Jungle Vision

From where I sit: The €50 billion flap

2011-02-15T13:17:00.002+02:00

From where I sit - an incredibly infrequent set of observations on various affairs from Athens, Greece.

I-R-P-C - The Iron Rule of Press Conferences: you will hear far more yawns than gasps.

So when a room full of Greek journalists went into a simultaneous conniption at last Friday’s EU-IMF-ECB, i.e. Troika, press conference it was a good sign that something had gone horribly wrong.

The O₂suckage in-question was induced by European Union representative Servaas DeRoose’s announcement that the Greek government plans to privatize some €50 billion in state-run enterprises and property over the next few years, €15 billion this year, mainly from the sale of state property.

“Excuse me, Mr. DeRoose,” one Greek journalist asked, apparently disbelieving the translation coming through her headset. “Did you say 5-0 or 1-5 … billion?”

“The first one was 5-0, the second one was 1-5,” DeRoose replied.

DeRoose’s smirk did not seem so much arrogant as it was excruciatingly uncomfortable. This presser was about to take an ugly turn and with it, perhaps, damage the cordial relations that had existed thus far, at least at an elite level, between the Greek government and its international lifeline. Relations between the Troika and the Greek public, on the other hand, are about as good as, say, those between Hosni Mubarak and Tahrir Square.

You see how that worked out.

The IMF’s Paul Thomsen immediately went into damage control before fielding the first salvo of journalistic zingers. Loosely paraphrased: Of course we do not expect Greece to sell off its cultural heritage, like the Acropolis, but …

Too late.

WARNING: Foul language ahead, unsuitable for younger audiences, international technocrats or potential employers. (You can see my other lovely writing samples here.)

€50 billion is a lot of F***ing money, especially in Greece.

Granted, OSE, Greece’s train operator has about €10 billion in debt and probably about €1 billion in assets (the first number is official, the second one not-so-much), so in theory that’s a good chunk of the target. But what are the odds that some Greek or international investor is going to take on all of that debt? Not likely. Granted, just getting that annual red ink off of Greece’s books would be an accomplishment even if the state has to deal with the current debt.

It’s hard to imagine what else the Greek government could move, and quickly, that would have an impact in so many billions of euros without an even greater social cost. As the Greek media reminded anyone paying attention, moving property in Greece is a murderous, chaotic bureaucratic process that takes years.

The reporters in the room reeled with the realization (which, by the way, was not included in either the Greek or the English press release handed to us at the start of the conference) and tried to come to grips with exactly what €50 billion would mean. Western European jokes about selling islands and monuments from spring 2010 collide with memories of the ‘Washington Consensus’ that led Eastern Europe on the road to privatization, and some would argue, nowhere. Balkan cousins Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Yugoslavia, like Greece, possessed woefully underproductive industries and utilities that the locals wanted to fiercely defend and international buyers weren’t sure were worth much at all.

When the zingers came, and boy did they come, Thomsen became uncharacteristically vehement. Again, loosely paraphrased: Do not be fooled by those who have a vested interest in controlling these social goods.

More than ever before, Mr. Thomsen seems to be suffering from the Athens strain of Stockholm Syndrome; that disease that afflicts foreigners who come to rescue Greece in a crisis and then fall hopelessly in love with this strange, beautiful, and-did-I-mention strange country. He is in good company with a host of former American and British officials this reporter has come across over the years who are taking up do-good causes that the Greeks seem to have little interest in themselves.

(This reporter, it should be noted, has been diagnosed with a similar contagion.)

Thomsen’s scoffing at quasi-state fat-cats who mobilize their respective masses by talking about capitalist fat-cats will and clearly did fall on deaf ears. After a bit of a lull, Athens is due for another bruising week of transport strikes (transportation being probably privatization target numero uno, αριθμό πρώτο) and marches.

Thomsen spoke of privatization being a benefit to Greeks. That’s one tough pill to swallow for a wanna-be-socialist country, literally. Take pills. There are a number of price controls that suit Greeks just fine, especially in pharmacies. It’s amazing the kind of drugs you can get in a Greek pharmacy for about €1 that in the States you would pay an arm and a leg for. Sure there are no 24-hour Walgreens, but you can find a Pharmakeio on almost every block and sometimes even more. These professions should be more open, in theory, but it’s not clear that Greeks have an issue with pharmacies as they are. (feel free to comment)

Or take transportation. A train ride between Greece and Thessaloniki is about €20. A bus from the airport to Athens’ center, just €5. Until recently, 90 minutes on all inner-Athens public transport cost just €1. It’s still less than €1.50, which puts Athens below Rome, Paris, London and New York. A month card used to be €35 and now it’s €45. Annoying, but not back-breaking. All of these brand-new forms of transport are perennial money-losers, with state subsidies. Sure, an international company would love to have all of these physical assets – bought thanks to the 2004 Olympic spirit and kept ‘well-maintained’ (read: under-utlized thanks to strikes). But there’s no way a private company could or would keep the fares at the level they are now. A lot of people would suffer.

Such is the dilemma between social and market pricing of goods.

Perhaps the biggest question this reporter walked away with was what happened to the big issue that was supposed to dominate this press conference?

Will Greece have to re-structure its sovereign debt?

Several think-tanks and many more analysts have said yes. Others say Greece can do a mild re-structuring by lengthening or delaying re-payment (something that’s going on informally with many Greek institutions already, based on anecdotal evidence and observations). At the 2nd Troika review joint press conference (this was the 3rd) the same cast of characters (minus translators) adamantly rejected both a restructuring or Greece leaving the EuroZone. We don’t know if they feel that way now because no one at the presser asked (though perhaps they did in side interviews). Sure people know what the reps there would say but it’s surprising no one really tried.

The Greek government responded vehemently that Deroose’s comments were ‘inaccurate’. What does that mean exactly? Past flaps have been a combination of miscommunication, too much communication and ‘Greek duplicity’ i.e. the government makes up its mind about something and then finds out right-quick that it just won’t fly with the Greek public and acts like it was misrepresented. The brief Troika statement issued on Saturday didn’t really clear things up. As of today, the consensus seems to be that the Troika should have waited for the government to say something first.

International followers of Greece’s ongoing, yet now largely forgotten crisis (thank you, Ireland, Portugal, Egypt), may be disappointed that the big question regarding their countries’ and companies’ investments in Greece went unaddressed. The Troika representatives present were clearly disappointed that their message of ‘respect for the Greek people’ for some reason got overshadowed by the €50 BILLION privatization of socially-priced assets.

That’s what you get when you make a press conference way too interesting.

Suspended Indefinitely

2010-11-08T13:20:00.000+02:00

On Friday November 5, 2010 someone hacked into my gmail and facebook accounts. It took the whole weekend to get things straightened out with gmail and I'm still waiting on facebook.

During this time I was cut off from the blog entirely.

I've been debating winding Jungle Vision down for awhile now. Since my freelance work has picked up, I haven't had as much time to write, and often I don't want to cut off my own copy by posting my material online. Several of the outlets I work for don't put my work online so I also hadn't had a lot of opportunities to re-post links.

Still, it's important to have a platform to display my work, although perhaps without the jungle associations, which no one except my closest friends understood. And even they were usually confused.

So Jungle Vision is heading toward greener pastures.

And I'm heading to various offices to try to prevent my total identity theft...

Greek-American politicians coming down to the wire

2010-10-28T21:24:00.001+03:00

Election 2010 could be a watershed or a wipe-out year for Greek-American politicians.

Hellenic membership in Congress currently skews Democratic with five Democrats to two Republicans. All but one Greek-American legislator – Sen. Olympia Snowe – are up for re-election. Four of those Democrats were elected during their party’s resurgence 2006-2008 and usually these incumbents would seem anchored in their districts. But commentators have been predicting one of the most anti-incumbent, or anti-Democrat, election years in decades. So the same Greek-American Democrats who helped their party sweep into Congress could be swept right out. Meanwhile, Greek-American Republican challengers are looking to capitalize on that mood in their own districts.

If the incumbents hang on and the challengers exploit the current climate, Greek-American representation in Congress could crack double-digits for the first time. Then again, it is theoretically possible that the incumbents could fall and the newcomers fail to impress, leaving just Snowe in office. This swing makes Election 2010 perhaps one of the most important in Greek-American political history.

THE INCUMBENTS

Shelley Berkley
Democrat, Nevada District 1

Shelley Berkley’s Greek-Jewish grandmother Rachelle Torres narrowly averted two disasters when she left Thessaloniki with her parents for the United States in 1916. A fire razed the unofficial capital of the Balkans in 1917and the Holocaust during WWII exterminated the city’s Jewish population.

"What are the odds of being a granddaughter of a woman who got out of (Thessaloniki), and today being a congresswoman?" Berkley was quoted as saying in the Las Vegas Review-Journal after a visit to Greece in 2003.

Born Rochelle Levine in New York, Berkley’s family moved to Nevada in her teenage years. She graduated from the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) with a bachelor’s in political science in 1972 before earning her law degree at the University of San Diego.

Berkley, 59, was first elected to represent urban Las Vegas (district 1) in 1998 and in her six terms has become a power player. The question for Berkley is not so much re-election in 2010 but what she will do in 2012. Republican Kenneth Wegner is running against her for the third straight time, but considering Berkley took the poll in 2008 with 68 percent of the vote the incumbent looks like a safe bet. Berkley told Politico in June that she’s interested in running for the seat of currently disgraced Republican Senator John Ensign in 2012. (Ensign admitted to having an affair with a former staffer.)

Already Berkley is distinguishing between herself and pack. Unlike Nevada’s Democratic Senator and Majority Leader Harry Reid, Berkley has supported the building of an Islamic cultural center in Manhattan, i.e. the Ground Zero Mosque, on constitutional grounds.

"Given the fact that my family and people in my religion have suffered so much from religious persecution, I cannot see how I can speak out against other minority religions in this country and their free exercise of their own religion," she told the review-journal in August.

Gus Bilirakis
Republican, Florida District 9

Gus Bilirakis, a second-generation Greek-American, occupies the opposite side of the political spectrum from Berkley. First elected in 2006, Bilirakis assumed a seat left warm by his father, Republican Rep. Michael Bilirakis, who retired after 23 years in Congress. The younger Bilirakis had worked as a lawyer and served eight years in the Florida legislature.

Arguably the most ardent Hellenist of the Greek-American Congressman, Bilirakis co-chairs of the Hellenic Caucus. He has thoroughly grilled Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Greek issues such as the now-completed visa-waiver program and the “name issue” with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. His most adamant foreign policy missions have been supporting the property rights of Greek Cypriots and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople.

Though he bills himself as bipartisan, Bilirakis has, like most Republicans, moved in lock-step against almost every Democratic and Obama Administration proposal. Bilirakis did endorse the administration’s new plan for Afghanistan (other than the timeline bit) and thoroughly questioned Secretary Clinton on whether general David Petraeus would change policy after general Stanley McChrystal was ousted.

Like Berkley, Bilirakis is expected to win re-election handily having already raised more than $350,000 cash on hand. He has an unexpected opponent since Hispanic advocate Anita de Palma upset Phil Hindahl for the Democratic nomination in the August primary. Immigration is the hot button issue Bilirakis and de Palma differ on the most. Bilirakis favors tougher border controls and “no amnesty” while his opponent is calling for a “sensible” policy.

Another thing Bilirakis has in common with Berkley (as well as Dina Titus and Zack Space) is that he signed onto the Greek News “Visit Greece” campaign to try to get more Americans to boost his ancestral country’s tourism revenue.

“I encourage people to go to homeland, to Mother Greece this summer,” Bilirakis said, adding that he planned to take his family to Greece in August. “Please, help out the Greek economy as well by going to our Greece.”

John Sarbanes
Democrat, Maryland District 3

John Sarbanes and Bilirakis belong to different parties but they are both dynastic Greek-American politicians.

The Sarbanes family hails from Laconia, Greece and John’s grandparents first made the family name as owners of Mayflower Restaurant on Main Street in Salisbury, Maryland. John’s father Paul went on to become a US Senator and is best known for co-sponsoring the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform act, passed in 2002 after Enron and MCI Worldcom bilked billions.

The younger Sarbanes won election to Congress in 2006, the same year his father retired, and Democrats capitalized on anti-Iraq War sentiment to take control of both houses of Congress. Despite an anti-incumbent mood, Sarbanes has the inside track. He has more than $750,000 on hand and his GOP opponent had to fight through a 10 person primary scrum.

On July 20, Sarbanes blasted Turkey for its occupation of Cyprus in an editorial published in both The Hill and The Huffington Post.

“On this, the 36th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Cyprus, the United States should demand an immediate withdrawal of the 45,000 Turkish soldiers now occupying northern Cyprus. Until that occurs, policymakers in the White House and in the Congress must press the issue in every conversation with their Turkish counterparts.”

Zack Space
Democrat, Ohio district 18

Zack Space’s grandfather emigrated from Greece to the United States and earned his citizenship fighting for the American military in World War I. His father, Socrates Space, also fought for the US Army in Korea and studied at the Ohio State University law school on the GI Bill.

Congressman Space followed his father’s footsteps into the law field and in 2006 made the jump into politics at the height of anti-Bush, anti-war sentiment. Space blew away fill-in candidate Joy Padgett (the incumbent Bob Ney withdrew due to legal woes) with the largest margin of victory (62 to 38 percent) of any Democrat that year.

An official trip to Greece during his first year in office caused a minor PR scuffle. Space had joined the Hellenic Caucus and in November 2007 traveled to Greece and Cyprus. Space switched to a less luxurious hotel after word broke that the State Department had arranged for the delegation to stay at the $400/night Grande Bretagne in Athens’ Syntagma Square, on the taxpayers’ dime.

In 2008, Space won re-election by another 20-point margin, dispelling accusations that he had been a fluke winner but likely benefiting from the “Obama bounce.”

The Republicans have not given up on Space’s district and Election 2010 will not likely be as easy as the last two races. Space has kept his ear to the concerns of farmers in his rural district and used his two terms to champion ethics reform, economic growth and modernization (before the recession hit) but faces a strong challenge from Republican state legislator Joe Gibbs. Polls have put Gibbs close behind and possibly tied with Space.

Dina Titus
Democrat, Nevada district 3

Democrats in Republican-leaning territory like Dina Titus rode the coattails of Barack Obama’s popularity (and George W. Bush’s unpopularity) to Congress in 2008. The pendulum has swung back the other direction and Titus may find herself on the wrong side.

The UNLV professor and longtime state legislator won her seat with less than 50 percent of the vote in 2008. She was criticized for so aggressively, and perhaps unfairly, welding George W. Bush’s policies to her challenger, then-incumbent Joe Porter.

In 2010, Bush is nowhere in sight and Obama is losing his magic. After the House passed the controversial healthcare reform bill, Titus lagged badly in the polls behind Republican challenger Joe Heck. Since then, she has recovered to take a slight lead, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s August poll.

Re-election may be in question but Titus’ Hellenic bona fides are not. When she was growing up in the 50s and 60s her family had to travel 125 miles from their Georgia home to get olives and feta. Her grandfather came to America through Ellis Island, and “the ‘coffee table’ in her Papou’s downtown restaurant was always occupied by local politicos arguing about current issues,” according to her campaign website.

Also ran…

George Demos
Republican, New York District 1

A strange sequence of events resulted in George Demos’ Hellenism, or rather his Greek Orthodox faith, putting him on not just the New York 1 map, but the national scene. Demos – an apt name for a politician –argued that there should be no mosque at Ground Zero before St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church (crushed on September 11, 2001) is allowed to re-build.

“I disagree with President Obama’s assertion (in favor of the mosque),” Demos said. “I happen to believe that the mosque being built in this location is inappropriate, provocative and wrong. But at least we can certainly agree that the St. Nicholas Church … must be rebuilt.”

The former SEC prosecutor will have to wait until at least 2012 for another shot at representing the lost in the September 14 New York Republican primary to Randy Altschuler.

THE CHALLENGERS

Charlie Crist
Independent, Senate, Florida

Two years ago, Gov. Charlie Crist was a GOP darling, whispered as a possible vice presidential candidate. Now he’s running for a vacant Senate seat as an Independent.

An odd outcome for a man who once campaigned saying that his immigrant family bucked the trend and went, business, i.e. Republican when it arrived to the US from Cyprus in the early twentieth century. In the 1940s, his father, a doctor, legally shortened the family name from Christodoulou to Crist. Charlie Crist was born in Altoona, PA on July 24, 1956, in the same town where his father shined shoes for $5 a day, according to The New York Times.

Crist’s career included working as a legal counsel for major league baseball, a stint in the state senate, two years as education commissioner and four years as Florida’s attorney general (2002-2006). In 2006, Crist kept the governor’s mansion in Republican hands (Jeb Bush was limited to two terms) defeating Democrat Jim Davis 52-45 percent.

Election 2010 will be Crist’s second shot at a spot in the Senate since he lost badly (26 points) as the Republican challenger to Bob Graham in 1998. But he won’t have the support of the Republican Party this time.

As governor, Crist pursued a pragmatic agenda. This moderation served him well until 2009 when he embraced the Obama Adminstration’s federal stimulus plan (i.e., the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA). Despite his pro-gun, anti-abortion, tough on crime approach, he became ostracized from a party that is trying to focus on fiscal discipline this election cycle.

Some wonder why Crist is running for Senate at all when he could still serve one more term as Florida’s governor. Crist said in a January article in The New York Times Magazine that Washington has now become the financial and political capital of the country due to the ongoing economic downturn. Most Republicans (publicly) resent that fact but Crist seems to embrace it.

His opponent for the GOP nomination, Marco Rubio, has the opposite mantra. A favorite of the Tea Party, he favors tax and spending cuts. Crist started an independent campaign and left the GOP in late April when it became apparent that his early primary polling lead had turned into a deficit. What should have been an easy win for a Republican (the Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek is polling at less than 20 percent) has turned into an internecine bloodbath between Rubio and Crist with the leader swinging wildly depending on the poll. (A Reuters/Ipsos poll published September 15 found Crist trailing 26-40 behind Rubio.)

If Crist does pull out a victory, he will be the first Independent Greek-American senator.

Alexi Giannoulias
Democrat, Senate, Illinois

Chicago is the hub of Greek-American culture yet no Greek-American politicians had emerged from Greektown (old or new) onto the national stage before Alexi Giannoulias.

At 34 years-old, not yet old enough to run for President, the current Illinois state treasurer (elected in 2006) has been a political boy wonder. His star looks to keep rising since his backers include none other than Barack Obama, the man who used to hold the seat Giannoulias covets.

Giannoulias’ meteoric rise looks rather orderly. He graduated cum laude in economics from Boston University and earned his law degree from Tulane University. In-between he played a season of basketball in Greece for Panionios. Shortly thereafter he worked as Vice Preisdent of the business (Broadway Bank) opened by his late father in 1979. (Broadway Bank was taken over by the FDIC on April 23, 2010.)

His Greek background has caused a bit of chaos (a Greek word) in his Senate campaign.

In 2009, The Chicago Tribune ran an expose, accusing one of Giannoulias’ Greek-American advisors (Endy Zemenides) of trying to influence a Greek-American Provost (Linda Katehi) at the University of Illinois on behalf of a Greek-American applicant. The plot thickened with connections to a politically connected Greek Orthodox priest (Rev. Alexander Karloutsos) and a Greek-American billionaire (Michael Jaharis, who has contributed heavily to Giannoulias’ campaign). Giannoulias was exonerated in the court of public opinion of wrongdoing.

Greece’s fiscal and financial troubles have given ammunition to Giannoulias’ opponent, Republican Rep. Mark Kirk. Kirk, like many Republicans, has worked the Greek crisis time and again into speeches about fiscal responsibility. These comments, however, are often coupled with references to Kirk serving in Kosovo while Giannoulias was playing basketball in Greece. Local media and national outlets – such as the Huffington Post, owned by Greek-American magnate Ariana Huffington – have accused Kirk of intentionally bringing up the Greek crisis to slander Giannoulias by ethnic association.

Whether the Greek crisis smear tactics are working are as hard to tell as the race itself. Polls have put Kirk and Giannoulias neck-and-neck with Kirk often holding a 2 point lead, within the margin of error, according to Real Clear Politics.

Dean Scontras
Republican, Maine District 3

Dean Scontras’ election 2008 campaign stalled when he lost in the Republican primary. A Silicon Valley veteran, Scontras called himself “Republican 2.0” and used social media get his message out. These attempts included an aide posting “Get a Greek-American elected to Congress!” on the facebook group “American by birth, Greek by the grace of God.”

In 2010, Scontras ran unopposed for the GOP nomination.

The second-generation Greek-American’s endorsements have ranged from moderate --former Governor Mitt Romney – to the conservative, almost libertarian Tea Party. He has proven to be an able fundraiser, especially from the Greek-American community.

“We as a community are an affluent group,” Scontras told the American Hellenic Institute in November 2007. “We have a lot to contribute. Unless we reach a certain level of representation, we will not be able to make a difference.”

That representation could increase dramatically if the 2010 class of Greek-American politicians win and the incumbents can hold on in a turbulent midterm election year.

The Aghios Pantelaimonas Residence Association Up Close

2010-10-11T22:50:00.000+03:00

Not exactly the scariest right-winger
I've ever seen...because she's not one.

The Aghios Pantelaimonas Residence Association does not strike you as a band of right-wing nationalists. They don’t even seem comfortable leading a protest.

If anything this middle-aged bunch looks more like Oprah’s Book Club.

(And you can decide which group is more militant.)

Monday night, the Association held a “secret” demonstration – or as secret as you can make a demonstration – to keep away the right-wing group (read: Chrysi Avgi) that had attached itself to the association’s protests against the deterioration of the old city center, largely pinned on migrants. A group of about 20-30 men and women, only two of which looked younger than 35, marched through the neighborhood from an Everest café on Patission Avenue with white picket signs and planned to stomp all the way to the Greek Parliament, about 5 kilometers away. (After about an hour of zig-zagging through “Ag. P” they decided to take a trolley.)

The group tried to make it clear who and what they are against: mafia, Dublin II, government indifference and, most notably, fascists.

The sign on the right says "The
neighborhoods of the center
will not become Guantanamo."

Marina Vixou, wearing a flattering red jacket, I might add, worked the bullhorn with those old-time crowd favorites like:

“Chrysi Avgi is calling the Ghettos of Athens because of government indifference.”

