That Was Then, This Is Now

Ah, for the heady days of the Reagan administration, when the dollar could buy 115 drachmas, and 1200 drachmas could buy dinner for four.  A lot has changed since we were in Greece in 1984-85, and prices are just one of them. 

In so many ways, the world has drawn closer together.  That year was the first time I had been to Europe, and so many things were different from America.  When you bought something in a store, you got a little plastic sack to carry it in! – unlike the brown paper bags or paper shopping bags we were used to in America.  They had places where you could buy a roasted chicken, straight off the rotisserie!  Everybody toted around plastic bottles with spring water in them! 

Well, America has gotten more European, and Europe has gotten more American.  And Greece has definitely gotten more European.  There are ATM machines on every corner now (no more getting caught without cash on Sunday afternoon), everyone has a cell phone or a phone card (no more searching for coins for the infamous "red phones"), and there is a McDonald’s on Syntagma Square.  Many of the little places that made life in our Kolonaki neighborhood so pleasant are gone:  the little cheese shop up the hill with its dozen different kinds of feta, the Kotopoulo Palace which sold rotisserie chicken from an open-air window, the kafeneion where the men sat smoking and playing backgammon, the Athenian Inn down the street full of visiting archaeologists, now being gutted, and destined for who-knows-what chic retail store.  You now get service at the  Kolonaki post office by taking a number (instead of shoving your way to the front), and the lady behind the desk is actually helpful (as opposed to the old days when the KPO offered special training in rudeness – necessary as it was so un-Greek!).  And everything is priced in Euros, not drachmas – and costs the same or more as in Hartford!  In many ways, in fact, the changes in Kolonaki mirror the ones in West Hartford Center:  everything has gone so upscale that there is little left that an ordinary person can use in the course of daily life. 

But in many ways, and as it has been for centuries, I suppose, all these changes are merely superficial.    You can still live in perfect convenience without a car, because the grocery, bakery, newsstand and movie theater are just a few minutes’ walk around the corner.  A Greek salad, with vine-ripe tomatoes and the world’s best olives, is still the perfect lunch.  The ladies of Kolonaki still put all the rest of us to shame with their chic clothes and impossibly pointy shoes.  The hot Greek sun is still blazing down and  – amazingly enough, due to unleaded gas, the new and beautiful Metro system, and newer cars with emissions systems – you can see Mt. Hymettos again from the American School, no longer shrouded in a cloud of nephos (smog).  That's why we came.  

-- Edie Folta, Athens, August 29, 2003