Sign outside a pharmacy on Athinas Street is a symbol of Athens as a cosmopolitan centre. We move today from our arrival hotel to the studio flat we’ve booked for a week. Leaves a three and a half hour gap between checkout time and check in time. Hotel staff probably the most cheerfully helpful we’ve encountered. Actually suggest we leave the luggage in the room behind the reception desk without our asking.
So we’re free to explore our new neighbourhood. Probably a kilometre or a little less to our studio which is spitting distance from Monastiraki Metro station, with the central market - meat, fish and produce - and dozens, possibly hundreds, of shops and cafés along the streets in between.
And spend some time sitting on the shady edge of Kotzia Square across the street from Athens City Hall, engaging in one of our favourite occupations - people watching.
And seems like représentatives of the whole world pass by. Some tourists but mostly not. North of the central market we’re into the home of locals. Elderly people with shopping bags, a surprising number of them wearing masks here in the clear open square. Two or three women wearing such formal, full skirted dresses we wonder if there’s an audition taking place nearby. A young couple with a pushchair - and a baby boy just finding his legs and spurning it. Gaggles of teenage girls in a uniform of jackets and trainers so universal it is impossible to guess ethnic origin. A man who kneels by small grassy rectangles along the edge of the square collecting cigarette butts which provide him with tobacco that he then sits and rolls in cigarette papers. Endless theatre.
Then time to collect our luggage and transfer to the studio, our home for the coming week.
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