The Mad Greek(s)

My wife and I traveled recently to a neighboring state for a week-long getaway.  We stopped by several places to eat and use restrooms.  Although we currently live in a city having people from different backgrounds, traveling can also surprise you with the variety of people one could run into.

There’s a great Greek restaurant in Baker, California, where we stopped for a bite to eat.  The gyros were fantastic and the service was friendly.  We saw people from practically all over the United States and the world.  Baker is a small town between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.  I told my wife I wanted to stop here for a meal on our way back home because I really liked the beef and lamb gyro I had; meat was tender, marinated nicely and cooked how I like it.

This particular Greek restaurant has “welcome” all over the ceiling written in different languages.  They also have a wall overlooking the condiments table which lists all the famous Greeks of times past along with some recent celebrity Greeks.  It was quite interesting to read all of the philosophers, statesmen, thinkers, leaders and so on which today make up the western cultural conscience.  If you are not Greek by heritage you are surely Greek by cultural standards.  

What was quite interesting to recall was the fact that one of our conversations early on in our trip was about how today’s western law science is derived from the Greeks.  I was telling my wife how those Greek thinkers came up with the notion of what was right and wrong according to their experience and their reading of histories and cultures past.  Although the notion of God was spread among theists, atheists and many ‘gods’ as is Today, the notion of consciousness was present in life.