Today was our first day climbing in Athens! However, we didn’t climb anything and instead we walked around with backpacks full of our gear and food for five hours.
Some background information: Last winter Naomi and I decided to take a long trip somewhere, and we chose Athens. Culturally, Greece is so full of history and mythology (both from the ancients and from my own imagination) and has shaped our own upbringing and education and aesthetics and dreams. The current situation in Greece is a balance of this proud, seemingly immortal heritage with financial and social flux and change. Participating in such a transitional, evolving culture is exciting and we hope to evolve our own world views and philosophies as we experience what it really means to change here. Logistically, we want to climb some rocks, and Greece has many. The obvious Greek climbing destination is Kalymnos, and we may travel there later in the trip, but we chose to explore the many sport climbing areas around Athens so our home base would immerse us most in the culture we were craving and give us the opportunity to really interact with it. So, we rented an apartment near downtown Athens for 20 days, and we have a week after that to go wherever we feel like exploring.
So back to present day: We arrived yesterday and decided to buy some food and wander around. Fresh produce is for sale on many street corners in small Greek bodegas, which I’m sure there is a non-Spanish word for, where you can get rice, lentils, wine in 1.5 liter plastic bottles, and many other things you may need. Produce, rice, lentils, and wine pretty much cover it for me. The smell of pollution and urine that is familiar in many giant cities is present here, and clashes with the bright colors of ripe fruit and vegetables, and with the overwhelmingly warm and helpful attitudes of the folks we talked to. Many people speak some English, and many don’t, so repeating “yasas,” “efharisto poli,” and “parakalo,” as well as continually trusting the gestures and intentions of strangers quickly became routine. Graffiti and posters (both radical and commercial) are omnipresent and beautiful. It’s a constant reminder of struggle and oppression in Athens and in Europe and the Middle East, and my attention is pulled from my daydreams of climbing back to the present and I appreciate that. After walking around our neighborhood, we wander in the general direction of “most of the cool ancient stuff in Athens” and holy cow there is the freaking Parthenon on a hill right in front of us. The transition from crowded narrow streets lined with markets and innumerable, identical, fig-studded, decaying apartments to crowded wide streets littered with cordoned off ruins and history with tourist-friendly post-card stands is sudden and immediate for me.
As excited as I was in those moments, we made our way back to the apartment for rest before our first day of climbing. We planned to walk to the area the closest to downtown Athens, Iera Odos, which would be about 1.5-2 hours each way and be really hot in the middle of the day. This morning, with half Greek and half kind of phonetic directions that we had gotten from the internet in our apartment written on a piece of paper, we left our apartment and immediately went the wrong way, several times. Then we figured out which way was north, tried again, and were much more successful, until we couldn’t find the streets anymore and realized we missed another turn. After consulting with several nice folks on the street who didn’t speak English and using a really wonderful person’s phone in one of a shockingly large number of bakeries, we got new directions. Again, we immediately couldn’t find the streets we needed. We walked by a cemetery, devoid of grass like most of Athens but full of ornate stone grave markers and most with colorful flowers, used their tiny restroom, and deliberated in the company of a herd of cats. (Tune in later for more detailed information on the stray cat scene in Athens.) We had been gone over 3.5 hours and were tired and annoyed and it was hot (and it turns out we weren’t even really that close to the climbing, just impressively lost and inefficient) and we called it a day. Getting home was much easier since we knew where we were going. On our way we got a sim card for Naomi’s phone so we could try again tomorrow with the help of maps on the internet that we can access from anywhere.
Hopefully sometime soon I’ll be able to write about climbing I’ve actually managed to do during this fancy international climbing trip. That would be rad. Maybe next time. Maybe not next time. We’ll just have to see.
Peace,
Jenn
jennclimbsrocksdotcom 