Very early last Thursday–or very late Wednesday, by convention–we once again found ourselves heading towards the airport with Mohammed at the wheel. Our flight to Athens left at 3:55 am. Our friends in the band Oneida were flying to Greece to play a show, so we turned it into an excuse for a 5-day getaway. As I may have previously mentioned, I’ve been on tour with them once or twice or more and I’ve always had a good time, so I was curious to see how the experience translated to Europe. (I was invited to go to Europe with them last May, but it would’ve coincided almost exactly with us moving to Beirut.) As an added bonus, our friend Katy is married to one of the bandmembers and was going to be in attendance as well, and then come back to Beirut with us for a short visit.
As is typical, I had done absolutely zero research for this trip. To be perfectly candid, Greece was never very high on my list of places to visit. The extent of my knowledge was that everyone had told us that Athens was ugly and dirty and that Olympic–our airline of choice–was a terrible way to get there. While Olympic was no Lot or ANA, it was certainly not the worst international carrier I’ve flown (I’ll let Air France and Royal Air Maroc battle it out for that honor). The plane was reasonaby clean and the flight was on time and maybe that was a good omen.
We got into town around 6am and made our way to the hotel via the Athens metro. By virtue of hosting the Olympics, the metro was extended to the airport. The complete trip is like 6-7 €, making it much like JFK’s airtrain…minus the disgusting carpeting.
Our reservations were at Hotel Exarcheion, in the heart of the “cafe district” in the Exarchia neighborhood. In fact, our guidebook had it in the For nightlife on the doorstep category under hotels. We checked in and slept for 4 or 5 hours, waking around 11am to set out and explore. We reconnoitered the neighborhood for several hours, checking out the club where Oneida was to play and making pit stops for souvlaki and coffee.
About the latter…there is a fairly vibrant cafe culture in Athens that doesn’t really exist in Lebanon. While the fancy Greek coffee drinks are expensive (Amy’s favorite, an iced cappuccino-like thing called cappuccino fredo ran about 3 €), it seemed to us to be within the pay scale such that much of the populace were able to afford to sit in a cafe for a couple hours with friends. We would soon realize that most of our non-hotel expenses in Athens were to be coffee. At night, many of these cafes would transition into bars which afford outlet to Athens’ equally robust nightlife. This concept appealed to us immensely and we’ve only seen it successfully pulled off in Beirut at our old fave Torino (and never in New York, though I would gladly accept being proven wrong on this). And even then, a place like Torino isn’t affordable to most Beirutis. Or as our friend and favorite bartender Mike likes to put it, “You’ll never see a plumber in a bar in Beirut.”
For better or for worse, I found myself comparing Greece to Beirut throughout the entire trip. Another aspect of Athens I appreciated at first blush was the presence of contemporary culture, especially with regards to music. In the 283 days to date that we’ve been in Beirut, we have been unable to find anything resembling a local independent music scene. The record stores are brimming Eminem and Jennifer Lopez, or else generic Arabic pop (habibi-jams). In Athens, every corner is plastered with gig posters and there are record stores everywhere, each often catering to a specific genre. On one of the blocks near our hotel, there were 4 record stores, 1 each catering to heavy metal, indie & vintage, dance, and r&b/reggae/soul.
Another interesting discovery was the apparently sizable nerd populace. I acknowledge many shades of nerd in the spectrum and Athens is definitely the spiritual home to the horror-movie-toys-and-model-building-and-tabletop-strategy-game variety (in the same way that Montreal is the spiritual home to the dress-up-in-costumes-and-go-into-the-woods-and-beat-each-other-with-cardboard-swords variety).
We were also impressed with the grafitti Athens.
For our first real meal, Amy picked a place that was seemed suitably traditional and out of the way. The joint (and it was a capital-J joint, if you know what I mean) was called Lefka and it was an old-style taverna on a hard-to-find (at least for us) side street. When we first walked up on the establishment, we thought it was closed. But the shuttered doors and vacant front room gave way to bustling eating hall in the back and we had our first of several great food experiences. Highlights included a pork dish similiar to stifado served over rice and juicy, fatty grilled porkchops. Amy had read that wine was expensive by the bottle, but many restaurants made their own. It is called hema and is served in tin pitchers. We found it quite delicious, but I must confess that I was not feeling top notch the following morning. Combining the fact that I didn’t drink very much and the fact that my capacity for alcohol is, well, more than adequate, I’m going to have to blame the hema.
