November 2005
Despite the Greek government, 87 percent of the stores still close at 2:30 or 3:00pm and then open up again around 5:00 or 5:30 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. They don't open again at all Monday, Wednesday and Saturdays. The Greek government has told them to keep the stores open all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays until 9pm but to no avail. For the most part the stores are doing what they want to do. So, when I went out to do my errands today, I found everything closed and had no choice but to go to a cafe and order a frappe (a special Greek iced coffee drink that's very good – I haven't seen it anywhere outside the country) and read the paper! It's rather nice to have forced siestas, although whenever one wants to shop one has to calculate around the days of the week as well as the calendar if one is driving into downtown Athens. Only license plates ending in even numbers are allowed to drive on even numbered days of the month and the odd numbers correspond to the odd days of the month! Unlike Egypt, nothing is correlated to the moon. So, I'm getting used to a different set of systems.
Today Starbucks opened up on campus right outside the studio where I am painting. It was an interesting combination of elements. The night before on the floor below, the gallery opened with a video installation complete with sound that wafts up the stairway. The exhibition is by a Greek artist who also lives in New York City. Today the opening of Starbucks was accompanied by a live jazz band that drowned out all the sound from the installation in the gallery. The jazz band stopped, though, for the priest all dressed in black with a large black hat who stood before the coffee shop in front of a table that held a bowl of water and an olive branch. He started reciting from the Bible in Greek, and a photographer whose work is based on Byzantine monuments and who just happened to be on campus visiting, immediately began to chant back. (The photographer apparently has spent some time in monasteries including St. Catherine's in Mt. Sinai in Egypt!). The people listening crossed themselves three times at various intervals in the ceremony and at the end the olive branch was dipped in the bowl of water and then waved in the air sprinkling the guests and the coffee shop. The priest presented the cross to various people in front of him and wiped their foreheads with the olive branch while they kissed the cross. Meanwhile, without the jazz music, the rather scary music of the installation downstairs intermingled with the chants of the priest and the photographer. It was quite an interesting mixture of elements for the inauguration of the 39th Starbucks in Greece! One wonders, though, how Starbucks survives in the market here. The Greeks already have plenty of coffee shops which seem to be the focus of young people's night life.
I've been traveling a lot since I arrived. I did a number of mixed media watercolors when we went to Meteora which has enormous rock formations with monasteries perched on their peaks. This has become the basis of my painting in the studio. The craggy rock formations maintain a line of continuity from my painting of the white desert. Also, last weekend I was in Santorini, a volcanic island where you can still see the layers of colored rock and visit the volcanic island that rose from the sea in various stages starting in 197 BC. It actually disappeared in 726 AD and then began to appear again in the 16th century and was enlarged again in the 18th century and 19th century and three times in the 20th century! The last eruption was in 1950. The pamphlet they hand out says, "The landscape's unearthly natural beauty is not the only remarkable thing... it's posible to study an number of extraordinary geological, volcanic and biological phenomena and processes in a balanced geo-ecosystem undisturbed by human activity". I guess the tourist boats that visit twice a day don't constitute disturbance. The experience is like walking on a black moon landscape.
The buried Minoan city of Akrotiri was not opened to the public because one of the new roofs they had built to cover the archeaological finds fell down on a tourist and killed him last month. But the new prehistoric museum in Santorini has a wonderful display including a few of the paintings from the walls of that city. The city seems to have been an outpost of the Cretan Minoan civilisation and they also had connections with Africa. The painting I found most intriguing was of dancing blue monkeys. The monkeys would have had to be imported from some place, perhaps Egypt. Even the much later Roman town that sits on the highest peak of the island has a sanctuary to the Egyptian Gods.
This was the last weekend for the islands. Most of the hotels were going to close up for the winter on Monday. The ferry boat that came to pick us up was late by three hours because of bad weather and we didn't get back into Athens until 4am. I get the Kathemerini (An english newspaper about Greece that comes with the Herald Tribune) and I am amazed at how often – almost once a week – one reads about a boat being caught carrying illegal immigrants. Often some of them have drowned. I can't imagine what it must be like for those people arriving in boats and navigating the seas around these emerging land masses that dot the Mediteranean. I guess Greece is one of the main entrances into Europe.
When we were on the island of Hydra about a month ago, the ferry didn't come at all because of a thunder storm. We had gone just for a day trip from Athens but ending up having to spend the night. I watched the storm pass over the mountain and move out to sea towards Athens – the sun arriving preceded by white fluffy clouds and blue sky. As I sat by the sea watching the sunset, I looked behind me at the darkened sky and was treated to an amazing lightning spectacle that went on for at least half an hour out in the distance over Athens. I remember watching lightning over the ocean from the window when I was a child in Rockport, Massachusetts. But that lightning was only jagged lines of light. From Hydra the lightning lit up whole clouds which became similar to firework displays. It really was quite a magnificent show. As one friend said to me when I told him about it, "Did you see Zeus?" I now understand where those Greek myths came from!
The weather here has gotten cold all of a sudden. My first week in Greece, then end of September, it poured. The rain was coming down the streets like rivers and I was glad I had been warned to bring my boots. Then, after a few days, it cleared and I was swimming in the Mediterranean which I did for the last time on Santorini last weekend. And now one has to wear a jacket when you got out. After Egypt, the change of seasons seems quite dramatic.
So, I've been traveling and painting this semester. I just got a mobile phone number which is very easy to do in Greece. You just pay 20 euros and you get a phone number, a card to program your phone, and 8 euros of minutes! On Thanksgiving I plan to visit Cyprus.
Always wonderful to hear from you.
Take care,
Marrin
Marrin RobinsonArtist in ResidenceThe American College of Greece
Athanassiou Diakou 28153-42 Aghia ParaskeviAttikis, Athens, Greece