Just a few more bloggedey notes about Greece, and then I’ll move on. Last time I wrote about random tidbits, but here’s the way the trip went more generally. First we spent 2-3 days in Athens (which at the onset I thought I’d appreciate most) and then went islands-ward (about which I was absent of expectations altogether). For the islands, we wound up spending several days on Amorgos, then several days on Santorini, and then one quick day on Mykonos before heading back to overnight in Athens before our 6 a.m. flight back home. Today I’ll just stick to a couple of observations about Athens.
Athens, at least in the downtown area, was pretty gritty, run-down with ubiquitous graffiti tagging, and relatively expensive. The ancient sites were, don’t get me wrong, very cool. But I think in my imagination I was hoping to feel something of the soul of the old philosophers and other thinkers as I traipsed around the old agora, but I didn’t pick up on anything of that at all. For my two cents, and deriving from what I’ve got in my experiential vault, for more of that “wow” factor of feeling the past alive in the present, a place like Rome really gets that vibe going on.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed the acropolis museum so much. The museum is built atop a partially excavated ancient ruin. You can see it all open around the suspended walkway/entryway. The floors on the ground level have clear glass panes so that as you walk through the sleek, modern structure you have a view downward straight into the past. So to my mind at least, it conjured up a sense of the present rising up from the past.
Besides the ground-floor design, what also took my breath away was the third floor Parthenon exhibit. As you ascend the stairs, there are big pane-glass windows that give a view straight out to the old Parthenon itself. And the third floor is a reconstruction of the artwork at the top of the Parthenon done to scale, some parts being from the original structure, and others (mostly others) being a plaster-of-paris remake, all set within contemporary brushed-steel looking settings. The plaster remakes looked pretty rough, and I’m guessing that was deliberate although the artistic point was kinda lost on me. All the same, it was really beautifully done. And it was on that floor that we were texted a photo of Maria and Teemu’s newborn baby boy, which made it all even more special still: present mixing with the past, and present meeting with the future. Pretty cool.
What also had Athens as a rocking experience was when we went to the temple of Zeus and ran into 3 of our friends – Jake, Elizabeth and Bernie – there. Of course, they were in Athens, as we were, en route to the wedding. But still. Athens is a big place and it felt somewhat miraculous that we managed to run into each other so serendipitously. That opened up the way for an afternoon and evening of great fun and wine sampling and, of all things, dinner at a quasi-Polynesian restaurant (hey, why not? We figured there’d be plenty of time for eating feta later on).
My imagination didn’t seriously begin to stir until we started ferrying about to the islands. In the evening the water was calm and purplish-blue, and all about were all these islands dotting the water. The crescent moon as it set was a brilliant orange. The part of my heart that loves to wander could well imagine what a thrill it would be to have been an ancient greek traveller, and how ready the area presents itself to encouraging a person to extend the length of one’s leash to his or her homeland by sailing incrementally from island to island. And the islands I’ll talk more about later.
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