Tsigariasto with chili

My husband's line of work in the taxi business usually involves mundane rides from A to B. During the summer, foreign clients make the rides more interesting. Yesterday, he came home late, after spending 7 hours with an Indian couple holidaying in Hania. Sometimes, such exotic customers give away a lot about their culture. Yesterdy was no exception.

"The man and woman had been standing by the sign listing the indicative prices for rides at Square 1866 in Hania. I couldn't see what ride they were looking at. At one point, the man walked confidently straight up to my cab [E-class 2011 model Mercedes] and asked me outright: 'Can you take us to Elafonisi?'

"I explained that the ride was an expensive one. 'I don't care', he said. I feel obliged to explain this to foreign customers because sometimes they come here thinking that everythig in Greece is cheap, and they are shocked to hear the prices of some services. I even had someone remark 'that's London prices' and walk off in a huff. So I gathered that these people were wealthy. They looked like Indians to me. We usually think of India as a country with a lot of poor people, so this ostentatious show of wealth felt shocking to me. The taxi has been part of my family for over 50 years, but when I travel, I would never spend this kind of money on a taxi, not even with my whole family in the car. Idon't feel that rich.

"On the way to Elafonisi, I asked them where they were from (Mumbai), and why they chose Hania for a holiday (a friend of theirs had come here and given them a good review of the place). I explained a few things to them about the sites they were passing by. It's an expensive ride, and they may as well get their money's worth. They took a lot of photos, and they seemed genuinely interested in the scenery.

"On arriving to Elafonisi, I was really quite amazed to see so many people at the beach. It's mid-October, and the place looked like it hadn't calmed down since the beginning of summer. I let the passengers off and asked them what their plans were after Elafonisi. They told me they just wanted to to enhjoy the beach and they wanted me to take them back to Hania after a couple of hours. Obviously it was my lucky day today.

"The car parks in the area were full and there was no shade. Driving is the easy part of a taxi driver's journey: what tires you out is keeping the customer entertained at the same time. The weather in the northern part of Crete does not compare to the southern part. We've been feeling autumn setting in in the north, while the south still feels like high summer. While I waited for them, I could feel the car heating up. It had also become a dust bomb. Elafonisi is very dry.

"Two hours later, my customers stroll back to the cab at the designated meeting place. The man was limping a little. I asked him if he was OK. 'It's nothing,' he insisted. 'We walked the Samaria Gorge yesterday'. That made my day. they had ventured out of their comfort zone.

"'Where do you recommend we go for lunch?' the man asked. I was thinking the same thing, meaning I wanted to get back home and enjoy my own lunch. I suggested that they might like to pick a restaurant while we were driving back. The man looked around, and spotted the restaurant located on a small rise , just beyond the sandy area where the tarmac road starts. He could tell that it would have a good view of the sea. 'We'll go here!' He was always very confident about his choices.

"The waiter bought us the menu cards. I told him I was surprised to see so many people here at this time of year. 'So many?' he exclaimed. 'This is nothing! You should have seen what was happening here in the last week of September!' We've all had a good run this year in terms of tourism.

"My customers asked me to join them for lunch, whcih I think was very generous of them. This doesn't happen often. Naturally they wanted a bit of help with the menu. The restaurant served very traditional Cretan food with a few tourist dishes for those who didn't want to be too adventurous. I told them about tsigariasto - 'I don't think I want to eat goat' - pork roast - 'I don't eat pork' - braised chicken - 'Hm, chicken is common'. The woman ordered a pizza. 'What are you going to have?' the man asked me. I chose the tsigariasto. 'OK, I'll have that too,' he said. I really hoped it was going to be good.

"The meals came and we began eating. The tsigariasto was much as I expected it - slightly oily, well-cooked tender meat, falling off the bone, with a wine flavour to the sauce (no tomato). 'Does the restuarant have any hot sauces?' the man asked me. Hot food is being served more often in Cfrete these days... but this restaurant, it's location, the menu - hot food was clearly off limits. I asked the waiter, and he bought some commercial spicy tomato sauce to the table. 'Got any ketchup?' the man asked. The waiter bought some ketchup too. The man must have used up a quarter of each bottle, splurging it all over the tsigariasto. He reminded me of when my children were young and we were in London at a Pakistani restaurant. Except that they wanted to eat everything without the heat. Now they're used to other people's food, and they eat it as they find it.

"On the way back to Hania, the man asked me about other places to visit. I suggested Knossos in Iraklio. 'I mean another part of Greece'. Crete is a very big island, I explained. But they clearly wanted to go island hopping. So I mentioned the classics: Santorini, Mykonos. This is the most common route that first-time tourists take when comeing to Hania: after spending three days here, they go to Iraklio, then take the ferry from there to Santorini, with Mykonos on the itinerary too.

'You have a lot of mini markets here, don't you?' I asked him why he was asking this question. We had been driving mainly on country roads until then with hardly any shops. 'What are those people selling on the road?' he asked. What he was seeing was the local producers of natural products selling their wares along the road, and there were many of them. My customers were interested in the natural products, so he asked me to stop at the next seller. They bought wine, raki, rakomelo, thyme, oregano, marjoram, sea salt and honey, one of each item that the producer was selling on his stall. As we were leaving, the man asked me to stop again. 'Can we go back to the stall?' he asked. They decided to buy some presents too. And as we all got back into the cab again, the stall owner called me back. 'Come and take a present for yourself,' he said. I waited for him to give me the present. 'You choose,' he said. So I took a bottle of rakomelo. It was clearly his lucky day too.

We drove back to Hania with the cab smelling like a Cretan hillside from all the herbs tmy customers had bought. As I dropped my customers off at their hotel, I asked them if they enjoyed the trip. "Wonderful, wonderful! We will tell our friends to come too!' I suppose I coudn't ask for more than that."

*** *** ***

More and more people are coming to Greece for a holiday. 2017 was an interesting year for us in Hania. We've never seen so many Asian tourists coming here before. Tourism depends on stable politics in the general area which is generally an unknown quantity in our world these days. No one knows where the next attack will take place, ruining a country's reputation  for safety.

The tourism season in Hania ends on 29  October 2017 and starts again on 24 March 2018. We have suffered a little from over-tourism in Crete this year. But as a Cretan I can tell you that the winter is also a wonderful time to be here too. You have the island to yourself. The weather isn't always guaranteed, but you will still be blown away by Greece's beauty, history and archaeological sites are not season-dependent, and the food is still fantastic (perhaps even better). The sea is perhaps a little over-rated anyway.

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Past experiences (Εμπειρίες από το παρελθόν)

In some people's minds, yesterday's post showed me up to be racist and prejudiced against Roma, which is, of course, not what I was trying to say in the first place, but that is what some may conclude after reading a one-A4-page summary of an episode in a stranger's life, which in actual fact lasted more than three years. The pictures of the girl were used to illustrate the post as a way to tie it in with international current affiars, as the Roma girl's plight has become a major European story at the moment. I would never have bothered to bring up the Roma episode in my own life through this blog had the girl's story not come up in the press in this way. But I'm glad it did, because these are the stories I want to make sure go down in my history. The stories I tell in this blog are not meant as sensational block-buster material for strangers' reading - they are real stories that my children may never learn about because when the time comes to learn about them, their parents might be dead, and they may never get the chance to hear these stories which will shed light on their own upbringing.

Through this blog, I have met a number of people who now regret that the only thing they knew about their ancestors was their name - and even that name had been changed when they migrated, so their offspring and grandchildren could not find any more information about them: all the information stopped at the Ellis Island records in New York, because it didn't match up with any records of the same people before they got to Ellis Island. We still see the same situation repeated by today's economic migrants, some of whom are dying in the earth's oceans, their undocumented status wiping out their traces. Even the magic tool of the millenium, the internet, still does not hold the stories that the moving people of the world grew up with, stories that may haunt or excite us, which would be interesting for later generations to know about if only they had the chance to discover them. 

