A moment's respite from the relentless self-improvement

This weekend I'm taking a break. I've decided I'm going to spend the whole weekend acting like an American abroad, by which I mean I'm going to swan into every cafe and restaurant and just assume I can speak English in a perfectly natural manner and everyone will understand.

This is a little act of self-rebellion against the situation I deliberately put myself into, which is to be as immersed as I can be in a foreign language in order to get to some form of fluency as quickly as possible. This is a project which, regardless of how hard you push, you can only ever be disappointed in. Because everything you know, you know! Of course! And everything you don't know is exactly what occupies your attention. I wonder whether this is a problem with self-improvement projects more generally. Because everything you learn becomes incorporated into the self you're trying to improve, nothing ever feels like a victory. It all requires the occasional step back to see how much improved the self you're occupying has become.

This philosophising all started with an impromptu day-trip to a tourism hotspot in the centre of the country with soaring cliffs and huge rock formations rising completely unexpectedly out of an otherwise flat plain that was apparently once an ocean floor. It was completely stunning but that's not really the point of this anecdote. The point is that, inevitably, I was the last person on the bus at 8am when we left Athens for the four hour ride it would take us to get there.

This meant that I was stuck with the little fold-down seat at the very front of the bus, usually reserved for the tour guide with a microphone. Since this stretch of the journey had no tour guide, the little seat, and its very little leg room before the dashboard, was left to me. The downsides were obvious enough, but the upsides were twofold: I had a fabulous unrestricted view through that giant front window for which coaches are famous (as a side note, I've never really understood why coach companies go to the trouble of making the whole front of the bus a window. It's marvellous but is it strictly required? The road is downwards of the driver, not upwards.)

But I also had no one to talk to except the driver, whose English was pretty ropey. This meant that for a lot of the way we chatted back and forth in Greek. By which I mean I prepared a little sentence or question in my head and said it to him, then he answered in ways in which I variously understood completely, partially or not at all. But it was great, and by the time we arrived, me and Konstantinos (is there any other name here?) were well and truly best mates and when our tour guide for the site was introduced to us, I got special mention as speaking excellent Greek.

So I had a whole day of kind of being a Greek speaker (albeit one that almost never understood anything anyone said to him.)

It was exhilarating and exhausting and has led to my conclusion that I need a little break. Yesterday I went in search of an English-language bookshop in town, and have spent the weekend resolutely speaking to everyone in English with no hint of British embarrassment about the whole thing. For one weekend only I'm going to enjoy the exceptionalism of being an American abroad.

Learning jazz guitar!

Sketches not selfies!

Bloody poetry for god's sake! How much improvement can one self take? Time for a little rest methinks...

On having and not having something to do

 It's two weeks to the day since my first day of not having school to go to, and this anniversary finds me in pensive mood. I went away for four nights, two in a small lakeside town called Ioannina, which was lovely to look at, small and pretty, but full of students and with nothing to offer the older traveller who isn't interested in mountain walks or canyon hikes, and two nights in Thessaloniki in the far North of the country. It turned out that, completely by chance, there was an International Documentary Film Festival happening which, on the plus side, meant that there were films to see in the evenings, all with both English and Greek subtitles, but, as might be predicted if one had done any planning, meant that there were no rooms available anywhere in town on Friday and Saturday night. So I came back to Athens early and was frankly delighted to see my little studio again and to be somewhere approximating home.

Early morning in Ioannina. Lovely. What the hell am I doing here?

One of many very attractive cinemas in Thessaloniki. I should probably come back here where I'm not feeling so lonely

While at the hostel in Thessaloniki, I did a yoga session and decided to use the 30 minutes' silent meditation at the end (thirty minutes!) to do some thinking about what life should look like in the Athenian existence without school that was to follow. I decided to dedicate myself to fitness, eating well and general personal wellbeing. Something about having my shorts on, and the special little white socks I bought myself to do running in always leads me to thoughts of becoming A Fitness Person. I can only assume it's the shortness of the socks that does it. Or maybe it's the slippery material of sporty shorts. I don't know but the effect is real. On my return to Athens I discovered that somewhere along the way I'd lost my running shoes, so the transformation to early-morning gym bunny took an immediate and inevitable slide.

