My last day in Athens was a full one. In the morning after leaving the Acropolis House I went to the huge meat, fish and vegetable market, Varvakeios. It is a set of large adjoining halls.
One has scarlet carcasses of all kinds hanging on hooks, each display with a person outside luring people in to inspect whatever skinless animal is hanging there.
As soon as a person shows interest a butcher in a protective coat with a large cleaver in his hand chops off just the portion that the customer wants.
Beside it is a fish hall with large styrofoam containers filled with ice and fresh fish being trundled in. There is everything fishy of every shape and color.
I talked with some of the young men hawking the fish in singsongy Greek. The first was from the Congo,
the second was from Pakistani Punjab,
the third from Indian Punjab.
All were very cheerful and have been here for decades without being allowed Greek citizenship. So we are not alone in our willingness to allow people from depressed countries to do our low paid menial work without accepting them as fellow humans beings. The overseeing butchers all seemed to be Greek.
The vegetables were piled on tables outside—red, green, purple, yellow, brown, a rainbow of colors—with men from other countries hawking them and housewives with rolling carts selecting what they wanted.
It was a wonderful morning. And then in the afternoon I attended an afternoon photography workshop in which very accomplished and very fluent students from all over the world presented a dozen photographs apiece to a critical audience. In spite of having taken several hundred photographs that morning and hundreds of thousands since I became hooked on photography as an untrained and wildly enthusiastic amateur 20 years ago, I didn’t understand a thing. I attended a photographic club several years ago and all they talked about was cameras and technical capabilities. At this workshop, cameras weren’t mentioned at all. The whole discussion was about concepts and threads and ambiguities and tensions and subtlety and profundity. Many of the photographs with the deepest meaning were of things that looked mundane to me, and were intended to. Beauty seemed something sentimental to be avoided, though intimacy was important and place important, the themes of the workshop. So I left as untouched by understanding as when I arrived, an innocent bystander awed but clueless.
Then after a marvelous fish dinner with two Guggenheim winners and one future Guggenheim winner, I went back to Adrianna’s penthouse airbnb which she got for a week, somehow, for $400, a bargain. It was my first luxurious accommodation on the trip. She told me about her life since graduation, how she brought up two girls on her own and found her way from owning a bar in NYC to being a portrait photographer and becoming more and more self assured and independent. It was late. I slept for five hours and was up at 4:30 a.m. to walk a mile and a half uphill to the Syntagma Square metro station
and off to Athens airport worn out before my journey started.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 