Sunshine & Clean Streets

Yesterday at approximately this time (5:30 pm) a guy walked down the street with a rolling trash can and a broom and did an exceptional job of hand-sweeping the road. I was very impressed, since it doesn't seem like the Greeks clean their streets very often. At least in Corinth. A sure sign summer (aka tourist season) is coming. Anyway, it is 24 hours later and I just looked from the balcony onto the street and in a section of street 4 cars and one motorcycle wide I counted 24 pieces of fairly large trash as well as several cigarette butts, candy wrappers, etc. In 24 hours. And this isn't some huge busy street. We're almost at the end of it and besides Beyond (a bar on the OTHER side of the road) there are just apartments and some small shops. Is this normal? Are people SO inconsiderate?

I needed to look up a word today and for some reason I pulled out a tourist guide instead of my dictionary and ended up paging through it because it had nice pictures. It was absolutely a dirty lying book obviously published by the Greek tourism industry. My favorite was the line, "Greeks are incredibly careful, slow drivers who pay attention to road rules."

The book also mentioned nothing about the horrible pollution here. If I were them I'd issue a warning to anyone asthmatic to go somewhere else.

So last night Alex came home from English lessons (I was in bed working expecting him to come home with a DVD) and said "You have five minutes, we're going out." I'll spare you the quotations but we ended up going bowling (and then playing billiards and then eating chinese book) with Peter Beech (for those of you who don't know Peter, he is the owner of the course I took to become certified to teach English), Petra and a few current students at the school. At first it was incredibly awkward (Here I would like to publicly announce that I WON in bowling, even beating Alex which I've never done before) but it ended up being a really nice night. I enjoyed being around a group of English-speaking people. It makes me look forward to being home.

Anyway, I'm going to go because I'm uncomfortable writing from the kitchen which, today, is the only place the Internet works.

FIN