Time here has been marked by two very distinct phases: the first of these is teaching English with refugees, which I'm now doing every Tuesday and Thursday, and about which I'll have to write a whole separate blog, doing a talk to a different set of refugees about being a software engineering, and helping out in little ways at the English language theatre I've kind of attached myself to. During these phases I feel useful, full of energy and ready for anything.

The other phase is basically spent in my flat, which means mostly either being in bed or on the bed, either playing guitar, making basic pasta dishes and salads, watching Greek-language TV or going on Instagram. Actually it's been an interesting experience getting into social media properly for the first time. Since I'm in need of a community of people, and in need of things to do, I decided I should join Instagram and join Reddit and I'm starting to see exactly how it makes zombies of the people I see all around me in London. It starts off being very entertaining: here's a "sub-Reddit" all about Athens where you can post questions like "What are these military jets doing flying around town today? Should I be worried" and get instant answers from lots of different locals saying "Don't worry, they're rehearsing for the Independence Day celebrations on 25th March". There's a Greek comedian on Instagram with short funny videos with subtitles which is great for my learning! Here is a person knitting a scarf with literal noodles where the end of the scarf is still dangling in the broth! Here's a post from a 21-year-old single mom looking for fun and no-strings dates in Athens! Here's a Greek influencer being funny while talking about hair products! Oh wait... I see what's happened here. It's terribly easy to be drawn into this stuff, especially when you're pensive and lonely and looking for easy connection. The communities on Reddit are of course not real communities from which you can actually draw any solace, and the funny stuff on Instagram very soon becomes just an endless stream of mild amusement, stealth marketing or just distraction from the fact that you haven't yet managed to get out of bed.

So there's a very stark divide between the me who has got something to do, and the me that has not. At the start of these travels I had nothing to do by default for many days on end, and I think I used the time fairly wisely. There was contemplation! Sketching! Amateurish poetry! Running! But it seems like the well of that kind of self-starting energy does actually run dry if you draw to heavily from it. And it's at times like these that I extra need to get up and get out and find Something To Do.

Today for example, I went to the Archaeological Museum which is a real wonder, drank a coffee and did some very hasty biro sketches of various little sculptures and pots and whatnot. It was really a lovely time and something I can definitely afford to do much more of in the yawning intervals between English teaching. As an aside, they say that inclusivity policy means that everyone should see their own stories reflected in the exhibits of a modern museum, but this is surely ridiculous:

Ah sir, you are a tall thin circumcised man with wings, beard and a little hat? Yes, we have an exhibit for you. Step right this way. 

The story of my Greek progress is the fodder for a separate post, but it's definitely coming along. Texting with Greek people is absolutely brilliant because you've got all the time you need to understand their messages, and all the time you need to formulate yours. Real life is of course a little bit trickier, but things are definitely progressing nicely.

That feeling when your Greek verbs app is the source of all your solace

Back out into the world

 This week I find myself both out in the cold and tucked up safe and warm.

Today was my last day of Greek language school. I've done three weeks and it's time for me to fly the nest and go back out into the cold. So the time ahead of me stretches out once again without structure or a place to go in the mornings.

But on the "safe and warm" front, I moved on Wednesday into my new studio flat. It's a basement flat that opens directly onto an incredibly busy road so it's suffused with the white noise of traffic and the occasional turn-the-radio-up blast of police sirens, and it's basically just one room and a bathroom, but for the next four to six weeks it's going to be my home and I already kind of like it.

Having your own place not only means that you don't have to worry about where you're going to be sleeping on any given night but, just as importantly, it means I can get around without taking my whole rigmarole of bags, suitcases and musical instruments everywhere I go. For that reason alone, it's 500 Euro well spent.

But so school: it was a lot of fun. They have socials every Wednesday which is a real fixture of the calendar, the classes are small and engaging, and all the students are friendly and up for doing stuff. There's homework to do (I absolutely love having homework to do. I don't know why. I think it's about having time where you're absolutely doing the right thing, the very thing you should be doing at that moment. No worries about what else you should be achieving, you're doing your damn homework and that's enough.) But I actually feel that it wasn't that great for my Greek. There was quite a lot of learning the months of the year, the colours and a whole long list of different fruits and vegetables. I'll no doubt be grateful for the vocab at some point in the future, but I think that the real magic comes from limping through conversations with real Greek people in real situations. I felt like my progress was actually being hampered by the structured learning, the carefully paced curriculum, and the international ex-pat vibe of the place. I think the school is excellently run, and to cater for those who want to fly off as fast as they can would be madness. So I've got no gripes with the place. I just think it's not quite aimed at people who are up for focusing very hard on the language to the exclusion of everything else.

