'Lazy' Greeks

So, just how lazy are some Greeks? Well, I'll tell you. They're so lazy that one of them that I know has been out of work for two years. And so has her layabout husband. They have two kids. She used to work for a public hospital; he's in construction. And this is the kind of slouches they are:

Some guy in the village where "Maria" lives recently built and opened a mid-sized grocery store. He has five of them, or 11, I can't remember which. He's a dick. Talks to employees in a gruff manner. Plain rude.

(In an aside, I ask in advance for readers' forgiveness for minor factual errors. This is a blog, I'm not getting paid and my memory is bad. That said...)

As I recall, Greece now has a law whereby the minimum wage for people under 25 or somesuch is less than 3 euros an hour. Maria is in her mid-30s, and yet Mr. Dick pays her just 2.50 an hour. And she's THANKFUL.

But it wouldn't matter if she wasn't. The boss says, take it or get lost... more than a few lazy Greeks are willing to step in to replace her.

That's how bad it's gotten. Her boss, as I said, is a dick... and oh, have I mentioned... yeah, he's a DICK. Won't give them time off as required by law. Instead, he has her come in on what should be her weekend and makes her wear civilian clothes so anyone checking up can be reasonably fed a denial... But no one checks, not that I know of.

Want more lazy?

Maria and her husband have to grow vegetables to make ends met. Their teenage son has been operating a backhoe since he was, I think, 11 or so... He's good, too. The younger brother goes fishing with his unemployed dad sometimes. Again, putting food on the table. The sea can be rough and dangerous. Maria worries about them drowning.

Slackers, the lot them. Makes me sick.

I have an Ikea

I can think of no better occasion for my annual blog post than the ridiculously anticipated arrival in Doha of Ikea.
Back in January one of the guys I play hockey with, and who works for the chain, sent out a mass email to all the players in the league. Anyone interested in visiting Ikea's 341st outlet to test its readiness should promptly sign up.
(The trial visit was originally scheduled for Jan. 26 but was postponed.)
"This [invite] will only be open to the first 3,000 email addresses, as we want a relaxed environment on this day," he wrote at the time.
But it looks like the big day will be anything but relaxed, now that the electronic invite has reportedly gone viral.
My invitation to the outlet's trial opening on March 7 was sent to me by email on Feb. 27.
The visit to evaluate the store's operational readiness includes a free meal (presumably the Swedish meatballs will have been screened for horse meat), and the opportunity to be among the first people in Doha to shop there. The only hitch is there'll be a fire drill to test evacuation procedures... an excellent idea given we had 19 people die in a mall fire not that long ago.
The store is scheduled to open to the general public on March 11.
When I showed my smartphone with the invite on it to a colleague at work, he jumped out of his seat and lunged at my phone. When I refused to hand it over, he physically attacked me, and started grabbing at the handset.
Clearly, emotions are running high in the desert.
So high in fact that the invitation, which is not personalised, has gone viral, raising concerns over crowd control and safety, according to Doha News.
I sent Ikea marketing executive Kershini Moodley an email on March 2, asking what was being done to ensure order and safety given the invite had gone viral. The reply from Vanessa Kaye, a member of "The Ikea Team", came just 15 minutes later.
"We kindly request you to limit this invite only to your close friends & family," was the only thing she said that came remotely close to addressing my question in her email to me, which also had Moodley cc'd.
A half-hour later Moodley sent out a mass email repeating Kaye's message, presumably to everyone on the original invitation list.
Somehow, I doubt very much that admonishing people to limit who they invite at this late stage is going to cut it. They've already invited half of Doha.
I've been in Qatar 18 months and Ikea was being talked about before I arrived. The hysteria is, I'm afraid, understandable given the furniture options in Doha. Here's a typical example of what passes for a bed:

 And here's what we've got for lighting:

Fancy a fancy couch? Step this way.

You get the picture... what passes for home furnishings here is, to be kind, not for everyone. As a result, I expect the wave of shoppers to hit Ikea this Thursday to be a tsunami of pent up demand... (I know, it's a cliche, but it's a blog. No one reads this.)

