Is Greece Safe for Tourists?

I spent most of July in different parts of Greece. While there, I kept hearing from friends: “Are you scared? Is Greece safe?” 

After I got back, on Aug. 7, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published a photo essay, “The Mean Streets of Athens”, which, with photos of heroin addicts, riot police and a burning mosque, made Athens look worse than Manhattan in the seventies.

The NYT photo essay had only one paragraph of text which read in part: “Recent images from Athens have mostly shown violent protests in response to the austerity program Greece has adopted to solve its debt crisis.  Less public is the city’s skyrocketing violent crime rate. According to police statistics, robberies almost doubled from 2008 to 2010, homicides are steadily increasing and illegal immigrants continue to arrive.”

In Athens, we usually stay at the Grande Bretagne on Constitution (Syntagma)  Square, but this year, when we first arrived, we borrowed a friend’s apartment near the Hilton, away from the center, because we had read about the riots in the Square in front of the Parliament building, during which the police used tear gas on the crowds and considerable damage was done to the luxury hotels around it.

The angry dissidents pitched tents and occupied that square, where we always used to sit in the cafés and watch the sun set over the Acropolis while boys on skateboards sailed down the marble steps and evening commuters emerged from the underground subway station(which is as  grand as the entrance to a museum, lined with the antiquities uncovered during its construction, displayed behind glass).

This July, I walked through Constitution Square, snapping photos of the occupying dissidents, who seemed peaceful and busy in the daytime tending to housekeeping chores in their groups’ campsites.  The cafes were deserted now and port-a-potties lined the sides where they used to be.  The McDonalds at the bottom of the square, which had been set on fire during the riots, appeared as good as new.  The Grande Bretagne was repairing some damage to its marble steps. (The GB has iron riot gates, which can drop down to barricade the entrance.) The King George Hotel, however, seemed to be both damaged and closed.

A few days later, we moved into a suite in the Grande Bretagne, overlooking the square.  A taxi strike had begun a few days earlier, and we had to drag our suitcases on and off the subway to get there.

Around 1 p.m. I saw that a demonstration was beginning in front of Parliament, with a fleet of striking taxis at the head. Many people were streaming out of the subway and the tents in the square toward the Parliament building where the  Evzones, in their pleated skirts, stand guard in front of the Tomb of the Unknown soldier twenty-four hours a day.  (The two Evzones are relieved by another pair every hour on the hour.  The big, formal changing of the guard, carried out by the entire regiment of Evzones, happens every  Sunday at 11 a.m.)

I wanted to open the door to our balcony to take photos, but learned that it was locked—no doubt to prevent injury to onlookers.  As soon as the demonstration began, a line of riot police positioned themselves between the demonstrators and the Evzones. There was shouting and singing and much honking of horns, but the demonstration petered out without violence and everyone eventually went back to their afternoon activities.

At the end of July, when I left for the airport, the taxi strike was still on, but the ride to the airport was fairly easy on the air-conditioned subway, and it only cost 8 Euros (compared to 35 Euros—the set price to and from the airport in a taxi.)

After I left, the taxi strike continued, some roadways were blocked, and the squatters remained in Constitutions Square until August 6.  According to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, “Employees of the City of Athens, in cooperation with the police, early Saturday cleared dozens of tents from Syntagma Square - the remnants of two months of protests by self-proclaimed indignant protesters.

The process was completed without any major resistance by the campers, though eight people - four Greeks, two French nationals, a German and a Romanian - were briefly detained.”

Which brings us back to the original question: Is it safe for tourists in Greece?

The answer is yes.  The minute you travel outside of Athens, as we did, visiting Crete, Corfu, Ioannina in Northern Greece and the fabulous new ecological resort of Costa Navarino near Messinia, the Greek hospitality was as warm as it ever was.   (The Greek word for hospitality – “philoxenia”—literally means “love of strangers”, and Greeks throughout history have felt it their duty to welcome strangers, even if it means serving them food meant for their own family.)

Visiting Athens is another matter.   It’s not dangerous—I have never felt threatened by demonstrators, nor have I encountered anti-American feeling in Greece in the last two decades.  (Back in the seventies and eighties was another matter.)

