Thessaloniki

It takes three hours and two lifts to hitch from Volos to Thessaloniki – Greece’s second largest city. My second lift is two twenty-something girls who’ve clearly never considered picking up a hitchhiker before. I approach them at a service station and convince them to take me, despite their hesitation – “Wait… you’re backpacking Europe… alone?” They can hardly believe it. “But aren’t you afraid?” People always ask the same things.

I’m staying at Terra Incognita, a squat near the centre. I find my way there with the help of a map and call my contact D, who meets me at the door and helps me clamber over the dog barricade of wooden pallets halfway up the stairs. I’m sleeping in the guest room and have my pick of four large double bunk-beds. Everything is clean, neat and welcoming. I meet my other new squat-mates in the kitchen – M, ML, B and Yoyo, a German traveler who’s been staying a couple of months already, awaiting friends who went home for Christmas and never returned. Amazingly I’m not the only vegan in the house – Yoyo and D are too. In fact, B is the only meat-eater.

The “P.P.P.” (my nickname for him) arrives later that night. He’s a Punk from Poland, and he’s almost always Pissed. He’s my room-mate for the next three nights and he snores like a bulldozer. Our politics, although both “Anarchist” are extremely different. He’s from the “I’m an anarchist so I’ll do whatever I want” school of thinking, where I’m more of the “I’m an anarchist so I take responsibility for my own actions and how they affect others” school. Still, he’s a nice enough guy.

There’s also a dog and two cats, seperated by the aformentioned dog barricade, lest fighting begin. By far the most interesting furry character though is “The Frog”, a stray cat who spends literally all of his time outside the kitchen window making strange rrrreeeagh noises. He’s named for this and the way he leans around the corner and rotates his neck to look inside. A very creepy cat.

Terra Incognita

Half of the guest room at Terra

The Frog

The White Tower

“Are you by any chance Couchsurfers?” I’ve rushed down to the White Tower after reading on the Thessaloniki CS Group that there’s a picnic happening. “Hey, aren’t you Jo?” asks a girl at the back of the circle. “Um… yes!?” “Do you want something to eat…wait, you’re vegan aren’t you – take one of these!” She hands me a beetroot and lettuce sandwich and I sit down next to her. It turns out this is Evgenia’s best friend. I stayed with Evgenia in Athens and it seems she’s been bigging me up to her friend in Thessaloniki. Thanks Evgenia!

Jon and Sebastien

Sebastien and Jon are two more travelers at the picnic, hitching their way to Egypt. When the picnic ends I take them and their sitar-playing Cypriot host to my favourite steki (social centre), the Migrant’s Place on Ermou, for 50c coffee and €1 beers. Here we discuss traveling, politics, spirituality and conspiracy theories until their eyelids are drooping – these guys have been traveling almost non-stop. Tomorrow they’re hitching to Istanbul.

Hitchhiking money

For giving to drivers who ask for money for lifts

It’s my first shift at the Hunger Strike, now on it’s 29th day. The shift is 2-8pm and involves sitting in the reception area of the Labour Centre with six other people – reading, chatting and playing backgammon. There are also three people upstairs attending to the hunger strikers, we are just the back-up. Within an hour a man has fainted and been hospitalised. They bring him down from the 7th floor in the elevator in a wheelchair. We stand to each side watching as he’s wheeled through us and out the door to the waiting ambulance, followed by a girl with a video camera. It’s upsetting to watch.

Half an hour later another ambulance arrives. I detected a change in atmosphere but couldn’t understand what people were saying. Now I understand. People make way to the side as before and the elevator reveals another gaunt unconscious man, strapped into a wheelchair. There’s trouble getting this one out and several people struggle with the wheelchair, which is lodged behind part of the lift. Tension is rising, but eventually he’s lifted into another chair and wheeled away. There are tears in several eyes this time.

4:30pm, another ambulance arrives. Again a man is brought down in the lift. I’ve been speaking to a friendly girl with good English, but now she goes with him to the hospital.

5pm. Another collapse. People aren’t speaking with me so much. Tension and tiredness perhaps? I read my “Learn Greek” book to keep myself occupied.

6:45pm. I’m talking to an Iraqi man who has come in to ask… what? For help? It’s unclear what he wants or thinks we can do. He asks to speak with the men upstairs and I try to explain the situation to him – these men have not eaten for 29 days. No – nothing. Yes, ok – water, some sugar and salt, but that’s it. They are risking their lives (killing themselves?) to get papers. What on earth makes you think they can give you papers? He eventually seems to understand and I’m told it’s ok to take him up, so we take the lift to the 7th floor where the hunger strikers are. A doctor is taking blood pressure in one room, men lie thin and exhausted in blankets in another with a television. A couple of men walk around slowly or sit with glasses of water. I want to speak with them myself, but questioning my own motives keep me from doing so. Why is it I really want to speak with these men? It seems somehow self-indulgent, like tourism.

