Daniele Somenzi's Greece

Greece With the grey Ford Escort 1300, we enter from Yugoslavia, passing from an eastern country to a little bit of euro-Europe, just to be clear, or if you prefer from a pro-Russian communist country to a western one.

The first night we sleep in a guest house at the foot of Mount Olympus; we arrive in the evening and Nadia, Stefania and I cook an entire pot of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and after not having slept well the previous night, we catch up sleeping 12 hours. The next morning I realise there's nothing for breakfast, like croissants or milk coffee, but the hunger is great, so I gobble down some leftover spaghetti from the previous evening; it's not the best, spaghetti for breakfast, I pretend to be Chinese; they, like the Japanese, do it all the time.

A walk on the little beach in front with the sea as smooth as oil, and then we continue towards the capital, but first I stop at the edges of a cotton field; I'd never seen one. A few bolls now sit in my display case.

Greece at first sight is run-down, ugly houses and ugly roads; then as we get closer to Athens, even worse: traffic and smog galore. The traffic is chaotic and I have to be careful not to have accidents.

We spend a night in an ugly hostel, and the next morning on foot a visit to the Acropolis, which instead is an interesting thing. Too bad the sea of tourists spoiling the setting.

From up there you see the polluted city all around; white is the predominant colour.

A few photos and then we come down from the hill. Greece is beautiful in the islands more than on the mainland.

Our car works well, and takes us without problems wherever we want. The port of Piraeus is crammed with ships of every kind, ferries and container cargo ships; here we see motorcyclists boarding for Africa; there are also ships leaving for Italy; we've come this far on our own wheels.

bye