EVERY now and then we hear reports of how the Prinos oil wells in the Thassos area are getting on and how other test drillings in the Nestos area and in the Western Peloponnese are showing encouraging signs that there may indeed be enough black gold under the Greek earth to solve some of the country’s more pressing economic problems.
ONE cold and rainy December day, a couple of weeks ago, a group of dejected-looking individuals trooped into a committee room in the sprawling offices of the National Tourist Organization in the Tameion Building and sat glumly round a long table, neatly laid out with white note-pads and sharpened pencils.
THE other day I was visited by a rather shifty-looking and emaciated dark gentleman who introduced himself as the military attache in the legation of an obscure African country on the southern edge of the Sahara desert.
IN line with the Government’s policy of improving services to tourists and educating the Greek people on how to behave towards visitors from abroad, a circular has gone out from the Ministry of Education to the headmasters of all secondary schools in the country.
TO look at the gay and gregarious Greeks, with social lives entirely taken up in the company of hordes of friends and relatives whom they visit or go out with every night, you would think it would be as hard to find a lonely heart among them as the ‘honest man’ Diogenes sought with a lighted lamp in broad daylight.
AFTER the ceremonies and celebrations of our entry into the Common Market last month and after I had recovered from the acute indigestion they brought on (my doctor diagnosed it as koinagoretic dyspepsia and said it had reached epidemic proportions in the greater Athens area), I suddenly realized that if anyone asked me what it all meant, I wouldn’t know what to say. And then I thought to myself that there must be somebody in my vast circle of friends and acquaintances who could give me a simple and succinct answer to the question:
AMBROSE BIERCE once wrote that noise was “the chief product and authenticating sign of civilization”.
LAST month, on these pages, you read how the Serene Republic of Venice conducted cruises to the Holy Land as long ago as the fifteenth century and how that operation compared with the streamlined and ultra-efficient performance of cruises in our day and age.
JESSICA Dublin’s advice to young women is: “Do your thing first and then get married.”
