Today I was finally made a Greek resident! After weeks of bank visits, insurance trips, hospital visits, and multiple fees, I made my way to the municipality and was given a residence permit. Well, technically a piece of paper that will stand in until my residence permit arrives, but whatever. The municipality is a few bus stops above the school—I’d never ridden it that far, but I have to say, if I had the means, I would live in Pylea. It’s the wealthiest part of Thessaloniki, and it was beautiful. The main road twists and turns up these hills that have gorgeous views of other hills, and when you peer down the side roads there are posh apartments or absolutely gorgeous mansions with gates, hedges, swimming pools, the works. Apparently, the street I live off was once the wealthy part of town; there are a few old-style houses that are now museums you can still see dotted about the road. The street used to be only mansions with spacious yards until the 1917 fire when it was replaced with nondescript city buildings. Oh well.
I also saw my first documentary today, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed. At first, upon walking in, I saw this picture:
With the cigarette circled and “Please no smoking” caption, and I figured it was pretty much guaranteed to be an amazing day from there. Sadly, I was mistaken. First off, it started on Greek time so we weren’t even let in the the viewing room until twenty minutes after we were set to begin. Then, they had technical difficulties 15 minutes in and we had to sit around for another 15 while they fixed it. Plus, I’m sick and was pretty much just infecting the entire room—the guy next to me definitely hated me.There were two documentaries shown in this viewing; the first one was called Divine Pig and was about a butcher with a pet pig, and alternated between interviews with people about pigs, scenes of the butcher walking and playing with the pig, and scenes of the butcher cutting up all sorts of piggy parts. The movie ended with a scene showing the slaughtering of the pet pig, watching it bleed out, and then watching the butcher both sell the pet pig and eat it with his family.
But I would even have watched that again than have sat through the second one, which was actually the one I wanted to see. The description was very misleading—it was supposedly about how people are dealing with the recession but was pretty much the artsy-fartsy hipster director being a complete douchebag with all his communist class warfare BS. It was basically the working class versus the rich privileged unaffected by everything (the rich being those that could afford 50 million dollar yachts before the recession but pretty much lumping anyone with a job [who’s not a prostitute] in there too) but whiny and annoying, mixing in Depression-era stories and footage that was either false, or recognizable from movies of the time, and using stories of people in California as representative of the USA today. I hated that this film was shown to foreigners, and I disagreed with pretty much everything this guy sneered. Plus, he kept trying to jam his stupid catch-phrase down our throats, and I wasn’t swallowing. I probably would have walked out if I hadn’t been sitting square in the middle. Hopefully the ones I’m seeing tomorrow with Tanya will be more enjoyable.Can you tell I’m sick and grumpy?
No comments:
Post a Comment