27 October, Athens, Greece

Welcome to another edition of “Where am I now!?”



Answer? Traveling from Athens to Crete on board the Festus Palace, a boat that outsizes even the Ionian King (One extra deck and much, much more crowded).

I’ve spent the last three days in Athens, Greece, having my mind blown by some of the oldest relics of civilization as well as the foundations of western thought and culture. That’s what I did during the days anyway, at night I’ve been hanging out with a woman named Cissy who has been showing me a bit of Greek nightlife.



First off, I arrived in Patras, Greece from the Ionian King… Patras is on the West coast of the Greek mainland, and my original plan had been to catch a bus to Olympus from there, to do some sightseeing, then head to Athens from there. Unfortunately, though the woman who sold me my ticket said that the ferry would arrive around 11am, we didn’t dock until nearly one o’clock (are you learning not to trust the ferry lines when it comes to scheduling? Smart move!). To get to Olympus, I first had to take a bus to Pyrgos, which didn’t leave until 2pm… figuring it would take more than an hour to get there, and then who knows how long to get a bus to Olympus, it was clear I wasn’t going to get there with much daylight to see anything, so instead I just took a bus straight to Athens, which left at 1:30 and put me in town well before dark.

There are two types of European cities… Those friendly to travelers, and those not. The friendly ones have bus and train stations near the center, lots of cheap hotels and are pretty compact, and easy to walk. Those not have bus and train stations well out on the edges of town, are spread out and hard to walk, and have a dearth of cheap hotels, or any hotels aside from those for business travelers which are very expensive. Athens, you might guess (and you would be correct) is of the latter persuasion. Welcome to Athens.

Fortunately, I’ve gotten rather good at figuring out which type of city I’ve arrived in.. ever since Lvov where I ended up walking the full 8 km from the bus station which didn’t deserve to be called the Lvov bus station at all, into the center of town, I know well how to spot the signals that tell me that I’m not within walking distance of where I want to be. Those signals looked like neon lights outside the Athens bus station. I walked about half a block in each direction outside, then went back in, got out my travel guide, and started calling hotels. Pretty quickly I found one that had a room, and I promptly got into the line of people waiting for cabs, and had the driver take me to the center. Turns out he couldn’t take me all the way to the hotel, since I’d picked one on a pedestrian only street, but he got me close enough, and the three or four blocks the rest of the way was a fine walk through a good shopping district. Besides, it turns out that cabs in Athens are dirt cheap… the 15 minute ride into the center of town only cost me about 4 euros, including the extra one euro fee for traveling from the bus station. You can’t look at a cab in NYC for less than $5, much less get anywhere you need to go. All in all I was pretty happy. But then the hotel kind of sucked… the room was miniscule, on the 5th floor with no elevator (with the ground floor being 0, not 1), a shared bathroom (which also sucked), no phone (not just in the room, in the hotel) and was a little dirty compared to a lot of the other places I’ve stayed. Even at that, it was 37 euros a night, which is a bit more than the average I’ve paid along the way. But, that said, the location was prime, with a great view of the Acropolis, short walking distance to most of the things I wanted to see, and also to the train station and the main shopping district (less than two blocks to each)… not that I am shopping (I’m not) but that is where most of the other things foreigners need are located as well. Plus the staff was very friendly, as were the other guests. Sometimes big and clean just doesn’t take precedence… sorry.

4 November.

Athens, again.

I’m back here after about week on the Isle of Crete, catching up on this blog and filling in some details that I missed before. I’ll continue along as if I never left off, then talk about Athens the second time, as well, and save the in between for the next entry, about Crete itself. So… onward…

I didn’t do much that first day, just kind of wondered around, especially looking at the souvenir shops and places selling various crafts around my hotel. I called Cissy (she and I had met through email quite a time previous, and had been exchanging messages for a couple months, so even though we hadn’t met, we knew a good deal about one another) and we made plans to get together for a drink that night at a place near to my hotel. I was pretty beat after traveling for so long (and not getting much sleep on board the ferry, which is the one drawback to traveling that way, unless you pay for a cabin, which is about twice the already considerable cost) so we just met for a short bit (two drinks, I think), then I went home and crashed.



The next day the sightseeing began. First was the Acropolis, not just because it’s the biggest and the best of Athens ancient sites, but also because I’d read that once you purchase your ticket to it, you can get into all the other ancient sites for free. When you consider that they cost anywhere from two to four euros each, that’s a considerable savings (about the same as the 12 euro ticket into the Acropolis, in fact) so, yes, the Acropolis first.



Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can say about my visit there. I can say that it is far more stunning than I expected it to be, even with major renovations going on throughout the site, the temple of Nike Athena and the Parthenon covered with scaffolding, and tourists everywhere. That in itself should tell you something. I feel kind of bad, writing as much as I write, and then seeing this and not being able to put into words why everyone should see it, but I really can’t. Yes, its very old. Yes, its very beautiful (all of it, but the Parthenon especially which of course was designed not even to be “perfect” but to LOOK perfect, with surfaces curved slightly to counter the various optical illusions that occur when people look at large objects, etc. The the architect was so far ahead of his time, when even now we have a hard time constructing a building that isn’t butt ugly, is reason enough to be in awe… ). Yes, it is very famous.

Yet, being there, and experiencing it, like all good aesthetic experiences is more than just those sums. I can’t tell you why I spent most of my afternoon walking around these ruins and sweating like a crazyman (yes, the days in Athens were the hottest its been in ages, and as it turns out the last warm days I would have, even when I went South, to Crete, in search of the sun). On the face of it, seeing the three main structures and the museum shouldn’t take more than an hour or so, but something made me want to linger. I did… and all I can say is if you ever go to Greece, and want to skip the typical tourist things, don’t skip this one. Read a bit about it, then go. You’ll be glad you did.



Finaly I did leave the hill, and wondered down and to the North, towards my hotel which is also the direction of many of the other main sites and tourist areas. Over the next few hours I went through the ancient Agora (market) site, with its near perfectly preserved temple to H (can't remember the name and don't have my guide book with me), which even though it doesn’t compare to the Parthenon, is far better preserved, and for that reason lovely, though it is unpainted (most visitors don’t know that these marble ruins were painted bright colors, especially reds and blues in their heyday… somehow we feel as though they carry more gravitas with the unpainted marble…)



Over the next two days I saw most of the main archeological sites as well as the Museum of Archeology. My favorites of the three days were the Roman Towe of the Winds, not so much for the tower, which is great, but because its the one site that you are pretty much allowed to walk all through, for the most part. You can actually just sit down on some of the stones that have been there for thousands of years, and soak up the feeling.



My other favorite was the Temple of Zeus, which is absolutely huge. As much as I hate to say it, size really does matter sometimes, and standing in front of those massive pillars and seeing the amount of ground that temple once covered is pretty awe inspiring. One of the most interesting things about that site is that one of the pillars has fallen, and lays on its side in pieces. From its condition its clear that it fell somewhat recently, but looking at it is like looking at the giant redwoods in California… even laying down they are taller than me, and stretch out for such a long distance.

The curious thing about this is that as I left I was reading the brief visitor information sign and it says that the pillar that fell actually collapsed in 1852, during a storm. I think its amazing that looking at it, your mind knows that it fell not too long ago. But then you read that it was knocked down around the same time Abraham Lincoln was a rising politician, which seems like ancient history in the United States. And then your brain clicks again, and you realize that compared to the 2500 years that pillar stood, Abraham Lincoln is pretty contemporary. Its only after these ruins make your brain do a few swirls like that, that you really begin to comprehend their age.



Finally, I stumbled on the theater of Dionysius kind of randomly, but I have to confess, though I'm not really one to think much about the history of theater (odd, given my profession, and how much I enjoy it) it affected me pretty profoundly sitting front row center in a place where some of the oldest existing works were performed a couple thousand years ago.



Well, okay, I couldn't get to front center (nothing seems to change, right? I couldn't get past the rope line.) but I got to about the fourth row, and took pictures of what remains of the  artwork on the stage.



As I was walking around those three days, I did run into some people as well… not just ancient stone. On the  way from Hadrian’s Gate into the Zeus Temple, which is just a short walk, I was asked the time by an old man with a shock of white hair. I told him, and he asked me where I was from, and when I told him the US, and then Texas, he grabbed my hand very tightly with both hands and started shaking it and dragging me down the street. I resisted at first (only a little, walking slower than he wanted) and asked him where he was taking me… he pointed to some of the park benches and said “I live in Houston 24 years!” and so I went with him and sat down. Over the next ten or fifteen minutes he asked me all sorts of questions about where I was from, what I did, where I was traveling, what I liked to do… everything. The interesting thing though, is that when I asked him questions, or responded to the ones he was asking me, he liked exactly the same things.After a while it became a bit of a game for me to give the strangest answers that I could and see if he could still manage to find a way to somehow agree with them. It became clear that not only had he never lived in Houston, he had probably never been to the United States at all, or half the other places he said he had traveled. It even turned out that he was also leaving for Crete the next day (as was I, of course) and planned to go to the same cities as me (which by this time were any cities I could remember the names of but wasn’t planning on going… I wasn’t about to giv e him my real destinations, no matter how harmless he seemed.) After a while I told him that I had to go, but wished him good travels, he was reluctant to let me leave, but finally did. As I walked away, I saw him approach a Islamic looking man, with a thick beard who was walking along the sidewalk. I stopped and watched as the man looked at his watch and said something to the old man, and then was taken by the hand and dragged to the park bench. I wonder if the old man was suddenly from Turkey instead of Houston?