“Our neighborhoods will not become Guantanamo.”

“Greeks, foreigners, we all despise Dublin II.”

The signs in the crowd read:

“MAFIA OUT!”

“Fascism, never again.”

After actually attending the group’s rally (sans right-wingers) you find that their positions are pretty reasonable. Dublin II has made Greece the prison of Europe. Years of legal limbo and government indifference to the root causes of migrants’ problems led to the festering of drug and counterfeit goods peddling.

Right-wing groups are certainly looking to capitalize but this Association shows no interest in cooperating.

Trouble Brewing in Athens' Historic Center

2010-10-09T16:04:00.001+03:00

Aghios Pantelaimonas. The massive
church that give its name to the
most contentious neighborhood
in Athens.

The battlelines drawn in Athens' historic center have created some strange bedfellows.

In this corner: right-wing nationalists and the Aghios Pantelaimonas Neighborhood Association.

And over here: Anarchists and Migrants.

Both sides have their gripes with the Greek government. If the country were able to protect its borders, there wouldn't be migrants sleeping on the streets. Migrants aren't exactly thrilled to be on those streets. If they were able to migrate legally more easily (to someplace other than Greece) or if refugees could obtain asylum status and receive services then they wouldn't be in such destitute condition.

Afghan refugees feel particularly abused. A translator for Doctors of the World was beat up badly in September resulting in the leader of the Center for Afghan Migrants and Refugees to packing up from Aghios Pantelaimonas and going elsewhere.

"Hands down from the Migrants."

"We have a map and I've drawn a red line around the city center, meaning 'do not go here,'" said Muhamadi Younis, the center's leader. "When I worked as an interpreter for the Red Cross in Afghanistan we did this to tell people where the fighting was really bad. Here in Greece we need it too."

Friday night, this reporter went to Plateia Attikis to see the Migrant/Anarchist demonstration. The Right-Wing/Neighborhood Association one was going on at the same time in Aghios Pantelaimonas but they have a reputation for hostile attitudes toward journalists. Anarchists aren't big fans of cameras and microphones either despite the fact that they are protected by law from having photos used against them in court. But Middle Easterners, who should be petrified, take pictures and video of everything.

Migrants and anarchists taking
turns on the mic.

Anarchists and migrants shared a square with grisly Greeks dressed in black pounding Amstels next to Muslim women in colorful headscarves holding their children. They took turns on the microphone surrounded by an impenetrably huge crowd.

A migrant woman speaking in Greek said, "The mothers of Afghanistan send their boys away to be safe. What do they say now that they are on the streets, hooked on narcotics?" (Migrants from the Middle East have become tell-tale users and pushers of drugs in the city center.)

"Nations and armies are in Afghanistan and we give them respect," said an Afghan man in English. "But nowhere in this world do we find respect."

Friday Fun/Παρασκεύη Παρτύ: Zorba's Dance

2010-10-01T10:39:00.000+03:00

To close out this week of Cretan delight it seemed fitting to share something of the island's modern history. Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis' everyman of the 20th century, captured the hearts of the world when it was turned into a movie in 1964.

The following scene shows the Athens Egghead learn how to dance from the salt of the earth.

Dance? Did you say, Dance?!

Happy in Hania

2010-09-29T23:51:00.001+03:00

This gentleman in the lovely hat is the custodian of
Hania's lovely waterfront.

The third and final installment of a series on journeys in Crete with College Year in Athens.

The Western port town of Hania (Chania, Χανιά) was supposed to be a mere overnight host for our weary band before and after trekking the Samaria Gorge. Mother Nature had other ideas. Any injury within the gorge entails a 4 hour donkey ride out. Nobody wants that. So the powers that be (wisely in this scribe's view) decided that if there was any chance of precipitation to call off the gorge hike.

So then the question became what in the world can we possibly do in Hania?

Quite a bit it turns out.

Our marquee event was a walking tour of Hania, which features some of the most spectacular architecture in Greece since it has been consistently prosperous for centuries.

Of course you can't get away from history anywhere in Greece, especially not Hania.

"You are standing on one of the most important Minoan Palaces," one of our professors announced when our contingent of 60 students or so reached an otherwise unassuming intersection. The stares of bewilderment and shock may have indicated our band had endured one pre-historic site too many.

So our company, or Team Awesome as we called ourselves, exited stage left shortly thereafter to see all this town had to offer us for our grande finale on Crete.

The famous lighthouse at Hania.
Reconstructed in time for the 2004 Olympics.
Beautiful at night.

Like the other major churches on Crete
the Orthodox Cathedral in Hania features
a number of different architectural styles
aside from the traditional Byzantine.

The old Mosque on the waterfront.
Have to admit it looks like something out of
1960s or 70s not the 1660s or 70s.

Boathouse row. Some say this has been where Hania's ships
have been kept since the Minoan period just built and rebuilt
time after time.

Re-make of a Minoan ship. Sheer awesome.

Ah, lest we forget Hania is a modern Greek city.
The conflicts between police and youth have not
been confined to the Greek capital alone.

This shopping mall with the neoclassical facade
reminds me of the Arcade in Providence, the US' first
indoor shopping mall. Inside you immediately get a whiff
of pungent spices. Sadly, the rest of the shops are pretty standard tourist fare,
which is odd because it's somewhat off of the beaten path.

And right here you have what sets Hania apart;
the beauty of its 'old town.
Narrow streets, pretty flowers, friendly people.
Less concrete, more culture.
That's what it is to be happy in Hania...

Off the Cretan Path

2010-09-28T17:31:00.001+03:00

Part two of three in a series of photo-posts on Crete.

Your typical trip to Crete takes one of two forms; a quick archaeological expedition to Knossos or wild debauchery at a place like Malia.

Having already done option number 1, and consciously avoiding option number 2, our contingent from CYA headed to sites in the interior of Crete on our way from Irakleion to Hania.
Unlike the site of Knossos which leans heavily 2010 BC, this leg of the trip offered a look at Cretan culture up to 2010 AD.

The Palace at Phaestos quenched our Minoan lust. Gortyn filled us in on Crete's role in Classical and Roman Greece (with a bit of a cheesey tie into the mythological dimension). The Monastery of Arkadi took us through the Byzantine and Venetian period up to the Cretan War of Independence. On a lighter note, we got to go the beach at the hippie haven of Matala.

The Palace at Phaestos. Unlike its labyrinthine contemporary
at Knossos, Phaestos had a bit more open space to work with.
Its designers also had the common sense to put the palace
at the top of a hill instead of in a valley though they weren't quite
as up to speed on the plumbing end of things. The high point did have
its drawbacks since part of the palace did eventually fall down a cliff.

As I said to my colleagues while we walked through the beautiful and usually closed
archaeological site of Kommos: these ruins tell me a lot about how to waste prime real estate.
Seriously, how did people just decide not to use these sites for thousands of years?
Oh as far as the history goes this maybe been the spot where one of Menelaus' oarsmen was
buried. (Menelaus being the cuckolded husband of Helen.)

Ah, Matala. Just as the Greek military dictatorship was taking control
of Greece in April 1967, LIFE magazine did a cover spread on
the hippies who took over the Roman cemetery caves you can make out in the distance.
For the hippies it made a lot of sense. Free accommodations in a warm clime right next to the beach.
Still, no one was able to answer for me why the Romans took the time to carve out those caves
in the first place.

This just looked really cool.

This couple tries to re-enact a 19th century romantic portrait
at the ruins of Aghios Titos basilica, i.e. St. Titus. This site was
one of the holiest in antiquity as it's believed that Zeus consummated
his rape of Europa here. As the story goes Titos then came here to convert
Crete to Christianity with great success.

The Odeion at Gortyn. Why not an amphitheater you ask?
It probably had a cover. Ergo, an Odeion.

THE LAW CODE OF GORTYN.
If Plato mentioned it in two lines of his Laws it had to be pretty decent.

According to the sign, this is the very same tree
upon which Zeus made it with Europa.
Maybe the Greeks here missed the Ag. Titos memo that the
island converted to Christianity a little while back...

Instead of showing you some boring pictures of the cemetery at Phourni
I thought a bunch of skeletons would be way cooler.
These guys have found their final resting place in an increasingly popular museum nearby.
"There is a problem with this museum," one of the employees there said to a group.
"People are actually coming here."

The main church of the Arkadi Monastery.
One of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen
with its mixture of classical, Latin and Byzantine architecture.
The art inside is also a mix of iconography and
more Renaissance-like frescoes.

Arkadi is a site of tragic heroism. During the Cretan revolt
of 1866 this monastery held off a Turkish siege.
When it was clear the resistance fighters could no longer
keep the Turks out, the Abbot gathered the 900 Cretans to
the arsenal and blew the place up, taking out 200 Turks in the process.
European and American journalists, like Victor Hugo, covering the Cretan Alamo
tried to use what happened here as a rally cry for the Cretans.
It took 30 more years for Crete to win its independence.

Knossos and the Labyrinth of Irakleion

2010-09-26T21:48:00.000+03:00

The disk of Phaestus. No one knows what
the disk or the hieroglphics on it mean.
It may in fact be hoax but for the moment
it has some nice digs at the Irakleion
archaeological museum.

I spent the last week (Sept. 20-25) in Crete touring archaeological sites with a medical kit and hotel reservations as a staff assistant for College Year in Athens. (Being a freelancer means you have to diversify your sources of income.)

After an overnight ferry trip to the port of Irakleion, we immediately hopped on a bus to the archaeological site of Knossos. Those of you who know Greek mythology undoubtedly have heard the story of the Labyrinth. Designed by Deadalus, aka Thomas Edison in a tunic, it was the home of the mighty Minotaur, the half-man half-bull monstrosity who ate seven young men and seven young girls from Athens each year. In reality, the Labyrinth was probably a story representing the palace of Knossos; a sprawling complex that had no fewer than 1,300 rooms and 3 drainage systems. First built around 2,000 BC, the Minoans at Knossos flushed their toilet paper 4,000 years (and counting) before modern Greeks.

For the next three posts I'll be putting up lots of photos I took (with my iPhone), thus saving you the time of reading a lot of text and me the time of writing it since I returned to the journalistic work pretty much as soon as our boat got back to Piraeus Saturday at 6am.

Sir Arthur Evans: the man who discovered
and reconstructed Knossos in the 19th century.

Knossos is world renowned for frescoes painted
with heavy Egyptian influence which
survived for thousands of years. These, however,
are fakes. The real ones are below..

Wow! How did this column survived white-washed
all these millenia? Oh wait, it didn't. This column is
actually concrete. So is the "wood" behind it.
Notice that the column looks like the Parthenon ones
turned upside down.

These are called "magazines" i.e. storage areas
which kept the stock (oil, grain, wine, etc.) of the palace
both for daily use and in case of famine or siege. These
magazines were rather servant friendly as they had fairly
wide berths and drainage systems in the event that one of
the pythoi (i.e. gigantic ceramic jars) should break.

This is the image everyone associates with Knossos but I thought
it would be too cheesey to put it at the top of the post.
Basically you have your raging bull and your red columns.
All concrete. People ask "Why did Evans make these columns
concrete?" Well, the old ones were wood and do you see them around?
Next.

Now we get to the real stuff. All of the major finds
are kept at the Archaeological Museum in Irakleion
which has been at its temporary location for 5 years.
This guy is known as "The Prince of the Lillies." Notice that the
wall was actually three dimensional and carved as a relief to
the features of the fresco.

Every ancient culture has its peculiar sport. The Aztecs
had "Human Sacrifice Ball." The Minoans apparently
had "Bull leaping" whereupon you run at a raging bull,
grab its horns, turn red, do a somersault over its back and then
land on your feet. Archaeologists argue that the bull, who is painted at
full motion here, may have been sedated. Why?
Because otherwise this is freaking insane.

And one more awesome fresco just for good measure.

The double-headed ax. Basically it was a sign of
authority somewhat like the Roman fasces.

Speaking of antique sports, this woman was either an
ancient referee or involved in an ancient stick-up.
When in doubt though, priestess.

Based on this diarama, the Cretan family hasn't really changed
that much.

How would you like to drink coffee
out of this 2nd millenim BC guy's head?

For all of the rich history and pre-history in Crete, it's important
to remember the city's vibrant recent past. From 1204 to 1669 Crete was
a key Venetian possession. Sturdy infrastructure like these warehouses
helped the Venetians stave off an (eventually successful) Ottoman siege
for almost 25 years. Many important buildings still exist and offer a different
architectural flair than your typical classical, neo-classical, Byzantine, concrete
fare, which you find in most of Greece.

In Crete this week

2010-09-22T19:57:00.000+03:00

Sorry but no blogposts this week.

I'm in Crete working as a staff member for College Year in Athens and it's eating up all my time.

To make matters a little more complicated my iPhone, computer and internet aren't getting along so it's making it really tough to blog.

More next week...

Friday Fun/ Παρασκεύη Παρτύ: Positive Energy Music

2010-09-17T09:28:00.001+03:00

Tonight I'm heading to the "Θετική Ενεργεία" or "Positive Energy" tour sponsored by Amita at OAKA (the Olympic Complex).

This video advertisement for the tour should make Greek kids who went back to school this week feel a little better.

My favorite group in Greece these days is the Professional Sinnerz, a Greek rap group, and they'll be on stage.

Favorite song? Πες ό,τι θες. "Say whatever you want."

I can't
I can't
I'm not going to tell you whatever you want.
I'm packing my bags and wishing you the best,
I've picked a another road...

Not too bad a lineup for a company that makes fruit drinks. For more info on the show, check out thetikienergeia.gr.

For more music videos click "read more".

Θα 'ρθω να σε βρω, "I'll come find you."

Όταν σ'ειχα πρωτοθεί, "When I'd first seen you."

Onirama, the headliner, I don't know as well but here are a couple of songs.

Κλείσε τα ματία, "Close (your) eyes."

Μπαλάτα του τρέλου, Ballad of the crazy

There's no way in hell this is happening again, but this collaboration of Onirama, Playmen and Elena Paparizou on Φυσικά μαζί/Together forever from the MAD VMAs was pretty awesome.

Important Documents on Greece's Financial Situation

2010-09-16T14:53:00.002+03:00

In this cartoon, Greece's finance
minister is told the EU inspectors
are coming. He starts whipping
himself to the delight of the inspectors
who of course speak German.
source: presseurop.eu

The Greek crisis is a numbers game always boiling down to the question of "How much?"

How much does the Greek government really owe? How much is the "real" budget deficit? How much does it really pay its people and how many people? How much has the "Troika" European Union - International Monetary Fund - European Central Reserve Bank given to Greece (110 billion euro over three years but the number swung wildly in the media before it was announced) and in what installments?

The Greek government, we know, hasn't been the most reliable source of statistics.

George Papanconstinou, Greece's finance minister, openly admitted to Vanity Fair, with almost gory honesty, what it was like for his team to find out how badly the country had been (intentionally) keeping its books.

“At the end of each day I would say, ‘O.K., guys, is this all?’ And they would say ‘Yeah.’ The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: ‘Actually, Minister, there’s this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.’ ”

The media's numbers at various times have also flown all over the place, especially before Greece, the IMF, the EU, etc. started to really clean the books out and publish results.

So who can you trust?

Below are some documents from the (now sobered) Greek finance ministry, the IMF and the train system OSE (for a specific example) with pullouts of some of the more interesting figures that are almost too bad to be falsified.

Greek Finance Ministry's 2010 Budget Report

There's a lot of ultra-specific charts and chatter in this report about what the Finance Ministry is doing, etc. etc. but there is also some readily available info.

On Pages 14-16 there are charts with the following info:

GDP is now 244 billion euro
Budgetary expenditure is 82.7 billion euro
The Finance ministry takes up over 20% of Greece's budget with debt payments, just over 5% without.
Greece has projected revenues of 102.2 billion euro with loans,
And about 54 billion euro (give or take) in revenue without loans.

In other words, almost half of Greece's budget comes from borrowing.
Yet that gap amounts to less than 9 percent of GDP.

Tax revenue is projected at just under 50 billion euro.

Greek Budget Report

The IMF's First Review of the Stand-by Agreement

Monitors from the Washington-based IMF keep flying in and out of Athens for meetings and evaluations of Greece's progress. Two permanent monitors will be left in place; one to oversee tax collection, the other expenditures. For Greeks, this may conjure an image of Amerikokratia the "American rule" of the 1950s when the US was heavily subsidizing Greece's development and reconstruction.

Here are some highlights that aren't as often mentioned:

The EU is contributing 80 billion euro of the 110 billion euro agreement.
Greece's pension reform plan should have a huge impact: 2.5-4.5 percent of GDP in 2010-2050 instead of 12.5 percent. (page 9, box with all changes on page 10)
A 'sub minimum wage' has been introduced to 'facilitate youth entry into the labor market, of 84% of the minimum. (page 14)
15-18 year-olds can work on one-year apprenticeship contracts of 70% the minimum wage. (page 14)
Page 15 focuses on competition, particularly the 160 'closed' professions.
Pages 20-25 are lots of graphs with small print.
Private consumption has dropped 4.0 percent, a sign that Greece's free-wheeling days are over. (page 26)
Public consumption dropped 10.6 (page 26)
Exports are up (21.1 percent from 17.8 percent) and imports are down (25.4 to 24.6 percent) (page 16)

Greece First IMF Review

OSE: The Epitome of Excess?

Earlier this week, I did a report on OSE workers who have been going on strike. OSE has its 2009 financial report on its website (ose.gr).

And it is not pretty.

Total revenue fell from 2008 to 2009 from 195 million euro to 174 million euro. (page 45)
Total liabilities are almost 2 billion euro. (page 44)
Total payroll rose over that period from 827 thousand euro to 920 thousand euro (page 44)
But that payroll figure doesn't tell the whole story (see page 48)

OSE paid 4.6 million euro in "other payroll expenses" in 2009 and 551 thousand in 2008.
"Other operating expenses" jumped from 15.7 million euro to almost 150 million euro
The report seems to indicate that those other operating expenses came from repairs and construction. Government and media reports have been saying that the payroll exploded.

OSE 2009 Report

I'm not a statistician so take my analysis for what it's worth. This way at least you can find all of these statements in one place and decide for yourself.

Night at the Vatican Museum

2010-09-15T16:27:00.000+03:00

The outdoor galleries in the night.

Now, I'm not the smartest cat out there.

But when I saw that the Vatican gives night tours Friday nights during the months of September and October, that was a no-brainer for my trip to Rome last weekend.

(It's a bit similar to the Greek moonlight night offered once a year.)

The best part?

At 31 euro it's cheaper than a day tour (around 50 euro).

What's even better?

NO CROWDS

The basilica is not included in the tour.
But when else would you hang around St. Peter's at night?

Usually it takes HOURS to get into the Vatican Museums without a tour and it's still dicey when you do. Once you get in, the most fantastic works of Western art from the ancient and Renaissance world are yours to behold ... as long as there's enough oxygen among your fellow sardines in the gallery.

Without further ado, here are some snapshots from the galleries at night for those of you trapped in either the US or Greece.

When in Rome...in September or October...keep this tour in mind.

The Apollo Belvedere had a golden glow instead
of its usual pristine white.

This reclining god only gets to have dinner parties
two months a year these days.

Greeks should recognize the head of Medusa, even in the dark.

Photo quality dropped dramatically inside the Museum itself.
Here you can make out the bust of Hadrian in a room full
of antiquities taken from his country villa.

Hercules: the golden man-god shining in the night.

Usually this oculus does the work lighting up the gallery
for guests.

Usually the 'geographica' room looks light and airy.
Behind the guy with the camera you can see the abyss outside.

You can see the ceiling frescoes better in the dark then
you can in the daylight.

This painting depicts Constantine handing off temporal
power over Rome to the Pope with the Orthodox icon
in the apse to the East symbolizing Byzantium.

Darkness brings out the drama of the frescoes in this apartment.

Pius Aeneas escapes the conflagration of Troy to flee to Italy.
Thousands of years later a Pope quenches a fire in Rome.
Our tour guide: without the destruction of Troy, there is no Rome.

After nearly three hours of walking the museums,
it's down the spiral stairs.
What? No Sistine Chapel?
Images of the Chapel are subject to copyright thanks to the trade
a Japanese TV station made to have the restoration work done pro bono.
Besides, it's a holy, special place that overwhelms the senses.
Better to just enjoy while you're there.

Good thing I can just write stuff on this blog instead
of sending out lots of postcards.

OSE Workers: Don't de-rail us

2010-09-15T01:27:00.000+03:00

It's not everyday you see a public transport bus stuck in front of the Evzones guarding the Greek President's House, let alone enough buses to fill a small parking lot. Nearby Vasilisis Sofias looked backed up for kilometers thanks to a demonstration taking place in central Syntagma Square.

The protesters du jour? OSE - Greek railroad company - workers who fear cut-backs and potential privatization.

"The government wants to minimize OSE," said Giannis Tzekos, an OSE employee. "We want to expand and create jobs and green development."

Tzekos and company have got reason to worry.

"The New 'Vatopaidi'"

The Greek government Friday (just before PM George Papandrou's keynote speech at TIF Saturday) announced the outlines of its plans to rein in the state industry that offers low fares but hemorrhages money. How much? Vanity Fair reported that OSE makes 100 million euro a year, spends 400 million euro on personnel and another 300 million euro on the rest of the operation. In other words, it would cost the state less to let everyone take (price-controlled) taxis than use OSE, according to Business Week.

With a debt of 11 billion euro, it's a little too late for that plan. So the Greek government announced the following, according to the CBC:

Cut employee bonuses and overtime pay.

Close services that lose money.

Sell a 49 per cent stake in rail operator TrainOSE.

Cut staff to 3,800 from 6,300 (although workers will be offered other public-sector jobs).

Open passenger services to competition.

Obviously, this plan didn't sit well with OSE employees who staged a strike and demonstration Tuesday. The tranquil demo was not a large one by Athenian standards; a few hundred people largely from labor unions GSEE and PAME in addition to OSE.

Legendary protestor "Matsgiaras"
Sign says "Karamanlis gave you 2 feet in 1 shoe."
Other demonstrators whispered his name
and got their picture taken with him.

Was there a lack of solidarity? Train employees are not the most beloved members of the public sector since their average wage is often reported as 65,000 euro ($90,000+ before the euro crisis) by the government and media.

