I expanded my Greece experiences today by going to the dentist.

I had a filling fall out on Saturday. I wasn't in any pain, but I didn't think I should wait a month to get it fixed. Mark and Martha recommended their dentist. I called her Monday and she took me first thing this morning. Now I can't say this is the way every dentist in Greece operates, but this is the way she did.

Her practice is just her. Not only are there no other dentists, she has no hygenist, assistant, receptionist or bookkeeper. When the phone rings she takes it, even if she's working on you. After she finishes, she collects the money and writes out the receipt. She prepped all her instruments - no one there to hand them to her. In spite of it all, she did a good job (at least it appears to me she did) and was very pleasant. There was no filling out a lot of paperwork, lengthy history, X-rays, etc. Extremely informal. I'm embarrassed to admit, but I underestimated the price and I didn't have enough cash. No problem, she said, I could come back later. Greek friendliness.

The next three pictures are from my documentary class. I had a guest lecturer tonight: Vincent Giordano, a Fulbrighter from New York who is in Greece working on a project involving the jews of Ionnina. He showed a rough cut of the documentary that's part of the project and discussed it with the students. Of course it was nice to get out of teaching for the evening, but it was even better having someone currently working on a project discussing things with the students. It was a good use of the evening, and I think Vincent enjoyed it, too. He's not teaching over here so his interaction with students is rather limited. I think he really enjoyed himself.

Just a little reminder for me that I really should appreciate the job I have and remember what a blessing it is to teach university students.

Last night I was invited to sit in on a guest lecture given by a Greek-American Professor from the University of Illinois-Chicago. On the
left is the professor of the class, Dr. Roy
Panagiotopoulou and on the right is the visiting professor, Zizi Papacharissi. Her talk was about her current research on social networks. Of course there were students as I expected, but I was surprised to find there were about 8-9 faculty on hand as well. Zizi speaks Greek, but she did the entire talk in English just in deference to me. I felt guilty but I never would have understood otherwise. At the end of her talk, the students' questions were a mix of English and Greek.


OK, so I have some more protest pictures, but

there's an instructional purpose to these. This labor protest was setting up on a major downtown thoroughfare for over an hour. They weren't marching - they were just waiting around. In the brief video below you can see people just milling around as they wait for the marching to begin. You can also hear someone on a megaphone trying to get the chanting going, but frankly I didn't think he was having much effect.

Note the riot police. They are always present whenever there is a public demonstration of any sort. Given the problems Athens has experienced, especially last December, it's understandable why. I would hate to be a riot police officer anytime, but especially in warm weather with the sun shining. They wear heavy protective clothing and helmets with

The next picture is a T-shirt a waitress was wearing. I asked to take a picture. She said a lot of people have commented on it. It may be over-simplification, but a lot of social issues might be explainable by this. They refer to the younger
generation as the 700 Euro a month generation. That's because no matter what their education or training, about the only thing they can find to do is minimum wage work that pays 700 Euros per month (at current exchange rate that would be about $930 a month). My students complain that there isn;t a lot of hope for any change. They point out the fact that most elected officials have been in office for decades, or are the relatives of former elected officials.

As I close with a picture of the sea from the apartment balcony, I'll include a related news story from today. A survey of students starting out for their university education shows that 93 percent of them believe that simply having one degree is not going to be enough for them to be able to succeed. The number of graduate students in Greece has doubled over the last five years.