As is quite common in these contexts, the teachers themselves couldn't wait to get away from their students at the end of the day (fair enough!) so I have ended up hanging out with lots of Americans, Germans, Danish and French people. That's a joy in itself but I don't want to spend my whole time here in the comfort and ease of an international crowd.

But progress has been steady: I'm regularly having very small conversations with various service personnel and occasionally even understanding what's said back to me. I'm also regularly catching little phrases and words I recognise on the bus, on the radio and even in the theatre (a funny story, which I'll tell in person if I see you, dear reader) but due to a misunderstanding I ended up with front-row seats for Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, entirely in Greek and without subtitles. Needless to say I understood almost nothing, but it's amazing how many little words and phrases you can catch even in that difficult context, and also how the language stops sounding like gobbledegook and rather becomes a collection of verbs and nouns I happen not to know yet. That sounds like a small difference but it's really quite a huge deal.

So what's a man to do when he's got no school to go to? Well, I've got a couple of interesting little leads already: I'm going to do some volunteering at an English-language theatre round the corner from my little studio. Initially they want me to help them work out how to add stuff to their website, boringly and predictably, but I'm also going to help their technical guy do a sound-check on Sunday which should be fun and I'm also invited to attend rehearsals whenever I want.

And I've just got off a video call with an NGO which does language and social integration work with refugees. From 17th March I'm going to be teaching English to a class of adults and a class of kids every Tuesday and Thursday night. That old English teaching qualification from 2007 never stops being useful!

Between then and now, it's all a blank so I'm considering doing something more self-indulgent like a yoga retreat or a trip to an island. Having had three weeks of something approaching a routine, I'm excited to once again be free to choose how I spend my time. I love nothing more than sitting in a cafe with my Greek text book, my notebook for poems and drawing and whatever, and an iced espresso, which is absolutely the only thing anyone drinks here. The weather is slowly starting to warm up and I can hear the distinct sounds of some tweeting out there among the traffic noise.

Back out into the world I go...

A random gallery of pics

There now follows a few sights and vibes from my last few weeks of hostel, Athens, weekend trips away, language school and my tiny little basement flat.

Tote bag painting at the hostel. It says "Athens" in Greece. I'm rather proud of my Greek handwriting here.

Ancient Greek dance class at the hostel. Togas included and mandatory.

An incredible live gig I stumbled into while on a weekend away in Xalkida, a workaday little town away from the capital.

From the English theatre I'm volunteering with.

Sunset on one of the many massive hills right in the middle of Athens.

Chekov in Greek. Not the easiest to follow tbh.

It's not all fun and games you know.

I had to pay for my month's rent in cash. Dodgy? Nah, it's just how things are done here! (Maybe.)

My fellow Greek students.

My little flat

Last day of school!

My first week of school

 The arrival of a long weekend for carnival marks the end of my first week of what is politely called "A0", and in practice is "the place they send you when you know no Greek whatsoever" where everything is either a delightful surprise given your native language ("year" is "chrono", "after" is "meta" etc) or a horrible shock ("university" is "panepistimio" and "family" is "oikogeneia" which, to experience in its full shocking form, you have to see at least once the way I have to, which is η οικογένειά).

The letters are now all pretty much ready to spring from the page and I get the pleasure of living purely in the present for at least another few days before the miseries of past and future are reintroduced to me. Today when a taxi driver told me that all of Greece has the same number of people as London I said "I don't know that" and he said "no, I know, I'm telling you". I wanted to say "I meant I didn't know that, but the closest I could get was "no, no, I say 'before I don't know that'". As I understand it, that's how Mandarin Chinese works: no tenses, all just before and after in the present. To be honest I can see the appeal.

The school itself is tiny: currently there are 12 students in the whole place. A0 consists of me and "the French guy" a young man who has distant Greek ancestry from some tiny island and wants eventually to do a PhD on the shared history of the French and the Greeks. His English is absolutely all over the place, but his Greek makes his English sound like Oscar Wilde's in comparison. He started the week thinking that the letter we call "pi", Π, was a capital M, and he seems to basically be stuck forever saying things like "Manestiminio" as a result.