"It's a big lie," Tzekos said, denying that the railways are mesa, i.e. in the government cookie jar. "The state builds airports, harbors and roads. It tells the rails to go to the banks."

"The problem is not the workers," said Eleftheris Maroussis, an international press officer for the Federation of Greek railway men. "The state must give a lot of money for infrastructure and they never give."

The current Greek government has made "decades worth of changes in 11 months" i.e. cuts to public sector pay and the whole pension system. So you can see why OSE employees are clearly worried that they -- and services they say benefit lower income Greeks the most -- will be "railroaded."

"We want to sit with the government and the prime minister at one table of dialogue," said OSE President Nikos Kioutsoykis after he rallied the demonstration via megaphone.

Kioutsoykis had just dropped off a letter to the President of the Greek Parliament ostensibly on the rights of citizens and passengers.

Friday Fun/ Παρασκεύη Παρτύ: End of summer blues

2010-09-10T12:00:00.001+03:00

In a previous post, I bellyached that too many Greek music videos go island-heavy. Well, summer's almost over here in Greece and it's okay to reminisce a little bit.

Video #1, find me at the island, features a guy in 2010 stuck working 10 hours a day - which believe it or not most Greeks do - who longs for sun and fun.

Video #2, kalokairaki, my little summer, the original longing for the sea from back in the early 1990s.

Getting Internet in Athens

2010-09-09T23:56:00.001+03:00

I so wish I were getting paid for this ad.
Source: e-shop.gr

It wasn't that long ago (winter 2008) that people told me it would take three months to set up an internet connection in an Athenian apartment. If you were lucky. Greece was a bit behind on the Internet revolution. So many apartments (like mine) in a city of 5 million still don't have phone lines and broadband...I mean let's get serious here.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the chat forum.

Like so many other innovations -- toilets, televisions, cell phones -- web usage sky-rocketed from the lowest in the EU in 2006 to almost Western European levels, especially in Athens. It's more than numbers though. The sheer availability and affordability of Internet in Athens is impressive from free wi-fi hotspots, low-cost landline/web combos and Internet USB sticks (just now catching on in the US).

Here is a look at what's worked for me and what hasn't so much.

FREE WI-FI IN SYNTAGMA SQUARE

If you've been to Athens you've been to Syntagma Square. Tourists watch the Evzones change guard in front of the tomb of the unknown soldier and hop on the user-friendly metro either to Monastiraki or the Acropolis. Locals often have to change buses there or go to a central office for something nearby.

Whatever you're doing you can pop open your laptop and enjoy FREE WI-FI. Totally, utterly free. No credit card, username, etc. required. It's pretty decent too. I've skyped with it on multiple ocassions.

The one drawback is it's sometimes not so mobile web friendly. Still. Free is free.

WI-FI AND LANDLINE FROM WIND

WIND is a pretty well known brandname across Europe and a serious player in Greece.

For 9 months I used the WIND-Tellas Double Play unlimited plan. Less than 50 euro a month and included wi-fi at 24 mbps, unlimited calls to landlines in Greece, the US, Australia and a host of other countries (not Slovakia though, apparently). Just for kicks they throw in 60 minutes to cellphones in Greece.

Occasionally the router failed miserably (about once a month at the most crucial moment possible) but other than that the service was steady and pretty fast by Greek standards.

WIND has other nice features (such as giving you mobile internet until you're all set up and ready to go) and was a decent cellphone provider before I switched companies for various other reasons.

V***ING VODAFONE

Sorry to pick on one company but Vodafone gets the booby-prize in this competition.

Looks great on paper. Unlimited internet for 45 euro a month (plus VAT). I had a Vodafone stick that I bought while having Internet issues in Italy a year earlier so I only needed a two-month contract.

Too bad they needed more documentation for internet than the New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicles needs for a driver's license. (For my European readers out there, the Driver's License is the main form of photo identification in the US and NJ has a 6 point ID system adopted after 9/11.)

Here is what you usually need to set phone/internet in Greece.

*ID/Passport
*ΑΦΜ (Tax ID number)
*Address

Not good enough for Vodafone. First, they asked me for the paper I got when I filed for a taxpayer ID. Luckily I remembered to keep that. Second, they needed a bill to prove my address. I was told it didn't have to have my name on it. Good thing because I just moved apartments. Brought that in. Computer was down. Came back a week later. Sorry, you do need your name on it.

That was on my sixth trip. And that 45 euro plan? It shot up past 50 euro in the time it took me to make all of those trips.

Fugheddaboutit.

COSMOTE WITH SOME CAVEATS

Cosmote is the mobile and internet offshoot of the former state-run telecom monopoly OTE. OTE -- now owned by Deutsche telecoms -- still owns the country's landline infrastructure but it has to share with other Internet companies.

WIND, VODAFONE, et al have brought European know-how to Greece but Cosmote still has the home field advantage of infrastructure and name-brand recognition.

Because a lot of people I know have Cosmote and grumbled about my WIND number (see above) when they had free in-network calls I switched over to Cosmote's i45 plan for my iPhone. (By the way here's a guide on how to unlock your iPhone free and legitly.)

Since wi-fi was out of my reach I tried tethering my iPhone to my laptop for awhile. Worked great. Super fast and I had Internet everywhere I went. But math wasn't on my side. I get 750 mbs per month with my phone plan. Apparently I use between 50-100 mbs per day just with e-mail, facebook, google maps, news, blogging and the occasional youtube binge. I needed some kind of an unlimited plan.

After the debacle with Vodafone I decided to go full bore with Cosmote. 50 euro (before VAT), unlimited internet. Sweet.

Well, not so fast.

Cosmote didn't need a bill from my house but they did need the paper proving my ΑΦΜ, which they didn't realize at first. At least they had the decency to call and tell me what they needed instead of breaking my heart on multiple trips.

On my second visit I was all set to go but they were going to give me a 7 mbps stick. That's the same speed as my old Vodafone stick and pretty slow. I asked if they could do better. Πιο γρηγόρο παρακαλώ... They said they could, 28.8 mbps, better than most wi-fi, but they wouldn't have it until the next day.

Something to watch for: Unlimited isn't really unlimited. In Cosmote's case, it's 30gb. I.e. a gigabyte a day. Way more than most people need, but it's also about 15 movies, for you iTunes fiends out there. So keep it in mind.

Got the stick. Signed the contract. Life is good, right? Well it took over an hour for my account to get activated and when I called the support line the shop gave me in the interim, the support line told me to talk to the shop. Went back to the shop with a different issue (misprinted cellphone re-charge card, totally random) and they said to wait five minutes.

Five minutes later, sure enough my connection was alive and I could send text messages. Yippee. Still no Internet though. Huh? The stick only came with instructions for a PC and I'm a mac user. The "help" section of the "Mobile Partner" software was utterly useless.

To make a long story short, you have to create a profile (Options -- > Tools -- > create profile), and type the word "internet" into the APN (static) field. That's it. So simple but I would have never have known of without this site.

Voila! Lightning fast Internet.

It'll feel great until the bill comes...

HONORABLE MENTIONS

On Telecoms, Forthnet

CORRECTION

An earlier version of this story said that OTE had been purchased by "Dutch telecom". It was actually purchased by Deutsche telecom, i.e. a German, not Dutch company.

"Baby Strike" in Athens today - Transport shut down through midday

2010-09-08T10:22:00.000+03:00

No this little guy isn't walking off the job.
It's just a small strike today.
source: cybergecko.com

Athenians today will have to endure their first "baby strike" -- baby meaning not so big, not people smaller than toddlers walking off the job -- since July.

No trolleys, buses or inner city trains from 11am-4pm.

No Metro, ISAP railway or tram from 12pm-4pm.

Why this time?

"Workers are protesting sackings and wage cuts in their sectors," according to the Athens News Agency.

Today is the first "baby strike" of the season but it won't be the last. A similar shutdown is planned for Thursday.

NOTE: "Baby strike" is not meant to belittle the cause of the strikers walking off the job today but to emphasize that this is a small strike compared to what Athenians are accustomed to. This strike will basically be a five-hour coffee and smoke break - except there are a lot fewer places to smoke for striking workers.

Immigration issues still plague Greece

2010-09-07T14:57:00.001+03:00

The soup kitchen in the video below should look familiar.

With all of Greece's other issues it may seem like the country's thousands of destitute immigrants and asylum seekers have been forgotten. The emphasis here is on the destitute and that situation has something to do with Greece's economic woes.

In the 1990s and 2000s some one million immigrants from Eastern and South Eastern Europe came to Greece after the fall of communism. Greeks didn't like it but the economy -- tourism, construction, telecom, etc. -- was booming and migrants took many of the jobs -- agriculture, domestic work -- Greeks chose to leave behind.

The economy has whimpered to a standstill in Greece but thousands of people from Africa (Somalia, Senegal, Morocco, etc.) and the Middle East (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, etc.) still come here to get into Europe because of the country's porous borders and the difficulty of penetrating wealthier countries like Italy and France.

For its part, the EU has often pledged more support to Greece but it is slow in coming and dwarfed by the size of the need.

The International Herald Tribune yesterday published a report saying Athens hopes Brussels will supply 57 million euros to help finance the construction of two new immigrant processing centers (one in Evros, Northern Greece the other in Attica) which will hold approximately 1,000 people. Right now the Greek police have 4,000 people in jail cells at any given time - cells designed for 2,000 people, according to the report. These centers would be operational, at best, in a year's time.

Al-Jazeera English's Barnaby Phillips filed a report on September 5 that details how much Greece's immigration and asylum system needs help now.

New home, features for Jungle Vision

2010-09-06T16:01:00.003+03:00

I made this logo in powerpoint.
For all my computer expertise
I still can't use or afford photoshop.
This caption is another one of
the improvements to the site.

Jungle Vision has quietly undergone an overhaul over the last couple of weeks thanks to updates in blogger’s offerings. These changes include a new web address – athensjunglevision.com. Don’t worry junglevision.blogspot.com will still get you here.

The improvements couldn’t have come at a better time since this site’s purpose has shifted from a project portal (still available here) to the main venue of showcasing and offering my work as a journalist (and English tutor) here in Athens, Greece.

PAGES

Underneath the banner at the top of the page you’ll find links to pages other than posts I’ve written.

George Mesthos – basically the “about me” part of the website.

Resume/CV – Journalists say show, don’t tell so unlike the hard copy version this interactive take on my life’s work includes links to schools, media outlets and projects I’ve published online.

Past Work – links to my articles in print and on radio.

Contact/Επικονωνία – This bit was sorely missing before. If you want to e-mail or call me, now you can.

NEW ADDRESS

So I saved myself a whopping $10 leaving the “blogspot” in this site’s address for over a year. A journalism mentor told me last week about how little it cost (per year) to register to a custom domain name and I decided to make the switch. He couldn’t quite remember how he did it.

Word to the wise –

Go to settings -- > publishing and buy the new domain name right there. (see picture to the left)

I wasn’t so wise.

(WARNING: the following is a bit technical and really only useful to blogging saps like me who run into the same problem I did.)

I googled “buy your domain name”. Google did let me buy a domain name but it wasn’t automatically linked up to my blog. When I typed the domain name I had just bought I got this infamous message:

“Another blog is already hosted at this address”

Pardon my Internet French, but WTF, yo?

When I typed athensjunglevision.com into my browser I was taken to a more or less blank page that Google wanted me to design. No thanks. Already have a site.

Google’s help page wasn’t so helpful. It told me to delve into my newborn domain name’s coding intestines and change the DNS settings ... which were already changed.

This is when one realizes you can’t just e-mail Google for help…you have to Google for the answer.

Finally on about the third forum I landed in, somebody said to delete the “mapping” under “sites” in the google apps account I had been given (and hadn’t asked for). That idea had occurred to me, but does a pirate throw out his treasure map? Apparently he does.

The map deleted, I tried putting the domain name into blogger again and it worked just fine.

One hour of my life I’m never getting back.

At least the improvements are worth more than $10.

Greece knocked out of FIBA World Championships of Basketball

2010-09-04T23:26:00.001+03:00

Still shot from the video below.

The Greek national team put of a spirited fight to avoid a knock-out against Spain, the defending world champs, but fell 80-72. That means they're flying home to Athens.

This tournament will not be remembered as one of Greece's finest.

Before the games got underway in Turkey the Greek team looked comatose in its last friendly against the United States. The only exception came with a strong run in the second quarter, a prophecy of what would come as the Greeks seemed to start slow, get warm and then run out of steam all tournament long.

The Greeks started with a glimmer of hope, silencing China 89-81 in their opening match and defeating Puerto Rico 83-80.

It was all downhill from there.

An ugly loss to national archenemy Turkey indicated a lack of heart on the Hellenic side. At one point the radio commentator on SKAI outright called players on the team 'bad'. A crushing defeat of Ivory Coast (97-60) was soon forgotten when the Greeks were accused of intentionally losing to the Russians 73-69 in order to avoid the defending world champion Spaniards.

If the Greeks did throw the game, it mattered little because the way the brackets fell they ended up facing Spain anyway.

Greece got to within 58-57 in the 3rd quarter but her 3-point steam evaporated and Spain coasted to victory. The Greeks meanwhile will glide home.

NOTES:

In other SE European basketball news, Serbia edged Croatia 73-72 on a free throw. The Croatians were the first ones sent packing, right ahead of the Greeks. Serbia will face Spain.

Friday Fun/ Παρασκεύη Παρτύ: Vodafone's Greek Revolution Edition

2010-09-03T19:06:00.000+03:00

It's 1823 and Thodoris Kolokotronis needs to call Georgios Karaiskaki , but vlakies!, everyone but Kolokotronis is on Vodafone. Clearly this cellphone carrier discrepancy explains the Greek revolutionaries' communication issues.

Bonus points...this commercial is probably the grittiest representation of the Greek War of Independence I've ever seen.

Commentary: Is 25 years-old too young to advise the Prime Minister?

2010-09-01T00:29:00.001+03:00

This emperor's advisors
were all probably over 25.
SOURCE: mindyhitchcock.com

George Papandreou’s government was forced into an “embarrassing climb-down” when it had to remove 25 year-old lawyer Angelos Hasopopoulos from a list of 20 new advisors to the Greek Prime Minister.

The nerve.

How could they not keep a 25 year-old on this list?

Critics argue Hasopopoulos has only been practicing law for a year, has no significant work experience, hasn’t quite finished his first postgraduate degree and, SHOCK, has not yet done his military service.

In other words, he represents much of the talented (and not so talented), unutilized youth in Greece today.

This is the same youth who went rioting in anger in dissatisfaction in 2008. The same youth who spin their wheels in their parents’ businesses or apartments, over-qualified and under-employed. The same youth who two years ago were offended at working for 700 euro a-month and would probably gladly take it now in light of the crisis.

So how young is too young?

Here are two cases to consider.

Glykeria Siouti, another advisor to the PM -- well, now former advisor -- resigned over the flap. She became an advisor to the Minister of the Council, Athens at age 35, after obtaining her PhD -- and ten years older than Hasopopoulos is now.

Siouti’s example is textbook European. She had Greek and European (French) bona fides and a PhD.

But how many stories are there of Greeks who worked themselves into positions of responsibility at much younger ages purely based on their wit? Then again that might be more a Greek-American than Greek theme.

Hasopopoulos’ situation does bring to mind the case of another once young Greek-American politico – George Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos was 30 years-old when he became a key advisor on Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign- five years older than Hasopopoulos. Clinton won the White House and Stephanopoulos had mixed success in the West Wing.

How do the curricula vitarum stack up? Well, in the US there is no compulsory military service. But Stephanopoulos had completed a master’s degree (in theology, which he said grounded his political philosophy) at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, in addition to an earlier Harry S. Truman scholarship. He had also worked on the Dukakis 1988 campaign and in Congress for two representatives.

Do those kinds of opportunities exist in Greece, though? And if they did, would Hasopopoulos qualify?

Critics have alleged that Hasopopoulos is a yacht club acquaintance of Papandreou’s in a story similar to how the PM met current environment minister Tina Birbili. At least Birbili had a PhD.

Perhaps Hasopopoulos is better off. It would be great if a 25 year-old could bend the ear of the Prime Minister to show what life is like for his peers who have their lives stuck on pause like a song on an iPod. More likely he would get sucked into the same maw that has dragged the country into dependence on bankers in Brussels and Washington. Maybe the youth are better off too since the snub sends the message that state jobs are not there for them.

So, Angele, do yourself and your generation a favor and find something more inspiring to do than advise the PM.

For the record, the author of this post is 23 years-old and would be happy to advise anyone … who’s paying.

Church of Greece ends "Solidarity" begins "Mission"

2010-08-31T10:12:00.001+03:00

Old logo of the NGO "Solidarity"

Bishop Theoklitos of Ioannina went into Thursday’s meeting of the Holy Synod with a grave report on the financial status and practices of the Church of Greece’s largest NGO, “Agapi”, once called “Solidarity”. It was bleeding red ink. Theoklitos left the meeting but “Agapi” didn’t make it out, since the Synod voted to disband the defunct NGO.

The move should not jeopardize crucial charitable services since Archbishop Ieronymos seems intent on transferring the old NGO’s worthwhile projects to a new organization founded this summer called, “Mission”.

SHORT HISTORY WITH LONG TALES

Wednesday’s decision was the end of a torturous path for the NGO founded under the late Archbishop Christodoulos in 2002. “Solidarity” was designed as a catch-all NGO that would modernize the Church's philanthropic work.

"In recent years, the Church has felt the need to confront new social problems that have affected society," the late Archbishop wrote in 2007. "The problem of immigrants, refugees, victims of human trafficking, large natural disasters in Greece and elsewhere, the victims of terrorism, the AIDs crisis, the increase in numbers of homeless people in major cities and the need for de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, were new issues for our pastoral service. It wasn’t possible to face these new issues with the support structures of the past."

Along the way millions of euros were wasted or “disappeared” much to the chagrin of the Church, the Greek government and (probably) the EU who all had a hand in financing the operation. (Interestingly, the NGO published financial reports on its website from 2003-2007 here.)

Under Archbishop Christodoulos’ leadership the NGO received and gave generously. Some 10 million euro went missing from 2002 through 2007. The manner it disappeared was more embarrassing. Wigs were sent to tsunami victims. Chicken was left to rot in Piraeus. Luxury “chicken coops” were built on the organizations’ operational headquarters in Pendeli. Books on the Holy Land, with little connection to social work, were sponsored. (There used to be a link to the .pdf of a book published by “Solidarity” that showed this last case but it seems to have disappeared.) The former CEO Dimitris Fourlemadis was able to escape a trial in ecclesiastical court for his part in the mismanagement.

Archbishop Ieronymos cleaned house shortly after his arrival in 2008 by installing a new CEO, former journalist Kostas Dmitsas, who changed the operational ethos of the organization from big relief missions and infrastructure heavy projects – such as a shelter for victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking called “Storgi” -- to smaller but visible charity work such as “Church in the Streets”. The 1,500 meals offered per day – mainly to migrants – in the city center offers a glimpse at the organization’s size and resources; or at least its spending.

In the last two years, the NGO handled some 4 million euros in funding, a shadow of its former largesse, according to kathimerini. The accusations of mismanagement and a feature in eleftherotypia called “The Color of Money” indicated “Solidarity” was receiving several times that amount before 2008. It is likely that the Church was footing much of the NGO’s bills with the organization’s reputation tarnished and the Greek government tightening its belt. (Sunday Eleftherotypia bluntly ran an article saying “Party’s over for NGOs”.)

Bishop Theoklitos – the head of the Church’s finances who has gotten a name for himself for opposing the State’s recent one-off tax on Church assets – griped in a letter before the Synod’s meeting. “The organization should be operating like it’s in crisis mode, not like it is at the moment,” kathimerini quoted him as saying (link above).

The NGO’s headquarters – although located in the rundown district of Metaxhourgeio – were fairly plush; glass doors engraved with the NGO’s logo, a doorman who checked passports, state of the art conference room, a well-furnished office for the CEO and a fully stocked kitchen. (I visited the location on several occasions for my Fulbright research.) “Solidarity” employed some 130 people, according to kathimerini. There does not appear to be a published report on who was employed in what capacities but there was no shortage of people in the kitchen ready to serve water, coffee or orange juice on a golden-colored, hanging tray.

Dmitsas, the CEO, and his assistant seemed to handle the bulk of the organizational work. The communications director did not return repeated requests for comment for months. Nonetheless, the NGO’s website featured almost an update a day on the organization’s activities, especially tons of food delivered. Solidarity.tv vastly expanded the NGO’s multimedia offerings with photos and video. These sites are still live and the front page includes a video of the NGO’s work in earthquake-stricken Haiti.

The website did not include a statement on the NGO’s fate – or for that matter an obvious update to its transformation to “Agapi”.

SUMMER OF SHIFTS

On June 23, “Solidarity” was re-branded “Agapi” (Love) with little fanfare. The Archdiocese had another plan in mind.

Ιn July, the Archdiocese christened a new NGO called “Mission”, or Apostoli in Greek, with the blessing of Prime Minister George Papandreou. (Pardon the ecclesiastical puns.) The new NGO is directly under the control of the Archdiocese whereas “Solidarity” was independent. Ieronymos is working to get the operational resources of “Solidarity” transferred over but red tape remains.

The premier social programs of the NGO should continue to function in the meantime.

So the Church will still be in the streets.

Athens Apartment Hunting 2.0

2010-08-28T18:15:00.003+03:00

RENT IS CHEAP!

That's the first thing I usually tell Americans about living in Athens.

YOU CAN'T FLUSH YOUR TOILET PAPER!

That's the first thing I tell Americans who visit me - while I'm living in Athens.

(Okay, some places you can flush, but it's rare)

If you can come to terms with certain things about accommodations here in Athens you'll find that there are many wonderful, affordable options for living in this world capital.

I wrote a similar post last year and felt it time to update my fellow hunters. Even in one year a lot has changed technologically and going through the process with new wants and desires (read: smaller budget) has opened my eyes up to new possibilities.

Even the tools I used to do this hunt make this year's edition Apartment Hunting 2.0.

THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT

Last year when I tried to find an apartment I generally found that most real estate sites for Greece were pretty scuzzy. I ended up recommending a bunch of expat sites (and warning about others).

