Yes, we are in Santorini now, but here’s some more stuff that happened back in Athens.
Joe stayed with three different people in four nights in Athens, all through couchsurfing. One very hot and humid night, we went with him to meet one of his hosts, a really nice girl named Olga. We met her and some friends at a medium-sized urban park in the Exharria neighborhood with a hill in one corner and a sandlot with a playground in another, and kids around our age or younger hanging out all over the place. It was an incredibly lively scene, and really felt like a SCENE. On the hill, there was a movie screen set up, and some kids started making an announcement, and a movie started. A got very involved in the movie, which turned out to be a 1930’s American movie about union-busting in a mining town. Very intense. I left him to the movie and hung out with Joe and co. The Greek kids turned out to be incredibly nice, and one of the kids with them turned out to be another couchsurfer, an artist from Chicago via San Francisco. People shared their beer with us and a guy walked by, collecting money for some cause. One of the kids explained to me that this park had been the site of a major showdown between students/young people and the city. It had been an abandoned city lot that had been cleaned up and taken over by the youths, and then of course the city decided to build something there. The kids won, and now basically own the spot. They take care of maintenance and clean up and planting plus do things like show movies, and that was what the collection was for. I asked what the park was called, and he said it was just known as “the park that used to be a parking (lot).” It was great.
The day before we left Athens, we stopped by a family-owned sandal shop that is a venerable Athens institution, at least according to the New York Times and Lonely Planet. It has been run by the family for 3 generations. It is touted as the shop of the “poet sandalmaker,” because the father of the current proprietor was a poet. The current proprietor is an artist. When you go into the shop they have a special chair that says “the poet’s seat.” I made Joe sit in it and took a picture, because he is a poet and I am a nerd.
The shop has about 27 styles, all of which are variations on Ancient Greek-style sandals. Some of them are named after celebrities that have patronized the shop (the “Sophia Loren” or “John Lennon” styles) and some are named after important Greeks. We were informed, however, that Socrates himself did not wear the Socrates, because he preferred to be barefoot.
It seems that gladiator-style sandals have gotten very trendy in the past few years, as evidenced by girls all over Paris and New York and Chicago, and definitely all over Athens. I think this has been very good for the Melissimos business, but perhaps has made things a bit tedious, because all the girls seem to want the same styles. I dared to be different, I guess, mostly because the sandals that buckle up your calf seem like they’d be uncomfortable to me, not to mention that they’d take a long time to get on and off, and would probably be kind of unflattering. I got a much simpler style.
We were in the shop for 3 hours, and each emerged with a new pair of leather sandals that had been adjusted exactly to fit our feet. Lest the 3-hours thing discourage anyone, I would say that a lot of that time was spent being indecisive about which sandals to get, and shmoozing with the guys who worked in the store, including the aforementioned current owner, grandson of the original owner. This guy was extremely chilled out and easygoing and friendly, and had lived in NYC for 12 years during the 1980’s, going to Parson’s, so we were asking him about his time in NY and talking about music and art and generally just chatting and watching the goings on in the store. Some of us needed several adjustments to our sandals, so the way it ended up working was that he’d adjust them, then we’d walk around in the store, deciding whether they fit right, and meanwhile someone else would come in and he’d start adjusting theirs, so we’d end up having to wait in order to get the next adjustment. This is probably how it ended up taking 3 hours. But I felt it was time well-spent, because we had fun and emerged with nice, very reasonably priced, custom-fit sandals. Go team!
