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It’s past midnight, but noises of an unremitting spark in Life resound as if it were day. Yellow lights flitter on the sidewalks’ canopies streaming through to the concrete and decorative garlands strung over the traffic reach into infinity like a cosmic journey. The lines of ornamental lights pull at the city’s futuristic lever of style, traveling light-years beyond time.
As Greece’s second city and home to a voluminous crowd of university students, Thessaloniki sleeps solely at the rise of dawn; it lives like a thumping jackhammer the remaining hours. The citizens roll their dice on Life’s board of backgammon. Obsessively, they’re transfixed as leeches desiring to suck the worth out of their rapidly modernizing center.

Midnight In Thessaloniki

Camron Karsten
2006-10-07 12:40:30

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like a scolded child pulled by the ear, I stepped off at the central bus station in Thessaloniki—the end of the line.
With travel, the beauty of it is throwing all your notes of understanding into the air and proceeding to watch as the wind catches hold of the millions upon millions of shards of paper. It blows them with disregard in any direction it pleases. And there, watching and playing the part
simultaneously, you dance in the art of catching and collecting. You twirl in the unknown steps of Life’s movements. You step with the lone partner surrounding you. The only way to survive this performance and depart with applause is to completely surrender. To do this is not to act out from your own will, but from that of the wind—and that source behind such wind. It will move through you if you’re so willing, sweeping you and combing your whetted soul to brush out of you the best potential imaginable. It will move in a defiance of true freedom wherewith the currents of the Universe has you in it hands. People, places and positions are found not by chance, but by purpose. You are lead. You willingly follow. The wind calms and the essence of travel—its unknown—feeds you your Life. It becomes a ritual inner belief of protection and trust.

The Art of Day & Night

Thessaloniki. With my arrival slipped from my own hands, I was in the wind’s flow, swept up and guided not to Delphi to some mistaken oracle, but this northern city’s heart where it would be my center of the world.
People move. They’re in cars, buses, trains. The older are on rickety motto bikes and the youth on racy motorcycles. By foot and with speed the Salonican peoples go about Greece’s Milan.

Fashion and style converge on sidewalks where the definition of lounging takes its name. Spilling from the bottom floors of stacks of geometric housing apartments—notorious throughout Greece—the streets are lighted colorfully with music in the backdrop ...