Arriving in Athens airport and getting into a taxi is a pleasant experience – open vistas, bright sun, friendly drivers and modern multi-lane highway. Pretty soon the city starts – mainly concrete buildings, excessive gridlocks and unclear lane-changing rules (blinkers recommended but optional), several cars parked bumper-to-bumper in any tiny area that would allow parking (and if not, pedestrian sidewalks are a popular alternative). In residential areas a weird occurrence would be seeing a recently built luxury building next to something rundown and sometimes abandoned, with windows missing, boarded up or sometimes covered in plastic tarp. I guess the gentrification […]