The main problem with Athens right now is that it’s inconvenient -- due to the strikes and demonstrations in the wake of the country’s economic problems.  The Greek newspaper Kathimerini, in an editorial, pointed out, during the taxi strike, that tourism is one of the only ways that Greece can hope to improve its economic future, and scaring tourists away is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Throughout Greece this summer I saw very few Americans, except for some Greek- Americans.  In the expensive ecological resort complex of Costa Navarino, and in most luxury resorts, the guests were primarily Russians as well as wealthy Greeks.

Greece has always been the dream destination for tourists, thanks to its beaches, islands, museums, music, food, and the warmth of its people.  All this is still true today, although its economic agonies and the influx of desperate immigrants has changed Athens for the worse.  In the city, walls are now covered with graffiti. Formerly chic shopping areas are filled with empty stores for rent.  But once you get outside of the city, the islands, the hospitality, the food and the  beaches and sunsets are as amazing as ever.

Hopefully by next summer many of Greece’s economic woes will be on the mend, but in the meantime, it’s wise (and increasingly economical) to fly into Athens airport (which is outside the city) and hop on a plane to one of the islands (or rent an car and drive to destinations like Meteora or Metsovo in the north—all now much easier to reach thanks to the new cross-country Egnatia Highway in the north.)

Outside of Athens, Greece still is as alluring and hospitable to the traveler as it was when it enchanted tourists like Lord Byron and, in the last century, visitors like Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, who wrote, “You should see the landscape of Greece. It would break your heart.”  

Hottest Street Art Anywhere: Miami’s Wynwood Art District

 Last night (Saturday, Aug. 13),  having just arrived in Miami in anticipation of the birth of our number-one grandchild, we were treated by very pregnant daughter Eleni and her husband Emilio to an Aegean-style dinner at a restaurant called Mandolin in a patio that kept me thinking I was back in Greece.

As clouds obscured the full moon and heat lightning dramatically flickered overhead, they then drove us to what is clearly one of the busiest, craziest and most exciting areas of street art I’ve ever seen. (And you know I like street art!)

Daughter Marina in front of a graphic mural.

The Wynwood district of Miami was originally the fashion district, filled with windowless factories.  Then it became a slum and, in  January of 2009, to coincide with the famous Art Basel show, it was transformed into the Wynwood Walls District.  At least a dozen of the hottest international artists decorated the large walls with their murals. 

Here’s how their web site describes it: “Wynwood Walls, Miami’s epicenter for cutting edge museum-quality contemporary murals, builds on the street art tradition already established in Miami’s Wynwood District. The result of a collaboration between Tony Goldman of Goldman properties and Jeffrey Deitch of Deitch Projects, the open-air art park launched during Art Basel 2009.

Probably the most famous name represented here is Shepard Fairey, the controversial artist who created the famous “Hope” campaign poster for Barack Obama.  He has incorporated in this mural (below) a portrait of  Aung San Suu, whose image he has used in a poster promoting human rights in Burma.

Here’s what Tangerine Living blog magazine has to say about the artists:

The bright light of the neighborhood is the Wynwood Kitchen & Bar that offers a memorable dining experience and delish brasserie cuisine, which also houses the Wynwood Walls with major works from influential street artists from the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Their diverse talents are represented with originals by Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf, David Benjamin Sherry, Christian Awe, Ryan McGinness, DB Burkeman, Coco 144 & Phase 2, Stelios Faitakis, Invader, Barry McGee, and Ron English to name just a few. It’s one of the coolest and most visually striking resto and art park in the country.

We were very lucky—we just happened to drive into the Wynwood District on the night of  the Second Saturday Art Walk.  On the second Saturday of every month, the district comes alive with  crowds, live music,  open doors to more than 70 art galleries, countless food wagons, valet parking and the hippest-looking crowd of art lovers spilling into the streets and enjoying it all.

We couldn’t stay to see it all.  After all, Eleni is nine months pregnant and can’t really party like a rock star, but  we took a quick look around and I wanted to share some of the photos I took last night with you.

                                           Joan and "Big Eleni". Emilio's mom, Carmen was there too.

The Body of the Year is the Crone of the Week

It’s been a long time (over a year) since I nominated a Crone of the Week, but when a 66-year-old woman is named  “Body of the Year”  over supermodels like Elle MacPherson, not to mention Jennifer Lopez and Pippa Middleton, then “A Rolling Crone” has to take notice.

The poll of 2,000 men and women was conducted by the L.A. Fitness club chain.  Helen Mirren won with 17.5 per cent of the vote.  MacPherson, 48, came in second with 10 per cent.

