Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Choruses From Hellas

By mid December we are usually wallowing in the bleak misery that is a London winter, dark ‘can’t get out of bed’ mornings, damp and gloomy days and that insufferable empty expressionless London sky. However this year, my Greek husband and I had decided we were off to Athens for Christmas. My husband of five years could not remember Greece in the winter and didn’t really care about Christmas too much anyway. However he was slowly beginning to fret at the idea of a Greek holiday without the beach? What would he do without his regular lazy days spent splayed out on the glorious beaches in the southern suburb of Vouliagmeni. This year he had forsaken his September break and was now getting crabby at the lack of hot weather he had endured for over a year. I too was getting tired of his constant moaning ‘ I can’t bear another winter, I need the sun!’

So off we set on December 21st for our first Greek Christmas. Although I have been to Athens many times, as we went through the boarding gate I got that familiar feeling of excitement that you only get when you travel by plane. Safely tucked into our seats on the outward journey and warmed by our second glass of wine I began to wonder what we were heading for. Would Athens lend itself well to winter? Would it be cosy and warm? Would I be homesick? What about Christmas dinner? I couldn’t wait to get there to find out.

We touched down at night and I was immediately struck by the cold. It was real and piercing not like the damp cold of London. The next day the sky was bright but not sunny or blue, I had never seen Athens without a blue sky. But the sky was high up giving out a feeling of light very unlike the closed, claustrophobic sky of London. I think that space between us and the sky made it seemed nothing like winter as I knew. It seemed like Athens was reluctant too, not quite sure how to deal with it. It smelt like winter though the whiteness of the buildings , peppered with the odd Santa Claus seemed somehow wrong. I sensed this, at heart, is a summer city. The people are summery, their outlook, their love of the beach. God, it must be a killer for them not to be sitting outside cafes sipping their coffee.

It really was much colder than I expected and I spent the first few days wrapped up thinking, why have we come here? It still smelt like winter though, the smoky air in the late afternoon when the day closes down was a familiar feeling.

I kept my socks on a night as my feet were always cold. I longed for a fire to warm myself against and to take refuge from the hostile marble floors. However it seemed I was the only one feeling this way. Two days later and it was Christmas Eve and it was then that Christmas seemed to come to life. We drove up to a house in the northern suburbs of Kifissia to visit relatives, high up above the city. There was wine and kisses and music and the sound of children laughing and at last I could feel my toes thawing.

On Christmas morning, we woke early and the sky was blue once again. I felt excited and nervous as I helped my mother in law lay the table. By 10.00 am the table was becoming laden with bowls of vegetables which had been cooked the day before, my mother in law is one for cooking ahead, however she always seems to be permanently chained to the cooker so its not like she ever gains anything by it. On closer inspection I eyed a bowl of brussel sprouts, I cheekily slipped one into my mouth but just as cheekily took it out again. It was stone cold! I guess I should have realised, why else was it sitting on the table at 10.00am. Cold brussel sprouts? Why? I retreated into the bedroom to get over the shock and took to wondering, as I shut the door, was is it with these Greeks and stone cold vegetables? I immediately felt homesick and wanted to catch the first plane home. I wasn’t sure whether to start crying or come over all English and go back out there and demand fish fingers instead. I whispered to husband, ‘ the sprouts are cold!’ he looked at me and said ‘so!’ he said cold vegetables was the same as eating salad. ‘yeah but ive never eaten brussell sprouts in a salad’ I groaned.

Anyway I pulled myself together and went back out and continued to help laying the table. My mother in law was getting stressed as she barked out instructions to me. Slowly, the family arrived and the house became full of chatter and laughter and once again I felt warmed by the hum of voices and it started to feel like Christmas again. The table was filled with food and I mean filled, there is no such thing as ‘here is your dinner’ on a plate. There were piles of turkey, salad, I think even salmon, potatoes, cold vegetables (of course) another pile of what looked like bones and god knows what else.It was literally endless and not even any gravy in sight. Still, we ate and drank and I considered the whole food issue.I have always found this endless food to be annoying, its like there are no boundaries, you eat until you are bursting.

My mother in laws insistence on pressing food on everyone, she does the same when she comes to our house, had gone from, in my mind, being quite harmless to downright menacing. ‘She’s a FEEDER’ I would frequently say to my husband when I was sick of the sight of food bulging from my fridge. Its like food is her gift and her weapon and with the wiles of a seductress you could not say no to her. She would suck you in. Nonetheless, Christmas dinner was a gay, loud affair and after a few glasses of wine I settled into it.

We had gone to Starbucks in the morning and I was stuck by how ordinary the day was. Not like in England when you go out on Christmas day and there is no one around and nothing is open apart from the petrol station if you are lucky. In England Christmas is a lonely time to be out of the house, its just not done. The only people out and about are the mad, the drifters and the homeless. Here it was just like an ordinary day, Christmas or no Christmas people were out drinking their coffee because that is what they do, life goes on. There was no inane Christmas music piping out or people serving you with silly hats, it was quiet and well, just normal.

