News from Athens

uche uche (Dutch for coughing sound)

Just a quick note on ciragettes, Greeks, Athens and of course the workshop.

Lots of cigarettes, even though I regularly spot a no smoking sign. However, in general they ignore this, and even walk towards the exit of the workshop-room with a burning cigarette in their hands. The room is connecting to the hall, in which people (again ignoring signs) smoke as much as they can before entering a room (where they suddenly do obey the signs, sort of). As a result the room is soon field with smoke too. Then you start to notice how we are used to a non-smoking environment: my lungs start to complain immediately and the Greeks themselves don't seem to have any problem.

Lots of Greeks too ;-)... men look at you shamelessly in the street (better ignore them, saying hi gives them the excuse to approach you for whatever reason), are somewhat more rude than English (who isn't?), and get too enthusiastic in a workshop. Very nice when you speak to them individually. From a hotel receptionist that wants desperately to teach me Greek (guess he picked out the linguist in me), to co-workshoppers that invite me for dinner. One girl with a very strong accent asked where I came from, because she spotted an accent, she said :-). Unfortunately, the people around the hotel do not have the impression to be very nice, so i usually try to walk as fast as i can or be accompanied by someone.
Students are passionate: we had to move the workshop due to protests against university privatisation. They took over the whole building after bombarding us with posters and folders.

Athens, as far as I have been able to see, has nice and less nice sides (e.g. area around my hotel). The nicer ones look fancy and have loads of patios where you can sit outside in January still! So that's where a co-workshopper and I had dinner last night, and on another one some Ouzo (with live piano in the background). But I will see much more on Friday, when I have my day off in Athens!

Then, finally, the workshop is great. It is given by the developer of the statistical method himself, who is pretty old now. He has got the exact dryness that you somehow expect from older men that are very knowledge-able, which makes things hilarious at moments. It also makes things sometimes very complicated, I admit having missed a few things due to too many greeks letters and equations on ten square centimeters on the whitboard. (It does help though that I now need to learn Greek letters for two reasons!) Having a mostly Greek audience makes it also funny in that everytime he pronounces a Greek letter in the wrong way, one hears a wave of whispers of corrections around the room - no one really dears to confront him too hard with this to say it out loud.

So far so good then... need to dash for dinner now!