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.

Riding the wind in disguise

I finally got round to doing something interesting today! I took part in the Athens Masked AlleyCat Race. I had heard of the AlleyCat Races and had always wanted to gear my self up to taking part in one.

Let me explain. These races are fun competitions/actions organised by a group of activist cyclists called λοκαλ (local), with the premise that its a fun way to reclaim our public space, by actually using it rather than just passing through in hermetically sealed cars. If you read greek, you can check out their site.
So what exactly is an alleycat race? It's a cycle race through Athens without a set itinerary. Starting off from the starting point you are given the location of the first check-point. Once there, you are told the location of the second check-point, and so forth. So you end up going in circles and zig-zags through the city never knowing where you'll end up, every one choosing their own route from one check-point to the next.
Only this alleycat race (my maiden one, but hopefully not my last!) had a twist. It's the second Sunday of the Apokries (Mardigras), so it was a masked race! Being my usual procrastinating self, I left it till last minute to decide what to dress up as. I ended up making myself a pair of wings late last night and this morning before the race. I almost missed the race because of the damn wings! They ended up a bodged job because I was in such a hurry.
Word of advice - when cycling in fancy dress avoid wings! They catch the wind and slow you down, they make it difficult to look over your shoulder at the cars behind you, they don't let you easily fit through narrow spaces. I originally made the wings to fall outwards like real ones. They looked great, but were hardly practical, so I had to stitch them up to sit behind my back. On the final leg of the race the stitching came undone and I found myself flapping down the street, wings stretched wide!

For those who want to know exactly how much of Athens I cycled through today, here are the check-points:

Start point: Zappeio Megaro
--> Omonoia Square
--> Syntagma Square
--> Hilton Hotel
--> Katechaki Metro Station (on top of the Calatrava Footbridge!)
--> Kolumbitirio (the swimming pool opposite the Kallimarmaro Stadium)
--> Syggroy-Fix
--> the workers housing on the Filoppapou ring road
Finish point: Gazi on the pedestrian street opposite Technopolis.

I didn't properly count but I think it took me about an hour and a half.

World Press Photo of the Year 2008

I was looking at the World Press Photo of the Year Winners last night. Truly amazing photos! If anyone is as interrested in photography as I am, they should really check them out!

The more things change, the more they stay the same

It's been awhile. What have I been up to?
First I was depressed,
then I got robbed,
then I was traveling,
then I got sick.

Now I'm back and kind of better.

It's easy to see that the only fun thing I did was traveling. First I went to Paris for a week and then to Thessaloniki for 4 days.
Things Paris and Thessaloniki have in common:
a. I studied in both cities,
b. I have a close friend living in each city,
c. They are damp, cold and dreary places in the winter, hot and humid in the summer, but wonderful all other times,
d. They are both far more beautiful than Athens.

In Paris I stayed at my good friend Amin's place. We had two years of catching up to do! I met his cute new boyfriend and said hi to his nice ex's - that boy sure has good taste! Apart from catching up with people, I meandered around the city. Actually I did a fairly good impersonation of an emo (or is that a goth?); I visited graveyards (I had never bothered to visit Pere Lachaise before) and a walked by myself in the hail and rain without an umbrella (not my fault the weather was foul and my umbrella was stolen!). Paris is lovely, yet depressing if you're single. I tried to cheer myself up with shopping (which only half-worked since I didn't have enough money) and taking photos (which was hard, because I was using a borrowed camera.)

As soon as I returned to Greece, I was off again to Thessaloniki, with my sister and my friend Voula this time. Thessaloniki was almost just as I left it. The only difference is that they're finally begun work on the long promised metro line, and the center city looks like one big construction site. (In other words what Athens looked like the years before the Olympics.) In Thessaloniki I took my friends for walks in the cold and we did a lot of eating. Thessaloniki is famed for it's food! I realised, yet again, that I know Thessaloniki like the back of my hand - far far better than I know my hometown of Athens.

And upon returning home, I realise that like most Athenians, I share a strange love-hate relationship with my city. It's easy to love her when I'm away, and very very easy to hate her when I'm home.

A week later

I finally ventured into the center of Athens yesterday evening. This whole week I have been feeling horribly old and out of the loop. Things had been happening, the center was ablaze and yet I went to work and returned home and did nothing. It made me feel not only old, but also alienated and vaguely guilty. If I really wanted to, I know people I could call that I'm sure would be in the current, they probably spent the majority of the week barricaded in the polytechnic. But somehow work just sucks you dry, and once you're back home in the evening you are little but a worn out husk of the person you used to be.

When I was twenty I would be rearing to join them, but now I'm feeling too jaded and let-down and pessimistic. I did once try to change things. We were organised and energetic. We were civilised and ready to talk. We had reasonable and feasible demands. We were right, I still believe strongly that we were right. Yet we were ignored and nothing came of all out efforts. I can't help but fear that these youths are doomed to failure. The government will probably fall. But so what? There doesn't exist a single political party that is not just as bad and corrupt. And what's more, we are part of the EU. The rioters and demonstrators are not only fighting against the inertia of the Greek government, but also that of all the EU governments.

Do I mean they shouldn't fight? That they should just lay down and take everything the state dishes them? Of course not. They should riot, they should break things. They should try. But also they should know that they will most probably fail. We have to try and change things, otherwise we might as well be dead. However we are seemingly doomed to failure. If you sit down and thing of it, even the French Revolution was a failure in the end.

As I was saying I went to the center yesterday. I went to the peaceful sit-in demonstration in Syntagma square. I sat with friends from seven in the evening till ten at night. It was quiet and uneventful and we eventually left because we got too cold sitting on the cold concrete. I later learned that the police finally broke up the peaceful protest at three in the morning by throwing tear gas.



After we passed by Exarcheia - the epicenter of the riots. Things were gearing up for hard night - it was exactly a week since the shooting. We saw fires and riot police everywhere. We quickly left because the place was smothered under a cloud of teargas.