Hey there you!
Met this dude at the free Greek lessons we’ve been taking at the squat near our place. It’s run by Anarchists and and are some of the nicest people. There seems to be a lot of nice people here in Athens, but these nice people are teaching us a language. Molly is too advanced for it as she needs to learn more technical things that would probably involve some sort of animal sacrifices and what-not. I require someone with great patience because I can’t remember the word or phrase we just talked about for the last 5 minutes and they have to keep reminding me. I’m sure they are wondering if I had a lobotomy and just forgot to mention it. I’m a high functioning post-lobotomic (I just made that up) ding bat. This past Thursday we had our class in the garden they squatted across the street. We were sitting under a fig tree. I was struck Isaac Newton style in the head twice by two different figs. I didn’t rediscover gravity but I did learn the word for fig. I learned it for about one minute and of course I’d now have to look it up again.
So the guy we met at the lessons asked us if we’d be in to checking out a bonfire of sorts at a church on the other side of Athens on Saturday night. He said it was a fire. I think in my head I translated it into “bonfire”. We got there about 45 minutes before midnight and hung out in a cafe not far from the church. People with big long candles started walking towards the open doors of the church and we could hear the service that I think was in Latin or Greek? I couldn’t tell, but it reminded me a little bit of Istanbul when it’s call to prayer time at every mosque in the city. They all have stadium style speakers to blare whatever prayer they are doing. The church speakers were loud but a little fuzzy. Check out a little video I took, warning there are loud booms.
This went on for about 15 or 20 minutes. We were standing on a walkway. It started out much more crowded but after the first really big explosion and fireball blew up pretty close in the street below us there was almost a stampede of small women who had all wiggled up front to see. Seconds later there was a wall of taller boyfriends shielding them from the new door to hell that had just opened up. Jesus had risen!
The street the fire was on is a major road that goes through Athens so traffic had been stopped ahead of time. I guess the church is in to this? We left after the booms and the fire died out and ended up in the neighborhood of Exarcheia for drinks. The only places with anything open here on Easter weekend were the atheist neighborhoods or more Muslim hoods like ours. It was a fun night.