It seems to me as if the French are almost uniquely affected by their own language when learning a foreign one. My mum would call it "First language interference" and it seems to be particularly brutal for the Francophone. Apparently it comes from both from orthography and from the culture. He can't get his head around the idea that a final "S", which is very common in Greek, would be included in the pronunciation or that there is no concept of liaison, where letters change their sound based on the start of the word that comes next. He's also interested only in aspects of the language which I couldn't care less about. We were limping our way through the numbers from one to ten, and he immediately wanted to know how to say "one thousand" so that he could express something like "In the year 1792...", and he always wants to know about the fine-grained levels of politeness which are seemingly still required in the academic world in France. "Is it more polite to say 'Kalimera' or 'Ya sas'?" is the typical thing he wants to know, and when the answer is "meh, they're the same" he will the persist and invent his own ultra-polite forms to test the teacher.

Still, despite my moaning, school is a fun place to be. It seems like even the really good students are absolutely terrible and the teachers are just what you'd expect language teachers to be: fun, energetic and communicative. They're a special breed, adult language teachers. A universal truth that it's always a joy to be reminded of.

Water water everywhere

 If you deny the existence of a form of magic which is generated when you put yourself in the way of life, with no effort or expectation, but just lolling your feet very casually in the river of human activity while you sit quietly on the bank watching the traffic of that river go by, then explain the following highly improbable encounter:

The crossing from Bari to Patras (or, with a little alpha-beta-ical flair, ᴨατραϛ) is eighteen hours, and my decision not to pay for a cabin resulted in me sleeping here, with surprisingly effective results, given the cold and my total lack of sleeping equipment other than my rain jacket to cover me.

Boarding a ship as a foot passenger is very odd. You just turn up at the edge of the land with your little pile of stuff and walk right aboard.

My cabin for the night. Actually it could have been far worse.

The following morning, as rain lashed the windows.

The journey from Patras to Athens is curiously ad-hoc given the fact that surely everyone must be going the same way. I was simply turfed out onto the street, blinking and stretching away the night's swelling, dreamlike crossing. I took a taxi to the bus station, went to a cafe to get my first spinach pie, where I befriended a man doing a Greek crossword by waving my crumpled Guardians at him and showing him the crossword I'd been doing. A bus took me to a train station and finally a train to Athens. On the train I got chatting to a pair of humanitarian workers who were working for the International Organisation for Migration, a UN body based in Corinth (I know: imagine working in Corinth! If I knew anything about Greek history I'd be amazed.) She was Greek and had lived in Strasbourg and he was Iranian and was doing interpreting work for the Pashtun speakers who had been doing the International Migrating.

We arrived at the central station and parted ways without swapping numbers and I walked my giant suitcase along the main road to the swanky downtown apartment I'd booked for my first night after the boat. The place was swish and I enjoyed some very mild strolling, ate Kurdish felafel with homemade bread, made before my eyes by a friendly Greek/Kurdish man, and generally began to form my impression that Athens is an unbelievably cool city where handsome people of all ages seem to be having a lovely time.

This morning it was time once again to move on, this time to the hostel that will be my home for the next two weeks while I start my Greek course and life starts once again to take some kind of shape. When I arrived at the Metro station, there was a hubbub as a small theatre troupe from Zakinthos were performing a traditional play in the street. I stood and watched in the sunshine (sunshine!) for a while then was about to call it a day when the acting was suddenly replaced by traditional hands-in-a-circle type dancing which was as easy for me to enjoy as the next person so I decided to stay and see it out. Some way through the performance I became aware of organised shouting behind me and turned around to see a protest passing, with flags and placards. It turned out to be a pro-Pahlavi Iranian protest demanding regime change in Iran and the restoration of the monarchy via the Shah's son. As I stood and watched the parade go by, reading signs and wondering at a population demanding a return to monarchy, someone from the procession grabbed my arm: the Iranian humanitarian man I'd met on the train! In a city of some large number of millions, I found myself right at the right place right at the right time! This time I wasn't going to miss out on a new friend so I walked alongside the protest just long enough to give him my number. We'll go for Persian food later in the week.

