Ouzo Doesn't Pay for Itself

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Naturally, the air conditioning was broken. Forty degrees outside: the three girls melted in their cockroach-ridden hotel room, one of their party flirting audibly with two middle-aged Australian men next-door. The Aussies offered cans of warm beer and hoped desperately for a threesome. They weren’t going to get one. Too hot for anything, Athens. Too hot to move. Too hot for the Arab men across the street to do anything but slump in plastic chairs on the pavement all day, smoking shisha.

They drifted in and out of sleep, steeped in their own sweat. It was dark now, the friend next door still giggling on the balcony with the indefatigable Aussies. Now the heat was bearable; time to go, time to find a cheap bar. Reunited (Australians disappointed), the girls walked down the street. A couple of junkies were shooting up in an alleyway. Directly ahead, prostitutes in fluorescent underwear posed and pouted on street corners: ouzo doesn’t pay for itself.

They walked on and on, past stalls of porn videos. People still watch videos? In Greece they do. They were nearing the cultural centre of the city: cheap porn gave way to raunchy fridge magnets and sex-position-a-day calendars. Seedy strip clubs became tacky souvenir stalls, flickering neon became plastic shrink wrap. Tourists pretended to be sophisticated in ‘authentic’ Greek bars. A generic balding man played an accordion in every one.

Suddenly, before them was The Acropolis, gold in electric floodlights. Scaffolding ate into one side of it. The indifferent teens moved on before stopping to buy dinner: half an overpriced kilo of ice cream each.

When they were done and sufficiently ill and sticky, they walked back, past the fridge magnets, past the porn and the prostitutes and the junkies until they got to their hotel: the one all of the Arabs smoked outside. Mosquito-bitten, they staggered up the broken stairs to bed, knowing the next day would be the same. They would roll out of bed, have ice cream and come straight back.

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