Mom...Dad...I joined a gang

My Greek life and and physical endurance have improved dramatically over the past month all thanks to the gang that I recently joined. I didn't come to Greece with the expectation of becoming a gang member, but I can now relate to the sense of solidarity that gangs provide.

No, I didn't join the Greek mafia and I don't have any tatoos (yet), but I do have one piece of gang regalia to identify myself with the rest...a bicycle!

Every Friday night, after an exhausting week of teaching, I go downtown, get on my bike and follow a group of some 60 - 100 other cyclists pedaling around Athens. During Carnival we all dressed up, biked around (led by a cyclist hauling a loud-speaker blasting the Gypsy Kings) and stopped to dance and do a 30-person conga line at a metro stop. Another week we took our bikes into the metro (where they are banned) to protest and demand that bicycles be allowed inside. Last week we traversed the entire city for 5 hours; we rode alongside transsexual prostitutes in cars on a trashy commercial strip, stopped for delicious crepes and biked out to the seashore - at which point my legs gave up and I had take the tram back home.

Aside from the social and physical advantages of joining this bike gang, there have also been economic - I don't have to spend a dime (or a euro) to see the whole city! Athens is an entirely new place on a bicycle.

To top it all off, the police are in cahoots with our gang. Every Friday they act as escorts, blocking traffic and making sure we are safe from motor-terrorists. Now all I need is a tatoo...