These guys were a couple of very talented street musicians I ran into... I wish I'd had some kind of recorder to get a bit of their music to tkae with me...

Later on, after seeing the Zeus Temple, I was walking around a smaller park, in the neighborhood, and found a good statue to photograph. The statue was of a man, in a typical heroic pose, but more interesting to me were the four small women on each corner of his pedastal, each one in a different pose, one reading, one thinking, etc. I started taking shots of them, and while I was shooting, a man who was involved in a backgammon game started half talking to me/half yelling at me, asking me if I knew who that was. I kept taking pictures, having learned that the best thing to do when faced with what seems like Greek animosity is just ignore it, and see if it escalates, or continues on the way it is, which is pretty much always what happens as they seem to consider yelling at someone a legitimate tone for a discussion. I talked back at him a bit as I kept shooting photos, and he started asking me if I even knew who it was. I told him no, but that I wasn’t as interested in the man as the women around him, and he seemed to find this really funny. He told the others and they all laughed as well. “You must be part Greek!”





After that, he kept yelling, but it was in a friendler tone, and told me who the man was… and of course I can’t remember at all now. The name began with two C’s, I’m pretty sure, and it wasn’t Christopher Columbus, I know. I need to look it up and see if I can find out… Anyway, we bantered back and forth for about ten minutes or so, as I took more photos of the statue, and then I stopped and was watching them play backgammon. Pretty quickly I realized that the rules they were using were different from the ones I know, as one of them seemed to have one of the other’s pieces captured on his side of the board and it wasn’t able to escape. I tried asking what was going on with that, but they seemed to think that I needed the whole game explained, which of course meant that they never got around to obscure differences in the rules they were using… all I got were basics in broken English, about how the object was to move your pieces from one side of the board to the other, along the points. In the end, I never did find out the differences between Greek backgammon and the kind I learned in the US. After watching them for a while and having the basics of backgammon explained, I started to move on, which caused the one guy great distress. “Wait! Aren’t you going to take a picture of us!!??”



It was true… As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m very cautious/conservative about taking photos of people I meet… I don’t want to seem like the pushy American tourist taking photos of the cute locals, so I hadn’t even pulled my camera out while I was watching them, but after he said this, I asked, “Do you want me to take it?” “Of course! Of course! I am much more pretty than the statue!” So, I did… I took a couple shots, one of which ended up being a bit blurry because it had started getting dark while I was talking to them, and I didn’t change my exposure settings to correct for it. Oh well… it’s good enough to see the scene. I wonder if you can guess which one of them was interested in being photographed?



I didn’t meet to many other people from Athens… I spent every evening I was in town with Cissy, and sometimes her sister Maria, who lives in a great apartment with her. Both of them work in magazine publishing, with Cissy working for the fashion mag Bazarre in Greece, and Maria doing copyediting for a fitness magazine whose name I don’t recall (not one I’d heard of). Various nights we either went out for dinner, or to different neighborhoods around Athens for drinks. One night I went over to their place and we ordered pizza and a ton of things to go along with it (a consistent aspect of Greek dinner, at least as Cissy and Maria do it, is to have approximately twice as much food as the people present could possibly eat in three days, and then just sort of go to town with it, sharing much of it along the way… this was the case especially on two occasions, once with Cissy at a restaurant, the other with both of them at their house, and less so, but still somewhat another day when the three of us went out to lunch.) and had a good time just listening to Dexter Gordon and Massive Attack (not together, sadly, which might be interesting) and drinking wine and talking.

It was about the same when I was back in Athens for a couple days, the one thing worth noting that I did was take a bus about an hour and a half south of Athens to see the Temple of Poseiden. It is pretty remarkable, though dwarfed by Zeus's Temple, of course, but especially after hearing one of the guides from the tour groups (which I actually did a good job of missing, but one showed up as I was about to leave, and I took advantage by hovering and getting a bit of a history lesson), I appreciated its significance. Unfortunately its impossible to get a good photo of it, in its context, so you can see its surroundings, without a helicopter... there's just nowhere to go to get the elevation needed. Anyway, I did get some good photos of it...



and its setting...



7 November.

As you can see, I left off rather abrubtly, and haven’t written much for a long while. I have been writing, just not on this… to be honest, from the time I was back in Athens, retreating from Crete, and heading north again after going as far south as I was going to get, it felt like I was headed home, and so writing this seemed strange. For that reason I’ve decided that I need to end this here, and put some finishing touches on the entry about Crete, and that will be it for the travels for now. Once I get back to the US and have real access to online, I am going to see about turning this into a real blog, and continuuing, but for now, I’m going to end it.






Or rather, what I think I am going to do is concentrate on putting up some photos from the last couple weeks, and I may very well write some things about those, but that’s how this is going to end… visually, rather than articulately. I guess I’m just not feeling very wordy as I make my way back to the States.

More photos soon…

Stephen