Advertisement
Published: October 3rd 2006
Edit Blog Post
It’s past midnight, but noises of an unremitting spark in Life resound as if it were day. Yellow lights flitter on the sidewalks’ canopies streaming through to the concrete and decorative garlands strung over the traffic reach into infinity like a cosmic journey. The lines of ornamental lights pull at the city’s futuristic lever of style, traveling light-years beyond time.
As Greece’s second city and home to a voluminous crowd of university students, Thessaloniki sleeps solely at the rise of dawn; it lives like a thumping jackhammer the remaining hours. The citizens roll their dice on Life’s board of backgammon. Obsessively, they’re transfixed as leeches desiring to suck the worth out of their rapidly modernizing center.
Who’s Driving Your Bus? I arrived in Thessaloniki by chance, and with any board game it’s about playing with what you have. My bus from Ancient Olympia and Pyrgos in Western Peloponnese felt disinclined to halt at my destination. Instead of leaving me off at Delphi it proceeded to surge past the turn-off sign. I knew this immediately when I saw the sign fly by and the driver shifted gears, lurching the whole bus into a higher grind. He sent the monster up
into Central Greece’s steeps without any regard for one lone tourist in the rear. I was silent.
We wound about the cliff’s gorgeous evergreen slopes, their summits lost in a dense coverage of thickly sodden clouds. Grey outcroppings of rock jutted out between the pines and vistas fell into valleys of townships centered on their sustaining agriculture. Inside the bus, we were silent; watching, sleeping or crossing ourselves as we thundered past every church and roadside shrine.
It was a B-line into the mountains where my distancing Delphi hung on to the hillside without me. It hailed my presence, but I was reticent. The bus rolled onward down onto those valleys of corn, cotton, potatoes and more. Five hours after my intended disembarkation, weary like a scolded child pulled by the ear, I stepped off at the central bus station in Thessaloniki—the end of the line.
With travel, the beauty of it is throwing all your notes of understanding into the air and proceeding to watch as the wind catches hold of the millions upon millions of shards of paper. It blows them with disregard in any direction it pleases. And there, watching and playing the part
simultaneously, you dance in the art of catching and collecting. You twirl in the unknown steps of Life’s movements. You step with the lone partner surrounding you. The only way to survive this performance and depart with applause is to
completely surrender. To do this is not to act out from your own will, but from that of the wind—and that source behind such wind. It will move through you if you’re so willing, sweeping you and combing your whetted soul to brush out of you the best potential imaginable. It will move in a defiance of true freedom wherewith the currents of the Universe has you in it hands. People, places and positions are found not by chance, but by purpose. You are lead. You willingly follow. The wind calms and the essence of travel—its unknown—feeds you your Life. It becomes a ritual inner belief of protection and trust.
The Art of Day & Night Thessaloniki. With my arrival slipped from my own hands, I was in the wind’s flow, swept up and guided not to Delphi to some mistaken oracle, but this northern city’s heart where it would be my center of the world.
People
move. They’re in cars, buses, trains. The older are on rickety motto bikes and the youth on racy motorcycles. By foot and with speed the Salonican peoples go about Greece’s Milan.
Fashion and style converge on sidewalks where the definition of lounging takes its name. Spilling from the bottom floors of stacks of geometric housing apartments—notorious throughout Greece—the streets are lighted colorfully with music in the backdrop of conversation. Cafes are full of students and their elders intermingling sociably like any good family of chimpanzees. But seating arrangements are for kings, all of them providing each customer a chance to be the dominant male.
Irresistible, my urge was sustained by a restricted travel budget. I was safe, and I knew it. But the Salonicans of the city were sucked in. After a day of classes or work, it’s impossible for the persons of Thessaloniki to ignore a cushioned sofa or reclined seating. There, sprawled out with service are tables of drinks, snacks of biscuits and peanuts, or a friendly game of backgammon. Cigarettes are lit as though the apocalypse is approaching and the men of Europe’s favorite sport sprint across fields on suspended flat-screens. And just beyond, Life passes
by within reach.
These lounge cafes are painted in pure art. They are stylistic in modern fashion, following in the footsteps of Milan in respects to how to relax and socialize. In fluffy comfort or retro-sleek designs, they’re fashioned with tweed frames to glossy metallic curves of the minimalist. Accoutrements are simple—comfort. It is the basic, and obvious, necessity.
Painting The Walls The sun is up. The next instant, the sun disappears under a haze blanketing the Gulf of Thessaloniki. Twilight unfolds into purplish darkness and the moon turns on its spotlight over the city. The lounges haven’t budge. The inhabitants skip from one couch to the next.
It’s a strange sight for me because I’m alone, and here within the city, thousands of people fulfill the objective of a day and night in Thessaloniki. It is to be together with family and friends. It is to lounge, shop, walk, lounge again, drinking and eating. There are few tourists in this northern Grecian region of Macedonia. Persons from Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania intermix in a population indistinguishable; for to lounge, you simply lounge.
Outside the cafes as I roam aimlessly for the purpose of
pure exploration, I’m alone, yet feel a part of the energy. The atmosphere of the city sucks me in, causing me to disappear and become lost within the mass of movement. The harder it thumps, the further I recede by the head of the hammer. Soothing, calming, I take in the lounges as I pass and revel in the art littering the walls.
Besides the fashion of relaxation and shopping, graffiti is an exception. It ornaments the empty walls. But one can hardly call it graffiti. Creative, picturesque—colors are not sprayed in a tagged Greek alphabet, but drawn with a unique sharp nozzle. Instead of a splash and a ray to another balled dab of paint, the paintings match the futuristic culture of Thessaloniki. Faces, robots, designs and letterings are silky with sudden mechanical turns of wrist and arm. Their artists are nameless to my English eyes. Their work is like a sign of who they were, what they represented, before moving on, vanishing into the city’s vastness. And beneath the silhouetted cats against the walls, whether on the sidewalks or in the streets, my footsteps prod further into Thessaloniki.
Then Comes The Light A city of
art. A place of continuous movement. Stirring up the silence to create a virtual reality based on rolling one’s dice and seeing what comes, Thessaloniki arrived and departs in such fashion. It is a fashion of future perception, looking ahead to the relaxation with family and friends after an occupied day, as well as the tag on Life which one makes. Upon any mode of travel, evolution into this aesthetic beatitude gyrates despite the directions of the wind. It is so because eternally—like strung ornamental lights over the city streets—the individual has one’s purpose, one’s will, and one’s belief in Life. The reality is realized and traveled in the very surrendering of it, handing it over to the hands of art, the pulses of a city, the laughter of companions and the surges of the bus regardless of who is driving. A progeny of potential appears in the emerging day and then is it understood and the papers are collected: Already, each person had their understanding perfecting arranged within.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.475s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 38; qc: 160; dbt: 0.2131s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.6mb
anonymous
non-member comment
I will get you a Spongebob cake for your next birthday !!!!! OX, Mom