The fact that many around me are in a bad state in terms of health made my mind spin. Caused a late wake up call. I hope I didn’t miss the deadline and I will still have time to squeeze something out of what life has to offer.
With the exit from the depression that followed the circumstances and the feeling that everything was crumbling, I partially got back on my feet. The temporary recovery sent me, even on this holiday, to try to enjoy life. As a bourgeois, this means looking for a family holiday where we will not suffer excessively. It will cost as much as it will.
This time the furor fell on Athens. We were here, my wife and I, a few years ago in a much earlier and much more flexible family phase. Now we are a mini-clan: two bleary-eyed and tired adults, a 4-year-old girl who is cute to death and a professional saboteur, and a baby who recently celebrated her one-year birthday and holds in her tiny body an energy reserve larger than a medium-sized nuclear reactor. When there is such a human package, every action abroad becomes a journey. Eating, changing clothes and diapers, going to the lobby, shopping, etc. Reality is a continuous portfolio of organizations, arrangements and times.
In this operation I am a platoon commander and my wife is a chief of staff. There are orders, procedures and mandatory targets. However, this city is easy. We took a hotel in Lava. In the center of the filet. The peak of the holiday and in the country everything is expensive missiles. But a person can save for years, live like a dog, and then discover that out of nowhere a serious illness has landed on him – and everything goes to waste. When this is the theory and, unfortunately, also the reality, you consider the economic elements less. In addition, we tried to be optimistic and always see the glass as half full. And yet, there were things on the trip that were simply unbearable for me and difficult to digest even with the new perspective and softened version of myself.
Let’s start with money exchange stings. May the name of the money changers of Greece be erased and may their house be destroyed which is near the Acropolis and was probably built on the savings of lost tourists, who did not notice the small print in a moment of haste (me, I admit and confess). And also to hell with pickpockets, a matter that surprisingly still exists in the modern world (yes, we were pickpocketed, or in fact that valuable object was lost to us and I’m just slandering). And in the same breath, it’s hard not to travel in this city without grabbing the market for the price differences compared to the country. From a snack and a meal to the prices of clothes at Zara, half price. Why? Taxation, distance from Europe and above all, as we learned a long time ago, unbridled greed of the Israelis.
I think about it quite a bit on vacation. Israelis are ashamed not to be rich. Work, modesty and contentment with little are values that have long gone to waste. I recently finished Assaf Inbari’s work, “The Red Book”, a true masterpiece, which brings us back to the beautiful principles that existed in Israel (and at the same time to a lot of crap from the past). At a protest march that passed me by, one of many in Athens, I saw a banner being raised with a call for economic equality. Since the social protest in 2011, who even remembers a discussion about ideas of this kind in our districts?
Between naïve philosophical reflection, in a city where true love was once a profession, to a bite in a Greek restaurant with a basic menu (and for some reason the dishes in restaurants here are almost always delicious and, sorry for the trouble, almost always at a sane price), you have to deal with the moods of the little ones. There are good and there are threats.
In one of them, suddenly in the middle of the main square, a magnificent historical site, Michaela, my eldest, caught a cold and took off her shoes and refused to move a meter without us bringing her sandals. The problem: the sandals at the hotel and us not. Threats, pleas and promises from our side – nothing helped. As in the movies, she lay down in tears on the ground and stomped her feet non-stop. A real show. There is nothing more interesting to the bored tourist than a moment like this, and accordingly the crowd around, who instantly became a super nanny, gave us endless advice, looked at us with pity and even took pictures and tagged us, until I considered taking out my hat and demanding compensation.
At the end of almost an hour of fiddling on the daughter’s part and complete helplessness on our part, with her eyes swollen shut and two tissue packs over her nose, she got up as if nothing had happened and continued walking, smiling and ready for the next challenge. I used to get stuck in an event like this for hours. eat myself Trying to understand why it happened and maybe even digging into her brain. It was in the past. I took a deep breath, looked at her, we chatted a bit about the incident and moved on. If there is a good moment in the present, why spoil it? Who knows how many more times we will be in Athens together, happy, healthy, in perfect weather and with a few pounds in our pocket to spend.