If you don't believe in magic that's ok for you, but I intend to keep dangling my feet in the river.

My first spinach pie

People of all ages having a lovely time

 

My newest friend

A few little impressions of my first day in Athens:

Overland to Greece: Bologna to Bari

My suitcase and guitar are in a left luggage office straight out of the 1970s at Bari port. I'm drinking coffee in a cafe at Bari airport having just dropped off the hire car that's ferried me around Apulia for the last five days. Thus officially ends a completely mad whirlwind of a time in Bari which defies summary and some of which is not for the family-friendly pages of this blog.

I arrived from Bologna and Florence, having decided that the weather was just too rainy and cold to stay in the North. Bologna is stunning, and I made good friends in the hostel I was in, and in Florence I visited D & T who I hadn't seen since London days and who made me an excellent welcome. But the kind of pacing the streets that freeform tourism requires is just that much harder when it's pouring with rain and 7 degrees. So I got on the earliest possible train South to Bari where my ferry was due to leave in just under a week.

I booked myself a room in a suspiciously cheap accommodation which turned out to be perfectly pleasant albeit in a ropey part of town, with young Russian influencer-types always occupying the bathroom. But I was sad to be in a room for one, rather than in a hostel. I thought what a mistake I'd made and set about glumly pacing the streets of Bari looking for someone to talk to. Bari was warm but also drizzly so unlimited strolling meant wet shoes.

My first discovery was Alessandro, owner of a vinyl records bar just round the corner from my accommodation and certainly the coolest bar and the coolest guy in that grotty suburb. He'd lived in Leeds and we chatted and drank beers, and he rolled me a cigarette and even offered me something stronger.

But it was my second discovery that was to kick everything into outer space. On the first full day, I strolled so far out of town that I ended up at a suburban railway station on the outskirts of Bari. I decided to get a train to a seaside town nearby for a late lunch by the sea. I stood and waited on the platform for 20 minutes, only to realise as the train rolled in that I was on the wrong platform and only a dash across the tracks would allow me to catch the only train that hour. Defeated and deflated, I waited for the train in my direction back to Bari Centrale.

My head was full of thoughts about sliding doors moments and about how I'd missed my chance for something exciting to happen and instead was heading back to the town I'd already seen. It turns out I was right about that missed train being a sliding doors moment, but that missing it had actually put me on the right side of history. At Bari Centrale, the rain was now coming down quite hard and the afternoon was by now well advanced. A large group of people stood at the exit to the station looking at the rain and hoping it would slow. I joined them, and stood in a corner looking out at a rainy carpark.

"It's not dry where you're standing," someone said to me. I looked round and saw a smiling young woman. "I was just standing there and I got dripped on. You should move along a bit." I assumed she was crazy, but even a conversation with a crazy person is better than no conversation. "Looks alright to me," I said, "I'll take my chances." She said that it didn't look like it was going to stop any time soon, and I told her that that was OK with me because I had no plans. "I've also got no plans," she said. "I'm just waiting until evening so I can go to my accommodation." When I asked her if she wanted a beer, she said "always!" and the evening was afoot.

She gave me her umbrella to hold and went to get her rain coat from her luggage which was in storage at the station, then we set off into the gloom together under her umbrella. She turned out to be Bulgarian by birth, went to school in Germany, and had been living in the US for 11 years where she'd married and divorced two different Americans, and had just hitch-hiked from Sofia in Bulgaria to Bari where she'd spent the last two years caring for her dad who had had a long illness and recently died. She was working on a budget of very little money indeed and was trying to hitch hike to Tunisia where she had a work placement sanding boats.

We bought beers, bread and tomatoes from a supermarket and went and stood on a street corner to drink the beers and share the bread. We talked animatedly about our lives and she told me a series of astonishing adventures she'd been on, including living in her car after her first divorce, and leading white-water rafting groups in Greece after sleeping with a rafter she'd met in the beer queue at a festival. After a few beers she said that she needed to get some Wifi so she could text this guy she'd met on a couchsurfing website who had offered her to share his single bed for the night. She wasn't feeling that keen on the idea, so I felt it only gentlemanly to point out that I at least had a double bed we could share. The deal was sealed.