I view this as especially important given that I live in a country where I was not born, and came at a late stage in my life, so that I do not have any connections with the local people (bar through blood ties, which is a different thing from friendships) through my young years, the time when people start forming freindships: primary school, high school, university. I did that elsewhere, and my connections with my previous homeland were severed after my mother's early death and my late father's departure from that country. Hence, my past is less tangible to my offspring than, say their father's past, which is all based in his present - and no doubt - future homeland.. 

Imagine moving around in an environment where no one knows you on the street: they can only judge you by what they see of you, not what they know about you, because few people actually know me in this town, and I like to keep things that way because it gives me the privilege to be able to hide away in my own little world and be a fly on the wall whenever I want. We learn so much more about ourselves from those flies on the wall, people who are not members of our own society and tell us things about ourselves that we never knew. We can choose to identify with what others say about us, or we can challenge their speculations. It is generally our choice what we do with this extra knowledge. But if we choose to take the easy option - to dismiss their descriptions of ourselves or our society - we will probably be missing out on a chance to understand ourselves better: 

"It is impossible to absorb a new or foreign reality unless you first comprehend well whatever is around you." (from an interview with the late Yannis Tsarouhis, whose life and works are being exhibited at the Benaki Museum in Athens)

The liberal world, as it has been shaped in modern times, has made us all feel aware of alternative lifestyles and opinions that we may not share. The ideal world is one where everyone is equal, but in the real world, this could never happen. There will always be rich and poor, educated and unedcated, black and white people. These divisions cause prejudices which the liberal world wants to try to wipe out - but they can never wipe out the divisions, which then raises the issue of being trapped in a vicious circle: on the one hand, everyone is equal, while at the same time equality doesn't exist. Rather than fight these forces, I prefer to live with the divisions. It's much easier for me to live with them, because I don't live in a country where people believe anyone can be Prime Minister (not in Greece at the moment, that's for sure).

 

But even though not everyone can be Prime Minister, I am pretty sure everyone can be who they want to be in this country, if only they knew who they want to be in the first place. We all tend to live with prejudices that we believe are formed by our experiences. I like to remind myself of this when I think of my cab driver husband. Not being a driver until my older age, I had been in a lot of cabs (but never his) before I met him. Most of my cab experiences were generally not good ones because I was always on my guard against being ripped off, as most people believe that Greek taxi drivers are rip-off artists. I also associated taxi drivers with smoking, because most cab drivers (used to) smoke in their car and do not ask the customer if this bothers them. And I rarely took a cab on my own at night, because my tidy dress style and accent always gave off an image to others that I was a well-to-do foreigner, which was bound to bring up a conversation about why I was in Greece, what I was doing here and if I am in a relationship. If a taxi driver is taking you home, that's the last thing you want to discuss, in case he decides to pass by your home regularly. 

Despite my prejudices against cabbies, I still married one, and am still happily married to one. My husband does not rip off customers, he does not smoke and he shares all his interesting daily stories in the cab with his whole family, be they stories of young girls who ask him if he has a condom to spare, priests who hold on to his knee for extra support, or stories that make him think about how he is raising his own family. 

Unfortunately though, we know plenty of cab drivers among us who rip customers off (our former co-driver was caught in the act, and received a hefty fine), do not take customers' preferences into account (while we travel abroad, the taxi reeks of smoke when we hire other drivers who do not take into account the fact that their filthy habits spoil it for many other people), and use the cab as a way to meet up with people they are having illicit affairs with, and I don't just mean romantic connections: we recently heard of a case where a cab driver - not a cab owner - was ferrying Pakistanis who were selling cigarettes ontained through illegal channels (the cab, which is now tied up at a police station, had been under surveillance for six months before the police pounced). 

"Egypt was charming... [Fielding] reembarked at Alexandria - bright blue sky, constant wind, clean low coastline, as against the intricacies of Bombay. Crete welcomed him next with the long snowy ridge of its mountains, and then came Venice... The buildings of Venice, like the mountains of Crete and the fileds of Egypt, stood in the right place... (A Passage to India, EM Forster, 1924)

I only very recently read A Passage to India, which describes the inherent racism of the English towards the Indians when they were governing them, how they swayed events to turn out the way they wanted without any justification, and how they ostracised their own kind when English people sided with Indians.  This story should remind us all that even though in theory we all want to be friends in our liberal world, we cannot always be, at least, not yet, to repeat the famous last lines of the book: 

'Why can't we be friends now?' said [Fielding, the Englishman]... 'It's what I want, it's what you want.' But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart; the [Indian] earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there'. A Passage to India, EM Forster, 1924. 

It takes us a long time to get over unexplained prejudices, but even when we think we have got over them, one tiny episode in a sea of incidents can easily break the balance that we strove for. For this reason, I never bother these days to make myself think that 'WE' are not all like 'THEM'. Instead, I tell myself that most people are not like me. I find that thought much easier to live with, as well as much easier to explain to my kids, who will eventually realise one day that they were not being raised in an average Greek household, in a similar way to Dr Aziz in A Passage to India, who did not view himself as an average Indian, but he eventually admitted to himself that he had to show some loyalty for his motherland.

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Bored (Βαρεμάρα)

Here's how husband passed his day today. 

What time was it when I left the house this morning, Maria? Did you hear me? It was about 6.30, wasn't it? Kosta had phoned me to ask if he could keep the car until he got a ride. "Where are you?" I asked him. "Africana," he said, "and I'm alone." But Africana never gets much business these days, it's so close to Hania people walk, so I told him to bring the cab to me, because if I'd left him there, he might have brought it even later than the time you take the kids to school, so I told him to bring it home and I could begin my shift. As it was, I'd lost my regular customer from my usual first stop, because another cab had already rolled into the Kalithea rank, and I knew he'd get the fare, and all I'd end up wth is a ντουλάπα.

Now that the tablets have been taken away from us* and we had to go back to the old system of picking up fares, I had to hit the road and go to the next taxi rank, which happened to be Africana. I was surprised no one was there before me. I was all alone. Then No. 72 came along, glanced at me, and drove off. Then No. 133 appeared and he left as soon as he took one look at me. The same with No. 55. I was beginning to think  they were all avoiding me because of some decision that I had taken against them** or something, so I called No. 55 and asked him where he was. He said he was at the Koumbe rank. I also asked him if he'd seen 72 and 133; he told me they were there with him. I asked him if I should come along too, and he told me I was fine where I was - he was 7th in line.

So I here I was, all on my lonesome, watching the world waking up and passing me by, as I remained still.  I heard 72 get called, then 133 got a fare, and I began getting a little edgy as I still had nothing. No. 92 came along and parked behind me. We both got out of our cabs for a bit of fresh air and a little chat. The first fare - a very young-looking chap - came along at 8.30. Just before I got into the cab, I asked him where he was going.

"Plakias," he said, matter-of-factly. I couldn't believe my ears. If you go to Plakias, you don't need to work for the rest of the day. Well, you could work if you wanted to, but you'd have made as much money as you normally would over two days of working all day in Hania. 92 stared at me with a jaw dropped as low as his πι-πί.

"Plakias is far away," I warned him, "it's going to cost you a lot of money." It's only fair to warn him. You don't know the people who come into your cab. You may see them very day, like my regular fare at Kalithea, or you may see them once in your life, like this guy, but you never know if they have the money to pay you. I once took someone to Paleohora, and when he got out, he said "Just a minute," and he went into his house and bought back a canary in a cage and told me to take it. Luckily, I didn't take off immediately, because his mother came out of the house running to catch up with me, and she was holding her purse. She kept apologising for her son's behaviour, and she paid me in full. Then another time, I picked someone up from Souda and he told me to take him to a village in Iraklio near Moires. After I got to Rethimno, he struck up a conversation (I always let the customer start the conversation - some of them may not want to talk much in the cab). He told me how hard his life was, being stuck all day in the psychiatric unit in Souda. The cheeky bugger had come onto the main road to avoid being picked up from the τρελοκομείο where he lived. All I could think of was 'Fuck'. He probably didn't have any money on him but I couldn't very well turn back to Hania. I just carried on driving all the way to Moires. When we finally got to his house, I found his father out in the yard. The guy got out of the taxi without even turning to look at me. His father came up to me and said, "Why do you keep bringing him here?" I told him I was only doing my job, I had no idea who he was, I just picked up a fare and took him where he told me. His father told me to wait a minute. He came out of the house with his wallet and paid me in full. I felt sorry for these parents. They looked old, but their kids were young. Their children had aged them too early. I remembered these stories as I watched the young man get into the back seat of the cab.

