Arrival in Greece

We left the UAE for Greece on the morning of September 28^th. The flight itself was too uneventful to merit its own post, but the Athens airport has a really gorgeous setting near the coast and surrounded by mountains. It was easy to see why Athens was a good choice of a location for a city—easily defensible for its earlier inhabitants.

My boss, Rachel, teaches at an annual ten-day conference class in Athens called the Euro-Mediterranean Journalism Institute that is hosted by The Fund for American Studies and the Greek branch of NATO, GAAEC. Typically, participants come from countries that have only recently developed free presses—or have partial press freedom. This year, we had participants from Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Brazil, Italy, Germany and the US. (The last five countries aren’t typically represented; the Brazilian girls had applied online and were accepted because TFAS is expanding programs into South America; the Germans were part of a really neat program I’ll discuss in a later post.)

In the next few posts, I’m going to give a little background on major happenings in Greece’s domestic and regional situation. I think they’ll come up repeatedly throughout my Greece commentary, so I thought I’d write a bit about them. I didn’t know anything about the Macedonia/FYROM controversy before arriving in Greece. You can skip these if you just want to learn how to say cheers in Serbo-Croatian.