Anyhow, I have an idea... I'm not going.  

Ironman spotted in Doha

The frequent complaint in Doha, not without merit, is that there's nothing to do. But that's only true if you don't go looking for stuff, make an effort, like we did the other day.

As we drove across a bridge near our place, by the Zig Zag towers, we came across this flying Qatari. Click and discover that superheros really do exist.

Tour de Doha

My first mistake was heading out the door late. 
It was only 9 AM but by then it was already 36 C. Not a cloud in the sky.

There seemed to be a faint petrol-chemical smell in the air. And while I can't be sure, it played with my head. I hadn’t been on my bike in maybe a year and I was going to need oxygen, a lot of it.

I rode on a Friday morning, really the only time a cyclist can reasonably expect to come home alive.

Any other time there’s too much traffic. Even if you could find a shoulder to ride on, there’s  the risk of a Qatari driving his Land Cruiser running you over while passing someone on the right.

The roundabouts are suicidal. The drivers of SUVs regularly launch themselves into traffic at high speed while texting someone. Riding a bike into one is like trying to jump on a speeding merry-go-round. You’d be swatted back like a fly.

I rode from the Pearl to the Zigzag Towers to the sandpit of construction that is Lusail. And back. The air was brown, part dirt, part the byproduct of the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.

The few construction workers who were out on what is for most a day off, stared at me like human cattle. Who could blame them, seeing a tall white guy coughing up a lung in the desert...

Every one of my pores was busying jettisoning sweat. It stung my eyes. I glistened. The searing sun was crisping my forearms like bacon.

Occasionally a dilapidated bus used to ferry construction workers would lumber by, leaving a trail of black exhaust for me to suck in. In Lusail, where everything is new or being built, a hot waft of freshly paved asphalt assaulted my nose.

On the way back, closer to home, even the moist scent of the Pearl’s freshly watered, unusually green grass was off-putting. Broad expanses of lawn with nary a weed in sight… proof of the truckloads of herbicides employed in the pursuit of perfection.

… And yet when I got home, I somehow felt good.

Crash course

Qataris have an undeniable need for speed. They are, basically, motorheads. I know that's like saying all Americans are gun-toting rednecks... but even in that, there is a grain of truth. And here in Doha you need only hop into your car and tool around a bit and you will almost certainly stumble across a car wreak like these. Everyday.
Legal disclaimer: I have no idea how any of the cars pictured crashed. I wasn't there, never saw it, only came across them as I was driving by. They may well have been innocent victims of someone else's stupidity. Maybe.
Anyway, a while back, before I had my own ride, I was taking a taxi home. The driver from India was telling me about how crazy the roads can get at night, especially the roundabouts. 

Apparently, it's good fun here to drive in circles as fast as you can. My driver says he once saw a Toyota Land Cruiser going so fast in a roundabout that it rose up on its outside wheels.
"What about the police?" I asked.
"Police coming," the man said. "Only watching."
There seems to be two main types of crashes in Doha, both speed related.
The first goes like this... traffic stops suddenly in front of Motorhead A, who slams on the brakes too late and rams into the poor suck in front of him. Happens all the time.
The second is a bit of a wild ride. I imagine it going like this... Motorhead B is screaming down the straightaway at 150+ km/h when suddenly a roundabout appears, and it's closing fast, too fast. Our speed demon tries to slow and make the sharp turn, runs out of road and hops the curb in his $130,000 dream machine.
(Holy Hanna that must scare the living shit out of a driver.)
The close-up of the silver Maserati (above, right), a GrandTurismo I think, shows what happens to the front end when it encounters the curb at speed. The exact circumstances of this fella's crash are unclear to me, but a casual look at the scene near my apartment suggests the dude came into the roundabout hot, catapulted over the curb and ground to a stop in the sand about 50-70 feet from where he left the road. Frontend demolished.
The very next day, a second Maserati (right)... circumstances less clear, results the same: a seriously messed up luxury car.
(Body shops must make a mint here.)
Well, at least the Qataris are beginning to notice. About a month ago I took in a movie at City Centre. The last ad the theatre ran before the movie started was a public service announcement in Arabic. Its delivery was awful but it had the right idea. The ad focused on a guy in his 20s, flipping through a photo album as I recall. He's reminiscing about his friend, who we learn at the end has died in a car crash. 
I'd say driving here is a bit like smoking was in North America in the 1960s. It can kill you, and people here don't seem to realise it. Or maybe it's just boys beings boys, only with really expensive toys, and a lot more at stake than they seem to care to admit.

