Exarchia

Rest day mind-adventure story time!

So of course we came to Athens and Greece to climb super rad rocks (and to have rock-based emotional breakdowns and to recover from rock-based emotional breakdowns, I guess).  However, social, political, and historical factors also drove our decision to make this our destination, so exploring diverse neighborhoods and talking to people are our jams on rest days.

We chose to walk around Exarchia, whose many partially broken and decaying walls are covered in graffiti murals and whose streets are lined with balconies, ivy, flowering trees, restaurants, and the refuse that permeates the city.  We wanted to witness this neighborhood and interact with the center of much of the occupy movement over here.  As we expected, there is an increase in graffiti and in political fliers and live music advertisement as you wander through this neighborhood compared to area of Peristeri that we are living in, slightly northeast of Exarchia.  The walls give exposure not just to tags and hastily drawn slogans, but often to more thoughtful political, often pro-anarchy and anti-nazi statements, as well as to beautiful murals that cover entire sides of buildings in color.  I noted that giving my community something so vibrant and happy would be something I would value and would love to do, and actually have done at my job at the treatment center, albeit in an intentional, controlled way in the milieu in which our kiddos live.  Walking further throughout the neighborhood with this art as the background, there is also an increase in coffee shops, book stores, and restaurants that seem to cater to a clientele who is more discerning (and willing to pay more for a beer) than elsewhere we have visited.  The book stores are literally filled with all types of books, in piles that reach to the ceiling and overflow to the streets.  There is a coffee shop tucked away in an alley to get to which you walk under a ceiling of umbrellas and in which young people were sipping on espresso and chatting or working lazily on laptops.  There are breaks from traffic-jammed streets on stone walkways with bars, more coffee shops, and shaded outdoor seating where men and families sit with full plates and full drinks.  It’s this opposition that has stuck with me while thinking about that part of the city; it comes as no surprise that overall Athens is a mix of ancient history and more modern (although often also in a state of decay) infrastructure, or a mix of dirty, urine-soaked streets that feel impoverished but also whose sidewalks and balconies are multi-colored walls beautiful flowering trees that smell of orange, thyme, and jasmine which tell the story of a culture that values freshness and had pride in its home.  It came as a surprise how engrained was the middle-class economy, at least on a superficial level, to the community that so openly and proudly defames the government and many institutions and that so generously and proudly endeavors to equalize political and economic hierarchies.  In no way am I placing negative judgement, and Exarchia was so beautiful and great, but that interaction of people stayed in my brain space and created many questions about the depth or superficiality of my cultural experiences and my cultural understandings.

Continuing to ponder this, we wandered back towards Kefallinias Street, where our apartment is, through a beautiful park, past a statue of a police riding horseback (which one artist captioned “fuck the police” in blue spray paint), and up some hills until we could look behind us and see the Acropolis raised on a hill surrounded by a sea of white buildings.  It’s moments like this that make me feel so grateful and that I long to share with others, and that are impossible to describe.  It seems I am continually on an endeavor to integrate even more dialectics into my emotional experience as a human and on this trip.

Skipping ahead a few hours, Naomi and I laid in bed, exhausted, encouraging each other to get up and go to see our friend Alex, who we met climbing, play traditional Cretan music at a small bar about a kilometer from our apartment.  We ended up succeeding, and man, are we stoked that we did.  The bar was dark and only about 15 other folks were there.  Amstel and ouzo seem to be Athens’s alcohols of choice, of which we partook, as Alex played percussion, accompanying a lyre and an oud.  Thankfully, the music went on for hours, Alex and his friends taught us some traditional dance steps, and we talked to super nice people who entertained our very limited knowledge of the Greek language (and improved it, teaching us “Yamas!” for “Cheers!”)  I was anxious and often uncomfortable with the close physical boundaries of people socializing with me (and with people I’m general).  Still, despite my frequent desire to be alone all the time, this bar, this night, with this music was fucking rad.  I got to hear and experience and dance to and breathe this traditional music, which is often not in 4/4 time, but in bars of 5, 7, or 9, and the fretless lyre would oscillate between smooth tones supporting the oud and percussion and fast melodic solos.  Neither the lyre nore the vocals are bound by half-steps in tone, but are microtonal and exceptional.  Focusing on these aspects of the music that were foreign to me allowed me to escape my busy mind and fully enjoy these new sensory moments.  Again my level of mastery of language leaves to be desired the ability to convey the specialness of those moments and the mix of happiness, sadness, anxiety, and gratitude that I have for them, that I have for them ending, and that I have knowing that something else that special will probably happen again.

So concluded the adventures of this first rest day.  I feel like I have a lot from these past few days to really explore mentally and emotionally and figure out how to integrate into my experience and my world view, which is really exciting to me.  There’s just… so much.  It really doesn’t change, this continual self-development and reflection, or at least it doesn’t have to.  I hope my self-development, my experiences, and my consideration of the world and of others never stagnate.  So, to growth and change of ourselves and our world view! Yamas!

Peace

Jenn