Chi-Ray

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  Athens, Attica, Greece
Monday, November 3, 2008

Today's intercultural excursion was a trip to the Greek doctor's office. After I failed to make it through more than an hour of teaching this morning, Sage and Lovely Lithe encouraged me to cancel class and get some medical help.

Lithe drove me to see a private English-speaking doctor. Doctors' offices in Athens are often located in residential apartment buildings. There's a dentist who works on the floor above my apartment, for instance. Sometimes I can hear teeth being drilled. At any rate, the doctor listened to my cough with a stethoscope and ordered chest x-rays.

Lithe immediately took me to the radiology place, located in another apartment building. You have to pay in cash before they'll do the x-rays. Or at least I had to, I'm not entirely clear on whether or not Greece has a system of socialized medicine for its citizens

Coughing up a lung

. X-rays are uncomfortable things in whatever country you have them taken. I couldn't really see any protective lead barriers anywhere, so I have no idea how much radiation I was exposed to or whether the radiologist glows green in the dark.

Ten minutes later, the radiologist handed me my own x-rays, and we brought them back to the doctor's office. The doctor had no lightbox, he just held the x-rays up to the pendant light hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Just a part of his do-it-yourself establishment. Patients would buzz at the front door to be let into the building for an appointment, and the doctor would press the button himself to let them in. And he collected his fee from me in cash and made change out of his own wallet. I got to keep the x-rays as a souvenir.

The doctor decided it's bronchitis. He prescribed an antibiotic, an antihistamine, cough syrup, and a bronchial inhaler. Lovely Lithe took me to the pharmacy and then delivered me straight to my door. I took the first round of all four meds and fell into bed for a nap.

I'm going to veg out in front of the TV and doze for the rest of the evening. Right now I'm watching the Greek equivalent of the Home Shopping Network. The jewelry they're selling looks a little gaudy for American tastes, and there's a heavy emphasis on gold to the exclusion of silver, but I'm not saying I wouldn't buy it. The production value is also a little more homey than the beloved QVC -- it's great fun to hear the director shouting off camera and phones ringing in the background as the saleswoman makes her pitch.

Later I'll tune in to Channel 14's exciting evening lineup of antique Who's the Boss and The Nanny reruns subtitled in Greek. Last night as I lay hacking, I watched The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. The plot of the film hinges on a Welsh hill that is twenty feet too low to qualify for mountain status on an English map, so the villagers decide to add twenty feet of soil to the top. But in the Greek subtitles, all the talk of feet had been converted to meters.

They don't have as many commercial breaks on Greek TV, so on the American shows you can tell there's a cut between Act I and Act II where a commercial would have gone in the States, but no commercials have been inserted there in Greece. Because of this difference in the number of commercials, shows begin at random times when the last one ended, rather than uniformly on the hour or half hour.

I'll sign off now, Tony Danza is calling.

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