Graffiti in Athens

It’s about time I wrote something about graffiti and street art in Athens. There have been so many cool articles about it already, that it seems kind of redundant – yet, I felt like writing something about a new and very controversial graffiti which appeared on the Polytechnic University recently.

Just to give a brief background, the graffiti scene in Athens has become bigger and bigger in recent years. As I have met a few graffiti artists in Athens, I feel a little closer to the whole scene. But it’s not like graffiti is a new thing – far from it. There was graffiti in ancient times, and apparently graffiti was used in the 1930s to convey secret messages. After all, the word “graffiti” comes from a Greek word…

In my personal opinion, modern graffiti is a great addition to urbanscapes. It adds colour to the city, and gives an artistic touch. That said, not all graffiti is nice, and not all graffiti artists are talented. I personally dislike the so called “tagging”, irrespective of the message it conveys – obviously some mottos are clever, but still I don’t like what I personally classify as a smudge. Besides, much of the tagging is all about the person’s name, and I personally can’t see how this could convey an important message.

When the news broke out about a huge graffiti that covered the Polytechnic University, I knew that was something I had to go and see. Before going, I read a few articles with different people’s opinions – some people liked it, some people hated it.

And there I was, standing in front of it. Woah!

My first reactions – big, ugly, a “smudge”, “how the hell did they make it”.

My later reactions… Well – it’s not like I am an expert on social movement media. BUT, although I can clearly see the signification of such a massive graffiti on one of the most important buildings of Athens’ modern history (we are talking about the Polytechnic University after all!), I disagree with this particular building being “vandalised”. Plus, this “smudge” would have looked much better on a different type of building – like a word-down building falling to pieces. But then… the “message” wouldn’t have been the same.

For some academic views, you can check out pages 408-412 of this report 🙂

Time flies…

…when you are having a good time.

So, my fella has been in Athens for a month now… wow!

Within this month I have tried a lot of new cooking, especially using new “things” (whose names I don’t necessarily know).

I have also managed to show him a bit of Athens (but the weather has been bad, on the whole, which has been our excuse for lazying around).

We still don’t have a picture together – that should be amended soon 😛

We are never too old…

A couple of weeks have passed since my English boyfriend moved in. Things are going surprisingly well, all things considered (my OCD, the fact that Greeks and English have different cleaning standards, the fact that I’ve never lived with someone before apart from flatmates, the fact that he wants a cuppa every morning etc etc).

So we (well, I) thought it would be nice to go meet my parents, who were obviously quite eager to meet him.

Now my parents have only met two of my boyfriends, and the last one was around 2002, so it’s not something I do everyday – more like once every decade. And it’s a thing that makes me slightly nervous – and obviously now there was an extra difficulty, my bloke doesn’t speak Greek (despite my huuuuuuuuuge efforts) and I don’t think he will in the foreseeable future (though his accent is pretty good).

We watched “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” before we went to visit – not that my family is a lot like that, but still I thought it would be a funny movie to watch together. In retrospect, we should really have watched it afterwards. Oh well.

So there we were, on our way to “Meet the Parents”, wondering if it was too late to turn around and pretend we were sick, we had a flat tire or something similar. But in the end we got there.

To be honest, it’s been a while since I had seen mom and dad so happy. I guess all parents want their children to be happy, which is fair enough and quite cool.

So we had some green tea, to begin with, and then some of my mom’s tiropita and spanakopita – you can’t really go to a Greek parents’ house and not leave with a full stomach. That was followed by some red wine… and lots of talking about nothing and everything – weather, family, sports, travelling and so on.

But that was not all.

As some of you know, I have a grandma. She will be 99 next month, and is a little blind and a little deaf (but her mind still works fine). So I asked her if she wanted to meet him. She hesitated at first, as “she wasn’t dressed up”… but in the end curiosity won, and she decided she wants to meet him.

