I arrived in Athens on Monday, June 12th in the late afternoon, and by the time I got my checked luggage and took a taxi to my residency, it was around 6:30pm. I greeted my hosts and their two artists in residence. The residency director, Dimitri, showed me to where I’d be staying and mentioned he didn’t have time to prepare it as he would have liked but hoped it would be acceptable and that he knew I wanted access to A/C (I had requested that if possible given that it can get up to 104°F/40°C in the summers), which this apartment has. Then we went out for drinks and invited a field biologist friend of Dimitri’s, as I had asked to have him show me some of the local fauna and flora on the nearby Lycabettus mountain. It is also the highest point in the whole city (and is inexplicably titled a hill here, as in Lycabettus Hill, but I assure you - and have photographic proof - that it is not!).
I returned back home and went to bed. I awoke in the middle of the night and discovered a large cockroach, so the next morning Dimitri brought a can of spray over. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bigger infestation than the can of spray could resolve, so he then spent hours patching crevices and holes in the place with cement, caulk, and tape, and finally a couple days later an exterminator came. Since then, I haven’t seen another (fingers crossed)! In the midst of dealing with that, my bathroom plumbing also flooded the place with contaminated water, and we’ve since had three plumber visits - I now have a brand new toilet, too. I’m hoping that was all my bad luck for the trip, right at the beginning!
I’ve had great luck, too, though! On my second day here, I went up Lycabettus with my new field biologist friend (somewhat confusingly for narrative purposes, he’s also named Dimitris so I will just refer to him as the field biologist). He brought his very nice birding photography gear, including a tripod and scope, because he has been observing a sparrowhawk nest and was happy to show it to me. It was AMAZING. I had a great time observing them; I’ve seen both adult and baby raptors up close before at LSU Vet Med, wildlife sanctuaries, and/or zoos, but to intimately see a healthy, wild sparrowhawk family through a scope was magical. We then climbed to the top of the mountain at sunset to get a bird's eye view of the city and the Acropolis. A few days later, I went on a five-or-six mile walk around the Athens city center and the base of the Acropolis with one of the other artists. I next visited the National Garden, as I was hoping to find one of the native tortoises. I did not, so I went back up the mountain the following afternoon to try to spot some, but then heard from other people in the trails that they're mostly around in the early morning. However, the trip wasn’t wasted as I then ran into a Eurasian hoopoe. Unfortunately, I had the wrong camera settings still running from the previous evening and didn't realize it, so those photos are not usable.
Interspersed between all of the above events was studio time! I began work on two different sparrowhawk paintings on papyrus and have been trying to get the surface of the 19th century tiles I acquired in Amsterdam to become more receptive to paint, as I want to use my OPEN Acrylics atop them and would like the resultant work to be relatively archivally stable. First, I tried hand sanding to no success. Then I tried a rotary sanding attachment on an angle grinder, but the surface of the tiles is not actually flat so it left a lot of pockets of shiny glaze. I decided to see if I could find a store capable of etching my tiles instead, as etching liquid/cream or sandblasting would uniformly work on irregular surfaces. I took the tiles to a glass store that told us they could sandblast them, but when I arrived it turned out their sand was far too fine and it would not result in the type of more open surface I was looking for, so they sent me to a sandblasting factory. There, they assured me they could do it and that I should come back the next day to retrieve them and pay. However, the next day it turned out the glaze was too hard for their sandblasting material, and they could not do as I’d asked after all.
The food here has been uniformly delicious, and Athens is in my opinion the most vegan and vegetarian-friendly city I’ve been to, which has been a very pleasant surprise! I knew the Mediterranean diet would lend itself pretty well to my vegetarianism, but there are an abundance of purely vegan restaurants around and several servers have proactively offered vegan modifications to vegetarian dishes.