I can’t remember too much more of Christmas dinner as the beauty of not being able to speak the language is that no one expects anything of you so you can quietly eat your food and get nicely drunk and no one knows. I did have a conversation with my brother in law’s brother in law, phew! Who is English and actually from the same area as me. He too was excited at the prospect of Brussel sprouts for Christmas and I told him they had been cooked especially for us. I amused myself with watching as he reached for the bowl, exclaiming ‘great Brussel Sprouts’ then waited for his reaction, ‘umn interseting’ he said. Which made him an immediate ally in this sea of foreigness. Now I am not obsessed with Brussell sprouts so I won’t go on about them ever again I promise! He told me about living in Greece, the trial of trying to learn the language and how excited he was about getting Channel 4 on satellite. The differences in the work environment. I wondered if I could I live here .Would I settle? Would I ever be at home? Who knows maybe one day

As the days passed I found we settled into a routine more or less. We always had coffee in the mornings, nearly always Starbucks and we contemplated the day ahead. Being free of the hot weather and the duty to go to the beach that that brings, it meant we could actually see more of the city itself. We spent the days exploring but I loved coming home to the apartment at night. There was a homeliness there, in the evening I enjoyed the smell of food lingering. (much more so than the smell of meat first thing in the morning) As the night drew in, it was a nice place to be, warm and familiar. My father in law sat in his favourite chair, my mother in law mostly in the kitchen. It struck me how normal it all felt, sometimes I had to remind myself I was in a foreign land but importantly I felt comfortable. The religious Byzantine icons I thought made this feel safe and settled and I always like that feeling. But most of all I had settled into a routine all of my own. At 7pm I got my cup of tea and biscuit and settled down to my nightly dose of soap, now this was what you would call a real soap, a kingsize bucket full of suds and I loved it! A real pot-boiler called ‘ a ring on my right finger’ , I could not understand a word they said but that did not matter, I didn’t need to, you just had to watch it and you knew. There were no smiles, no comic moments, no irony ( from what I could tell) just like those south american soaps, this was pure hardcore drama, intense stares, elaborate sobs, lots of door slamming, dramatic drags on cigerettes and long tense pauses that made you think any moment the actors would burst out laughing but of course they didn’t. This from the country that gave us Plato, Euripides et al. It’s a funny old world on Greek tv. However, I am no cultural fascist so I will be taking up just where I left of on my next visit.

 

As the days passed, it got warmer and warmer, it became just right, t-shirt weather. After 10 days, it was time to go home, During that time we had sat outside numerous cafes watching the world go by. I had overcome my dislike of the famous frappe and even had one or two but had settled on drinking filter coffee which in one particular place was really delicious. We had travelled on buses, the metro and the train and marveled at the efficiency and the cost ( so cheap). We had adventures, none more so than negotiating getting on a bus at Pereias, a long story! We had eaten spaghetti lobster at the most charming waterfront of Makrolimano as the sun went down. Forget eating langoustines at Porto Fino or driving through the Riviera and all those other places constantly raved about, Athens to us seemed like our secret and we had no desire to go anywhere else, you have everything here that you could want but none of the hype.

We went to museums, art galleries, the cinema, we walked up to the Pendelli mountain and drank hot chocolate in a small café. There were no crowds, it was easy and peaceful. We even ate breakfast right on the seafront in a café which seemed to be someone’ s house. The point is it was so easy to escape and find your own little place. In urban England it seems you can never get away from people, unless you leave your house at 3 in the morning to drive somewhere but then when you get there, the hoardes are never far away. Here you had time to think. In fact being cut off from the language, gives you a kind of freedom, you have no distractions, you exist outside of things, your mind is clear and free to wander and contemplate

The day before our return, we sat outside in t-shirts drinking coffee of course and had bought the English newspapers to see what was happening at home. We read how it had been one of the worst new years eves ever for drunken violence, there were gory headlines such as LIVERPOOL 25 Stabbings, BIRMINGHAM 2 murders NORWICH, 999 called every 8 seconds….. pages and pages of reminders of the joy of life in England. I wondered if such events would have happened in cities around Greece, somehow I doubted it. Suddenly England seemed a dangerous place. When you are there especially London, life seems to be about dodging the sick on the pavement, the constant sound of sirens and somehow it sometimes seems even cool, somehow alive but here in the peace and safety of an Athens suburb it just seemed horrible. Even if you left a bar at 2 in the morning you could not imagine worrying about getting home all right. My moaning about the noise of the dogs, and the traffic seemed silly when I thought about it. In fact the truth of the matter was I didn’t want to go home and that in itself shocked me. As we wandered along the sea at Vouliagmeni on January 2nd, for the first time I actually thought, ‘ I could live here’ I have never really felt that abroad, not San Francisco, Sydney, New York maybe with the exception of Paris but then again its full of French people. It was true, slowly over the years I had been falling for Greece, its people, its smell, its scenery, its way of life and I certainly would not have dreamt that on my first visit, years ago when I was struck down with food poisoning. As we strolled, slowly along the beach, savouring our last few moments here before we caught our plane home…. I found myself humming the words of a song ‘its funny how I found myself in love with you’ I knew I didn’t want to be away too long. Sometimes life throws up surprises, and this was one of them.