A week later

I finally ventured into the center of Athens yesterday evening. This whole week I have been feeling horribly old and out of the loop. Things had been happening, the center was ablaze and yet I went to work and returned home and did nothing. It made me feel not only old, but also alienated and vaguely guilty. If I really wanted to, I know people I could call that I'm sure would be in the current, they probably spent the majority of the week barricaded in the polytechnic. But somehow work just sucks you dry, and once you're back home in the evening you are little but a worn out husk of the person you used to be.

When I was twenty I would be rearing to join them, but now I'm feeling too jaded and let-down and pessimistic. I did once try to change things. We were organised and energetic. We were civilised and ready to talk. We had reasonable and feasible demands. We were right, I still believe strongly that we were right. Yet we were ignored and nothing came of all out efforts. I can't help but fear that these youths are doomed to failure. The government will probably fall. But so what? There doesn't exist a single political party that is not just as bad and corrupt. And what's more, we are part of the EU. The rioters and demonstrators are not only fighting against the inertia of the Greek government, but also that of all the EU governments.

Do I mean they shouldn't fight? That they should just lay down and take everything the state dishes them? Of course not. They should riot, they should break things. They should try. But also they should know that they will most probably fail. We have to try and change things, otherwise we might as well be dead. However we are seemingly doomed to failure. If you sit down and thing of it, even the French Revolution was a failure in the end.

As I was saying I went to the center yesterday. I went to the peaceful sit-in demonstration in Syntagma square. I sat with friends from seven in the evening till ten at night. It was quiet and uneventful and we eventually left because we got too cold sitting on the cold concrete. I later learned that the police finally broke up the peaceful protest at three in the morning by throwing tear gas.



After we passed by Exarcheia - the epicenter of the riots. Things were gearing up for hard night - it was exactly a week since the shooting. We saw fires and riot police everywhere. We quickly left because the place was smothered under a cloud of teargas.

City Under Siege

Fortunately I was wrong, it wasn't the National Library they burnt, but the Law School Library. Of course that is almost as bad....

Five days later and Athens is still at war. Today they even closed down two of the central underground stations. The train doesn't stop, but just goes through non-stop. It's scary to think of. Obviously buses have long since stopped going to the centre.

Things have completely got out of hand.

The state of things in Greece and the present government often makes me so mad I want to bomb the Parliament or something similar, so I can sympathise with the rioters to a point. Sometimes you are so damn angry you have to break something. However there is a line and it has been crossed. I'm ok with breaking banks and burning police stations. I can even deal with a couple of broken shop windows and destroyed cars. But when you start burning public libraries, blocks of flats with people in (!!), fire-trucks and national health offices you have definitely crossed over into gratuitous, senseless and indefensible destruction.
But I'm not so much angry with the rioters as disappointed and frustrated. My real anger is reserved for the government and the police. The police are busy drowning the centre of the city under gallons of tear gas, beating up kids from the protest marches organised by schools and pulling guns during the funeral procession of the dead boy. Worse than that I suspect the fact that they are condoning the fact our very own neo-nazis (the Golden Dawn) have taken to the streets amongst the general mayhem to attack anarchists and immigrants.
As for the government and the politicians in general, they are too busy playing their power games to give a damn about what is actually happening. All they care about is whether the current government will fall or not and whether the opposition party will be able to take advantage of the situation and seize the power. If any of the rioters and reading this blog, can I make a request? Could you please attack the Parliament while it's in session (otherwise there'd be no point)?
Maybe I shouldn't be too greedy, one of my requests has already been granted. Thankfully they burnt the hideous Christmas Tree that has been defacing Syntagma Square for the past couple of years. (Thank you rioters!)

There once were buildings

I just learnt that the National Library is on fire. I think I'm going to lie down and cry...

There are no words

I have so much to say that I'm choked by the words.

Amateur journalism in Athens

So yeah, I went for a walk midday in the center of Athens. After the riots of the night, and before the ones of the next day. I took some photos. They could have been better.

The pot has boiled over

It's been awhile since we had riots. It was only a matter of time really, especially how things have been on edge lately. It was an explosion waiting to happen.

