To give you home-stayers a bit of a taste of how the authorities work around here, I'll use the simplest of tasks to demonstrate this gem of experience: picking up the transit log we dropped off at the customs when we left last year December.
Here we go: I walked into the customs office with the receipt for the transit log ready and was directed to a man behind a desk. He wasn't very happy to see me, you could tell, and he pointed at another desk an mumbled something along the lines of 'that lady'.
However, there was no lady and when I pointed that out in the most friendly way at my disposal, he pointed at a chair with the command 'wait'. After about half an hour I asked if he knew where the lady was. He got up and left the room for a while to return a couple of minutes later. It was not clear if he had tried to locate the lady in question or had called his mother to inform her what he wanted for his lunch. After another 15 minutes of no-show and some increasingly undeniable signs of growing impatience in the form of tapping, coughing and whistling while studying the ceiling from me, he surrendered. 'I will help you' and he did. He unearthed the requested document within about 47 seconds, just as the lady walked in. So I was dispatched to her. My impression was that she had even less of a grasp of the required administrative rituals than I have and a long and winding dialog with the aforementioned man emanated. Part of the problem seemed that adding 6 months (validity of the transit log) to the current date was not a trivial task for a civil servant class 3 (I guess). But after more dialog it was resolved. With this hurdle out of the way I was given a piece of paper with the instruction 'upstairs, get a number'. After having dealt with Greek admin personnel before, I understood that asking for more information was a waste of time and ultimately a waste of the emotional energy, already needed to finish the task at hand. After aimlessly wandering through the building I found stairs, climbed them and found a clutch of women in conversation (or verbal battle, I couldn't tell). This was daunting, you wouldn't intrude on an ongoing discussion in Greece! But it turned out to be an unfounded fear. The lady behind the (rare) computer screen instantly knew what I needed, found something in het computer, scribbled on my 'Francis was sick yesterday' note that was given to me downstairs, and looked triumphantly at the accomplishment. I was completely flabbergasted as the whole thing had only taken less than a minute and I had already gone into a meditational trance that I now use to survive these admin-task encounters.
Anyway, like a homing pigeon I found my way down to the original lady civil servant and handed her my now validated sick-note. She seemed content with it and stated to unearth my transit log, now buried under about 300 other pieces of paper (did I explain that these department work almost exclusively on paper records?) and she started to discuss the next steps with her colleague. Eventually the rubber stamps came out and I knew I was on the home stretch. Some quite energetic stamping followed. There was hardly any ink on the cushion and I expected to be dismissed without transit log with the message to come back after the Greek economy had sufficiently recovered to afford ink for its civil servants. But I was in luck, after several rubber stampings were performed, and overrun by scribbles and signatures in pen, I was given back what was originally mine: our transit log, our legal portal to Greek waters.

Epilogue: even though my grasp on the Greek language is ashamedly abominable and I need to put in much more effort, I do not believe that having a firmer grasp on the language would make much of a difference. It is the same for the Greeks themselves and we have spent many side-splitting hours with Greek friends recounting their own experiences. Maybe it is the result of Greek's defiance of rules, triggering more rules, which need to be defied (ad infinitum), and as such a essentially Greek situation. Strangely enough, this makes these experiences much easier, even interesting, to me.
At times I feel in Kafka's 'The Trial' and think of what great stories I can tell over dinner next time.