Popped next door to get breakfast components, milk, Frazzles (Frazzles are a bacon -flavour corn -based snack sold in the UK, once manufactured by Smiths, now by Walkers.) and chocolate, and came back to consume it to the background wheezing of the French bloke. He went on to try and comb the knots out of his greasy hair as Zorba sloped out to do whatever he did when he wasn’t asleep (probably scoring some drugs).
We headed to the city centre and shopped around the travel agents off Sintagma Square (The name Syntagma means Constitution). 6,460 Drachma was the cheapest fare quoted to Haifa so we began the process to book it when the girl behind the counter informed us of the old “sufficient funds or onwards ticket” chestnut. An open return was double the single fare and would decimate my remaining funds.
(Incidentally Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. The discipline was used by senior commanders in the Roman Army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as cowardice, mutiny, desertion, and insubordination, and for pacification of rebellious legions. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth". The procedure was an attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders. This practice was reinstated by the Italian army in desperation in the First World War.)
We retreated for a coffee and a rethink in the square. In trying to locate a Kibbutz Office we met an extravert Australian singer named Daniel who bid us “forget the repressive wintry Hades where the Jews shit on you and inflation was a cool 200%”. He began to give us some worthless advice, realised that we had not just arrived on this morning’s banana boat, and left us to it.
I decided not to borrow any more money if I could help it and we both concluded that our best bet was to make our leisurely way home via Venice, Marseilles and Paris. By now it was raining so we wandered back to the hostel through deserted streets. It appears that the afternoon siesta is observed throughout the year.
We had a chat with the Warden, who still seemed a bit wary in our presence. He told us that his local, The Stag, was a good place for nightlife but pointed out that we could only go there if he told us where it was as it was in a secret location. A sneaking suspicion that it may be a gay club prevented us from enquiring further.
We got all the ingredients for our old favourite, the Greek Mega (doorstep) Sandwich and sat down to a gut-busting feast on these thick hero sandwiches. No more details are listed but they probably consisted of slices of bread crudely cut with a penknife and filled with wadges of cheese with thick tomato and raw onion slices.
To help it go down we went on a long walk around gloomy overcast Athens winding up in the café on Syntagma Square sipping Nescafé instant coffee and writing postcards. On our return to the dormitory, we found an American beanbag waiting for us.
This naïve Miami boy didn’t know his arse from his elbow, so the Warden had told him “George and Steve are friendly and approachable, they’ll show you the ropes”. The punk didn’t even know what the Greek currency was. He couldn’t operate the pay shower, the climate was too cold for him, and he didn’t know what to do with himself now that he was here.
He had flown here directly from the United States and we left him in bed recovering from the terrible jetlag that he had incurred. We were then swindled out of 130 Drachma to watch possibly the worst film ever made. It was a post apocalypse insult to the intelligence which was mercifully short and best forgotten.
The movie, “2019, After the Fall of New York” (Italian: 2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York) is a 1983 Italian science fiction film directed by Sergio Martino in both English and Italian. It is of the post-apocalyptic Italian genre similar to the films 1990 The Bronx Warriors and Endgame. It is set in 2019, after a nuclear apocalypse, and stars a mercenary out to rescue the last fertile woman on Earth.
We finished off our postcards in Alex Burger, a trendy McDonalds-style fast food restaurant with yellow mesh tables. This meant that if you spilled any coffee it went straight into your lap. The couple on the next table put on an amusing demonstration of this hazard by tipping over a cup of hot coffee.
The piped disco music attracted a menagerie of sub bar age youngsters who posed with their cigarettes like Vogue fashion models or the he-man cowboys on the Marlboro adverts.
No comments:
Post a Comment