The ideal Greece, vs. the Greece one sees mostly, food in Greece

Ideal Greece

Greece as a work in progress

Patmos, Greece

Comfort food Greek style

My idea of comfort home in CA is very simple:

Bagels for breakfast with lox, tomatoes, red onions.
Lunch—salad
Dinner—favorite dinners include: More salad. If we go out, I like to order fish. But at home, I’m fine with salad.
Dessert—I like dessert! Except cheesecake.

Here, we have Greek comfort food.

For breakfast, we have cheese bread. It’s good warm or cold. The cheese is all melted into the bread. It sounds odd, but it’s excellent. It’s actually a little cheese pie. We break it in half and each have half. The coffee is excellent. Greek and Turkish coffee has a thick smoky depth that American coffee never seems to achieve. Plus they add sweetened milk.

We aren’t used to eating three meals a day at home, but here, we are on vacation, so we have a Greek salad for lunch with tomatoes and onions. With some fruit.

Dinner here in Patmos so far—couscous and cucumber salad. If we continue like this, I’ll be able to do all the food preparation. Usually on vacation, we eat simply, and I can take over the kitchen. We need lemons for all this salad.

Here in Patmos, there are stray cats, and you can always hear roosters crowing. I judge cities by their foods. Are you far from arugula? By maybe I should think about the chicken aspect. If you are a collection of villages, like Los Angeles, you have chickens. There are roosters in our neighborhood. But in NY and Chicago, it’s hard to imagine anyone having chickens. London and Paris? Forget about it.

Athens is full of dogs. Unlike American cities where dogs are scooped up by the dog catcher and the pit bull varieties are usually put to sleep. Too many news stories of pit bulls mauling kids’ faces or the sad one last year where the pit bull killed his pregnant owner when she was about 6 months along.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/pet-pit-bull-kills-pregnant-woman-pacifica-california/story?id=14289961#.T9qcabW0zZ0

The dogs of Athens all seem to be a shepherd mix. They do not look ready to attack, bark or run. They are sleeping everywhere. The people of Greece have different priorities; they’re willing to let sleeping dogs lie, they’d like to just have the country on track. And it doesn’t appear that whoever gets elected will improve things, but as is usual in these situations, the fascists, like the Minute Men in the U.S. want to blame immigrants for the country’s problems.

One extremist group in Greece call themselves the Golden Dawn. When they beat people with the Greek flag, the police, “stood off until the thugs had finished.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/fascism-rises-from-the-depths-of-greeces-despair-7712276.html

Members of the Golden Dawn are becoming elected officials. Their symbol is an adapted swastika. They believe that immigrants, no matter how long they have been in Greece, should be punished.

(One wonders, punished how?)

The fascists in Greece are like the California and Arizona minutemen, they like to blame the country’s problems on immigrants.

One might ask if immigration helps a country or not. The United States is built on immigration and it’s interesting that when they’re choosing who should be in power, who should be left in and who left out, that people with darker skin are always getting pushed out as the “them.”

Today, we are going to Lambi Beach so I can go for a swim. A long swim. I plan to see if I can swim a couple miles. Stretch my limbs. Think.

By the way, Google knows that I’m here. Every time I google anything, it gives me Greek options. Google reads my blog. It knows when you’re asleep, it knows when you’re awake, it knows when you’ve been bad (surfing for porn) or good (contributing to Oxfam or Doctors without Borders, buying Red Hen books,) so be good for goodness sake.