A Kitchen in Athens

In the beginning of the year, my wife and I took a short trip to Athens. It was only a two-day trip to complete all the formalities for our UK visa application, but it was our first real trip to Athens in almost three years of living in Greece. I’ll share a few pictures from that trip later.

I remember we had a very cozy and quiet little apartment with a kitchen window that looked out onto an overgrown and slightly abandoned garden. One day it was raining, which is common for Greece in the winter, and I was doing dishes in our quiet little kitchen, looking outside. I saw how the water pelted the leaves and barrels. I also saw a cat hiding under a staircase and thought that this might be one of those core memories that stay with you for a lifetime.

I thought about my pilgrimage: how the “me” from 2021 would have never imagined myself doing household chores in Athens. I grieved all the things I had lost and all the people who were no longer there.

For the last few years, I’ve been reading a lot of various small, personal websites and blogs. It brings me back to the beginning of the internet when people could create small pieces of the web for themselves, and all the websites looked authentic and different. I thought it might be a good idea to create something like that for myself and share things that I do care about and which are already gone.

I was thinking all these thoughts while doing dishes. The rain was pouring, the cat was sitting, and all the small, precious things around me and inside my strange life were connecting to each other. The cat eventually left and the rain stopped, but the warm feeling inside me lingered for a while. I can still bring it back to life sometimes.