Cycling for treasure

Want to know what I did the Sunday that past? I went on a cycling treasure hunt! It was a lot of fun!

We were divided into groups and each given a list of 17 riddles. The answer to each riddle was a location in the center of Athens that we then had to find and photograph. The starting point of the treasure hunt was the park at the corner of Patission str and Kuprou str in Kupseli and the finish point was the park at the corner of Zoodohou Pigis str and Nauarinou str in Exarcheia. Both are parks that are being planted and sustained by the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods despite the mayor wanting to turn them into parking lots.

I spent about three and a half hours cycling backwards and forwards all over Athens, learning about places I'd never been and constantly bumping into the other groups that were also searching for the locations. It made Athens feel so small and so interesting.

Of course afterwards I felt accomplished and very very tired!

For those of you who know greek here are the riddles. How many can you answer? With a little cheating we got 16 out of 17. We didn't go too bad. Here are the results. We were the Fantastic Four.

Money well spent

Another thing I did over Easter was use my easter present money from work to buy myself a d-slr camera. Now I am no longer camera-less! I splashed out and got the Olympus E-410 with two zoom lenses (it was on offer). It's a super-cute super-small d-slr! unfortunately it's also rather complicated (I haven't finished reading the manual yet), and I am having a bit of trouble with the manual focus too.

But anyway, I'm happy about it!

I checked it out over the holidays and took a bunch of mediocre test photos. Want to see a couple?

The Resurrection


The only time a year Monastiraki Flea market is closed


The Ancient Agora


The Acropolis' "good side"


An old house in my neighbourhood

Easter came and went

So Easter came and went. Far too fast for my liking. Five days aren't nearly enough! Especially when Easter day is spent unconstructively with the family eating.

Besides eating lamb and red eggs, I did a couple of other eastery things, like going to church. I've been in Koukaki since the summer and I had never got round to checking out our neighbourhood church (Saint Nicholas). We went for the Epitafios (the Good Friday Epitaph) and the Anastasi (the Resurrection) - the only days most people bother going to church. And for good reason, they are the two single most theatrical and convivial services of the year! My impressions of my neighbourhood church? The priest is nervy and irritable, and on Friday he gave us a heartfelt advertisment of the Saturday morning service. He almost persuaded me to go - until I remembered it was at eight in the morning! The crowd was big and varied and multi-national. Besides greeks of all ages , there were also plenty of eastern european orthodox christians and a couple of pakistanis who were videoing the whole thing (!). Unfortunately the psaltes (choristes) were rather off-key. You can't have everything!


One other thing I did remember over my five days of freedom, was how much I am missing by wasting 10 hours a day at work (I count the two hours of transit as work hours).

Over Easter, I woke up nice and late and took advantage of the beautiful sunny days to go walking, cycling, shopping etc. How I had missed the sun and being outside midday with no hurry to get everything done on time!

I have often thought that a forty hour week is overdoing it. Who needs/wants to work forty hours? Except workaholics and doctors? I could very well my work done in twenty or less hours a week. I spend at least half my working day killing time. It makes you feel like a factory worker - clocking and clocking out. There's nothing that spells enforced labour more that being expected to arrive at nine on the dot and leave at five the earliest. I would like nothing more than to be a freelancer. To be payed by the project and to be able to make my own schedule. I always worked better with deadlines better than this enforced nine-to-five business that makes me feel like a damn secretary (being expected to answer the phone and occasionally make coffee doesn't help either). I didn't spend more years than I care to share studying architecture and then getting a post-graduate in urbanism to end up as a glorified designer/secretary!

So now I'm back to the old grind-mill, busy counting time till this annoying crisis/recession finally ends so I can find a better job. Sometimes I feel like I'm mentally marking down days on my figurative cell wall till it's time for my parole.