The Sights and Smells of Athens....

Living in Athens is stimulating for a number of reasons but the olfactory sense definitely gets its fair share of excitement. Because of this I decided to dedicate a whole entry to the smells of Athens because frankly I can’t deal with it all alone.



Item 1 is of course the bathrooms. I don’t think I can accurately portray how disgusting they can get over here. Porta Pottie comes to mind. Rarely is their any toilet paper but this of course can be easily remedied by carrying tissue, a nuisance but well worth the effort. I cannot, however, carry disinfectant. Call me OCD but I don’t like using a bathroom that hasn’t been cleaned in ages, where the whole room reeks of stale pee. This is caused by a number of things. First of all they don’t flush toilet paper but place it nicely in the open garbage can next to the toilet. And for extra fun they have Turkish toilets in some places which is a porcelain hole in the ground. These are particularly fragrant, because the walls and floor are splattered in pee. And to top it all off, they either have no faucet at all or one that is extremely dirty with no available soap. Wet naps and tissue have been a live saver. Now I just need a nose plug.

Item 2 would be the body odor. I’ve never had a teammate or even played against anyone with body odor over here. The young girls are very clean and always shower. However, I haven’t had the same experience with personal hygiene in all cases. The metro is especially nauseating. It gets really bad in the summer when it is hot and sticky and everyone is standing in a close compartment with no air conditioning. Without fail someone will have their arm up in the air to hold on to the bar and I will have my head as close to a window as I can get so I don’t pass out. The other day in the bank I sat next to a lady, about 50 or 60 I suppose. She sat down next to me as I waited 45 minutes to withdraw money (pretty standard wait over here). Anyway she placed her large purse on her lap and proceeded to lift up her arm on my side and dig for who knows what at the bottom of that purse. She couldn’t find what she was looking for but her arm stayed up there, flapping up and down and pushing the air closer to me. It was absolutely disgusting. I’m sitting there thinking how in the world can a woman smell that bad. It wasn’t humid outside and she didn’t look like she was much into exercising. How long exactly and with what amount of laziness would it take for a woman to smell that horribly? A man might be able to pull it off in a few days if he wore the same clothes and didn’t shower. A woman? I’m guessing upwards of a week or more. Gross.

Item 3 is pollution. There are a lot of people in Athens. Traffic is horrible so cars idle and emit exhaust right in your face when you walk down the street. I don’t know how strict their emissions standards are because the pollution can get bad downtown where there are a lot of cars and scooters.

Item 4 is cigarettes. The sad part is that I have become very accustomed to the smell. I still don’t like it, but where as before I could smell a cigarette from across a restaurant, I now smell them all day long and fail to notice. People smoke everywhere here except on public transportation (but the B.O. makes up for that). Movies have intermission for smoke breaks, people smoke on their scooters, at sporting events, at their job, every restaurant, club and café. They blow smoke right in your face and in 10 months of being in Greece I believe I have been asked once if I mind. Taxi drivers love smoking and hate for their back windows to be open. This makes for a fun trip. My teammates smoke before the game when they are getting taped, halftime if they feel like it, and for sure after the game while we are all trying to shower. And while I have learned to deal with it at some level, there are certain types of cigarettes that smell especially foul. I don’t know what the difference is, and its ridiculous that I actually know there is a difference, but it there is one.

Item 5 is my own personal rant. On my latest bus trip, 10 hours each way to be exact, I had the privilege of having my air scented. They have “air fresheners” here that spit out a scented mist every so often. This particular fragrance was spit out every 15 minutes and smelled of fake citrus and cheap women’s perfume mixed together. The mist was released into the confined area of the bus and attacked your nostrils at every breath. It was like catching a really foul smelling hair spray just released into the air and tasting it on the back of your tongue. My whole trip was broken up into 15 minute segments. I could have probably told you what I was doing at each air freshened quarter of an hour.


So, it can get kind of nauseating sometimes. But then I go down to the sea and breath in the fresh air from the water or go to a taverna and smell the Greek food cooking. So, I can’t complain too much.