A guide to the vexed

Whether you have grown up here or are just passing through, negotiating your way around Athens can be a daunting task. And it never seems to grow any easier.

Like mythic figures of yore, Athens residents and visitors alike greet each new day as a heroic task: one that is intended to appease the gods and is fraught with peril. They don their armor and courageously venture beyond the walls of their sanctums out into the valley of evildoers where scurrilous scammers and tricksters and machinating bureaucrats lie in wait. And at the end of the day they remove the dust of their mythological ancestors from their cars, their living quarters and their clothes and shoes and count their wounds. Incidentally, the dust that perpetually powders the city's streets and platias and is the foe of every Athenian housewife, the dust that made such an impression on no less a figure than Gunter Grass while he was undergoing a headbirth much like the one that brought into being the city's patron goddess, will be the subject of a particular inquiry at a later date.

For the moment, let it suffice to say that this guide is intended to soothe the apprehension and heighten the survival skills of those who find life in Athens (Athens, Greece that is) a little too perplexing: for those who always have that uneasy feeling that they don't quite get it. It is to them that this blog is wholeheartedly dedicated.