Double Exposure Assignment

Greece is known to be one of the most popular holiday destinations for tourists around the world. Beautiful beaches, extensive historical monuments and museums, great food, world-famous nightlife, etc. have made Greece the place to be in the summer. My past summers in Greece led me to stereotype the country as a forever sunny, always happy, place to be, while Athens specifically was stereotyped as a large city with palm trees, endless heat and sun, and countless ancient sites. While living in Athens for the past four months, the stereotype of Athens has changed dramatically. Yet, it has not at all become negative. Instead it has led to even better stereotypes in my case.
In the past, my experiences with Athens have been minimal in terms of places visited and things done. The old and new places visited during these four months have changed in terms of the emotional feelings for them and the experiences that occurred in those various places. One specific aspect that has changed is my attitude towards graffiti. The previous stays in Athens over the years have been short, lasting only a week at the most. My overall opinion of graffiti had been negative, considering it an unappealing, low-class aspect of urban life. Yet, recently this opinion has faded away, now considering graffiti as a way of life and an art that expresses ideas and values, based on Jeff Ferrell’s
Urban Graffiti: Crime, Control, and Resistance.

Like the Graffiti example, my attitudes towards several aspects of Athens have changed. However, I will be focusing on specific places rather than ideas. A first example is The Mall. Located in the northern suburb of Marousi, The Mall
Athens has been in the past few years an exotic building for me. Walking with friends into the mall was usually an easy attempt to escape the summer heat that would bake the entire city. Inside a cold frappé would be tradition or a cup of icecream, which would be relatively cheap. Recently, the Mall has become more of a meeting place for me. It has become the spot where friends living nearby would wait for me before deciding to head together into the commercial area of Marousi or even Kifisia. The view from the Mall however has not changed.
The view overlooks northern Athens, with the OAKA (Olympic Stadium) just ahead, and the leafy neighborhoods and suburbs that would dominate the land. Many times it would be me who would be waiting endlessly before my friends would arrive. In the meantime, the view from the Mall would scream my name. In a way, the Mall has become a symbol of home to me, giving off feelings such as comfort and assurance, in that here, friends and even family exist.
The Kolb’s Learning Cycle involves several ideas such as concrete experience, reflective observation, and abstract conceptualism. These ideas help

develop an understanding of the city of Athens as a place where reality exists, where people live and work, and operate their daily lives. Unlike the Mall, which
I’ve known before these past four months, several other neighborhoods of
Athens I have only recently gotten to know have had a significant impact on my perception of Athens as a living, breathing city, not just a holiday destination. The neighborhood of Kolonaki is a perfect example. Kolonaki, where I have been interning on a regular basis, has been essentially a common area for me. The streets, lined with luxury shops and endless cafés have become a significant piece of my life. Experiencing Kolonaki for the first time, a concrete experience, led to actually
“feeling” the neighborhood and its people.
Reflective observation has led me to watch and observe that here exist a great number of business men and women, who most likely work in Kolonaki, in addition to the abundance of more wealthy looking people (based solely on their appearance).
This has led me to use abstract conceptualism to think and conclude that
Kolonaki is probably a business and shopping district, as well as a high-class residential area. This is somewhat surprising for me, mainly because my past stereotypes of Athens have not involved a something like this. Therefore the existence of a working people has entered my new stereotype of Athens.
Walking regularly to my internship, where I would go to work and follow responsibilities), I’d stroll through quiet residential streets, stepping on small, wet

leaves on clean sidewalks. Every step on these wet leaves was significant to me.
“We rejoice in the progress of our body across the uneven surface of the earth and our spirit is gladdened by the endless interplay of the three dimensions that we encounter at every step, the shifting and changing that occurs with the mere passage of a cloud high up in the sky,”
(Dimitris Pikionis article). These leaves themselves will remain a simple, important piece of my life and attitude to the new piece of Athens that my life has grown to understand.
A more personal area of Athens that I’ve grown to understand is the neighborhood of Ampelokipoi. Here I’ve gotten to know a girl that had become special to me for quite a while, until it came to an end. Ampelokipoi instantly became a symbolic place. It became a place of happiness and romance in addition to a place of gloom and sadness. Ampelokipoi helped me add the existence of relationships to my stereotype of
Athens. The idea that people fall in love here and at the same time suffer from the loss of love is now a part of Athens. Hearing the name
Ampelokipoi immediately makes me think of what
I have experienced there. I instantly “make an effort to remember the past as a

present, to return to it to find the hideous shape of the unspeakable again,” (Marc
Augé article). This is vigilance. At the beginning of my experience in Ampelokipoi, the weather was hot and sunny. Now it is consistently colder and cloudier.
Thinking back to when Athens was a place of endless sun, happiness, ease, and innocence, I’ve been very mistaken by this inaccurate representation of such a powerful cultural landscape. Athens is indeed a powerful place. I’ve discovered that people do everything from laugh and relax here, to work, love and cry here. The city is a mixture of so many emotions that lead me now to stereotype it a reality world. Anything can happen here. It is a place where life really exists, and events [both negative and positive] occur. From the graffiti that has become an art, to the Mall being a “home”, to Kolonaki being a workplace, and Ampelokipoi being a place of love and sadness, the “real” Athens has surrounded me in every way possible.