Last we wrote, we’d had a bit of the case of the winter blues. I’m very happy to say that Athens has well and truly vanquished them. We had 6 beautiful days of warm, sunny weather, and had a great time exploring the city. I’d read a couple of times that ‘they’ (whoever they are) are calling Athens ‘the new Berlin’. I think ‘they’ might be right. Athens is grungier, livlier and more multicultural than most other European cities, and light years away from the rest of the citites in the Balkans. Surprisingly, it even manages to rival Berlin for graffiti and street art, both in quantity and quality.
The first night we arrived in Athens late off the train (we didn’t get to the hostel until 11pm), and having not had dinner were absolutely starving. We asked about the closest place we could go to get something simple, and were told that if we didn’t want to go out we could get suvlaki delivered. 10 minutes and 7 euros later two suvlakis and two beers were delivered directly to the hostel door. What more could a tired cyclist ask for??
In true Greek form we spent our 6 days in Athens sleeping in and staying out late (our record for starting dinner at a restaurant is now 11pm!!!!). We saw some traditional Greek music played in a smoke filled brick basement, where the musicians wore black suits and black ties and played while smoking copious cigarettes. We ate as many mezedes as we could fit in our stomaches, walked until our feet were about to fall off, saw heaps of amazing grafiti, and did the touristy thing and visited the Acropolist and the Ancient Agora. We did have some amazing photos of the Acropolis on our new camera, but some cretin accidentally deleted the photos (I’ll give you a hint – it was the same cretin that lost our last camera).
We also managed to meet up with some old friends. Clemence and Andres, two of the cyclists we first met in Montenegro, just happened to arrive in Athens at the same time as us, via a different route through the Balkans. They were staying with a host who was part of a small cycling community in Athens, and we tagged along with them to a movie night. The night consisted of great conversation, and a bunch of short films and hillarious adverts about cycling projected on a pull down screen in a basement in central Athens (if you’re at all interested, I recommend looking up ‘European Bike Stealing Championships 2015’ on You Tube). We met a lot of really great people, and got some good ideas for where to cycle if we ever go back (basically the answer was always the Peloponnese).
We went back a couple of nights later to farewell Clemence and Andres again (they were off towards Turkey and the Middle East), and met Chris, who had been helping Andres to fix his bike. After Clem and Andres had left he invited us back to the community centre for a beer and we ended up chatting for several hours. He talked openly and honestly about life in Greece, and it was a really humbling experience.
Despite all the highlights, Athens does have another side. The capital controls and austerity measures in place across the country are having a visible impact on its people. Our walking tour guide told us that total unemployment is sitting at 35%, which is high enough, but youth unemployment is at a staggeringly unbelievable 76%. We saw more homeless people in Athens than in the rest of the trip combined, and when we ate at restaurants we had children as young as 6 coming up to us trying to sell us flowers (even at 11pm).
Interestingly, despite all of the constraints, the Greeks seem to have maintained a strong social culture. Restaurants, cafes and bars are busy and everyone seems to be out and about enjoying themselves. To us this seemed at odds with what everyone was saying about the crisis, as surely if things were that bad you wouldn’t have money to be out partying. But when we asked we were told that Greeks have survived the last 8 years by falling back on their strong family ties. Young Greeks are moving back in with their parents, and as our walking tour guide put it “in most houses you will find Mum, Dad and the kids in one part of the house, the Grandparents in another, and the crazy uncle in the basement”. This apparently leaves them with just enough money to go out. The other explanation we heard was that while Greeks will spend hours in cafes and bars, they will nurse the one coffee or beer for much of that time (which I understand wasn’t unusual even beforer the crisis).
On our last night, Stavroula (who works in the hostel) took us out for some Pakistani food and after for some Raki and Rakomelo (which is warm raki heated with honey and cinamon, and is as delicous as it sounds). Like Chris, Stavroula was incredibly open and yet again we found ourselves chatting for hours about life in Greece. It made the perfect end to our time in Athens, and we’re both now feeling rejuvinated and ready to finish the trip with a bang. Next step… Morocco!
4ks an hour 