Vignettes of Greece V

On the boat from Aegina town, an earnest looking dyke with middle-aged ankles and feet shod in Soft-Mocs flips through a guidebook for Gay Athens, trying to keep the sides of her unzipped turquoise windbreaker closed with her elbows pressed tight to her sides. Her eyes slide over me for an instant, then they’re gone. I’m wearing sensible shoes and my Tilley hat and snapping photos of the shoreline. How does she know that I’m not? One of the sisterhood, I mean. Perhaps I could be?

We disembark from the ferry to Piraeus in front of a heavily laden yellow transport truck, a window frame delivery van and a fleet of stinking motorbikes. We lurch towards the intersection. I think of grade eleven history and having to read The Iliad. What would Odysseus the Cunning, son of Laërtes and Anticlea, husband of Penelope, and father of Telemachus, Acusilaus, and Telegonus, think of this twenty-first century chaos?

The grimy squares of sidewalk are so cracked and disarranged it’s like a moonscape. Getting from the port to the Metro station, it’s more like wrangling dead cows along the narrow walkway rather than our suitcases with big wheels. The noise is tremendous—honking, shouting, klaxons, music. At eleven in the morning, the air is thick with traffic haze and the clinging veil of ferry smoke, but it’s surprisingly odorless. 

At the next corner, the traffic light turns green. The walk signal flickers a vague yellow. Navigating six lanes of traffic should be a breeze, we think. After all, there are four policemen standing at the crosswalk; however, they’re smoking and talking to one another.

We draft in the wake of an old lady with a bundle buggy and finally get across. Our pace is slow and we hear the impatient clucking of pedestrian tongues behind us before they trot out into the street and brush by. We navigate around the vendor booths on every corner, tripping up on street cart flotsam and cigarette butts. There are curb cuts, sometimes, where they’ve been broken down by decades of car tires. Even the curbs in the old port are marble – crumbling and filthy, but marble, nevertheless. Whose were the hands that made these thousands of years ago? In Greece, marble is as ubiquitous as concrete is in North America.

Like the ancient traveller, we’re left to our own devices.