The Greek Oscars

On Monday night I put on my best outfit and headed over to the award ceremony of the Greek Cinema Academy. On the way over I prepared my speech. Nervous about conjugating verbs correctly and using proper articles, I settled on ευχαριστώ ("thank you"). Unfortunately, I didn't win any awards and never had to address the audience.

When my friend Sophia invited me to the event, I imagined something out of People magazine - red carpet and all. I've got to say that my pre-conceived notions of the Greek Oscars weren't too far off (apart from the red carpet, I think it was a tiled floor).

The award ceremony was, of course, all in Greek. Fortunately, my friend Manolis translated for me and I could put my 2nd grade context clues skills and 2-year-old knowledge of Greek to good use for everything else. For almost every category a film titled "ψυχή βαθιά" (that's Greek for "Deep Soul") was nominated, but never seemed to win. A movie about a transsexual won several awards, including best make-up and the film nominated to be submitted to the Oscars was titled "Dog Tooth" (I'm just as perplexed as you).

After the awards, actors, actresses, directors and no-namers such as myself were mixing and mingling. I was shifting weight from one foot to another and scoping out the hors d'oeuvres table while my Greek friends tried to act natural about standing so close to famous Greek people. My guess-work about potential celebrities turned out to be spot-on: big Greek men with frumpy clothes and untidy facial hair were directors, scantily-clad women with sleek hair were actresses, guys wearing all black with Chuck Taylors were cameramen and under-dressed people making a dinner out of hors d'oeuvres were Americans...or just me and my friend Chris. Why must stereotypes be so true?

The picture below is of me winning an award for Best American Spectator ;)

Three Strikes and You're in Greece

No school today. No buses either for that matter. Nor taxis nor postal service. Yes, the Greek economy is going down, but that doesn't stop Greeks...well, actually, it does.
A friend of mine who is studying for her Masters in Business Administration asked me how everything is over here. "Just fine", I said, not realizing she was referring to the economy, the topic of many of her economics classes. Apparently the media abroad has made it out to seem as though a lot of radical stuff is happening here in Greece. For me it has just been the same old, same ancient. This is the third strike in three weeks. I've already gotten used to things not functioning as planned; showing up for class -lesson plan in hand- and finding out a last minute change for the kids to go watch a play in the theater or race each other in Athens College Olympics (come on, we're in Greece!) has caused classes to be canceled for the umpteenth time. So when the buses don't work I now take it as another inconvenience, but not a surprise.
My business-minded friend asked what Greek people think about the economic crisis. I asked a Greek friend and got a description similar to sky-diving without a parachute. They know their country and quality of life is dropping rapidly, but nobody is doing anything about it, feels they can nor wants to...which is precisely why they are going on strike. What can they do? There is no point. Too late to go back and get the parachute and it's not their fault that there never was one to begin with.

About one out in three Greeks are employed in the civil service, a trend that began some fifty years ago to pull Greece out of a previous depression. Public sector employees have tenure; they cannot be fired and they are over-hired. What possibly could some 3 million people be doing in the inefficient Greek economy? I asked myself that question after reading these statistics. I got my answer at the National Library, but not from a book.
I pass the National Library every week and one day I decided to go in and check it out. This concept was quite foreign, or perhaps I was just foreign to the Greek library system because, while I was walking around perusing the books, I noticed that I was the only one doing so. Then I noticed a librarian stalking me. When I reached for a book she asked if she could help me and I told her I was just looking. She proceeded to tell me the biblio-protocol: if I wanted a book I could ask at the desk and a book retriever would get it for me. In that moment I realized how the Greek government is capable of employing so many people; Job title - Book Retriever.

I used to try to leave receipts at stores, that was until I found out that both the store and the customer can be fined for not having one. Now I get a receipt everywhere I go as businesses are being held accountable for paying taxes. But there still is the "receipt-less" discount. At a car rental place I got two different quotes - the one with the receipt was 50 euros more. With that sort of economic incentive, it's hard to say yes to accountability because it also means saying "Yeah, sure... I'll pay more for a little slip of paper".

So on strike days nothing works - and by nothing I mean not just buses and taxis, but people, too. This time off isn't too bad for me, especially with gorgeous islands just a ferry ride away (if and when the ferries aren't also striking). All things considered, I wouldn't mind working in Greece again next year.

