more violence in kolonaki

This afternoon, I was walking to my professor's apartment in downtown Kolonaki (the area of Athens I live in) to babysit her two year old, and when I turned onto the main street, which has quite a few ultra-swanky stores, I was shocked to see that the storefronts of almost every single store had been smashed, along with the windshields of some cars parked on the street. It seems that just two hours earlier, a group of about forty anarchist youths had run through the streets of Kolonaki's shopping district with sledgehammers, smashing everything they could.

Only two hours after the fact, some people were already replacing the glass, while others just stood outside surveying the damage or milling around in the street. Apparently most of the same shops were destroyed, burned, and looted only three months ago in mid-December, which may have accounted for the grim resignation on most people's faces.

There were hardly any police to be seen, and when I heard a horrified American tourist couple ask a bored and resigned-looking clerk smoking a cigarette on her store's stoop why the police weren't there and hadn't done anything, and she just shrugged and explained, "the police never do anything. It's not a surprise."

This was interesting, because when I first got to Greece, I wondered why there were so many policemen, wandering around in clumps and hanging out on street corners, but I never saw a single one stopping anyone for not wearing a helmet on a moped (which is required by law but about half of all riders don't wear them) following the speed limits, or running red lights-- especially as many Greek drivers like to do all three simultaneously. In all seriousness, I asked one of my professors whether Greece even HAD a speed limit, and she just laughed and explained that of course there is a limit-- it's just never enforced. The police apparently don't think it's their job to do day-to-day things like traffic stops or busting underage drinking (not that there's a drinking age in Greece, but still)-- they're there for the "big" situations, which I guess is why spend a lot of time standing around looking intimidating and showing off their automatic rifles. I do have to give it to them-- it's generally pretty tough to look scary in a beret, but they definitely pull it off.

Good example: about a month ago, I found a wallet with no money in it (of course) but still containing some ID cards that, given the world-famous efficiency of Greek bureaucracy, would probably be agonizingly difficult for their owner to replace. My first impulse of course was to give it to the policeman I saw about a block away, but when I tried to hand it to him, he looked at me like I was crazy and asked, (and I was SO proud that I understood this in Greek!!!) "What? What do you want ME to do with it?" I gave up and just took it to my school and let them deal with it, but it was a very strange experience.

Anyway, given that there are usually clumps of policemen on every major corner, and that they are only around for the "big problems," it seemed odd to me that the police clearly had made a minimal effort to stop the youths, as they were able to completely destroy the storefronts of at least five blocks that I saw in broad daylight in the middle of a weekday.














I think the most surprising thing for me was how little emotion the shopkeepers or people on the streets were showing, besides the horror-struck tourists. They were certainly upset, but in a much more resigned way than I would have expected after a similar event in America. To them, I guess this was just another in a long series of disappointments and senseless destructions that they had dealt with before, and had come to terms with the fact that they would likely be suffering from again. Some of the shops had already begun to replace the broken glass, only two hours after the attack. I couldn't decide whether this attitude was positive in a "the show must go on" kind of way, or depressing in that everyone seemed so resigned to the fact that these problems are not going away anytime soon.

I'll go with the positive, but that might just be the American optimist in me.

there are lots of cats in athens

Today, on my way home from school, I walked past a very elegant and somehow manly-looking black cat with bright green eyes and a small white spot on his chest sitting up regally on the seat of a black motorcyle. I was really bummed that I didn't have my camera with me, because I would have called it, "Tall Dark Stranger on a Hot Ride." Har har har...

περιμένω ταξί

There's an old saying (is it an old saying? Or did my friend just make it up?) that you don't seek adventures, they find you. That seems to happen most often when you take taxis in Athens.

Before any of this will make sense, a general overview of cabs in Athens: Taxis are incredibly inexpensive. The minimum fare is 1.20 euro and it doesn't go up very quickly from there, so the average fare ends up being something like 3.50 or so. This means that the drivers don't make very much money, so to increase their profit, they'll take multiple passengers with slightly different destinations at the same time, and will turn you down if they don't feel like going where you want to go, particularly if the distance is too short to make it worth their time. This refusal happens more frequently than not, which explains why one of the first phrases we learned in Modern Greek 101 was "περιμένω ταξί"-- I wait for a taxi.

To catch a cab, you either find one with the light on, which means it is completely empty, or hail one that's already carrying a passenger and yell out the name of the area of the city you want as the driver cracks the window and slows down slightly. If the driver's already headed in that direction, or if he decides that you look like enough of a tourist that he can probably take you on a more expensive and roundabout route, he'll stop and make the other passenger scoot over to make room for you. This works because Greeks aren't very into the idea of personal space or privacy, which is what makes the trips so interesting. Greeks love to ask you questions, even those that at first seem a bit personal, like grinning and pointing to your belly before hollering, "PREGNANT?? BABY???" (No, sir, no baby. And I am officially never wearing this shirt again.)

