Athens

On Monday I left Paris for Athens, Greece on a three hour Olympic Airways flight. On board they served me a lunch of octopus and pasta (which I later learned is a normal meal in Greece). I arrived at our hostel to meet Amy, Bri and Mary in the shadow of the Acropolis. My expectations of Athens quickly adapted as I realized it is not a beautiful city. It is covered in graffiti, dirty and overrun with stray dogs that were all in need of my adoption.

Tuesday was kicked off with three cups of coffee and exploring the Acropolis. All that remains are a few crumbling pillars and walls that once held of the ancient buildings devoted to Athena. Understandably, the ruins were covered in scaffolding due to the Acropolis’ ongoing restoration, yet I still felt disappointed by the metal construction hiding the marble architecture. The view from the Acropolis is lovely and expansive as the city sprawls over the hills with uniform looking square building of the same height. We walked down the massive hill to Socrates’ prison that held him in his final days before his hemlock execution. We wandered down a long stone path to the dilapidated Temple of the Olympian Zeus. I enjoyed these ruins more than the Acropolis simply because of the absent scaffolding. They are lovely reminders of the city’s history. We walked through the National Gardens, past the Greek parliament and looped back through the flea market to Monastiraki Square. We spent the evening on our hostel’s roof top bar with great views of the Acropolis. We drank a Greek lager called Mythos served in glasses that hold a half-liter of beer!

On Wednesday, we headed through Monastiraki Square and the corridors of the flea market to the Ancient Agora. It was the market place of the ancient Greeks that has since been reconstructed to include some of the original marble. My favorite statues belonged to Aphrodite and two men depicting the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Agora also has a little museum of several centuries worth of pottery and household ceramics. As we walked by the remnants of the speaker’s platform, I imagined the times Socrates and Plato had stood there spewing their ideas. I was impressed by the water clock the ancient Greeks had developed to time speakers. Water dripped through the basin of a ceramic vessel and when the last of the water emptied, six minutes had passed and it was time for the next speaker. The temple in the Agora is I think the best-preserved ruins we saw in Athens. The less well-preserved buildings are the Olympic stadiums from 2004. It was depressing how ramshackled and covered in graffiti these athletic building built for champions had become in just seven years. They could be a metaphor for Greece’s current economics.