The last post ended on the very cusp of February, so that’s where we begin.
Because of our family covid illnesses in January and the rapidly changing international rules about travel, the first two weeks of our February were largely spent freaking out about whether or not we’d actually be allowed to entry into Greece. It didn’t look good: as near as we could tell, entry into Greece by EU citizens required a negative covid test within 3 days of one’s arrival at Athens airport. But it also seemed to require that anyone who’d had covid have been tested positive at least 14 days prior to arrival: anything later than that and one would be denied entry.
Molli had first tested positive exactly 13 days and 22 hours prior to our scheduled departure time, but about 14 days and one hour after our scheduled arrival time.
Things really didn’t look good: we spent a lot of time trying to come up with alternative ways to spend our week of winter vacation.
Meanwhile, I finally got a chance to get my new rifle out to a range. Turns out that shooting at static targets from 100 meters with a 30-06 rifle is a whole different thing from blasting at clay pigeons with a 12-gauge shotgun.
The distance is daunting at first: those tiny white squares in the background are the targets.
And so the first thing a novice like me realizes is, oh, THAT’s why the scope is so important…
I didn’t manage a single bullseye, but I only shot 15 rounds and most of them were at least on the target, some of them just an inch or two off. So I took it as a mostly positive first effort.
And now a Didi shot.
We’d had some big storms in late January, and they did a number on the woods.
(Didi can also do a number on the woods.)
As the date of our hopeful departure to Athens approached, we were literally self-testing every night. Trine still had a faint pink positive line on the Wednesday before our departure, but the girls were already testing negative.
Our evenings were so hectic and poorly planned throughout this period that we had some wildly inventive dinners: one night we ended up having macaroni and cheese with escargots.
Picture or it didn’t happen? I got that:
Finally the great day arrived: all four of us had negative PCR tests, and we’d rehearsed how we’d respond if anyone pointed out that Molli had not yet gone 14 days from her positive test. We got to the airport well ahead of time, neither crazy early nor nail-bitingly close.
It was one of the smoothest airport experiences we’d ever had. We had time for the girls to get a Burger King breakfast, check-in was a breeze, and we whisked right through security. We had time to browse duty-free and get some refreshments and some comfy seating at Joe & the Juice.
(Apparently the eye doctor from Faro was moonlighting for a skincare company in duty-free—and apparently it hadn’t worked out very well for him. Inside family jokes aside: is that really the best model for a skin-care product?)
I wasn’t kidding about the comfy seats at Joe & the Juice:
We should have known things had been going too smoothly: suddenly our departure time was advanced an hour.
The baggage handlers had declared a strike that morning!
It’s hard to tell in the pic, but those are all baggage wagons just sitting and gathering dust out on the tarmac. I’d never seen anything like it.
The strike hit hard—look at all the flights scheduled for departure before 8:40 whose information is simply “Info at 9:30”:
Maddie and I took a stroll to the second floor of our wing of the airport just to pass the time. It was eerily deserted.
I mean, that’s Rapture-level eerie, isn’t it?
It got even eerier when an apparently drunken or drugged Pole came staggering down the hall and in broken English begged us to go and get his bags for him because he had a bad back.
It was a little surreal. We ultimately led him down the deserted corridor and down the escalator to our own gate, where we hooked the poor guy up with an airport cop who took him off our hands. The guy wasn’t violent or malevolent, just very out of it, pained, confused, and, possibly as a consequence of those things, exceedingly stupid.
Our flight ended up taking off a mere two hours after schedule—just in time for Molli to pass the 14 day mark!—and 3 hours later we touched down in Greece.
Passengers were being plucked out randomly for covid tests: we dodged our last bullet when the guards waved the four of us through.
We’d made it!
Denmark, you may or may not remember, had dropped all covid restrictions of February 1st. Greece had not. That was the one down side of our trip: we had to wear masks almost all the time except when we were walking around or in our hotel rooms.
