This Train, Beach Glyfada?
Trip Start
Sep 07, 2008
1
26
148
Trip End
Dec 09, 2008
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Glyfada,
Attica,
Greece
Friday, September 19, 2008
Every Friday, vendors line both sides of an entire street. They sell fruit, vegetables, fish, eggs, nuts, candy, napkins and paper towels, flowers, clothes, shoes, rugs, pillows, and tablecloths. The food is amazingly fresh and only what's in season. I bought some toothsome figs, grapes, oranges, bananas, and eggs. They don't refrigerate their eggs around here, not even in the big supermarkets. Hrm. Well, if there were masses of people dying of salmonella, I guess we would've been warned about it. My plan is to hard boil the eggs for little lunches, so I'll be ok anyway. I used my pathetic Greek at the market. The egg seller was smothering a laugh the whole time when I said "Six (but not in the form that agreed with the noun) egg (yeah singular, I don't know how to pluralize yet), please."
European women dress much more formally and fashionably, even on casual days. And nobody wears tennis shoes unless they're working out. So everything we wear screams "American." Consequently, several people engaged us in English, "Where are you from?" We found a fruit seller who had lived in Seattle for eight years. He gave Mary Lou and Wedding Belle free oranges and had a long conversation with us in English.
Street market
They bought broccoli and I bought oranges from him.We dropped all our produce in my refrigerator and walked to the tram station. I'm still very confused about Athenian transport. There are busses, trolleys, trams, and the metro. They're all in different places and they all have different rules. The students who braved their way to the beach last weekend reported that we need to pick up tram 5 from the station down the road from the ancient stadium. Ok, we found that pretty easily. But we noticed that the trains departing from that station seemed to be going in the wrong direction from the beach. So after walking around a lot and conferring, we found what we hoped were a set of tram tracks going in the opposite direction. We followed those tracks and eventually found another little station (after doubling back a few times, we really had no idea what we were doing).
Ok so now we were at the right tram station. Now we had to buy our tickets. Acckkkhhhh - the machine wouldn't take my Five Euro note. Wedding Belle graciously paid for my ticket with her euro coins. Mary Lou and Belle are working on learning their Greek letters in class, so (gulp) I'm the one in the group with the most Greek. I asked a woman (I never ask men if I can help it) if this is the correct tram to take us to the beach in Glyfada. Only I have no verbs or articles, and it comes out something like, "This train, beach Glyfada?" Fortunately, I could understand the part of her answer that has "Yes" in it. But then she looked at our tickets.
Fresh tomatoes at the market
"Eine edaxi?" (Is it ok?) I asked. "No, bloop bleep blah bar bar bar" she answered. (I'm making a little joke here because the Greeks coined the word "barbarian" to describe foreigners whose language sounded like "bar bar bar" to their ears.) She walked us over to where we bought the tickets. There is another machine there, and she showed us how to stick our tickets in to get a validation stamp. Thank the Divine for the kindness of strangers and their patience with stupid tourists.I'm writing out all this detail to try to give you a sense of the time consumption, anxiety, and little bits of courage required just to find the station, buy a ticket, and get on the tram when you're in an unfamiliar place and you don't speak the language. When I got home that night, I fell asleep on the couch for a few hours just from the emotional exhaustion of being a coiled spring all day. I'm grateful that Mary Lou and Wedding Belle invited me to go along with them, I never would have braved all of this by myself (and perhaps they would have had a more difficult time without someone who spoke a little Greek).
It's about an hour ride down to Glyfada. As soon as we saw water, we hopped off the tram at the first beach. Mary Lou was starting to feel faint, so we had lunch at the taverna of a beachfront hotel. Several people walked up to us trying to sell their wares: flowers, sunglasses, beach towels, and oddly, a little pack of Kleenex. Toronto joined us there. Mary Lou met Toronto, a young Canadian real estate developer, in a club the night before, and they'd been talking on their cell phones all day trying to meet up again. He finally found us at the taverna (he looked at Mary Lou like a golden-basted turkey dinner), and then we all headed together to the beach. Well, it's not really a beach, it's a gigantic ash tray. I've never seen so many cigarette butts in my life.
The young women had stretched out in their bikinis and Toronto had bought a big beach blanket (he crowed, "Who's your beach blanket daddy now?"), when I looked at my watch and realized I only had 20 minutes of sunning to do before I have to leave to be home in time for my scheduled Skype call with Bear, who was getting up an hour early before work to call me.
Understandably, Mary Lou and Wedding Belle were not ready to leave yet, so I bought my ticket, got the validation stamp, found the right tram, rode for an hour in embarrassingly sandy beach shoes, got off at the right stop, and found my way back to my apartment by myself. All with ten minutes to spare before the phone rang. Victory!
After I left, the students must have had a wonderful evening that doubtless extended to a disco club, because they haven't yet made it back to my apartment that night to retrieve their market purchases.
Comments
I love your writing!
I'm sitting here envisioning a golden-basted turkey dinner lying on a beach blanket, on top of an ashtray. You paint good pictures with your words!
-Diane