When getting a tcp packet from USA than a local ISP is faster...

Today i decided to update our desktop linux machines to the latest and greatest Ubuntu version (8.10).
I was using it for sometime on my laptop and decided it would not break anything so it was time for an upgrade.
Since Digital-OPSiS office is in Athens, Greece,we use gr.archieve.ubuntu.com as a repo to pull updates etc.
I noticed that the download speed was not that great so i switched one of the machines to use the use the US mirror instead... and it took about 40% less time to download the same packages...
Doing a simple ping to the gr and us mirrors cleared things a bit more.

stelios@DIAS-Linux:~$ ping gr.archive.ubuntu.com
PING patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211): icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=197 ms
64 bytes from patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211): icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=199 ms
64 bytes from patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211): icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=201 ms
64 bytes from patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211): icmp_seq=4 ttl=58 time=197 ms
64 bytes from patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211): icmp_seq=5 ttl=58 time=194 ms
64 bytes from patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211): icmp_seq=6 ttl=58 time=202 ms
64 bytes from patroklos.noc.ntua.gr (147.102.222.211): icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=204 ms

--- patroklos.noc.ntua.gr ping statistics ---
7 packets transmitted, 7 received, 0% packet loss, time 5998ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 194.562/199.653/204.150/3.273 ms

stelios@DIAS-Linux:~$ ping us.archive.ubuntu.com
PING us.archive.ubuntu.com (91.189.88.31) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from leningradskaya.canonical.com (91.189.88.31): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=90.2 ms
64 bytes from leningradskaya.canonical.com (91.189.88.31): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=89.9 ms
64 bytes from leningradskaya.canonical.com (91.189.88.31): icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=90.3 ms
64 bytes from leningradskaya.canonical.com (91.189.88.31): icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=89.5 ms
64 bytes from leningradskaya.canonical.com (91.189.88.31): icmp_seq=5 ttl=54 time=89.1 ms
64 bytes from leningradskaya.canonical.com (91.189.88.31): icmp_seq=6 ttl=54 time=88.6 ms

--- us.archive.ubuntu.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 1998ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 88.453/89.106/90.142/0.816 ms

It looks like it takes 2.5 times more time to reach the local Athens uni, where the mirror is than the US mirror.
I was aware that there are capacity issues at the AIX the Greek providers are using for interconnecting but this is really ridiculous...