Customer Reviews

Culture Shock! Greece (Culture Shock! A Survival Guide to Customs & Etiquette)

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Culture Shock series describes customs and courtesies for primarily a British readership. Usually the books are written by expatriates and/or tour guides, probably the best subject matter experts one could find. Unsurprisingly, Culture Shock Greece aims to give the tourist or potential expat an overview of Greek culture and society to better assimilate. Greek culture being almost 3000 years old, certainly some aspects will change slowly if at all; this makes the "currency" of the book less of issue than, say, a travel guide. Nonetheless, although I did in fact find some of the book useful, there are some serious limitations here.

First, although my copy says "New Expanded Edition" and a copyright date of 2001, without a doubt some of the material is at least ten years old. Euros are called "ecu's", nor mention of the move from drachmae to Euros, which totally changed the pricing of commodities (crucial information for someone who may be doing business, or planning to move to Greece). Athens information is painfully inadequate and basically useless for anything except the touchy-feely impressions of the author. More importantly, zero mention of resources available on the internet.

Second, is the snide tone the author takes with American influences (considering there's almost as many Greeks living in the US and Canada as Greece he shouldn't be surprised.) Frankly, I couldn't care less what the author's views of American language and culture are-even less in a book about GREEK culture. I believe part of this attitude is present as well regarding food and drink. My experiences in Greece/Crete were that wine is considered a special treat, and the beverage of choice for most meals is beer. The author insists that wine is a standard, and beer is "outre". I've encountered wine snobbery before, and this feels like it again. Well, again, maybe ten years ago that was true-not now. The worthwhile parts of the book are the societal insights, and if one takes the infrastructure information with a huge grain of salt-is worth reading.

A true view of life in Greece. I am speaking from experience as I grew up there and planning to return to retire there also. Greece is a beautiful country that offers a great life to someone who wants to retire there and is tired of all the crime, dirty water, boring, robotic life, fake smiles etc. If LIFE is what you are looking for, then GREECE is the place, and this book gives you a lot of instructions on how to handle things there. Thank you.

As a Scandinavian who has lived in 4 different countries including Greece and Turkey, I found this book near to elementary level. It is not only misleading, but the writer has biased opinions on Turkey, history and even Greeks themselves. This is what I can say after studying East Meditarrenean for 12 years, including a BA in Greek Studies.

Rawlins (writer) mentions "Turkish aggression" when talking about Cyprus. He ignores, that this "aggression" is called defence by most historians and even Cypriots themselves. A fact that is often forgotten when talking about Cyprus, is that the "aggression" was started by the Greek government who tried to assassinate the Greek Cypriot president Makarios and join the island as a part of Greece ignoring all the international agreements as well as the human rights of the Turkish minority.

Many other things in the book are also false. The writer claims, for example, that during the Ottoman times, Greek language was prohibited and it was saved by Orthodox priests who held clandestine schools. This is not true since Greek language was never prohibited, nor it was a punishable act to speak that language. Rawlin's claims are against all research and remarks of historians. This is something an ultrapatriotic Greek would like to say, but, unfortunately it is not true, nor realistic either. It is a great wonder if a few hundred priests can save alone a language that is spoken by millions of people. Series of studies have proved that this claim is not and cannot be true.

Rawlin also gets into too many details on renting apartments, bills etc. I cannot call that culture at all.

In my opinion, this book is a piece of fairytale, written by a person who has an extremely narrow and one-sided knowledge on history, Greek culture, as well as the whole Meditarrenean.

Read this book and have a real culture shock!

I did not get a real sense about what Greece is like from reading this book. I thought this author had a very pessimistic/negative bent as well. He focused a lot on the ancient past and not much on the present. Never having been to Greece, I can't say whether this book is accurate or inaccurate but I would think the job of a guidebook is to make the reader excited about going somewhere and this book did not accomplish that.

It is impressing that the author manages to write 283 pages without giving any relevant information.

Brief and yet informative and enjoyable!