Living in the present

Ah...to be a toddler again, or at least speak like one. Okay, toddler might be an overstatement as some Greek toddlers probably make more complex sentences than I do. But I'll give myself some credit. For having arrived only knowing one Greek word, spanakopita (spinach pie), my Greek has multiplied 300-fold. My first few words included katsuvidi (screw driver), figari (moon) and periptero (kiosk). All of these words came from having to meet basic needs (don't ask about "moon"). Not too long after these primitive utterances I was saying "hello", "thank you" and "please". Then came such elaborate sentences as "How are you?" and "I'm fine" (come on now, 3-year-olds don't say that!). By month three I felt ecstatic that I could read signs (although I didn't understand what they meant). Finally the esoteric world of sororieties and franternities seemed intelligible to me. KKK - kappa kappa kappa!

And now I'm living in the present. I study Greek. I eat spanakopita. I teach English. I go to the store. I waste my time.

For all the future and past talk I do in English (What am I going to do with my life? I should have gone to a Spanish-speaking country) I have found that this simplified language has made life simpler and less anxiety-ridden without the regrets about the past and preoccupations with the future that more elaborate grammatical structures entail.

I have truly embraced the concept of living in the moment through my limited Greek grammar and lexicon.

A complex day involves asking such advanced questions as "Can I have three apples? "Do you like spanakopita?" and "What time is it?"

Declarations such as "You are hilarious", "It doesn't matter!" and "I don't understand" are making me into a more dynamic person.

Everyday I am humbled - if not humiliated - when I hear little kids running their mouths in Greek, but I can proudly say that I speak more Greek than any 6-month old Greek baby.

I give myself a pat on the back.

Mom...Dad...I joined a gang

My Greek life and and physical endurance have improved dramatically over the past month all thanks to the gang that I recently joined. I didn't come to Greece with the expectation of becoming a gang member, but I can now relate to the sense of solidarity that gangs provide.

No, I didn't join the Greek mafia and I don't have any tatoos (yet), but I do have one piece of gang regalia to identify myself with the rest...a bicycle!

Every Friday night, after an exhausting week of teaching, I go downtown, get on my bike and follow a group of some 60 - 100 other cyclists pedaling around Athens. During Carnival we all dressed up, biked around (led by a cyclist hauling a loud-speaker blasting the Gypsy Kings) and stopped to dance and do a 30-person conga line at a metro stop. Another week we took our bikes into the metro (where they are banned) to protest and demand that bicycles be allowed inside. Last week we traversed the entire city for 5 hours; we rode alongside transsexual prostitutes in cars on a trashy commercial strip, stopped for delicious crepes and biked out to the seashore - at which point my legs gave up and I had take the tram back home.

Aside from the social and physical advantages of joining this bike gang, there have also been economic - I don't have to spend a dime (or a euro) to see the whole city! Athens is an entirely new place on a bicycle.

To top it all off, the police are in cahoots with our gang. Every Friday they act as escorts, blocking traffic and making sure we are safe from motor-terrorists. Now all I need is a tatoo...

The Best Dance Party in Greece...

Is to be had at a middle school of all places. Shocked? Appalled? I was both on Friday night when I went as an unofficial chaperone / fly-on-the-wall to "Dancing Night" (as the posters referred to it) at my middle school (that is, the one I teach at).
Upon entering the dance scene, I saw clusters of teenagers looking skiddish. Surely, I thought, they were avoiding boys with acne who might ask them to dance and gossiping about who was wearing what and dancing with whom. But as I walked up the stairs and saw the gym filled with dancing and scantily-clad students I realized "Dancing Night" was far from awkward. It was impressive.

Now I've been in Greece since September. I've made many efforts to "go out" and many times I've been "disappointed". I firmly believe that expectations lead to disappointment and in this case it was true: I wrongly extrapolated from the wild and crazy nightlife in Spain and superimposed that on Mediterranean country number two, Greece. Nightlife in Athens, however, is pretty tame. Yes, people go out late and stay out late (a 12 am to 5 am schedule), and yes, there is loud dance music and libations, but at mainstream clubs in Athens NOBODY DANCES. I have even gone so far as to interview Greek people at these "dance" clubs as to why they don't dance. The response I got was "We are a shy people".

Well, Greek youth is not shy. Not at all. These middle schoolers were pulling moves that have never before been seen on MTV and some that were directly appropriated from it. Girls were dancing on chairs and one even went so far as to pull a chair out in the crowd and stand up on it pedestal-style. A boy in the crowd got up on someone's shoulders, took off his shirt and started waving his hands in the air. Even the teachers could not resist dancing to the Greek pop music, myself included.

The best part and worst part was seeing my students. It was so endearing to have students run up and say hello, and so terrifying to see some students wearing next to nothing at all.

Needless to say the salsa dance club I went to afterward just couldn't compare.