So I thought… why don’t I teach her how to say “γεια σου” (= hello) in English.

She initially found the thought amusing, but she gave it a go. After three or four efforts, she got it right. “Hello” – with a Greek accent, but it was absolutely crystal clear.

So they met, and she was smiling the whole time.

And then, when we were leaving, she asked me how to say “αντίο” (goodbye) 🙂

We are never too old to try new things!

P.S. Meeting the parents was not too bad after all 🙂

New year, new decisions, new life

Hello everyone (I believe there are about two people, at least, who still follow my blog)…

If you are reading this you probably know who I am, and a little bit about me. You know that I used to live in London, and you know that I used to be very active on a hospitality exchange website called Couchsurfing (if you’ve never heard about it, you probably come from some faraway planet), and that all this interaction with foreigners and travellers made me want to travel the world. Which I did for a few years, planning short trips to (mostly) European countries, and meeting new interesting people, tasting lots of nice food, and “expanding my horizons”, as they say.

In July 2011 I met a guy, from Brazil. Yes, a guy. I’ve never written anything about him in public, and I won’t really start now, but well, it was someone I met (on couchsurfing, not surprisingly), hosted and decided to meet again. He said he wanted to meet again, so we started thinking about it a little more seriously.

Now Brazil had always been extremely high on my list of places to go to, and – in retrospect – that guy gave me an excuse to actually take the decision. So I asked for a year off work, I gave my home keys to my cousin, I did all the necessary vaccinations, I bought a book about Latin America, I booked a return ticket to / from Rio De Janeiro… and then, three weeks before I was planning to fly to Brazil, the guy announced that he was no longer in love and didn’t think this would work.

Panic. Disappointment. That feeling of emptiness. Friends (especially Spyros) advising me to stay at home and travel at some other point.

Yet… I already had the tickets and the year off work, and was sort of prepared for that… so, I thought to myself, it’s now or never.

When I arrived in Brazil I was in the worst possible mood. The fear of the unknown, the feeling of rejection, the heart-broken situation, the idea of being so far away from home, all these were rather scary – though, on the upside, I was getting to go to new places, meet new people etc etc. There were lovely moments, but also shitty moments. Those five months in Latin America, followed by a couple of months in Europe, were really strange times. Apart from new places, new foods and new languages, I also discovered new emotions, new limits and new ways to push the limits. I discovered new reactions and new ways of thinking – and all that, at the not-so-tender age of 38…

When I started this blog, it was meant to be strictly a travel blog – and it worked, for a couple of months. I managed to write a lot about my three months in Brazil, in December 2011 – February 2012. Then I went on to Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Cuba… and there were always heaps of other things to do – like trying to buy a new camera in Argentina (not as straightforward as you might think), trying to get rid of the altitude sickness in Bolivia, trying to decide where to go next while in Peru, and trying to find an internet connection (not a decent one, just ANY one) in Cuba. That was all in spring 2012. In those five months I met hundreds of people, made a few new friends, saw many lovely places, and, above all, concluded once again that the world is not too bad after all, and not everyone’s out there to get us. People are people, and in my experience they will want to help you, talk to you, get to know you (ok in some countries they may want to get to know you a little better), but overall they are not out there to harm you.

And then I went to London for a while. I spent a month squatting my good friend Pete’s floor – I don’t know what I would have done without this guy, I owe him eternal thanks, and he is welcome to Athens anytime he gets his hands on a passport – I just hope I’ll be alive then.

And then it was a couple of months in Greece – one month on Crete, where I’m going to move when I grow up, and another month just travelling around, meeting friends etc. But I realised I still had some time left until the end of my year off… so I followed a couple of Brazilian (again!) guys to the Middle East. We went to Jordan, Israel and Egypt – some great landscapes, heaps of sand and dust, lots of fun (comparing Brazilian and Middle-Eastern attitudes could fill up a whole book), and lots of disappointment, or should I say melancholy – even depression??? – upon realising that the year off would be over very soon, and that I would have to go back to work.

