Pretending to be a tourist in Athens

Wait! Don’t start yet! Put some -appropriate- music on first!

There are moments when time stops, freezes like a picture immediately after the magic click. You observe around you with genuine curiosity and for the first time you see. The color of the sky, -a thousand shades of blue, an endless journey of your eyes-, the architecture of buildings beside you, the imposing wooden doors that hide behind them so many human stories, the color of the flowers, the faces of people who left you behind in a hurry. All so obvious and at the same time not at all.

These thoughts passed through my mind a morning of 2012, walking in Paris, my second city. I had just come out of a bookstore, where a strong impulse pushed me into. There a few minutes ago I had discovered a picture book with hidden corners and unusual Parisian shops, many of which I had overtake without giving a real look. A defining moment and a part of me that changed for ever. Until then I passed in a hurry the environment around me, either because I was absorbed of the past, or because I was thinking what would happen in the future. Literally absent from the present and from myself.

And then, magically I began to observe everything, as if I have never seen it before. Really, the feeling was exactly that. I hadn’t really seen it before. In a moment of doubt I thought it is the city of light that causes all this and that I could not “live” it in the city where I grew up, in Athens. A thought that happily was proved incorrect. When I began to spend most days of my time again in the Greek capital, after three years of permanent residence in Paris, I never saw it as the city I left behind, -Moreover the scene had greatly changed since I left- but as a new town that invites me to get to know her from the beginning.

Athens by Polina Paraskevopoulou-Allrightsreserved-40

Athens by Polina Paraskevopoulou-Allrightsreserved-10

I got my partner in such “crimes”, my camera and started this journey in Athenian streets that from the first click I wished never to be ended. I wandered among streets from another era, traffic lights and balconies that reminded me of Paris and sweets that reminded me it even more. Wooden large windows and magnificent wooden doors. Lodges who brought me to the legendary French passages.