We go back down and I buy the Iraqi man a coffee from the bar. He’s telling me he lives in a house with no water or electricity. I resist telling him he’s comparatively lucky. This man is suffering, that others suffer more doesn’t make him suffer less. He asks for my phone number and I give it to him. He never calls.

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23rd February, another General Strike. I go to the demonstration with Yoyo. It’s good to be with someone else, looking out for one another. The demonstration is very large – it’s impossible to tell how large. We’re somewhere in the middle and neither end is in sight. We march down main streets, past shuttered banks and supermarkets, which people try to open with crowbars. A classic moment: marching past a supermarket with a cash point outside, a man in a mask with a sledgehammer waits patiently in line while a woman gets money out, then goes in and smashes it to the crowd’s applause. The woman walks off with her money as though nothing unusual has happened.

Despite elevated heart-rates, nerves on fire, some running and the faint whiff of teargas, we come out unscathed. Police attempt to break the demonstration a number of times, but it holds up until the end. I don’t even need to use my Mallox.

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Kamara - the big arch

The hunger strike supporters are doing an awareness-raising action at Kamara. I arrive late to discover music playing and fliers on the floor, but only two people left. They point me down the road to the bus stop where I find the others fly-postering buses. It goes like this… the bus comes and a few people jump in front to stop it moving. One person gets on the bus and distributes flyers to those inside, while a girl sloshes glue onto the outside of the bus with a big broom and others run in with posters. There’s also a guy writing “solidarity with the hunger strikers” in marker pen on the back of the bus – apart from one bus, which leaves too quickly reading “solidarity with the hung”. Genius. Some of the bus drivers have evidently heard about this in advance of arriving and try to avoid us – but people run at the bus, stand in front of it, yell “MALAKA! MALAKA!” (Greece’s main swearword) and even move plastic barricades in the way of the bus. When everyone’s finished someone shouts “ENDAXI!” (ok) and everyone moves aside to allow the bus to pass. Few buses escape without posters and those that do have a liberal helping of glue sloshed over them anyway.

Rotunda

I arrive at the Rotonda after a hurried make-up session and some clothes grabbed from the ‘free shop’ outside my bedroom. Fortunately, my lateness and the general habit of Greeks to start everything 1-2 hours later than stated synchronise and I arrive just as the procession is beginning. I find the Zombie Geisha, Zombie Nurse and other general zombies from the squat amidst the zombie crowd, stick a plastic bone in my mouth and begin groaning. Tonight is ‘Zombie Riot’. Once again I find myself thinking, you couldn’t get away with this in England! as people fill the streets – moaning, screaming, rolling over cars, stopping all traffic and covering everything from ancient statues to banks, supermarkets and fast food restaurants with fake blood. The slo-mo rioting zombies march the streets for a good hour before retiring to the Polytechnic University, covering that in blood also and proceeding to drink their way through a hell of a lot of beer and spirits amidst live rockabilly bands.

Despite these few exciting sounding ventures, my time in Thessaloniki can mostly be remembered as a lot of time on the computer, an unshakeable feeling of tiredness, cold weather and a lot of coffee. Mostly I’ve been writing, reading blogs and only venturing out occasionlly – mostly to the Migrant’s Place steki, or just to the shops or a walk around.

One particularly epic and interesting walk takes me up into the small old streets that twist up the mountain. Here houses are older and shabbier, some almost shacks. I feel it has more character than the standard white blocks with balconies in the city centre. There’s a castle at the top where I find a party of tourists with a guide. We look at one another curiously, travellers from different worlds.

Old City House

Who lives here?

Castle

Making “March Bracelets” on March 1st. According to tradition now I won’t get sunburned.

The city just ends suddenly where the sea begins – no barrier, nothing. I wonder people don’t just fall in sometimes.

Ruins pop up around almost every corner, a reminder of how ancient this city is

I’m intening to have “goodbye Thessaloniki” drinks with the few friends I’ve made on my last night. Jon, who never made it to Egypt and came back to Thessaloniki after being turned away at the Syrian border, texts to say he’s in hospital with a broken foot. I go to the Migrant’s Place, hoping to see my friend Iovanna – a slightly eccentric 50-something year old woman from Rhodes who lives in a storage room – but she’s not there. All the Terra people are preparing for a concert at Biologica, another steki on the East part of town. There are so many stekis I never visited and one is on the way home – Iskra. I decide to pay them a visit and have a nice political discussion with the guy behind the bar – until he hears I’m vegan and reels away from me as though I’ve shot him in the chest. We talk a while more and I feel it’s time to leave when his girlfriend comes and stands behind him with her hands firmly on his shoulders.

On my way home I pass by the Labour Centre and pop in for the end of the Hunger Strike Support Group’s nightly meeting. These tend to be epic and I find it best to just pop in at the end for a translated summary. Now I hear they’ve spent three hours discussing what to do next. Nobody seems to know and people are still throwing in suggestions. I teach my translator the phrase “clutching at straws”, bid her luck and leave. I’m going to the forest tomorrow and I may not have internet access for a couple of weeks, but she says I can text her for updates. Fingers crossed.