This year I checked out homegreekhome.com and its Greek page spitogato.gr. The problem with these two sites is that they compile ads for rental agencies who usually charge you a fee for the service.

The mecca of classifieds in Greece is Chrysi Eukaria or "Golden Opportunity". But the paper and its site, xe.gr, are only in Greek. Last year I knew the vocabulary to look at the ads but not how to register for the site to get the contact information. Even if I did get the contact info, I didn't really have the confidence to cold-call lots of different Greeks about their apartments.

This year I had the confidence ... and an iPhone.

Turns out Chrysi Eukaria has an iPhone app that lets you save favorites, gives contact information up front and allows you to call straight from your phone. In seconds, I could flip through dozens of houses according to the specs (space, neighborhood, price, etc.) I was looking for and e-mail them to my friends for second opinions. A lot of the fields were in English too, making it a bit easier.

NEW EXPECTATIONS AND CHALLENGES

I had some sweet digs last year.

For about $500 a month (plus utilities and a roommate) I had an apartment that made my friends go "wow" when they walked in the front door. It was safe, quiet, furnished, had two balconies with a view, renovated kitchen/living room, spacious bathroom (by Athenian standards) and a bedroom with lots of storage space. Location-wise it was in the center with two metro stations less than 10 minutes away and dozens of buses. In New York City $500 might not even get you a cardboard box, let alone all of that.

Not too shabby.

People grow and change. A year ago I was coming straight out of college and wanted company in a foreign city. Plus I had a steady income more than double what most Greeks my age make. This year I could make a lot more or a lot less, but I simply can't predict it right now.

So to put it simply I wanted to live by myself and somehow save cash. That meant going down from 380 euros a month plus shared expenses down to at least 300 or less.

My taste for the city had also changed a bit. The old neighborhood was pleasant but I had to walk a decent distance to get to decent food or shops. For instance, there was a supermarket right down the street but the service and prices were awful. The next closest supermarket had the same prices but better service. The next supermarket after that one had great service and prices but wasn't so close anymore.

Of course American suburbanites are sitting there thinking, when was the last time I got to walk to the supermarket? Point taken. But this is Athens and we expect these kinds of things.

I had identified Koukaki and Kallithea as neighborhoods I knew pretty well and had the amenities I was looking for without giving up the perks (transportation, proximity to the center) I was used to. From what I could see on xe.gr there were plenty of options in the 200-300 euro range.

That's when I ran into something new. The phrase ιδάνικη/καταλλήλο για φοιτήτες became the bane of my existence. It literally means "ideal" for students but what they mean is "looking for" students. Koukaki and Kallithea both have large universities and landlords in the cheap apartment market want an investment they can count on for 4 years.

Not every potential landlord had this scruple. Unfortunately the apartments that were left over were usually located in basements (read: cockroaches), smelled bad and/or didn't have an ounce of furniture (like a stove or refrigerator) in them. I had expected that I would need a bed so I stored the one I bought last year. But no fridge? I wasn't ready to throw down cash for serious appliances.

SEALING THE DEAL II

The situation above called for a change in strategy.

I broadened the search to include a few neighborhoods close to the center but not hooked up to the metro system. Voila!

One neighborhood was loaded with furnished apartments (bed, fridge and a hot plate or stove) for less than 300 euros. I happened to have done a lot of work in this particular neighborhood and knew there were decent souvlakia, pizza places, shops, banks and even a cheap dry cleaner to work with that would make the pinch of not having a clothes washer or proper stove a bit more bearable.

The apartment I settled on is 30 m2, between two bus stops, quiet but next to a major thoroughfare with a 15 minute walk to the metro and center of town. It was listed at 280 euros but often times these things are negotiable. Haggling is usually fine by me but it's one thing to barter with a merchant you'll probably never see again and another with your future landlady. When the price got mysteriously knocked down to 270 euros, I just kept my mouth shut. Something to improve on for next time.

So my housing situation per month should look like this:

270 Euro- Rent
50 Euro - Koinochrista/common fee (includes heating oil)
20 Euro - EUDAP/water
50 Euro- DEH/power
45 Euro- Unlimited mobile internet from vodafone
$25 - Skype to make up for lack of landline
Total - 435euro + $25

The place has some shortcomings. I already knew that there wasn't going to be a washing machine and ironically it came with two beds so now I have three total. There is also no hook-up for a landline telephone (meaning no wi-fi and thus the mobile internet above) or television (even though a tv came with the place).

But it's a place of my own.

Friday Fun/Παρασκευη Παρτυ : Athens Sites set to Rock

2010-08-27T00:17:00.000+03:00

Greek music videos tend to be pretty island and beach heavy.

So it's nice to see Pale Faces rock out in some of my favorite urban spaces around Athens. I could describe them, but then again, you can just watch the video...

Team USA crushes hopes, Greeks

2010-08-26T01:07:00.000+03:00

Source: Greekshops.com

It wasn't that long ago that Team Hellas was the underdog darling of the sports world. It also wasn't that long ago that most people had no idea Greece had a deficit problem.

Wednesday night, Team USA came to Athens and creamed the hometown team 87-59 with a cast of b-list NBA stars. Television station NOVA had dubbed this match "the Dream Game" but the Greeks looked like they were stuck in a nightmare the whole way through.

For the AP coverage click here.

Lucky for the Greeks, this was an exhibition match for the two sides who are headed to the FIBA World Basketball Championship starting this weekend in Turkey.

The near 30-point blowout was the cap to an ugly week that included a gruesome confrontation with Serbia that cut one of the exhibitions short. Ironically, the two main antagonists from each national squad play for rival Greek league teams Panathaniakos and Olympiakos.

SOME SOLACE

The Greeks did knock the US out in the 2006 semi-finals, then lost to Spain in the final.

"The US has been a superpower for years and Greece has improved just the last few years," said Vasilis Panagiatopoulos, a lifelong Plaka resident, with a shrug as he snuffed out his cigarette in a mostly empty cafeneio. After all the negativity surrounding the country for the last year, he knew what it would have been like if Greece had beaten the Americans -- again.

"Everyone would have been talking about it; in the cafes, in the streets. If this had been an official game we would have had a panagyri (village festival)-- a big one," Panagiatopoulos said.

"If we had won."

Moon "Smiles" on the Acropolis

2010-08-25T02:11:00.004+03:00

This photo taken with my iPhone.

Greece's economic woes almost cost the capital its marquee event of the summer; a full-moon night on the Acropolis. At the 11th hour, the government came to terms with the security guards of arguably the world's most famous hill on who would foot the bill for the evening.

Had the dispute not been resolved, 89 other monuments and archaeological sites around the country would have (and were) open to the public. A special concert was given at the (new) Acropolis Museum.

But everyone knows that seeing the Parthenon up close and in-person is the big-ticket item for Athenians who 364 days of the year can only see the marble temple glowing overhead and at a distance. Even better - entrance was free.

"Don't stop to take a photo," a man said in heavily accented English to keep the crowd moving. "There are 3,000 people behind you."

His pleas were in vain but Greeks and tourists alike snapped their photos quickly and made space for each other. SLRs and camera phones were most people's weapon of choice, with point-and-shoots saved for group shots probably destined for anywhere between a family bookshelf and facebook.

They had to move quickly because at 9:45pm the floodlights were flipped down, leaving the temple lit only by the full moon. The crowd oo-ed and ah-ed in unison as the temple changed hue, but remained largely visible, especially on its south side.

Spotlight on the Propylaia, gate to the Acropolis.

A carnival mood infected a people beaten down by austerity and a crowd conspicuously larger than usual for late August when many families are still on island vacations or visiting relatives in rural areas. As 9:00 pm, the start of the festivities, approached, the metro system strained to accomplish giddy Greeks, their chattering creating an even louder din than usual in the train tunnels.

The column of bodies filed out from below and turned the walkways around the Acropolis into a happy mob scene where on most nights one would find not much more than a smattering of jet-lagged tourists. On this Tuesday night, not a table could be found in the trendy bar district of Thiseio (named for Theseus). They were filled with the foot-weary from the hike in the dark and those who thought it more prudent to get a head start on the evening's drinks.

The whole evening might have been a bust had the Acropolis security guards not backed down. They had reason for concern. 500 short-term employees have allegedly been waiting almost two years to be paid. The guards decided to donate their wages from the evening to a prominent Greek charity, "Smile of the Child".

Werewolves are supposed come out on a full moon. This time it seemed to summon Greece's better angels.

A year ago at Athens News

2010-08-23T23:40:00.001+03:00

A year ago yesterday the 2009 team of Athens News interns delivered our world famous summer farce.

I'm pleased to announce that I haven't ordered any elderly Greek pop stars since.

Paul Krugman and the gods

2010-08-23T00:38:00.002+03:00

Krugman on "Meet the Press"
Source: ceoworld.biz

Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize sitting on a shelf somewhere for explaining early and often why the world got into its current economic funk. He's also been saying for weeks that using Greece as an example of America's oncoming deficit apocalypse is ... shall we say ... disingenuous?

Mr. Krugman (or KRUGMAN! as Stephen Colbert screams) is a columnist for the NY Times and a regular on Sunday talk shows and has used these platforms to put into as simple language as possible (for a Princeton economics professor) what is going on and how (usually) the government should be spending more than it is to fix it.

Take that for what you will.

Point is, this guy has a PhD and (even) he's noticed how the Greek crisis is being manipulated by self-proclaimed budget hawks.

READ KRUGMAN'S COLUMN ABOUT "BOND GODS" HERE

Never mind the numbers, (Austerians) declared: immediate spending cuts were needed to ward off the “bond vigilantes,” investors who would pull the plug on spendthrift governments, driving up their borrowing costs and precipitating a crisis. Look at Greece, they said.

The skeptics countered that Greece is a special case, trapped by its use of the euro, which condemns it to years of deflation and stagnation whatever it does. The interest rates paid by major nations with their own currencies — not just the United States, but also Britain and Japan — showed no sign that the bond vigilantes were about to attack, or even that they existed.

There it is. Meaningful, insightful analysis that offers Greece exactly zero hope. But at least those other guys were wrong, right? Don't worry though. It gets worse.

Anyone who doubts the suffering caused by slashing spending in a weak economy should look at the catastrophic effects of austerity programs in Greece and Ireland. Maybe those countries had no choice in the matter — although it’s worth noting that all

the suffering being imposed on their populations doesn’t seem to have done anything to improve investor confidence in their governments.

But, in America, we do have a choice. The markets aren’t demanding that we give up on job creation.

Notice the switch there? We are supposed to look at Greece as an example after all, just for the completely opposite reason.

Krugman argues that the US should keep greasing the economic wheels with more spending, which means more spending and more borrowing on bonds with abnormally low interest rates. Any possibility of a bond bubble? Krugman says no even though the NY Times reported the same day that investors are increasingly pouring their retirement funds into government debt because they think it's safer, and at least it has regular, fixed payments.

Nope, there's only a bubble if you believe there's a bubble or several million investors panic - one or the other, Krugman says.

Should we listen? Well, Krugman does have a Nobel Prize.

Not to mention one sweet beard.

Other Greece-related news items worth a read:

Greece's Shipping Class and the Recession:

The Financial Times isn't the first place one looks for quality feature reporting, though they often stray into stories that others don't.

Much of the reporting on Greece's economic crisis has come off as superficial. Sure there are "real people" in the form of civil servants, green grocers and what have you. But the depth just hasn't been there.

Greece's shipping industry (the largest in the world and the product of shrewd investments in American military surplus after WWII) is a reminder of how this small country has weight in the world without economic crises and ancient history.

Joanna Kakissis captured the spirit of her subjects with an eye-popping scenes and quotes like in this passage:

Angelakos blames the lack of innovation in the bloated public sector for dulling the minds of the brightest young Greeks, turning a nation of entrepreneurs, he exclaims, into a “nation of vegetables”. Angelakos seizes on the phrase and he repeats it, angry this time. “The Greek is not a vegetable!” He is roaring now, his voice booming from the deck. “He is Odysseus! Greek politicians managed to vegetablise Odysseus!”

The 2010 tourism season in a nutshell

Bloomberg News has cranked up the production of its nascent Athens bureau. Maria Petraki published this feature on Greece's tourism sector August 13, full to the brim with concise analysis, stats and angles from perspectives across the business spectrum.

It's one of the few articles this reporter has seen discussing how the austerity measures affect domestic tourism, not to mention the cultural impact. Then again the invisible hand works in mysterious ways and less vacation means more activity in Athens.

Antonis Katsigouras, 40, who works in a shoe store in central Athens, said business is unusually brisk for an August. “People obviously aren’t going on holiday,” he said.

It's not quite so clear that people aren't going on holiday. Just eye-balling it, there are definitely more Athens denizens around this year compared to last. But instead of 5 million people shrinking to 500 thousand it might be something like 5 million down to 1 million.

In other words, Athens is still a ghost town. There are just more ghosts around.

(Full Disclosure: I've applied to work with Bloomberg. The story is definitely worth reading but I probably shouldn't comment further.)

Ancient Recycling

2010-08-21T11:17:00.002+03:00

Audiences attending the Herodeion's grand opening in the 2nd century AD didn't have plastic bottles to recycle. Likewise there were no stainless steel or fluorescent-colored bins to be found.

But they might have had some kind of ceramic urn where they could toss their concessions. Or at least 21st century visitors are used to seeing that kind of thing around the archaeological parks of the Acropolis and Agora.

So how do you stimulate recycling today without ruining the ancient decor?

Over-sized ceramic urn + aluminum recycling sign + black trash bag = environmental friendliness with a hint of antique tackiness

Now you can have your ancient spectacle and recycle your Coke bottle too.

FOR MORE on actual ancient recycling, check this out.

Death of a Dictator

2010-08-20T14:36:00.005+03:00

Greece buried one of the last remnants of its military dictatorship Wednesday. Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannides, who successfully toppled one dictatorship in favor of another, harsher one, found his final resting place in the First National Cemetery (Πρώτο Νεκτροταφείο) alongside archbishops, prime ministers and his fellow dictators.

Ioannides, 87, died Monday, August 16 still serving his life sentence at Korydallos Prison for his role during the Junta (1967-1974), one of Greece's darkest periods that has driven a wedge between Greeks and the United States. Only one of the dictators is still alive.

Somewhere between 100 and 200 people - mostly family, some former colleagues and a black-shirted contingent from right-wing group Chrysi Avgi -- attended the service. The two gold-robed, white-bearded Orthodox priests appeared neutral as they offered last rites to one of the men who touted a "Greece for the Christian Greeks." Some women wailed and a couple grown men cried over the casket draped in a Greek flag, his medals and cap perched on top. One of his eulogizers called his eight months as Greece's ethnomarchis, national ruler, the best government in Greece's history, one that left Greek without debt, financial, moral and spiritual (among other kinds).

The Junta did balance Greece's budget ... at the cost of democracy.

As a result, observers have not been so kind on the other points.

Ioannides was in charge of the most notorious repression instruments of the post-Civil War and Junta eras. His work included the infamous island of Makronisos where inmates were tortured and forced to build mini Parthenons. During the dictatorship Ioannides headed the military police, or ESA, one of the most brutal elements of the regime and its lasting legacy. Ioannides seized power eight days after the suppression of the November 17, 1973 student uprising completely discredited the regime.

Instead of regime change, Ioannides led a crackdown and instigated a coup against President and Archbishop Markarios in Cyprus. The details are often debated in this part of the world, nonetheless Turkey used the coup as a pretext to invade and retains control over Northern Cyprus more than 35 years later. Greeks used the invasion as a pretext for yet another coup and a return to democracy. Ioannides and his co-dictators were convicted and imprisoned in 1975.

Keep in mind all of these coups and plots come not from distant, Byzantine history but happened in living memory, with photographs, phones, television cameras and all.

After a short procession, the priests gave their final blessings and those in attendance tossed their flowers onto the black coffin buried three feet down into the side of a walking path. Those in attendance murmured "Kalo taxidi" safe trip, a wish eerily familiar to the Ancient Greek notion of death staring with a boat ride across the river Styx.

Most people meant kalo taxidi as a blessing.

It could also mean good riddance.

Conservatives find Greek Riots Useful

2010-08-04T07:58:00.001+03:00

American politicians in the 18th century looked to Athenian democracy as mob-rule to be avoided. In the 19th century, the glory of the Acropolis and its jewel the Parthenon --raised by free men in that same 5th century BC democracy --was raised as a model for an increasingly industrious country to aspire, and had largely remained on the pedestal since.

Conservatives have swung the pendulum back in the opposite direction with a decidedly 21st century twist.

The sight of flaming trash and tear gas from the May riot in Greece plus the sound of foreign -- and obviously angry -- chants have become synonymous with socialism, entitlement and the dangers of debt. Sometimes these clips roll overtly. Other times it's subliminal.

My first morning back from Athens I was eating my breakfast while pundits on Fox News blasted away at "Obamacare". Clips from Greek demonstrations played in a separate window without producers or commentators offering so much as a clue to what was going on in the pictures. They didn't have to. Those images have become Modern Greece in the contemporary American imagination.

Talking heads on cable television have their outrage du jour and the color - albeit completely out of context - makes them a bit more interesting at least.

But could events in Greece actually affect politics here in the States?

At least one conservative candidate is trying to punch home his platform with a molotov cocktails. Meet Representative and Deficit Hawk Paul D. Ryan (R-Wisconsin), profiled Monday in the NY Times.

“The question is, Could this happen here?” Mr. Ryan said, as an image of a burning street from the recent riots in Greece flashed on a screen behind him.

Ryan is trying to pitch the impossible to seniors; cut back on all entitlement programs including social security and medicare. Fiscal conservatives have said this for years (even if they vote and do otherwise).

Now though they have the pictures of what "happens."

The parallel has some merits. A large state bureaucracy, a supposedly just but unwieldy pension system and expansive medical benefits all have some role to play in Greece's crisis. (So does large military spending, including brand new American F-16s.)

Fact is, Greece is not the US and vice versa. Here are a few reasons:

The US is 30 times larger than Greece and (still) has more thriving sectors to the economy than government, shipping and tourism.

Greek tax collectors play financial soccer with evaders. The US has the IRS. If Greece could just collect back taxes it would plug the budget deficit.

The American stock exchange has had its busts but for the most part it's been a stable way for people to increase their savings for retirement. Greeks haven't had an open stock exchange that long and several busts in that time have crushed confidence.

Greece did not suffer much in the way of direct ill effects from the US' banking meltdown in 2008. The massive drop in consumer spending and tourism in 2009 did pound away at state revenue. In other words what happened "here" had a big say in what happened "there".

The US can borrow almost at will with low interest rates. Greece couldn't before, then she could, now she (obviously) can't again.

The US' access to credit means that the country won't run into the type of crisis Greece is having for awhile. As long as investors believe the US won't default, the federal government can borrow trillions of dollars from the market. Greece meanwhile will have to settle for billions of euros from the EU and IMF along with austerity measures that undercut the sprawling but weak welfare state.

It also means the US can get into a much worse crisis - without socialism.

Greece in the Media: Why I get annoyed

2010-08-02T05:36:00.004+03:00

If you ever see the word “very” in the newspaper – watch out. Something wicked this way comes.

Sure enough, front page of the New York Times today:

SUNDAY BUSINESS

Expansion? Not in Italy

The nation’s debt woes, very different from Greece’s, can be traced to a mistrust of those not in the family, and an aversion to risk and growth.

These are the kinds of editorial teases that drive me insane. Everything in this sentence shows how Italy is like Greece and not the serious ways the two Mediterranean countries are “very different.”

Yet there is that label; “very different”.

More than bad editorial judgment examples like this one show how Greece has become a byword for debt and profligacy. The reasons why seem so obvious as to not need explanation … and rarely a good one -- beyond a bloated public payroll and "generous" $15,000 pensions-- is offered. (Nevermind tourism and shipping got pounded by the recession.)

Greece has essentially become the barometer for sovereign debt; you’re either like Greece or you’re not.

Right now nobody wants to be Greece - including Italy.

My Fulbright colleagues from Germany, less so from Italy, could not understand my preoccupation with how Greece is covered in the international media.

“Why do you think the international media is out to get Greece?” one of them asked me.

If there is some conspiracy out to destroy Greece or milk money off its bonds -- as plenty of Greeks in the streets have asserted to me-- so be it. I’m not making that accusation though.

What drives me nuts – not as a Greek, but as a journalist – is reporting that comes off as:
a) Uninformed
b) Inaccurate
c) Both

Case in point: David Segal’s marquee piece on the front of the Times Sunday Business section, “Is Italy too Italian?”

The piece wanders for several hundred words talking about famous designer Luciano Barbera’s stubborn approach to high quality fashion before invoking the economic crisis du hier; Greece’s debt issues.

Since the economic crisis began, this country has regularly turned up on the informal list of Nations That Worry Europe. While its finances are not as precarious as those of Greece, Portugal or Ireland, because it is far larger – the Italian economy is the seventh largest in the world – its troubles are more frightening.

Study the numbers and you will find symptoms of distress that look a lot like those of Greece. Public sector debt amounts to roughly 118 percent of the gross domestic product, nearly identical to Greece. And like Greece, Italy is trying to ease fears in the euro zone and elsewhere with an austerity package, one intended to cut the deficit in half, to 2.7 percent of GDP, by 2012.

Here is a case of well-intentioned but Charlie-come-lately reporting:

Italy sits on the “Nations that Worry Europe” list but was there well before Greece’s crisis sent markets into a panic.

Indeed, Italy’s troubles are frightening because the country is so much larger. Yet the typical way of reporting sovereign debt issues mute just how frightening it could turn out.

Reporters use percentage of Gross Domestic Product in order to put into perspective countries’ economic difficulties. Rarely do you hear how much a country actually owes. Seems fair. How else do you compare countries with vastly different economies? If, however, someone has to bail out one of these economies there is a big difference in dollars and euros that will come calling.

Here is the actual comparison between Greece and Italy, assuming that government debt is 118% of GDP.

ITALY: GDP $2.1 trillion, Debt $2.48 trillion

GREECE: GDP $330 billion, Debt $389 billion

(Source: Rounded Averages from IMF, World Bank and CIA World Factbook found on Wikipedia)

To put it in relative terms, Italy is six times larger than Greece (60 million to 10 million citizens, respectively) but her GDP and Debt are seven times larger. To put it in American terms, Italy’s production is larger than California’s (GDP $1.8 trillion) and Greece’s is smaller than New Jersey’s (GDP $448 billion).

