1. You envy your friend who lives in a flat with a five metre by 3 metre scrap of land in front of it because she has a garden.
2. A few hundred square feet of grass and trees packed inside streets upon streets of concrete counts as an urban green space. You forget that when you first arrived you lamented the loss of greenery like Hyde Park, Central Park or the countryside.
3. You call that scrap of land a green space, even though most of the year it consists of dead grass and dirt.
4. A 90 square metre flat sounds huge to you. "Enough to start a family!". Your mind has deleted the concept of the spacious type of housing you may have lived in.
5. You start saying "close the phone" and "close the light".
6. You read about foreign incidents of road rage caused by someone parking someone else in, look at the photo, and can't understand what all the fuss was about.
7. You lose your balance and fall over if you come across a footpath that's not one foot wide, cracked, planted with orange trees and parked upon all at the same time.
8. You snigger at people who walk their dogs.
9. You go to the laiki and are wary of produce that's marked out as not being Greek.
10. When you leave Greece and meet your friends for a coffee, you are surprised when they begin to make their excuses and leave after an hour. You had cleared three hours of your schedule for the meeting!
11. It doesn't shock you any more to see heavily pregnant women chain smoking and drinking.
12. You get so used to life in Athens that you venture out alone late at night on the weekends in London and end up scared sh*tless that you'll get stabbed, mugged, punched, groped or vomitted upon.
13. You get so used to life in Athens that you try to make small talk with people on the tube in London and get looked at like you're crazy.
14. You can answer questions on University Challenge that the anally retentive toffs from Eton and Cambridge can't, like what is a dodekahedron and what is paraskavedekatriaphobia, and your family turns and looks at you like you're a genius.
Feel free to add your own.
5 comments:
I love these!!!
Especially no.14!!!!
:-)
Close the "5"!
I'd like to add the following :)
a) You can cross a 4 lane per way Avenue without using the crosswalk and without killing yourself.
b) You look left, right and up (the flying motorbike) when crossing a one way street.
c) You blow the horn instinctively when the car in front of you removes the gear while approaching a STOP sign in order to stop.
d) You throw hundreds of litters of water during summer in order to clean a 1 square meter balcony.
e) You stopped using the sidewalk time ago.
f) Sidewalks are for motorbikes, and pedestrians using them are tooted to "return" to the road, where they should be in first place.
g) In case of real problems, you never call the police.
h) You have, at least, 2 mobile phones.
i) One of your dreams is having a Hummer and pass over these "yellow cockroaches" when they stop in front of you without doing any kind of signal.
j) You use the word "strike" at least twice per week.
Oh a few additions by me, since I only live in Athens for 10 years.
a)...you do not know your neighbours (although in my current one I do know them)
b)...you see a bus that is PACKED and you still manage to squeeze yourself in
c)...you schedule meetings with your friends who live in the other end of the city tops once in a blue moon cause it takes too long to get to them
d)...you arrange enough time to get to your destination because you know that traffic is weird and it might take you 30 minutes or 2 hours to get someplace
e)...you avoid supermarkets on a Saturday morning, and prefer taking a day off work to do your shopping
Just a few off the top of my head...
'You start saying "close the phone" and "close the light".'
I LOVE it!!!
That's just the bad part of athens...
but even with these serious problems, it still remains the city of my heart... with its good and bad... with its noise, its pollution...
but still so sensational... full of differences, never the same city, every day seems so different, especially in nights... athens is a piece of art.. i love every single athenian problem cause i try to trasform it to an advantage for my way of life... you may cannot understand what i mean, firstly cause of my english and secondly cause of your images from london, Manchester etc...
truely is not london... but i think that these 3,000 years of history say much...
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