"I've got €220 in my pocket," he said. I nodded a see-you-later to No. 92 and started up the car. Do you know how many years it's been since I've been to Plakias? I didn't remember how bad the road was. One minute you're climbing a hill, the next you're rolling down it, then you drive through a gorge, a bit more up and down before you are finally back on flat road. We got to Plakias forty minutes later, and I asked him where excatly he wanted to go. He told me to drive down to the beach, so I did. I expected him to tell me which spot on the beach he wanted to get out at, but he said nothing. I kept driving slowly along the coast, but he still said nothing. I thought maybe he was μαστουρομένος, but he didn't smell of pot or anything, and his eyes weren't jaded either. To try to work out what the hell he was up to, I asked him if he wanted to stop off and get a coffee at the kafeneio - nothing else was open. "No," he said, "it's too cold." I was fed up, and feeling a little jittery after the drive, but I couldn't do much about my situation. I asked him where he wanted me to take him.

"Let's go back to Hania," he said. I wasn't sure if he was having me on. The meter would continue ticking; he'd have to pay for the return fare too.

"You've come all the way down here, and you haven't even stepped out of the cab," I said to him.

"That's none of your business. I'm the paying customer." We arrived back in Africana at about 10.30. The round trip had cost him €140.

The man looked very young, but he was actually in his mid-30s, as I found out when I got back to Hania. No. 92 had made it known among the 200 or so cabs in Hania through the wireless that I had got lucky. Some other cabbies knew the young man I had picked up. Apparently he is from a comfortable but not very rich family. He has never worked in his life, which explains why he looks much younger than he is. He has no dreams, no aspirations, no plans to leave. In the summer, he gets up late and sits at MyCafe all afternoon drinking frappe. He is bored shitless, and he can't do anything to change his life.

I joined the Africana rank, behind two other cabs. I got out to stretch my legs and the other cabbies just stared at me like I was crazy. "What are you doing back here?" they asked me. You should go home now.| It was too early to go home. I made another €20 picking up three more fares, until it was time to pick up the kids from school. As I watched my son dragging his bag on the ground because he couldn't be bothered lifting it up onto his shoulder, my mind went back to that young man.

*For the last 18 months, the cabs of Hania were working via an online GPS-oriented system - the funding program fell through, and it's now back to old manual routine of picking up fares, at the taxi ranks and through the wireless system.

*My husband is on the Monitoring Board of the Hania cab association, which controls system cheats. 

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500: Boureki

The phone is ringing; the screen lights up with the word 'HOME'.

"Baba, lunch is ready! If you don't come now, we're gonna start without you!"

"What's for lunch?" he asks.

"It's a surprise!" his youngest yells and disconnects.

It's half past twelve, and he has been up since seven today. In total, he has travelled 15 kilometres in his cab. And he has made €11.50 (gross), in a cab that requires €32 to run in expenses (petrol not included) on a daily basis. Should I stay or should I go? plays round in his mind. On hearing his child's voice, he starts up the engine. By the time he returns home, he will have driven 20 kilometres; his takings will stay the same.

He arrives home to find the children setting the table. He takes off his jacket and slings it over the armrest of the sofa. The plasma TV set on the wall above the mahogany kitchen unit is blaring out foreign babble in musical form on MAD TV.

"We couldn't wait any more, Baba!"

"Good thing I came now, then!" he laughs.

Just then, his wife comes out of the bathroom with a fresh load of washing.

"Just let me hang this up and I'll be with you in a minute!" she calls out to him as she makes her way to the master bedroom.

He follows her. She goes out to the balcony to hang the laundry, he goes to the ensuite to wash his face. Summer has come too early, leaving him with a parched skin. He can't sit in the cab all day, but he can't stay out in the sun, either. It's going to be a difficult summer.

As he heads back into the kitchen, he looks out at the garden he planted: to zucchini has already come up, the tomatoes have flowered, the vlita has practically created a lawn. 

 

He joins everyone at the table, which has been set according to the family's daily dietary traditions: there's a little bowl of olives, a plate of feta cheese swimming in olive oil, a leftover sausage from the previous evening's meal (cut up in small pieces for everyone to have their share), and a slice of bread next to each person's plate, which is empty.

"Is that all we're having?" he said, feigning a moan. Just then, his wife came into the dining room holding a large baking tin. He could smell its aroma from where he was sitting.

"Boureki! Where did you find the zucchini? You didn't cut off all the small ones, did you?" he said reproachingly. 

"They're not from our garden. Yiani's plants are already overproducing and I saw him carrying a huge bucketful as I was taking out the trash."

"What do you mean? Was he going to throw them away?"

"No, he was taking them to the chicken coop, and I simply asked him if I could have a few."

Well, he thought, thanks to her resourcefulness, as least we won't starve.

*** *** ***

As a friend of mine noted recently, "Democracy, like social justice, is not handed away, it has to be earned in the hard way, and that's what we are going through now. We are in our learning curve and we are still at the bottom. However, out of this borrowing that we will never pay back, we have infrastucture as a country, investments in tourism and agriculture, nice houses to live in, and cars to last us for another 10-20 years."

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Crete, not Athens (Κρήτη, όχι Αθήνα)

Today marks the commemoration of the Battle of Crete.

During our one-night stopover in Brussels (which I toured through two decades ago), half the family had a bad cough, a result of the snap change in climate as we travelled from south to north. Instead of becoming acquainted with the food, we tried to get acquainted with the northern European climate. On our arrival at Brussels Midi (from London via Eurostar), it was raining steadily, leaving us feeling quite despondent. Although I'd booked a hotel reasonably close to the station, walking in the rain with luggage and children was out of the question: there were no extra hands for holding an umbrella upright. The streets beyond the station looked like an untidy muddled cluster; the taxis parked right outside the train station looked much more tempting.

As we neared the rank, a slim well-dressed young black man nodded to us as he opened the boot of his cab. I gave him the address of the hotel.

"Fifteen euro," he said. The price didn't sound exorbitant. In Greece, we are led to believe that taxi fares in northern Europe are expensive. But Greece has recently caught up to their prices - since the crisis broke out, laws regulating the Greek cab business have made them quite expensive here too, not to mention the rising fuel costs. (But our tourists are still slow to catch on to this fact.)

Once the cabbie had placed the luggage into the boot, we all got in, and off we went.The taxi meter wasn't turned on, which didn't concern me, as I thought perhaps this was legal in Belgium, which of course it probably isn't; likewise in Greece. EU countries all have their own laws and countries still debate within their own national borders because there is no European public space.

"Where are you from?" he asked us in French. He spoke French most of the time, but when I didn't understand, he did his best to speak in English and make himself understood.

"Greece."

"Athens?"

"No." We all laughed, and so did he. "We're from Crete." We had had exactly the same experience with a Nigerian taxi driver in London only the same morning, and another Nigerian Eurostar official who was thrilled to hear we were from Greece. He narrated the story (in broken Greek) of his arrival in Greece, which is where he had entered Europe from before ending up in London at the suitcase security check-in of St Pancras International.

"Crete?"

"It's an island in the Mediterranean, located north of the Libyan Sea." (I stopped myself from saying "located between Greece and Libya." It's easy to confuse other people about Crete's status that way.) He looked puzzled. We were now driving along wet narrow roads and one-way streets. It all felt very disorienting. This isn't what I imagined as meaning 'close' to the hotel.