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.

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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.

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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.

Patras

Anthony and I wait as directed in the coffee bar in Agios Nikolaos, where Camil arrives shortly to pick us up. This is really a stroke of luck – a lift out of Trahila followed by another one all the way to Kalamata with friends of the community (see last post). Camil has a dentist appointment in town. He drops us on his way and we cross the city on foot. It’s a beautiful day.

After a few short lifts we get a long one – all the way to Patras with a Greek truck driver, Yiannis. The only catch is we have a couple of stops for an hour or two each to load and unload the truck. We take the opportunity to walk around and eat the bread, oranges and olive oil we brought with us. I have a two litre bottle of the oil we harvested: my last piece of Trahila. Yiannis comes over with a lettuce from his cargo and a couple of bottles of water for us. He’s not a talkative guy, but he’s obviously generous.

We arrive on the outskirts of Patras around 9pm. Anthony jumps out of the truck to give me a squeeze goodbye. He’s going to continue with our driver all night to Thessaloniki – a little more synchronicity for him.

After some faffing about with buses I get to the centre of town and meet Sma, who’s borrowed a bike from the guys she’s staying with, and we walk together to their flat.

Our hosts are a Greek guy whose name I can’t seem to pronounce and Tony, a Spanish guy who used to be an Erasmus student. They each have their own rooms and keep to themselves mostly, so it’s hardcore internet time for Sma and I who also get our own room and wifi connection. She’s been here almost a week already.

Walking around the following day, the first thing I notice is the migrants. There are people everywhere, especially down by the harbour – lined up along the fences staring longingly at the boats to Italy. It’s easy for me to connect with migrants here, I just need to walk around. I guess I must stand out a lot with my reddish-blonde hair, anarcho-hippy-punk attire and obvious lack of Greekness. I meet a man from Nigeria named Shaggy who, like most other migrants here, wants to go to Italy. Not allowed to stay and not allowed to leave either – the situation in Patras reminds me a lot of Calais. Shaggy asks for my phone number. I’m reluctant at first, but give it to him. He’s going to Athens for a day, but wants to call me when he gets back. I tell him sure he can call me and we can meet up, but in no way is he to think of this as anything other than friendship… EVER! He says of course, no… but he never calls. Was I too harsh?

It’s an interesting exercise to walk about in a meditative state, be aware of how all this attention brings a fear up in me, an urge to close down and erect boundaries. I concentrate on breathing, relaxing, opening to it as much as I can, but it’s hard.

Walking up the big steps to the castle, I’m followed by a sly looking man. He’s looking at me in a way I don’t like and it makes me impatient so that I turn to him and demand “what!?!” He smiles and slinks back to his friends, but one of them comes over. I’m not happy about this, but the man is much politer than his friend. “May I sit with you?” he asks. I reluctantly agree and he sits and chats with me a while. This man is polite, unintrusive and his eyes have a sparkle. His name is the Moroccan version of ‘Jesus’, so I take to calling him that instead. We discuss migrant problems, languages – of which he speaks a few – and the country he has come from, which he obviously loves. I ask why he came here – “It’s a big story!” Ah yes, it always is. He doesn’t want to tell me and I don’t push. Jesus tells me in the two months since he arrived, I’m the second (presumably non-sans papiers migrant) who has spoken with him. There’s a lot of racism here. Like all the others, Jesus doesn’t want to stay here, he wants to go to Italy – then up to Belgium, to England, to Canada… it’s a big dream. This guy has confidence, more than most others. I wonder if it will see him through.

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Sma and I go to meet a girl I found on CS, an anarcha-hippy like me. Silena takes us to a squatted social centre, Perasma (“passage”), then to a Greek bar with live music where we drink “Rakomelo” – flaming hot sweet alcohol, with her friend Christos.

Perasma

Rakomelo

 

The squats here seem more open than in Athens. We go to the weekly Kafeneio (cafe) in Perasma, and another in Maragopouleio – the squatted house, recently evicted and then re-occupied. We go to the latter with Yorgo, another CSer who Sma stayed with last time she was here. He’s been hosting her winter boots and coat ever since.

I meet Jesus again two days later in Persma. He’s with some friends and I go over to say ‘hi’ and invite him to sit with us. I’m with Yorgo and some other “comrades” (they use that word a lot here) from the other squat. One guy, Dimitris, persuades me that I absolutely have to go and listen to Rebetiko music in another cafe. Jesus and his overly-smiley friend come with us. The friend is constantly looking at me, flashing his teeth. I feel uncomfortable, but smile back. Jesus himself is as respectful as before.

I laughed when Dimitris said I’d be out half the night – I’m usually in bed by midnight. But he’s right and it’s 5am by the time I get in the door, waking Sma who was already asleep. How did time fly? Maybe something to do with the kiss I shared with a Greek comrade, my first in three months.

view from the castle steps

Patras from the park

distant snowy mountains