Balkan Shuffle

I've been away from Blip recently. Partly because my family and I moved house but mainly because I was travelling with my girlfriend and two friends around the Balkans. It was a perfect getaway from what became a slightly restrictive and, dare I say, monotonous Highland life.

A key point to the trip was to do everything on a wing and a prayer. All we had booked were flights to Athens and flights home from Split. Everything in between was to be decided on the day.

Athens

We arrived in Athens on the 18th August. The first thing that struck me was that it was like no other European city I had been to. It was dry and hot. The paint cracked and flaked from many of the buildings, parched by years of ferocious sun.

There was a distinct lack of skyscrapers, only a handful that were restricted to the financial areas. Instead, the mass of small terracotta tiled building was most evident in its sprawl. A true metropolis of cobbled streets and blaring boulevards where the pedestrians are a second class citizen and where the loudest horn rules the road.

The recession hit Greece hardest in Europe. The country, which was already struggling to keep its Euro steady, plummeted into debt. In an effort to slow the recession the government made huge cuts in all its sectors. These actions re-ignited the flame of the historically influential left-wing guerilla groups. These groups triggered the riots in may when protests got out of hand and people were killed in the bank in the main square. I asked the hostel worker about these riots, and about these groups. He told me that Greece was still just as safe but that tourism had been effected. And that there was as much as a 50% drop in American tourists during 2010 because of the threats.

The only evidence of tension we saw was in the form of heavily armed police officers and revolutionary graffiti.