Even if Italy’s production is more robust than Greece’s, that country still owes $2 trillion more than Greece. Do you see that statistic reported anywhere? Not in this article.

"Italy is pursuing an austerity package to cut its budget deficit in half to 2.7 percent of GDP by 2012."

A 5.3 percent budget deficit for Italy is $111 billion. A 12.8 percent budget deficit for Greece is $42.24 billion. Italy’s deficit is almost equivalent to the 111 billion euro (depending on the value of the euro) package that Greece will receive over the next three years. So imagine what an Italian bailout would look like? That’s frightening.

Greece and Italy’s predicaments really are different but not because of either country’s own actions. Europe hemmed-hawed-and guffawed until the Greek crisis reached the breaking point. In May, the EU set up a nearly 1 trillion euro support mechanism. So Italy should never have to face the market demons or credit rating snipes that tore at Greece.

Now that is a big difference.

The Times Continues:

But dig a little deeper and the similarities end. The Italians, unlike the Greeks, are born savers, and much of the Italian debt is owned by the Italians. That means that unlike Greece, which will be sending a sizable percentage of its G.D.P. to foreign creditors for a generation to come, Italy is basically in hock to its own citizens.

Supposedly this paragraph shows how Greece and Italy are different.

“But dig a little deeper…”

“The Italians, unlike the Greeks, are born savers.” Both countries are at “record low savings”. Italian households save 14 percent of GDP. Greeks save 7.2 percent. Of course Greeks make 500-1500 euro per month on average and Italians make 1000-2000 euros on average.

(According to Eurostat the more precise figures for median income are Greece 900 euro, Italy 1,300 euro, Germany 1,500 euro.)

The irony here is that Greeks were “born savers” but in the last decade have had more access to credit. Partly as a result Greece had an average growth rate twice as high as Italy’s since 2000. (For more on the inverse relationship between credit and saving, see here.)

“I know that in the States, all Mediterranean countries get lumped together,” says Carlo Altomonte, an economist with Bocconi University in Milan. “But Italy’s problem isn’t that we have a lot of debt. It’s that we don’t grow.”

So growth is definitely one difference between Greece and Italy but you wouldn’t know that Greece has grown at a faster rate than Italy over the last decade from this article.

Unlike Greece, which will be sending a sizable percentage of its G.D.P. to foreign creditors for a generation to come, Italy is basically in hock to its own citizens.

Like using the word "very", most of the time you will not see “which” clauses in news articles because journalists are taught to “burn the which”- get rid of dependent clauses and replace them with syncopated appositions and dashes if you can.

For some reason the Greek case has caused reporters to use “which” left and right. A favorite phrase is the “European debt crisis, which Greece started.”

Greece will indeed send a sizable portion of its debt to foreign creditors; has been since 1821 and probably will do so forever. Ten years ago the country was applauded for privatizing and opening itself up to the world. Then foreign banks gobbled up Greek banks and their liabilities.

National banks everywhere, including Greece and Italy, take on a great deal of their countries’ debt. The difference is that the French, Swiss, etc. bought up Greek banks like Emporiki Trapeza (“Commercial Bank”) that held lots of Greek debt and continued to add on. So Greece is in hock to both itself and to those “foreign creditors” simultaneously.

One of the shames of Segal's almost 3,000-word article is that so much of the best information comes after two jumps. Sure the details about making a fine Italian suit might titillate some, but those details could have been woven in better and quicker.

The meat of some real quality analysis on Italy’s apparent insularity comes toward the end – when most people have stopped reading. Is the “family” feeling Segal describes so different from Greece? In Greece people always talk about having to be mesa “inside” either by family or connection. Whether it’s la familia or i oikogenia, it’s all the same.

Just when things are looking good, Greece gets another jab.

To Professor Giavazzi, the future here doesn’t look like Greece. It looks like Argentina.
“Before World War II, Argentina was rich,” he says. “Even in 1960, the country was twice as rich as Italy.” Today, he says, you can compare the per capita income of Argentina to that of Romania. “Because it didn’t grow…”

What does it mean to “look like Greece”?

Huge budget deficits? Restrictive economic practices?

Not “very different” from Italy at all.

The Crash

2010-07-13T08:06:00.003+03:00

The Global Financial Crisis that started got underway in earnest in September 2008 affected my Fulbright project in two ways. One, it made it clear that there weren't many opportunities for college graduates besides government programs. Two, the wheels of Greece's catastrophe were set in motion...

I SLUMPED into a padded stadium chair in the balcony of Brown’s largest auditorium and hoisted my laptop out of its case. "Introduction to Economics" had seemed like a good idea sitting in a bean bag chair in Athens as I pondered how best to become a well-rounded journalist. At 8:55am after the first real weekend of my senior year that notion was under reconsideration. I swiped away a yawn as our professor fiddled with a transparency on the overhead projector some thirty feet below.

A blue box popped up in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. I’ve got mail.

Probably a dozen times a day breaking news and top stories from The New York Times and Washington Post came to my inbox. And a dozen times a day I glanced and deleted them.

Not this time.

The headline read “Lehman Files for Bankruptcy; Merill is sold.”

LEHMAN BANKRUPT? MERILL SOLD? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

Lehman Brothers was one of the most powerful investment firms on Wall Street. This was no small or medium-sized bank that went belly-up. The Lehman brand was synonymous with the rich and powerful.

But like just about every other sector of the banking industry, Lehman's had reaped huge profits in the last decade as deregulation became conventional wisdom and the circular logic of ever-escalating home prices fed a vicious wheel. Homes were overpriced so buyers took out loans they could not afford and banks granted them on the assumption that as long as the loanee had an income and the value of the houses kept going up that the bet was a sound one. Meanwhile firms like Lehman’s took these loans, slapped stellar ratings on them since, after all, they were mortgages, bundled them together into financial products and sold them in exchange for pension funds and other crucial elements of other countries’ economies.

All of this was and wasn’t clear at the time of the bankruptcy. Banks had been teetering for months (see Bear Stearns) and the public was getting tired of the government “bail outs.” If only they had thought of what was to come.

I'm no economist but I could see this coming (somewhat) from my reporting experience. In the summer of 2006 I worked as a business reporting intern for the Courier-Post. That summer new housing construction ground to a halt, striking fear into our local municipalities and economies that had taken development for granted, even tried to stop it. The next summer foreclosures started to slam Providence where I was working as WBRU's News Director, but we were having trouble grasping the size of the phenomenon and distracted by other issues such as immigration reform (a gigantic failure). By the summer of 2008, I was shadowing reporters in DC as they did stories on people desperately trying to avoid foreclosure and federal programs that were getting lost between the government and banks.

It was like living in a parallel universe. We knew the problem. We chose a course of action. Then we watched the crash happen anyway.

Our professor’s voice snapped me back to attention. The transparency she had been fiddling with was the hard copy of the same story I was reading online.

Guess this was the right time to take economics after all.

***

I should have been relaxed that morning.

Covering the GOP Convention had cost me the first three days of classes and put me in a hole. Then I had to finish up the Fulbright application, taking away time and energy that could have been spent studying, or better yet savoring my last year in college. Two months after my first draft, I had needed a two-day extension to hammer home the final versions.

The essays were just part of the larger Fulbright paperwork picture. I had to fill out the online form on the International Institute for Education’s website, which included both biographical data and short answer questions, print it out and hand it in to Brown but not hit the submit button. My Greek professor had to fill out a language aptitude form. Other professors from Greece sent e-mails of “welcome.” Then I found out that they needed to send me hard copy letters from Athens. Transcripts had to be ordered both from Brown and my study abroad program. The Registrar’s office and the Dean of the College used to be on the same floor of University Hall but the Registrar had just been kicked over to the newly refurbished J. Walter Wilson Building, adding to the chaos. And of course there was that letter of support from the University of Athens I had so eagerly anticipated.

This was not the end, nor the beginning of the end nor even the end of the beginning.

Fulbright’s deadline for applications wasn’t actually until mid-October but Brown had an internal process for vetting entries. This deadline was always set for early September and just about always extended. 2008 was no exception.

Not surprisingly Brown got a surge of applications after the news about Lehman sent the market into a nosedive. The 94 applications were the highest Brown had ever received. It was clear we would graduate into a deep recession. From the day I submitted my Fulbright application (September 12) to the day I had my interview the Dow Jones Industrial average fell from well over 11,000 points to just over 10,000 (October 3). The next week it would be at 8,500 (October 10). Billions of dollars and millions of jobs – lost.

I ironed my khakis and dress shirt for my on-campus Fulbright interview. I never iron. But I was keenly aware that what had once been a dream was fast becoming my only hope.

That day was one of those perfect early fall days in New England; warm but the leaves have already started to change. There’s still that golden light that brings out the color in everything before the long hard months where everything takes on various shades of gray. My interviewer had her office in one of the departments that was once a well-to-do 19^th century home but by no means a manor, full of wood an ornaments that provide some relief from the brutalist concrete structures that dominate the campus. Like Athens, Brown’s boom times in the 1960s and 70s coincided with an ugly period for architecture.

As I stood outside her door I couldn’t help feeling like a fraud. What the hell was this kid from an unknown town in South Jersey from an even less known school doing at an Ivy League University applying for a Fulbright? For the most part, Brown is an accepting, encouraging place but every now and then you run into those old Northeastern elites who take up your credentials and spit them out. I braced for one of those kinds of conversations.

To my surprise my interviewer answered the door with a baby on her hip. Please, please not in front of the child.

“Is it okay if this guy joins us?” Cute kid

“Not a problem at all.” She seems relaxed

“Look I’m going to be straight with you," she said (or something like that). "The purpose of this interview is to see that you’re a decent human being, that you can look me in the eye, and present yourself with etc. etc. After all, if you get this, you will represent the United States and the Fulbright folks kind of care about that.”

“Understood.”

“Your application is solid. The committee liked it. I’m giving it my highest mark.”

I almost fainted. Earlier indications I’d gotten from the grapevine about “The Committee’s” opinion had not been so positive. But two months of work on that proposal had paid off.

“You’re taking a unique approach, and you do include the two sides of the debate. But you’re not totally the first. Try to inject an author into the proposal – maybe Michael Herzfeld –and you should be good to go.”

The interview was supposed to be 20 minutes. It might have taken 10.

At first I thought maybe the on-campus interview was a joke until I saw and heard shell-shocked classmates who had gotten sliced, diced and told to start from almost scratch.

***

I was anything but shell-shocked as I took a seat in the back of an auditorium in Barus and Holley, Brown’s engineering building.

A year earlier, In a room similar to this one -- gray walls, gray floor, chairs that had their paint removed and were thus gray -- we had been told by an executive from SEARS/KMART that when a firm goes bankrupt, the shareholders get wiped out. They lose everything. SEARS’ owner, a hedge fund manager was under fire for taking his investors' money and putting it into retail instead of more ‘secure’ financial products. SEARS is still around and Lehman’s shareholders lost everything.

What infuriated me after the collapse was how the cause of the crash was right there. It had played out in news reports for two years. Yet this amnesia descended upon us as economists, who failed to predict the crash, then came up with theories of why it happened…when we already knew why.

The two economists speaking to us at Brown that night seemed like they might have fallen into that ilk. I’m not sure. Haven’t read their work.

Supposedly they came from two different backgrounds but they both agreed we had to pump billions, if not trillions of dollars into the financial system. At stake was not just the US economy, not just the world economy but really our way of life in and of itself if we didn’t act.

As existential as I’ve made it sound, a year earlier Congress had to haggle with the Bush administration for $35 billion that would give health insurance to essentially every child in America. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took up a billion dollars a week and that was supposedly bankrupting us. It only took a couple of weeks to hammer out the bank bailout.

Suddenly the answer to any problem was $700 billion. Amount of oil we import from foreign countries; $700 billion. Amount needed to prop up the banks; $700 billion. Stimulus program needed; about $700 billion give or take $100 billion. When in doubt, it’s $700 billion.

There was a pause, as always, when the economists finished giving their smug shpeels and the floor was opened up for questions. Who’s going to ask first? Am I going to look dumb? I don’t want to look over eager. No one likes that type. These there the thoughts I had watched flash across my classmates’ faces for three years.

So I stood up.

“I’m not the smartest cat, especially when it comes to economics (I got a C on the first midterm). But where are we getting all this money from?”

The answer in an oh-so smug way was that the government would be able to borrow the money and then prop up the economy.

Did that answer your question? No.

“But how long can we borrow? And didn’t extending credit without limits get us into this crisis in the first place? Where does the buck stop? Can America go bankrupt?”

Well, the government will just print more money if it needs more money. You do run the risk of inflation but right now the crisis is too severe.

I sat back down. Two questions were enough even though I had a third.

What about countries who can’t print and spend money like the US?

News out of the Twin Cities

2010-07-11T08:45:00.001+03:00

This entry in my recap has a bit of a different backdrop; the Midwest. I was in the middle of the culminating moment of my reporting career when I got some of the most important news of my Fulbright application process.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA played host to one of the most bizarre events of the 2008 Presidential campaign. And, no, it wasn’t Sarah Palin’s coming out speech as John McCain’s running mate. That took place a couple days later.
Day 1 of the Republican National Convention got neutered because a hurricane struck the Gulf of Mexico. On the same day three years earlier, then President George W. Bush gave John McCain a birthday cake as thousands of people were drowning in New Orleans. Needless to say, the Republicans were not trying to avoid a repeat of their obliviousness.

It did come out that day that Palin’s daughter Bristol was pregnant.

But I could really give a damn. As far as I was considered Bristol was the town on the other side of the Burlington-Bristol Bridge.

Besides, as WBRU’s one0man reporting team in Minneapolis I already had to hop between convention and demonstration coverage. The tabloids could take care of the gossip.

Politics and riots. Turned out to be good training for Athens.

Since most of the day’s action in the Xcel Energy Center canceled or watered down I took the opportunity to drive out to the marquee demonstration at the Statehouse in St. Paul (the other half of the Twin Cities). Protests in the United States usually don’t get that raucous but after eight years of Bush dozens if not hundreds of groups were bringing their A-Game.

Ralph Nader enthusiasts with sandwich boards begged reporters to open up the debates to their third-party challenger. Sorry, Ralph. Better luck next time. Code Pink held a gay marriage between Bush and McCain impersonators. Well that’s pretty obvious. Another group had used paper mache to make a chain gang of the Bush Administration, incarcerated for their alleged war crimes. A nice touch. My favorite was a group that had converted the song “Insane in the membrane” to “Insane in the McCain brain.” That’s going to make great nat sound on a day when there’s nothing else to report.

After an hour or so I headed back to where I parked by the Masonic Temple and pulled out a map (I’d forgotten my GPS) to try and figure how to get back to the Xcel Center without the I-35W bridge that had collapsed a year earlier and set off a frenzy about America’s infrastructure.

I rubbed my face and forehead more than a few times trying to juggle both my responsibilities and the ambiguities. This wasn’t my first time reporting solo but multi-tasking coverage and handling logistics like rental car, hotel and media passes gave me a few headaches.

To make matters worse, we had been the first outlet in Rhode Island to apply for credentials in December 2007 but somehow got forgotten and then put at the mercy of a two-bit talk radio operation for our passes. The woman in charge tried to bully me in-between hob-nobbing with GOP luminaries (and non-luminaries).

I stopped at a café with wireless and a decent turkey sandwich. It was that typical clean, chic, black and purple café set-up with a clientele ranging between high school kids in their converses and businessmen in their suits. Let’s see. Weapon of choice… Rocket ship laptop or microscopic text on iPod touch? Go with the iPod.

This gizmo had been an accident and my saving grace. Before I left for Athens earlier in 2008 I asked for a cheap or used iPod so I could stick a microphone on it for radio purposes. My grandmother went out and instead bought me the shiniest, most expensive iPod she could find, which of course wasn’t compatible with a microphone (at the time). At first I thought, what the hell am I going to do with this thing? From Athens to Budapest to Rome to Lugano to DC and now to Minnesota this little device had saved my butt on more than one occasion with impeccable wi-fi, maps and notes I could jot down without pen or paper. And, oh yeah, it played music.

She’d had the silver back engraved when she bought it.

To George. Love you.

Grandmom.

Thanks, Grandmom.

I connected to the Internet and downloaded my e-mails. My hotel room had wi-fi but it cost money, I’m cheap and I was in a rush. One e-mail was timed at 4:00am. Who the hell would send me an e-mail at 4 in the morning? Then I looked a little closer.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Unexpected news out of Athens

The e-mail in question had come from the MA in SEE secretariat. In it, she chose to painfully detail all the times I had tried to contact the program since July 25. At first I kicked myself for sending the e-mail so close to the start of August, when Europe, especially Greece goes on holdiay. Her admission that she had been on vacation for over a month evaporated that guilt. At that point I realized that I had spent three weeks calling before anyone told me she was on diakopes. Then she returned to work a week after the date I’d been told. Now with this e-mail literally in the palm of my hand I became all too aware that those mornings waking up early were entirely pointless.

Pride aside, this e-mail breathed new life back into my Fulbright prospects. I had all the know-how, for the most part, I just needed a program affiliation to back up my application. Other than apologizing for the delay, the correspondence didn’t say much besides that she would bring my inquiry to the attention of “the relevant people.” Fair enough.

My response was short and didn’t do justice to the relief I felt.

Better late than never.

After a snoozer of an evening at the Xcel Energy Center on Monday night, I took my time planning out my course of action for Tuesday. It was clear that preparations for this hurricane had been adequate and that political posturing could resume as planned.

As I looked for the updated schedule of the day I found at the top of my inbox an email from 5:28am. It was the University of Athens saying that I could either enroll in the Master’s program or work as an independent researcher at the department of political science and public administration. Had I not been in the middle of covering the biggest news story of my life up to that point and handling a budget of a few thousand dollars, I would have been ecstatic since everything for my Fulbright had fallen into place.

On the Ground

Minneapolis started to boil that Tuesday night. Eight years of angst had been stymied by storm watch. I walked through a buzzing crowd to the back entrance of the Xcel Center, a hockey arena where the fights usually take place on the ice. But on this day there were reports of clashes breaking out across this usually serene Midwestern capital. There I found a line of black armored riot police with wooden batons. They looked like a cross between Darth Vader and a Ninja Turtle. I imagined how I would ask in a friendly but authoritative voice if I could pass through. Instead I limply held up my press pass and timidly asked if I could go. Even though I was wearing a suit, I realized I was even younger than most of the potential rioters and looked pretty green for a 21 year-old, even in a suit.

A towering officer who looked like the Norse god Thor snarled and looked down at my press pass. Then cracking an equally timid smile he said, “Oh ya shor ya can” with a quick nod of his head. Got to love that Midwestern hospitality.

I strode on to Radio Row with my laptop on my back and my microphone in my holster. There in-between talk radio booths from around the country I would interview the likes of Mike Huckabee (in a crowd) and Christie Whitman (one-on-one). Whitman had been governor of New Jersey when I was a kid and I made sure to mention I was from Burlington County.

Up the elevator and over to the press box I had a dead-center view of the action, next to a guy from CNN Radio. We swapped war stories. Well, he swapped war stories. We had a good time making fun of the goings on of the delegates below us and the talk radio orgy happening behind us. September 2 was the first of three long nights.

On the Floor

Another day, another e-mail from the Master’s program. This one was like a Hollywood ransom note with “R” instead of are and “U” instead of u.

September 3 was the day that Sarah Palin made her big debut. From where I sat, she was a speck on the black stage but her head floated about 40 feet long on the jumbotron in front of my face. A steady din came from every corner in the press deck as voices whispered to listeners in untold corners of America that Palin was “introducing” herself to the American people.

Palin needed no introduction to the delegates. They ate every word she had to offer. From the story of her family to her executive experience including that “being a mayor of a small town is kind of like being a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities.” The barb at Obama made my eyes bug out of my head. She would abdicate those “actual responsibilities” as governor less than a year later. Some might say
I'm revealing my bias there. Well, I am if that bias is against hypocrisy.

I stayed in the Xcel Center until about 2am putting together audio reports for the morning newscasts, long after most of the reporters had quit for the night and went out to patronize local watering holes. Me? I just got behind the wheel of my car and drove the half-hour outside of town to my room at the Red Roof Inn.

After dragging myself out of bed and before checking out of my hotel I found my “formal” invitation to the MA in SEE program waiting in my inbox.

That last night of the convention the gatekeeper to my media pass would give away my seat in the press box to her Budweiser-guzzling nephew. And I would just happen not to be able to find her in the crowd of talk radio revelers to give her back the floor pass. Oops.

I spent the evening talking to the small but jubilant RI delegation as red, white and blue balloons popped all around us. I returned to the depopulated press box where a fellow reporter snapped a shot of me above the convention floor, empty save for the confetti.

That night Republicans were convinced that with McCain, the war hero, and Palin, the reform governor mother, that they had Obama on the run. The Convention bounce brought McCain-Palin into a near dead-heat with Obama-Biden on September 15, according to Real Clear Politics.

The next day everything changed.

"The Package" and "Prevailing Faith"

2010-07-10T04:24:00.002+03:00

Here's part 2 of my series on how my Fulbright experience developed from project proposal to master's thesis. It's a challenge to myself to write every night for one hour and preserve the whole process for posterity. May you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it (well hopefully more so).

You can read Part 1 here.

With no further ado we return to summer 2008...

A WHITE CARDBOARD ENVELOPE sat waiting for me on the piano when I got home from my internship.

It had no chance.

I shooed away the cousins running around my knees and ripped open the package like my life depended on it. It kind of did. My prospects of avoiding Ivy League baby sitter status after graduation rested on the materials inside.

Secluded in my room I pulled out the package’s contents. The Brown University Fellowship Office had sent me a dark purple, almost black folder with the personal statements and project proposals of two successful Fulbright applicants. For the next few weeks this folder would be my bible as I crafted the three pages that would determine more than anything whether I got a Fulbright or not.

At first glance, the proposals had a tenuous relation to what I was trying to do. Both were European proposals but they were music projects. The names of the applicants were scrubbed out but the first line of one of the personal statements read “I, John Doe, am applying because…” Well, that was creative. I could feel my confidence improving already.

