Elections

View from my balcony: Saturday market to the left and primary school on the right (where the elections took place)

Sunday, 6th May 2012. Elections in Greece. The world is coming to an end...

Nice Sea View

No - just kidding :) Yesterday we had governmental elections here. Since we live right across from a primary school we also had the primary location to watch this spectacle. In Greece you vote from dawn until dusk; meaning from 7am to 7pm.
As it is our pleasure by now to know fairly many laywers we were allowed to watch the elections from a closer vicinity. Ok, for some of you this might sound like the normal procedure of an election, but since I have never been voting (I know shame on me, but I was always out of the country), I don't know any better:
All classrooms in a school are divided into diffrent name departments (e.g. A-E, F-H etc.). So when the voters go to the room according to their surname they first present their ID (often looking like fake certificate from before war times) to the secretary. The secretary (in our case also a lawyer, but does not have to be) checks the ID for validity, then crosses off the name of a list (we had about 600 names listed) and copies all the information again into another journal. The ID is then passed on to the actually lawyer, who keeps the ID and gives a stamped and signed (by him) envelope to the voter. The elector then proceeds to collect flyers of parties and waits until it is his turn to vote in the booth (which looks very provisionally: blue fold up curtains). Then the envelope is thrown into the ballot box. Its crack in the meantime is always covered with something (so nothing else can be thrown in there). As soon as the envelope is "submitted" the ID is returned and the voter leaves.

Yummy :)

It is not allowed to have more than two people waiting before the booth, the rest of the crowd needs to wait at the door step. Things start getting hilarious when people ask a casillion times if you are responsible for the department δ - κ (delta - kappa --> D - K) and it says it on a huge sign outside the room. Oh well... :) All in all a very fun day. Because I did not want to let the laywers starve (they were not allowed to leave the room) I baked some raisin and nutella snakes :)



Since about 3 weeks we always have a market outside our house on Saturdays. Although it starts quite ealry and is therefore very loud, it is also convenient. This is how it looks like :) Guess what? Of course, I love it!!! :)

#Fun Fact of today#
1. Greeks love hand sanitizer...