What happens Thursday nights (above)

Also a victim of Thursday night

Filthy swine

Back in the Stone Age, there was the VHS cassette tape. Along with it, the video store. The one near my old place in Toronto had a door in the back. Behind it, pornography. It's a little like that in Doha, only the porn isn't porn. It's pork.
Apologies for the vulgar analogy. Allow me to explain.
Pork recently arrived in Qatar, forbidden as it is in Islam. And for a while there it seemed like the expats here couldn't stop talking about it, me included.

This is where the analogy comes in. The pork is distributed through the QDC (video store), the lone outlet in Doha that sells alcohol. I'm told the room where they display the pork (porn central) used to be the beer fridge.
So I bought breakfast sausages. And now this blog entry becomes a food review.
The sausages looked promising and plump. There had been a lot of build up: "Hey, did ya hear? They got pork now at the QDC." Cue the saliva glands.
Anyhoo, to the point. I fried up those broom-handle thick babies until they were a golden brown. Then I buried them in a sea of baked beans, but not before I lay down a foundation of fried eggs, sunny side up.
I should have known better.
According to the label, Blakemans' Supreme Pork Sausages were a jolly medley of 50 percent pork, water and pork fat, with a side order of potato starch and soya concentrate, seasoned with E450 (iii) stabiliser, E221 preservative and E300 antioxidant. Eeeee.
The verdict?
I would liken biting into these sausages to chomping down on a wad of pork-fat-soaked paper toweling. It was that good.

Dawn of the dead

They're not quite the undead. More like the soon-to-be dead.
The downtown Athens neighbourhood of Omonia has long had its fair share of junkies. Once the grande dame of the city, with fountains and well-manicured shop fronts, Omonia today is a dive. But the junkies? Wow. Never like this it seems.
The three zombies in the picture were shot (while one was shooting up) as riot cops had other things on their minds, like the October 19 general strike.
Spaced out, brain damaged addicts are now flaunting the authorities. They shoot up in plain site. They pass out. They score. For the most part there are no cops.
Probably the most disturbing scene occurred several blocks away, several days after the strike, just off the busy pedestrian walkway of Ermou, a Greek rioter's stone's throw away from the parliament.
Staggering towards me on a cool fall day was a man in his 20s, maybe 30s, who knows. Picture a zombie in Dawn of the Dead. That was him: shoeless, filthy and (reader discretion advised...) Um, how do I put this? You know that Saturday Night Live skit with Justin Timberlake and Adam Samberg, called "Dick in a Box"? Well, this dude could have used a box.
Yep, he was flying low, so so low.
So why?
Probably many reasons... general despair has to be on the list somewhere... But I'm thinking the cops don't give a shit any more (or the patrols have been cut to save cash)... and, I'm hearing that the state funding for methadone treatment has been cut, to what level I don't know. Obviously, not enough.

Fuelling the revolution

A friend of mine in Canada asked me about what was going on in Greece.

"I know it's tough as hell there," he said in an email, "but can you help me with the faraway impression? If the Greeks had just paid their taxes, we'd have had a better outcome. True? False?"

He also wrote that "we've heard all about helicopter cameras showing swimming pools in the yards of non-tax-paying citizens, etc., etc. [But] what's really up?"

This rambling response is the best I could come up with in a short time...

What's going on here in Greece is a class war. The Guardian published a commentary that helps explain some of it.

