So, the ride to the airport was a complete cluster fuck. Dubai, being Dubai, in their quest to be a hub of international acclaim had a tremendous airport rivaling anything in the United States. However, their growing pains continued to show. I asked my Uber driver to drop me off at Pegasus airlines, the carrier I would be taking to Greece. He assured me he was dropping me at the right terminal. I thanked him for the ride, got out, and went to check-in. I looked at the desks, there was no Pegasus. I looked at the flatscreens for flight information, there was no Pegasus. When I did not see them, I tried asking a security guard if this was the right terminal. He had no idea what I was saying. I then went to the desk of another airline and asked. They told me I was in Terminal 1 and Pegasus was in Terminal 2. I asked if there was a shuttle. They looked at me perplexed. I asked if there was a way to get from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2. They said I could call an Uber. So, like in most airports, Uber is only allowed to pick up at the baggage claim. Unfortunately, the wifi signal was not very good, so I had to hail one from the departure level. After watching the minutes tick by, finally one heeded my call. I then ran down the stairs, bags in tow, to find my driver. When I was dropped off at Terminal 2 and checked in, I requested a partial refund from Uber as my initial driver dropped me off in the wrong place. I got one, but it was in Dirhams. Blerg.
Terminal 2 was not as illustrious as Terminal 1. It was very crowded and not a lot of seats. The gates were all clustered together. I guess this is where the more “local” passengers waited. There were a lot of men in dishdashas. They had an interesting duty-free shop where it seemed everyone was very interested in purchasing Tang. After grabbing some McDonald’s breakfast and watching men wash their feet in the bathroom sinks, my flight was called and I found my seat where I immediately passed out until I landed at one of the 15 airports in Istambul.
Since my next flight to Athens was in a few hours, I considered going out and exploring, except I was way too tired. I ended up getting lunch at a little airport restaurant then headed over to a Starbucks to get some green tea. What was awful was that one needed to pay for internet in this airport. Anyway, as I was sitting in Starbucks, I heard Satchimo faintly over the loudspeakers, proving once again, no one could escape New Orleans. But why would anyone want to?
I boarded the second plane and again immediately fell asleep. I awoke just in time to see the Greek isles. If gorgeosity isn’t a word, it should be to explain the utter beauty of this scenery.
I landed and began the European leg of my journey. While I was waiting to clear customs, I got FREE INTERNET which allowed me to plan my journey to the city and to my hostel. I found my way to the metro and bought a ticket that got me to the center of Athens for 10€. Maybe it had just been because I had been on my own for a bit, but I found the voice of the recording of the Greek woman on the subway loudspeaker incredibly sensuous.
After finding my stop and leaving the metro and getting back above ground, I looked around my surroundings. There was every type of Greek tourist kitsch possible: Spartan shields and helmets, pottery, posters, postcards, and t-shirts. People came up to me asking me to see their wares. I just smiled and said no thank you as I tried to divine where my hostel was; my iPod in one hand, my bag in the other as the Acropolis watched over my shoulder. After a few wrong turns, I found where I would be staying down a recently unpaved street. When I arrived, an incredibly cute young hostess greeted me. Her name was Elizabeth. I thanked her graciously. Her English was impeccable but had an intriguing accent. She checked me in and showed me my room. I then came back downstairs and asked for the internet password. She gave it to me, then poured me a big glass of Ouzo, a Greek anis flavored aperitif on the house. We chitchatted a bit more, then I went to see what was available in the kitchen.
Much like in other hostels, there was a free food area that either other travelers had to leave or just could not use. I helped myself to leftover cucumbers, feta cheese, pasta with cheese and butter followed up with some cherries. I figured it was good karma for the bottle of wine I left back in Perth. After dinner, I came back out to talk to Elizabeth to see what there was to do in Athens besides the obvious sightseeing as she poured me another glass of Ouzo. I thanked her for her recommendations then headed to bed after taking a shower.
The next day, I woke up and headed downstairs. Luckily, there were some more leftovers for breakfast. I chitchatted with Elizabeth some more before I headed out to take a sightseeing bus around Athens. I walked back towards the metro station which was a hub for these types of hop-on, hop-off tours. I showed my ticket to the operator and she was a bit perplexed as I was charged for an extra ticket. I rode all the way to the Acropolis. Unfortunately for this sightseeing company and for me, my entry tickets were not delivered yet. So, I waited and then made friends with the flustered by very nice middle-aged hostess. Honestly, I should have known better about all this due to my reading of Boomerang by my college commencement speaker Michael Lewis. Finally, about an hour later, my ticket showed up and I was allowed to enter the Acropolis.
