The concussion grenades sound louder than I remember them. Maybe the police in Athens put in an order for more powerful explosives since I left the city.
I went down to Syntagma Square for Day 2 of the national strike, staying on the periphery of the actual rioting. Within the square now, people wearing red T-shirts help those with deep gashes caused by thrown stones or police clubs. They have a little area roped off to take the injured, a place they can bleed together and be patched up.
Watching from a distance, I see the crowd along the road parallel to the Grande Bretagne hotel surge. They're panicking, spilling over a retaining wall and into the slippery water fountain there. Soon I see a man hobbling towards me, wet... I assume he's turned an ankle in the fountain or been trampled by the fleeing crowd.
Things are kicking off so I drift from the square, spotting along the way the burned out remains of the previous day's fires... ticket booths, piles of uncollected garbage... anything that'll burn.
Strategically, police on mopeds position themselves on the outskirts of the rioting, where they wait for orders. From these positions they can sweep in from behind the crowd and box in the protestors.
A helicopter hovers over the downtown crowd as parliamentarians decide who will pay what and how much. At the same time an unsteady junkie leans against the fence around Hadrian's Library in Monastiraki for support, contemplating it seems the tortoise shuffling his way across the ruins.
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