Random Greece: Top Ten Tips

Yes you go for the beaches. But when in Greece, also enjoy...................

Easter eggs, Greek style

Easter: Roast lamb, red eggs, and testicle soup…..Easter is bigger than Christmas, and worth a trip in itself, unless you’re a goat, an as-yet uncastrated bull, or a vegetarian.

Frappe: Cold frothy coffee shaken and stirred. Instant but unique.

Periptera: From bottled water to worry beads; everything's for sale at the omnipresent street kiosks.

Shade: Only sun-starved skin-cancer candidates are out in midday sun. The Greeks are under umbrellas, and on the shady side of the street.

Pretty colours trump dead animals

Sponges: Those who prefer synthetic over dead go for the super-practical, pastel and marbled sponges in every Greek supermarket; soft on one side and scouring on the other. Some of us have carried them about the world for decades: they weigh nothing. If you’re too cheap to buy a sponge, pick up free pumice stones on volcanic beaches.

OTC Antibiotics: From antibiotic ear drops to broad spectrum 10 day courses, get them over the counter at the pharmakio, for when your doctor claims you’re fine, but you know you have pneumonia.

Retsina: Interchangeable with antibiotics above, happily, nothing else tastes quite like resin-matured wine….though the Greeks say no one drinks it any more. 😕

Plug in mosquito repellents: One wonders what one is inhaling, but these liquid-fueled mosquito repellents take care of the little buggers and last forever.

New airport, new metro,
 it's all happening in Athens

The Athens Metro: Against all the odds, this is one of the most efficient, effective urban train services in Europe, and it’s cheap. It serves Piraeus port and Athens airport, although Piraeus trains are on the oldest line, and airport trains fall frequent victim to strikes, which are announced cheerfully, in advance, in English. 9E buys a 5-day pass (airport is extra).

Athens Airport and Aegean Airlines: The relatively new airport and Olympic Airlines revamped as Aegean bring to mind a Venus-sprung birth more than a makeover. The airport sports miles of classy shopping and spacious gates, though bathrooms could be bigger and more prevalent. Aegean Airlines has plentiful free meals and super polite cabin staff (wake up American Airlines….)

Athens Beauty Redefined: Layali Salon

Back in 1963, my father-in-law, Nikos Makrigiorgos, built a block of flats at Pipinou 78 in Athens. Artemis, a pediatrician and my mother-in-law, had her office on the 6^th floor, along with the family home. At street level, they installed a hairdressing salon - a “Komotirio”. 

Very pink

Pink no more

Yiannis and Rania rented and ran the komotirio for almost 50 years. It was very pink. A modesty wall protected women from street eyes during the private business of having their hair washed. Yianni's two teenage daughters maintained a statuesque, unfathomable presence, one on each side of the door. Nikos called them the Karyatides.

Sadly, the business closed, as did many in Athens, a few years ago.
In 2018, as a volunteer at Orange House – a shelter and community center for refugees and migrants run by the Za’atar NGO – I talked to Marina, Za’atar’s intrepid leader, about her dreams of a community-based enterprise.

“Starting with something like a hair-dressing salon, to help refugees who plan to live in Greece find work, train, and prosper,” she said. 

The volunteer army moves in

As I strolled, literally, down Memory Lane - Pipinou Street – where my husband and I lived when first married over 30 years ago, my brain and my camera clicked. With my new-found techno-skills on WhatsApp, I fizzed a photo to Marina… ‘Hey…we own this closed-down komotirio….'

Lock in Greece

Keys in America. Do they fit?

WhatsApp moments are dangerous. A few days later, I was relaxing on a family vacation, when the WhatsApp warning bell chimed. In flew a similar photo.

'Hey Anne. Guess where I am?’ Love Marina.

"So," I said to my hapless-husband-in-holiday mode. "Remember how fond your mother was of that salon…?"
A hundred and one (give or take) signatures, rubber stamps, transatlantic texts, lost keys, sawn off padlocks, found-too-late keys, electrical certificates, old bills, new contracts, tax forms, cousin-helpers and happy-funders later, a volunteer army moved in, along with a designer, boxes of floor tiles, and paint charts. The ashtrays and modesty wall moved out. Project Layali launched, the Salon has been redefined, and it’s no longer very pink.
We're waiting for the power and the permit. Watch this space, the light will come.

Opening the Door

Victoria Square - a hub for many refugees

It’s 10am at Orange House in Athens, and we open up to the day’s first visitors, a family with two small boys. Here to use the hot shower which serves dozens of refugees every week, they prepare with patience in the living room – except for young Sami*, who, I learn too late, flings things about, and is not to be let loose with Lego. His parents tell their story in a single broken sentence. “We pick up our babies, and we run away from war.”

Another clang of the doorbell heralds bigger boys; young men, almost. Momentarily jaunty; briefly polite, they nod, then settle back to smartphones. Orange House offers free WiFi 10 hours a day, a clever way to tempt kids in and off the streets.  

By mid morning, the door swings back and forth nonstop for students. Orange House has free classes daily in languages; guitar; yoga, dance. The youngest learners are 6 or 7, the oldest, 60 or 70; they speak Farsi, Arabic, Linguala; they’re Muslim, Christian, Hindi; some are illiterate, some have PhDs. They’re capable, they’re compromised. They move across our TV news in dusty pickup trucks and rubber dinghies, holding their children hard. They are the refugees.

Banner in Exarchia Square

We are the volunteers. Most of us are not here long, and none for long enough. We get to know them briefly and intensely - the Lego throwers; the villager who dries clothes in the oven; the Palestinian with a scholarship to Athens University. We engage over football and the weather; poetry and philosophy. We listen to tales of inhuman camps and missing family members. We clean, we teach, we pick up little plastic blocks. We direct people to doctors and link them with lawyers. We open the door.
Some say it’s a false dichotomy – whatever boat we came here on, we’re in together now – but we, the volunteers, can choose to leave. Most refugees don't want to stay, but the world has closed its borders, so 60 thousand plus are stuck in Greece, and Greece is stuck with them. Greeks understand migration and unrest, and manage it, in general, with grace, but it’s a tough assignment for a bankrupt nation to take on.

Two small wet boys emerge, hair shining, from the shower. I switch Lego for a race car and instantly regret it, as Sami seizes on his new dream toy and won’t let go. I wonder if he’s traumatized or just a normal, tiresome 2 year old. As the family heads out, we resolve the issue, with a promise of the dream returned tomorrow, in words that no one really understands or much believes.

*Names have been changed