The next few days are too wild and various to go into in complete detail but, as a sketch, I'll say that we shared an electric scooter round town with her urging me to go faster, drove all over the region in my hire car, broke into a building being renovated and ended up hopping from rooftop to rooftop in an ancient stone city, befriended an old jewellery maker who lived in a cave, swam naked in the glittering and cold Adriatic, ran up a mountain side as the sun set and we realised we were in the wrong part of the valley, drank free Prosecco in an Italian restaurant where she'd charmed the owner, ate, drank, sang and danced and were generally incredibly merry and in love for four days. We exchanged music, talked about our lives and backgrounds and generally learned about one another in every possible way. We ate focaccia from an ancient bakery, the like of which I literally didn't know existed (nothing like the focaccia I've had in the UK) and saw ancient cities on hillsides that, old and jaded as I am, I couldn't take my eyes off. We stole kisses among the ruins at dusk. Her energy, thirst for fun and loving nature had a magic which transformed things. With her presence, she transformed my lonely room in a dodgy part of town into a little home which it was always a delight to come back to.

She left the night before last at five in the morning to get a bus to Rome where she would be getting a boat to Africa. As she left, she wrote my number on her arm and we agreed that one day we'd see each other again. I'm glad I missed that train, and instead got to spend a few days riding on this metaphorical one. A much more rewarding journey.

An old jewellery maker who lived in a cave

A very poor attempt to mirror some street art

Some entrancingly beautiful tourist opportunities, among whose winding ruins kisses were stolen

Overland to Greece: the cold and rainy first leg

 Only four days into my latest travels, and time is already doing that thing where it feels like a thousand years ago since I arrived at Victoria coach station in the freezing dark of a Monday morning, wrangling through the London Underground my giant wheelie suitcase and the too-tall-for-doorways guitar on my back.

The coach from London to Paris is a very odd mix of people. It's wildly cheap and takes a very long time indeed, which clearly attracts a certain section of the market, that section seemingly being Latin Americans, immigrant families with lots of luggage and the occasional London teenager keen to get started ASAP with the TikTok and tunes out of their phones' speakers.

The coach was so cheap that I bought the seat next to mine too (something they actively offer you at less than double the price of one seat) so it was actually a very tranquil and meditative 11 hours of London traffic, white cliffs of Dover and, eventually, long after the sun had set on Monday evening, the chaos of the Paris périphérique.

As has been the theme of these travels so far, it was pouring with rain and extremely cold in Paris that evening, but I managed to stroll around a bit, have a beer while staring into space and pretending not to be listening to the French conversations all around me, then found myself at a punk rock gig in a little sticky-floored venue just off the Bastille. There's something dream-like about these solo wanderings where, as a man, your existence goes completely unacknowledged and you can float on the edge of various societies in an almost documentary film kind of way. The soaking wet shoes and socks on my return to the hotel were all too tangible though.

It's much quicker to get from Victoria coach station to a grotty Paris music venue in photo-montage form than to do it in real life

Absurdly early the following morning I got the train to Milan, which covered the boring sections of central France in the hours of darkness and had arrived in more scenic climes by the time the sun rose. It's Very Fast Indeed from Paris to somewhere South of Lyon, then the same train becomes a kind of winding alpine cattle-herd of a thing, with stops every twenty minutes at which no one gets on or off, and the snow on the platform is increasingly menacing-looking. Eventually we crossed into Italy and the Alps quickly eased off, replaced by rain.

The sound made by a wheelie suitcase coming upon sharp rocks hidden beneath the snow

One more slog up and down Metro stairs with my giant suitcase and, before you know it, you're breezing along a canal in the Milanese rain looking for a place to have a beer and some free Italian crunchy snacks. The rain was unrelenting and the cold somehow more intense than Paris, but the strolling was second-to-none. I chatted to some American Winter Olympics people on a tram (not team members sadly, but marketing and events drones but, being Americans, were still fun to chat to) then wandered around an art gallery called Pinacoteca di Brera which left you in no doubt as to what they thought Jesus and Mary looked like in 16th Century Europe. You could probably get a BTEC in crucifixion if you were really concentrating.

My Milan hostel was of the co-working-space, everyone's doing something important-looking variety. This included the reception staff and the bar staff and the people in my dorm who were all very concentratedly scrolling Instagram, so no fun was had. I left early the following morning to get the train to Bologna.