We rose relatively early on Friday in the hopes that we could get on a ferry to one of the nearby islands. We took the metro to the end of the line, to the port town of Piraeus, and set about finding a place to buy tickets. We soon found out that the ferry workers were on strike and that there would be no ferries that day. We would later find out that the strike would last the duration of our stay in Greece and that strikes of all kinds are very common in the country. We even heard a joke that was supposed to be some sort of play on words when told in Greek. The rough translation is that state workers are always either on strike or on holiday.
Well, we were in Piraeus and determined to have some kind of adventure anyway. To our understanding, there were three: the ferry and shipping port, the Richie Rich yacht port, and the cute fishing and eating port. Since the first had nothing for us, we set off to check out the other two. I found the yachting port to be quite interesting, since I have some nautical inclinations. I was also interested to see that nearly every other boat sported a Tracphone and/or TracVision unit. These are satellite phone and tv units respectively, and are made by my old company KVH. It brought back memories of summers in college spent coding DSP routines in C++ and parsing output logs with Perl. It also made me remember a funny memo I had received, something to this effect:
Attention all: Our TracVision line of products is correctly spelled with a capital V and can be referred to as TV for marketing purposes. HOWEVER, under no circumstances should our Tracphone line of products be spelled with a capital P, as we do not want the products referred to as TP.
But I digress…
After I finished inspecting all the yachts and daydreaming about one day sailing across the Atlantic, we went to the next port in search of food. On the way we were almost hit by a Rolls Royce on its way to the yacht club. No kidding.
This next port was indeed cute. The water was dotted with fishing boats and the waterfront was dotted with all manner of cafes, restaurants, and pubs. We selected an Italian place based more on its location and lack of pushy hawkers rather than the menu, but were reasonably impressed with the cuisine. Afterwards, we selected a nice cafe overlooking the harbor, one of many that had a wood fire burning inside.
All I’m going to say about this photo is that apparently my sense of humor hasn’t matured along with the rest of me.
Some gross fish.
After returning to our hotel, we wandered around the neighborhood yet again. At this point, I was really getting the feeling that either we were not seeing the right (i.e. wrong) parts of Athens, or that people who had said it was ugly and dirty were out of their minds. Sure, it’s not the stunning testament to architecture and historical preservation that, say, Prague is, but it is a handsome city in its own right. We really found the general sentiment baffling. Or maybe it’s just us.
In the evening, we sought out a venue for rembetika music. If I may borrow from the guidebook…
Arguably the only genuine Athenian music, rembetika can be described as songs from the urban underworld (or the blues of the Balkans). The roots of the genre can be traced to the 1920s Piraeus hash dens, populated by the immigrants from the big population handover between Greece and Turkey. Drawing inspiration from Turkish cafe music, or aman, rembetika adopted a simple style and instrumentation, and became the voice of the dispossessed and miserable immigrant works in Piraeus.
We found a place somewhat near to our hotel and perhaps not surprisingly had to make a reservation to secure a table later that night. Though the establishment was somewhat dingy and situated in the upper levels of an old house, I suspected that this was not going to be quite the experience we were looking for. Amy and I have both enjoy Balkan folk music, especially gypsy music from the former Yugoslavia. I have fond memories of watching a musician attack the strings of an upright bass with what looked like a pencil at the Black Panther, a barge and tavern on the banks of the Sava, while revelers smashed glasses in the back. I also have fond memories of sleeping in a Yugo on the side of the road after a day spent listening ot brass bands at the yearly music festival in the Serbian town of Guca. I will fully admit that I’m kind of romanticizing here (I’m just now remembering specifically young men at Guca with t-shirts that had pictures of Mladic with the caption “Serbian Hero”…also the seats in the Yugo didn’t recline and I had to turn on the engine a couple times during the night because it was so cold), but the point I’m getting at is we were hoping to get this sort of vibe from our rembetika experience. I was worried that we might instead find ourselves at a place where people pay way too much to listen to bland reproductions of music from a time they don’t remember. One 35 € bottle of wine later, I was to discover that sadly this was largely the case (though to be fair, there was no cover charge).
To be continued…