 It’s hard not to hate Helen Mirren for looking so good in a bathing suit.  The instinctive reaction is, “Well, she probably has a personal trainer  who comes in every day”. But the actress who has played three queens, and can look like an elderly frump as well as a hot pin-up girl, says she stays fit by exercising every day by herself with her WII.

“You can hula, jog, yoga, step – all in one session,” she told the Daily Mail of London. “You need never get bored, as every day you can tailor a new workout. It challenges you and you do it at home, so nobody need see you in those old yoga pants and torn T-shirt.”

(For fellow crones who are as technically ignorant as I am, a WII or more properly wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo in 2006.)

 Helen Mirren is a brilliant role model for all of us over-sixties.   She’s intelligent, dignified (usually) and a hugely successful career woman (Golden Globe, Oscar for  “The Queen”, a house full of other prizes).  And she has abs to die for.

I don’t imagine that any amount of exercise could get me abs like that, but Helen Mirren has inspired me to turn my single weekly Pilates session into two and –as soon as I get back from Miami, where I’m going on Friday in anticipation of welcoming my first grandchild into the world—I vow to sign up yet again with Weight Watchers to try to shed that extra ten pounds, which has somehow turned into an extra fifteen pounds. (Thinking of the heat in Miami I pulled out some shorts from years ago, tried to put them on and promptly tossed them into the pile for Goodwill.) 

Another thing I love about Helen Mirren is that she lets her wrinkles show.

Wedding Bread as Folk Art?

We’re presently at Costa Navarino in Messina, Greece, a super-luxurious resort complex which is devoted to ecological reform as well as supporting and promoting the culture and agriculture of the region.

As part of introducing the resort guests to native traditions, they gathered four local women yesterday to demonstrate making the traditional  “embroidered breads” which are usually prepared to celebrate a wedding.  The breads are set before the bride and groom at the wedding table, and the bride distributes pieces to the guests (like wedding cake in western weddings.)

These four ladies do their bread-making at Costa Navarino every Friday. I was there yesterday, sitting at one of the caned wooden chairs outside the perfect replica of a traditional cafenion, while around us couples sipped coffee frappés and played tavli (backgammon).

You know I love folk art in any form, and photograph it wherever I travel. I quickly realized that the decorated breads made by these local ladies were indeed folk art.

First they sifted.

Then they kneaded.

Taking an occasional break to sip thick Greek coffee from demitasse cups.

The leading artist was Kyria Maria, who had prepared a pencil sketch of her design before she came. (She told me they make different designs every Friday.)

She had a true folk artist’s compulsive need for detail.  Her assistant stood by rolling tiny balls and thin snakes of dough at her behest.  When the first bread, made by two other women, was complete, Kyria Maria was still creating flowers, butterflies, a sun and birds out of dough to cover every inch of her round loaf.  (The first and primary part of her design represented  bunches of grapes on a vine surrounding the Acropolis.)

I was surprised at how many Greek guests came up and asked the women what they were making.  They had never heard of “embroidered breads” for a wedding.

Here are the almost-finished creations, which would be baked to a golden brown and served at the resort’s restaurants for breakfast the next day.

I knew about the “embroidered” wedding breads because last year, when daughter Eleni was married to Emilio in Corfu, Greece, her cousins and her aunt Nikki had prepared  the “embroidered wedding bread” traditional to their part of Greece, but according to their custom, the bride would throw the bread over her shoulders to the single ladies in the group,  like the bride’s bouquet in western culture, before it could be distributed to the crowd.

Eleni’s friend Catherine caught it and, just as for the single ladies who wrote their names on the soles of Eleni’s shoes, hoping that she would dance them away, the magic of the wedding bread will undoubtedly spread all the way from Corfu to Worcester, MA and conjure up a happily-ever-after future. 

A Fish Story from Greece

On Saturday, July 9, in Ioannina, the capitol of Epiros in northern Greece, we had lunch at Spuntino, an Italian restaurant set on the edge of Lake Pamvotis, a deep glacial lake surrounded by mountains.  

The lake contains an island  where Ali Pasha was executed in 1822 by assassins from Constantinople because the Sultan believed the Ottoman Albanian ruler had gained  too much power over his realm. 

Ali Pasha wowed visiting poet  Lord Byron with his luxurious lifestyle, amid his mosques, palaces, Janissary corps of soldiers, his harem of 300 women and the seraglio of young men.

