Day 5 – Athens

After having checked all the must-do tourist stuff yesterday, I could be all myself today. Means: doing all the stuff no one normal would ever do.

Actually I had been planning to move on today but I had quite a lot of work to do, so I decided to stay one more day in Athens. Also, I had bought some food from a Greek online shop a few weeks ago and put down the Post office as my address so I would be able to pick it up there and provide myself with 2 months worth of breakfast while traveling through the Balkans, where I probably won’t get gluten-free stuff anymore.

First thing in the morning, I moved my stuff to a nearby hostel as I couldn’t stay any longer with my Airbnb host. When I asked about the best way to get to the post office, the guy at the hostel reception asked me twice very friendly if I was sure I wanted to go there and assured me that I was the first person to ever ask for the way there. This didn’t surprise me too much. In the last 27 years I’ve gotten used to always being the one person doing the opposite of everyone else. I explained that to him and then asked for another unusual way-finding advice – to the national library, where I wanted to spend the afternoon working.

Although the receptionist had warned me that I would be getting to know the “less nice” part of the city, I actually couldn’t see the big difference to the center when I got to the post office’s neighborhood and found it quite appealing. In the post office, however, my parcel was (of course) not there and my odyssey began. Unlike what you might think, I really like that kind of situations and also wasn’t at all surprised about the trouble. Getting to know a place from a local, real-life perspective and occurrences taking me to unknown, off-the-track places is what travelling is all about for me. I sometimes feel that trudging round all the sights is a little bit like staying on “international grounds”, as if you were in an airport all the time, not getting to know the essence of a city at all. 

Excited by my new task and after several phone conversations with the online shop and the (increasingly angry) post office worker, I found out that my parcel had been sent by a private courier service which official post offices don’t accept and that they took it to their office which was in “Iraklios” somewhere in the north. So I took a metro, and then another metro to Iraklios and found out there that the office was not (as they had told me) next to the station but another 2 km further. I decided to walk. 

This journey took me right into the heart of one of those anonymous residential areas I had seen from above yesterday and I was amazed to find out that this place was actually much nicer than the center! I walked through parks and streets full of normal people, schools, playgrounds and kids coming home from school. The area almost reminded me of a french village and was very cozy, quiet and nice. And to make the trip perfect, the “post office” (see photo) really had my parcel!

I got a few more this-girl-is-from-a-different-planet looks when asking for the way to the national library and was told that it was “very far” away and “a little complicated” to get there. So I just followed my way back, walking the 2 km and getting on the metro to the center where I got a bus to the south edge of the city, where the “Stavros Niarchos foundation cultural center” is. And again, I was amazed. It seems like Greece bans all the nice stuff from the center and puts it far away from any tourists. The cultural center, national opera and national library is an enormous, completely new building complex close to the seaside with an adjacent park area, artificial “lake” and lots of space to walk and chill out. All of it responding to the highest European standards of design and offering every kind of facilities to visitors.

I am glad to see that Greece, the origin of modern education, university and libraries, is apparently still handling these topics with absolute priority. Speaking of which: I don’t know anything about the Greek education system, but every single person I have talked to in the last two days spoke perfect(!) English; and I’m not only talking about hostel personnel or librarians but also Kiosk workers, bus drivers, post office employees and supermarket cashiers! The buildings and cars may not be as fancy, but in this aspect Athens is light-years ahead of any place in Spain or the Basque country, and probably even Germany.

I installed myself in the highly modern reading area of the library, which was packed with students, and spent the rest of the afternoon (there wasn’t very much left of it) working. By sundown, I made my way back to what turns out to be the perfect hostel (Bedway Athens).