Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

When we arrived in Athens, my grandmother encouraged me to start a diary. I made a list of all the new things I had discovered for the first time, meticulously recording them: the first time I felt air-conditioning on the palms of my hands; the first time I tasted bananas; the first time I saw traffic lights; the first time I wore jeans; the first time I did not need to queue to enter a shop; the first time I encountered border control; the first time I saw queues made of cars instead of humans; the first time I sat down on a toilet instead of squatting; the first time I saw people following dogs on a leash instead of stray dogs following people; the first time I was given actual chewing-gum rather than just the wrapper; the first time I saw buildings made of different shops and shop windows bursting with toys; the first time I saw crosses on graves; the first time I stared at walls covered by adverts rather than anti-imperialist slogans; the first time I admired the Acropolis, but only from the outside because we could not afford the entrance ticket. I also described at length my first encounter with tourist children as a tourist child myself, when I learned with surprise that they did not recognize the names of Athena and Ulysses, and they laughed because I did not recognize the image of an apparently famous mouse called Mickey. Our