Hello, its Norman the Wanderer again!  This time the report is about Greece,
not its monuments, but its people.  Visiting Greece for me is like going 
back to my childhood and teenage, so much does Athens and Corinth resemble
the Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh of that time.  Modern KL and Athens could be 
sister cities.  The lack of town planning, leading to traffic jams, flooding,
low water pressure, is endemic in both.  A Greek friend asked me how 
Singapore managed to bootstrap itself out of this chronic disorder.  I had 
to think a bit, then I found an apposite reply.  "Singapore is a city
state with the discipline and lack of humor of a Sparta; but its rulers 
added an ingenious ingredient -- they gave the citizens a new opiate 
-- consumer goods to amuse and distract themselves."  And the Malaysians?
Could they not emulate Sparta too?  Never!  Not in a million years!  They
are all like the Corinthians who were the despair of St Paul.

Our host was Pavlos Peppas, who hails from the naughty city of Corinth,
but works in Athens and Patras.  Pavlos is a non-monotonic logician
like me.  I actually wrote a paper with him in the evenings.  His sister
Tina who saw us work while allegedly on holiday, swore she will never
marry an academic.  To avenge this insult, I told her I will steal a
couple of strands of her hair, then visit a bomoh in Penang, and get
him to make her fall hopelessly in love with a Greek number theorist.
I think she is actually quite nervous, especially after she learned that
my very own late uncle was a highly successful bomoh!

Greece is currently on the fringe of Western Europe in more than a 
geographical sense.  Its ethos is much like that of a second-world 
country, the result of a series of disasters visited on it by recent
history.  If you drive in Athens, the parallels with the chaos you will
suffer are amazingly like that in Kuala Lumpur.  As one approaches a
roundabout from a road marked with only two lanes, the cars try their
damnest to convert it to four lanes.  At a traffic signal, the Greeks have
what they think is the smallest perceptible measure of a time interval --
between the light turning green and someone honking.  Ex-Malaysians as we
are, we began feeling homesick there and then!  Passing through the Agora
(Greek for Market Place, and actually where Plato and Socrates once walked
and taught in 5th century BC), we saw cops come and clear away unlicensed
hawkers.  Those who were too slow to pack away their goods had them pushed
and thrown around by these brave agents of law and order.  Again, we felt
a pang of nostalgia, having seen Malaysian cops do the same in the Pudu
Markets when we were just wee ones going shopping with our moms on
Saturday mornings.  There are the Neo-Plutos (new rich in Greek, you know
the Neo prefix we inherited in English, and Pluto as in Plutocracy,
government by the Rich) who flaunt their wealth as obscenely as those in
Kuala Lumpur or London.  Many were the times when I would momentarily
(American relatives, this does not mean "in a moment", but "for a brief
period" -- just teasing!!) think I was in the Sungei Besi or the Jalan
Chow Kit way back in 1975.  The haphazard architecture, the disorder, 
the incessant coffee-drinking, the illegal double-, nay, triple-parking, 
all conspired to dull my mind into this not unpleasant reverie.  So nice 
to be transported back to a simpler time, almost expecting my elementary
school teacher Miss Yap to pop out of the mini-market.  That is the Athens
of today!

The politicians are as venal as in present day Malaysia, with the same
shifting alliances based on self-interest and short-term gains, making the
same hypocritical noises.  The guy at the top, Simitis, is honest.  But
his cabinet is full of vipers.  How has this come about?  It is a painful
irony for Helenophiles like me who breathe and live the intellectual 
heritage of classical Greece, as any passionate scientist or philosopher
surely must.  Here was the center, indeed progenitor, of the western
intellectual tradition.  Even Rome which conquered it militarily felt so
inferior to Greek culture that it sent its best sons and daughters to be
educated in Athens, and its patrician families spoke not Latin but Greek
at home.  And for centuries, the Bible was in Greek.  If you look deep
into your soul, much of it will be Greek.  So what happened?

