Helicopter

9 March - Helicopter

If the Greeks today would have to vote between the two main Greek parties PASOK and ND (Neo Demokratia) a majority would have voted for no party at all. The Greeks have lost their faith in all their political leaders and you just have to say ‘helicoptero’ and they will have a big laugh.

Instead of looking at the very long political discussions on the news the Greeks now are hooked on the weather forecast. Which is kind of dull these days, because it is only clouds, showers and when you are lucky some bit of sun. Temperatures are between 6 and 20oC. The winter, although it is spring, keeps on plodding with rain showers, grey skies and sun.

Even the sand of the Sahara did arrive already. And that did not come from the Sahara of Limnos, like is called the sand dunes of the neighboring island of Lesvos, neither did it come from the sand dunes at the beach of Kampos, not far from Gavathas. Each spring here in Greece there come sand clouds from the African desert. They love to sprinkle everything in a red dust. Last week we had such a day that the sky was covered in dust and thanks to a storm from the south it took only one day to disappear, further to the North on their way more into Europe.

The Greeks do not follow the weather forecast because the nowadays politics are less trustworthy than the weather forecast. They all watch the weather forecast on the television channel STAR, because it is presented by a real Star-weather woman: Petroula.

Petroula Kostidou is not really a weather woman, she is more a sexy stand-up comedian, who just like Lakis Lazopoulos, the anchorman of the popular satiric program Al Tsantiri News on Alpha tv, makes fun of everything and everybody. Each night at five to nine Petroula appears on the screen in another sexy outfit in front of the weather map of the country and chats like a housewife drinking sherry about life and the weather in Greece. At the end of her five minutes show, giggling like a schoolgirl, wiggling her backside in a too small dress she lays her hand under the temperatures that she has to read as a weather woman.

The talk of the day is not about what weather we are getting, but about what Petroula was wearing and about who she made fun of. The bigger the chaos in Greece, the more the Greeks and Petroula and Lakis Lazopoulos have fun. Each political misfit is a beautiful target, like the escape of the criminal Palaiokosta and his mate from the prison of Korydallos by helicopter. This last word did lose its common meaning of a flying means of transport, it now means a big joke about the failure of the government.

Petroula used this news item already one day after the Big Escape on 23-02-2009 and Lakis Lazopoulos nowadays sends his show from a helicopter platform in his studio where a small helicopter flies over the heads of the public.

I saw Petroula already a few times on television, but never thought that this was a serious weather forecast. Only seeing the carnival parading through Molyvos with a car depicting a weather station with Lela Petroula, did I realize how deep Petroula already entered the Greek society.

The crisis does not yet seem to have reached the Greeks, although there are daily plenty of disaster forecasts like that this year there will not be enough tourists. And each time when the government fails, they just make jokes about it. Helikoptero! I am happy that the Greeks can find so much humor in their own misery.