So there I was, on 2 January 2013 – back to work, different office, slightly different conditions, bored to death of people who couldn’t stress enough the importance of having “a job” during the crisis in Greece. While I respect that opinion (and I’m still in the same job anyway), I still thought that there has to be something more than that.

And then two things happened, which changed my life a lot.

In October 2013, a Canadian company called Circle Adventures approached me and asked me to do alternative tours of Athens for them. I jumped at the idea, and started researching possible routes and possible places to take tourists. Obviously I already had lots of experience, because of Couchsurfing and some other tours I had done in the past, but this was a much bigger thing. In the next few months, I literally woke up and went to bed with just one thing on my mind: I am a tour guide! Even part-time, but yes, I can call myself a tour-guide. Within 2014 we had about 20 tours, and we are hoping to have more in 2015.

And then… in October 2014, I organised a couple of tours for bloggers who came to Athens for the TBex conference. While the tours were interesting (if not slightly stressful) and I learnt a lot from them, the most important thing that happened there was… that I met someone. A foreigner, of course, and needless to say a traveller… but from a country I’m a little more familiar with this time. Yep, that would be England. An Engish guy, with an English accent, who likes English tea and beer (any beer, not just English beer), who can plan a few days ahead like the English do (actually he likes planning!) and who, although he hadn’t planned to move to Greece, is now happily living in Greece and discovering Athens… with me.

This is from our first day at the supermarket together. Needless to say, that was a bit of a shock for me as we were actually looking at TV screens, and everyone who knows me knows how much I hate the concept of a TV 🙂

Then again… how is it possible to cuddle watching a movie if there is no screen? This has yet to be discovered…

For all I know, this has been one of the happiest three months of my life, and I know this sounds like an exaggeration – but hey, deep down inside I’m still Greek 🙂

17 things that change forever when you live abroad

I could add quite a few more. But I’ll start with these ones…

Athens never fails to surprise me

So, today I went to a few places here in Athens that I’ve wanted to go for a while now.

I arrived at 10.30 to catch a guided tour in the Ancient Agora… I was really surprised to see more than 100 people queuing for the exact same thing! (Perhaps some Greeks DO go to ancient places after all?) I spent some time there, but decided that the crowd was too big, and made my way out.

Then I went to the Roman Agora – right now they have a “philosophical walk” (can’t really describe it in a better way, you have to go and check it out), which made me think about a few things… Lasts till the end of October.

I spent some time in the Folk Instrument museum – great place if you are interested in Greek music, and it’s free. You’d be surprised at the ways bells are used in our tradition…

I went to the Museum of Greek Folk Art, in Plaka, where, among others, you can see traditional Greek costumes and bridal dresses. Comparing those to today’s white dresses I couldn’t help wondering what a wedding would have been like 200 years ago.

A huge surprise was the Museum of Children’s Art. As the name suggests, it contains paintings, drawings and other work by children aged 7-13. Don’t be so quick in thinking that it won’t be interesting… Who knows, the next Picassos or Miros might have a painting here! They organize workshops for children, and at the moment October is fully booked.

Finally, I passed by the Children’s Museum. As it was FULL of parents and little ones there was not much space there, but from what I saw there was a cooking class and a “get to know your body” class (no, they were not playing doctor).

Athens is a city that never fails to surprise me, even though I’ve been living here for years!

Epicurean philosophy

This is more for my Greek friends. But I’m sure you can get an idea if you use some online translation… And for anyone who can’t read Greek, here’s a little info about our top Greek philosophers!

Oh yeah, I have a blog, that’s right… I remember something…

I had somehow forgotten about this… Wow, time flies, my last entry was in January 2013, and now it’s August 2014…

However, I recently decided to write down stuff that I do every day and is new, or kind of new… They say “do a new thing every day that scares you” (but I’m not sure what scares me anymore, I can even deal with cockroaches for the most part)… so I’ve decided to just do “new things” and write them down and see what happens 🙂

New things that I have done in the past few days include (but are not limited to)

– I woke up at 6.15 one day and went running  – yes that’s right, that’s before work!