The Acropolis complex housed the Temple of Athena, the goddess of wisdom after which Athens was named along with several other structures. Its most famous building was the Parthenon built during the Golden Age of Athens from 460-430 BCE. One of the more interesting aspects is that there was a giant bronze sculpture of Athena in the center of the complex facing the sea. Holding her polished spear aloft, it reflected the sun’s rays out to ships, serving as a beacon home. After the Roman empire made it to the shores of Greece, Constantine was so enamored with the statue, that he moved it to his namesake city of Constantinople. When the Ottomans sacked that city, the priceless statue was lost to time. Over the course of the centuries, different people would place different things at the Acropolis. One thing that was placed in the Parthenon was armaments when the Ottomans subsequently conquered Greece. It was during a war with the Venetians that a direct hit to the powder keg of the Parthenon damaged it severely.
Climbing the slippery marble steps up to the Acropolis, smoothed over eons by the feet of millions of people, one thought came into my head, “Damn, it was crowded.” Maybe it was because I have seen it in books for as long I as can remember, I found it a little underwhelming. But the panoramic vistas of the city were amazing.
I schlepped back down and saw that my pass also included the Acropolis Museum, which was utterly fascinating. It was amazing how they could encapsulate thousands of years of history as it relates to one specific place in a several-floor museum. They discussed the founding of the site, the construction, the visitation, and its eventual downfall. It was incredibly enlightening.
I came back down and caught the bus to the port neighborhood of Piraeus. It was incredibly scenic. I then returned to the Acropolis hub and while waiting for my Riviera tour, I got a beer and wrote some postcards. I realized I was adapting to this Mediterranean relaxed lifestyle very well in the hot June sun. I took a bus out to the beach then came back. Along the way, I also stopped at the first Olympic Stadium. The sites I really wanted to see were not available with my pass (although it was advertised a such) so I decided to write the tour company about their utter fuck up.
I finished up my tour, got some dinner at an actual restaurant and not from the free section of the kitchen, then returned to my hostel. I dropped my things and headed to a rooftop bar packed with the young and beautiful of Athens and had a drink while the Acropolis looked on.
I woke up the next morning and decided to take a walk around the city based on the clusterfuck that was the day before. I headed over to the War Museum which took me by way of their parliament. I heard drums in the distance and saw the march of their military tattoo. I must say, their uniforms were incredibly interesting. It is weird how I usually always end up right where I need to be.
I arrived at the off-the-beaten-path museum and showed the attendant my bus ticket that granted me entry. He looked perplexed and said that it did not. He then asked for my 6€ entry fee. Since I usually paid by things like this with credit cards, I had not had a chance to stop at a bank and get Euros. I told him I did not have any and if he knew where the closest ATM was. He told me he did not. Then to my surprise, he stamped my ticket and let me in. I looked at him incredulously to which he told me to enjoy the exhibits. And boy did I. It was something to be in a museum that had the most primitive stone weapons next to the more advanced shields, javelins, and swords of the golden age of Greece next to more advanced missiles controlled by silicon. There were several floors covering the different epochs of warfare. However, my favorite section was the different arms presented to Greece’s war ministers over the years including a gold-leafed HK MP5 from the Kuwaitis.
After the museum, I headed back towards the Acropolis to have lunch at a lovely 60-year-old restaurant. Even though they were tourist prices, I had a block of feta cheese, a pork gyro, and two glasses of wine for under 20€, all of it delicious.
Since it was warm, I headed back to my hostel to take a nap. When I awoke, I then headed out to find more food. When I got back to the hostel the second time, I had to do a little work. I then booked two tours and then headed to bed. Little did I know that the clusterfuck would continue.
One of the tours I booked was an island-hopping cruise. Apparently, after my confirmation, I needed to reconfirm by calling their office, which I did not see on the ad, nor in the confirmation email. I needed to log back into Viator and look at the view details page. I contacted the company twice: once before I went to bed and the next at around 1 am. No response. To top it off, the Gmail server was not responding. I woke up every hour and checked, but nothing. I finally checked at 6:20 before my alarm went off and they wrote back saying that the bus was coming in 20 minutes to a nearby hotel. I scrambled and got all my shit together. I just made the bus and got to the boat. I thought we were just going to hop a catamaran and head to sea. How wrong I was. Three more busses showed up at Pireaus and all 250 of us boarded. You would think that that 130€ I paid, thereʼd be more included but the upsales began before we even got on the gangway.
