As it happens, we weren’t able to travel on the flight to Istanbul on Monday 18 August as planned. The passport hitch with the children’s residence stamp was resolved the following day, but the bigger problem was finding free seats on any flight to Istanbul. This proved impossible, mainly because of huge overbooking on Turkey flights (Iranian nationals don’t require visas to travel to Turkey), so .eventually, we returned the Istanbul tickets and had new ones issued via Vienna, thanks to the unstinting efforts of a travel agent (“the friend of a friend”), who bent over backwards to issue the tickets on Friday 22 August.
We flew to Vienna on Saturday 23 August. We had a five hour stopover there, so we were able to take the CAT train to Vienna and walk until Stefansplatz, teeming with tourists, a festival of Turkish music attracting a fair crowd.
We got to my parents’ house in Athens at 1 am on Sunday morning and have generally been relaxing and doing nothing much since, apart from last Thursday when it was Athena’s fifteenth birthday, and she was to choose the outing. A sign of the times that the shopping-starved youngster would choose visiting an American-style shopping mall, named rather predictably, The Mall in Athens, near Neratziotissa metro station last.
Athena found all the familiar shops she hadn’t seen since we left London: Zara, Bershka, Funny Fish, Carpisa, Tie Rack, M&S, Nine West, Monsoon, Accessorise. As we sat eating our KFC (the ultimate culinary blasphemy in the land of souvlaki), I looked around at the people and the place. The scene could have been anywhere, from New York to Dubai to Hong Kong. The Mall has been built to cater for Greeks in the same way that ancient Roman emperors provided bread and spectacles to keep the mob quiet. At the same time the traditional areas of Monastiraki and Plaka in the centre of Athens attract tourists in search of a Greece that is fast becoming a museum attraction.