The Ladies

I couldn't get back to sleep last night after Skyping home. It was just about 3am as I rolled into my dorm bed... And my body was awake. Wide awake.

It wasn't supposed to be. Aside from it being unbelievably early in the morning, I hadn't gotten much sleep beforehand. Sure, I had gone to my hostel at about 9-ish, meaning to get in a few hours nap and wake up just before 2 for the call home. Instead, my body stayed awake. I read some, listened to some music, and then pointlessly stared up at the bunk above me. Sometime near midnight, I finally drifted to sleep only to jerk awake minutes before my alarm went off.

At the time, I figured it was for the best, that I'd be tired enough after the call to immediately drift back to sleep. 3am turned into 4am, which turned into 5am. I wasn't alone in my sleeplessness, either; in the other beds, I could hear people tossing restlessly the entire night as well, as if someone had cast a sleep of sleeplessness on our room. The first thing I heard when I woke up was another girl bitterly complaining about how little sleep she'd gotten.

My day, consequently, was a little drab. I spent the morning walking through the open-air market of Athens' Central Street. The place is enormous, and the food is all awesome! If I lived here, I would do all my shopping on these few blocks. There were easily 20 or more different stalls for fruit alone, that many more for vegetables (including half again as many devoted simply to olives). Across the street was the meat market under what looked like an abandoned train station. There were as many meat vendors as the fruits and vegetables combined, and they were just as pushy in their sales as I'd been warned.

Imagine walking down a street crowded with nothing but fresh produce, and at each stand there is a man shouting at you in Greek. I have no idea what they were saying, but I imagine it was something like "Buy my stuff!"

The prices also were very tempting. You could get 3 kilo of tomatoes, fresh as if they'd just been picked that morning, for only 1€. I'm not sure what that converts to, but when I also saw a dozen eggs going for 0.12€, I knew it's quite a bargain.

I didn't take any pictures of either market as I got the feeling it wasn't really a place that would appreciate it. There weren't many other obvious tourists there, probably because the vendors are very pushy. I have, however, developed quite the stare-down myself and have been able to adopt a "Don't expect me to acknowledge you" expression that scares off most people. I never knew a mean look could come in handy so well!

Right next door to the food stands were tons of birds and other small pets for sale, like rabbits and chipmunks. They were all just piled up in their cages, dozens of them at each stall, all squawking indignantly. I saw a bunch of miniature turtles for sale at 10€ and I was so, so tempted to get one, carry it in my pocket, pet it at night... Alas! I'll have to go to Mexico next spring and get one there -- they're so, so cute!

I spent a few hours walking through all the stands. In addition to foods and pets, there are also tons of knock-off purses, dresses, sunglasses, and flea-market type of products, all for very cheap. If I was flying home tomorrow and didn't face the prospect of lugging my purchases on my back for the next two months, I probably would have spent a fortune and brought home a ton.

In the early afternoon, I decided to take a walk to the long-distance bus station and get my ticket to Delphi for tomorrow, provided that they were still going to be driving in spite of the general strike. I wasn't exactly sure where it was but I thought I knew the general direction of the bus station. 45-minutes later, when I'd done a massive circle only to land back at my hostel, I went in and grabbed a map, and then set out again with real directions leading me the way. The problem, which I didn't take note of before heading out, was that the map I had led me all the way to the last street I needed, but that my destination itself was off the map! And on that last street, I had to walk about 10 blocks blindly hoping that I hadn't passed it, relying on my amazing powers of intuition and observation.

I did make it, though, and got my tickets. The lady behind the counter didn't look like she wanted anything to do with me, which is just weird, but luckily another guy came by just then and pretty much forced her to do her job and sell me a bus ticket. She gave me a sour look the entire time.

Her irritation with me put me in a wondering mood, which led to me making a striking observation for my walk back: that, it being early afternoon, there were tons of people lounging around the city, sitting on benches, eating lunches in restaurant patios, walking the streets, etc, but that they were all men.

