Every night it’s a non-stop costume party. It starts on a Thursday known as Tsikno-Pempti or “Smokey Thursday.” All of the business owners in Greece wake up early and start up their giant grills. They throw on different sorts of fatty meats and cook all day selling and eating and drinking beer. Then at night time the real party begins with dressing up in your favorite scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary outfits and dancing and drinking until the crack of dawn.
At AFS, we threw a “Smokey Thursday” dance party for the students. It mostly consisted of the boys cross-dressing and dirty dancing across the floor with other boys (only in Europe) and the chaperones laughing at them and trying to avoid being pulled out on the floor engulfed by twenty boys or were they girls? All in all they had a blast.
Then it was time for the adult party fun. Jacques (the other intern) and I had met some local Greeks here and they invited us to join them downtown. So I grabbed my bird looking mask and feather boa and we headed to the bus stop to go downtown. After a long one hour bus ride, due to so many stops, we made it to the center called Aristotle Square. After a few back alley ways and crooked turns we found this hidden street filled with hundreds of people dressed in so many different costumes, with loud music, streamers and dancing.
We found our new Greek friends and joined them at their table. The food was big slabs of beef and meats, and there was also wine and beer. The meat was served straight onto the table, no plates, napkins, nothing but a knife and fork. It was divine!
After the fabulous meal and conversation we decided to walk back to the center where there was a huge celebration going on. There was a stage with live bands that played all day long and thousands of people dressed up, mainly in drag, and dancing. We stayed for a while just soaking in the culture and danced until we both decided we wanted to explore more areas of downtown. We bid our friends farewell and took off towards the bar district.
The bar district is only a few blocks from the center, within walking distance, and consists of a long strip of exciting, music hopping, fun-loving bars and clubs. We walked down taking in the mass amounts of people and their “very out there” costumes and decide to go inside a very small quaint, on the corner of the block, bar. We walked inside and it just so happened to be live music night! We found a table upstairs that looked down onto the two guitar players, drummer and two singers. The music was mostly in Greek, some in English, but we had a great time watching everyone dance and appreciate the music being played. Once a new song started, in Greek, everyone around us started singing that song like they were in so much love with it. They sang like no one was watching, they sang from memories that brought this song to life. I had no idea what they were singing, but I felt every word of it as if I had written it myself. The atmosphere was perfect that night in that bar. We ended up staying at that bar until 5:30 that morning, just in time to catch the local bus back to The American Farm School. Carnival has just begun. Now I will be off to Istanbul, Turkey, where the fun awaits. So it goes with another three-day weekend. Full of spontaneous travels and circumstances. So it goes. I love life.
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