All things will pass: Greece will recover

Nike agrees: "We are entrepreneurial and intelligent. What are we going to do, fall apart?" she asks rhetorically.

My friend Rita, who is driving us through the chic Kolonaki area cramped with Hermes and Louis Vuitton shops, is angry. "Look at these people, they are the ones responsible for the crisis," she says as she points to a tanned blond, driving her BMW convertible into her apartment's garage.

Most of the cars in Kolonaki are BMWs, Porches and Jeep 4-wheel-drives. Machine gun totting policemen, policewomen and countless doctors' suits are all part of Kolonaki's landscape.

"Most of the doctors around here declare less than 10,000 euro income a year! Less than a poor pensioner" says Rita as she vents her anger.

Petros, an English language teacher, has had a 30 per cent reduction in his salary. "In Australia, you pay taxes and you get results. You get roads, hospitals and education. Here the salaried pay taxes yet the elite end up with villas and declare a pauper's income to avoid taxes."

He tells me Greece has the largest number of privately owned luxury yachts in Europe and describes the lengths their owners go to not pay tax.

To avoid the new luxury yacht tax, imposed by the Papandreou government, Petros claims owners are declaring their yachts are used only for commercial purposes and make their offspring hirers to avoid the new tax.

Antonis, 78-years-old, lives off his savings of 100,000 euro, ($140,000AUD), but he's scared of the future. "I am better off than some," Antonis says. "But I have spent hundreds of thousands over the last three years on a kidney operation, on pharmaceuticals and my regular check-ups."

His one bedroom apartment is full of objects from a more affluent time. Oil paintings of his wife from the 1960s, a beautiful singer, adorn the walls. Kristina passed away five years ago.

"Kristina sang for Khrushchev and toured the Middle East," he says, while showing me photos of her singing to a young Gamal Abdel Nasser, the then president of a “new Egypt” in 1957.

Antonis was a sales representative selling children's clothing who, by his own admission, loved the "playboy lifestyle" in the 1960s. "I stayed in the best hotels in Europe and have played in casinos from Monte Carlo to Paris."

He takes me for a drive in his 15-year-old Citroen across the dusty, rundown neighbourhood of Patision, once an affluent Athenian area. "I never walk around here anymore, look at it!"