"And where are you from?" I asked him.

"Nigeria."

While we were being driven to the hotel, I took the opportunity to find out whatever I could from the driver about the city.

"What's that?" We were driving along what looked like a castle, although I could only see its spire.

The cabbie looked in the direction that I was pointing to. Very politely, he explained that he didn't really know what it was, but it must be some kind of historical monument, and it's very old. Again, we all laughed. We take things for granted when we see them on a daily basis; tourists are often better informed than ourselves.

We had left the avenues and were now driving along very narrow roads full of cars parked in strange positions, resembling the maze of Athens streets, but without the dust, grime and sunshine. The roads were busy with vans being loaded or unloaded... but many shops also looked closed, as if out of business. It wasn't quite clear to us what was happening in Brussels. We would only realise later that we were seeing the most obvious signs of the European economic crisis in Northern Europe.

The drive seemed to take a much longer time than I thought it would. The narrow busy one-way streets, half of whose store fronts were unlit from disuse, continued until we came to a very large square where some kind of activity was taking place, despite the pouring rain.

Place du Jeu de Balle, Brussels' flea market, as seen from the hotel window

"Place du Jeu de Balle," our driver pointed to the right. "Hotel Galia is down here." He was worried that the flea market had closed off the streets, but he drove us round the square, straight to the hotel, which directly faced it. The shop fronts on the square looked in a dismal state - the premises directly next to the hotel were boarded up, while a building on the corner had been demolished. While the raindrops were falling on their heads, people were selling all sorts of what looked like household bric-a-brac at partly covered stalls. Some goods were laid out on tables, while others were in buckets, and others were strewn over a piece of plastic over the ground. They could not be called antiques. We'd call it junk, and it was difficult for us to understand who would be desperate to come out here on a cold wet dull grey day to buy this stuff.

We paid and thanked the very sweet driver, our first introduction to Belgians, and entered the hotel with our luggage, where we were met by a beautiful slim young lady, humming to a tune that was being played on the radio. She looked as if she were expecting us.

"Have you just come from Athens?" she asked us with an excited look on her face.

"No, Crete!" Again we laughed. Thanks to the Greek mass media, the whole world now equates Greece with Athens. This time, the woman showed some recognition of the place name.

 

Our hotel room was actually two rooms, with one double bed and a bunk bed. The wallpaper gave the room an art deco look.

"Was it sunny in Greece when you left?" she asked us. This opened up a discussion about the climate, an obvious choice of subject in Brussels."Here, it rains nine months a year," she said gloomily, handing us a set of keys. We were given a choice of appropriate rooms (finally selecting one on the first instead of the third floor). The rooms had recently been renovated, the bathroom was large and clean and the beds were comfortable. We took a short rest for the sick members of the family to revive their energies.

*** *** ***

From a Brussels tourist brochure found in the hotel: "City tourism isn't just about big monuments and museums: excursions off the beaten track create the true emotions of a visit. Meeting real life and seeing the real city creates those unforgettable memories, because you can't find it anywhere else!" VisitBrussels Week-end Bienvenue/Welkom Weekend

On the hotel map, I found the locations of Manneken Pis and Grand Place, being the two places that we thought would take us to the most touristy sites in the city on such a short visit. On a one-day stopover, you can't do much more than take a walk and have a bite to eat. Along the way, we would also pass various other sites of interest according to the map, which also held one surprise: in the vicinity of the hotel was a Greek Orthodox church. We aren't church goers, but it means a lot to Greeks to bump into familiar cultural sights when away from home. Armed with umbrellas, we set off.

 We stayed in the Marollen neighbourhood - the Greek church is pointed out by the blue arrow. It's the first time I've seen a Greek Orthodox church specifically mentioned on a non-Greek tourist map. While respected as a minority group, Greeks usually keep a low profile in Europe. Greek communities in Belgium have a long history spanning four centuries, but a large number of Greeks settled there during the post-war years, working in minefields.

The Greek Orthodox church in Brussels;
it's built along the lines of local
architecture rather than the Greek way.

To see the church, we had to take a detour off the main road that led to our chosen sightseeing route. We found the church closed; its offices were open every weekday except Friday (which is was that day). The detour was not wasted; by walking down this side street, we got acquainted with the Marolles neighbourhood of Brussels, well known for its street art and comic strip tour, some of which we saw during our walk. The art work contrasted starkly to the rather grim looking buildings in some parts of the area. A number of walls were covered with graffiti.

Our detour led us into the "comic strip" roads, as well as through lesser known area covered in graffiti; note the Greek - ΠΡΑΣΙΝΗ ΘΥΕΛΛΑ (green wave).

Continuing our walk, we came across all sorts of weird and wonderful street scenes: sandy sectioned off areas for dogs to poo in (?!?), highly visible public urinals on main roads (!?!) and recycling centres separating all glass colours (which explains the need for urinals, I suppose). Activities such as these seemed strange to us because, in all fairness, we don't see people drinking alcohol straight on the road in Hania - this activity is reserved for our Northern European tourists. Looking after select breeds of small dogs, however, is on the rise, even in the crisis. We often see young people - both male and female - walking their dogs both in the city and around the villages.

At one point, we came across what looked like a grand old Gothic-style church, across the road from a funky art dealer, all neighbouring a skating park which was covered in the graffiti style often associated with skateboarding. We found the contrasts too confusing. The church had lost its significance amidst its incongruous surroundings; its cavernous emptiness made a glum impression on our minds, dampened by the rainy weather that we were once again about to subject ourselves to. The art dealer's shop was the only lively looking store we had seen so far - there were no customers, but the outdoor decorations made an impact against the general greyness. The whole scene looked culturally incoherent.



The church led to what looked like a promising side-street. It was pedestrianised and lined with cute buildings, cute cafes and cute artists' galleries. We had entered the area famed for its Belgian chocolate. The elegant displays in the chocolateries had matching prices: something like €32 for a box of 25 hand-crafted tiny balls of chocolates. I was disappointed. Clearly I could not buy chocolate at this price, but somebody else probably is: Brussels has a constant flow of grey-suited men coming and going, and they don't make ordinary wages. A few people were sitting outdoors in the dank sky. What could have been a moment of joy at the Place du Sablon in better climatic conditions suddenly took on a morbid miserable appearance in the bad weather.

Presentation: it's everything in places like this - maybe too much.

Back on the main road, the ruins of a wall with a Rapunzel-like tower caught our interest. This was the 'castle' that we had seen from the taxi. No wonder the driver had no idea what it was - there was no sign on it to indicate its significance to the city (it turned out to be a surviving part of the old city walls).

During this time, the sky was changing colours - one minute it was blue, the next it was dark. At this point, our luck started to run out. On our way to Manneken Pis, we got caught in a downpour. No matter how much we kept our umbrellas hugged around us, we could not keep dry. As the only sane person among my company (two were sick and one was under-age - no one was in the best of moods), I led them into the first eaterie I could find. Neither the name of the non-descript cafe nor the range of food it offered was of any importance to me at that moment. I just needed to salvage my family's sanity.

*** *** ***

The casual diner was run by an Asian woman with impeccable English skills and polite manners. Her husband was just as welcoming. The last customers (schoolchildren) were on their way out. We had the place to ourselves. The display case contained an interesting mix of dishes - spaghetti and mince, noodles with vegetables, chicken breast slices, rice-paper spring rolls, and various sandwich fillings. We had last eaten on the train (Sainsbury sandwiches). Anything edible looked tasty at that moment.

The man showed us to a table and laid some placemats in front of us. "Where are you from?" he asked us in very broken English.

"Greece."

"Ah, Grecia! Io, Italia! Una fatsa, una ratsa!" We were just as excited to hear this as he was to say it.

"Where from in Italy?" my husband asked him.

"Sicilia."

"Ah, isola!" my husband spoke to him in the broken Italian that he remembered from his study years. The man responded in Italian; we caught the words "Magna Grecia".

