My penultimate blog of 2008 and I finally get around to Athens, starting off leaving the ferry at Piraeus at 5.30 a.m. still dark but heavy traffic and hundreds of people about, the metro station surrounds awash with litter. Greeks love their newspapers and periodicals. Goodness only knows how many are published, daily, weekly, monthly. Add to that the fliers and posters everywhere and one can see a goodly portion of the rain forests lying wet and filthy on Greek city streets and old Popie fellow has every right to be worried but not about the extinction of the human race which will no doubt happen eventually and naturally from over-breeding and we will die out in a miasma of shit. It wasn’t until we started recycling in Vamos and separating what could be saved from what had to be thrown that it was brought home to me how truly wasteful our world is and how much landfill is stuffed with recyclable material, mainly packaging of one sort and another: tin, aluminium, glass, plastic, wood, cardboard, paper, cloth. Thinking of how much is produced by this one household alone and then multiplying it millions and millions of times and the resulting conclusion is truly horrifying. All Greece has a problem with waste disposal and it is amazing in Athens just to see the number of overflowing waste bins all over the city that are emptied every night. Add to the purely domestic rubbish the amount of old furniture, old clothes, shit paper and other assorted rubbish that gets cast out and collected, the city waste disposal department does an amazing job, but where does it all go to, thousands and thousands of tons of it nightly? This from a city small in comparison to the major and most heavily populated cities of the world?
Since my previous visit the graffiti bandits seem to have been having a field day (or night rather as none of them ever seem to get caught red handed) and their mindless daubs everywhere really are such an ugly blot on the city. Added to that now are the burnt out or trashed and looted premises from the recent riots when all manner of bugs came crawling out of the woodwork many with a secret agenda of their own to wreck havoc and parts of the centre look like a war zone; were a war zone for a few days I suppose. The ripples spread further than burnt out premises and those people losing their livelihood. As ordinary citizens were fearful of entering the centre, the remaining shops did little pre-Christmas business and theatres even less as patrons just stayed away. The night I went to see “Mister Episkopakis” at the little theatre situated only metres from where the boy was shot, we were seven in the audience and only two were actual paying customers. I presume cinemas and restaurants suffered the same fate. The fifteen year old being shot may have been the spark that brought thousands of protesters onto the streets but, apart from the purely criminal element, their reasons were many and the background; historical, political, social, economical, will just have to wait for another time. The effects of the Junta’s short but brutal reign can still be felt in Greece.