London
In 1979, I got a job at Metaxa Travel, helping Julia Metaxa and my mother sell cut-price package holidays to Ibiza and Corfu.
The agency had a small office overlooking Leicester Square Station, and I agreed with Mr Metaxa—who handled the money—that I would get Thursday mornings off to collect unemployment because he didn’t pay me enough.
Most days, I delivered airline vouchers around town, elbowing my way past brown plaid bell-bottomed Americans lost in Piccadilly Circus while the bronzed statue of Cupid pointed his arrow down at them from the centre of the circle.
But I also helped out the travel agents on the phones.
When the person on the other end of the line sounded posh, I had to add in ‘Fuel Surcharge’ and then ‘Airport Tax,’ only to knock it off as a ‘discount’ if they complained.
By the time the 80s rolled in, the complaints about Greek hotels under construction and goats pissing in the alleys filled a three-inch binder, but package holidays had started to go out of fashion, and anyway, I’d moved on.
Instead, me and Julia’s daughter, plus a few of her friends, decided on a trip around the continent. It would be better, we figured, than two weeks on a beach with Greek goats and no air con.
So we took Euro Rail from Waterloo to the Gare du Nord, then did a two month circuit around France, Switzerland, and northern Italy, a kind of Gilded Age Grand Tour, the low budget version—nights spent in camp sites, or greasy hostels or with the five of us squeezed into a hotel room.
Upon our return I saw that London too, was moving on, and so I saw no reason to leave.
New Middle Eastern cultures mingled along the Edgware Road, and tanned men, white robes, Rolex watches, red roped headdresses were flash of money. They had replaced the Americans, and they came with women dripping gold.
The music was changing—The Cure instead of The Clash. Fashion was changing—floppy hair instead of spiky. Food was changing—Dinner at The Spaghetti House was replaced by Nepalese Nights off of Tottenham Court Road. You could drink cheap red wine and watch the Flamenco students dance on the tables up Kentish Town. And pubs included tandoori platters or pie and chips instead of being beer-only places for rain-mac’ed men and their lonely pint.
Weekends were spent clubbing downtown at the Hippodrome, jumping to Melle Mel’s ‘White Lines’ with friends who influxed from Germany, Finland, and the Ukraine. And the chiselled Berlin blondes, as well as the latest arrivals from (then) Yugoslavia portended the dark clouds gathering over the Communist Bloc, as they jostled to the beat.
‘Everyone is coming here,’ the friends said. ‘Why would you want to go anywhere else?’
Because travel was always in my blood, even though I did not realise it.
وا حد. Uncle Vartan’s Carrots