So although we enjoyed a few gulps of fresh air outside the airport, just five or ten minutes after leaving the airport terminal we had to board the train to the city, and the masks came back on.
We got off at Monastiraki station, which Google maps told us was just a few hundred meters from our hotel. We had no sooner come out of the station and emerged to street level than the first view of the Acropolis struck our eyes.
And our rooms looked right out on it.
I love this picture of Trine finally relaxing without a mask.
The girls were on the 6th floor and we were on the second, so their view was the same, but nicer.
After settling in and resting a little, we asked the concierge where we could get a traditional Greek meal—gyros, souvlaki, moussaka, saganaki, all that kind of stuff. She said the best place for that was Thanasis, which was happily just a block or two away from the hotel.
I include a picture of the last page of the Thanasis menu not because it’s all about Achilles and Patroclus cooking up some gyros in the Iliad (which is why I originally took the pic), but because of the picture you see there, which clearly impressed itself upon me subconsciously. You’ll see why later.
It was a good meal, and not very expensive, and we had some nice Greek wine to go along with it.
That was one of the nice surprises of the trip: that Greek wine is actually pretty good.
Being brand new to the country (three of us, anyway) we pestered our waiter for how to say things in Greek. Like gyros, which is pronounced differently in every state I ever lived in. ghee-ROS, we were told. I think. I kind of forget. He also wrote down for us how to say thank you:
…but we all forgot that, too, after a few attempted usages drew only blank stares.
To help you along through the rest of this post, in which I’ll be using various Greek words and phrases without translation, please take a moment to memorize the following:
Got it? Good. There will be a test.
The hotel had a rooftop bar and we ended our first night up there. (We would end a lot of our nights up there.)
All these pics were taken within moments of eachother, but on different cameras and with different settings.
The nights were chilly, so it was nice that the rooftop bar had an inside as well as an outside.
The clock on my Olympus isn’t properly set, so sometimes pictures are a little out of whack (because to make these blog posts I throw all the pics together into a single folder and then sort by the date-taken timestamp). So the following pics are from our just meandering around town between dinner and our nightcaps.
I think. Anyway, I’m pretty sure we didn’t have nightcaps and then go wandering around the city, so we’ll stick to my original theory.
This big church was about a block from our hotel and its belfry was visible throughout the neighborhood, so it became a good reference point for us.
And a few blocks beyond it was the great plaza across from parliament.
There were churches everywhere, ranging in age from millennia to quite recent, and sometimes great modern buildings had been built around them.
The next picture doesn’t play very well in small size, but I like it in its full glory because it’s so representative of all the little alleys of the Plaka neighborhood: every single one of them seemed to lead to (or at least straight toward) the the Acropolis. But because of the scale, you can’t really see it rising in the background here:
The next day we took a walking tour around the area. Our hotel was just a few blocks from the old Roman marketplace—the Roman Agora—which was itself directly up against the ancient Greek Agora.
So first we made our way around the ruins of the Roman Agora.
There were feral cats everywhere. Especially crawling around the ruins that were fenced off. It was like they were looking out at us to taunt us: “Ha, stupid humans, we can lounge around on these sun-warmed stones all day, and you can’t come near us!”
That right there is the old gate to the Roman Agora: around the 2nd century AD, if I remember, it became the hot marketplace, so Athenians could either amble around their crumbling old classical Agora or saunter through that big proud gate and shop at the hoity-toity Roman Agora.
My three jewels:
That’s not at either of the Agoras: it’s just one of the shops in one of the alleys around the hotel.
Another nearby store featured local art. A lot of paintings of the Acropolis, most of them pretty blah, but this one jumped out at me: I like the colors.
And boy oh boy, were there a whole lot of icons for sale.
The style is kind of jarring to me: the seriousness of the subject and the garishness of the style don’t harmonize very well.
But clearly my opinion is not widely shared.
The visits to the shops came before the Agora visits, in case that matters (camera timestamp issues). The ancient Greek Agora requires paid admission, but since we were there in the off-season it was just a pittance (two euros a head, I think?).
