Be Introspective, then Reflective and then Understand...

In one of the motivational posters I read "you are not where you come from, you are where you're going to...".

Which, snazzy though it may be, raises a fundamental question: do I know where I am going to?

One may argue, of course, that NOT knowing is, in and of itself, a kind of direction to whit, the pursuit of direction.

I wonder how many of us actually do know where they are going -- or do we simply settle for a vague idea, based on what we have around us.

Do we want to know everything about the future?


Or, maybe, "where we are going to" is the journey to know oneself.

If so, all it takes is to reflect upon oneself, to discover, see, accept and move on. The more we know ourselves, the more we know where we are going to? Or, the more we know ourselves, the less important is the goal of defining a specific destination...

"DE-BAIT", in Greece

On Sept 21st 2009 the leaders of the two major political parties in Greece, Nea Democratia and Panhellenic Socialist Movement, met before the TV cameras for a show reminiscent of the Eurovision trash-song contest.
Minus the actual voting, of course. That comes on Oct 4th.
That's a shame because,

• it's the best part of the (any) Eurotrash show,

• it would save taxpayers in Greece an estimated (and mind-boggling) Euro 115-125 million in subsidies to politicians & their parties.

Not to be outdone by the leading role politicians, TV entertainers ensured their own full star billings by extending the event on either chronological side: Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we had pre and post debate discussions and shows. Free content.
The pre's analysing, and speculating on what the two leader were to say; the latter analysing and and speculating on what the leaders actually did say (or not, as the case may be).
Not to put a too fine point on it, little was exchanged that had political consequence.

May I dare propose the following brief but (I believe) no less accurate summary?

• New Demo: I've had it with all the bozos around me. Same old bull, plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose. Country's run by a bunch of lazy morons, anyway.
• Pan Socialist: "I've got a dream, I've got a vision: I'm riding the donkey and leading the country. It is my turn to ride the donkey. They're not the only ones with bills to pay..."

Allegedly, viewership was low in the <24 year olds.

Who said Greek voters are not choosy when it comes to TV entertainment?

Why does one keep a blog?

It has become a customary thing to sit and write on a public medium, be it a forum or a site or a blog. Apart from the quest of popularity and the need to make oneself heard, I asked myself what it is exactly deep down that makes us want to do it.

Could there be an overwhelmingly personal, human dna-related explanation for the mounting number of terrabites dedicated to lonesome soliloquies?

In a world where the nagging frustrations are dealt with in a desultory manner, and cyberspace is quick replacing the village square, the first thing that comes to my mind is, Thank God for the Internet, because at least some contact is achieved in this fashion and something is always better than nothing in my book. However, this explanation does not go too far below the surface of things -- which is where we want to be.

I think there is a more immediately recognisable source for the urge to cyber-blab and waffle and it is rooted in peoples' natural gregariousness. Indeed, isn't the forum, or a frequented blog, a recreation of the erstwhile community with all its components?

Less the physical presence and contact, of course, the cyber community is where one is heard simply because one is there, part of that community; and one exists and is acknowledged as such by that fact itself. In our overwhelmingly urban society being heard is to exist and vice-vera; it's a way of rising above anonymity.
On the other hand, it is no plain sailing as communicating / talking / touching others, requires a strategic approach with set tactics and rules of operation.
Not so with communities -- the small size, the customs inherent, the stories that (used to) emanate from each community are (were) legion. Of course, one of the staples of such communities is that no-one is anonymous and nothing is secret!


So, have we reached the point where the quest for privacy and anonymity has taken us to the other side where we now look for that locality, the sense of "growing old together"?

I think so. And there comes the frustration of cyber-contact, a frustration that can only be ultimately washed away through actual contact.

The blog, is one's own tiny little forum, a little voice unhindered by custom, rules, lies, or circumstance other than our own. But it's one voice amongst millions of others, many more added every second.

Some voices are lucky and around them, forms a community. So what of it's virtual, it is a community of sorts, and soemthing is always better than nothing...

Living, Investing... in Greece. (1) Living

(That's a map of ancient Greece. Reputedly, things were better then.)

For anyone planning to live in Greece, invest in Greece, or simply move to Greece for a while, pointers and support are generally (if not generously) available.

Here I will give brief, but in my opinion most pertinent, guiding principles. These are ruling maxims, if you will.
Following these, everyday life falls into place and understanding is easy.

