my biggest challenge now is looking for work.. as you see am Filipina born, lived half of my life here, foreign educated.. they see Fi;ipino nothing but a housekeeper.

sigh….

fellow blogger here in athens

you might be directed to my new site which is still being fixed

its http://www.schatzli.blogspot.com

i closed it for the time being I was away in France for a while

Great post Diva. I’ve felt the same openness and welcoming in Greece, all over the country, in every place that we’ve lived. My situation may be slightly different than yours, as I am married to a “real” Greek, but I am still a foreigner nonetheless. And from America, the devil country!

But I think (I hope) such extremist nationalists are in the minority. At least they seem to be, based on my day to day experiences.

For instance, one customer told me Thursday that he hates all Albanians and that Greece would be a better country if we just deported all of them. I asked him what about the “X” family? “Oh no, not them…they’re the good Albanians” he replied. So then I named off several more families in the neighbourhood and he again said, “well, no not them either…I’m talking about only the criminal Albanians”. I kept pressing him who these bad Albanians were and then he finally admitted he actually knew none but figured they were out there … where? He didn’t know. So what started out as hatred towards all Albanians was narrowed down to just the known murderers. If I had more time with him, I’m sure he’d have admitted that his hatred was was induced by rumour and fear mongering tv reports.

What a difference 20 minutes of conversation makes.

I’ll admit, that sometimes I think everything is going to hell in Greece, but - fortunately - it’s not. Not yet. I am still proud to be greek and these people you mention, people with arms wide open, these are the true children of the great ancients.

No, your street is not unique. There are warm people everywhere, despite the big city and modern - “white” - way of life, that’s trying to smother our humanity from within us. Even the racists, most of them, are just simple people, uninformed and naive, not really evil or vicious.

Anyway, I won’t say anything more. Thanks for posting this.

Of course, there are also those who don’t even bother and I meet more than I probably would if I didn’t work in retail businesses. The stories I could tell of what comes out of their mouths would make your hair fall out.

Our shop was robbed at gunpoint a few months ago. The immediate reaction was “ALBANIANS”. People were rather quiet after they learned the truth that they were greeks.

I can’t even tell you how sick I am of this stereotypical “immediate reaction.” Our flat was burglarised by a Greek drug addict and even as the police caught him red-handed, our neighbours were muttering about “Albanian thieves.”