The awkwardness doesn't need translating as he fumbles through my underwear for the price tags. I might add, a quite pretty pair of laced navy blue briefs'.
It is an overcast afternoon in Macedonia. We have wandered into 'CHINA TOWN', a badly-lit, roadside warehouse selling possibly all the goods the People's Republic of China has ever exported, ranging from socks to sweaters, car mats to cuddly toys. An unabashed, glorified bargain den, quite randomly run by a Chinese woman and her son, in the middle of the Macedonian countryside. Not quite the usual bustling urban Chinatowns that come to mind. There are no houses, in fact no other people it seems, for tens of kilometers all around, so I'm not quite sure how business is still running.
I have convinced my dad to pull up here out of sheer curiosity, after a day exploring the region of Macedonia, north of Thessaloniki. It is a beautiful, somewhat austere place. Vast expanses of fields and hills vibrant with autumn foliage, sliced by straight highways, littered with cotton from the nearby plantations. The tarmac is often interrupted by miniature roadside memorial chapels unique to Greece. But mostly void of human presence.
The flat highway turns into a winding road, as we head further north into stunning mountains, through quasi-ghost towns. There is the occasional lonely farmer selling fruit from the back of his truck. To whom, I'm not too sure. Our rental car also gets the odd assault by wild dogs which patrol the sparsely populated settlements. Our road trip reaches its nexus at the Pozar Thermal baths, exquisite natural hot springs in the mountain range bordering the country of North Macedonia.
And so our drive back to Thessaloniki is punctuated by an spontaneous spin to Chinatown.
Back at the till, I share a clumsy series of stares and grunts with the Chinese-Greek boy of about my age, who is serving me at the till. He speaks zero words of English and I am about as useless at Greek as I am at quantum physics, never mind Mandarin. I give him 2 euros for my undergarments, wrongly thinking the price to be1.50 for two. I gesture for change as he gestures for an extra euro. After he indignantly shows me the labels I understand that is the price for one, and he won't be cheated out of a euro. The laughter we both share doesn't need translating either. I pay up and briskly head out with a quick 'efcharistó!', blushing and still chuckling to myself.
These are some of my most favourite aspects of travel. The quirks I cannot plan but always retrospectively relish whilst on the road. The ironic and the embarrassing. The unexpected and out of the box. The outright random and borderline ridiculous. Off the beaten track. Lost in translation.
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