"Noi, Kriti," my husband continued.

"Atene?" The Italian did not seem to understand. Like most non-Greeks, he seemed to know only of Athens.

"We are from Crete, not Athens."

"Why Brussels?" he asked us, speaking more with his hands than in words.

"Holidays," I said.

"Vacanze," my husband translated.

"Vacanze?" the man exclaimed. "In Brussels?" He made the sign of the Roman Catholic cross as we all laughed. "Vacanze in Brussels?!" He was now shaking his head in disbelief. His wife was busy in the background heating up our order, with a smile on her face, acknowledging her husband's joke.

Sometimes the food is not important - my conversations with the owners of this cafe were priceless.

We found an opportunity to ask the couple about the closed shops. The woman explained that Brussels was in the midst of an economic crisis, where 40% of the commercial area had closed due to the bad economy and the number of people living on welfare had risen quite sharply. It came as quite a shock for us to hear this. We'd been brainwashed into believing that southern Europe was facing a crisis, not the prosperous north. In places like Brussels, it's easier to see the crisis seeping through the threads, unlike in London where we had stayed close to one of the most deprived areas of England - despite its social problems, it had what seemed like a bustling local economy.

A young girl entered the cafe. She went to the back of the diner that was not so visible from the shop front. She took out a small laptop from her bag, together with earphones, and began tapping away as her order was taken. The woman returned behind the counter, taking a teabag out of a box. Then she heated up some water in the microwave and took the tea to the girl's table. At that point, the man left and got into his car which was parked outside the shop. The woman followed him, placing two chairs from the shop on the road to keep other cars from parking there. At this point, I had the feeling of deja vu. Although this is a common procedure in the south, hogging parking spaces in this way wasn't what I expected to see in the north.

The rain continued to fall steadily until the end of our meal, when it stopped pouring - now, it was only drizzling. As we paid for the meal, I asked the woman where she was from.

"I am from Bali in Indonesia," she spoke softly. "Do you know Bali?"

"Yes, of course, it's an island, just like Kriti," I told her. "Most people in Europe know about Bali, it's a popular place for holidays." She looked so happy to hear this; her eyes brightened as she smiled. But what was she doing in Brussels, so far away from home?

"I came here because of my husband, we live and work here now."

"So you're here to stay?" I asked.  She hesitated before answering.

"I suppose I'd like to go back one day to see my family, but it's not easy. Life brought us here to Brussels," she said, with a tone in her voice that I recognised. We thanked her for her hospitality and continued on our way.

*** *** ***

Belgian icons: waffles, chocolate and Manneken Pis

Our destination - Manneken Pis - would take us through more empty roads, although the stores looked slightly busier in this area than they did in the Moralles neighbourhood. The first sign of tourist-centred activity was pictures of Jacques Brel on the window. I'm a big fan of Jacques Brel, having been introduced to his music in my school French lessons, and the first CD I ever bought was in Brussels: a Jacques Brel collection. But that was twenty years ago - and he's been dead for more than a decade already. It's a lack of modern icons and heroes that causes this attachment to the past - Greece suffers a lot from this imagery attachment herself.
 

Oh, look, waffles for €1!

The streets from this point on were getting busier, with shops clustered closer together and more people milling about. A few people were obviously tourists like ourselves, judging from the maps they were holding in their hands. We came across a few eerie sights: a couple of shop windows were broken, and boarded with cardboard stuck over the hole in the glass. Whether this was caused by vandalism or burglary is not significant - these were the first signs of direct parallels with the demonstrations that have been taking place in Athens in the last three years. Less than a week before we arrived, Brussels was the scene of more crisis-related street rage by state sector workers (among previous cases of social unrest).

Before entering the side street leading to Manneken Pis, the hullaballoo was already evident. The main road was vacant in comparison to what was going on in the narrow road. The souvenir shops made a garish impact, in the same way as in the centre of Hania, once a tourist starts walking along Halidon St. The area clearly becomes a tourist magnet, an enclave disassociated with the remaining area that the locals probably avoid unless they want to buy cheap seashell chocolates, waffles and ceramics in the shape of traditional Belgian architecture.

Although the signs all clearly said €1 (at two different shops), this is totally misleading (it should have stated: 'v.a. €1' which means 'starting from €1'.  I ordered two waffles for the children (below) - I was charged €6. It was raining and we were lucky to find cover under the balcony of a disused building sandwiched between two souvenir shops so that we could eat the waffles without getting wet. Maybe each topping was another euro or so - who cares at this point, right? All I'm sure of is that I was purposely misled.

 

As for Manneken Pis, no one had bothered to dress him on that day. He looked so much happier twenty years ago when I last saw him, wearing a medieval suit in the middle of summer under a blue sky, when the European Union was celebrating her comeuppance rather than her demise. But that is not the general image of Brussels in the media. Brussels, together with Berlin, is where all the decisions regarding Greece's future are made. Brussels is where the Eurozone finance ministers meet to decide Greece's fate. The Belgian central bank governor recently broke the taboo of Greece leaving the euro by describing the situation as an 'amicable divorce', while Brussels policy documents are littered with the word 'growth'. On the other hand, Athens is Greece, and Greece is Athens. Maybe it's time they all looked into the mirror themselves. 

After tasting our first (rather overpriced) waffle (nice and sweet), and making a decision not to buy the 6-boxes-for-€10 chocolates that were selling at the souvenir shops (on the pretext that we are probably better off saving our money to buy better quality ION chocolate when we get back home), we wandered into La Grande Place for a quick look at the main square in Brussels. We could not stay long enough to admire the interesting architecture, because our stroll was spoiled by more heavy rain.

At moments like these, I like to remember Cavafy's words:

"And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean." (Ιθάκη - Ithaka)

 *** *** ***

After La Grand Place, we walked back to the hotel, taking a slightly different route, constantly ducking under the awnings of the large buildings to protect ourselves from the rain, taking care not to disturb the homeless who were sheltering in these protected parts of the streets. The evening was spent at the hotel, so that my flu-ridden family members could recuperate. The brasserie's tempting aromas wafted up to our room, with free entertainment provided by the sounds of a jazz concert taking place there that night. A meal out in food-loving Brussels (as I was told by a colleague) was not to be for us that night. Instead, we downed the last of our Kettles crisps, bought from Sainsbury's.

 

Hotel breakfast room by day, brasserie by night: the Chez Nous restaurant attached to Hotel Galia was decorated with items bought at the flea market. 

Maybe I was more open-minded when I first came to Brussels. My mind has been shaded by my experiences of living in Europe for two decades, and is now clouded by the problems Greece is facing. Even in my own country, I cannot see the problems so clearly, because I live in Crete, not Athens. But from what I saw in Brussels, it was obvious that the feared contagion had already begun.

Breakfast contained a rich variety of cold meats and cheese, good coffee and delicious bread.

I had ordered a taxi in the morning to take us to Midi for the next leg of our journey. After a very filling delicious breakfast (included in the price of our booking), we noticed a very gruff stocky white man standing outside the hotel, who did not even bother to announce his arrival to his paying customers, or even to the hotel staff that had made the booking. When we emerged with our luggage and children, he opened the boot. No Bonjour (or Goedemorgen), no assistance in placing our luggage into the car, not even an acknowledgement of our existence as his precious customers. But the drive to Midi station took half the time that it had taken the previous morning and the meter was turned ON. When we arrived at the station, he parked the car and opened the door of the driver's seat without even looking at us.

Breakfast at Hotel Galia

"How much?" I asked on purpose, just to see if I could get a spoken response from his tight-lipped mouth. He pointed to the meter without speaking: €7.20, half of what we were charged by the very sweet polite Nigerian the previous morning. It seems that being helpful and cheery comes at a price!

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Organic puttanesca (Βιολογική πουτανέσκα)

It's Holy Tuesday (Μεγάλη Τρίτη) today, the only day when the Hymn of Kassiani is heard in the Greek Orthodox church.