I’m not especially drawn to ruins. I mean, they’re just crumbled old buildings. What I love is to imagine what they were like in their glory. Now and then I’d find myself able to get a shot without any signs of modernity in it, and that’s what you see in the next three shots. They’re all looking up at the Acropolis from within the Agora.
Plato might have looked upon something like this, from this exact spot, while haggling with some idiot over a bunch of grapes or a hunk of lamb.
The temple of Hephaestus is pretty imposing, bearing down on the Agora from a hillside.
Do you find these pictures boring? I don’t. The whole point of the trip for me was precisely to see these things.
And to share them with the girls I love.
There are going to be a lot of sequences where it’s multiple versions of the same basic shot. That’s because I couldn’t decide which image I liked the best. I’d apologize for the redundancy, but this is the Molli and Maddie blog, dammit, so actually I won’t.
(That little church is actually medieval, not ancient, but it’s right there in the middle of the Agora anyway.)
Here’s a map of the Agora as it would have appeared back in the day. Fat lot of good it does you now, at this resolution, but it helped our imaginations while we were there.
That long low building in back is the Stoa. It was basically a covered promenade, built in the second century BC. It was reconstructed in the 1950s, and now contains the Museum of the Agora. We didn’t go into the museum.
I know it would be wrong, but I kind of wish they had reconstructed the whole damn Agora—with the original materials, when possible (god knows there was enough rubble lying around)—so one could better get the feel for this really vital inflection point of human civilization.
Poor Simon:
Got a text from a Danish friend who’d forgotten I was in Greece and wanted to know what I was up to. Replied with a selfie:
Statue of Herodotus in the outdoor part of the Stoa:
The Ancient Greek Agora is bordered on one side by a subway line—the line that will take you straight to Piraeus. The juxtaposition of the the graffitied modern train zipping alongside the ruins of the marketplace where western civilization was seeded caught my fancy, even if I wasn’t very good at catching it on “film.”
And on the other side of the tracks from the Agora, a row of restaurants where we took a couple of lunches over the course of the trip.
Every corner you turn in Athens there’s some kind of excavation. I don’t even know what the ruins in the next picture are, there was no signage or anything. You’re just walking along the street, there’s an opening between two buildings, you glance to see what’s between them, and it’s some ruin that was probably already crumbling when Jesus was walking around.
Our first outdoor lunch of the year:
Note to self: keep this next picture as a reminder of why you need to keep your hair tidy and must never again go three months without proper exercise.
Lateral view of the Stoa from the non-Agora side of the tracks:
The grocery store around the corner from our hotel, which we frequently popped into for snacks and drinks, offered some very affordable animal heads.
I have to say, I prefer shopping in Denmark, where the products aren’t staring back at me.
During our meandering that afternoon I almost bought a Greek Asterix & Obelix because I thought it would be cool: I have several in English, French, and Danish. Why not in Greek, I wondered aloud.
“Because you can’t read Greek?” Trine offered.
Valid point. So the picture will have to do.
We took a long walk around the Plaka neighborhood that night.
I assume they only serve Nectar and Ambrosia (and Coca Cola).
Apparently Melissinos (“the POET Sandal Maker”) is a pretty big deal. I took a bunch of pictures of the little posters set up in his window displays: autographed pictures of celebrities praising his sandals. (John Lennon & Yoko Ono among them: also, weirdly, “Jill Biden, wife of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden”).
No idea why a poet would make better sandals than a sandal-maker, but hippie logic has never really worked for me, even when I was a hippie.
Hadrian’s arch by night (we’ll see it again later):
(One of) the wonderful thing(s) about a family vacation like is (are) the little surprises that pop up. While heading back toward the hotel we strolled by a little café with a display of desserts that caught the girls’ eyes. The café’s hustlers made quick work of us: before we knew it we were seated in their rooftop garden.
The girls had never before tasted baklava.
