The only thing we learned about economics is that a dollar will not buy a euro,
probably never again. Carroll did not like this. We hear every day from Washington that a
weak dollar is good for America; it promotes exports. Somehow in my gut
this doesn't settle. Everywhere I go at home I see the word China. In two
weeks of traveling abroad, the only American product I saw was a beat up
Ford sedan with a flat tire. Anyway, this was not a business trip. It was
a combined wedding anniversary and birthday. Let's be discreet and not
discuss numbers.
What surprised me? The Greeks grow lots of olives, but they
don't eat many of them. If you want olives in a Greek restaurant, it's a
special order. Go figure. Incidentally it takes a thousand olive trees to
produce 10,000 dollars in income.
What impressed me? Well, there were the old things, and there
were the new things.
In one room in Istanbul I saw the walking stick of Moses, the
skull of John the Baptist, and the footprint of Mohammad. There they were,
the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic, about thirty feet apart. We
don't get confluence like that very often. Some folks will dispute the
authenticity of there artifacts, but I'm pretty comfortable with the
situation. Belief is in the eye of the believer.
We also visited the spot from which the Apostle Paul preached to
the Ephesians and the island on which John wrote the Book of Revelations.
There was Biblical history all around us. To be truthful, I had read the
guide books and was pretty well prepared for the ancient world. Certainly
there were a few surprises. A fellow trying to sell me a Persian rug
explained why the symbols on many old world rugs are identical to symbols on
our American Navaho rugs. Cultural anthropology is powerful stuff. For
your information, if it is knotted, it is a rug. If it is woven, it is a
kilimn.
And now for a modern moment. We checked into our first hotel-it
was in Athens. Just like in every hotel in America, we were given a plastic
credit-card-looking key. It opened the room door, but that's not all. Once
you opened the door, you placed the same key in a wall slot. This activated
electricity for the room. Think about it: when you left the room, you
removed the key so that you could get back into the room later on. All
electricity was instantly shut off. Can you imagine how much electricity is
wasted when people exit their hotel rooms with lights and fans ticking away?
I wish we could say an American invented this. I don't think it is so.
I just want to mention one more thing. It's sort of modern and
ancient at the same time.
We were on the Isle of Crete exploring the re-discovery and
restoration of a Minoan Palace. No one knows much about the Minoans, but
they abandoned this palace about three thousand years ago. There were
frescoes and giant clay pots, amphora I think they call them. There were
storage rooms and worship rooms. There was an impressive parade area and a
superb device for destroying litter. But what caught my eye was the drain
pipe coming out of the queen's bathroom. It was three thousand years old,
and I kid you not, it was identical to the ones we have been digging up out
on Blankenship Drive for the last two weeks. That's right, a six inch terra
cotta water pipe.
If there is a moral to this story, it is this: we need to hang
on to the old things that work well and not be fearful of the new things
that might have merit. We'll never get our arms around all of it anyway.
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