I hadn't noticed on my walk to the bus stop. It's a special station served by a private company and is approaching the outskirts of Athens' northwest side. Walking back towards the city center, I was really struck by the utter lack of other women walking around and at the overwhelming amounts of men who were, for lack of any other evidence, humming it up. Some of them were sitting on the sidewalk, some were leaning up against trees, some were just propped up against the next building, but they were all guys.

I have no idea why there were so many men just hanging out. It was still early afternoon, about 2:30pm, too early (I think) for work to be out.

The closer I got to the city center, the more women I started seeing, first in small smatterings and groups, and then more regularly. It wasn't until I was very close to the city center that I started seeing a more even population between the genders. I'm trying to figure out where all the women are from the other part of town. The shop owners are slightly uneven, with a slight majority being men; the food vendors were all male. Even as I started seeing more girls in the city center, it's hard to judge how many are tourists versus locals.

Maybe this is just a weird twitch of mine to be devoting so much time to, but it's really, really weird to walk through about 20 blocks of a major city and not see another woman. I didn't feel threatened, I didn't feel like I should be worried about it, and on the walk to the station I didn't even notice it really, so that's not why I'm spending so much of my thinking on it. And there are plenty other parts of the city that I haven't been too -- maybe all the ladies work there (not to make it sound like a red light district!). Who knows. It just was really, really weird, and I'm intensely curious about it.

That was my day, really low-key. After I got back from my bus-walk, I pretty much passed out like a dead person for over an our. Then I grabbed another delicious salad and visited my rooftop bartender Edwin again, watching the sun go down once more and the Acropolis get lit up in the evening. The strike starts tomorrow but I'll be on my way to Delphi! A bunch of people here at the hostel are knocking their heads together trying to figure out how to get to the airport, if their flights have been changed or cancelled even, how to get to the island with the ferries also being on strike. I consider myself fairly lucky, especially after I found out that the day I got a ferry Santorini to Athens was supposed to have been another strike but it was called off at the last minute!

I have a lot of sympathy for the Greek people, but I also know that their policies and attitudes are what's lead them to this position. There is a lot of apathy here to how the government runs things, a very pessimistic apathy, in the "that's the way things have always been, there's nothing we can do to fix it" vein. There's also a certain resistance to change and a great deal of excuse-making for problems. I don't know if I told this story but I'll tell it again anyway:

While I was on the islands, I was astounded by the sheer number of emaciated stray animals that wander around despondently, absolutely heedless of the human population as they trudged the streets. The cats are everywhere, the dogs are everywhere. They lay down in the middle of the sidewalk, they gather in the trees' shade, and they'll walk down the sidewalk in such a way that you're the one moving out of the way. Here in Athens it slightly less noticeable, but the dogs are bigger and they're still everywhere, even in the ruins, scouting for food, very hopelessly wandering the streets. It's extremely sad.

Yesterday, while I was talking with my Canadian family, the father mentioned how he had to switch hotels because the dogs howling outside his room kept him from sleeping. Before he'd moved, though, they'd tried to get the police to do something about this wild pack of stray dogs that had set up camp underneath his windowsill.

The cop they found, however, refused to do anything about it. "Some of the animals that look like strays actually belong to someone," was his excuse, "and if I take them away, then instead of having 20 dogs howling at me, it'll be 20 people, plus their mothers. And no one has any money to pay if I try to charge them to get their animals back." So the Canadians moved to a new hotel and the dogs got to stay where they were, howling at the next resident.

The Canadians were shocked by the cop's attitude, especially since it was the Greek son, from that island, talking so they couldn't blame it on them just being tourists. They have the same sort of animal control system as the states and figured that not only would it be a better solution for all involved but it would also prevent animals from dying of starvation right on people's doorsteps.

I feel like a rant is about to come on :) sorry! I sort of lost my point somewhere in the puppy story. At any rate, Greeks have tons of excuses and little to show for it. Much of that is the governments policies, and much of that is driven by a decades-old system of kick-backs and favorites. So they have my sympathy but only to a certain extent.

Location:Athens, Greece