After Orienteering last Sunday I went looking for gas and found - nothing. As I don't tend to pay much attention to the Greek papers (it's usually the same soap opera for months at a time), and can't bear to watch the news, I neglected to understand the gravity of a trucker's strike. Yup - those long lines of trucks backed up onto the freeway actually did signal something - the end of deliveries, for a while at least, of just about everything. And while we are pretty well stocked with toilet paper, frozen peas, diapers and beer, the gas tank had plunged to reserve. (All those trips back and forth to "our tree" (see post about carnival etc.) have made our weekly gas consumption double, but I'm not used to thinking about filling it up so often.)
Imagine my surprise when eco-friendly Ado & Chris suddenly find that they are just as dependent on petroleum as the rest of the world! No gas, no travel, at least not anywhere outside the city.
When we lived in Berkeley, Chris started musing about converting our car to biodiesel with a kit that allows your engine to run on used cooking oil. (I think the Ecology Center uses it for it's Recycling trucks, and there were a couple of other folks who had started to promote it as well.) Cute, I thought, and a bit weird, but when gas prices hit $2 a gallon it didn't sound so bad after all. Then we moved here, and didn't have a car for the first year, which was kind of nice in itself, especially when you consider the parking problems in the city. But for the last four years we've watched gas prices go up up up (they're still 20% higher than in the US - even at $4/gallon!) - the average price before the strike last week was 1.07 euros / liter, which translates to about 45 euros to fill the tank on our Toyota. The weekend saw the price shoot up - I saw 1.30 in some places - as the stations took advantage of the get-out-of-town-at-any-cost Saturday morning rush. (So maybe it's a good thing I didn't get the seriousness of it and fill up!) Anyhow, things are suddenly starting to look a little, well, different. And our hippy Berkeley roots are starting to seem a bit, well (dare I say it??) forward thinking...
When we lived in Berkeley, Chris started musing about converting our car to biodiesel with a kit that allows your engine to run on used cooking oil. (I think the Ecology Center uses it for it's Recycling trucks, and there were a couple of other folks who had started to promote it as well.) Cute, I thought, and a bit weird, but when gas prices hit $2 a gallon it didn't sound so bad after all. Then we moved here, and didn't have a car for the first year, which was kind of nice in itself, especially when you consider the parking problems in the city. But for the last four years we've watched gas prices go up up up (they're still 20% higher than in the US - even at $4/gallon!) - the average price before the strike last week was 1.07 euros / liter, which translates to about 45 euros to fill the tank on our Toyota. The weekend saw the price shoot up - I saw 1.30 in some places - as the stations took advantage of the get-out-of-town-at-any-cost Saturday morning rush. (So maybe it's a good thing I didn't get the seriousness of it and fill up!) Anyhow, things are suddenly starting to look a little, well, different. And our hippy Berkeley roots are starting to seem a bit, well (dare I say it??) forward thinking...
For now, the pumps are back on again, and as our neighbor gas-guy said this morning, "if people hadn't panicked so much, the supply would have lasted at least a week longer" (go figure!!). But I am beginning to wonder if maybe those used-oil-in-your-engine-kits aren't such a bad idea. Just think - a town that smells not of diesel and exhaust fumes, but calamari! Sit in traffic and breath in the ripeness of cheese fritters! Pull up to the back of any friendly taverna and tell 'em to fill it up - and eat lunch while you're waiting!! 'Cause while the lorry drivers may go on strike, the french fry cookers never will...
1 comment:
Oh, I'm sorry that I didn't see this post sooner. I'm with you, we don't really pay attention to the news too much. When Kosta's sister left here that Sunday and said that she needed to fill up because of a strike, he really thought that she was over-reacting. Go figure. Anyway, I think that if there was a demand for used cooking oil as fuel...it would eventually be exploited also. But in the beginning...you'd be way ahead of the majority of the population. I think that Willie Nelson fuels his buses by using biodiesel, not a fan, but he's cool for leading the way. I think that I'd get hungry if the city smelled of calamari & cheese fritters all of the time, kinda like driving by a Burger King or Taco Bell for me. :)
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