Upon closer review, both proposals were thoroughly detailed and well thought out. They introduced their (incredibly esoteric) topics in a way that made them accessible to the uninitiated and showed how their projects were culturally connected to broader happenings in the host country. I knew nothing about Latvia before I received this package but after reading the proposal the impact of the country’s transition from Communism on music felt like History 101.

I mined the two applications for structure. After the introduction of the proposals came a paragraph on what the project would entail, the logistics and phases of the research, how the project related to the United States and a tentative idea of what would happen with the project after the grant ended. All of that had to fit in two pages. If that sounded bad you had to fit your life story and how it was reaching up to the crescendo of a Fulbright grant in one page. It also seemed like a good idea to sprinkle your experience in-country around liberally.

If these samples were my bible, now I needed a minister.

Brown was good enough to supply her too. God Bless this poor woman’s soul. A graduate student I had never met read about a dozen drafts of my proposal and another half dozen. When I felt my writer’s pride bruised (and rightfully so) I sent the proposal for advising elsewhere. Then I sent it back to her and she said I made it worse.

She was right.

My agony stemmed from trying to fit in way too much information about my topic. I felt like I had to because the perspectives on the issue at hand were absolutely opposed, plentiful and sparse at the same time.

In January 2008, I had arrived in Athens just in time for the Archbishop of Athens and all Greece Christodoulos to die. In one course at College Year in Athens we analyzed how the late Archbishop had divided Greek society and emphasized the Church’s nationalist legacy and connections to the state.

True enough.

But in another course our professor, who was a priest, passed around obituaries from different publications and showed how they interpreted the head of the Greek Church’s life in wholly different ways. “This article is biased,” he said. “Then again, I’m biased too. He did ordain me.”

Such was the enigmatic of character of Christodoulos.

This split of opinion extended to the issue of immigration. Academics labeled Christodoulos’ nationalist rhetoric during his campaign to keep religious affiliation on the Greek identity card reactionary, xenophobic and a reason why Church and State should separate. Priests and devout lay people saw him as a man who extended a hospitable hand to migrants through his December 26 breakfasts, his charitable work and his interfaith dialogue. To them, Christodoulos had used the Church-State relationship to help migrants. Journalists were split but seemed to arrive at the consensus on Christodoulos’ successor Ieronymos; drop the nationalism and keep the philanthropy.

The 99 words I just used above to describe the two views of the church-state-immigrant triangle mark the first time I managed to keep it under 100 words.

I had planned to spend a couple of weeks writing the proposal and personal statement. The Fulbright was my hail-mary post-graduation plan so graduate school applications, resumes, work samples and GRE testing had to be set in motion. Besides, they were only three pages anyway, right? My first draft was dated July 30. In September, I was still working on the proposal.

The final product was titled “Prevailing Faith” after the term in Greece’s Constitution that describes Greece’s “unofficial official” religion the Orthodox Church. Looking back on my words, two years later, they seem prophetic in a way I never expected.

This scholarship is especially timely for Greece and its Orthodox Church because now is a time of transition with a newly elected hierarch and constant pressure to conform to Western standards of government.

Drafting, drafting and re-drafting the proposal seemed endless. Instead of knocking out the proposal in a couple of drafts over a few nights, I was reviewing it constantlyl first thing in the morning, last thing at night, sitting at a computer on the assignment desk at the television station. I’m wasting time chasing a dream and sacrificing energies that could be better spent on better career prospects.

A year later I would receive a message from a friend. She was applying for a Fulbright and just received her “package” of successful essays. The name was scrubbed out but she had a hunch the essay on religion and politics in Greece had to be mine.

Where it all began

2010-07-08T21:44:00.000+03:00

THOSE OF YOU who follow Jungle Vision know that the material I posted on this site dropped off dramatically in 2010. Those of you who know me well know that I’m not happy about that fact.

Many of the things I saw and heard in Greece, and many of the things that brought me there in the first place do not fit easily into blogging. The stories are long, involved, more complicated than they often get portrayed and less complicated than I usually try to tell them. People want short stories on the Internet, yet the web is the only place where a writer doesn’t deal with the devil of inches, paper and ink.

The people I talked to did not want their names or their stories on the Internet. Protestors gave me an “or else” if I didn’t put my camera away. Union journalists didn’t want some punk with a point-and-click camera and a cheap microphone on their turf.

But as I sit here, unable to sleep, as always I can’t help but feel this story needs to be told – if not for anyone else’s sake then for my posterity.

It was mid-July two years ago when I began the process to apply for a Fulbright Fellowship to study how the Church of Greece interacts with immigrants and what that means for Church-State relations. After all this time I still have trouble boiling the purpose of my project down to a coherent sentence. The wordiness ought to foreshadow the bureaucratic application process a little bit too. Bureaucratic, but well worth it I might add.

Two years ago, I was adrift trying to figure out what to do with myself. Now I’m trying to make sense of what I did these last two years.

The best solution then is to write, and write a lot, but not too much. I need an audience (that’s where you come in) or I’ll say, “what’s the point?” and give up. So each night for as long as it takes I’ll devote one hour, no more no less, to telling the story of a world in recession, a country in crisis and a kid from New Jersey trying to make sense of it all.

Pretty grandiose right? Well I’ve got 50 minutes left tonight to start this story.

(NOTE: because I’m not warning people that I’m doing this in advance, I’m going to leave out most personal names)

My bed in Arlington hated me. Few nights did I go to bed quickly.Not once did I wake up feeling rested.

Luckily most days I didn’t get to sleep much at all. One day of the week I worked the 6am shift (unpaid) as a news intern at Fox 5 in Washington, DC. Two other days I woke up at 4am to call Greece about my future. Those calls ended in frustration.

It turns out the oracle doesn’t take long distance calls. Not after July 15 anyway.

Bleary-eyed and blind in the gray morning light I fumbled for my headset and waited while my laptop fired up Skype, the salvation of students making international phone calls. If a voice did answer on the other end I would clear my throat and croak out what I needed in Greek. I was trying to call the University of Athens’ Master’s in Southeastern European Studies programme. According to the program's (old) website and a succession of terse people speaking in loud Greek and broken English, the programme secretariat took calls from 11am-1pm, two days a week. Great timing if you live in the Balkans but for those of us in the Western Hemisphere the seven-hour time difference meant an early wake-up.

Unfortunately, I was desperate.

If I didn’t find an institution in Greece to support my research proposal, there was no prayer I would get a Fulbright Fellowship. Every unanswered call or conversation in broken Grenglish made it look like my only hope to stay productive after college was slipping away.

It had become clear to me that a) I wanted to go back to Greece b) I had no idea and too many ideas about what I wanted to do with myself longterm after I graduated from Brown c) the US was heading for some kind of economic disaster with houses falling into foreclosure, banks folding and $4/gallon gasoline pummeling everybody.

These conclusions came to me while I was sitting in the third floor student center of College Year in Athens in May 2008. Technically, I was writing papers and drawing up power-points for final exams. In reality, I was reading news back in the States and glancing every other minute over the top of my laptop at the Acropolis. Located next to the Marble Stadium, where the first Olympic Games were held in 1896, CYA’s top floor has an unobstructed view over the tree tops of the National Garden and all the way up to the backside of the Parthenon.

Things were bleak back home and even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed and set off the dominoes that toppled the international financial system. I got e-mails from Brown’s Career Development Center just about everyday about preparing for graduation. But they weren’t fooling me. We were heading into a bad, bad situation.

Meanwhile, I had just spent four months living in Athens, sharing an apartment with three (then four) other guys, cruising around the Balkans and eating souvlaki to heart’s content. For the first time in college there were academic issues I was dealing with that didn’t feel like they had been hashed out 600 times already. I felt passionate about what I studied; religion, politics and immigration. But what was I going to do with it?

“Why don’t you apply for a Fulbright,” one of my best friends in the program said to me.

Reading it now sounds a little bit like a 1950s commercial. I have x problem and someone replies why don’t you do y. Truth is, this actually happened.

“Yeah, I’m doing it. You get paid to live and do research in Greece. Isn’t that what you want?”

God Bless her Soul.

Her suggestion changed the course of my life. I still feel a little guilty I got the Fulbright, she didn’t and one of my best friends in Athens was someone researching her same field (public health).

But I only feel a little bit guilty.

***

The voice on the other end of the phone sounded more excited than I was. After over a month kicking around ideas and procrastinating, in early July I finally took a friend’s advice to call Brown’s Dean of the College Fellowship Office for help designing my Fulbright project.

“I see. I see. Oh that’s interesting. How would you do that? Ok. Ok,” one very excited Brown University Dean said over the phone as I explained the unexplored triangle between church, state and immigrant. To my credit, I had my elevator pitch figured out. I would supplement the book and article research with interviews in the field. Throw in some multimedia and a blog and voila! 21^st century research project by a kid coming out of an Ivy League school.

One problem was brought to my attention. I needed an institutional affiliation for Greece. Other Fulbright countries like Japan take the student and the project then they find a match with professors at a university. In fact, just about every Fulbright commission, I would later find out, has their own way of doing things.

This university affiliation had to be a "real" in-country institution so my beloved professors at my study abroad program were out of the equation. Worse yet, I needed a professor or a program that works in English because my Greek isn’t that great, and definitely not up to postrgraduate level.

I spent some quality time with google over the next few days and came up with the MA in SEE studies at the University of Athens. I started by e-mailing the secretariat and each of the professors in the program to see if they would offer me a letter of support and/or advise my research.

A couple weeks later I still hadn’t gotten a response.

I reported back to the College Fellowship office with my troubles finding an advisor but with the good news that I had found a potential English-language postgraduate program.

“Take limited coursework, do not do the full MA program. It’ll take away from your research,” was the advice I received.

The pitter-patter and joyful screams of children’s footsteps was growing louder outside my door. In exchange for baby-sitting, college advising and rides to baseball practice some relatives had offered me free room and board, including the torture rack of a bed. My charges were getting restless.

“Sure thing,” I replied feeling a bit harried. “No master’s degree. Got it.”

A month and half-a-dozen 4am wake-up calls later, there was still no response from Athens.

Fulbright at Parliament

2010-06-14T13:05:00.001+03:00

On April 28, the Fulbright Foundation Greece held its spring meeting.

Instead of doing something tacky like going to an island, we headed straight to the center of Greece's political universe: the Βουλή or parliament.

You've seen pictures of the parliament plenty of times on this blog. It's a big yellow building that doesn't match anything else in the city since it's style comes from Northern Europe, not neo-classical or 1950s concrete.

There's a reason for the difference in style. The Parliament was once a palace and its first occupant was a Bavarian youth named Otto. Now as Greece reels with the implications of new German influence in her affairs, fierce debates go on between elected representatives.

***

Okay, so I started this post on May 4. The next day riots broke out in Athens.

As you can imagine a month and a half later I have thoroughly lost track of what I was going to say in the post.

So here are some pictures I took from inside the Parliament.

Pictures are worth 1,000 words anyway, right?

Casual Friday # 3: Summer in Greece

2010-06-11T20:05:00.002+03:00

This is just too adorable for words.

Greek Protest Erupts in Peace

2010-05-28T00:28:00.005+03:00

So I have a confession to make.

If protests on May 20 had turned violent you would have seen it on this blog a lot sooner. I would have taken a whole day to write out my every memory. There would have been a video plus pictures galore.

It's May 27 and it'll be May 28 in Athens by the time I'm done writing this post.

I was reporting on the protest for CBS Radio. It was no secret that I was out there just in case things went crazy after the riot on May 5.

My mission then was to somehow capture just how peaceful this protest was.

In other words, I had to show what a Greek protest sounds like when it erupts in peace, not violence.

NOTE: I'm trying something a little different with my video this time, namely a rolling audio commentary. I wanted to get across just how laid back these protests really are. I did it in one take so I said things a bit flippantly. If anyone takes issue, I'll take down the audio.

NOTE 2: I neglected to mention in the first writing that the Greek police did detain 100 people at checkpoints before the protest. Democratic? Probably not. Effective, doesn't seem to have hurt.. Reminds me of DC a couple summers ago. There was speculation before the protests that anarchists were going to chill out but that there were still a few dozen that were more 'hardcore'.

I got a few actualities (sound bites) from the early parts of the protest. The communist union PAME/ΠΑ.Μ.Ε. which literally means 'Let's go' was in the front as always. They're pretty mellow. Couldn't find anyone who spoke English though.

A couple of guys drinking beers agreed to talk to me because they thought I was a Greek who spoke good English. Amazing what a difference a beard makes. They told me how they were certain foreign agents (read: American intelligence) were responsible for the bank bombing, not anarchists.

When I told them I was American they paused for a moment, then said they think American propaganda is brilliant because we've convinced the world we're stupid. "But we know the Americans are a very clever people."

Thanks?

At least one sign holder also thought that the CIA was somehow responsible for the tragedy of 5.5.

That sign was grim but cartoonish and the first indication of how different a protest this was. On 5.5 I was asked to report any funny signs back to base.

There were none.

The closest was an EU swastika.

Those signs were all about war and struggle. Two weeks later, a lot more people had made posters and put jokes on their banners. Even the main flyer for the rally read a simple, "ENOUGH ALREADY."

One guy outside the parliament building actually stopped me so I could take a picture of his sign. It showed George Papandreou paddling a kayak over a waterfall with IMF written on the front and USA on the back. On the other side was Angela Merkel with a Hitler mustache ... next to Hitler.

Before or after that, I'm not so sure now, I was right in front of the line of police as they stared down several thousand demonstrators. The front line wasn't waving molotov cocktails this time. One man gave flowers to the largest Greek police officer I've ever seen (looked like a blue version of The Incredible Hulk). A woman went around banging a Greek coffee pot. Kind of annoying to be honest with you.

There were a few anarchists who squared off with the cops on the Venizelos Statue side of the Parliament Building. About the most obscene thing that happened there was a guy grabbing his crotch (you can see that in the video).

After over an hour of stand-off in front of the Parliament the crowd started dissipating down Stadiou St.

(It should be noted here that the riot police showed a lot of restraint not firing tear gas at the folks right up against their shields.)

At this point I caught up with some newly formed migrant labor groups who wanted to show their solidarity with Greeks. They clearly weren't ready to deal with the media yet. I'll try to get a hold of them in the near future.

I roamed around seeing if there were any skirmishes. None to be found.

So it was back to Syntagma where I had to use a payphone to report back to CBS in New York.

"You want me to tell you all about the riot that didn't happen?"

They didn't.

Luckily I had had the presence of mind to get in the front of the demonstration when it got to the bank so I caught the crowd giving a cheer to the fallen bank employees. In my script, I called it a salute. Suppose I've gotten a little too used to 'worker solidarity' here in the socialist Balkans.

The audio from the video I took of the guy giving flowers to the police could also be extracted so there was some decent 'peace sound' to work with. To CBS' credit they decided to run the story.

Hopefully American audiences got to see a different side of a Greek protest.

The real one.

Trying to Find Some Humor

2010-05-08T15:11:00.008+03:00

The shock of Wednesday's events has Athenians looking for humor to cope with the situation.

Much of it comes from the depths of the gallows but it usually raises my spirit.

The Economist has been the king since the crisis started with reports full of tongue-in-check Classical quips, lots of graphs but light on accurate analysis. And let's not forget headlines like 'Acropolis Now', which apparently used to be a BBC radio comedy about Ancient Greece.

(Oh, those Brits and their affection for antiquity, that they sometimes steal.)

But Jon Stewart came up from behind and stole the show. "Greece's financial crisis threatens to take down Western Civilization, a civilization, they themselves invented. A rather tragic irony, which they also invented." (Video below, 3:00)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Family Research Council's European Gaycation

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Stewart than cited an iffy report, arguing the Greeks didn't invent math? Uh, ever heard of geometry, Pythagoras? I'd also like to clarify that Greek holiday bonuses aren't 'huge' (usually) and they're what make it seem like Greeks get paid 14 months a year (not 14 months + holiday bonuses).

Stewart goes on to say that Greece invented democracy and America perfected it. He omitted that Greece invented this crisis and the EU has made it a perfect storm.

There were some pictures I took that struck my funny bone, located right next to my violent irony bone, once I had a chance to process everything.

This one particularly caught my attention.

I'd long suspected that anarchists throw like girls. Now I have proof.

(No offense to the Doane Academy Lady Spartans re: throwing like girls)

So let me put my baseball cap on and try to explain this.

Look at the anarchist in the foreground. His form is all wrong. First off, he's not wearing a shirt. Don't know what's up with that. Second, it looks like his eyes are covered, not good for accuracy. Third, his left shoulder is flying wide open. That just kills your power. Fourth, bended elbow good. Bended so much, not so good. This guy is heading for Tommy John Surgery if he doesn't fix his mechanics.

Geeze.

Now look at the cop in the right background. Clearly, this guy has had some training. His body is lined up right with his target and he's kept his shoulder in, the same shoulder that's carrying a gigantic plexi-glass shield. Bonus points.

I'm not sure how powerfully I want anarchists or cops to throw their bombs and tear gas canisters, respectively. But then again, it's probably better they hit the right target instead of doing something stupid. (See tragic gaffes by cops, anarchists)

Other pictures I have, you kind of had to be on site to appreciate.

This guy just shrugged as the digital municipality sign was set alight in Syntagma. Then he looked the other way. "What? What? Nothing to see here."

I accidentally got caught in the middle of a bunch of anarchists attacking the Grande Bretagne, one of Athens' oldest, most absurdly luxurious hotels. They spent a long time trying to break the glass. Gave up. Shrugged. And then lit the bushes on fire.

One of my female American colleagues who used to play softball and weighs about 100 pounds said, "Man, I could have made a bigger hole than that" after she saw my video.

As I told her, this is why we can't have nice things.

Live from Athens

2010-05-07T19:33:00.002+03:00

Friday afternoon I checked in with my old friends at Fox 5 about the crisis in Greece.

Next time I'll look at the camera.

May 5th: The End of Innocence

2010-05-06T23:21:00.010+03:00

Protests in Athens used to seem a bit romantic.

Instead of cops and robbers you have cops and anarchists. Sure cops and robbers are dangerous with guns and anarchists have molotov cocktails. But in the game no one got hurt and the danger made it all the more exciting.

The game is over here in Athens.

Three people died on Wednesday.

Four if you count the baby one of them was carrying inside her. They were employees at a bank that tried (foolishly) to tough out Athens' often raucous conditions.

It didn't work.

The experience shook the city, but does not seem to have moved the mob.

This reporter is a bit shook up too. At one point I found myself on one knee, in a dark stoa off of Syntagma Square, struggling to breathe and understand what was happening.

(For a much shorter version of what happened yesterday, see the story I wrote with Nicole Itano, here)

(Photo: Chelsea Rudman took this shot outside the burned-out bank)

(VIDEO: Political purposes, a violent end)

A Simple Assignment

It's hard to believe that on Tuesday, the day before the chaos, my big assignment was to call up pool construction companies in Athens.

Why?

The Greek government used satellite images to find that thousands of people who claimed they make 10,000 euro a year had pools that cost more than that to build. In the international press madness that has surrounded Greece's billion dollar support and austerity packages, anything could make a good lead. It was a simple enough assignment.

I found a guy whose business is literally called 'pool construction' and interviewed him in his sterile white office. The walls were so white, so bare, so clean that our cameraman had to play with the light coming from the window so our interviewee wouldn't look like the Greek God of pools floating out of a shining white background.

Our interview subject didn't speak great English so I had to prepare the questions in advance. As I've posted before, I can basically read, write and speak Greek (with an accent that makes my classmates laugh) but I cannot for the life of me understand what people are saying to me. So before the interview I jotted down my questions, bounced them off of the Greek cameraman, and he agreed to give me translations.

Worked like a charm. I asked the questions and our interview subject, a gentleman probably in his 50s, bald and armed with a series of kind expressions, generously responded despite my pronunciation. Afterward, I would lean back in my chair to ask the camera guy for a quick translation. Usually Greek interview subjects, especially speaking in their native tongue, duck and dodge my questions. This gentleman came right out and said, "Yes, people have been asking me to construct some kind of cover for their pools. But I don't want to be involved with that."

Easy. Pleasant. Clean as could be.

We wrapped things up and I reported back to the boss I did the interview for. It had been an all-day process. The sun was beginning its descent as we rode down Amalias Ave, leading into central Syntagma Square.

It was the kind of sunset that turns everything a gold color. Tanned locals and tourists walked about; almost all the Greeks in their ubiquitous jeans, the tourists in shorts to cope with the heat. The yellow parliament building looked more radiant than usual and occasionally people stopped in front to watch the Evzone guards in ceremonial skirt, fez and pom-pom shoes do their march in front of the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. It was a postcard day in Athens.

I called up the chief to check in. She had a favor to ask of me the next day,

Hey George, can you help out with the demonstration tomorrow?

Why not?

I'm no stranger to Greek protests. (See November 17, December 6, Another strike?)

Most of the time they bore me.

People walk around chatting with each other and occasionally chanting their slogans. If it weren't for the anti-imperialist, anti-government, anti-capitalist, anti-whatever signs they carry it would seem a pleasant social event, almost like Providence's Waterfire. Sans the water.

Inevitably, some folks show up to start trouble whether you call them self-styled anarchists like the international media, youths like the local media, or malakies, jerk-offs like those of us who live with their destruction on a near daily basis.

The peaceful marching of thousands of people who feel their poor but pleasant way of life slipping into poverty gets lost almost every time in these antics. These are the folks who get on TV and every time they show up I spend about an hour reassuring friends and family over the Internet that I'm ok. Athens is ok. Everything is ok. Really.

My friend Chelsea from Brown was visiting but that wouldn't be a problem. The general strike canceled her ferry to the islands and closed pretty much everything else she would have gone and done as a tourist. Besides, she was a journalism student like me as an undergrad, and a tough one I looked up to when I was a freshman. Then I trained her to be a radio reporter when I was a sophomore.

Her inaugural assignment at WBRU was to cover a protest over the closing of Rhode Island's largest homeless shelter. So this was nothing new.

What I didn't tell her, and she might be alarmed to read here, is that I like having a girl by my side when things get hairy. (See Unger, Erinn and dozens of hungry migrants) It seems to calm people down especially when my own style of interviewing --notebook out, in a suit, gazing intently -- reminds people a bit of the FBI.