The pools? Get this... an envelop of money in the right tax collector's hands will allow you to dodge taxes on a pool because it's, um, not really a pool. Because, you see, I have this medical condition and I have it for therapeutic reasons. Also popular: explaining away the pool as an environmental solution because it's actually designed to, um, collect rain water.

I know someone who has worked in a public hospital for 27 years and was making 1,250 euros a month. Because of government cuts she's now making 800. Another person I know, who is an accountant and earns a similarly meagre wage in the private sector, hasn't been paid for September and there's talk of the business going under.

It goes on... A guy I know at the Athens News says reporter friends at other publications don't ask him how much he earns, but whether he actually gets paid. A freelance writer I know who was owed 750 euros for a job she did had to badger the publication for 11 months before she got paid recently. My friend, a school teacher, had his monthly salary cut by 500 euros. His wife lost her job. They have to pay for supplementary schooling for their teenage daughters because the public system sucks.

Generally, the poor pay their taxes... but yes, the civil services is bloated, a problem created by the country's two major, family-run political dynasties... handing out jobs for votes... and most people would agree that you can't continue to have one in four workers in Greece employed by the public service.

But equally so you cannot continue to have people not pay their fair share of taxes... take for example the doctor with an office in a trendy part of town who declares 15,000 euros in annual income... or whatever it was, but it was low as I recall.

What else... the violence in the streets... To an outsider like me it seems the violence has turned in a way that Greeks are now beating up Greeks. An example: on Thursday, members of the communist affiliated PAME union battled with so-called hoodies, made up of left-wing extremists and anarchists.

But the prevailing talk on the street is that these hoodie dudes are actually affiliated with the cops. One protestor said her PAME colleagues nabbed one hoodie guy on Thursday, stripped him, and spotted cop ID on the guy. Pix and video online purport to show hoodies getting out of cop cars before concealing their faces with scarves, gas masks etc. While the two groups battle each other, the riot cops watch.

Now what? Selling off public assets to private investors for a song. The end.

Not a pretty picture.

Athens Strike: Day 2

The concussion grenades sound louder than I remember them. Maybe the police in Athens put in an order for more powerful explosives since I left the city.

I went down to Syntagma Square for Day 2 of the national strike, staying on the periphery of the actual rioting. Within the square now, people wearing red T-shirts help those with deep gashes caused by thrown stones or police clubs. They have a little area roped off to take the injured, a place they can bleed together and be patched up.

Watching from a distance, I see the crowd along the road parallel to the Grande Bretagne hotel surge. They're panicking, spilling over a retaining wall and into the slippery water fountain there. Soon I see a man hobbling towards me, wet... I assume he's turned an ankle in the fountain or been trampled by the fleeing crowd.

Things are kicking off so I drift from the square, spotting along the way the burned out remains of the previous day's fires... ticket booths, piles of uncollected garbage... anything that'll burn.

Strategically, police on mopeds position themselves on the outskirts of the rioting, where they wait for orders. From these positions they can sweep in from behind the crowd and box in the protestors.

A helicopter hovers over the downtown crowd as parliamentarians decide who will pay what and how much. At the same time an unsteady junkie leans against the fence around Hadrian's Library in Monastiraki for support, contemplating it seems the tortoise shuffling his way across the ruins.

The fall of Athens?

It was tough when I first moved to Athens in 2007. Hot, no friends, no clue of where anything was. But eventually I got to know the city, and despite it being overrun by cars, it could be so fragrant... I remember most the scent of jasmine outside the Akropoli metro station, or the orange blossoms early in the new year.

But now... the only smell that leaves an impression is the stench of the mounting piles of garbage, the result of a too-long running strike by rubbish collectors.

Athens feels like what I imagine Saigon felt like when it fell. For the umpteenth time, the city was paralysed by a national strike today. Things kicked off around the parliament, not as violent as it has been, but still...

Afterwards, we walked to Omonia (see pic). The riot cops were ready to clamp down. In the pic, notice the junkies on the far right. The whole area is littered with these drugged out zombies. It was bad before, but not like this, where I'm always looking over my shoulder...