There was an elderly couple up there when we arrived, but they left shortly after we’d settled in. We then had the patio to ourselves for the next 30-40 minutes, and it was a wonderful time. Looking back at the whole vacation, in fact, I’d say it was (for me) one of the nicest experiences of the trip.
Some shots are merely included for aesthetic reasons. This is among my favorite pictures of the trip:
For reasons I can no longer recall we decided the next day would be our Piraeus excursion day.
It was just a 30-minute train trip from our hotel.
We weren’t sure what to do or see, or where to go, once we got to Piraeus; so we kind of played it by instinct. Very quickly we found our way to the Holy Trinity church, which for some reason caught all our interest.
We lit candles for Nana and Pop-Pop, and I paid a donation to have them included in prayers. (I know there’s no Greek Orthodox in our family lineage, but why not hedge all our bets?)
This apparently political poster caught my eye:
I was curious what the communists of Greece were up to, so I fired up Google Lens, which was often a great help to us.
This time, not so much:
I’m pretty sure that’s not an accurate translation, but I love it: “ATTACK! Battalions neo-Nazi beat with the state… Today Alkis tomorrow you? That’s ENOUGH! KNEE.”
The original Greek confused me less than the translation.
While the girls went in to an H&M across the street from the church, I got a cup of coffee at a nearby café and played around with Google maps trying to figure out where we should go. It looked like there was a nice harbor not very far from where we were, so when the girls were done shopping we made our way there, marveling at the abundant oranges hanging from all the trees on every street.
Molli’s verdict: not very tasty. But man, they were everywhere.
It turned out to be a beautiful harbor, and reminded us all of Vilamoura down in Portugal.
Not as commercial, though—and some of the boats were a little scruffier than you’d see in Vilamoura.
Some of them a lot scruffier.
I liked this KFC poster:
No idea what it says, but it sure looks like Colonel Sanders is urging us all forward to the glorious new future of anti-capitalist chicken.
Speaking of food, we hadn’t strolled very long when we seated ourselves at a harborside table for an al fresco meal of fresh fish. (All the websites said to be sure to eat fresh seafood in Piraeus.) The English language menu was intriguing.
The fried codish, please note, come with fried fries.
But it gets better:
Smoked muscles, anyone? Steamy muscles? Spaggetti shrimps?
The menu aside, it was a wonderful meal in a wonderful setting with wonderful company.
(Gawd, Greg, get a damn haircut, man!)
Unironically and unsarcastically, I think this is the best food picture I ever took. It could be on the cover of Gourmet magazine. Unfortunately it was not my lunch.
This was my lunch (not a joke, and yes, this is the whole plate):
That’s a squid. A fresh squid. Emptied of everything and with its face and limbs hacked off. And then grilled.
It was tasty enough, I guess, but… well, the owner himself was laughing at me, saying, “Not enough food, big man like you, not enough food! You need 2 kilos at least!”
From our harborside lunch we made our leisurely way out to where the harbor opened out onto the Saronic Gulf. (I didn’t know it was the Saronic Gulf until I looked it up just now. I would have called it the Aegean, probably, or the Mediterranean.)
Another one of those series where I didn’t know which one to keep…
Those shots were all from street level: it was possible to creep our way down the rocky hillside to the water’s edge, so we did.
The water felt swimmable to all of us, comfortably swimmable, but this wasn’t that kind of vacation, so we made our way back up to the street.
I deliberately didn’t force a picture in front of this, because we’d been there / done that in Faro. Repeatedly.
This point at which the harbor opens out onto the gulf is also the site of the Holocaust memorial. I’d wanted to see it when I’d read about it, because I remember how powerfully the memorial in Kaunas, Lithuania, had struck me.
This was a different experience.
Maddie: “Are those garbage cans?”
Molli: “They look like garbage cans.”
Me: “No one would make a Holocaust memorial out of garbage cans…”
Would they?
No, they wouldn’t.
