Thessaloniki Diary :
Wednesday : so clearly, in this case, it is as good to travel as to arrive -- there being no other option. I leave home at 9am, Shelley takes me to a Piccadilly line tube -- the traffic takes us ages -- I sit on the tube and marvel at the loveliness of outer London in sunshine with blue sky. Heathrow Terminal Two is quiet and easy. The tickets are waiting for me. There is no queue. I have coffee in the Café Nero and listen to some nice opera thinking perhaps I'm in a movie of what travelling should be like instead of the overcrowded hell that is most airport waiting. The plane leaves on time. This is getting ludicrous! Athens airport is bright and shiny and, if even if all the stories are true and nothing else had been done, it certainly seemed ready for the Olympic hoards.
I had a two hour wait and barely stopped myself buying several yummy bags and a couple of totally unnecessary pairs of shoes. Barely. The journey on to Thessaloniki is equally uneventful, taking just 40 minutes -- and a driver is waiting to get me to the hotel. Despite all this ease, my anal retentive nerves are starting to panic me. I don't know what time I'm needed for the panel tomorrow, I don't know when I'm meeting the Greeks, I don't even know the name of the hotel. Things have been slightly less organised than the detailed itineraries I usually fancy, but I trust the taxi driver and sure enough, the hotel has a room for me. It's plain, comfortable, clean and has a huge variety of TV channels. Some of them in English. It also has two framed pictures on the walls -- a cod-Kahlo and a Miro copy. On closer inspection they are both completed -- and framed -- jigsaw puzzles. Weird. At 11pm I finally speak to my Greek contact and we arrange to meet in the morning. I sleep incredibly badly, but that's not news -- I never sleep well in hotels. At least not without half the minibar in me.
Thursday : the wake-up on the TV comes on half an hour earlier than I set it for. I realise the TV clock is half an hour earlier than real time, not a great start. But out the window is sunshine and Greek roofs and a shining church on a hill, shops with signs not merely in a foreign language but also in foreign letters. Words which -- as in Russia -- I read slowly and proudly that I can decipher them, spelling out whole phrases I don't understand, but which I can at least 'read'. (There are many reasons to be grateful for a liberal Catholic education -- a smattering of Cyrillic is at least one of them.) I meet Christina from the Greek book people and learn I'm not needed until 6pm. Brilliant. There's a big bay here and I'm walking.
I walk for an hour around the bay of Thessaloniki. It isn't the bay I'd imagined -- sand and swimming -- but then I do have a Pacific girl's view of what bays should be. It's always so easy for me to forget that these places -- as in almost any European city -- did not start out as tourist traps, but as proper working ports -- and in this case it still is. I won't be using my swimming costume here, not even in the hotel rooftop pool -- it's 20 degrees. Easily swimming weather for a New Zealand girl. Clearly too cold for Greeks and the receptionist laughs at my question. And it's true, I'm wearing linen trousers and short sleeve linen shirt, while they're wearing jackets and coats and jumpers. This Celtic skin likes 20 degrees. Anything over 25 and I'm melting faster than the wicked witch of the west. Yay for cool breezes.
The walk along the waterfront is typically European. By which I mean there is water, then a busy and noisy road and THEN the cafés. Another reminder this is not the Southern Hemisphere. Every time I'm near water -- especially the Mediterranean countries -- I'm aware that for such a long time the water was the workplace for these people. It might be pretty, but if you're working on it all day, you maybe don't want to look at it over coffee as well. It's almost always the tourists right on the edge of the road, staring past the trucks and motorbikes to the bay -- just as at home in London it's tourists lining the South Bank, staring at the Thames. But I do want to stare at water (you can take the girl out of Aotearoa...) and so I walk past about fifty cafés despite my need of a caffeine fix. (Seriously, so many!!! which is odd, it's nice enough here, but truly, Thessaloniki isn't Florence or Paris, I can't believe there are that many punters here to keep the cafés going) and they aren't your usual Euro caffs either -- chrome chairs, chrome seats, an umbrella. These are gorgeous groovy café-restaurants, one after the other full of big leather sofas, low tables, cool music, great looking menus -- maybe they get full of terribly beautiful students later. I hope they do -- the fine furniture needs pretty people sitting in it.
But, because I want sea and not sea/truck/sea/motorbike I walk on. Past the White Tower (sight of some important Ottoman/Greek event which I'll check when I get home -- the hotel's guides being all Greek to me) and on round the bay to the old man's caff. I can tell it's the old man's caff because there are only old men here -- about twenty-odd -- and another fifteen little boys playing football. But there is a sea view and no trucks and coke-light. So I'm a happy girl. I'm also sitting here typing this up like those other writers I see in cafés and never believe are really working -- that writing in the cafés idea always seems so off-the-telly to me. I think maybe it works for non-fiction, like this, a letter, a diary, but I can't see myself ever doing it with a book. It's hard enough to write books as it is, without the sea as a distraction. And the blue sky. And the old men.
