In city that never sleeps, services extend to 24 hours

Rent a DVD, work out, buy a coffee any time, day or night

By Yiannis Elafros - Kathimerini

It’s three o’clock in the morning on Acharnon Street. A young man swipes his card through a slot and a door opens into a 24-hour video and DVD rental outlet. Four or five machines that look a lot like ATMs are lined up in a cubicle, waiting for customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to select a film or game from their lengthy menus. This particular chain already has 125 outlets throughout Greece and it is not the only one either.

Two in the morning in Kalogreza and the light spills from the windows of one of many 24-hour gyms cropping up in the city, where night owls can pump their bodies into shape at any time of day or night.

It is five in the morning and a small minimarket in Peristeri welcomes its patrons, wage earners getting ready for another day at work and catching up on the shopping they have no other time to do. This is but one of many all-day and all-night minimarkets that have sprung up in neighborhoods across the city.

Sunday morning and a friend I called to invite out for a cup of coffee politely tells me he cannot make it because he is going shopping. When I ask him whether he has forgotten that it is Sunday and shops are shut, he points out that he is headed for the Seirios shopping mall on the national highway, where he, a hardworking man who spends a lot of time away from home, can do all the shopping he needs.

It is Sunday afternoon and the Karaiskaki Stadium is not enjoying its usual crowds because the Olympiakos soccer team is playing behind closed doors. Nevertheless, there are quite a few young men and women milling about, enjoying a coffee at one of the coffee shops, just so they can be near the team. The Olympiakos boutique is not the only store that’s open though, because others were given a special license to stay open on Sundays, when most of the stadium’s matches are played.

Sunday as a day of rest seems to have gone out the window as we are faced with a city that appears to be increasingly tuned in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Especially now, with the new bill announced by the Development Ministry on March 4, the workweek has been extended to six days rather than five, while Sunday’s rest may well be sacrificed on the altar of “tourist development” by any given prefectural council.

Nevertheless, even before the bill, a slew of services have been extended to cover greater and greater parts of the day and of the week. In the past, we knew that the only services we would find open at night were hospitals and pharmacies, necessary to cover essential needs. Now we are seeing a whole range of new possibilities opening up to us, almost without time constraints. Movie rentals all night long, 24-hour gyms, mounting pressure to extend shop opening hours and flagrant violations of established opening hours, fast-food eateries that are open 24 hours a day, kiosks and mini-markets that never seem to shut, public transport services extending their schedules (and so they should, because they ought to run 24 hours a day), parking garages that are always open, and 24-hour hotlines that offer everything from electricians, plumbers and other home technicians to shopping. The city never sleeps.

But the fact is that this expression no longer applies to Athens in the same, Bohemian, romantic way it used to. In the past, late nights were associated with having fun, dancing, being with friends. Today, mounting pressure to extend the opening hours of a variety of services is all together a different matter. It expresses the relentless expansion of hours spent working or attending to other obligations, an endless waste of time stuck in traffic jams and on public transport, as well as the creation of new needs, whether real or imagined, that are enjoyed in solitude.

At the same time, at least for a lot of people, going out at night is becoming more and more infrequent, nightclubs are open fewer nights a week and, even on Sundays, there is a noticeable trend for people to prefer to stay home and rest in preparation for the tough week that lies ahead. This is why, strange as it may seem, this expansion of hours seems to be shrinking and constraining, rather than expanding, the number of activities we can enjoy. One might even say that we are being robbed of our time, that we are robbed of our days and being thrown a few shards of nocturnal solitude in compensation.