It has been a busy few days here. Sunday, June 23rd, was Pentecost so Monday was a bank holiday. We have had a lot of tourists from Serbia, North Macedonia and Bulgaria. As most of them are Orthodox like the Greeks, they also took advantage of the long weekend.
I haven’t found much of personal interest to write about. The Euro elections have come and gone with no real surprises. The new president of the Republic of North Macedonia caused a fuss; in her swearing-in ceremony she managed to omit the words “Republic of North…”, which threw the Greeks into a spin. It was predictable. Only an uneducated prick like Alexis Tsipras would have failed to recognise that “North” as well as “Macedonia” were recipes for future trouble. How long will it be before militants start demanding “their” south? There is also some tension with Albania over the continuing imprisonment of Fredi Beleri, an ethnic Greek Albanian politician convicted of buying votes. In a move than can only increase tensions, he was on the ballot papers as a New Democracy MEP candidate and he was elected!
In February I posted a photo of our Japanese acacia. Here it is in April and May.
The leaves were struggling to emerge in April.
In May the leaves were out and the tree looks beautiful against the stormy sky. That’s Odin in the centre.
Finally, in its summer glory with Odin still getting himself in the picture.
Next week we head for our summer place in Halkidiki where my focus will be on two things: the Euros and the UK elections.
Many Greeks expect the long weekends with great expectations and plans. But I think that most of them expect the long weekends not to celebrate whatever is to be celebrated but to live the delusion of a 3 days holiday. And then, disappointed once more that it was not enough or, mainly, not good enough, they go back to their usually hateful routine.
In my case (I am a Greek too – at least in my identity card), first of all I do not wish to celebrate anything that is to be celebrated in long Greek weekends because I do not believe at all at the ideas usually celebrated.
Secondly, I do not like at all the “mass-mentality”. Crowds rushing out of town in a maniac way to reproduce at the beaches or the country the same agonies they experience into town.
Huge traffic, superb neurotic behaviour at restaurants and bars from both people who serve and clientele, mass hysteria and other phenomena characterising our schizoid times in and out of towns etc.
So, I stay at home (or in some friend’s where I feel nice and safe). I enjoy calmness most of all and a kind of sadistic satisfaction that everybody is “out” suffering and me stays “inside” enjoying.
Of course it is a fact that many truly enjoy these days rushing out of town.
Let them enjoy. It is their reality. But I want to be free to enjoy too my own reality, in which I expect for such weekends to end, so that all get back into cages, the life field settles down again, and then, me, IF I manage, I can go out and enjoy the country and the beach in more human terms.
Maybe it is not so so “greek” my attitude and maybe it is me who is paranoid. Never mind. Nothing is objective, anyway.
It’s ok for me to be considered paranoid, if only I am left alone and able to enjoy some calmness in long long beautiful days and not in long weekends…..