Here she is, the gigantic poured-grey-cement Balkan village of five million people: who all think alike, look alike, act alike, talk alike and can’t agree on anything. Απολαύστε την. (Double-click to take in all the rich architectural detail.)
Sorry, I was just thinking to myself about what parts of my Balkan trip I needed to post next; people who kindly gave me interviews or let me photograph them and how I have to get on it… And, how I’ve been wasting my time engaged in a running war with everyone in Athens to prove basic things like the fact that Albanians are a tall, extremely attractive people. People in mono-cultural societies say the most deafeningly racist crap — you can’t imagine. If one more person smirked at me when I said: “You know, Tirane is actually kind of a nice city…” things would’ve ended badly. If it weren’t so offensive, it’d be fun to hear ignorance trumpetted with such certainty. But it is. Good timing to head to Istanbul. Where I can’t understand the racist crap people are probably saying.
And I thought to myself, what? is it going on twenty-five years now that Athenians have been freaking out about immigration? And it doesn’t seem to have crossed the brain of even the most intelligent or open-minded Athenian’s to make that an asset for the city and not a “scary” liability. Where is this immigrant Athens? In all these years, malaka, not one person has said to me: “Yo, Niko, there’s apparently this great Pakistani place in Patissia; you wanna go check it out?” Everyone knows I’m into South Asia. “Wanna go to the laike (market) on Saturday in Kypsele and see the stuff the Afghans sell?”
Or, all these tens of thousands of single, alone and lonely Albanian men… There must me some woman somewhere they hire to make them börek or baklavadhes for bayramia and namedays and things. Like the Mexican women who make tamales for parties in New York. Where is she? Where are they? In New York she’d have a full front-page spread on the “Metro” or the “Food and Wine” sections of the Times and she’d be taking orders from Upper East Side ladies by now and have her own thriving business.
All the cement-cave-dwellers have had sushi though — without exception mediocre and psychotically over-priced…
Provincials, vlachadera, isolationists…μικροαστά, petit bourgeois συχαşιάρεδες…
Taco stand on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona, Queens, about five blocks from where I grew up, where for three to five dollars you can have a full meal of some of the freshest, most complex tastes of any of the world’s cuisines. I know Athenians who have been coming to New York for years and who I haven’t been able to convince to try one of these places even once.
Actually, what I’d really love to do is bring a Kurdish kid home to New York with me from Istanbul with a big tepsi of stuffed mussels and watch him become a millionaire. I don’t know where I’d set him up first though: Astoria? Sunnyside? or straight to Manhattan? or Long Beach or somewhere? Or get him a booth at the Italian summer festival circuit…
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
I’ll never forget getting my cousin to concede trying a Syrian/Lebanese restaurant in Panourmou. His shock when he realized 75% of the menu was identical to taverna food. He had no idea- this is the state of Neo-Greek cultural awareness- to eat souvlaki and mezzes with tzaziki or yemista is somehow “Italian” (???).
The Chinese restaurants in Athens seem to do alright though. Everytime I go to a Bengali place in Omonia, I am definitely the only non-immigrant there.