This week has passed peacefully, with less and smaller demonstrations than last week. This can be up to 3 reasons: A. After the government passed the austerity measures, people got over the initial shock and is now looking to find a way to deal with the new situation. B. People temporarily withdrew from the streets just waiting for a spark to get back to the streets again. C. Workers' unions are mostly controlled by pro-government people, so they choose not to pull the strings but rather keep their reaction to a “symbolic” level.
I also believe that the fact that 3 people died during a demonstration 10 days ago have caused a feeling of nervousness to the majority of people. Then, another issue is that we are just getting into tourist season (when 18% of the greek GDP is produced) so a lot of people are making an effort to put themselves and businesses together, hoping to get the best out of it.
Meanwhile, hotel bookings have been very low compared to the last few years, both because of the instability of the country, as well as because of the economy being bad in most EU countries too. There have already been 17.000 hotel bookings canceled, just for hotels in Athens and we're only in the middle of May...
Even still, for the first time since we got in this crisis there has been a little optimism. Not in the sense that “this will turn out to be good” but more likely “we'll finally make it, no matter what”. I don't know how rational this optimism seems to be, but we really need it. If there's one reason I tend to believe this, is that it's mostly said by older people who have been through hard times in the past. All of us, younger than 40-45, have mostly been grown up in a bubble, so all this seems like a mountain in our eyes.
A picture which I think describes perfectly people's psychology at this point is something I saw when I went outside the bank where the 3 people died. There were lots of flowers, candles, notes, and people passing by, standing there for a while. One would think that when you are in such a place you probably leave a flower yourself, you think about stuff, most likely in silence. What was weird is that people were fighting! Not particularly about something that had to do with the 3 dead, but about politics, the demonstrations, what should be done now. It was really an awkward situation. Like being at a funeral and finding a reason to fight. I couldn't really follow what they were saying, there were 2-3 different fights going on at the same time.
A good thing is that we have started talking to each other, having real conversations. I'm not talking about the fights here, I mean civilized conversations. In Greece we weren't used to this. Our dialogues seemed to be more like 2 parallel monologues. These days it's been quite usual to see people talking about the economy, the country's economy or their household's economy and not being dogmatic at all. They say their opinion but they are also listening to the other person with respect. It may not sound like such a big deal, but before that you could tell that people wanted to talk about stuff only with people with which they knew they would agree with.
Despite all that, up to now it doesn't look like there is something going wrong in the real economy. I don't know how things were in other countries that were only a step before going bankrupt, but still it looks weird having bars and restaurants full of people, drinking and eating. A friend who's a bar tender told me today that his boss told him that when there's a crisis people tend to drink more. My question is, weren't we drinking a lot already?
Something I heard and thought it puts it right:
“Greece looked like a client in a restaurant who keeps ordering stuff so that the check will never come”.
RSS Feed