“Although some friends questioned the wisdom of traveling to Istanbul at a time of such volatility, when bombs seem to go off with disturbing frequency and nowhere is truly safe, I thought how…

“For twelve hours we left the ‘crisis’ behind, and revisited the Greece we used to take for granted.”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is The Best Revenge By Diana Farr Louis ATHENS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—1/25/2016—After…

“I’ve done lots of the tourist ‘musts’ with exceedingly great pleasure, but each visit reconfirms that the Turks themselves are the pièce de resistance in the Lucullan feast for all the senses that…

“Here on Andros, it has been much easier to focus on a less troubled Greece . . . .  Every day, there is at least one almost miracle to lift the spirits.”—Diana Farr…

“On a personal level, we are all numb. Even younger people are behaving as though they have dementia. We forget the way to familiar destinations, we lose our keys, we mix up words,…

“Thank goodness for the weather. It gives us something to talk about besides politics. This Easter—which fell a week later than what Greeks call ‘Catholic Easter’—we tried to get away from what is…

“Whenever I close my eyes I see olives. We’ve been picking seriously for four days and for a week before that I was selecting the best for eating, begging friends to come and…

  “Athens, where hundreds were dying of starvation on the streets every day in the winter of 1942, may not be the right place to begin. God forbid that such horrors ever occur…

“It’s this uncertainty that’s demolishing us. If we knew what the year was going to cost, we could perhaps cope, but it’s only February and new surprises arrive every week. January’s pensions looked…

“Some ‘experts’ from abroad assure us that life will become much more tenable when we revert to the drachma. Maybe so. But it will take a while. They haven’t realized that almost everything…