Listen: I took a lot of pictures of this memorial, because it was an atrocity. I even took a picture of the big plaque in which the artist described, in fewer than 10,000 words, all the stupid symbolism behind his ugly, stupid monument.
What stays with me? Not his idiotic explanation of his stupid art project, but the hideous effrontery of his stupid art project itself.
Much more aesthetically pleasing, I thought, was this pigeon looking over the harbor (note the differences in depth: this was the Olympus, so I focused first on the bird, then on the background.
Hey, turns out I didn’t delete the full text of the artist’s explanation: here’s his description of the “17 symbolic sculptural compositions within.”
It was at this exact point of our walking tour of Piraeus that my right sneaker fell apart. The sole of the shoe simply came unglued from the heel.
I had to walk a kilometer plus just to reach a department store (Marks & Spencer, Grandma Lewy’s favorite) with a shoe department: they had none in my size of any kind (I would have taken anything, even slippers), but they did have tape—and that’s what you see there.
Fortunately there was a sporting goods store not far from the M&S where I was able to get a tolerably cheap (if much too tight) pair of walking shoes that fit my feet enough to get me back to the hotel.
And it was on that uncomfortable walk from the harbor back to central Piraeus for the train that we passed this sign:
It was so strange—are unicorns with sharks for arms a thing?—that I had to Google it immediately, and in fact that very sandwich board is itself an internet meme. Who knew?
Who wanted to know?
We took the train back to the hotel, and the girls wanted a longer rest than I did, so I went out on a little photography tour.
I kind of like that one. I officially declare it my 57th birthday self portrait.
Remember way back a million pix ago when I said the photo on the last page of the Thanasis menu would ultimately show up in one of my own photos? Here’s that photo.
And here’s a flashback to the menu photo:
No! Wait, that’s not it! Close, but not quite.
(Hang in there, we’ll get to it eventually.)
I like that shot of the guy smoothing some freshly laid cement on the sidewalk alongside the ancient Agora. (Temple of Haephestus in the background.) I like it because it reminds me that way back in the day, some nameless guys were working with cement and stone to build the things they built, but we never think about them. We think about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, so many others… but not the guys who busted their asses actually building all the stuff.
So, you know: hats off to them.
Looking up from cement spreader guy:
Pulling back a little:
Among the things I wanted to see while in Athens was a site billed in all the literature as “The Prison of Socrates.” The literature all identifies it plainly as the apocryphal prison of Socrates: that is, as not necessarily a place where Socrates was ever actually held, but a place that had for centuries, maybe millennia, been commonly referred to that by name without there being any actual evidence that the bitter old fella actually spent any time in there while waiting for his hemlock.
Since the girls had made it clear they wanted a longish rest, and since Google maps told me it wasn’t too far from where I was (down there near the ancient Agora) to the “prison” that I knew would bore Molli and Maddie to tears, I decided to pay it a visit on my own.
Google maps doesn’t do a very good job of communicating topography: I was indeed close to the “prison,” but it was all uphill and sometimes quite steep.
It was about a 15 minute walk to reach the site, which turned out to be tucked away in a sprawling garden across from the base of the Acropolis itself.
I jammed the camera through the bars of the rightmost cave to get a shot of what lay within:
I like to think that Socrates was held there, because that makes the caverns very interesting—instead of just a couple of holes in the face of a stony outcropping.
But even imagining what Socrates would have undergone there, it wasn’t that interesting, so I was only there long enough to snap a few pictures, wonder a little whether there would have been benches in the caves, or something for the waddling old guy to piss in, before I made my way out of the garden.
Which led me directly to the base of the Acropolis. It was the first time I’d been so close to the thing we’d been staring at from afar all week.
Only when I was down there looking back at the entrance to the park I’d just come out of could I see it was “Hills of Muses, Pnyx, Nymphs.” I was disappointed not to have seen any of them (especially the nymphs), and sort of intrigued by the word Pnyx, which I’m pretty sure I’d never seen or even imagined before.