Being ruled by foreign overlords for a long time is not helpful.  The
Greeks had in turn as masters the Romans, assorted barbarians, the
Venetians, the Turks.  Their last rulers were the Turks, when Greece was
under the Ottomans for 400 years.  During this period, the Turks tried to
wipe out Greek culture and language (can one separate them? I think not).
I imagine the top echelons (now, that too is a good Greek word) of the
Ottoman bureaucracy believed that it was only a fitting and proper
thing to do, to bestow upon the Greeks the generous benefit of a
superior refined civilization.  That's what we all do, think our
culture is the gift of the gods, so eveyone else deserves it :-).
However, they failed, because the Orthodox Church preserved language
and culture in secret.  You can see why to this day it has an influence
on Greek society quite extraordinary for an allegedly secular western
state.  The Turks were not physically in Greece in large numbers, but
they appointed Greek tax collectors to do their work, and they did
something that I shudder to recall.  Routinely, they took away the
first-born sons of Greeks by lottery, and their parents never saw them
again.  These, together with first-borns from other Ottoman provinces
in the Balkans and Asia Minor, were trained to be the commandos of the
Turkish army.  They were the feared Janiseries, the front-line assault
infantry.  They were raised as Turks.  There is consequently a lot more 
ehtnic mixing in the region than people there would like to confess.
Turks have Greek blood, Greeks have Turkish blood, they all have
Albanian, Celtic, Arab, Slavic, Scandinavian blood.  You see quite a
number of red-headed, freckled Greeks and Turks today, and those are
typically Celtic traits.  This mixing, as any decent geneticist will tell
you, is a very good thing.  (China lost its vitality in the 17th century
after it sealed its borders.  Prior to that, it had a navy with ships five
times the size of the vessels sailed by Columbus, and the Admiral Cheng
Ho had visited east Africa.)   

More recently, the Greeks saved Western civilisation for the second time.
The first time was at Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis where they turned
back the might of the Persian empire in the 5th century BC.  If the
Persians had won, science, mathematics and philosophy as we understand it
today would not have been lost (I believe that these discoveries are
inevitable) but probably delayed by centuries if not millenia.  This
second time was when the Nazis had to divert their divisions to deal with
these pesky Greeks who just did not understand that they had no chance
against the panzers and the blitzkrieg.  The battle to subdue Greece cost
Hitler a precious 2 months, enough for his troops to suffer the onset of
the Russian winter when he later invaded.  As my mom would have said,
"Heaven has eyes".  The sonofabitch had such contempt for Slavic troops
that he did not even bother to equip the German army in Russia with
winter uniforms, thinking it will be all over in a few weeks!  Good thing
for democracy that the Greeks were (and are) a stubborn and unrealistic lot.

The CIA had its dirty hand in screwing the Greeks too.  If you have heard
about the right wing junta of Colonels who ruled Greece with an iron fist
for years after the war, the coup that brought them in was supported and
financed by the CIA.  That crowd had no Greek scholars among them to feel
wistful for the country that gave the world the bold concept of
democracy.

The European Union has been pouring money into Greece.  Quite a bit of it
disappaeared, a sorry story like that in Indonesia and the Phillipines.
The new govt seems more responsible, especially with the world watching
because of the Olympics in 2004 at Athens.  A German friend told me that
there is a European affection for Greece that does not extend to other
Europeans because of an emotional gratitude for what it gave to western
civilization.  The Olympics will be interesting to watch, because it will
be a test to see how far modern Greeks can transcend their pettiness and
little hatreds and jealousies.  They have proved they can when the cause
is big enough.  In ancient times, the city states stopped fighting
whenever the Olympics were held.  Oh, one tradition that we won't see --
the contestants in those times were naked.

The national hobby seems to be partying and pretending to work.  Dining
out begins at 10pm, then progresses to coffee parties and night clubs at
2am, finishing at 5am or 6am.  Then one goes off to work at 9am, lunches
at 2pm or 3pm.  In the smaller cities like Corinth, the siesta is still
in force, so one goes home or sleeps in the office backroom for an hour
or two after lunch.  In which case, the office or shop re-opens at 4pm or
5pm and business is done until 8pm.  Actually, this is a great idea.
Ramadan all year round!  Ideal for hot places like Malaysia.

You won't believe it, but it snows a lot in the mountains.  Pavlos' 
ancestors hail from a remote village called Lavka up past the mountain
Lake Stymphalia where Herakles performed one of his labors.  That is
typical.  The Greeks are very precise about where their heroes made
legend -- like when soneone told me a few years back, "This is the village
where Oedipus met his father Laius".  We went up to Lavka with Pavlos, his
sister Betty and his friend Spiros.  On arrival at their village home, all
the water pipes had frozen.  What to do, as we just had to have Greek
coffee, bugger showers and toilets!  This was the first time I had seen
snow cooked.  We bucketted snow off the patio, melted it, and made coffee.
Next day the pipes unfroze.  

I have a lot of anecdotes to recount, but I thought this will do for the
moment.  I'll tell you later where you should go and see Greek
archaeology, of the wonders of the Greek language and mysteries.

Love to you all, Happy New Year!

Norman (and Yokelin)