How the EU’s Immigration Policies Cost My Husband His Wallet (or, The 300-Euro Subway Ride)

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

ATHENS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—11/8/10—It (like just about everything else in life, except root canals) happened in a flash.

Yesterday, my husband, Dean, a savvy New York City commuter, and I were body-surged into an Athenian subway car (Dean clutching his wallet) by a wave of commuters . . . and then, miraculously, we were on the car, surrounded by diminutive, poker-faced men, and Dean was not clutching his wallet.

“SONOFABITCH!” roared my Rochester-born spouse.

“ONEOFYOUASSHOLESJUSTSTOLEMYWALLET!” (Hell hath no fury like a working musician robbed blind on the penultimate day of a six-week sojourn in a foreign land—especially a working musician who has ridden the MTA almost every day of his adult life, without incident.)

Of course, we raged off at the next stop (ironically, the stop for Athens’s version of the Met), and roared back to our hotel, where we spent several hours trying to contact Dean’s bank and credit card providers, long-distance, at about 3 a.m. their time. Collect, we thought: how wrong we were. I did most of the talking. Dean was slumped, disconsolate, in a chair.

Greece—Athens—used to be the safest destination in Europe. Really. I once left my purse on a park bench, and a man sitting near me remained on duty, guarding it, till I remembered the damn thing and returned for it. That kind of safe.

No longer. Athens has been overrun, like New York City by bedbugs, by over a million illegal, undocumented, unemployed, homeless “aliens” and, each day, the EU dumps their own apprehended illegals—those whose first “portal of illegal entry” was Greece—back here, as opposed to repatriating them to Pakistan, Romania, Albania, Somalia, etc., etc., etc.

Really “White” of you, France, Sweden, Denmark, the UK, etc., etc. (I know, I know: I’ve never been noted for my PC-ness.) Greece has 8,498 miles of coastline, and a navy the size of Jamaica’s (well, I exaggerate a little), but you take my point. So, if a pick-pocket in Stockholm is a Pakistani national, do not, for God’s—and Dean’s and my—sake, repatriate him to Greece. Send him straight back to Pakistan, without passing Go.

This shouldn’t be brain surgery, but the EU may have more diabolical motives up their sleeves.

Whatever, Greece is in one helluva fix.

The economy is on the skids: 12 percent unemployment; some one in four or five small businesses closing; and the government simply incapable of collecting the income and other taxes owed by its wily, suffering citizenry.

Speaking with a senior member of the opposition party this week, I asked how he himself would solve the tax crisis.

“NOT by attempting to levy or collect income tax from businesses the way we’ve been doing it,” he said. “The only thing I can see working here is for Greeks to preserve their receipts for all expenditures, and deduct them from taxes levied on their businesses.”

“I, for one, will never pay what I owe, and my policy is the Greek norm,” he added. “Our salaries are too low, and determined in an absurd fashion. The only way to survive here is to game the system.”

Meanwhile, chimed in a small businessman, “The papers state there are 1 million illegals in Athens; there are actually 2 million in all of Greece. My son’s second-grade Greek schoolbook reflects the deluge: two of the children in the stories have Greek names, but the third is an Albanian. And 57 percent of offenders in Greek jails are Albanian. We’ve been overrun”

I told him I thought we’d soon, in the US, see “Dick, Jane, Sally and Spot” hanging with Juan and Luz in print, with Spanish on the opposite page, but our jails were brimming with our own, homegrown underclassmen.

After several hours on the phone with late-night Customer Service reps for all our banks and credit card providers, Dean and I were whipped . . . but still determined to visit the National Archaeological Museum, an ancient, immense, neoclassical pile sitting directly on one of the capital’s main thoroughfares, and one of the most visited sites in Greece. I’ve been going to “the Archaeological” for 50 years. You’d need to be . . . an Albanian not to know where this museum is.

Unwilling to venture into the Metro again, Dean and I hailed a cab.

I told the driver, in Greek, where we wanted to go, and he said, “Which museum?”

“The National Archaeological Museum,” I said, evenly.

“We have lots of those,” he said, beginning to cop an attitude.

This was not the day for anyone half my age to cop an attitude with me: I went immediately into irate-Athenian-late-middle-aged-matron mode.

“How old are you?” I snapped

“What does that have to do with it?” he said.

“What? 23? 22? 12?” I went on.

“28,” he replied, wounded.

“And you mean to tell me that, in a city center exactly 10 miles square, you have no idea where your country’s largest, most important museum is located? You’ve never been there? You’ve never trundled by the thing on a trolley or in, presumably, your taxi? Ever heard of Mycenae? Menelaus? Gold goblets? Big Zeus-y guy hurling a thunderbolt? That sort of thing?”

“Oh, you mean The Acropolis Museum?”

“Are you some sort of moron?”

Silence.

“And you call yourself a Greek? AND a taxi driver? Let us out. Now.”

“I can’t. The meter’s running.”

“Well, what difference does that make if you have no idea how to get to one of your city’s major attractions? The meter can run all day if your brain doesn’t. It’s as big as Parliament by the way. Or the Parthenon. Heard of the Parthenon, perhaps?! Big thing with columns up on the hill?”

At this point, the 28-year-old cell-phoned his friend, George, whom even I could hear yelling down the line: “Kosta, are you a complete idiot?! The Archaeological, You Imbecile! Right next door to The Polytechneion!”

I sat back then in my seat, fuming; Dean nodding off against the window. I was determined not to speak to Kostas again till we arrived at our destination.

“Here we are,” said Kostas, with a slight snarl.

“And here are 7 euros,” I said, sweetly, “the precise cost of admission. You should go sometime. Have a look at the glory that was Greece.”

Which is just what Dean and I did for the next few hours, for inside that ugly old building are surely some of the most sublime objects on our planet, guarded, every few feet, by vigilant Greek museum employees who know their Neolithic from their Cycladic. Then, it was back into the Metro for us, devoid of any jewelry, cameras, purses or visible means of support.

When I looked around me, I was stunned to notice that not one Greek woman in our subway car was wearing a gold cross, chain, earrings or watch—standard for Athenian women as recently as last year. “Too many of us have had purses or crosses grabbed off our shoulders or necks,” a woman explained. “The Romanians are the worst. They hunt in packs.”

“I think we ran into some of them this morning,” I said.

The Athens I’ve known and loved for half a century? Gone; and not coming back.

PS On the way to the airport the morning following, at 4:30 a.m., we related our tale of woe to our middle-aged Athenian cabbie and then had to wrestle him to the pavement upon arrival to accept our fare money. Single-handed, he wanted to make up for his native land’s infamy. Restored most of my faith in Greece, and the Greeks, on the spot, I must say . . . .