– I woke up at 6.40 on a Saturday to go catch a ferry

– I saw a big, big sea turtle swimming just about 20 cms away from me (I think this was the highlight of my summer so far… amazing feeling)

– I went to a couple of places close to Athens that I hadn’t planned months and months ago (as I normally do) and had a really great time

– I took my oldest nephew (almost 10 years old now) for a swim and a chat. I learnt a lot of stuff.

– I drank real cow milk – the real thing, not the thing that comes in a carton – didn’t really like it to be honest 😛

– I tried to do the wheel. For the first time in my life. Yes, that’s right. It worked! Perhaps not too well, but I don’t care, at least I tried it!

– I swam and dived (apparently both “dived” and “dove” are correct) in an underwater cave… Scary at first, purely amazing just seconds later…

There will be more to come…

The first days of 2013…

So today I’ve been in Greece for a month, after the crazy last minute trip to the Middle East (I will write about this later).

I haven’t really done too much in this month… I am now back to work, same office as before, but a totally different role which is actually interesting! Who would have thought I could have an interesting job in the public sector…

Apart from that, I had a nasty flu which came with a very bad cough and made me very weak – so all I could do was go to the office, go home, cook something, watch a movie. I went out once, and returned home around 11pm because I was tired 😛

Last week I went to a couple of yoga classes – and realised that I remember a lot of things, but I am a bit rusty. Or more than a bit. My goal is to be back on track in June… or even later, I’m not in a hurry, but June is a good month as it’s far enough and yet not TOO far and it’s time for the beach yee-haw 🙂

So these days I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the last year… A year off work, without routine, away from most things familiar. A year spending time at (mostly) new places, meeting (mostly) new people, eating (mostly) different foods – and what do you know, when you are on the road you can’t put on any weight although you are eating twice as much as usual… a mystery. A year when what mattered most was where to sleep at night, what to eat, where to go next. I’m thinking about it every day as I walk to the office – a 20 minute walk with no distractions and no surprises, apart from an Athens metro strike (which, incidentally, is not really a surprise)…

I thought this article written by my good friend Tristan describes a bit how I feel… “For us, the real goal is to be exposed to new things and new ideas, so that we can learn more about our world and about ourselves”. I am sure I have found out some things about myself that I didn’t know before… it’s been a really interesting year, and I believe I will do it again at some point.

That said, it’s time to go on with the blog!

The last place I wrote about was a place I was almost a year ago… Recife / Olinda. It was a time when I decided to escape the rain in North Brazil and go back to Rio, to experience the rest of the carnival and to meet my friends Tiina and Andreas who had been travelling for a few months already. I had a couch with Eddie, and I had a ticket to go to the sambodrome…

Stay tuned 🙂

How to survive in a foreign country

Happy New Year everybody! I hope the new year brings you health, love, and whatever else you want.

I spent Christmas days with my family and brother and nephews. It’s crazy how quickly they grow, and it’s even more crazy what discussions you can get yourself into. The last one that impressed me was my oldest nephew (just over 8 years old) asking me what is a camera with “film”. How the hell do you describe film to someone who has only used digital cameras. I was lucky he’s seen tapes… Makes you realise how quickly technology changes.

Yesterday I had a party. Not too big, not too small, not too many drunk people, plenty of drinks left. I woke up with almost no voice – I’ve had a bad flu for the past few days. Hopefully it will go away soon and I can start my yoga classes.

And the link of the day… A good friend posted this on his FB profile. It is more relevant for those who are living in a foreign country, but it’s good for those who travel long term as well.

…I could live without good avocados, but whether it’s possible to survive without feta cheese, is another matter 😛