And then of course I find the perfect white-shaded café with fat sofas and good coffee only five minutes further along. Shelley and I have a theory -- the next place will always be better than the one you just stopped at. Du'uh. But then again, the singing old man and great/granddaughter here at the fancy café, the four chattering ladies looking like S&TC forty years on, the grumpy waitress and the fine blue sea -- I wouldn't have written a word had I stopped here sooner. See? I'm done now.
This is what being by the water does to me -- it reminds me that all my life I have wanted a house by the sea. Not near the sea, not in some little village twenty minutes from the sea, not even two streets from the sea. That's not it. I want a place by the sea. Right on the water. Maybe a small stretch of sand between deck and wave. And a place in London too. Sigh. Now where did I put those notes for the sixteen bestsellers I meant to write???
Walking on : ooh ooh! the café/bar at the big theatre. By the water. Looking at the water. Noisy road BEHIND it. Caesar salad and beer. I wanted something more obviously Greek -- they don't do it ... there's a lot of wontons and spring rolls going on in Thessaloniki. It's a lovely building from the outside, I want to go in, ask to have a look, see if the theatre works as well as the café -- so very often they don't. I wonder if saying I've just done a show at the UK's National (I have) would have any sway -- I don't try. Even in a foreign language I don't want to be an actorina.
The event I'm here for is at the Scripta International Book Fair. The first in Thessaloniki. I'm not sure if I've got this right, but it might even be the first in Greece. I'm on a panel discussion with three other writers -- myself, Marlena Politopoulou, a Greek writer and journalist, just now working on her second crime novel, Alicia Gimenez Bartlett a Spanish crime writer, and Prof. Petros Martinidis, an architecture professor and crime writer who is chairing our discussion on women and the crime novel.
The audience is small and the event forced to be slow in that only one of the three women writers speaks Greek. Alicia is speaking Spanish, which is translated into Greek for the audience and then into English by my interpreter! She does at least have some English, so I don't think my words travel quite so convoluted a route to her. We three are nothing if not European! We introduce ourselves and a little of our work and then the discussion is on why there are so many more known women crime writers in the UK as opposed to the rest of Europe -- Alicia believes she is the only woman crime writer in Spain. We don't come up with any solutions, but we enjoy suggesting possibilities.
As usual I talk about sex a little more than the others, but am delighted to be neither introduced as a lesbian writer (seeing as I don't get paid for being gay) nor solely the writer of a lesbian protagonist (seeing as that is so not all Saz does!) ... besides, after all this time, talking about my or Saz's sexuality just seems so ordinary when there's so much else to be getting on with. Like trying to help the Greek interpreter find a good Greek word for tart -- as in Tart Noir/Tartcity. (Even before we started I warned her that the way I was going to use the word would not in any way be pejorative.) Pleased to have introduced the tart concept to the audience, I then took notes as Marlena asserted her belief that one of the reasons women protagonists are good for crime and good to write, is that, for so long, women have lived in veiled, shadowed or closed worlds -- which makes us better at accessing them -- and the secrets of others -- when necessary.
While I have heard variations on this theme before now, I've never heard it described with such lucidity before -- though maybe that's in part down to the necessity of real-time translation forcing clarity on the interpreter.
Then there was dinner (meze -- though I think I may be offering the Turkish not the Greek spelling here, apologies if that is the case), a lot of wine and the local Thessaloniki variation on ouzo. And talking. Lots of that too. Certainly I remember us covering children, the depressing lack of interest in the English-speaking world in works-in-translation, adoption, radio, journalism, bi/sexuality, marriage, finding 'The One', renting flats in Athens during the Olympics, the increasing size of young Greek girls, how the Balkan conflicts affected Macedonian tourism, if dinner at eleven at night is slightly too late, why don't Thessalonians ever eat at home (because there are too many lovely cafes?), Buddhism, Catalan breakfasts, and what is Greek for creme caramel -- creme caramel. All in all a pretty damn good evening. And, at five hours sleep, a hard start to the next morning's return flights. But how else do you know it was a worthwhile night? Oh yeah, and on the way back to the hotel we stopped at a tiny street-side shrine-ette to light candles. There are loads of them, all over the city, candles burning all night through. Very Thessalonian apparently. I liked it. More tiny shrines in Brixton please.
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