miss the inside story, none of them help us realise, which is the main fruit of each city?
Connecting cities, is a project that hopes to teach us not only the main trends in fresh produce, but also the habits and traits each individual city imposes in the everyday life of its citizens. The little quirks we don’t notice but look so interesting and weird in an international setting. The things that create stories worth telling.
We need to come to contact with foreign ideas. We need not judge them, but appreciate and understand them. We need to get to know other cultures deeper, not through the channels of knowledge with authority that have a completely different purpose, view, experience but from someone like us, a normal citizen that is ready to challenge our idea of normal and teach us something new and interesting about places we have never visited. We live in the era of information. But we need it to be relatable. We need authentic experience, not numbers.
We live in a world without distances. We live in a world where we speak to people from all over the world everyday and still we don’t quite understand them. We process and judge different ideas and realities with our pre-existing set of values that was cultivated, however, by a certain culture and a certain way of life and we end up missing the gist too. We act like computers running on really old softwares. We are in crucial need of updates.
