Volos

Sma left Maria’s house a good hour before me, but here she is at the hitching spot when I arrive. I want to travel alone for a while and we’re going seperate ways – she to Thessaloniki and I to Volos. Well, they aren’t such different ways really, so we team up. It’s another hour before our first ride stops for us, but he’s a great one – Kostas not only picks up hitch-hikers, he’s also a Couchsurfing host – and he buys us coffee!

Kostas drops us at a service station and from there we find a trucker going to Thessaloniki. He drops me by the highway exit for Volos, where I wave goodbye to him and Sma and walk down to the smaller – though not much smaller – road and get my last lift with two very stoned 20-something guys. They ask where I’m going to stay and seem impressed when I tell them Matsaggou – the only squat in Volos.

I find the squat easily enough from the directions on the website, but there’s nobody in sight and no doorbell. I text my contact to say I’ve arrived… Soon another girl arrives outside and waits with me. The door is answered by a beautiful dreadlocked woman, who says something in Greek to the other girl and scutters off quickly. The girl shows me to a room with two small mattresses and a double bed, where I put my things. I follow her back out into the main room, but she seems busy so I have a look around the books in the library area, then look back at the girl who’s struggling to get to the door with a big roll of posters and a bucket full of water. I give her a hand and off she goes in a car…

 

Now what? Nobody’s around and actually I’m kind of tired, so I make myself at home on the double mattress and curl up for… three hours!?! Shit – where’d the time go??

Staggering dazed from my room I now meet the dreadlocked girl and two men, Dimitris and Adonis. Adonis is vegan, so we have something in common, but he seems shy of his English. Dimitris squatted in London for several years and Liza spent some time there too, so they can handle my un-edited full-British accent – a rarity!

In the kitchen a familiar sight catches my eye – among many other stickers is one large word which makes me smile with recognition – “Bollocks!” I make a mental note to email Tom back in the UK and tell him how far his Bollocks stickers have made it across Europe.

————————-

There’s a demonstration in solidarity with the 300 Hunger Strikers I wrote about in my last post. This is my third demonstration on this topic. It’s smaller than the one in Athens, but there’s still at least a couple of hundred people here and for a city this size that seems a lot to me – though others seem disappointed at such a poor turnout. We march around the city once chanting Greek slogans I can’t even begin to follow or remember a word of. I don’t see a single cop and apparently I’m the only one surprised by this. Our circuit complete, people either wander off or file into the University building for an information session about the Hunger Strike.

————————–

I seem to have a lot of energy these days and there’s no internet in the squat, so I spend my time in my “office”, exploring Volos, cooking and skipping/dumpstering food for the squat. The men at the market seem surprised to see me – “ah, a tourist!” I return their broad smiles, and when they see me picking up the half rotten food from the roadside, one man gives me a bag of fresh onions and carrots. “Efharisto poli!”

My “Office” is the wifi cafe up the road from the squat, where I can get a large Greek coffee (“enna Ellinikos cafe diplo, parakalo!”) and spend an hour or more rushing through emails and saving pages to read later, back at the squat. It’s good for me to have my internet time curtailed, it’s such good procrastination.

My impression of Volos: it’s very square. Apparently a series of earthquakes knocked most of it down in 1955 and for some reason they chose to make the new city very linear. It takes away from the character, I think: there are no surprises around corners… or are there?

Unexpected Cob House

“Art”?

Stray dogs in the rain

There is a mountain though – Pilio is huge and supposedly stunning, but I wouldn’t know since I only make it to the top of the smaller mountain (“what, you mean the hill?”) next to the city. Still, the view is lovely and the sun’s about to set. Thousands of small purple flowers are pushing their way through the earth and I sense the unmistakeable smell of wild garlic, but wherever it is, it’s hiding well.

Ancient ruins up the mountain

Spring is springing

View over Volos

Cycling down the seafront on my borrowed squat-bike (one brake, two flat tires), I pass a group of hippy-types juggling and jamming near the “beach” (they call the park that opens onto the seafront “the beach,” despite the abundant concrete and obvious lack of sand. That’s nothing, you should see “the waterway”). I smile as I pass the hippies and think for a moment about joining them, but go on past… “Jo??” I circle back, recognising immediately the heavily pierced face from the photograph of the girl I’ve been emailing on CS. I join them for a while, play with some poi and attempt to teach hula-tricks to a girl with her child’s hoop, but it’s hopeless.

The “Waterway”

The *real* beach

 

It’s the weekly bar night at the squat, only most of the usual people are at the Worker’s Centre, which was occupied in the early hours of the morning in preperation for the General Strike next week. There’s hip-hop music blaring ’til gone 3am, so I drink a few beers and do my best to be merry, spending most of my time chatting to the barman, yet another Dimitris. This one is from Kavala and he makes me squat maps of that city as well as Thessaloniki, where I’m going tomorrow.