We met with a friend for a bite in the tourist district of Monastiraki. We ordered our food, but before it arrived, a wave of protestors. I went to look. Two young women with rudimentary masks (pic) hurried off somewhere. In the distance a pile of garbage burned. In the foreground, anxious protestors dressed mostly in black watching for the cops.

And the cops did not disappoint. They soon arrived on motorcycles, dressed in black armour, resembling Darth Vader, and scaring the bejesus out of people.

A crowd swarmed our outdoor dinner table, and forced their way inside our restaurant, they verged on panic.

Management lowered the restaurant's corrugated metal shutters. It was surreal. Here we were tucking into our meals, and here came the cops, concussion grenades and all. Stavroula started a coughing fit, the traces of tear gas tearing at her sensitive lungs.

Long story short, it's the shits here in Athens. We escaped to higher ground, and watched from just below the Acropolis, as flaming cardboard boxes ignited an awning belonging to a business. The black smoke wafting over the city of white. We could hear people shouting. I have to wonder whether anyone was listening.

They broke Christmas

The ornaments belonged to my parents.
They date from the 1960s and I've always enjoyed hanging them on the tree during the holiday.
But the Custom Clods here were in a hurry, didn't give a shit or whatever, but you see the result.
My fault, too, for not packing them better.
I know, small problem.
And it is.
I was shooting the breeze with some Nepali guys in Doha that work in a cafeteria (how's that for a segue?), and one guy told me his work schedule.
I thought I heard wrong, so he repeated it.
"Sir, in one month, work 29 days, one day off."
I didn't have the heart to ask what he earns, but the guy who I regularly dial up to drive me around has been here many years and says that guy's probably earning less than 1,000 riyals a month... less than $300.
So, yeah, they broke Christmas, but what's that expression again?
First World problem

Hockey Night in Doha

I am now a Sand Viper.
Viper for short.
Or just sniper.
They call it the Qatar International Ice Hockey League. As billed, the QIIHL is the hottest game in the desert.
This evening, in our first game, the Vipes were in a tight one against the Molson Canadians, tied at 2 going into the second before going on to a glorious 5-2 defeat.
Surreal moment of the game (aside from the fact that we played in a mall): at the start of the second, the boys are huffing and puffing and skating... and then over the mall's PA, the Muslim call to prayer.
What's it like being back playing hockey after something like a two-year absence?
As the first 20-minute period ended tied at 2, Dan, thinking the game is over, goes, "What happens now? Shootout?"
Coach says, "No man, we play another period."
I'm pretty sure he didn't see my eyes roll back into my head.
Another 20 minutes of this? It felt like I could hardly stand, much less skate.
I managed, of course, conserving vital energy by standing still on the ice as much as possible.
Towards the end, while on the bench, I glance up at the clock... 1:42 left to play.
Thank Christ, I think.
Then the guys come off for a change and I don't want to go on, figuring, guys, finish the game. I look at the clock again. 6.12 to play.
Those 7s can be tricky when you're not wearing your glasses.

The other half

IT'S PROBABLY hard to see in the picture at right, but in the middle, near the top is someone's deck.
They've rigged a piece of plywood for shade, and if you click on the photo and magnify it, you can make out a plastic lawn chair.
They're not in the picture, but there were two people sitting there a few minutes ago. It's about 40C right now.
It's only marginally better than some of the shanties I've seen, and surrounded by more satellite dishes than I've ever seen in one spot. The migrants that I've talked to, mostly cab drivers, swear by Qatar. To a man, they've told me that here they're able to earn more than in India, Nepal or the Philippines. But then my driver from India hasn't seen his wife and young family in months.
A topnotch 3-bedroom apartment in Doha costs about 16,500 riyals a month, or about $4,500. My driver was thinking of bringing his family here, but he was having a hard time making it happen. He'd be looking at 5,000 riyals a month, he said. He charges between 30 and 50 riyals for a ride. I'm not good at math, but something doesn't add up. It's the new calculus.