I was reading an article the other day about the science of dread, about the human urge to feel anxious about any event set aside on the calendar as it slowly approaches, regardless of whether it marks a positive or a negative occasion. That was my really long-winded way of lamenting that my four weeks in Athens are coming to a close much too quickly. Three days. That’s all that I have left, really. Four weeks had seemed like an impossibly long stretch of summer. But time marches on.
A few days ago we went to visit Monastiraki again one last time, one of my favorite spots in Athens. There comes a point at the market where you reach a large open square. There the Metro stops and a Byzantine church stands and a bunch of fruit sellers have set up shop. I think there might be some antiquities that have gotten dug up in the area along the way. There is an old joke around here that goes: you can’t dig a hole in Athens without finding ruins. I don’t know that you need to a dig a hole anymore. In this square, there is an old mosque that has been transformed into a museum of folk art, but mostly of ceramics. The tickets of admission are cheap, but I saw that they offer discounts for students.
The man behind the front desk asked my brother and I how old we were. “Seventeen,” Chris said. The kid is six-feet tall, wears a scraggly beard because he cannot be bothered to shave, and has a voice so deep that half of what he says can’t be heard by other humans. He is seventeen, though, even if he doesn’t look it. He was allowed free admission, no questions asked. The man behind the front desk then asked me my age, and I told him, “twenty,” before producing a student ID. He took the ID from my hands and asked me where I go to school. When I explained that my university is in New York, the man immediately began speaking to me in incredibly broken English. Let me just reiterate here that I am fluent in Greek.
So there I was, trying desperately to understand this guy’s terrible English as I go on responding to him in Greek. He comments that there is no date of expiration on my ID card and begins to insinuate that I am impersonating a college student. I think that this is a lot of trouble to go to in order to avoid the three-Euro cost to get into the museum. He tells me that all European student ID cards have dates of expiration. I then have to explain to him that New York is not, in fact, in Europe, so the student IDs work differently there. I begin to get nervous because he is not handing back the ID and I’ll need it in September to, you know, go to school. Finally, I insist on paying full-price for the ticket because the man is insane, but he lets me through. My brother and I were the only other people in the museum. There was not much to see.
I ended up leaving feeling vaguely insulted, not because of the insinuation of fraud, but because the guy was so convinced that I couldn’t actually be twenty years-old. I still get ID-ed at Rated-R movies. How old can I possibly look?
As much as I will miss this place, it’s nice to get little doses of reality every once in a while. I like to think it keeps me grounded.
–Marie-Irene
badpoetree 