Inhabitants of Ioannina believe that the mists rising over the lake in the morning are the ghosts of the many women Ali Pasha had his henchmen drown in the lake, tied in bags weighted with stones, because they had displeased him in some way.

Visitors ride to the island in small boats to see the sights and eat at the fish restaurants, featuring tanks full of live eels, frogs, trout and other fresh-water seafood. (Once in the seventies, when I visited Ali Pasha’s summer home on the island, where he was killed, I saw that Jackie Kennedy Onassis had signed the guest book at the top of the page.)

But we like to eat on the mainland lakeside,  called the Molo, usually ordering the shrimp risotto at Spuntino.

As we watched the boats sail past and the loon-like birds diving for fish, our meal was interrupted by a Greek fisherman climbing over chairs and tables while he played what was clearly a very large fish on his hook. 

He  followed it around, through the restaurant, patiently exhausting it –letting it out and then pulling it back--without breaking his line.  I couldn’t help thinking of Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea”.

We carried on eating and watching the lakeside drama until the fisherman managed to exhaust the fish and drag it close to the lakeside, where a friend produced a large net.

By the time the fish was landed, a crowd had gathered.

The triumphant fisherman was applauded by the crowd as his dying prey flopped on the shore, trying uselessly to get back into the vast lake of ghosts and legends.

And then Nick and I went back to our dessert of  watermelon and honeydew. 

(If anyone can tell me what kind of fish this is, I’d love to know.  I did ask the fisherman and bystanders, but got a variety of answers all of which meant nothing to me.)

P.S. An eerie coincidence. As I was typing this at noon on  Thursday June 21, the Greek TV news is announcing that a small firefighting  plane has fallen into the lake of Ioannina—but I don’t know yet if the legendary Lake Pamvotis has claimed another victim.)

The Invisible (Old) Woman

 A couple of days ago, my husband and I were staying in an antique-filled small hotel in Chania, Crete, which had, in the parlor, a wall of books in many languages discarded by previous guests.  (This is one of the delights of staying in small hotels.)

I picked up a paperback by Doris Lessing called “The Summer Before the Dark”, published in 1973, and I finished it as we arrived in Athens on Sunday night.

Briefly, it’s the story of a 48-year-old British housewife and mother, Catherine (or Kate) Brown, married to a doctor, who takes a summer off from domestic life, because her husband is at a medical conference in Boston and her three teen-aged children are traveling with friends in different countries.  She lets their house for the summer and begins working at a job as a translator at conferences around the world.  (Luckily, she’s fluent in four languages.)

When her well-paying work is over, Kate takes an American lover who is much younger—in his early 20’s.  They travel in Spain, he becomes very ill from some never-specified disease, then she becomes ill and returns to London alone, staying anonymously in a hotel. 

By the time she’s well enough to get out of bed, Kate has lost 15 pounds, her clothes hang on her, her dyed red hair is coming out gray at the roots and her face has aged dramatically.  As she weakly walks around London, even passing her own house, where her best friend doesn’t recognize her, Kate realizes that, by suddenly aging from an attractive, stylish, curvy redhead into a skeletal old hag in baggy clothes, she has become invisible.

Several times she plays this game: she walks past a group of men who ignore her or goes into a restaurant where the waiters scorn her, then she goes back to the hotel, puts on a stylish dress and ties her hair back, adds lipstick and returns to the same places, where she is coddled and admired.

I admit that it’s plausible for a 48-year-old woman to transform herself at will from an invisible hag into a noticed and admired woman, but when you’re sixty, or seventy (as I am) you’re permanently in the “invisible” category, unless you’re, say, Joan Collins or Jane Fonda.

I’ve been noticing this “invisible woman” phenomenon with both amusement and consternation over the years.  Haven’t you had the experience of walking into a coffee shop or a department store or a cocktail party where everyone looks right through you and you start searching for a mirror to make sure you’re actually visible?

Yesterday we checked into the Grande Bretagne Hotel in Athens, one of the grand old luxury hotels of the world.  We arrived a bit out of breath because there was a taxi strike and we came via subway, dragging our suitcases up stairwells when there was no escalator.

My husband walked in first and I was greeted on all sides: “Welcome back Mrs. Gage!”  My suitcases disappeared. Cold water was provided.

