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Hello from sunny Athens, Greece! Before telling you about this ....... interesting ....... place I want to add a few more observations from Turkey.
Turkish streets have an odd feature that I have never seen anywhere else (although I haven't been many places) and that I cannot find a reasonable explanation for. American consumers like to buy everything in one store, hence the growth of places like Wal-Mart and Target. Turkish consumers, on the other hand, apparently prefer to have 25 stores on the same block selling the same exact goods. For example, I walked through one street and saw 25 stores selling luggage. Each store had slightly different inventories, and some stores had themes -- all backpacks or all huge bags --- but for the most part, each store sold the same bags from the same companies. This boggled my mind, and still does, because it is a system that doesn't seem to make any sense. Anyone with a rudimentary economic background knows that geographic rent is a major contributing factor to a store's bottom line, and by clustering around competitors stores eliminate the benefit of location. My only explanation is that Turkish shoppers decide "I want to buy luggage" and like to go to one area and shop for a couple hours, at a leisurely pace, and bargain using stores against each other. This isn't just luggage, by the way, I saw blocks with nothing but stores stocking mannequins, faucets, music and just about anything else imaginable. Even if Turks do have a strong preference to shop for a single good in an area that specializes in that good, you would think that some small store owner would realize that he can make money by selling shoes in the area where everyone else sells faucets. But I digress.
Now on to Athens. Athens is a mixed city, and the area we are staying in is decidedly not mixed. It is, as Richard called it, a mixture of Tijuana and Cass Corridor. It's a dump called Omoneia (spelled right?) Square and, as the Taxi driver informed me, "full of Pakistanis." Store fronts are in many languages other than Greek and English, and further investigation revealed that it is regarded negatively by most Greeks as the area where immigrants live. Greece is a decidedly undiverse country, with something like 98% of people belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church and being ethnically Greek. People on the bus today crossed themselves whenever we drove by a church, and it wasn't just the old that did it -- some of the younger people did as well. Immigration is a big deal here, and Greek citizenship is almost impossible to obtain if you aren't of Greek heritage -- but if you are, there is a Law of Return similar to that of Israel that makes naturalization possible. The people here have a distinct medditerranean look, but there is a lot of diversity in terms of hair and eye color and it is pretty obvious that a lot of people have slavic and northern european ancestory. This whole leg of the trip got off on the wrong foot when the cabbie from the airport spent the entire drive to this hotel trying to convince me to get a 15 euro hooker from him. He also ripped us off, charging 40 euros -- 1.2 Dollars per 1 Euro, thank you George Bush -- for a 15 km drive from the airport. The cabbies around here have gone beyond ripping us off, and what they are doing can only be referred to as theft. They give us incorrect change, hit buttons on the meter at the last minute which change a 2 euro fare to 8 euros, and have bad attitudes. I'm really sick of these vultures, and the fact that our hotel is in such a crummy area means that we almost have to take at least one cab a day. I should elaborate some more on the area. It is a haven for pickpockets and prostitutes, and the cabbie's assurance that I could find "nice lady" here was borne out when, at 7pm and in broad day light, a woman called out to us in greek and then in English, asking me if I wanted "Lovely ladies." These people could use a healthy dose of Puritan values. Needless to say, we are spending as little time their as possible. Our room has a wonderful view of the scary alley that our hotel is situated in.
Yesterday we went to the Acropolous, which was cool. I still have a lot of trouble getting excited about ancient monuments, and the constuction all over the place just made things worse. According to the placards, they are doing construction to repair the damage they did with the previous restoration effort which apparently was botched pretty badly. I was not too impressed with the state of Greek Archeology. The Ancient Greeks, on the other hand, did build some pretty cool stuff. The stuff here just puts Jerusalem to shame. Their descendents are apparently available for 15 euros, although I am sure you can haggle.
Outside of the ghetto that we're staying in, the city has a lot of nice areas. It reminds me of L.A. with its limitless sprawl and tanned populace. Greek words are, of course, completely impossible to pronounce without breaking my tongue, and navigation is made easier by the fact that quite a few people have a decent command of the English language. We went to a beautiful beach not far from the city today, and the public transportation was excellent and affordable -- for some reason, the Greek metro and bus systems rely on the honor code (there is a ticket reading machine, but no turnstile, so you can walk right through) so most Greeks seem to take the discount price of free passage. This is something else I cannot figure out -- why not install turnstiles and force people to pay for the subway?
Our room in the ghetto is sparse but adequate, with the bizarre exception of the shower. I will try to explain the bathing facility, and maybe someone can explain this to me, too. It is a lowered area in the bathroom, with a step that is maybe four inches high seperating it from the rest of the bathroom. It has a hand held showerhead, with no place to mount it above you, and no shower curtain or door to keep the bathroom from getting soaked. Like the shower in Athens, the water settings seem to be either scalding hot, lukewarm or freezing, and I cannot manage to get it to that comfortable burn that I enjoyed so much in the United States. If this showering setup is commonplace throughout Greece, it explains the general low level of hygeine here -- which is still significantly better than Turkey.
I apologize again for rambling, and I will update again soon with the rest of Athens and the move to the next destination, which is Budapest. Thanks for reading this far!
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anonymous
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I hope you are eating again. Sounds like you are getting a real education on the rest of the world. - Lisa