Setting out on foot, instead of encountering an elegant business area near the Metro, it turned out to be what to my eye looked like an industrial area with a supermarket and a few restaurants. The apartment is surrounded by distant hills, with white houses covering the foothills. White is the common color for homes around here, with red terracotta roofs. I watched several homes being built. So far as I can tell they do not use wood. Everything seemed to be poured concrete, which is later decorated with a fascade of stucco or tile. First they pour the foundation, then a series of two-foot square columns at the corners and midpoints of each exterior wall, then they pour the second floor on top of this. The opened sections of each wall are either filled in with brick or more poured concrete. At this point, internal stairways are also poured with concrete. The homes are usally two-stories with lovely terraces, and very little clearance between adjacent homes. There are trees everywhere, but properties that I walked by had no lawns - too much water required I suppose.

The common tree is the olive tree, which you see everywhere, mixed in with pine trees and tall, narrow cedars. There are no lawns to speak of. People wear rather colorless clothes, not like the bold blue Hawaiian print shirt I wore for a few hours today before I changed into something more subdued. The cars on the freeway are mostly small, mid-sized Toyotas, Citroens and others. You might see a few small station wagons, but no large cars at all. A common sub-compact looks like the picture below. Believe it or not, we fit six adults into it, though when we tried a similar trick with a Taxi the driver refused to take us saying it was illegal.

Anyway, their cars are certainly nothing like the SUVs we have. Gas is 1.00 Euro a liter which is close to $4.80 a gallon. There are no telephone poles and hanging wires anywhere; it’s all underground even in this suburb. Restaurants serve food as late as 1:00AM. It was also rare to find a merchant that didn’t speak at least a little English. The sidewalks I have seen so far are almost completely dysfunctional, however. It is not uncommon to find them only a meter wide, with trees growing in the middle of them, or cars parked on them. I would not call suburban Kifissia a walkable town, so walking is not a significant reason why Athenians are so slim – it’s got to be due to calorie restriction – which matches up with the small-sized food portions you get in restaurants, typically half by volume of what we Americans would tolerate back home. I never saw anyone bicycling either. With no sidewalks to speak of, and cars that drive at literally a murderous pace, I can imagine that bikes are not a very safe way for anyone to get about. There are virtually no sidewalks so you are walking in the street and constantly on the look out for cars that are driving way too fast for the narrow roads they try to navigate. But there are many people out walking nevertheless.

People use taxies a lot, but to get one you have two choices: you either hail one on the street or reserve a ‘radio taxi’ the day before. Hailing a taxi is quite an experience and I didn’t believe it when I read the travel guides but it’s true. You stand on the street and as one comes towards you you vigorously wave your hands. If the driver is interested, he will stop and lower his window. You then shout at him the name of section of town and the street you want to go to ‘Nia Kifissia - Kapetan Korella’. If he is interested, he will wave you into the cab. If not he will drive away. When I was in Nia Kifissia square (actually a large traffic rotary), it was easy to get a ride to the metro station for 2 Euros. When I was at the metro station, though, it was very hard to get a ride back to Kifissia. I definitely did NOT like this whole process, but endured it. I spent the rest of the day shopping for food and walking around the small neighborhood of Nia Kifissia. It was a good thing I did this because as I walked, I became familiar with the major street names, so that when I had to explain to a Taxi driver where I wanted to go, I had enough other streets to offer him as reference points.

I returned to the apartment and fixed a delicious lunch. I also watched a little TV – all in Greek, and much of it indistinguishable from what I would find playing on afternoon TV back home. There were talk shows, music video shows, local news programs and a shopping channel. My adventure of the afternoon was rather modest.

I went to the Super-8 supermarket and explored what was on the shelves, and then paid for my selections at the checkout counter. No one spoke English, and all I could say in Greek was thank you Efcaristo with the accent and stress on the last syllable ‘Ef cal riss TO! or please - parakalo – Par a ka LO! The people in the supermarket were not what I imagined. They were not all short and dark-haired, but many were blond and tall and very European-looking. Aside for the signs, mostly bilingual in Greek and English, you would not know you were in a foreign country. The nice thing about a language that has no Latin-style letters is that you are not constantly trying to decipher them into silly words. The Greek language just fades into the background like some odd style of art work on a store front. The spoken language has a very different cadence than English, and very complicated to listen to, to make sense of it. After a few days of using my knowledge of the Greek alphabet to pronounce words, I think I got pretty good at it. I managed to pick up a few words from Fodors Guide to Greece, but I am not going to invest more time ‘learning Greek’. This is definitely not the way to make yourself understood – besides, just about everyone in this Olympic Town speaks some English. I feel totally cut off from the outside world because all the news is in Greek as are the newspapers and magazines.

By 7:00 PM, I was joined by Isabel Hawkins and Igor. They had taken a taxi to get here from the airport, but the taxi driver could not find the apartment. I literally had to stand outside waving my arms as the taxi drove around looking for me. They had just arrived from a 2-day visit to Santorini which was very exciting for them. After unpacking and chatting a bit abut their Santorini adventure, the three of us then waited to hear from Noel so that we could go out for dinner. This didn’t actually happen until 10:00 PM. In Greece, dinner is a meal often eaten after 9:00 PM.