"Are you free?" A very pretty young woman got into the car at Nea Hora. She was slim, with long legs, and a round unblemished face. She had long blonde hair curled up in a bun. But I couldn't see her eyes. She was wearing sunglasses, even though the day was not sunny.

"For you, honey, I'm always free." I'd been waiting in the rank for one hour before I managed to crawl my way to the beginning of the queue. For my good luck at landing such a beautiful fare, I hoped she would be worth my pocket. As I started the car, I noticed the other taxi drivers waving me off with big cheesy grins on their faces.

ΓΑΙΑ - GAEA

"I'm going to Gaea," she said. Oh, great, I thought. I had just landed myself a quickie. I would be losing my place in the queue only to rejoin it half an hour later.

"So you're into organic food, are you?" I said, just to make small talk. "Is that how you keep yourself looking so gorgeous?" I didn't expect she'd answer back. Not that I was really interested. I was just pondering over how busy the Dikastiria taxi rank might be.

"I just want to stop off and do some shopping there, and then go somewhere else," she continued, ignoring my flattering remarks. Oh, wonderful, I'm now going to be tied in one place, losing money on waiting time. I had now entered the thick stream of traffic on Kissamou St. The dowdy look of the street with its old apartment blocks, its cheap-looking shops, the rubbish on the road and and the stinky atmosphere of car exhaust fumes suited my mood. I was going to be in for a long wait.

I used to shop at GAEA; these days, I prefer local over organic.

Parking outside Gaia was non-existent. I parked right outside the shop, narrowly missing a crate that had been placed in front of the store to allow the goods lorries to drop off produce. From my position, I was able to see straight inside the shop. It wasn't very busy.

I've never bought anything from an organic store myself. I don't even know what it means for something to be organic. Does it mean that there are no chemicals in the food? I don't believe it. Nothing grows without chemicals these days. If it does, it doesn't look big and shiny and clean, like the stuff I could see in the crates outside the store. Tomatoes in winter? My foot. Bloody ha-ha, if you ask me. If I eat anything organic, it's because I grew it in my garden, or picked it from my fields. It's organic de facto. 

The woman was taking quite a while. Twenty minutes had passed already, while new customers were going in and out of the shop, but there was no sight of her. She must be one picky lady!

Finally, she came out of the store, holding four bags of goods. Even her handbag was fatter than when she went into the store. I got out of the cab to open the hood for her. I could have told her to open it herself, but I really wanted to see what she had bought. Apart from a couple of small bags of fresh produce, I noticed a lot of pre-packaged good. Not all of the products were identifiable to me.

"Πολύ πράμα," I joked with her. "You must have paid a lot of money for all of this." I was hoping that she would reveal exactly how much she paid; she didn't. I helped her load the bags into the car. She held onto her handbag.

"Oh, it's all worth it," she said, as we got back into the taxi. "Gaia sells good clean food. I would never swap it for cheap supermarket produce. If you have children, you should buy all their food from here."

"Yes, indeed," I pretended to agree with her. "I've got two, and my wife's very careful about what she cooks with." I turned on the engine and looked at her, with a big smile on my face. "What goes into our bodies is really important. So where are we going to now, my lovely?"

"Minoos." Minoos? Opa!

Minoos St, Hania

"Exactly which part, love?" I asked a little cagily, not wanting to sound too obtrusive.

"Minoos," she repeated. "You can leave me at the cafe," she said, "it's a little too narrow for a car your size," she explained.

"OK, ma'am, whatever you say," I grinned. It's been a while since anyone said that to me.

By the time we arrived at the cafe, the sun was shining. Spring weather is changeable. One minute you need an umbrella, the next minute you need sunglasses. My pretty fare was well prepared. She never took her shades off the whole time I was with her. I got out of the car to open the boot, while she fumbled in her bag to find her purse among all the new items she had placed in it when she did her shopping.

Red light at night, sailor's delight

"Kalimera, kiries," I said, half-looking in the direction of the cafe, where the other prostitutes were airing their fannies, taking advantage of the good weather. They all said 'Yia', lifting their hands to greet their colleague, half-smiling as they looked in my direction.

The packet of biscuits my husband was given

The fare cost €7.50. The woman gave me €10. "Keep the change," she said. I thanked her. As she put her purse back into her bag, she gave me one of the items that could not fit into her bag, after she had tampered with it when she was searching for her purse. "Here, take it," she said, "a little present from me."

"Oh, thank you, you really shouldn't..." I started. "You bought it with your hard-earned money."

"No," she answered firmly. "You keep it. Give them to your children. They'll love it."

I thanked her and waved to everyone at the cafe. They shook their heads backward in reciprocation. When I got home, I gave my wife the packet (it turned out to be imported biscuits), and told her who gave it to me.

"Did you notice the price?" she said, showing me the sticker she found on the packet. "€3.49 for a packet of biscuits?! They must be raking in the money! Even during a crisis!"

Theme music to Safe Sex (1999)

*** *** *** 

"Smitten by Kassia's beauty, the young emperor approached her and said: "Through a woman [came forth] the baser [things]", referring to the sin and suffering coming as a result of Eve's transgression. Kassia promptly responded by saying: "And through a woman [came forth] the better [things]", referring to the hope of salvation resulting from the Incarnation of Christ through the Virgin Mary."

I make the most incredible puttanesca sauce - nothing to do with my technique at all - made with organic pantry staples: green olives, capers, peppers, onion and garlic, in tomato sauce - all foraged/grown/preserved by ourselves in summer/early autumn. The capers also include the leaves - the white spots are a natural result of the pickling process. And of course, it's lenten.

Kassia wrote many hymns, the most famous of which is the eponymous Hymn of Kassiani, commonly sung late in the evening service of Holy Tuesday. The Hymn of Kassiani is popular with sex workers in Greece, who may not often be seen in church at other times of the year. They come in great numbers, in order to hear the Hymn of Kassiani, as it is traditionally associated with the woman fallen in many sins.

  

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

The 2011 Greek cabbies' strike (Απεργία ταξί)

UPDATE: The strike ended on Friday, 5th August, 3pm. 

 My husband is in the third week of strike action taken by his professional group, the Greek cabbies. During this period, he was on airport duty almost daily, directing tourists to the buses that would take them into the town, ensuring that the strike was not broken (cabbies were only allowed to accept work without money), and making sure that freelancing moonlighters were not hijacking the trade (a good number were caught making a quick buck). This strike action is unprecedented in that it is the longest lasting strike in the history of the Greek taxi drivers' profession. During this time, some tourists questioned him about the strike and what he thought of the chaos it caused. 

Isn't a bad time for you to be striking?
Yes, it is. As a cabbie working in a Greek summer resort town, I make money in the summer, so these three weeks, which have come at the busiest time in the year for me, have cost me a similar amount of money as I would have made in January and February put together. But this strike couldn't have been delayed. since the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport (MIT) decided to announce the changes now, in the middle of the season, so we've had to go on strike at this time.

What exactly are you striking for?
The present MIT (Yianis Ragousis) overturned a decision by the former MIT (Dimitris Repas), and the changes he has decided to bring about in the profession of the Greek cabbie would in effect spell the death knell for most cabbies. Repas deregulated the Greek taxi industry a year ago, but he placed a ceiling on the number of cabs each area will have. His idea was that the Greek taxi industry will follow other European states' laws on the number of taxi licences issued in an area, which is usually about 1 cab per 1000 inhabitants. After the cabinet was reshuffled, Ragousis took his place and overturned Repas' decision by allowing free reign on the number of licences issued in an area, with no cap, completely disregarding his predecessor and other European states' laws already in force. If the industry is saturated, then there won't be enough work for all of us working in it, let alone the loss in the value of the licence, which most people working in the industry have paid for dearly.

