[please redial your call (except you don't mind it or give anybody the creeps worrying about hiding that you mind it so nobody's feelings will be hurt)]

Thursday 3 May 2012

May 1 in Athens

This is the chronicle of a May 1 in Athens. 
A May 1 with the crisis. Economic crisis, but maybe even some more...

We decide not to take the metro - we would have no chance to observe the city - so we leave home heading to Syntagma first: today a big demonstration is planned and my father, with his past in the Trade Union, is of corse curios to see it.


After all the protests and fights of the preceding months, the Parliament is in stand-by mode; elections are going to take place in less than a week and, as Panos pointed out, it makes no sense to take to the streets, no Government being there... Anyway Gigi finds out something to criticize: the palace of the Parliament is imponent, without, however, missing to be harmonious: the proportion of the measures is there - after all we are in Greece! "The rolling shutter shouldn't be there though, in a palace like this!" I think it over and somehow I sense my father is completely right, even tough I cannot explicitly put it out why.

Anyway, since the demonstration is going to take place in the evening, at 10 p.m, nobody's around and we enjoy being in the middle of the big way where usually it would be impossible to cross, a pleasure similar to the one felt as if one would let his or her own completely naked body be watched by somebody and pretend not to be aware of it.


After not buying the International Herald Tribune - the edition of May 1 is gonna be there only tomorrow after all - we start our quest of the stop of the bus 140 to complete our travel to Mikrolimano, one of the harbour of Piraeus.

After leaving the rock of the Akropoli on our right,

  
it's the turn of the temple of Zeus, whose stoic columns play peekaboo with us


(looming from over that wall, it looks like they also didn't get good information about the demonstration and came to the right place at the wrong time!).

Finally we find a bus 140 stop...    

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