Greek Thoughts

Thoughts
  1. All the prices here have gone up to EU standards, even on local things like fruit – but people still have approximately a third of the income. Isn’t the EU a wonderful thing?
  2. The amount of cool and exotic animals – from water turtles to colourful lizards to wild jackals – is staggering. And yet very few people appreciate this, and if things continue like this it will all be lost. The seas are already totally overfished, and more than a few species that used to be common on land are now very rare. It’s depressing.
  3. The landscape is more or less the same. This is an incredibly beautiful country, but every year when I come back here, more and more has been built. Soon, there will be no empty space left at all. The beaches are already filling up with bars and chairs.
  4. Let’s not even talk about the corruption, and about the current government. If this country does not get some serious left-wing (i.e. not PASOK or, heavens forbid, KKE) leadership, it’s going straight to hell.
  5. Which of course it may be doing anyway, with the whole absurd “Macedonia” issue. Now there’s talk of an oppressed “Macedonian minority” in Greece. As if there weren’t enough internal probems, people have to start chipping away from the outside, making up fictional groups and re-writing history. Look, I’m from Macedonia. We have enough right-wingers here, we don’t need right-wingers from outside trying to claim a country that has historically been Greek for several thousand years and thereby also inciting a nationalist reaction from within Greece. There’s enough absurdity going on already, this is taking it too far.
  6. And for those who think there’s no such thing as climate change, and the ozone layer is a myth: thirty years ago, my father stayed in the sun from morning to evening for 3 months each year, without ever getting a sunburn. Now you can’t stay in the sun for more than 10 minutes at noon without risking serious damage. It’s fucking crazy.
  7. Also, as the temperature goes up we get more jellyfish. I hate jellyfish. Can we please start some kind of sea turtle breeding project?