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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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of conversation. Cafes are full of students and their elders intermingling sociably like any good family of chimpanzees. But seating arrangements are for kings, all of them providing each customer a chance to be the dominant male.
Irresistible, my urge was sustained by a restricted travel budget. I was safe, and I knew it. But the Salonicans of the city were sucked in. After a day of classes or work, it’s impossible for the persons of Thessaloniki to ignore a cushioned sofa or reclined seating. There, sprawled out with service are tables of drinks, snacks of biscuits and peanuts, or a friendly game of backgammon. Cigarettes are lit as though the apocalypse is approaching and the men of Europe’s favorite sport sprint across fields on suspended flat-screens. And just beyond, Life passes by within reach.
These lounge cafes are painted in pure art. They are stylistic in modern fashion, following in the footsteps of Milan in respects to how to relax and socialize. In fluffy comfort or retro-sleek designs, they’re fashioned with tweed frames to glossy metallic curves of the minimalist. Accoutrements are simple—comfort. It is the basic, and obvious, necessity.

Painting The Walls

The sun is up. The next instant, the sun disappears under a haze blanketing the Gulf of Thessaloniki. Twilight unfolds into purplish darkness and the moon turns on its spotlight over the city. The lounges haven’t budge. The inhabitants skip from one couch to the next.
It’s a strange sight for me because I’m alone, and here within the city, thousands of people fulfill the objective of a day and night in Thessaloniki. It is to be together with family and friends. It is to lounge, shop, walk, lounge again, drinking and eating. There are few tourists in this northern Grecian region of Macedonia. Persons from Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania intermix in a population indistinguishable; for to lounge, you simply lounge.
Outside the cafes as I ...