From "Matt Barrett's Athens Survival Guide" I used to love the Plaka. Now it's more of a love/hate relationship, a microcosm much like my relationship with the rest of Greece. The fact that there are about three restaurants in the whole area that serve something besides the standard tourist fare of souvlaki, mousaka, pastitsio and lobster has a lot to do with it. If it weren't for the ouzeries I might even live in another area of the city where the good restaurants outnumber the bad. Like many places I have loved, the Plaka has sold out to the tourists. In the summer months the streets are jammed by nine o'clock with women who look as if they were poured into their clothing and men who are starting to spill out of theirs. The streets are lined with  gift and T-shirt shops, and what were once quiet neighborhood tavernas now have men in starched white shirts begging people to come in and have a look at their authentic Greek menu of ...souvlaki, mousaka, pastitsio and lobster. The tiny cafe's where the old men used to play backgammon and argue politics now serve gelato. And if you order ouzo, instead of a meze of marinated octopus or cheese from the owner's village, they give you a handful of nuts. But Plaka has many memories for me. The first time I ever smoked marijuana was in the Plaka outside a little dive called The Golden Key, a renown hangout for drug dealers, hippies and American high school students. I think it was my father who encouraged me to spend more time in downtown Athens rather than the American Youth Center where I had been spending my weekends. It turned out to be an excellent suggestion. After that first night in which I sampled marijuana from a legendary traveler who was forever known as "The Colorado Kid," (even though we never saw him or heard from him again), the Golden Key became my hangout. Well, actually the steps outside the Key is where we spent ninety percent of our time. The weather was always nice and you could hear the music just fine. Plus you didn't have to buy a drink. Really, all the action was outside. But every night at about midnight, a cop car would drive up the tiny street and park right in front of the Key. More plainclothes cops then it seemed a Fiat could possibly hold would pile out and walk into the bar. The music would magically stop as soon as they entered the door. They would go from person to person examining their eyes and looking at their papers. (After all, this was during the military junta.) Then they would select a few unlucky customers to go with them, climb back into the car and drive away. Then the music would come back on and it was as if nothing had ever happened. Except for the people they would take away whom you would never see again, or if you did they had their heads shaved and were in the army or if they still had their hair it was the general consensus that they were now narcs. The most amazing thing about it is that even though this happened almost every night, we still hung out there. We never once turned to one another and said "You know what? This place is fucked. Why do we come here?" Well, we were young. And the place did have its good points. First of all it was where the cool kids from the other American and International schools would go. It was a few short steps from the Acropolis where we would take acid and stand in front of the giant floodlights that lit up the Parthenon in various colors for the evening Sound & Light Show. Then we would wander around the mountainside with our vision so short-circuited that we didn't know what was real rock and what was a hundred foot wall made of strawberry jello. As the end of the night approached we would usually be sitting on the sidewalk drinking from a shared bottle of retsina that cost us all of about twenty cents, before jumping in our respective taxis for the ten kilometer-fifty cent ride home, (including tip). Down the street was another club called Folk 17 that was more of a live acoustic music place. The cops would go there first before hitting the Key but because most of the clientele were westerners, they usually left empty handed. Around the corner was The Odyssey, or as it was known in the sixties "The Trip." This was where Andrea and her friends would hang out. It was more of a disco, though at the time there was no music known as disco and people danced with wild abandon to Hendrix, The Stones, The Doors, and the soundtrack to Woodstock. All three places would be closed by the police for weeks at a time. Somehow they would always re-open. The Plaka wasn't just a fun-center for hashish smokers, acid heads and under achieving high school students. Some of the most famous old Tavernas were down there where people would dance to live Bouzouki bands and smash plates till four in the morning. These were full of rich businessmen and poor laborers who didn't mind dropping a month's wages for a night of celebration. There were plenty of tourists, but a heartier variety then the current breed. Back then Greece was not on everybody's list of places to visit. Only the most adventurous traveled east of Italy. There were also seedy bars like the Cat Club, above our favorite souvlaki shop, where sailors, from