EMJI Highlights Part I

This post is just going to be the first of several collections of highlights from Greece:

-It was nearly impossible to live a meal sober; we all ate at a meze place after visiting the acropolis and when the waiter asked us what we wanted to drink, we said 'nothing.' "Nothing," apparently, means no hard alcohol, as we discovered when he brought over carafes of red and white wine. Ah well, not going to complain about free alcohol. This was about when I learned to say cheers in Serbo-Croatian: Zhi-val-ee. (In Japan, it's Kam-pie.)

-Bruce Clark, the international editor for The Economist, came to speak to us towards the end of the program. He talked about his experiences in the former Soviet block countries, and how difficult it was to make economic predictions without freedom of information. He asked the Ukrainian journalists whether it was still common for companies to offer journalists bribes for favorable coverage. They shook their heads, but the Lithuanian journalist, who covered business news, said it was still very common in Lithuania. "People my age, we just say, 'No thanks, that's why I have a salary.'," she explained. We could tell this story really touched him, and it was inspiring to see how corruption could end.

-At one point, a journalist from Cairo asked a panelist how journalists could best cover events, for instance, President Mubarak's illness, to minimize economic disturbance. Her question made it clear to me how different attitudes about the job of the press are in different parts of the world.