The Garbage Strike is Over, Thank Heaven

Monday, June 15, 2009

Around here, there is a different arrangement for trash and garbage than we have in Richmond. In Richmond, every household has its own garbage can(s) and we hire one of several companies to come around and empty them every week.

Here in Thessaloniki, there are dumpsters at every intersection (almost) and everybody takes his trash and garbage in bags or boxes and tosses these into the dumpsters. The garbage trucks come around every day or every night, depending upon your neighborhood.

Well, the garbage workers have been on strike for a week now. They are distressed about the site of the dump. I don’t know why. Perhaps for ecological reasons. Perhaps they are quite right. I don’t know. All I know is, a garbage strike in June is not pleasant. With small mountains of garbage building up everywhere, several times what the dumpsters can hold, this city has become increasingly stinky for several days now.

I also don’t know what ended the strike. (Our television has died, so we don’t hear news.) But it’s over, and what a relief!

I spent the day putting the house back into order. After the fact that you miss your company, that’s the second worst part of having them leave – or the only good part, depending upon your point of view. The disorder resulted from our having removed so much of our stuff from the master bedroom, which we gave to them for the duration. Also from not having had time to fold and put away all the laundry we had to do, and also from having too much laundry because the kitten – well, kitty cried and cried to go outside and I have no idea why we were stupid enough not to let him, but he in desperation scraped together a few layers of a bed sheet and used that instead of his litter box. And after that, he thought that was an acceptable alternate place. So we went through three times as many bed sheets as would have been necessary…

I still have the floors to wash, the refrigerator to clean out, and the bathroom to scrub, but at least there is order now. As Demetrios remarked, “The house almost has back its former shape.” Yup.