The order of presentation will leave some to be desired. I tried to work my way from the general to the particular; nevertheless, readers will notice many lapses in this logical sequence and will have to excuse my muddle-headedness.
Please be advised that contemporary Greeks, i.e. the contemporary inhabitants of Greece of Hellenic origin (i.e. in no order, Athenians, Megariotes, Macedonians, Corinthians, Eubiotes, Cretans, Rhodans, Peloponnesians.... etc) are commonly referred to in Greek as neoGreeks.


Moving to and Living in Greece: preliminary consideration
You are expected to have property in Greece before you move here. Preferably inherited. Please keep in mind that, by Continental European standards, Greece is expensive. In all but renting real estate, prices are slightly to considerably higher than elsewhere.
Buying property is relatively easy but establishing your title on that property can be tricky.
Any newcomer to Greece, not arriving to claim inheritance, is a potential source of income -- or unwelcome. This is not to discourage anyone -- rather, it is an explanation.
The above is a generalised fact; I went through it as have others and as will others. It applies to all who have moved to Greece from the late '80s onwards.


Moving to and Living in Greece: the Dominant (predominant) lifestyle
Here as elsewhere, there is an cultural undercurrent, a denominator which shapes everyday life -- as it is lived by some and pursued as a goal by others.
The institutions, as presented and in their daily operation reflect this clearly. Understanding this brings a ray of light to all the shady perversions of mondanity.
Urban Greece is for healthy adults, educated elsewhere, with independent sources of income, appreciative of lightweight conversation and socialising (superficial is OK) -- in short, a country where applied leisure is the national vision & supererogatory goal.

Other parts of the population are a hindrance if not a nuisance.

E.g. You are most welcome to have coffee at a trendy cafe, at any time of the day -- particularly during all working time of the day. In fact, you can sit for hours on end with just one drink. Reading a paper. (This is most enjoyable in a country where the weather sometimes allows outdoor drinks in mid-December -- and this is not a side effect of global warming.)

This is because the predominant lifestyle is... just that, and it is thereby cherished and protected.
In this respect, and within limits of other peoples' leisure and the entertainment /Horeca industry, you can generally do anything.

Example 1: park your car anywhere. But NOT, leave your pram anywhere UNLESS it is at a cafe -- where it is tolerated but not condoned.

The limits to your freedom derive from any hindrance to the "rule of leisure"; i.e. if you actually disturb other peoples' leisure. If your car blocks access to a cafe -- but NOT if your car blocks a pedestrian crossing (unless said crossing facilitates a bar or a cafe-restau).

This is instrumental if the newcomer is to understand why, say, an automobile belonging to, and driven by a healthy adult takes precedence over a pram holding a dependent baby and driven by an adult.

It is important to understand that this habit is neither good or bad -- it just is. Moralising about the precendence to the needy gets you nowhere in Greece -- it simply is NOT on the agenda.
Likewise, parents are NOT supported in any institutional way; while this may be frowned upon elsewhere, it must be clearly understood that in Greece, mothers are NOT a priority. Indeed, many women become mother out of an inculcated urge or strategic necessity and perhaps patriotic duty, rather than any inherently parental consideration.

Point 2
Thereby, Greece is generally hostile to two categories of the population: children & the elderly.
This is not a cultural matter, but a practical one. Both -- particularly children -- are mostly a hindrance to leisure and pleasure.
Political correctitude apart where everyone wastes their breath touting the importance of children and respect for the elders, we don't waste our money throwing it away where our mouth is:

• if you need a dependable school, it is privately operated;
• childrens' activities are few & far between. The nation's capital sporting one small building in Plaka (the old town) called the childrens' museum; the building is run mostly by volunteers and the building is run down;
• children don't vote, so there is another reason why throwing money at them is a waste of money;
• children are the antithesis of leisure -- unless you have 24/7/365 nannies, which few can afford;
• the only exception is childrens' parties & funparks -- but these really facilitate adults' leisure and offer parents some pleasure;
• childrens' prams take up space which can usefully be allocated to tables for adults; they require pavements which can be better used as expensive extensions to real estate and the horeca industry; they require armies of teachers, etc; and children take away from the leisure industry all the adults who have to supervise them.
• Summing up overall, last but not in any way least, children and pensioners, are expensive. Good money, thrown away at hospitals, retirement benefits (sometimes delayed hoping for the beneficiary's), teachers in sundry pretence of education...
  
