The silence of the lambs
It is Easter time here in Greece, and lambs are "sacrificed" as part of a ritual lost in the depths of time. But I am not talking about these lambs. A surrealist event happened in Bethlehem in mid April, two tourists (from Japan) arrived complete with plastic water bottles, guide books and cameras, to visit the Church of the Nativity, that Christians and Muslims consider as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The tourists had been travelling for 6 months and had not listened to any news on the radio or read any papers. Their upbeat guidebooks could not inform them that this was the very church where 200 people were besieged by a powerful army for 4 weeks. The taxi driver that dropped them off a kilometre away did not bother telling them either, and they did not bother asking him...Tourism, even independent travel, tends to produce surrealism as it regularly brings the underprivileged, the miserable and the oppressed face to face with the better-off , and also because of language, religion and cultural barriers. Looked at from another point of view, the Bethlehem tourists naivety emphasized the bigger surrealism and barbarity of war. It also showed that real tourist has to be politically informed. Tourism does not take place in a vacuum and it should not be about visiting empty historic and natural monuments, and ticking items off your list. It is about communicating with others like you and others unlike you. It could be great if every single person on this planet could have the financial means and free time for quality travel, to visit and be visited, to be free to work abroad, to go back home, to talk and listen to different people across the world so as to open both sides' minds and hearts. This is something for the leaders of this world to ponder on, how to open borders for people to travel and to work, and not just open borders for the multinationals. Currently there are visa payments for some and visa restrictions for others, austerity packages and holiday packages, operas for the few and soap operas for the many, border checks for the poor and border cheques for the affluent, ghettoes and tourist ghettoes, divisive dogmas, tabloid hysteria, bodyguards and Le Pens. Speaking of whom, Nature staged her own symbolic protest against the rise of xenophobia in Europe:  In mid April, skiers on the Swiss Alps near the French border were covered with a dusting of sand from the Sahara desert. Around 80,000 tonnes of the reddish brown sand fell from the skies onto slopes. Geneva's meteorological office explained that rising water vapour sucked the sand up into huge clouds in Algeria and Morocco. Then, an atmospheric depression carried the clouds along the eastern Spanish coast and up the Rhone Valley in France, nature sees no borders.

Cum Grano Salis
" Good stewardship means understanding the consequences of our actions, and convincing others to not needlessly destroy our environment " - U.S. President George Bush, Earth Day 2002.