Note: this is a post I started last year. The issues remain the same, although to be fair, the Ministry of Culture has started to post its admissions policy on its website, which remains a work in progress.
I will indulge in a minor rant. As Les has indicated, we've encountered some frustration with the occasional less than helpful person. We can chalk these incidents up to various factors, including individual perversity, cultural misunderstanding, the crisis, etc. But the biggest headache for us has involved those issues for which you would think there would be standard, uniform rules. Exhibit A: admissions to sites and museums.One would expect a single clear-cut policy that applies to all sites under the control of the Ministry of Culture. Maybe they have such a policy, but we have never been able to have it clearly explained to us, or for that matter applied consistently. I remember two years ago, when we first came with the students, being very pleasantly surprised to find that their Deree IDs would get them into many sites free, or at least at the half-price student rate. We relied on that last year as well. This year, as Les has noted previously, we were told that the rules had changed. The unhelpful ticket seller at the Acropolis insisted that the students couldn't even get a student discount with their Deree IDs (which I think was nonsense, but we'd already given him our money, so he was not interested in changing our tickets for the half-price ones). We got similarly stonewalled at Delphi, although there they at least gave discounts to the students who had brought their UNF IDs. Since then, our luck has improved. Leslie has switched tactics: instead of trying to explain who we are in Greek, she speaks only in English, and that seems to make them more willing to accommodate us. At the Agora, she was able to get us all in for free; she had success at the Theater of Dionysus. What has become clear to us is that, whatever the rules may be, how we are treated depends entirely on the mood the ticket seller is in: not just did they know what the latest policy for admissions is, but have they had their coffee, do they like the look of us, are they in a hurry to get us out of their faces. The clearest demonstration of this occurred at the Acropolis Museum. Les used her Greekless approach, saying that we were eleven students and two professors and proffering all of our IDs. The ticket lady looked at the cards, and then asked us what we taught. Les, not thinking quickly enough to obfuscate, said that she was a folklorist, and I was an archaeologist. So the students got in for free (last year they'd paid the reduced student rate), I got in for free, but Les had to pay full price. Take that, folklore!
Finding this new flexibility at the Acropolis Museum was particularly surprising, as it is a structure entirely devoted to showing the world that the Greeks can be northern Europeans too. It is, after all, the only museum I have ever been to that makes you go through a metal detector and scans bags (which later need to be checked)--although I noticed that the guards paid no attention when people set off the metal detector. No explanation is given as to why they are so worried that people will try to vandalize or terrorize this particular museum, and not at any of the hundreds of other museums around Greece. Also, at this museum there is a strict no-photography policy. I have encountered this elsewhere, usually at small regional museums that have many unpublished finds. But all of the pieces in the Acropolis Museum are extremely well-known and frequently published; I myself have pictures of many of them taken at the old Acropolis Museum, where there was no ban on photography. So despite these gestures towards Teutonic strictness, it is nice to know that the ticket sellers are still capable of relying on situational ethics.
2014 update by Leslie: Akrotiri, Ancient Thera, Corinth, Mycene, Palamidi and the Acropolis all let the students in for half price when I explained in English that we were 16 students and 2 teachers from a university in America, even though the IDs were a mix of Deree and UNF. No one even questioned why there were two sets of IDs. So the rules are clearer at least on students. However, only Palamidi let Phil and me in free as teachers, though. Everyone else charged us full price.
I will indulge in a minor rant. As Les has indicated, we've encountered some frustration with the occasional less than helpful person. We can chalk these incidents up to various factors, including individual perversity, cultural misunderstanding, the crisis, etc. But the biggest headache for us has involved those issues for which you would think there would be standard, uniform rules. Exhibit A: admissions to sites and museums.One would expect a single clear-cut policy that applies to all sites under the control of the Ministry of Culture. Maybe they have such a policy, but we have never been able to have it clearly explained to us, or for that matter applied consistently. I remember two years ago, when we first came with the students, being very pleasantly surprised to find that their Deree IDs would get them into many sites free, or at least at the half-price student rate. We relied on that last year as well. This year, as Les has noted previously, we were told that the rules had changed. The unhelpful ticket seller at the Acropolis insisted that the students couldn't even get a student discount with their Deree IDs (which I think was nonsense, but we'd already given him our money, so he was not interested in changing our tickets for the half-price ones). We got similarly stonewalled at Delphi, although there they at least gave discounts to the students who had brought their UNF IDs. Since then, our luck has improved. Leslie has switched tactics: instead of trying to explain who we are in Greek, she speaks only in English, and that seems to make them more willing to accommodate us. At the Agora, she was able to get us all in for free; she had success at the Theater of Dionysus. What has become clear to us is that, whatever the rules may be, how we are treated depends entirely on the mood the ticket seller is in: not just did they know what the latest policy for admissions is, but have they had their coffee, do they like the look of us, are they in a hurry to get us out of their faces. The clearest demonstration of this occurred at the Acropolis Museum. Les used her Greekless approach, saying that we were eleven students and two professors and proffering all of our IDs. The ticket lady looked at the cards, and then asked us what we taught. Les, not thinking quickly enough to obfuscate, said that she was a folklorist, and I was an archaeologist. So the students got in for free (last year they'd paid the reduced student rate), I got in for free, but Les had to pay full price. Take that, folklore!
Finding this new flexibility at the Acropolis Museum was particularly surprising, as it is a structure entirely devoted to showing the world that the Greeks can be northern Europeans too. It is, after all, the only museum I have ever been to that makes you go through a metal detector and scans bags (which later need to be checked)--although I noticed that the guards paid no attention when people set off the metal detector. No explanation is given as to why they are so worried that people will try to vandalize or terrorize this particular museum, and not at any of the hundreds of other museums around Greece. Also, at this museum there is a strict no-photography policy. I have encountered this elsewhere, usually at small regional museums that have many unpublished finds. But all of the pieces in the Acropolis Museum are extremely well-known and frequently published; I myself have pictures of many of them taken at the old Acropolis Museum, where there was no ban on photography. So despite these gestures towards Teutonic strictness, it is nice to know that the ticket sellers are still capable of relying on situational ethics.
2014 update by Leslie: Akrotiri, Ancient Thera, Corinth, Mycene, Palamidi and the Acropolis all let the students in for half price when I explained in English that we were 16 students and 2 teachers from a university in America, even though the IDs were a mix of Deree and UNF. No one even questioned why there were two sets of IDs. So the rules are clearer at least on students. However, only Palamidi let Phil and me in free as teachers, though. Everyone else charged us full price.
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