• add lib
  

Point 3
Greenery and global warming.
In Greece we are particularly concerned about global warming. Indeed, awareness has reached stratospheric levels in this country and Greece is probably one of the statistical leaders. In fact, Green is trendy, Green is very neoGreek. When Porsche, an automobile manufacturer, offers a green model, Greece is sure to be one of its best, if not THE best, markets.
As long as we can just speak about it and on occasion get together to switch off the lights collectively sipping a well-deserved glass of wine.
In Greece, being very Green does not extend to actually doing anything about it. Indeed, being very active and, consequently, noisy, about it is in very bad taste.





Comin up: Being focused on leisure and entertainment, Greece does NOT favour nor does Greece COMPREHEND any business initiative and activity OTHER than in the horeca & entertainment industries.
Many complain about institutions, corrupt civil servants, unfriendly authorities, etc. They are wrong.
It is simple to understand...}

Schools in Athens, Disctrict of Attica, Greece (4)

(con'nued from previous)

If you have children, small or otherwise...
...that would be private schools.

Costea-Geitona (CGS) has nice facilities attesting to wise use of funds -- and lots of them. Private secondary school is good business in Greece, nay, getting better and better as public (grammar & local) schooling gets worse and gradually abandoned. You just have to see CGS' buildings to realise - goodness, the schools has been around for ~30 years. Not that long, considering the likes of Jeanne d'Arc.

And yet.

CGS -- I started out as a hard-working nobody and now am a fully fledged somebody, with solid foundations &, some, very good points to make in secondary schooling.

CGS management had the bright idea to join the IB bandwagon very early and to supplement the Greek Ministry of Education curriculum (admittedly, more of a hindrance as private eductational institutions in Greece probably know education better than Ministry apparatchiks with questionable credentials) with IB's skills-centred appraoch to learning. Its IB programme is also reputed to have results - i.e. many students get offers at first choice universities.
And, they are welcoming, and... expensive. You are convinced The only setback is, there is nothing particularly obvious to choose this school rather than another. No offense meant; as a matter of fact, there is nothing to dissuade one from actually chosing CGS, despite its "youth".

_____________


Another well-known institution, albeit with a much longer history, is Ziridi. Here, there is a 75 year history and a strong family undercurrent -- the Ziridi family, that is, with Ms Ziridi (amazingly for her apparent age, only 2nd generation) on the home page. To give credit where it's due, the P.A. is well supported and active, too and, the point being made is that this school is also a family -- not an institution.

SO far so good.

"We're a family of school-children and our school family name is Ziridi."

Having stated this, the old tradition that came with the original "Lykeion i Athena" is no longer. As a matter of fact, the present name is "new gen Ziridi". Unlike new gen coke that bombed, this one hasn't.

The school is heavy on competencies, things environmental (Greeks are into these, as long as it doesn't require them to actually do anything more than talk and, occasionally, switch off the lights for an hour) -- and sports a "botanical garden" (i.e. nice looking and scenting herbs planted in its grounds); some traditions are still favoured the highlight (IMO) being the inauguration of the new campus with the presence of no less than His All Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople and New Rome.

Wow.

Of course, Ziridi is "connected" to the legendary Great School of the Nation -- Megali tou Genous Scholi (in Greek) -- the school of all schools, with a list of Principals going back to 1454. Now that's prestigious. That, is also the one school that is supervised by the Patriarchate.
{Unfortunately, the school, situated in Turkish territory, is regularly attacked & pillaged after the Turkish government in 1945 simply kicked out 250.000 people of Greek origin and, of course, pocketed their belongings.}

So, does one choose the "new gen Ziridi", with its penchant for competencies in 1-6th formers and a preference for IB?

Let's stay tuned.

p.s. is it necessary to repeat that teaching of English as a second language is excellent in both schools?

BEST WISHES for a BETTER everything

BEcause, you deserve it,

BEcause, it's about time,

BEcause, it's against all odds and sometimes against the odds works better than with them,

BEcause....


Haappy(ier) New YEAR!

(U.S.) Elections -- the hidden provocation

Not the US elections in particular, but election campaigns in Western countries in general.

• The provocation is this: millions are spent on an elections show.
• On the other hand, people out there are suffering to the tune of a minute fraction of the millions spent on the elections show.
• The elections show is officially for the benefit of "the people".
• With or without the show, some people are still starving. They could do with a little bit of that money.
  

From the view point of the needy, the whole election campaign thing is either very ironic or very tragic or a very tragic waste of money... or any combination thereof.