Based on English pronunciation, though, it could be a pretty cool nickname for the New York basketball team.
Now I could see the base of the Acropolis at last.
That was an exciting moment for me, and I’m not being ironic or sarcastic.
I made it all the way to the (modern) entrance—the gates and turnstiles through which millions of visitors pass every year, for a small fee, to wander around the ruins of buildings erected 25 centuries ago.
I was tempted to sneak in and have a look around, but that would have been unfair to the girls, so I turned around and began my descent back down to the city.
It was a quick walk, but could have been quicker:
I like the anachronism of people riding around the Acropolis on Segways.
Both on my way up and my way back down I’d passed by a vast terrace covered with seating for outdoor cafés, about half way up the long and winding road from our part of town (the Plaka district) up to the Acropolis: it had looked so nice I thought maybe the girls would enjoy it, so when I got back to the hotel I persuaded them to give it a try.
Hey, look at that! My hair is under control! So that must have been the day on the morning of which I got my Big Fat Greek haircut.
In fact, all of this must have been morning activity, because the photographic evidence says that we’re now up to another long and solitary walk I took: this time to see yet another site I knew would bore the girls.
Actually, it looks like first we walked back to the hotel together, and then I just continued on my way.
I include this poster because I like to think it was a Fathomless-esque comedy:
And I include this tree because—come on, what a tree!
And what a house!
This next shot is just one of many unnamed ruins in our area: what’s different about it is the (barely discernible at this resolution) little two-by-fours holding the thing up.
Most of the gift shops—of which there were millions—featured these very unusual Greek bottle openers.
The girls thought they were hilarious for some reason.
Now at this point I’m headed up toward parliament, because my destination is on its far side from us.
And really just a couple of blocks beyond the parliament (whose side streets were fronted by regal-looking embassies of European nations), I had my site.
Better known to many of us as the Lyceum. The place where Aristotle put on his thinking cap.
I took so many pictures of that place, where the very first seeds of the Enlightenment were planted.
As one of the signs put it: “It is difficult to appreciate, from the scant archeological remains on this site, that this spot is one of the most significant places in the history of mankind.”
It really is: it’s the spot where one of the lights of civilization switched on.
I won’t dwell on it, but I’ll note for the permanent record that my 10-15 minute sojourn in the boring, boring garden of Aristotle was one of my own personal highlights of the trip… even if I found the actual location a little boring myself.
By the time I got back to Plaka Maddie and Trine had settled themselves in for hot drinks at a neighborhood café.
Molli eventually joined us, and the girls asked us whether they could get their nails done. We agreed that they could, and since it was a vacation I even offered to treat. Off they went.
It seemed to be taking a long time, so Trine and I eventually used Google maps to track them down: we found them in a little nail salon in the middle of what appeared to be the wealthiest section of town.
By the time we got there they still weren’t done, so Trine and I settled ourselves into a nearby café that happened to have a very impressive menu of single malts.
We will not speak of the Great Athens Nail Salon Misunderstanding. (Nor are we likely to forget it.)
If you thought the “Unicorn with Sharks for Arms” tattoo parlor was funky, how about the offerings midtown at Slamdunk?
I guess that was the night we ate at the TGI Friday’s across the street from our hotel.
And then went out for a nightcap…
That was the eve of our grand and glorious walking tour of Athens and the Acropolis.
It was supposed to have just been a tour of the Acropolis—a little two hour affair for which we’d be on hour own after the first 90 minutes.
But we got a call from the company we’d booked with: there weren’t enough people for the morning Acropolis tour we’d signed up for, they said, so it was canceled, but if we’d like they could include us in their whole Athens and Acropolis tour, which was 4½ hours and included the same tour we’d have gotten (only in the afternoon instead of the morning). For no extra price. So sure, I said, yeah, we’ll do that.
Our tour began in the train station in front of Parliament, where we spent a good half hour having all its various archeological displays explained to us. It was too much for Molli, who fled the scene. Maddie was also suffering, but managed to hang in there.
