ATHENS
June 20, 2014 I look at my left foot, vivid with color around my small toe. I struck my foot, on the previous day, against a metal bar on one of the large costume racks I keep shifting from room to room of my little flat, cursing myself for not wearing slippers around the house. I realize now, that on this same day 16 years ago I did pretty much the same thing on my first night in Athens as I walked around my tiny hotel room barefoot! Some people never learn! Back then I hit the side of my foot so hard, and it hurt so much, that I realized I must have broken a bone in the foot. So there I was in Athens, leaving in two days for a folk dance camp in Serres Prefecture, where I would spend two weeks learning the dances of the indigenous Romany population of Northern Greece. What to do- try to find an emergency room without travel insurance in a country where I didn't speak the language, or trust that it was a clean break and just ice the foot? After all, I had broken the same bone on the other foot once, and my doctor in the States didn't even feel the need to cast it. Of course, I had to wear hard soled flat shoes for 8 weeks when that happened: they acted as a splint while the bone mended. Unfortunately, I didn't have anything quite like that in Greece, only a pair of white canvas Keds, and a pair of flat thong sandals. The dress sandals with the two inch heels certainly wouldn't do, either! What if a Greek doctor wanted to put a cast on my foot? How would I walk around? How would I dance? This was, after all, as my mother described it, the trip of a lifetime. I made up my mind; I called the front desk and asked for a bucket of ice.