Every time you get in a cab, the driver will ask you where you're from, what you're doing in Athens, and how you feel about Obama. (Hint: an enthusiastic response here is definitely the correct answer, and the fastest way to make new friends. The Greeks love Obama.) The old man you're sharing the cab with will then chime in with his opinions on American Politics in a combination of Greek and broken English, and then he'll ask you something like why Americans are so fat, or whether or not I know his cousins from New Jersey.

On Monday, I fell and turned my ankle about a block into the 30 minute entirely uphill trek home, so I decided that although it wasn't too bad, I should probably catch a taxi home rather than walking the entire way on my ankle. (Turns out that was a good plan, since it's still a bit sore now, on Thursday!) I hailed a cab, which already had a middle-aged woman in it, and we were off for Kolonaki. After the ritual conversation about where I was from, the woman explained that she was from Georgia-- Russian Georgia, not the American state. She seemed very pleased that Bush had gotten very drunk with their President on his most recent visit. All went well until we approached my street, which the driver had not heard of, and is one-way and difficult to reach. After compromising on an alternate drop-off point several blocks from my apartment, I went to pay, which is done by mentally calculating the difference between the fare when you got in and the fare when you exit. After arguing over the fact that I only had 10 euro bills and the fare was 3 euro, (a conversation in which the Georgian woman participated heatedly) I gave him 2 euro in change culled from my jacket and the grungy bottom of my backpack and was on my merry way.

Yesterday, I decided that it was probably finally time to do my laundry, as upon investigation of my empty underwear drawer, I forced to wear a bikini bottom instead. This was after I had accumulated about a month's worth of dirty clothes due to a combination of travelling and dreading the long walk to and from the school to do my laundry. (School is the only practical place to do laundry, because although the washers take 2 hours to get clothes somewhat clean and the washers take 3 hours to get the laundry from wet to moist, it's free. There are no self-service laundromats here, and laundry service starts at 10 euro a kilo, which is about 2.2 pounds-- and the average load of laundry is 8 pounds. You do the math.) Since my ankle was still a bit sore, I decided to get a cab to and from school, as the 6 euro fare to school and back was still much better than paying to get it done.

(I forgot to mention the final option for laundry--doing it in the bathtub. I tried this once, and it was a horrific experience I vowed to never attempt again, even before it took four days for my underwear to dry hanging out the window, at which point two pairs had disappeared forever onto the street below. I have a new-found appreciation for both pioneer women and my trusty American Maytag.)

After wrestling my enormous body-bag sized duffel of laundry into the cab, I asked the drier to take me to the Panathenaic Stadium Kallimarmaro, which is right next to my school. The driver had no idea where this was, which is mind-boggling, because it is enormous and a major Athenian landmark. Things only got better after he picked up another old man (who barely fit in the backseat with my duffel) , who helped me tell the driver where the stadium was--after, of course, explaining where I was from and what I was doing in Greece, and that yes, I was aware that I had a large zit, but no, it was not a disease, although that's very interesting that it looked just like that when your sister had impetigo.

Well, it looks like I won't have time to detail the trip back, because I have to eat lunch and do my Greek homework (yes, mom and dad, I actually have homework), but it involved a crazy woman who claimed to speak Italian and Egyptian and a scenic tour of the entire southeastern corner of Athens... when I was trying to get to the Northeastern corner. Stay tuned.

I'm alive! I promise!!

I am so sorry it's taken me so long to update this-- I think I felt like I couldn't update it until I had something brilliant to say, and also felt that once I updated it, I had to immediately cover everything that's happened in the last month and a half-- which got more and more intimidating, to the point that I just never wrote anything at all. BUT, I've decided that it's better to just start and not worry about it being perfect, so to that end, my first post isn't going to be about Greece at all. Well, I suppose it is tangentially, because being in Greece has reaffirmed my decision to go into museum studies, but in and of itself, it's not.

Anyway, I subscribe to a museum listserv, which is basically people who work in museums posting emails about anything from "Help! How does your museum store branding irons?" to "Problem with Difficult Coworker-- Please Advise" to my personal favorite: "Summer Internships for 2009." Anyway, there was an email today about a temporary slightly above entry-level museum position that had just been announced:

"Museum Project Assistant. Bachelor's degree in Museum Studies or History preferred with three months experience. Individual must have proficiency in CONTENT and or Past/Perfect. Individual must have experience in image editing software (Adobe Photoshop), creating metadata and transcriptions, and general interest or knowledge about Osteopathy and Osteopathic Medicine. Individual must also have experience in reading handwritten manuscripts and be proficient in computer operating systems."

Guess what this position, with its education and experience requirements, pays?

$8.58 an hour. $8.58 AN HOUR. With benefits, but still!!! You can make more than that babysitting!!!

Oh, well... You do what you love, and the money will follow...?

I promise I will update soon with lots of fascinating tales of my life in Greece. (and Turkey!)

Testing 1-2-3

Testing how to write posts and put up photos, using some pictures from a Greek dinner of stuffed peppers, zucchini fritters, and stuffed grape leaves I made with my friends!

TESTING TESTING

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