The tour consisted of heading to the islands of Hydra, Poros, and Egina. Before we even left the dock, there was a kid onboard having a temper tantrum when I was trying to nap. I never wanted to Achille Lauro someone so bad. Being unable to sleep, I got a coffee on the aft deck and just looked out. Traversing the waves, I was mesmerized by the blue of this water. I had never seen that color before. We arrived at Hydra and were allowed to disembark. I walked all around this island and oddly enough, ran into a Tulane graduate that noticed my shirt. I asked when she graduated, and she said way back in 2005, which is the same year I graduated. Very small world.
We then headed to Poros where I claimed to the top of a little mountain they had there and took my picture with the Greek flag in the background. As I headed back to the boat, I noticed a superyacht in the harbor. Before getting back on the boat, I dipped my hand in the Aegean before sailing to Egina.
We then had lunch where I was at a table with an older British couple living in Tenerife and two French guys; one of whom was going on a trip like mine. He had just been in Asia, was now touring through Europe, and finally would be heading to South America. After lunch, I headed to the top deck and had a glass of Ouzo, sat at the front of the ship, and pondered life looking out to the waves and the seagulls.
Finally, we made it to Egina. I did not opt for the upsell bus tour and decided to walk the island. My first stop was to the left around a beach. In a small park was a bust dedicated to Nikos Kazantzakis. If that name does not ring a bell, perhaps his masterwork will, Zorba the Greek. 
After paying homage, I headed back the other way. I tried to go to some ruins, but there was both a steep entry fee and a non-attendant attendant. I walked further along the main drag, excusing myself from restaurants offering me lunch. I then heard some singing and noticed there was a Greek Orthodox church. Upon crossing the threshold, I realized this was the first type of these churches I had ever entered. There was some beautiful iconography. I left the church and continued on down the strip. Amongst flags promoting Greek Communism, I found an ice cream parlor that just happened to serve beer. I got a bottle and continued out into the June sun and continued walking. I found a rock jetty and just strolled out into the Agean. There were some blocks of salt from evaporated seawater that I helped myself to before headed back towards the dock. When I arrived, I noticed a tiny round building with a cross on it and walked inside. It was the smallest church I had ever been in, purportedly for the fishermen to pray in before their set out to do their craft.
It was time to get the boat home. It took us about an hour to get there and from my perch at the bow of the ship, I could see the Acropolis. I imagined what it would be like seeing the radiant bronzed Athena’s spear shining a light out to me coming home from a journey at sea. When we arrived back at Pireaus where my bus was waiting to take me home.
I arrived back at the hostel and met my new roommate who was lovely, but the biggest millennial ever. She was from New Jersey and she just finished working at the UN in Rome. She would be returning to America after a trip through the Balkans to start her free PhD in Marine Biology at Stanford. She got the spot because a professor at a conference liked her Master’s research in Sea Turtle mortality and invited her to apply. She had never been to California before and was feeling guilty that she might have taken the spot from someone more deserving. I told her that if they truly were more deserving, then they would have gotten the spot. She was very nice. She seemed a little naive about the world, but in a cute way, like mispronouncing the names of the countries she will be visiting. We traded Instas and I went to bed.
The next morning I awoke early and headed out to catch my bus for the next tour. Ever since I heard about it in my studies of Greek Mythology, I always wanted to vist the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. And that is where this bus was taking me. The tour guide was very informative but kept interrupting my naps with her explanation of everything we were passing.
The Temple at Delphi was a popular tourist attraction even several millennia hence. Not only were there oracles that shared the fates of those who asked, often in riddles induced by escaping earthly gasses, but there was an amphitheater as well as a sporting complex.
We stopped at a tourist trap of a bus stop with 10 0ther busses. The guide said to be back in 15 minutes, which was never going to happen with the line for the ladies’ room being at least 45 people deep when we arrived. Knowing I needed to juice up, I purchased a 5€ Red Bull. Turns out there were no bandits on the highways in Greece but in the rest-stops. 45 minutes later, we were all back on the bus and ready to continue the tour.
As we approach Delphi, the guide brought our attention to a valley where we could see three roads coming to an intersection. She said that it was the road where after Oedipus heard his fate of murdering his father and sleeping with his mother at Delphi, he culminated the first part of the prophecy. It was here, at these crossroads as the story goes, that Oedipus got into an argument with Laius (his real father) and killed him.
