Friday is market day in our neighborhood, and Kim and Martha felt I should come along to see. Here they are looking at scarves. Unlike the Macerata market in Italy, this one runs exclusively along one street. Stalls line both sides and people walk in the center of the street. OCD person that I am, I noticed the stalls were not uniform in how far they stuck out into the street. In fact some people "extended" their stalls by putting more merchandise on boxes, resulting in bottlenecks to an already-crowded street.

Like the Italian markets, you could buy
everything from clothes to food to housewares.

Salespeople were a mix of Greeks and

immigrants. I don't know what time they opened but they were tearing down about 3 p.m.

This picture shows Kim (second from left) clawing her way to a stand that was shutting down and selling off his remaining stock of oranges for 3 kilos/Euro (that works out to around 35 cents a pound). He became very popular very quickly.

Unfortunately the pictures can't show the length of the market.

Martha wanted to take us afterward for coffee/tea to a place about a 15 minute drive south of us down the coast. Very nice cafe - they even had valet parking. High temp today was only 53 degrees, so we sat inside and looked out. There were a couple of people in the water (I said they must be Germans). Just a couple of minutes from where we had coffee is the picture below: it's a natural brackish lake where the water is warm and supposed to have healing properties (a mineral spring, I assume). Martha said that some retirees actually get their pool fees paid by getting a doctor to prescribe the treatment.

Finally I'll close with some Athens news. When I was in Italy I noted all the immigrants. Because of Greece's location, it has

even more of an issue. Greece is an entry point to the EU for Africans from the south, Eastern Europeans from the east but also middle-Easterners and Asians. Obviously a large influx of immigrants causes a drain on the social system. Unlike the US, if a child of immigrants is born in Greece that is no guarantee of Greek citizenship. In fact citizenship has more to do with heritage than it does with location. There are Greek citizens around the world who have voting rights in Greece yet someone born here who is over 21 may not.