Keeping up with the news whilst in Greece

On my last trip to Greece I made an extra effort to travel light.  My bag did not weigh that much less than usual.  But I did "evict" some of the things I usually take to Greece.  My small travelling radio was one of the things I evicted.  With a laptop and a Cosmote dongle, I could get internet access wherever and whenever I wanted it.  So I did not need the radio to keep up with the news - there was a time when I would have said that not keeping up with the news was one of the charms of being abroad.  I did not need the radio for music - if I wanted to listen to music, I could use my laptop.  Another benefit of the radio - in theory - is that it has an alarm.  But this radio does not have a buzzer, only a radio alarm.  I would only use an alarm in Greece if I had a ferry or plane to catch early in the morning.  But not knowing which radio channels would be broadcasting at 4 in the morning meant that the radio alarm was useless as a back up to my travelling alarm clock.  So the radio was evicted from my luggage.

In Athens you can get today's English papers later in the day; on the islands they arrive next day, if there is a boat.  And in low season or on islands with few tourists there are likely to be no foreign language papers on sale. 

I prefer buying papers published in Greek in English to buying foreign papers.  The International Herald Tribune is published every day but Sunday, and includes a section at the back of the Greek paper Ekathimerini in English.  And Athens News is published in English every Friday.  You can read Ekathimerini and Athens News online (and although the paper version of Athens News is weekly, the website is regularly updated.

Buying a paper on a Greek island does bring problems you don't get on the mainland.  On one small island I found the newspaper rack empty - this was soon after the local boat arrived, and newly delivered newspapers would usually be on sale.  The shopkeeper told me that there had been a "small problem" on the boat, and the papers were on a rack in the back room being dried!

Another source of news is TV - but although the Greek rooms I stay in now usually have TV, I rarely watch it (I don't watch TV at home either).  I do sometimes watch TV in tavernas.  I've noticed that the TV and speaker in a taverna is rarely switched to the same station.  In bigger tavernas or cafes there can be two, three or more screens.  When a football match is on, all screens and the sound are usually synchronised.  But otherwise all screens are often tuned to different stations, and the sound switched to yet another station!