Coming up from the subway, we got to see the changing of the guard at parliament. It was crazy, like something out of a Monty Python silly-walking skit.
From there we passed through the national garden (which was pretty, but none of the pictures were very interesting), and then alongside the velodrome or aerodrome or whatever they called the stadium erected for the first Greek olympics of the modern era
And just past that, this pond of turtles. It had some sort of significance that I can no longer remember. But just so you know: these are significant turtles. (I think they were nymphs who’d pissed Zeus off so badly he transmogrified them into turtles. Something like that.)
And all the while, glaring down upon us from above, the Parthenon.
Then we entered another little park, this one home to the Temple of Zeus and Hadrian’s arch (seen previously only at night).
Now, it’s billed as the “Temple of Zeus,” but really it was the “few remaining pillars of the Temple of Zeus, some which remain upright.”
I like this next picture that has both Hadrian’s Arch (lower right) and the Acropolis itself.
I’m less impressed with my photographs of the “Last few bits of the Temple of Zeus.”
But you can tell I was really trying.
Oh, and in the midst of it all, “a few sad remains of what were once the Roman baths.”
At about this point Molli returned to us: she had used Life 360 to track us down.
(Life 360 is not very good at identifying locked gates.)
We paused for some refreshments down at the base of the far side (from our hotel) of the Acropolis, then made our way up to the main event.
And finally we were there.
The next pictures are from an old theatre at the bottom of the walls of the Acropolis. It’s the Theatre of Dionysius. This is the first known theatre in the history of the world. It’s where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides first premiered.
That’s astonishing to me: that this is the actual physical place where human beings saw the very first productions of the Oresteia and Oedipus Rex and The Clouds.
From the Theatre of Dionysius, there was nothing left to do but make our way up to the Acropolis itself.
Along the way we passed another theatre, one that’s still used for public performances (in season), but I can’t recall its name or history—and really, at some point it all becomes too much. The brain simply snaps. Everything is so ancient and significant and historical that it sort of collapses into a category of “whatever.”
Our tour guide explained the significance of absolutely everything to us as we passed it, but with the entrance to the Acropolis within eyesight at last it was difficult to stay focused.
That’s looking down on the ancient Agora: you can see the Temple of Hephaestus top right.
And then, finally—I mean finally—we made our way into the Acropolis, the ceiling of the Athenian world.
Almost. First, we have to sit on the steps in front of the entrance for one last pre-Acropolis monologue from our indefatigable tour guide Katrina.
Then we finally got to pass through the gate and enter.
Yes, seriously. We were supposed to wear masks up there. In the open air. At that elevation. With all that fresh air blowing around. Holy shit, Aristophanes could have had some fun with that.
Fun fact from Katrina: the Parthenon is not rectangular. What it is is actually the base of a pyramid. The inward angle of the corner pillars means that they would, if they went all the way up until their ends met in a point, reach the exact height of the tallest mountain of which the Greeks were aware (which I recall as being something like 4800 meters).
I desperately wanted a great picture of the girls by the Parthenon, but their patience was by this point exhausted. The tour had been too long. I kept telling them this was a place we would probably not visit again, so some day they’d look back fondly on these pictures, and that only seemed to upset them worse and make Trine laugh harder.
I myself was happy as hell.
A full view of the ancient and the Roman Agoras.
And of the paltry remains of the Temple of Zeus (the top of Hadrian’s Arch also visible just below and to the left of the Zeusian stuff).
And middle right, the whatever-drome stadium:
And of course the great hill opposite the Parthenon, which we never got around to visiting because its access routes were all pretty steep and not everyone in our small group was excited about steep ascents.
Our hotel is discernible in this next picture, but only if you know exactly where to look:
So let me help:
Looking down on the Theatre of Dionysisus: we were told that all the grassy area had once also been seating: the theatre could accommodate tens of thousands of spectators.
