Day 70 Greek ruminations

Ruminations
Toilets-we have stayed in 18 beds so far and have made a study of toilets and bathrooms. First non US one was at Bristol Bus Station UK after the bus from Heathrow. Some sort of turnstile affair with 50p to get in only to find-no paper, no soap and no attendant. Greek toilets: After 400 years of Roman tutelage in many places the Greeks don’t have a plumbing system that will accept toilet paper, you are supposed to put it into a bucket alongside the toilet-ugh! Come-on. Even in pricier hotels you are usually warned not to drink the hotel water but to buy bottled water. After an early morning cold shower Brian storms to the hotel reception to demand that someone explain to him why he should pay for the room when there is no hot water. After venting he goes back upstairs to find Christine luxuriating under a hot shower. Who would know that you have to let the water run for at least 5 minutes in a recently refurbished hotel? (“Please don’t use too much water, it is a precious resource for us”). Would someone please teach the Europeans how to make a shower that works? We have yet to find two the same. The hot/cold mixer doesn’t work, you fiddle with the thing and get scolding hot (where are the lawyers and their law-suits to fix that?) or freezing cold-then, when you have it just right, the bloody thing just decides to change the temperature on you all by itself. Showers usually share the same space as the toilet and so forget a dry toilet seat and don’t forget to move the toilet paper before you shower. That’s OK., they have less space than Americans but there is nowhere to hang up the shower wand thing and so you have to get wet all over, turn it off (and start to freeze) while you soap and then turn it back on again (except it will now be too hot or too cold). Egyptian, Indian and Cambodian bathrooms loom in our future.
Greek economy. They are poor. They just have agriculture (either serfdom to the large agricultural corporations or a meager, hardscrabble living as an owner/farmer) and the low-wage service economy of tourism. But they are an indolent lot and suffer as well from this socialist economy. All the men are in the cafes playing backgammon and the women are working somewhere. Well, we saw six women (all government workers) processing our museum ticket and entry, when it looked like a part-time job for one person. Meanwhile the roads need repair, the litter needs to be picked up and fences mended. Road signs are unreadable, even if in Roman script they are faded, covered in graffiti or riddled with bullet holes. The EC has pumped some money into worthwhile things such as roads and archaeological excavations but you also see lots of EC funds going into some misguided junior, and distant, bureaucrat’s dream with an EC funded 100 meter long new bike path with (inlaid coloured cobble stones) and no bike path for 100km in either direction of it and no hope of one ever being built. Anyway, the people of Crete don’t ride bicycles, I have yet to see a Greek bicycle. They have one big road here on Crete which is a two lane affair and largely empty. I have seen four American bicyclists with their shrink wrap Italian clothes and expensive bikes. I hope that the EC knows they enjoyed the 100 meter bike path.
Also you have to wonder what the Greeks have added to their architectural heritage this past 500 years or so. While others were building Washington DC, New York, Oxford, London; while whatisname was laying out the street plan and architecture of Paris, Eiffel was doing his tower; and Las Vegas and the Louvre were built-the Greeks built-what? Some Byzantine churches but it seems not much else. The Maltese build their houses with their lovely honey-coloured limestone and add the intricately designed balconies. With similar raw materials the Cretans throw up concrete slab buildings. Then again it’s easy to be confused by what Greece achieved in the past and to mistake its size in the world today. It has the same population as Ohio and what has Ohio built in the last 500 years that will last? Not its tire factories I guess.