The 'hood

Obviously, Greek city life is much different from Greek village life. Greek village life is quieter, simpler, and you don't have as many conveniences at hand. Greek city life is noisy, busy, and full of conveniences (ie. shopping and food). People are considerably crankier in the city than in the village, and I can understand why. Traffic, parking, noise, stress - ugh.

Our neighborhood is a semi-decent one. It rests on a quiet back street parallel to a major road, which means we have the quiet of a residential area but are in close proximity to shops, restaurants, bus lines, etc.

The people in our neighborhood seem to be a mixture of everyone - lots of students, elderly, immigrants, and a handful of families. I haven't met many people yet, aside from an African immigrant who introduced himself when we were first arriving. I'm afraid I was a bit snarky with him, simply because I was in full crankypants mode, we had just driven an hour with three screaming cats and I was annoyed with my husband for some insignificant reason. Unfortunately I haven't seen him again to make amends, but it would be nice to have someone new to speak English with.

Other notables in the neighborhood are a child who can have no other nickname but Squeaky and a guy who all afternoon shouts the same thing every two minutes. I heard him at first when I was putting the laundry out, then I kept hearing him with the doors closed and the air conditioner on. In America, the latter would certainly mean one of two things: either the guy was drunk (or on some other substance), or he was crazy. Here, it can be those things or it can mean he is Greek. I couldn't make out any of the words well, it was blurred and hard to understand, I thought the last word was "I'm coming", and was wondering if perhaps he was trying to woo a young woman who was not reciprocating his affections. Alas, today my husband was able to listen to what he was saying, and it turns out the guy is just selling watermelons. Does he really have to shout it every two minutes? Well, yea, we are in Greece after all. Still, having my husband bring such things to light sort of ruins the whole storyline I invent around it.

Surely something can be said regarding shouting about your melons all day.