Four years in Greece: the underside of slow

What it says

What kind of piece this is. It is a corrective: written for people considering a move to the Mediterranean, or newly arrived, about the gap between the life you see on holiday and the life you live there. The writer neither defends Greece nor attacks it; four years in, she counts what is actually the case. Her landing point: the idea of a perfectly slow Mediterranean life stays a fantasy.

The writer is from Boston. In 2022 she quit her job to travel for a year; Athens was a stop on that trip, she fell for the city and decided to stay. A few years later she bought an apartment there. Four years in, she counts the side of the Mediterranean pace that doesn’t show up on holiday.

August. Almost every shop in central Athens closes for at least two weeks, and most cafés and restaurants with them. Athenians leave en masse for the islands and the villages. For anyone staying, that means planning shopping and paperwork well ahead. Public transit shifts to a summer timetable, so waits get longer too.

Sundays. Most supermarkets and shops are shut — in her neighbourhood even the big international chains. A good share of smaller shops close early on Saturdays as well. The weekend is therefore not a stretch of slow coffee; it is the window into which the week’s logistics get compressed.

The ávrio problem. The Greek word for “tomorrow” functions in practice as “later”. Her gloss: maybe tomorrow, if the stars align; or in a few days, a week, sometime before summer. It usually comes with “it depends” and a shrug. Tradespeople, deliveries, an electrician’s installation — the same vagueness throughout. For someone from a place where tomorrow means tomorrow, this is the hardest adjustment.

Slowness isn’t distributed equally. This is the sharpest part of the piece: through the peak summer months some tourism workers put in 14-hour days. The slowness one group enjoys is held up by the overtime of another.

What keeps her there. She is happy with her life and names what she values: friends making same-day plans with no scheduling ahead; four-hour dinners where no server pushes the bill at you; whole days spent at the beach.

Her conclusion: the idea of a perfectly slow Mediterranean life stays a fantasy. The reality is a long way from the holiday version; getting the benefits takes real planning and adjustment, and not everyone gets them in equal measure.

The account above is our own rendering of the piece, not a translation or reproduction. The original text is at the link in the source box.