May Break II: The Hellenic Half

A long time ago, well before the invention of trains and airplains, well before the invention of digital cameras and memory cards, well before the invention of the internet and blogging, there lived a man. This man, Homer was his name, liked to sit by the sea and write poems that he concocted with his vibrant imagination. Years later, some of his descendants misinterpreted his fables as history and decided to build temples to the likes of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and Nike. Many, many years after that, a young man named Bryan - that's me - visited the land of Homer and his descendents.

The most notable place to find remnants of the great Greek empire is on top of the famed Acropolis. So of course, Pug, Tymona, and I started our sightseeing there. Atop the Acropolis, which is a big stone mesa, stand three temples. The largest is known as the Parthenon, another was built for the gods Athena and Nike, and a third built for Athena and Poseidon. It is amazing how people who lived before the invention of cranes and steel could manage to build such mammoth buildings out of huge slabs of marble, but somehow the Ancient Greeks did it, and I applaud them for that. It is amazing how people who lived after the invention of cranes and steel could manage to put up scaffolding everwhere around such remarkable tourist sites, but the Modern Greeks did it, and I loath them for that. But in all respect to the Modern Greeks, they do it so they can further restore the structures, so I guess it is alright. Maybe my children will get a chance to take a good picture someday.

At this point, it was time to go to a place where there wasn't so much scaffolding, and the Temple of Zeus was a logical choice. Not much of this building remains in tact, supposedly because the scaffolding has not had a chance to repair it yet, but what does remain lets the mind easily imagine what the structure would have been like during it's prime. And my mind did a pretty good job of recreating the structure, I think, because I was impressed, again.

Pause. I decided a break in the story was necessary to point out an important fact: there were about 1/10^th of the amount of people in Athens as there were in Rome, which was a blessing in itself.

Resume. After a couple goes at ancient structure, the team decided to seek something a little more modern, so we headed off to the Greek Parliment Building. On the way though, we had the chance to walk through the National Garden, which was really nice. According to the guidebook, which I actually read for this trip, the beauty of the gardens is not in its colorful flowers, but in its shades of green. That is not an exact quote, unless I suddenly developed photographic memory. Anyway, I can vouch that the guidebook was right on this one, and the garden, made up mostly of just trees, was incredibly beautiful.

The Parliment Buildings has some guards in front of it who wear funny little pomb-pombs atop the toes of their shoes, and every half hour or so they walk around raising their feet really high and doing all sorts of funny looking maneuvors. I have yet to determine the point of this excercise, but I should say that it did make the guards look absolutely ridiculous, which is great for tourists.

Museums are pretty good for tourists to look at as well, and we saw a few interesting ones which were mostly filled with statues and carvings. The Ancient Greeks had some carving skills. I'll leave it at that.

Ancient Greeks have carving skills; Modern Greeks have cooking skills. We went out to eat at an out of the way diner one night, and the food tickled my taste buds in the way I hoped it would. This was a great relief from the incessant bread and chocolate spread diet that pervaded the rest of the trip. Bread and chocolate spread is cheap, but I'm pretty sure a whole week living off of it made me sick.

This adventure finishes with some trouble involving attempts to get home, but I think that story is best left for another blog entry.