Again, it's not a matter of the yanks' elections -- it's all elections. It's just that the show being currently aired is the yanks' show. Since the US elections are imminent and Americans prepare to vote (or some of them do), their the whole shenanigan has received much airing. Hence the reference to them. It's also a really grand show, and their campaign seems to last for ever.
Now, how about if someone requested the candidates bail out a bank or support a few jobs being cut... say for a year?

Kaput: banks, shares, savings, younameit...

The US parliament (Congress?) did not approve the bankers bailout plan. Markets are going kaput.

Of course, why should failed bank executives' employers, i.e. the banks, be saved from annihilation just because they failed?
Answer: Because the extent, the reach, and the consequence of their failure is tremendous.
Savings will topple, people are left without a penny, and those banks' senior management is left without its golden parachute...

Of course, some say that it is better this way. I'm not sure I wouldn't support this view myself: why use our children's money to bail out out bankers' fathers?

Whatever the case may be, it is useful to pray. Buying power in many European countries is down by 35% in the past 8 years. The erstwhile middle class is getting poorer. And in becoming so, it is breeding widespread discontent.

Easy to grasp, if you think of this in the following way: see your children worse off than you were.
In the hitherto inalienable grand scheme of life, offspring were supposedly bequeathed a better world than their forefathers.

No longer! Pray, pray, fast, right now, immediately. Who else is there to save us but God & ourselves. We are incapable of saving ourselves.

That leaves only God. Yet again.

DaDa DadADAda DaDa DadADAda

MANIFESTO

OF

SURREALISM

BY

ANDRÉ BRETON

(1924)

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!).
Nope! Man is no longer a dreamer. He has been roused violently; he is no longer discontent with his destiny but, rather, desperately hopeless. There are few if any objects earned through own efforts since such effort is insufficient to warrant the objects; nowadays we inherit or grasp or partake in an historical aberration, a revolutionary turn of events...
(A revolutionary turn of events which shows that half of Fortune's listed top billionaires are Russian. Imagine the above sentence, 20 years ago: Dangerous science fiction!)

So what is in store. Nothing. The store is empty.

The surrealist manifesto has been duly incorporated and floated and now lists in a few SEs. Indeed, not so long ago, people made money off surrealist inspired derivatives.

We need a new manifesto.

We need is something that is obscure enough to be under the radar for a while and, at the same time, popular enough to have widespread appeal!

Hell of a product. Unobtainium!

We need help and no-one is listening ! Make them listen. Call: +4790369389

The telemegaphone (left) guarantees your voice will resound over a Norwegian mountain. THAT'S BETTER THAN NOWHERE!

And what's more, the device is commendably & politically correctly green: it's wind-powered. (One wonders how these people expect struggling oil people to survive.)


At least let's have some contemporary SURREALIST humour courtesy of the telemegaphone.

(It's better, i.e. healthier and more constructive, than sitting around moping and hoping it will all go away, simply because you are moping. Simply because the "sun will shine following the rain" etc. That sentimental clap-trap does not apply in real life.)

"They want more for themsleves...

and less for everybody else."

That was George Carlin (on "Who Owns You)".
He dead.
He dead the day before yesterday, or summat round there. He was 71.
A very interesting man, amazingly outspoken and undeniably interesting and invariably funny. Hilarious at times! I could just dumb-sit watching a TV screen & laugh like an idiot. It's not that I wanted to clap knowingly at the irreverent truths he would (dare) express -- it's that, too, but that's a bit conventionally stereotyped. No, it's the plain hilarity of some of the things he said and the way he said them.

So why pick that quotation above? Because it is the only time I know of, where I would venture a rephrasing.

Here's what I propose:
From,
"they want more for themselves and less for everybody else" to
"they want so much more for themselves that there's not enough to go round... So they've got to take some of yours -- what else can they do? It's not personal".

Have fun, mate, wherever you may be! Enjoy. And bash all those pretentious, self-serving, plutocratic, smug spirits out there, too.

Bad news...

Late in the day before yesterday, a good friend lost his father. He too, just joined the "next in line" club.
We all become members of this club, some sooner and some later...
It has got me thinking about "life": life used to be about fun and about having fun. This is nothing new.
Many of us would have been glad to continue this life -- but life itself wishes otherwise. Life insists on getting serious. The differences are unsettling and uncomfortable and demanding; they require us to look for new meanings and to find new truths.

And Truth is rarely pure and never simple*. For some, or for all.



*O. Wilde