Upon Landing

Amsterdam is nice but it’s awful too nice at times. After a day (or so, given the delay in posting this) in Athens after stopping so briefly in Amsterdam I’m trying to root out just why I like Athens so much even though it’s loud and filthy and hot. Why, with it so much less nice than Amsterdam—no little stone houses or breezy cobbled streets, no scented streams of marinated weed pouring out of corner coffeeshops, and no canals bowed over with quaint bridges, their flanks floral with bicycles bright and oft-used—does it still charm me?

Maybe I like Athens because it’s not very nice. Despite all that’s legal in Amsterdam that others might call criminal, there’s a mildness to women in lingerie calling from window boxes on the street that I can’t explain even though it may jar or shock. But in Athens, there’s less a of a screen between the bystander and the hot concrete life of this city. What might be there to filter and strain out the irregular bites and chunks of apprehension and perception do not seem to exist—as if you’re part of the city, whether you like it or not. I still feel very much the foreigner here, but despite being outside it still feels like I’m deep in.

As soon as I stepped off the plane there were hints of it, like the sitting-wrinkles in the calves of the men’s designer jeans. Before we even got to the baggage claim the Greeks had stepped aside to a separate smoking area—just two or three lifted tables in a featureless corridor down to the right from the gate—to light up and blow words in each other’s faces and catch gestures with wild juttings of their own. As if they hadn’t seen each other for days. As if all their lives had been re-written on that three hour plane ride. As if it was there last conversation, so quick were the words and the flashes from their lighters.

It’s the smell of the Laiki Agora: damp vegetables drying, fish getting a little too ripe, and all the fruit—cherries, now, and apricots, melons dark green or inveined yellow, tomatoes still cheap, the light reflected from them turning their vendors red—becoming ripe too together. Like wet pavement washed that was dirty and hot and goods just unloaded from the beds of latched trucks traveled early in the morning from somewhere beyond the city.

Maybe it’s almost getting hit by a taxi. Or a motorcycle winding down the wrong way on the slim branch of the sidewalk. It’s the way I sweat in this heat, or the way the evening sun can seem to cool though it might be a trick in that it simply warms so gently as to coax you into wanting. It’s the smell of the old apartments, the worn-flat wood warmed and stretching, or the old pipes, the old walls, falling into themselves. Nasty, but there’s a little bit of home in the scent, certainty that this is Athens through to every part of it repeated, unique, or dilapidated.

Maybe it was the first man-purse I saw swinging by the side of yet another Gucci man. Might also be the first time for a long time I saw two guys riding together on a scooter, squished up against one another talking wildly as they sped down the streets. Really they belong together, forever unshaven, forever behind dark sunglasses, finding their own way through traffic—together, as if there were nothing more masculine than straddling another man with your legs, your hands on his hips, sputtering off together up a hill and off into the sunset.

So this is the start of a new blog. It’s called what is because the apartment I’m housesitting in rests just off from a pine-lined street that leads to the First Cemetery in Athens where beneath the cypresses and ornate marble tombs lie some of Greece’s most notorious personalities—ex-Prime Minister Papandreou, Henric Schliemann, excavator of Mycenae, and so on. So we’ll start from there. I’m off for a while into the mountains, and I’ll try to update when I can once I return.



Sean