Why are cabbies against deregulation? Isn't it the way things are going in a country like Greece which has serious economic problems?
Just to put things straight, the cabbies aren't against deregulation. They simply want it to take place with laws that will protect both old-timers and newcomers to the profession. Such laws already exist in other European countries. All we want is to be like them, and none of them have completely deregulated taxi industries. When deregulation comes, it's still going to hit the existing cabbies. There'll be mini-buses, private care hire, mini-vans, taxi fleets, all-inclusive airport transfers, hotel chauffeurs, and a whole host of new services that haven't been exploited yet in Greece, like they are in other countries. But these services exist alongside private cabbies like myself, along with well-established rules to protect both customers and businesses.

Mr Organically Cooked in his cab

But isn't this strike hurting the tourist industry at a critical time?
Yes it is. But when you have been given an ultimatum, what should you do? Should you just grin and bear it? By striking, you are showing your indignation. A well-organised strike has a better chance of making an impact. So far, no one in Greece has chosen to accept the fate handed out to them by the government. Everyone goes on strike. Strikes are a way of life in Greece. At any rate, tourists use taxis mainly for port transfers. They don't use taxis the way Greek people do, or should I say used to, when the Greek taxi was considered very cheap. They know taxis are expensive means of transport from their own experience in their own country.


What do you think of your colleagues' action blocking access to some ferry ports and airport terminals around the country?
Such actions are deemed harmful for the tourist industry, but again, I don't believe it. It simply gives Greece a bad name, which the country has already earned from our politicians' actions! Again, it's politicians' actions that have caused this strike! The actions of the taxi drivers at the ports were wrong for moral reasons, but people should be asking themselves where the police were to stop them from behaving like that. In any other country, this wouldn't have taken place; why was it allowed to take place in Greece?! The police only got involved when they realised we were serious; surely, they should enforce law and order at the first instance, and not take a wait-and-see stance.

But many of those tourists may not visit Greece again, after what they went through during the blockades!
Well, I don't doubt that they will be angry, but somehow I doubt that they didn't know what they'd be in for if they came to Greece. I don't use the internet much, but my wife who uses the internet all the time says that there is no one in the western world, where nearly all our tourists come from, who doesn't know about the problems that Greece is going through. The Greek crisis has practically become a serial with thousands of episodes, most of which contain untruthful claims made by people who don't speak our language, don't understand our culture and don't even live here! Everyone seems to have something to say about Greece these days, because she's on the news all the time, all over the world. People come to Greece for a holiday because they want to, not because they are afraid their holiday will be ruined. At any rate, they probably see Greece as a safe holiday destination, which is why we've had record numbers of visitors to Greece this year. We're being told that this is due to the Arab unrest, but I'm not convinced that people are coming here just because they can't go elsewhere. When I go on holiday, I make a conscious choice about the destination, and I know what I want to do when I get there. Each place is unique. I don't think western tourists make less intelligent decisions than I do.

Children of striking taxi drivers in Thessaloniki, holding up a banner that says: 

"Our family lives off our taxi."

But the blockades stopped tourists from doing what they wanted to do while they were in Greece, so it was like they wasted their money coming here!
The blockades were enacted to make a statement to the government. Our unions constantly asked the MIT to see us and discuss the situation so that we could resolve it, but he keeps telling us that he isn't backing down on his new interpretation of the law, and he could only talk with us after summer. Somehow, the cabbies had to make a statement, and like all Greek strikes, it involved some chaos, which is a Greek word. Chaos is as old as ancient Greece! And we have to accept that sometimes things go wrong on holiday. Just look at what snow does to the Eurostar trains, or what happens when volcanic ash disrupts flights for two weeks. Travellers who were caught up in the disruptions still managed to sue the airlines and train companies just because their holiday was stuffed up by an unpredictable act of nature! At least in Greece, strikes are announced, so if you still decide to go ahead with your trip, even though you've been informed about the strike action through website information, you are partly to blame for being a victim of your own fate.

While you're on strike, how are you coping financially?
That's a very tricky question. Like all freelancers, most cabbies will have savings. Cabbies are usually family-oriented men, so if their wives work, they'll be in a luckier position. The ones who I really feel for are those that entered the taxi trade only recently, because they are most likely to owe money on their cab. They've got serious bills to pay. I'm glad I live in the country because at least my food is free. Athenians don't have that luxury. Being out of pocket is part and parcel of striking.But if we don't strike, we risk losing our trade completely. Since the announcement of the deregulation, an application for a fleet of 1700 taxis has been lodged with the Attika (Athens) peripheral administration unit. Who can afford to buy 1700 licenses on the cheap? Only people like Vgenopoulos, the owner of Olympic Airlines, who will then add an airport transfer to each flight, using his fleet with us as low-paid chauffeurs. It's a clear case of the big fish eating the little fish, impoverishment through globalisation.

  Although I don't completely get it, I guess Sunday's (6-Aug-2011) Kathimerini magazine supplement cartoon is trying to show the strength the cabbies showed during the strike (akin to brute force).

How likely is it that your actions will have an effect on changing the government's stance on the deregulation of the Greek taxi industry?
We're hopeful that they are taking heed of our actions, because our strike so far is the longest on record in our sector, so we are showing endurance at a critical time when it's hurting our pockets, and we would really truly rather be out there working than losing money. The fact that Ragousis refuses to see us and the dissent concerning his actions within government circles makes us feel very hopeful that this issue will be resolved the way we believe it should be. Strikes always involve an element of risk. You may get nothing out of them, which is what happens most of the time these days. But if you have a real cause, and you show how strongly you believe in it, then you have to stick it out. That's what we're doing.

*** *** ***

As I write this, we are awaiting the result of tomorrow's talks, not with Ragousis, but with the heads of the peripheral administration units of Greece (a clear sign of the government losing face, by not sending its own representative), who have pledged not to issue any new cab licenses until the new laws are drawn up and the taxi unions are given a chance to debate them. There is a 99% chance that the strike will be resolved. This is a clear defeat for the government, who tried to enact the new taxi laws by presidential decree, which means that the law does not need to be debated (whereas drawing up a bill means debate before the law is passed, after which it cannot be changed). Since the Greek economic crisis broke out, the cabbies' strike is the only one among the low-middle class professional establishment in Greece to claim a partial victory during the extreme austerity conditions exercised by the government, possibly due to the unfairness that it uncovered, coupled with the fact that it combined endurance with a nationwide compulsory strike (unlike the public sector, where striking takes place 1-2 days and is optional for the union members).  

UPDATE: The strike ended on Friday, 5th August, 3pm.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Taxi! (Ταξί!)

 If you are coming to Greece (the country hasn't been obliterated off the map yet, you know) on a summer holiday this year, your biggest worry is probably not whether you will need an umbrella (sunshine guaranteed) or if the food will be good (you already know that if you are reading this blog). One of your biggest worries is probably going to be how to avoid being ripped off in this smash and grab country which was recently bailed out of poverty by the IMF.

Apparently one of the biggest rip-off artists this country has ever produced is taxi drivers: according to the popular press, Greek taxi drivers don't take you where you want to go, they don't use the taxi meter, they ask you where you want to go before you get in the cab (and leave you in the lurch if they don't like your destination), they tell you an inflated price, they take you round and round in circles to charge more money, and they perform a whole host of other pranks to find a way to make themselves rich while you pay them half your holiday budget just to get from the airport to your hotel. At the same time, it should be remembered that this kind of thing happens everywhere, not just in Greece

But when a Greek taxi driver DOES take you where you want to go, USES the taxi meter, DOESN'T ask you where you want to go before you get into the cab, DOESN'T leave you in the lurch even when your destination was out of their way (which they DIDN'T tell you in the first place anyway), DIDN'T inflate the price, DIDN'T take you round and round in circles (as if he didn't have anything better to do himself), but simply did his job, we never hear about it in the reviews, do we?  