The next morning I checked in with the chief for an update on our assignment. She was going to be on top of a luxury hotel in Athens doing live shots for a TV network. I was going to be in the streets. Figures.

All we need is for you to get the atmosphere of the protestors, give us an estimate of how many are there and translate some signs. No need to interview anybody.

As we say in baseball, simple as a can of corn. I didn't even bring my notebook with me because it was full of notes I need for my Fulbright project and don't want to lose. My handwriting is terrible to begin with and if I needed to jot something down I had my iPod.

It would only be a couple of hours anyway. Always is.

Or at least always was.

Whispers

In the days leading up to the event some of my young Greek colleagues told me they had heard whispers about fasaria. In other words, people were getting ready to make some noise.

There was no noise whatsoever in the center of Athens the morning of May 5. All was silent.

We walked from my apartment through the haughty area of Kolonaki. Few people were out. Few shops were open or had any customers. We were sweating before we started walking. The weather reports said the temperature was in the 70s in Athens. I swear they're off by 10 degrees every time.

I was wearing jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt. Covering a protest is like cutting the grass. What's comfortable (i.e. cool on a hot day) may not be what's functional. You have to protect yourself and be prepared to walk, or run, a lot. Chelsea opted to wear black tights and sandals. It was a subject of discussion...

We grabbed some frozen coffee off of Panepistimiou Ave. Chelsea informed me that she had decided to leave her cellphone back at my apartment. "But don't worry I have your number written down."

Panepistimiou had already been cordoned off but there were only a few pedestrians like ourselves. A cameraman warned me in Greek that he was about to go live. I looked up and saw a familiar Cable TV reporter practicing for his next chat with his tan earbud already plugged in and wearing a 'smart' purple dress shirt. No time to chat though.

We peaked into Syntagma Square and found only a van with a megaphone blaring away. Otherwise the square was deserted at 11am, when the protest was set to start.

We worked our way back up Panepistimiou and saw a surprising lack of police presence considering Athens feels like a garrison in times of peace. It seems there's a cop on every corner in the center and that cop is wearing a blue jumpsuit, navy blue bullet proof vest, a black assault rifle and various shades of aviator sunglasses. By this point we had walked several kilometers and had barely seen a soul.

When we reached Omonia Square we saw why.

The square was filled to the brim with people and at 11:15 they were already pouring down Stadiou St. (which runs parallel to Panepistimiou) toward Syntagma. I come to this square several times a week, usually checking in on something related to immigrants. During the day they seem like the only residents. On this day, though, the square was a sea of heads and white banners.

One peak down Oct. 28/Patission Ave. revealed that this was going to be a loud, long, large protest.

The Masses

In one of the Chronicles of Narnia books, C.S. Lewis wrote about a place where there were pools lined up as far as the eye could see. There were no pools on Patission, just one banner, after the next, after the next.

The protest had started with a rally at Pedion Areos or the 'Field of Ares' it's the Greek translation, roughly, of the Latin Campus Martius, or plain of Mars. In Rome, the youth mustered on the campus, outside the city walls, and drilled for military service. In Athens, this field is a wide intersection of Alexandras Ave. and Patission where KTEL or national service buses queue up. It is no less a militant rallying point but unlike Rome it is very much inside Athens. Conservatives wave their Greek flag and shoot their fireworks off here for election rallies. Unions unroll their homemade banners and anarchists probably hide their molotov cocktails here too.

It is more than 4,000 feet from Omonia Square to Pedion Areos, according to Google Maps. The better part of a mile.

30,000 people in a city of 3 million were on the streets, the police would say later. 100,000 the journalists would say. Whatever the number, it looked like one mass of humanity blanketed the streets and sidewalks.

I called the boss lady for a check-in. "This is a big one," I said.

What do you mean big?

"I'm in Omonia now and there are banners for as far as the eye can see down Patission. I bet they reach all the way to Victoria."

Okay, text me some translations of signs. Look for Anti-IMF stuff.

"The chants right now seem to be focused on the EU. I'll keep my eye out."

At about 11:30am the crowd was focused on sending various unpleasantries the Evropaiki Enosi, EU's, way. The front ranks of banners also made little mention of the IMF. "They're used to railing against the EU," I thought to myself. "Probably takes some practice to come up with new chants."

The signs were straightforward and uninspiring but I texted my translations back to base.

DOWN WITH THE BARBARIANS, THE ANTI-PEOPLE MEASURES The Government - European Union - Oligarchy. GREECE OUT of the EU. KKE M-L (a splinter group from the Communist Party)

THE PEOPLE AND THE WORKERS DON'T OWE ANYTHING TO ANYONE | CLASS DEMONSTRATION | OUT EU AND IMF!

THE GOVERNMENT. THE BOSSES. THE EU. THE IMF. THEY WAGE WAR ON US. THEY WILL HAVE IT WITH CLASS STRUGGLE. Union of Book Employees, Attica.

Chelsea pointed out that the crowd was playing Green Day's cover of "Working Class Hero" over loudspeakers as we approached the National Archaeological Museum. She started an exposition on the irony of so many sickle-and-hammer groups blasting music from one of America's biggest bands. I try not to think about that stuff on assignment. Too complicated.

I was taken aback with how on a beautiful May afternoon the Archaeological Museum would usually be crawling with tourists coming to look at the splendors of Minoan Crete, Mycenae, Periclean Athens and Hellenistic Greece. On Wednesday the lawn in front of the neo-classical columns was one throng brandishing frappes and cigarettes.

As per usual, the back of the protest column looked a bit more ready to rumble than the front. Most of the crowd was a thorough mix of ages, but a bit middle-aged heavy in the front. It got younger and younger toward the back. I don't know if I missed the anarchist banner or if I've just started to ignore that crew. In either case, they weren't making much of a fuss around noon time.

At noon, we came to the end of the protest into a now vacated Pedion Areos. Migrants, from Southeast Asia based on their appearance, were taking scaffolding from the speaker's podium down. As the rest of the city went on strike to march through their territory, they had work to do.

I called back to base.

Are they coming our way?

"Yes they're coming. The first bunch went down Stadiou about 15-20 minutes ago. Should get there any second now."

Change of Plans

We took the electric train back to Omonia and weaved our way in and out of the protest as it marched down Stadiou, taking pictures and some video. At this point we were just keeping an eye on the crowd and trying to get to Syntagma, so we could get a good spot when the action started.

(A good spot to me is where you can see what's happening but still get out quickly sans tear-gassing. After all, the US Embassy warns US citizens not to take part in and observe protests for good reason because they might become violent.)

What we didn't know was that a column of protesters tried at that moment to storm the Parliament building. Riot polce barely managed to drive the crowd back before they reached the ranks of domestic and international journalists perched on the promenade in front of the entrance overlooking the square.

Those people were not anarchists. (For the most part.) Hours later I saw footage of Greeks like all the other Greeks I see on the street everyday, men and women, charging and then retreating down the parliament steps.

At around this time I got a call from base.

George, TIME called. They want a story. I can't get down there. We need interviews. I asked if we could double by-line it and they said yes.

By now it was about 1pm, right around when I thought my day would be over and I could go back to being a Master's student and researcher whose friend was in town.

But nobody with the journalistic itch turns down a byline in TIME, or in this case TIME's website.

Problem.

I hadn't brought a notebook. I cursed myself for my lack of preparation. There wouldn't be enough time to transcribe what people told me in a microphone. Besides people are pretty skittish around mics anyway.

Fortunately, Chelsea had a notebook. I asked her to rip out some pages but she insisted on giving me the whole thing.

I walked up to my first victim and we started talking. His English was bad and his Greek accent, in Greek, was thick. He did give me his name but the quote was unusable.

Chelsea was gone.

I had her notebook. That meant I had my phone number and she didn't. There was no way for her to contact me.

We had gotten separated a couple of times while she found her shots but only for a few minutes. I stood still and she would come back to wherever we parted. It didn't happen this time.

She's a big girl. She can take care of herself. Hopefully she would have the presence of mind to go to an Internet cafe and get my number from her e-mail.

I had a job to do, after all.

Five people wearing ghost masks were walking hand-in-hand as we entered the entrance into Syntagma. A couple of men walked next to them with Greek flags draped around their necks like Superman capes. I asked them what was up with the outfit.

"We believe Greece is for Greeks," one of them replied simply. "That's why we wear the flag." So did they mean Greece doesn't belong to the EU, IMF, immigrants? They figured out I was a journalist (not that I hid it) and scurried away.

By now it was about 2pm.

I walked into Syntagma Square and everything looked like a 'normal' protest. People were processing up George II street in front of the Grand Bretagne and it seemed like they were peeling off to the left, away from the parliament building. Usually that's the point where the regular demonstrators get out of the way and the guys with molotov cocktails come out.

I started to hit paydirt in front of the Grand Bretagne.

A family of three talked to me about why they were marching. "I'm a public employee. My husband is a pensioner. My daughter is a student studying to be a teacher and is about to be unemployed. The measures are all of our problem."

A few dead-ends and cold shoulders later I came across a professor at a private university who spoke fluent English. Private universities in Greece have it tough because their degrees are not recognized automatically by the state and there are a host of other restrictions. These restrictions are generally a product of the masses who are afraid of private education and march in protests like these. So to see a private university professor out was a bit strange.

"It doesn't matter that I'm from a private university," he said. Taking to the streets "is our only chance. Otherwise we will be in poverty and unemployed. It is our responsibility to ourselves and our children."

Down on the streets it was hard to remember the reason why these people came out. Public sector workers already had their pay cut three times. The private sector has seemed keen to follow suit. The most recent measures more or less removed the two already reduced holiday bonuses that have been given out since the 1950s. The Dora or gifts used to be used so people can go back to their ancestral villages at Easter, buy presents around Christmas time (Dec. 25 or Jan. 6/7) or were saved up for summer holidays or a mortgage on an apartment.

The average Greek wage is so low (compared to EU countries that aren't Romania and Bulgaria) that the 'gifts' have become as much income as regular pay.

Most Greeks make about 1,000 euro ($1,300-$1,400) a month. A young Greek with a university degree who tries to work a 9-to-5 makes around 700 euro, probably less than their friends who work in bars. Then again a number of doctors and lawyers in Kolonaki and Kifissia also claim they make 1,000 euro a month on their tax forms.

The crowd chanted kleftes! kleftes! kleftes! THIEVES

A man who works for Hellenic Shipyards (having huge issues right now with German company Thyssen Krupp - Berlin expects the Greeks to spend less on everything but its submarines) was holding a banner that said Greece's politicians had received 84 billion euros in bribes while they went unpaid for two years.

"Our politicians should go to jail," he said. "We get paid low wages while they support the German defense industry and their bank accounts."

That particular batch of protesters was going heavy on the politicians-to-jail line. I looked to my left toward the Grande Bretagne and saw that the spray-painters had been busy. IMF and USA GET OUT in Red. GEORGE GET OUT in green, obviously referring to Greek PM George Papandreou. I asked three women nearby if they agreed with that last bit.

They looked aghast.

"Oh no, no," they said. "We don't like the measures but we wouldn't say that or spray-paint it."

I probably should have taken GEORGE GET OUT as a clue before what came next.

Things Turn Ugly

For the record, I hate the above expression.

You hear that phrase in just about any English-speaking media report that involves a protest in Greece.

But boy did it turn ugly.

What I hadn't noticed about the protest in Syntagma before I finished my interviews was that the crowd had turned to face the Parliament. Usually they just walk by.

The police had formed a barrier near the Evzone ceremonial guard post and blocked off the ramps up to the Parliament promenade. (I'm curious as to whether the Evzones were there or if they had retreated since they're such important national figures.)

Things were at a lull. Small groups of people were up against the police. The usual few middle-aged men who seem to lose their minds and scream in their faces were doing their thing. Some tourists were actually close by taking pictures too.

A little farther back from the action I talked to a set of honeymooners who said they heard the protests were coming. "But we didn't think of the tear gas," the new misses said. She said they were shook up. Her new groom kept clicking away with his camera anyway.

I kept getting closer and closer to the police in front of parliament. They seemed not just stoic, but relaxed behind their plexiglass shields and helmets. My video recorder was out but there was little I could do with the footage once I got it.

My original mission and my current mission became blurred. Before I was supposed to keep an eye out on what was happening. Then I was supposed to talk to people. Perhaps I was still supposed to do both.

The police finally lost patience. One of them started spraying tear gas into the ground. Last time they sprayed tear gas in front of parliament they hit an 80+ year-old man in the face who fought in the WWII resistance. Lesson learned.

Shot on to the ground, the potency of the tear gas didn't kick in immediately. After about two minutes it did. That tell-tale burning on the face and in the mouth followed by sneezing and coughing set in. I moved away fast enough that I didn't feel the effects too bad myself.

I splashed some water on my face and moved farther into the center of the square.

That's when all hell broke loose.

The chants of Batsi, Gourounia, Dolofoni (Cops, Pigs, Murderers) began in that tone that's half guttural and half a pubescent boy's voice cracking. Molotov cocktails started flying on the streets that run perpendicular to parliament.

In my quest for cover, I had stumbled in front of the Grand Bretagne where the usual suspects were chipping away marble for missiles and setting things on fire. I retreated when they started lobbing molotov cocktails at the police and the police charged to return the favor.

Action in front of parliament and the Grande Bretagne now meant that the East and North sides of the square were not safe for retreat.

I dropped my journalist's hat at this point and decided it best to shoo away fellow Americans who wanted to watch the fireworks. The first girl I found had a nose ring and was wearing flip flops, a sundress and over-sized sunglasses while taking pictures with her digital camera.

I said to her, "You, American?"

"Yeah, is it that obvious?" she said with a smile.

"A little bit. You a tourist?"

"No, I study here."

Being a former study-abroader in Greece myself I somehow forgot my original self-imposed mission to evacuate people.

"Oh, really, I'm a Fulbright Fellow."

"Oh, cool! Yeah I'm doing photojournalism so this is perfect."

"That's funny. I'm doing some work on the side as a journalist right now too."

"Really? For who?"

"TIME, I think."

The orange flash of a crowd grenade directly over our heads and the accompanying tear gas ended the meet and greet.

We followed the crowd down into the center of the square to the water fountain, still bubbling amidst the chaos of the now full-fledged riot.

The smart thing to do would probably have been to get on the metro and get away or to at least just stay down there. We both kept on wandering around the square. I was a little bit more confused and reeling from my second tear-gassing of the day. Some people told me not to stick my fingers in my eye. That was of course exactly what I was doing. Other people asked me for water to wash their own faces.

The police launched tear gas into the center of the square, taking away one more refuge point. We walked over to the south end of the square where people were desperately grabbing water from the fountain there and splashing it on themselves.

Once the people at the fountain regained their composure a bunch of them stormed the police on the street where the X95 airport buses usually line up. The ranks of anarchists or whatever you want to call them stormed up with their full artillery.

I heard a battlecry next to me and saw a man in a green dress shirt and brown work pants flailing his arms and rushing to join the attack. Other men in polo shirts and office attire joined in too. The police fired more tear gas and the make-shift insurgency retreated, jumping over the walls and the fountains built in them.

Fasaria went into effect. The various violent elements seemed to be executing a pre-choreographed plan. They smashed a digital Municipality of Athens sign and cannibalized benches to build a bonfire. The noxious black smoke added a certain patina to the tear gas.

Only Filellinon (Philhellenes) street was left relatively unscathed. In the center of the street, a contingent of the crowd was pressing up against police guarding the entrance to the fancy clothing shops on Ermou St. Various protest groups had diverted from the usual route by Grande Bretagne and were filing down Filellinon toward the Plaka tourist district, clogging the south side of the street.

The north side of the street was relatively clear except there was a gap between the flag-waving anarchists and the next closest demonstration group coming off of Stadiou St (and boy did those groups look bewildered when they got to the square already in smoke and flames). The gap was dangerous but the square was becoming unbearable.

Chelsea and I were about 50 feet away from each other and didn't know it.

She had allowed herself to wander away from me forgetting that I had her notebook. Luckily she did have the presence of mind to seek out an Internet cafe from her Lonely Planet Guide to Greece. Having gotten to the internet cafe on Stadiou just before it closed, she took my number and proceeded to the nearest payphone in Syntagma, on the northwest corner by Public Cafe. As she was dialing my number a man yelled to her in Greek to run. She didn't need a translator, followed orders and left behind her phone card.

I somehow missed all of this.

After sustaining another volley of tear gas I stumbled past the payphone that Chelsea had just vacated and into a dark stoa, an alcove at the bottom of a tall building that has shops and cafes in it.

Bad idea.

The tear gas burned my face and made it hard to breathe. The smoke trapped in the enclosed space didn't help. I fell to one knee. I tried to clear my nose and throat. A steady stream of mucus came out all over my clothes.

I got up and walked for a few paces before slumping down again and spitting on the ground. Never before have I wanted to vomit like I did then. Other people were passing by and having the same struggles more or less. Part of me was conscious that I had company but I still spit up what I could.

Mercifully I was able to breathe again and followed the stoa around to Stadiou St. A bookstore owner shooed away people looking for refuge. He looked at me saying, "Air, Air. It's better for you out there than in here," as if to defend his innocence. He had a point but I'm not sure I'd acquit him.

I came out of the stoa onto Stadiou utterly demoralized and exhausted. Whatever bravado I had about protests in Athens had evaporated. It's not so much that I was proud of my previous experiences with them as those experiences had made me come to believe the myth that this regular pyrotechnic festival wasn't so dangerous if you were 'smart' about it.

Looking down Stadiou things appeared fairly calm. My phone rang as I considered my options. Chelsea had made her way to the Acropolis, bought a new phone card and called me again.

"There's an Everest next to the metro station," I barked at her. "Go there and wait or me. I'll be there in 15-20 minutes."

"Everest?"

"Yeah like the mountain. It's a fast-food place."

I turned and walked away without taking another look down Stadiou.

Journey through Hell

The scene walking through to Plaka was surreal. In the side streets closest to Syntagma demonstrators were running frantically and cops were standing guard. Over what exactly wasn't clear.

After just a few minutes, though, I was walking past tavernas that were doing fine business, all things considered. Basics like the poikilia meat platter and specialties like shrimp saganaki washed down with a fair dose of wine or Alfa beer were the order of the day as people talked in grim tones of the politics that led to the chaos a few feet away.

I thought that by the time I got to Plaka that things would be calmer or at least that the protests would not spill out so far away from Syntagma. Wrong.

A building had been lit on fire sending black plumes into the air. Recycling buckets and trash cans had been rolled, almost neatly, to block exits onto the main road, Amalias, and then set on fire.

Even when I got down to Kydathinaion St, the main drag in Plaka, I could smell tear gas and a black plume was blocking the view of Hadrian's Arch. Tourists speaking French and German, among other languages, mingled with Greeks and all marveled at what they were seeing. Of course they also took pictures.

I didn't know it at the time but the destruction went on past Plaka, down Syngrou Ave; home of the most strip clubs and sex shops per capita and where I lived this past summer. Cars were lit ablaze and left for someone else to take care of.

Finally, I reached the main walkway leading up to the Acropolis where there are a number of overpriced tavernas set up to catch foot-weary tourists.

An older couple flagged me down and asked me to tell them what was happening. An Irish couple, name was O'Connor. There's a special place in my heart for the Irish. After all, despite my name and my Orthodox background, I'm as ethnically Irish as I am Greek. I told them that it was a bad day, that the protests had gotten out of hand. They nodded their head gravely yes, and said they couldn't be too surprised what with the sacrifices Greeks were going to have to make.

"It's kind of exciting, don't you think?" Mrs. O'Connor asked me.

"Maybe," I replied, "But don't go bother exploring it. Not worth seeing."

"Oh, really?" Mr. O'Connor asked, not seeming too surprised.

"Really."

I bid adieu and found Chelsea at the cafe next to Everest drinking an Amstel. It was almost finished.

"Hey what happened to you," she asked (or something to that effect) with a wry smile.

"Oh nothing much," I replied as I lolled my head back. "That beer looks like a good idea."

I had already texted base to that effect.

I'm out of commish. Tear gassed 5x. Getting a beer near Akropoli metro. Call if you need anything.

This is the Big Time

I had taken one sip of beer. It tasted as cool and refreshing as I'd imagined it.

My phone started ringing.

George, this is the big time. Three people dead. Marfin Egnatia Bank on Stadiou. People are crying outside. You need to get quotes.

It was after 3pm. Not counting my time on the floor of the stoa I had sat for a total of five minutes in four hours.

We paid and poured my leftover beer into Chelsea's water bottle. Liquid courage for the road.

The walk to the bank is a blur. I have no idea how long it took or what route we went.

We found the burned out shell easily enough. It looked like the police were guarding a blackhole into another world ... with a blue Marfin Egnatia Bank sign next to it.

A small, stunned crowd of journalists and protesters were milling about. Lots of people had white tear gas protective make-up running down their faces. Whether the make-up ran from tears or sweat wasn't clear.

I struck up a conversation with a couple of protesters. My Greek was awful. No time to write out the spelling here. One was a man with a megaphone dangling limply from his shoulder. The other was a woman just shaking her head at the scene. They talked to each other and tried to figure out the last time someone had been killed in a protest. They settled on 1999. (The answer was 1991.) I asked them how they felt.

Halia Awful, they both responded in turn.

The man said a great deal in Greek but moved off before I could stop him and get his name. I had said that I was a journalist but they weren't focused on me. The woman said, roughly translated, "This is a demonstration. It's not about this. Not so fierce."

I asked for her name. She shot back, what's my name? Perhaps she was trying to do a Greek rendition of Robert Deniro. I said please just your first name I'm making a report. Maria, she said.

One bite was in the can but I needed something deeper, and something in English preferably. The crowd was getting tight. Chelsea's camera battery had died and so she was running around with mine.

I looked to my right and making its way down Stadiou was a group carrying the sign I saw earlier saying "The people don't owe anything to anyone." Could have sworn I had already seen them in Syntagma. What are they doing? Laps? I thought to myself.

This group replaced the stunned din around the fire site with all the sound and fury we'd seen all day. Soon enough they started pelting police with water bottles and people already in the crowd took the initiative to rough up journalists, especially the ones with video and SLR still cameras.

Crowds in Athens have lots of different chants. There's the anti-police chant, the anti-fascism chant, the anti-imperialism chant. Unfortunately, there's also the anti-journalist chant.