So yesterday was Saint Nicholas' day. I traveled to distant North (otherwise known as exotic and chilly Marousi) to attend Nikoletta's party. Upon arriving I was informed (because I have no television and am woefully ignorant of current affairs) that earlier that evening a 16-year old boy had been shot by the police in Exarcheia. Obviously Exarcheia, where else? Exatcheia, the most unstable area in central Athens. The traditional haunt of leftists, anarchists, students, junkies and alternative culture. A stone's throw from the Polytechneio (National Technical University). Exarcheia being the area of Athens accumulating the majority of the police force. Ever since the Olympics the situation has been ridiculous. Every street corner in the area has a policeman or two (all done up in combat gear) loitering. Loitering being the operative word, because they have never been seen to do an anything constructive or useful even if asked to. They just loiter and smoke and hit on girls.

Yesterday evening things got out of hand and a young boy was shot and killed. The nation was shocked (this is Athens, not New York or Mexico City!) and riots ensued. Molotov cocktails were thrown, storefront windows were broken. Storefront windows are always broken in Exarcheia. The riots stopped and no one thought all that much of them.

Nikoletta's party winded to a close and we got a taxi home. Passing by the center we realise all the roads into the center are closed off and all the roads out of the center are jammed with cars fleeing outwards. It is four o'clock in the morning Saturday going for Sunday. The riots started again and this time it's the whole of the center, they say.

Once in our lovely semi-central neighbourhood of Koukaki, all is quiet. I get home and go on the net to see what's up. Ermou (the main shopping street) has been burnt, they say. Students and demonstrators have barricaded themselves in the University buildings. Riots have broken out in other greek cities, notably Thessaloniki. The police are absent.

Strike one to the BBC over CNN and Euronews. The BBC never sleeps. It's the only non-greek news-site I find mentioning the riots last night.

Today - the next day - there were demonstrations in many Greek cities. More fires, more clashes with police, more people in hospital. But not more dead, yet. Will this change things? No. Unfortunately it never does. Obviously the riots are part anger over the killing of the teenager, part frustration and anger against the police and the state in general. The state has a lot to answer for, but it never does. The riots will stop and everything will go back to normal, because the people in power never listen.

Photo Competition

I'm taking part in an photographic competition held by fnac. It's nothing special but I thought I had nothing to lose in sending my three photos.

You can see them if you want. There's one from Athens, one from Paris and one from London. I wonder if you can guess which is which.

Mirrors

Dome

Underground

Comics that make you think (thoughts you've already had)

So the other day I was reading this comic (part 1, part 2), hardly believing how bigoted and offensive it was. I’m still not entirely sure it’s actually for real. I learned a couple of interesting things about the US – the US is so weird that it could easily be another planet. For example, I discovered NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association). I couldn’t help scratching my head as I looked it up in Wikipedia. With the way the world – and the US in particular – has gone hysterical over paedophilia and child pornography how can a group like that be legal?

Of course then I started thinking that Neo-Nazi groups, like Golden Dawn in Greece, are legal (they even take part in the elections) and all sorts of other peculiar groups are legal too. And it is a person’s right to say and believe whatever they feel like. I certainly wouldn’t trust the state to tell me what sort of groups can or can’t exist. Neither would I trust the state to tell what books I can or can’t read. Of course the state seems more interested in sex than subversive political ideas when it comes to censoring books. As if the Story of O is somehow more dangerous than The Anarchist’s Cookbook, or any of those truly dangerous books written by islamist extremists.

If a bunch of middle-aged guys want to sit around talking about how great it would be to have sex with pre-pubescent boys, it’s their right. Just like anyone can write racist leaflets and hand them out or write extremely sadistic and demeaning pornographic novels. We don’t have to agree, to defend their right to be perverts/racists/religious extremists. Everybody knows that, I’m assuming.

Only thing is that we shouldn’t neglect the rights of the voiceless majority. Eight-year old boys have the right not to be assaulted by older men. Dutch film-makers have the right not to be shot by islamist extremists.

Back to books, because I believe the world can never have too many books and a person can never read too many (even though it’s obvious that it would be better to spend your time reading Richard Sennett than a Harlequin novel). I’m emphatically, categorically, absolutely against banning any sort of book, however badly written, perverted, bigoted, subversive or dangerous it might be. However the unfortunate truth is that there are people out there who aren’t able to properly judge what books they should or shouldn’t waste their time on. There also are people who will read a fanatical propagandistic book urging them to kill “infidels” and instead of shaking their head and throwing the book away, will believe it and follow the author’s orders.

What can anyone do about that? It’s the author’s right to publish his books and the bookshop’s/library’s right to stock them. Grudgingly I will confess that giving potential readers an “ability to think and judge for yourself” test before letting them run loose in the bookshop/library is a tad patronizing.

