Monday 6 August 2012

from Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki. I was collected in the centre. A hand on my shoulder, hello Kaleb, another young man on a bicycle, my description by text - yellow bike and yellow hair - completely redundant; I am obvious amongst Greeks. He was the nephew of a friend of some friends of some friends of my sister. We're all friends now as I pursue one strand of hospitality to the next, digging deep and tenuous. I guess I have been obvious since leaving Austria and with the Asian threshold about a week distant it may be a long time before I don't stand out.

I haven't seen much of Thessaloniki yet, a glimpse of some parks and ruined aquaducting, a flash of suburb as I struggled to keep up with Konstantinos uphill to the flat. The fridge door chucks out ice and there is wifi and every other modern utility. Yet tradition prevails; a lift connects my host's living room to that of his parents above. The nephew, also under his parents, is next door; further family next to them.  I gather this is typical. My old twice-annual visits to mum and dad in Norwich, the almost-never ones to extended family, look paltry and self-absorbed in Hellenic light. Perhaps we'll come to a more Mediterranean arrangement when I crawl back broke and unemployed, former independence traded for a scrawl in the atlas and an unkempt beard. I've been feeling melodramatic all week, the heat or something.

So what stories of the road from Athens? I said about not sleeping and then finally sleeping and all the emotional drama that that lends, already, several times, but there was lots more of that. Melancholy. Euphoria. Melancholy. Euphoria. Melancholy... There was an escort from friendly highways officers with young peaches and fresh almonds, a radio ahead to their colleagues to look out for me. There was me in my pants at 3am chasing a pack of dogs away from my tent with shouts and stones, tripping a little to take a harmless, ridiculous tumble. There were three effective Belgians cycling the other way who amazed me with fresh camp carbonara. There was a dearth of roads above the Volos peninsula with every way becoming either forbidden motorway or whimsical dirt track into swamp and my taking the worst of both until the police put me on a train for twenty miles in absence of any legal route for cyclists. Mostly there was the cruel and charmed Greek landscape; either mountains or sea and story enough in itself were there but words. Terrible litterbugs though, the Greeks, pity.

Not so far to Istanbul now.


1 comment:

  1. Say hello to everyone in Thessaloniki from us! Sounds like you're having a wonderful time...it's all going to get crazy once you hit Turkey:)

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