Goodbye Volos, your square streets and lovely squatters.

When in Rome – Italia Parte Tre

The directions for escaping Bologna on Hitchwiki look fairly challenging:

“Take the bus to Casalecchio… change the bus… walk 200 metres until you reach the fences… Normally you can’t enter the service station… fences you can’t cross… a little parking lot of the service station staff… ring there and maybe they will open… If not, at the service station on the other side… a little hole in the fence… Crossing the motorway… a bit difficult… under the motorway through the building site, but it is muddy… easier to get off the bus one stop before it crosses the motorway… inside the service station, you can cross the motorway easily. Enter the building and go upstairs to the restaurant. .. down on the other side of the motorway. Attention: You are not able to cross the motorway in the morning… the restaurant is closed. But if you have luck, the barmen will help you.”

Blimey. Well, we’re up for it. Our first lift turns out to be our host Diana, who works in Casalecchio, so we only have to hop one short bus ride to the edge of the city. Here we find something Hitchwiki didn’t mention: there’s a trainline between us and the service station. We manage to find our way through allotments, clamber first over the trainline, then the ditch on the other side. Nobody ever said hitchhiking was glamorous! Now we’re outside the service station, AKA Fortnox – there’s a giant fence running all around it. We find our way to the gate Hitchwiki mentions and when some workers turn up in a van, I ask if they might let us in? The man wags his finger at me aggressively, “no, no, no, tutututut.” Great. Now what?

We walk around the perimeter, looking for an opening or lower fence. One part is a possible last-resort clamber which I’m not looking forward to, but then we find… some steps leading up to a small open gate! We walk up the steps and into the service area, grinning inanely and wondering how many poor unwitting hitchhikers have clambered over that wall. Must make sure to update Hitchwiki…

Inside the Autogrill I buy a coffee and ask the man I share a table with where he’s going. Turns out he’s going a good way in our direction and agrees to take us to Prato. Here we’re picked up by The Rock ‘n’ Roll Vicar (my words, not his). He’s not really a vicar, but he sings in churches throughout Italy and Spain. I speak Spanish with him and we listen to Lynrd Skynrd and Janis Joplin on the way to Orviedo, where our paths diverge. Our next lift is an economist. He’s soon to fly to Manchester for one day to watch a football match. He doesn’t want to see the city though, he tells us, only the football.

He takes us right inside the perimeter of Rome, but drops us at another Autogrill. We do a bit of table-diving (chips mostly) and find our last lift with six trainee priests in a minibus, all in their mid-twenties and on their way to the Vatican to meet another set of trainees for dinner. I sit in the back next to “Luigi”, who speaks good English. He lowers his voice when he says he initially had doubts about living such a controlled life, constantly obeying another’s orders. “But now I think it’s ok”, he adds. David had asked how he came to this path. “For love,” he says softly, “I wanted more love and now I have found love with Jesus which I can share with others… Perhaps you too will find your path,” he adds. “Oh, I don’t think so,” David replies. “But maybe…” “Hm.”

They drop us near the Cathedral and we find our way to the metro and over to our Couchsurfing host. I’m looking forward to meeting this Buddhist-Anarchist-cycling-enthusiast, if his CS profile is anything to go by.

We sit down on the bed exhausted while our host procedes to tell us all about Buddhism, the type of Buddhism he practices and it’s history, all unprompted. He opens up a shrine on the cupboard and and tells us what each part means, talks us through the printed parchment and repeatedly announces how simple and open his type of Buddhism is – not like those other types that won’t allow women or scholars to become enlightened, no – this Buddhism is for everyone. David and I watch him speak, bleary eyed. “Wow, I’m really tired,” I attempt during a pause. He nods briefly, and continues…

We agree to go to a Buddhist meeting the following night, politely declining the one this evening on account of how very tired we are. David manages to change the topic to Anarchism and asks about social centres, resulting in a tyrade about how he has tried to push the local couchsurfers into meeting in one of them, but they just won’t listen. “When you see the place,” he tells us, “you will agree with me.” “I’m sure we will,” says David and we change the topic to cycling. Now we hear about the many bike kitchens in the city and the Critical Mass on Friday, for which he kindly offers to lend us some bikes. There will also be a potluck at one of the bike kitchens tomorrow. “I’ve never met such a pushy Buddhist!” David whispers when we finally get left to sleep.

Our host has agreed we can stay for two nights, but we want to stay in Rome longer, so our first priority is finding a new place to stay. We borrow a bike each and cross the city through crazy traffic in search of a couple of social centres. Ex Snia is closed, but we meet two men there who direct us to Forte Prenestino, the second and more infamous place I’ve heard about.

