A taste of tear-gas

This morning some policeman waved me away from Syntagma Square, which I usually walk through on the way from my flat to the dig. Behind them there were half a dozen big armoured police vans. When I was walking home this afternoon I couldn't get anywhere near Syntagma since there were so many people. In the distance though I could see the banners of a demonstration up near the parliament building. As I skirted the square I saw lots of people making signs and one man at a stall selling Greek flags and whistles, apparently useful equipment if you want to join a protest. All the cafes I walked by were even fuller than normal, with people talking animatedly over coffee. People were stopping outside of newspaper stands to read the front pages of all the domestic newspapers. I couldn't really figure out exactly what was happening though until I got home and looked at the BBC website. Parliament was going to be voting on a new set of austerity measures that had to be met to guarantee a bailout from the EU or IMF, and the unions had called a general strike in reaction. The article said the police used tear gas on the protestors but I didn't see any violence at all, only a bunch of people enjoying an extra day off.

Later on when I went out to find a cafe where I could read and have my usual late afternoon frappé (a cold coffee popular here), the picture was quite different. As I walked down towards Panepistimiou, which runs into Syntagma Square, I could hear what sounded like gunshots, except slightly deeper - what I imagine mortar or artillery fire must sound like. When I got to Panepistimiou there were crowds of people looking over at Syntagma, trying to get a view of the protests and the clashes with police, but obviously not wanting to get too close to the action. I passed a Japanese couple who looked startled by the sudden explosions; there was a Greek man sitting on the curb smoking and saying to them, 'None of this will affect you' in English. Around this time I began to notice that a lot of people looked like they had colds, with red eyes and runny noses, and a lot of people also had handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, or even had part of their shirts covering the lower halves of the their faces. Then I passed a bunch of policemen with gas-masks on and simultaneously started to feel like sneezing, like someone had just thrown ground pepper on my face. By this time I'd realized that I and the people around me were suffering the mild effects of the tear-gas used by the police in front of Parliament, and wafted over to where we were standing, not 500 meters away. The next morning around 6, as I walked through a Syntagma covered with rubbish and surrounded by shops with smashed windows, the sharp scent of the stuff was still lingering in the air.