whatever fleet happened to be in town, would go to be ripped off by sleazy women in mini-skirts, who would get them to buy bottles of cheap champagne at a hundred dollars a pop and disappear out the back door before things got out of hand. There was a live band but all we could hear from outside was the sound of a Farfissa organ playing the same simple repetitive chords. When we would discuss who would be members of our personal Supergroups, my best friend Peter always chose the organist at the Cat Club over Keith Emerson, Jon Lord or Rick Wakeman. As we changed, so did the Plaka. We began to spend our nights in the local tavernas, drinking retsina from the barrel and having orgies of inexpensive food at places like Barba Stavros, which was later torn down to expose the archeological relics beneath it. It's now a garbage pit. We kept moving from taverna to taverna as they would be closed down or go out of business. Psaras was the last in that long line of old restaurants. It has a sign that says it's been open since the late 1800's and some of the staff could probably testify to that. When Psaras closes its doors for the last time we will probably skip Athens altogether when we visit Greece. By the end of the seventies, Plaka had become a Sodom and Gomorra. The bouzouki bands were playing at full volume all night long while drunken people staggered through piles of broken plates. More bars and discos opened and as space became scarce, long time residents of the Plaka, mostly old women, were terrorized and harassed by thugs who wanted to get their hands on their valuable real-estate. Finally the government decided to act. First they outlawed all amplified music in the area. Then they prohibited the smashing of plates. Overnight the bars and discos were out of business. The restaurants that had been popular because of their loud music and wild dancing, now had to make it on their food. Many of them went out of business too. The center of gravity moved away from the streets where the clubs used to be and moved closer to Syntagma. Eventually it became what it is today: A tourist trap, but a pleasant one. In the winter, when tourists are few and outdoor dining or air-conditioning is not a necessity, the Bakaliarikos open. They serve bakalaro(fried codfish ) and skorda-ya(garlic sauce) as their specialty, along with boiled beets, radish greens, tarama(mullet-roe or as sometimes translated: egg-fish-salad), and incredible fried potatoes. They have very good wine and even though your clothes smell like fried codfish and cigarette smoke for days, it's worth it. In addition, all the hip expatriates hang out there. All you have to do is eavesdrop at the table next to you and wait for an opening. Then you figure out what friends or places you have in common and before you know it, you're all pals, even if you haven't agreed on a single subject all night. (That's what I mean by very good wine.) These restaurants are in basements on Kydatheneon street, where they have been in business for a hundred years. When the weather gets warm, the ovens and deep-fat-fryers turn these rooms into underground furnaces and the owners stick a sign on the door that says 'Gone for Vacation. See you in October.' One of the more positive aspects of the present day Plaka is that they have eliminated almost all motorized vehicles from it. With the exception of a few speeding motorbikes, taxis and delivery trucks the streets are now safe for pedestrians. The old city is one of the best places in Greece to walk around or sit and watch other people walking around. I spend a large portion of my time doing that. My favorite past-time is to go sit at To Cafeneon, or the place known as "The Nice-guy Cafe" (because the owner is ill-tempered), order an ouzo and meze, read the baseball results in the USA Today, and wait for someone I know to show up or walk by. It's one of those crossroads of the universe. If you sit there long enough, sooner or later everyone you know, no matter where you know them from, will pass by. But maybe I am living in the past. Maybe I'm like one of those New York, East Villagers who mourn the way the village used to be before the yuppies and businessmen came in and filled it full of great restaurants, bookstores, cafes, and bars and chased out the poor artists and non-working musicians. Because if I really think about the quiet streets with their historic houses, the cafes, the people from all walks of life from every country in the world and above it all sits the acropolis, I have to admit it may just be a case of sour grapes and people who come to Greece don't care about seeing hippies and highschool students hanging outside rock clubs and discos. They want to walk down the main streets free of cars, crowded with fellow travelers, past gift shops, gold shops, boutiques, restaurants and cafes. They don't want to sit for hours over one drink at the Golden Key, waiting for the cops to make their nightly visit. They want to sit in an attractive restaurant and eat Greek specialties, watching people pass in the street or striking up a conversation with their neighbors at the next table. And come to think of it, that's what I like to do too.