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We were only in Athens the second week of January, after three weeks in western Crete, and while the differences were noticeable, so were the similarities in the ways people we know or heard about are enduring and talking about year five of the financial crisis. Crete is self sufficient and semiagrarian: even men and women who live in the cities are closely tied to the villages where their families are from and where they still get their oranges, lemons, olive oil, and raki—in some cases from farms they still own and work. Nevertheless, one couple with a son who's an officer in the military, married with one child, told us his pay had been cut by a third. And Chania's youngest alderman, a high school tech teacher, isn't completely sure he'll have a teaching job next year. Athens, of course, is another big city, some four million, I think, with all political extremities well represented, the left by anarchists and Communists, the right by the protofascist anti immigrant Golden Dawn. While it's tempting to think that a country as cosmopolitan as Greece could never be taken in by an ultra right wing, it's worth remembering that the Communists lost the civil war that tore Greece apart after the Allies drove out the Nazis in 1944. People here are too nervous, said an actress in Athens who plans to leave as soon as she can, first to France and then possibly to the U.S. The take home monthly pay of our cab driver to the airport, who studied in Germany, had been reduced to 400 euros from 500. She has no faith in the current government or, worse, in any government that could replace it. By the way, nonstop flights to Athens from New York and back resume March 15. Whether they stop mid October as they did last year, for the first time in recent memory, probably depends on whether the Greek economic situation improves in the interim. That seems unlikely.
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