A couple of hours later, I came down to the lobby to ask a question at the concierge desk.  There were three concierges and no other guests waiting.  The white-haired concierge was on the phone confirming someone’s dinner reservations.  The middle one was explaining to the youngest one about the book where must be recorded all cars and busses and pick-up times. I learned a lot about the hotel business, standing there 18 inches in front of them, until finally one of them noticed me and said “Oh hi!  How can I help you?”

A more fraught episode occurred Saturday in Crete at the magnificent wedding reception of a very prominent Cretan family.  Nick and I passed through security and into the estate, up some stairs where we were greeted by waiters with glasses of champagne and a world-class view of the sea below.  Lit by the full moon was a football-field- sized clearing by the seaside, filled with flower-laden tables and lighted by candles and lanterns. I stopped to admire the view, then turned toward the swimming pool area where the family was greeting guests, but my husband had vanished into thin air.

For half an hour I walked around the pool area, even wandering into the nearby yard where I thought Nick might have gone to escape the crush.  As I circled, I kept looking for a familiar face, but the only ones I recognized were from TV and the newspapers. The predominant languages were French and Greek, which I know (far better Greek than French), but I couldn’t imagine plunging into one of the groups surrounding a prime minister and blurting out in any language: “Hi, I’m the wife of Nicholas Gage”.

At the far end of the swimming pool, on a white banquette, was a young woman in a long brown dress completely absorbed in her cell phone.  I decided to take the other banquette and watch the parade of Parisian fashions pass by. Unfortunately, I had left my phone at the hotel.

Eventually my husband re-appeared.  He had gone with friends to find the lists for our table seating. After we clambered down to the sea and found our table, I had no trouble talking to the Greek jewelry designer on my right and the elegant Frenchman across the table, but that first half hour of invisibility wasn’t fun.

But sometimes I delight in being invisible.  Yesterday, I repeated a summer ritual. I walked from Constitution Square down Hermou to a tourist shop just below the Cathedral on  Mitropouleas Street to  deliver another batch of my Greek Cat books for them to sell.  Then I went to a small restaurant called “Ithaki” where every summer I get a really good gyro and some chilled white wine. I sit at the same table every time and watch the owner charm the passing tourists into sitting down to eat.  I’m fascinated by the man’s ability to know each person’s language. He’s way more skilled than the usual restaurant shills who try to lure you in with the two or three sentences they know.

Yesterday he charmed two pretty girls from South Africa into sitting at the table at my left, treating them to a piece of his “famous spinach pie” as an appetizer.  Then he gathered a rollicking table of Italians and told them which beer to order.  Directly in front of me were two American boys who had befriended two girls whose accents suggested that they came from someplace once in the USSR. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to see America,” I heard one of them say.

Wrapped in my cloak of invisibility I could hear the South African girls complaining about their parents: “If my mother ever found out!”  I could watch the American boys rather awkwardly courting the much more sophisticated Slavic girls.  I reflected that every young person should be required to take a year off before the age of 30, to tour the world with a backpack and sit in a taverna like this one, listening to the owner speak a medley of languages and learning about the world.

When he brought me the (very modest) bill, I tried to tell the owner that I come back every year because I enjoy watching him speak so many languages so well, but he just shrugged and rushed off to greet some Japanese tourists.  I think he didn’t hear me.

Eight Months Pregnant in Miami-- Still Smiling

In the continuing saga of her (first) pregnancy, daughter Eleni still has a firm grip on her sense of humor (and irony) as she  writes occasional updates about the gestational process on her blog "The Liminal Stage."

I had to share this photo that she just posted in her latest: "Swimming Upstream During Miami Swim Week."  Here she is at eight months and three weeks, posed next to a poster of a swimsuit model. Could she get any more pregnant before she pops?  Best  of all was her comment "One of these things is not like the other."

Looking through my own photos of my three pregnancies some 30 years ago, I realized that there is exactly one photo of me being pregnant, and I'm holding a little sweater I knitted in front of my gut.  Back in those days the point was to hide your growing stomach.  Nowadays, thanks perhaps to Demi Moore, pregnant women like to flaunt it.

As I 've written before, modern pregnancy is far different from what it used to be in my day, but I really hope when Eleni's got through it to the other side, after getting her strength back from those first months of motherhood, she will collect all her hilarious and wise pregnancy posts into a book for our generation's amusement and edification.