Of the 25,000 taxis in Greece, half of them are yellow, ie they are Athenian cabs and work in the greater Athens area, what is known as Attiki (Attica), which consists of approximately 4000 square kilometers; that's just 3% of the land surface of the country (which is approximately 132,000 square km). Attiki is where close to half the population (approximately 5 million) of the whole country (approximately 11 million) make their home.It's hard to keep track of 12,500 taxis in a capital city with a density of over 1000 people per square km, as it would be in any country in the world. But these days, every legal taxi carries a microchip stuck to the windscreen, which a traffic officer can zap with an infra-red light to check its status.

Taxis were, until this year, a privileged profession. Anyone holding a B-category professional driver's licence can become a taxi driver, but buying a taxi licence is very expensive. It depends on the region; a taxi licence in Hania costs about 200,000 euro - that's a serious amount of money to invest in an occupation which you may end up not enjoying in the long run, and that doesn't even include the money for the actual car. In Athens, it is a guaranteed source of income, and you can make your money in a few years time, provided you work hard and you are young enough to do that, because eventually your nerves will wear out and you won't be able to hack the pace. You will have been accosted with knives and guns enough times to wonder how you managed to stay alive, and you will have seen so many hoons on the road and so many crashes, that you will realise that there is no such thing as a traffic accident, but they are all perpetrated by stupidity (which is why the road toll in Greece is very high).

My husband gets asked by other cabbies where he gets his delicious sandwiches from, because they always smell good, and they are placed in one of those commercial paper bags specially made for hot dogs and rolls (available from paperware stockists).

One of the most infamous cases of an illegally operating Greek taxi occurred a few years ago. The driver was literally caught in the act - completely by chance of course: how on earth can traffic officers stop and check every single taxi on the road in a built-up city without causing more chaos than already exists? The probability of this incident happening was a chance in one (or two) million: While putting in a normal day's work driving up and down the busy streets of Athens, a legal taxi owner-operator got stuck in a traffic jam (which is all part of a day's work in Athens). While he was waiting for the queue of traffic to decongest and continue on his way, he had plenty of time to survey his surroundings and take in little details like the licence plate number of the taxi cab stationed in front of his. It was exactly the same as his own. After the initial shock, he collected himself enough to call the police on his cellphone, who managed to catch the unlicensed driver and confiscate his car. At the same time, by catching that one guy, a racket was discovered involving false licence plating, garages which ordered a lot of yellow car paint (to change the colour of a vehicle and make it look like an Athenian cab), and other illegal activity. On being questioned, the fake cabbie insisted that he had bought himself a Mercedes and simply wanted to find a way to pay it off more quickly...

At the moment, you buy a taxi licence off the previous owner, not a state company. But very soon, in line with EU regulations, the taxi business will be freed up and become a more public profession, rather than the closed racket that it is at the moment. Unlike the London cab business, where there are black cabs (expensive) and mini-cabs (private cars used as taxis, that are much cheaper to hire than a black cab, and you don't need to be a registered 'knowledge' holder), Greece has only one sort of taxi, the one with a meter, and no other kind of cab service is presently legal.

Whereas once it used to be cheap to take a cab in Greece, this is no longer the case. If you are coming here on holiday, keep in mind that taxi fares have gone up considerably. Do not base your idea of how much a fare should cost by what it cost the last time you were here; and don't ask the taxi driver how much it will cost to go to a particular place - he should be able to give you an approximate indication of how much it will cost, but ultimately, it all boils down to what the meter writes up, and the meter should ALWAYS be turned on. If your taxi driver doesn't turn it on when you enter the taxi, tell him/her to do so. If s/he still doesn't want to turn it on, then ask to be taken back to your original pick up point so that you may take another cab. The rest is up to you. And when you get to your destination, don't forget to ask for the receipt, after paying the driver - yes, taxis are now legally required, for tax purposes, to issue paper receipts, whether the customer asks for one or not.

It used to be cheap for everyone (including us low-income-earning Greeks) to take a taxi and drive for miles. That's not the case any more. Rising petrol prices, the green-living policies and the austerity measures which introduced new taxation systems (all taxis must have a machine installed in the cab in full view of the customer that issues paper receipts) have raised the price of taxi fares to a level unknown before in Greece. Taxi fares now resemble the luxury that such a mode of transportation should be.

*** *** ***

Economic crisis (or volcanic eruption) or not, those of you who want to come to Chania (or Hania - it's the same place) may be wanting some information about the taxi services here. For a start, you don't flag taxis down in Hania. There are taxi ranks at all the main pick-up points, like the airport, the harbour, the main square in the town, and other service areas dotted around the city. There are grey taxis (which means that they are registered in a village), and blue taxis (which means they are registered in the urban area of the province of Hania). Hania is a small town, and taxi drivers know each other or of each other - a stranger in the crowd stands out easily, so it is easier to curb and put a halt to illegal cab activities altogether.

In the meantime, here are the official indicative prices for journeys made by the Ermis taxi company in Hania.

Luggage, scheduled pick-ups, telephone appointments at an arranged time and minimum fare fees also apply; they are not included in the list of prices in the table. The Ermis Taxi company (which has over 200 cars in its fleet, while the Kydon company has about 25 - go figure) has a special van available for hire if you have disability or mobility problems, at no extra cost (the driver receives a salary and performs a community service rather than working for himself). Taxi drivers' yarns about their work experiences are free of charge; just ask for a good story...

RADIO TAXI CO-OPERATIVE ‘ERMIS’

INDICATIVE FARES for 2010*

	CHANIA TOWN	AIRPORT	AGIOUS APOSTOLOUS	STALOS	AGIA MARINA	PLATANIAS
AIRPORT	€23	--	€32	€35	€36	€41
GOLDEN SAND BEACH	€7	€30	€7	€8	€9	€10
AGIOUS APOSTOLOUS	€8	€32	--	€8	€9	€10
KALAMAKI BEACH	€8	€33	€7	€7	€9	€10
STALOS	€11	€35	€7	--	€7	€8
AGIA MARINA	€13	€36	€10	€7	--	€7
PLATANIAS	€15	€41	€12	€7	€7	--
GERANI	€17	€45	€13	€10	€10	€8
MALEME	€20	€47	€15	€12	€12	€10
KOLYMBARI	€30	€48	€25	€22	€21	€20
KASTELI	€42	€65	€38	€35	€34	€32
OMALOS	€55	€78	€55	€55	€60	€60
THERISSO	€23	€45	€25	€30	€30	€32
ELAFONISI	€85	€95	€80	€75	€74	€73
PALEOHORA	€85	€108	€75	€75	€70	€70
SOUGIA	€75	€95	€70	€70	€70	€70
SFAKIA	€80	€97	€82	€85	€87	€90
RETHIMNO	€70	€87	€76	€78	€80	€85
PLAKIAS	€100	€115	€105	€107	€109	€110
HERAKLEION	€150	€160	€155	€160	€160	€165
LIMNOUPOLI	€12	€35	€12	€13	€15	€17

• HANIA (town) to SOUDA BAY (ferry port): 10 euro
• Hourly charge for day-trip hire: 35 euro/hour
• Airport surcharge fee (due to arrival wait-time): 5 euro

RADIO TAXI COOPERATIVE – PREFECTURE OF CHANIA

ERMIS

Mournion 38 – Tel: 28210-98700

IR No.: 998454319 – Chania Tax Office B

You can also book our taxi: call 6977-399-306 (when you have arrived in Crete).

Happy holidays to all. You can also find this information on One Day in Hania.

UPDATE 25 May 2010: Signs with inidicative prices (slightly different from the table I have posted above: some destinations have lower prices, while others have higher prices) of taxi fares covering the 2010 summer season have now been posted around the town. The one I have included below is found close to the Agora (the central market in Hania), therefore it lists prices to/from Hania. In the same manner, a sign posted at the airport will list prices to/from the airport.

*UPDATE 22 June 2010: As of 1st July, 2010, taxi fares will increase by 11%, because of the changes in the way taxi drivers will be taxed from this day onwards. In order to get an idea of the new indicative prices for the destinations listed in the tables above (in both the text and the photo), you need to add 11% to the price shown.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.