How about we put warnings on books? Like cigarette packets have these big black warnings that say “smoking kills” and other even more explicit and disgusting things. We can have warnings on books proclaiming “reading this book might kill brain-cells” or “this book could turn you into a dangerous terrorist” or “none of the facts contained in this book are in fact true. Read at your own peril!” How about the warnings we have on cds that say “Parental advisory necessary, contains offensive lyrics”? Why cds and not books? “Parental advisory necessary, contains bad grammar and syntax”, “this book contains ideas and/or situations that many will find offensive”.

Do you think my idea might catch on?

Some gratuitous whining

Lately I’ve been feeling more and more miserable. After a while you stop trying and just start wallowing in your own self-pity. I am prone to bouts of unreasonable depression by nature. Sometimes however, I actually have valid reasons.

I never was all that keen on my job to begin with, but for months and months now I have begun to hate getting up in the mornings. And once there, I count down the hours till I can leave. For starters, its soul destroying being an architect and being forced to work as a mindless designer. If I wanted an unchallenging job where there’s no need to think or take initiative, I wouldn’t have spend 7 years studying architecture. Fortunately it’s not all bad. I am learning stuff. Or at least I did in the beginning. Now I think I’ve learnt all I will in this job. The upside of my workdays is when I have to deal with civil engineers and mechanical engineers over the phone. It certainly breaks the monotony, even when they drive me up the wall.
And what with the economic crisis – which in Greece is mostly in people’s minds so far – we don’t have much work. My main project – where I had lots of fun having disagreements and misunderstandings with the civil and mechanical engineers – has been put on the shelf by the clients. I’m so bored that when the other day my boss asked me to come up with a couple of ideas for glass doors with frosting, for the bathroom doors of a rich client, I came up with 32 ideas and could have easily reached 100.
Possibly the worst thing of my job however must be the atmosphere. Unfortunately I never got on with my co-workers (all women). I tried in the beginning, but we’re just so different that they think I’m weird and I think they’re dull and bitchy. So we barely talk.
Since the summer it’s got worse, everyone’s on edge. The boss has been edgy and nervous and the other girls go around with long faces. They make it painfully obvious they don’t enjoy their job either. Especially the mothers who go on and on about how they’d rather be at home with their kids. I’d rather they’d be at home with their kids too!

I have completed two years at this job. It’s a good time to look for a new one. Only Christmas is coming. It’s singularly stupid to leave a job before Christmas and miss out on the present. I should start seriously looking from January. However this stupid crisis is messing up my plans. Not many people are hiring lately. I have two out of work friends (one architect and one civil engineer) who have been looking for jobs since September with no luck. The situation is rather depressing.

And to make things so many times worse the art gallery my sister works for is going to close down in two months. The owner has had enough and is closing it. It’s much more than the crisis. For a year now he’s been talking about moving or closing.

The truth is the gallery is located in what has recently become one of the worst areas of Athens. It’s noisy and dirty and overrun with immigrants, junkies, prostitutes and the homeless. The gallery is opposite the central soup kitchen for the homeless. On the corner of the road giant groups of Pakistanis are always congregated. And walking down the street you frequently come across people shooting up. Do junkies shoot heroin in busy streets in plain in view in every city of the world or is it an Athenian thing? People are knifed in the area (and Athens has a very low crime rate compared with London). Every now and then the police show up and aggressively make the junkies move on. To where? I wonder. Or they raid the whorehouses looking for African prostitutes without licenses.
I remember taking a friend for a walk round the area a couple of years ago. He was overjoyed. “This is just like I remember New York being,” he said. And then he dragged me into Pakistani video clubs and Chinese junk shops before we sat down to eat and a run down Indian place, where we were the only Greeks in the place, and I the only woman. The food was not nearly as good as Brick Lane in London, and the other men in the place wouldn’t stop staring at me. Obviously we paid special “greek” prices and it ended up coming to the same as an ordinary taverna would have. Of course that wasn’t the biggest let down of the evening. That would have been the fact that it was supposedly a date of sorts. Nothing came of it, except me feeling like a fool barking up a wrong tree. A couple of years later the guy confessed he was a gay in denial. Trust my luck!

Back to my main train of thought: I’m depressed. I don’t like my job. I hate surviving on minimum wage. My sister (and flat-mate) is losing her job. I still don’t have a boyfriend. And I still am overweight.