Looking out toward Piraeus:
But the real view was the stuff all around us.
And then finally, to the girls’ unutterable relief, we had passed through the exit and were done.
On the way down I couldn’t resist leading Trine up to the Prison of Socrates as long as we were in the neighborhood: the girls chose to sit on a bench and wait it out.
The cats of Athens were, as I mentioned very early in this post, everywhere. Feral cats, obviously, but therefore with a dependence on the kindness of strangers. On our walk along the “shortcut” from the Acropolis back to the hotel we heard a strange and piercing whistling sound, and we noticed many, many cats scurrying along the low scrub in the hills around us.
They had a purpose and a destination: behold the (surprisingly young) cat woman of Athens:
As we took a snack that afternoon in the sunny outdoors…
We were getting pictures of conditions back home:
Once again the girls wanted some time to rest and I was left to set out on foot for another photographic odyssey. This one took me to the heart of the financial district.
Yes, verily, that is directly across the square from the Greek National Bank.
On the way back I passed by what appeared to be some interesting night spots, including Little Kook—where it’s always a Victorian Christmas Eve.
But that night did not end at Little Kook’s: it ended instead in our own hotel bar.
The next day was, I believe, our last in Greece. We chose to just kind of meander around, and took a stop at an outdoor table at the same café on whose roof we’d spent such a great hour or two earlier in the week.
That café, by the way, had a sign in its restroom whose actual meaning still eludes me.
No flushing books? No menus in the toilet? What?
Eventually the girls got tired of walking, or at least tired of walking with us. So we sent them on their way and Trine and I made our slow way all the way around the Acropolis. We even got another shot at the Prison of Socrates along the way.
And this vast empty space you see here: this is actually the spot where the Athenian assembly met. This is where some of western civilization’s first elections and debates were held.
Finally it was time for our last sundown in Athens, which Trine and I enjoyed with a scotch up on the roof of our hotel.
It was a picture not unlike this one that had caught my eye online many months earlier and had made me think, yes, this is a hotel I could stay at.
Shortly after sundown I went out looking for somewhere we could enjoy our last evening of the trip.
Little Kook still looked like a lot of fun.
I mean, come on:
On my way back toward the hotel I passed through the main square. And here we have it:
Have what?
Have this:
Despite my painstaking tour of possible dinner and drinks places, we ended up at a place just down the street from our hotel.
I don’t remember what we did to insult out waiter—I actually thought we’d been good guests and had a good rapport—but I paid in cash to use up a lot of the euros we still had, and our change suggested he was not a fan of our patronage.
In the windows of a sculpture shop near our hotel was a work that suggested either incredible ignorance of the myth of Icarus, or a very dark idea of freedom.
I’m gonna go ahead with the former, because the artist didn’t seem unduly preoccupied with the classics.
And holy hell: the next morning it was just a question of packing up our stuff and heading down to the train station.
And thence to the airport, where we were able to enjoy the traditional Kammer-Nagan Burger King air travel banquet.
Note for the historical record: the western effort to deter Russia from Ukraine had been the background media noise of our entire trip. It was February 20th at this point, and the television behind me is informing us that western leaders hope to deter Putin from invading Ukraine.
Alas for the hopes of western leaders.
The next morning at 6:30, I was already back at Nordhavn station on my way to work.
We were home.
I went back to the range our first weekend back:
And the Greek relaxation had apparently done me some good:
My first and only bullseye.
So far.
It’s all over but the shouting, now, and a little extraneous business to take care of.
First, this mystery shot from Athens:
I believe it’s from Athens. I believe it’s a selfie Molli sent us when we were waiting for her somewhere and she was letting us know she was on her way.
I can’t say for sure because I don’t remember. But it makes me smile every time I look at it.
Also, the invasion of Ukraine wasn’t the only big news of late February. At the time of this writing (late March) this story is now fake news, but it was real for a while:
Long post. Now set it aside and get your eyes off the screen for a while. See you in about a month…