Our first stop was a museum filled with items of antiquity at the base of the mountain. We then all got together and headed into the compound. It was an uphill trek, but very much worth it. I learned a lot from listening to the guide:
- Apparently, while the Sphinx started as a male in Egypt with the head of a man and the body of a lion, it became female in Syria and got eagle wings on its way to Greece.
- Even though the temple at Delphi was dedicated to Apollo, the god of the sun, music, and tolerance, Dionysius the god of a good time was celebrated here too.
- The statues around the compound were once painted, but given their age and weather, all the paint ran leaving just the marble.
- Delphi was thought to be the navel or omphalos of the world, and given the topography; apparently, it was an outie.
- Ancient Greek only used capital letters and no spaces.
As I was traversing the mountains, a young woman came up to me and started a conversation. Her name was A from Salt Lake by way of Michigan. As we were talking, we walked to the temple of Apollo where the oracles would make the prophecies with the help of natural hallucinogenic gases. I then pitched an idea to A about hanging out in the parking lot and selling nitrous balloons to tourists coming into the park, promising their own prophecies. She thought it was funny. We then headed past the amphitheater up to the top of the mountain where a stadium was located. It was here I learned that the etymology of the word gymnasium comes from the word gymnos, meaning naked. I will think about that the next time I am in a 24 Hour Fitness.
Walking back down the hill, A and I traded travel stories and then boarded our bus. She just happened to be sitting in front of me. As the journey continued, we headed to a restaurant where the meal was not included. Luckily, I had a few things in my pack and headed out to the back patio which had an expansive view of an olive tree-covered valley facing the sea. It was marvelous. Not content with tourist prices, an Irish couple and a Portuguese gentleman joined me. We talked about travel, life in the EU, and what else they were planning to do. After the meal, A came and joined us before we got back on the bus. We stopped at a town called Arachova then made another quick stop at the Sanctuary of Athena. We then headed back to the city.
Given my very limited knowledge of Russian and its Cyrillic alphabet, I was elated when I could read the street sign as we passed, Νέα Φιλαδέλφεια or N. Philadelphia. With our tour over and we being hungry and thirsty, A and I headed to a Vietnamese restaurant and talked some more. Then to a nearby bar. We then walked past the Temple of Zeus on the way to the ersatz Temple of Aphrodite, her place.
After, I headed back to my hostel to get some sleep after a very long and busy day. The following day would be my last in Athens.
I woke up the next day and had to pay the piper. I did some work for a client, edited his latest treatise, and began collecting contact information of people he wanted to share it with. After all this, I headed to the Archeological Museum. It was expansive and covered almost every epoch of antiquity. They covered a lot of history, cultural movements, and the rise and fall of Greece. While the Romans might have conquered Greece, it was their culture that conquered Rome. One glaring omission however was the Peloponnesian War.
The Peloponnesian War highlighted in Thyicides tome I mentioned before, was a war between the City-States of Athens and Sparta and their respective allies that lasted for around 30 years starting in 431 BCE and ending in 404 BCE. It was important to understand that this was unlike any war that had been fought before. While Greece at the time was a collection of City-States, they usually fought together against foreign enemies such as the Persians only 50 years earlier. It was this war, as these places’ power in the region increased, they started fighting amongst themselves. Much like how World War I ushered in a new era of total war, so did the Peloponnesian War. There were no demarcations between civilians and warriors. While Sparta was eventually victorious, it was a Pyrrhic victory as this left all the City-States weakened and more susceptible to outside incursions. I guess no one wants to highlight family squabbles.
Upon leaving the museum, there was one statue whose eyes were so lifelike and startling. I thought, to see what it has seen is unfathomable.
I headed back to my hostel and printed my boarding pass then went to dinner. I sat in a street-side cafe and had nothing but a 500ml jug of wine for the company until a Canadian couple of German extraction saw I was alone. Since we were so close together, they included me in their conversation. They asked what I was doing and told them. The man’s expression perked up. He shared that the last time he traveled like I was, he was in Greece in 1982, the year I was born. He and a friend drove a Citröen station wagon with a toolbox and, being mechanically inclined Germans, fixed every stranded driver along their path. He said when he and his friend returned to Germany after their holiday, they both had about $3,000 in their pockets. Somehow, I am always where I need to be.
I walked around some more then headed back up to the Acropolis. I got there just in time to see the Grecian army take down their flag for the night. There were cliffs nearby so I joined all the teenage sweethearts there as the sun set into the Aegean. It was getting dark, so I headed back to my hostel after procuring a bit more wine. I headed to the rooftop balcony, poured a glass, and marveled at the spotlighted Acropolis one last time.