Forte Prenestino entrance

It really is an occupied fort, complete with moat and warren of underground tunnels. We find the gate open and some people hanging out inside the entrance tunnel. One of the girls speaks English. I explain our sitauation and she says she’ll ask for us. She tells us to take ourselves on a tour and then come and find her again.

Tunnel

The place is amazing – tunnels and doors everywhere, covered in thirty years worth of graffiti, posters and art. There’s a cinema, cafe, bar, tea salon, infoshop, wine bar, massage parlour, theatre and a yard with lots of live-in vehicles. Memories of Pete and Princess bring a lump to my throat, I wish he was here to share this.

Our own little prison cell

We find the girl again who says yes, we can stay for two nights – three at most. I’m so excited I hug her. She smiles and shows us to our room – down a tunnel, past a robot and up into a tower, is a small prison cell painted white with two single beds, neatly laid out – our own room – wow!

The girl has lived here for six years, the man who is accompanying us, twenty. Forte Prenestino has been occupied for almost thirty years. I wonder how many police hours have been spent puzzling over how to evict a fort?

We go upstairs to meet our neighbours, a Spanish girl and American guy, free travellers like ourselves. We share stories a while before the long cycle ride back to our host. I’ve already decided I want to stay at the fort tonight, even though we have one night left with him. We go to his place first to collect our bags and let him know, then jump the metro to the potluck, where friendly bike-enthusiasts welcome us like personal guests and ply us with red wine. A “Bike Kitchen” turns out to be a D.I.Y. bike-maintenance workshop, much like Cranks in Brighton.

Forte Prenestino is a squatted community, but strangely commercial. A meal in the cafe costs up to €6, a beer isn’t much below standard price, a cup of tea in the salon is €1.50… but they are letting us stay for free and they’re all very friendly. For sure I would stay here again.

Apart from Forte Prenestino and the bike kitchens, I feel like a big fat tourist in Rome. David and I visit the Colloseum (it’s very big) and the Palatina and Foro Romano ruins. I’ve always had a thing for ruins and ancient Roman ruins are really something to get excited about. I have the strange experience of watching an enormous communist demonstration from up in the Colloseum. A communist march and helicoptors in ancient Rome – how surreal!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

An Email

For the following to make sense, you need to have read –>this<–

Greetings from Hungary – 31st May

Hi there,

Hopefully I have the right e-mail addresses which I got from my dad. If, by any chance, you don’t know what I’m talking about please ignore my e-mail because then they are probably wrong addresses.

My name is Kata Franko and I’m the daughter of the man you met in Hungary. My dad is short with a moustache.:-) I think you spent one night in our house. Hope you remember.

So he asked me to write a few words for you. First of all because  he would like to know if you got back to England without any problem.

Second of all he just would like to say hello.

Unfortunately he doesn’t speak English, as you probably realised, so when he said that two English ladies spent a night in our house I imagined the situation which, I’m sure, was very funny.:-) But he said you could actually communicate in a way.

I’m sure you met a lot of people on your journey but I thought I just write a few words about him and the place if you don’t mind.

So he’s my dad and the place you were was once a very busy place with lots of children, neighbours. It used to be my grandparents’ (my dad’s parents) weekend house however they spent half of the year there once they retired. Me and my brother spent our summer and other holidays there. We also went there every other weekend just to get out of the city and enjoy the nature. We loved that place. Back then it was still “alive”, we had the little pool, we could play table tennis, my grandma cooked everyday, we played and sometimes studied with my grandpa. Our cousins were also there sometimes and we could bring friends as well. So it was brilliant.

But then we grew up and after a while it was not so interesting to spend our weekends there but we stayed at home instead. So it was my dad only after who went there every other weekend and we visited occassionally only. Unfortunately my grandma died a couple of years ago and since then even my grandpa doesn’t go there anymore. So my dad is the only one who goes there when he can and this place is his now.

He’s just retired recently and now has more time to go there. He actually lives very close to the capital in a flat with my mom and brother (and I lived there as well) so he can’t wait to get out of the city and spend some time alone and do some gardening and stuff.

I actually live in London and came here almost eight years ago. I go home every other month to meet the family and friends.

So that’s it really. Hope you don’t mind my long e-mail. I just thought you would remember that place differently if you knew a few things about it.

I’m sure my dad would be happy to hear a few words from you. How you carried on with  your journey, which countries you visited, how you liked Hungary, etc.

Also, he mentioned you took a couple of photos. Would you mind e-mailing them if you have them?

Thank you for reading my e-mail.

Take care!

Kata

x

P.S. I’ve attached two photos – one is a lunch – my grandparents and my dad, the other one is the house (it’s not my dad on the photo;->)