JOURNALISTS! PIMPS! PANSIES!

My microphone was still on. You can hear someone next to me join in the chant, and me saying "Chelsea, let's gooooooo."

We retreated a little ways, even with the Korai walkway on the other side of the street, when we got a call from base. I explained that the anti-journalist chant had started up. We were told, "Get out of there."

I had to pause for just a second. A Bangladeshi man who'd painted his face white to protect against the tear gas was selling water bottles. The immigration expert in me lept for joy. But he wouldn't let me take his picture.

As the sound of renewed strife picked up and then faded away we reached for the liquid courage.

The Writing Process

Our original plan was to retreat to my boss' apartment in Plaka. Too bad the power was knocked out there so we couldn't be buzzed in by her friend or call the house phone for that matter. A balcony door was open and I could climb up to it (thank you renewed attention to push-ups and barbell curls) and was halfway up when I realized breaking into an apartment while anarchists were crawling around and I fit the demographic profile was less than bright. That and no power meant no internet.

Our instructions were to proceed back to Syntagma for a rendezvous at the Grande Bretagne. It was 4:15pm and the metro strike had started at 4pm.

The chaos had cleared in Syntagma and the clean-up was underway. I walked through moonscapes in Attica after the fires last year. I didn't think I would walk through one in the heart of town.

Outside the Grande Bretagne, maids in that classic black and white get up were sweeping away debris with brooms and dustpans. The absurdity of Chelsea and I, two twenty-somethings, walking into this umpteen star hotel covered in dust and some bodily fluids past smartly dressed porters and concierges was not lost on me.

The front desk wasn't eager to admit our motley crew of two. We had no journalist cards. Our lead reporter was on the roof. Finally we were able to get someone to vouch for us and a porter escorted us to the elevator at 4:45pm.

When we got to the roof the boss was live on TV.

For the first time in almost six hours I could see my reflection in the glass of the rooftop hotel restaurant.

I looked like hell. It was like a thin gray film had covered my body and a line of snot went straight down the front of my navy blue t-shirt.

The city looked hell too. Smoke rose from a couple different quarters. You could see the last wisps of extinguished fires limping skyward.

After a few minutes, we were all able to swap war stories.

"You know I was surprised just how bad the tear gas was up here too," the boss told me.

"Oh did it now? Wow." I said, suppressing a laugh.

Couldn't complain. She fought to get me a byline in TIME. I fought to get a decent quote or two. I retreated with her laptop to type up my story for about an hour in the comfort of one of the most beautiful hotel rooms in Greece.

I wrote way too much, about 900 words, but all the raw material from the streets was there for the final TIME copy. Much of the stuff I gathered before the bank fire had become useless. For your typical Greek protest story, they would have been great. In fact, I was surprised when I typed it up that I was able to get those quotes, in Greek no less.

But the fact of the matter was that the deaths in Athens were the news now.

At 7:45pm Chelsea and I walked back to my apartment. The street cleaners were already out. The Grande Bretagne staff had gotten much of the graffiti off the ancient hotel. The ashes and cinders of the bonfire in the center of the square had been swept away.

We returned to our laptops to find a logjam of messages from the States asking if we were okay.

I had a simple response for most folks.

It was a bad day.

On the trouble of mixing

2010-04-25T18:01:00.000+03:00

So when I laid out my Fulbright Project the idea was to have all of these synergies.

-My Fulbright research would involve interviews.

-The interviews would make good content for a blog.

-The interviews would also feature photos, videos, etc.

-My Master's class would make me produce all kinds of good research.

-All of this material would be good fodder for journalistic side projects.

Let's examine how this plan turned out to be a little more complicated than expected, at the expense of this blog, but not my research.

(PHOTO: There isn't one. It's a metaphor.)

Step 1: Journalist Demosiographos is a dirty word

In the states if you call up an organization (especially a government one) and say, 'I would like to interview you for this project I am doing for school' you'll get batted around through 8 circles of bureaucracy and probably never get what you're looking for. If you say, I need to talk to you for a well-known journalistic outlet, you get an interview and then you have what you need for class and work.

At least that was my experience.

In Greece, it's the exact opposite.

As one politically connected individual told me, If you say you're a journalist they're going to (mess with) you. If you say you're a Greek-American making an ergasia for University they'll probably introduce you to their daughter.

Honestly, it was too difficult to explain that I a) was a scholar from the United States b) a student at University of Athens c) and oh by the way I'm a journalist. In Greek.

So in February I decided to drop the journalist tag. It definitely improved my conversations, but not gathering and writing material for a journalistic outlet meant less raw material for this blog.

Recently, I've started working as an assistant to an American freelance reporter. I call myself a 'freelance field producer' and I see my role as facilitating things with Greeks and bringing some expertise from my studies to the work at hand. (Granted she's lived in Greece way longer than I have and been around awhile longer, but I digress...)

At the moment, this means that I get access to a lot more people, but I'm not the one producing the content (usually) so I am a bit more at ease to explain who I am and what I'm all about.

Of course I don't want to put something up on my website before my boss or I can get it into a 'real' publication.

Step 2: The Master's Conundrum

My advisors at Brown had a clear opinion about getting a Master's while trying to do research.

Don't.

Another former Brown Fulbrighter told me that being part of a program provides some structure and resources in terms of libraries and connections but that it's better to stay independent.

I was warned.

Nonetheless, I decided to participate as a full member in the University of Athens' Master's in Southeast European Studies, (Which has a new website!)

The program is interesting and provides me with friends, connections, even a new advisor, that have benefitted both my research and my sanity.

But with a few exceptions, my coursework has rarely been related to immigration. (Although that's going to change next week, I'll have a few good new posts.)

The courses themselves take place at 4:30pm and 6pm depending on the day of the week and the work is pretty flexible so it doesn't get in the way of the project. But it doesn't help me churn out related material for the blog either...

Step 4: You still can't take my picture

Back in August I wrote a lengthy post on the difficulties of taking photos in Greece of anything despite the landmarks and pleasant cultural events.

It hasn't changed.

Step 5: I'll talk to you but not for the Internet

There are two and a half major problems with putting interviews on the Internet. (I've gotten about 13 official interviews done to this point with about 3-5 more lined up.)

First, I have to give people full warning about what I'm doing. That means that if they do not want their comments put up on the Internet I have to honor that request. After all the work they are doing is often controversial in the present. If I put their comments on the Internet now they may well have to deal with repercussions they won't have to in the months, if not years, if ever, my research is published.

Second, these are often long, long conversations. I need to transcribe them from my digital recorder, a time consuming process when I would rather be making phone calls, knocking on doors or doing reading for class.

And a half, these interviews are often in broken English or Greek. So I have to edit or translate what people say. Each time I have to do that is a major ethical decision of saying what I know they meant and capturing the tone they were trying to say it in, without distorting their words too much. It's tough.

Conclusion

The research is going fine. I'm digging into a lot of material that's related to the Church of Greece and immigrants. My conversations sometimes change people's perceptions, which is another issue that needs to be managed.

The only problem is what then to do with Jungle Vision?

Sure, there are lots of things about Greece that I find interesting, 'both high brow and low brow' as one reviewer put it. But then that material buries my project work.

The solution is probably to set up various tabs for people to click on. Blogger has added this function (wordpress long had it). But it's pretty clunky. That means I need time to play around with it.

And with my June 16 flight to Philadelphia looming, time is rather of the essence.

Casual Friday # 2: Greek Soccer

2010-04-16T11:37:00.002+03:00

Greece is heading to South Africa for the World Cup in a couple of months.

Back in October though, Greece wasn't looking so good even when she was winning. Greece scored three goals in a match against Luxembourg that Hellas won 2-1. You do the math.

The Greek commentator says, 'what happened? All right 2-1.'

Interview: Antonios Papantoniou, KSPM

2010-04-15T17:05:00.002+03:00

"Have you talked to Antonios Papantoniou?"

This is the refrain I hear time and time again from everyone I try to interview for my project on the Church of Greece and Immigrants.

For over 35 years Dr. Papantoniou has been the Church's voice to the international community on migration. His organization, The Re-integration Center for Returning Migrants KSPM first helped Greeks who had gone to work overseas in the 50s and 60s acclimate themselves to a country that had rapidly and radically transformed by the 70s and 80s. In the early 1990s when it became clear that the Iron Curtain had rusted away and that migrants were heading Greece's way, KSPM was one of the first organizations ready on the ground to fill some gaps in services and, conduct migration research and advocate for more sound immigration policies.

Papantoniou and his small team walk a fine line between being representatives of the Church and a group of lay experts in their own rite. As a result, many academics and politicians in Greece and the EU know Papantoniou but, despite his best efforts, do not know he is associated with the Church.

The Church's role is a bit ambiguous here. Rhetorically, the Holy Synod (KSPM is technically a committee of the Synod) backs KSPM's activities. Financially, KSPM fights an uphill battle every year to keep its doors open.

Papantoniou, 73, does not need to worry about his own paycheck. He's a volunteer. The future of his organization is another matter.

Way back on December 3, 2009 I interviewed Dr. Papantoniou at his office in the Holy Synod. Though now a sociologist with a PhD from Germany, he studied theology in Athens and was born the son of a priest in the Cycladic Isalnds. With a gravelly voice that contained more than a hint of his familiarity with the German language Dr. Papantoniou spoke with me for over an hour and a half.

Note: Interview is edited for length and clarity of content. My questions are almost entirely different from what was said in the conversation.

Tell me about how KSPM was founded.

Originally this committee, this institution, was officially founded in 1978 but existed since '74. Immediately after the change of the political situation (from dictatorship to democracy) we saw that a lot of Greek so-called Guest-Workers from Germany wanted to come back after living in Germany, Western Europe.

The problem was that Greek society did not understand that living 25-30 years abroad means a change in consciousness, in mentality in attitudes. It was necessary to have a process of re-integration in Greek society, which is naturally not just to re-adjust to the people to the situation and the morals of what is established in Greece but to find some way to meet somewhere in the middle where you have all the best of what they got abroad, and what is now very important in Greece.

It was very difficult…to convince the Church, and more difficult the State to understand it. The concept was that these people are coming back home, which means there is no problem for re-adjusting. And they are bringing money with them. This is something that was known in the past as the ‘Uncle from America.’ Everybody wanted to have money and financial assistance or something from the returnees but no one realized they had problems. Problems from social re-integration, maybe also financial, health problems.

33% had problems with mental disease. And naturally the problem with the second generation. The problem with the school. Children were born there. They started in German schools. Most of them didn’t know the Greek language. And the issue was that they had to be welcomed into the schools. The solution was to just to let these people sit at the end of the school class.

This institution was to deal with these problems. To know, what are the real problems? 75-78 we conducted an empirical investigation asking them about the social, economic, psychological and other problems they had to deal with. And according to the findings of this research, we organized the services of the so-called re-integration center for migrants.

At what point did KSPM switch its attention to immigrants not of Greek origin?

The first 20 years we were oriented almost only on the returnees from Western Europe. We were not involved with people coming from Eastern Europe, either political refugees or the people coming back after the possibility to come back in Greece.

In the 90s, we realized that Greece is no longer a country for emigrants but for immigrants. And they have the same problems that we had in Germany and that the Greek society is in a very difficult situation because of two things. The first is that, and contrary to the German immigration where two or three countries were the source of immigrants, we had in our offices more than 120 nationalities. That means there is a mosaic and it is not enough to know for instance Arabic, French or English. For instance in Sudan there are more than 600 language. That means that we had people coming from Sudan who could not speak with other people from Sudan.

Where does KSPM interact with immigrants? How do you get in touch with migrants who are coming to Greece?

They know our offices. And they are coming to us immediately. We are also at the borders. In the last year we are working at Lesvos, Mytilene where there was a big problem with the facilities. In Pagani, there was a center for 200 people and it had more than 1,000. Without any propaganda (laughs) we see everyday more than 40 people asking for assistance, medical assistance, social assistance, some of them they also need some money.

We have then dedicated the office of Efthalia Pappa (The Ecumenical Refugee Program) to refugees and asylum-seekers. This office (located in the Holy Synod in Athens) is for the migrants who are not refugees, that are economic migrants. And an office in Thessaloniki which is still dealing with the problems of the returnees from Western Germany.

As you know, Greece has a difficult, inefficient system to obtain legal residence. What is the story you often hear?

A major problem for these people is becoming illegal.

You have to stay from 10pm at night until noon the next day, hoping you will be served. Sometimes you need to repeat it three or four times. The moment you get your license, it is already expired. If you say, okay well I would like a renewal the response is no, you must come back another day and repeat this process, staying all the night to apply for a renewal. This is a situation which is inhuman. Naturally we are advocating for an amelioration of this situation. We are informing the European Union, the Council of Europe about this situation.

We have had some success but it is a wall and don’t forget that according to the law, what we are doing is illegal. You are not allowed to help people who are here illegally. And it is your obligation as soon as you know that someone is here illegally to inform the police. We don’t do it naturally. We are trying to legalize and to solve the problems. But this is not very easy and sometimes we have trouble.

Was it difficult to get the Church to switch focus from Greeks coming back to foreigners coming in?

Yes.

You see the Church has a lot of problems. It is a little bit introverted. It was difficult to see that the problems outside the walls of the churches are affecting the church. It is only in the last, let’s say, 10 years, that the Church has realized the problem and is doing a lot. For instance you see here the Archbishop delivering 1,000 packages of food and he is very often there. We are now organizing a conference (on immigration) and the three main organizations working with migrants or immigrants. Archbishopric and Allelegii will be there to talk about the problems we face and coordinate our work.

But still there are many bishops and many people in the administration, not clergy but lay people, who (think) this is not our work this is something that has to be done by the state. We are not ready to be involved. This, unfortunately, still (exists). Not the majority of voices any more. Until 2000, it was the majority.

Now the situation is changing. The change started with Christodoulos in spite of the fact that all of the collaborators, for instance the director of the finances, were against (acting). It’s amazing how the Holy Synod has decided to take action but the financial department has refused to give them the means.

Why did the attitude in the Holy Synod begin to change in the 2000s?

Christodoulos was, from the very beginning, very open.

I can remember his speech when he was elected, saying in this city, there are not only Greek persons, there are a lot of foreigners and strangers, but we have to face them like we are facing Jesus Christ instead of a foreigner. We must see in their faces, the face of Jesus Christ asking for help. It was, yes, a movement. And this office has done a lot in this direction. I was writing the sermons, and the speeches of the Archbishop if they were to address issues of migration.

And then they discovered in their parishes that there are many problems. The parish is not what it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 98% Orthodox. … The image of the parish is changing. We have a lot of Muslims. We have a lot of Hindus. In some of the parishes I could say that the Orthodox are in a minority.

Did Christodoulos change the funding of your organization?

The funding of my organization is falling, beginning with the last years of Archbishop Seraphim. Because the World Council of Churches and the Germans (where KSPM originally obtained its funding) wanted to work and send financial assistance to the Eastern European countries. They have naturally and gradually decreased their assistance. So the Church has said okay we will pay for youm but not others. Up until this moment we are fighting and now with the economic crisis they are cutting, cutting, cutting so that if I do not manage as in the last year to change the budget approved I have to close the doors.

The Holy Synod naturally is in favor. Always the Holy Synod is in favor. The last few years it has only been as a result of the Archbishop himself saying, ‘I don’t know what you are saying but I want it (slams hand on desk). This office remains open. We only pay for what is necessary. But we have to pay for it.’ Again this year we have more than a cut of 40%.

What is your budget?

The whole budget is 140-150 thousand euros. For this money you can only pay for the three persons working.

I am not paid for this.

I’ve said that if my salary is also in the budget for which I am fighting then I am in a difficult situation. In order to be free and fight I want to be unpaid for these special services I am giving as director of the office, all the time from the very beginning I was not paid.

And we are able to get some European projects and every European project is year-round about 50,000 euro. We use this money not for running our offices and not for the three persons working there but for additional personnel that is necessary for the work; lawyers, translators, social workers, anthropologists. Sometimes these three persons can add more than 20-25 additional collaborators or high-level postgraduates, also a lot of expertise for the work we are doing.

Volunteers, we have just one person (besides me). In Thessaloniki we have one person we served who said to us I appreciate what you did for me and if you will I would like to give you 2-3 hours a day assisting your work in whatever direction you need. Voluntarism in Greece, is not as in your country.

Does your budget affect how loudly you can advocate for immigrants?

No, no. Because advocating for the migrants is something which has to be done by one or two persons. One of them is Efthalia and another is myself. Independently of the budget. You don’t need the money in order to think. If you are engaged and you have a commitment and you believe in the necessity of something.

Naturally, I do not have the money to go to TV and make an advertisement. But you have the possibility to write to responsible persons. To write to the minister. To write to the police. To go to the ombudsman. To write to the (European) Commission. This is the first.

The second is, that as I belong to the founders of CCME, an umbrella organization sitting in Brussels, and the World Council of Churches, we use these channels in order to make an advocacy in the high level that is we can, we are able to influence decisions in the European Union, related naturally always to immigrants and what may be the difference between our advocacy and the advocacy of other organizations is that we try to advocate for issues which are possible. We dream, naturally for something much better, but we go step-by-step.

We could introduce for instance, a special education program for the children of the second generation. And it was acknowledged by the ministry that this is because the center for migrant workers helped us, illuminated the situation. We could change at European level the issue of family reunion. Greece at the time (2003) had the presidency and at Thessaloniki they had the summit and using this opportunity we organized with CCME and the Church a conference about the situation of the migrants and about the necessity for the family reunion and we invited all these people. The archbishop addressed the issue and all of us. And the result has been that the directive for the family reunion which was discussed for more than six years was decided in Thessaloniki.

What do you think of Prime Minister George Papandreou's pledge to extend citizenship to migrant children? It would be a big change for a country that currently does not issue birth certificates to migrant children born here.

(A month earlier --November -- Papandreou made the announcement in front of the UN Secretary General. The bill was unveiled in late December. In March, a watered-down version was passed. It now has to be published in the Government Gazette to become law. Then begins the implementation process...)

The only thing is that I don’t believe that it will be realized. A lot of things promised and we see that we are not.

Well take this concrete promise. Children born here will be nationalized. We have fought for that with the last government, these children born here, they've never been to another country, they speak fluent Greek, they go to the Greek schools, yet they are nothing! They are stateless because they are Ethiopians and they’re not Greek. The next day we heard that only those children born here whose parents had been legal at that time can be nationalized.

Now I must confess that until this moment I have been in favor for a so-called automatic possibility for naturalization (at birth). The experience we have collected from all the European countries, starting with Germany, I don’t speak about France because this is a special case, or the situation in the UK, but Holland, Denmark, Germany, Austria I’ve seen that we must be very careful. We must give the opportunity, but we have to do that not automatically but according, to my opinion, we have to prepare people to make the choice

I think this is very important, the nationality of a person. And you cannot say to them you know you are not any more an Albanian. You are now a Greek person. Or you have not the right to be a Greek person even if you were born and live here. Maybe you have never been to ‘your country’ as is often the case with people here from Africa. These people and these children ought to have the possibility to make the choice. And if they are choosing to be Greek, they must be accepted and we must give them all the possibilities. If they choose not to be Greek we cannot oblige them because they are born here.

So what do you see as the future for KSPM?

*Sighs*

Difficult to say.

I always had in mind, knew that I ought to have a successor. And I have prepared a lot of people to be the successor here. Unfortunately because of the financial problems we have, the majority of these persons are not any more with us.

I don’t know if the Church will find some person. But you know this is nothing which makes prestige in the Church. And so far the people who are able to do something avoid spending their time with migrants. Naturally, I don’t know whether the Church will decide to liberalize and to have an orderly budget for this.

What work are you doing now with Greece's Muslim communities.

First we are doing research. We have been asking muslim people if they are in a difficult situation because of religious discrimination. I was very proud and very happy to see that the majority of the Muslims responded to this concrete question with the declaration that we don’t feel and we don’t believe that every difficulty we are dealing with is because of our religion but because we are foreigners and this is what every foreigner deals with here in Greece.

The second was to inform each other. People in Greece hearing about Muslims, they confuse it with Turkey. And we have a very bad history. By definition they are skeptical and they don’t know a lot about it. So first off we try to give them the basics of what is Islam. Muslims also have to respect some basic values we have and be careful. That is what we are trying at the local level in the parish.

Then we have a map of the places where the religious worship sites are. The reason there was also two fold.

The first was to illustrate for our Orthodox priests that their parish is colored. It is not any more what they believed it to be. In one parish you have maybe one Church and four places for muslims and what is more you can see that in these places because we have indicated what kind of places they are. You can have nearby two different places for the same group. They have divisions. Not to think that Muslims are the same group. They have many many many divisions and you need to be careful about contacting them.

Second, was to give the opportunity to both to the priests and to the imams to know that if I have something which I could ask the Church, this is the Church that is so-to-speak responsible to me. And if I have problems I know here are the Muslims. I have in mind to do the same with the Hindus, and naturally with other religions.

Unfortunately our priests are busy with a lot of other things. And neglect, with some exceptions, some very very good exceptions. The majority is … maybe the city is also asking a lot of the priests and they don’t have the knowledge but maybe this is another issue that has to be explored.

Anything else you think should be said about the Church and immigrants? What do you think is the Church’s potential?

I think what is very important for the Church in general was not done until now.

It is not very difficult if you have the money to do a lot. But what is the difference between what you are doing and what other organizations with more or less money are doing and sometimes maybe better than you. For me, for the Church it is very important to realize the theological consequences of the presence of so many different people in the parish. And for me because integration is naturally something which needs a legal framework, but administration is not enough. Integratin is realized or not realized at the local level in the everyday life in co-existing, in sharing the same market, the same parks, the same house. So what is needed and this is why we have started this with the Muslims is to find new pastoral, theological and social reaction and reflection in the new changing image of the parish and of the society.

In order to convince our own people we have to think and reflect deeply, theologically. We need a theology of immigration, which does not exist in Greece, right now.

Casual Friday # 1 : Corinth Canal

2010-04-09T12:20:00.002+03:00

Next week, we'll get back to serious project-related posts. Today, though, Jungle Vision is proud to announce a new feature, Casual Friday, which will just be something fun from Greece.

And nothing says fun like using a motorcycle to jump the Corinth Canal.

Found this link on xpatathens.com