Getting A Little Warmer

As many of you may have seen on the news today, Athens had quite a day.  The first Pan-Hellenic strike under the new coalition government led to massive protests in the streets.  This protest has been planned for weeks and we all knew it would happen.  It was however, meant to be peaceful.  The articles on the New York Times website show pictures of police on fire, citizens hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails, and people running away from tear gas.  While the protest did get ugly for about ten minutes, the news outlets are overreacting a bit.  99.9% of the 50,000 lining Syntagma Square were peaceful and organized groups of people.  So for any of you worried about me or Greece, we're both fine.

I live about five minutes away from the Greek Parliament, where the protests happened.  We walked past the area in the morning and saw the thousands of people.  Around 1:00 it got a little ugly.  We were watching the live feed online as we saw a militant group of people throwing Molotov cocktails towards police and lighting a tent on fire.  The police responded quickly by throwing tear gas and arresting over 100 people.  After it looked like it was winding down, Aaron, Adam, and I decided to check it out a bit closer.

We walked through the National Gardens where police were stationed every ten feet or so.  Most of the shops in the area were boarded up for the day.  As soon as we got close to the main square the tear gas hit us.  Our eyes burned and watered and our throats became soar.  We took a back way around to the square to avoid the gas and arrived at Parliament around 3:30.  Everyone had dispersed but signs of the riot were everywhere.  Tear gas in the air, garbage burned on the street, litter everywhere, all shops closed up.  It was a bit eerie.  We took a shaky video on Adam's phone to show the situation.  We uploaded it to CNN and they featured it on their iReport.  Adam is holding the camera, I'm narrating.  Here's the link:
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-849029

Don't worry about me though, we made sure the square was safe before going there.  Here's a few pics from the day:

Walking towards the square

Burned trash at Syntagma

Plenty of cops riding through the park.