Dinner at the Museum

We celebrated my father's 75th birthday with a nice dinner at the museum, as the sun set and cast a golden glow over the Parthenon. We had dessert at home — a chocolate cake the manager of our apartment delivered for us, and a glass of wine I picked up at the roadside wine tasting booth in Rhodes. Here is a photo of the lit Parthenon, with my parents reflected in the window. 

The Acropolis Museum

The museum is sited over an archeological excavation of an early Greek settlement. Glass walkways over the site provide light, cover, and a view for visitors of the excavation. It's really quite extraordinary. 

The entrance to the museum. 

Inside the museum, visitors start by walking up a ramp, with antiquities in glass cases on each side. This represents the path from Athens up to the Acropolis which the citizens of Athens would have ascended every four years at the culmination of a city-wide celebration. The parade — called the Panathenian Procession — included virtually all the people of Athens, bulls for sacrifice, and — at the front — a young girl carrying a specially made cloth which would be draped over the ivory and gold statue(which is long gone) of Athena contained within the Parthenon (the ruins of which are visible from the museum).  

Around the top of the Parthenon is the frieze — a series of panels of carved stone telling the story of the Panathenian procession with great attention to the real life details: the struggle of young men to control bulls bring brought up for sacrifice, casual conversations between men, the intimacy young women share when they are together, the air of supremacy that gods exude as they lounge at the top, waiting for the mortals of Athens to arrive to worship them. This is Ria, spinning in the empty exhibit after dinner. 

The Acropolis

I can't quite wrap my mind around this place. It's the birthplace of so much Western culture, so much history, and yet it feels more like Nicaragua than like Rome. The German/EU austerity plan is really killing this place. I look around and see decay everywhere, and clearly the first thought that springs to mind is, "This place needs way more government spending," not "I wonder how much more blood can be squeezed from this stone." It's appalling how bad the infrastructure is, how unhealthy the people are and how degraded the environment is. Rio di Janeiro is in better shape in many ways. 

The Acropolis was terrific, especially as Ria and I got there as it opened, and before the cruise ships disgorged crowds of people armed with selfie-sticks. But even more amazing was the Acropolis Museum. We looked through it fairly quickly in the evening, and had dinner in the restaurant at 8 p.m. When we were done, the museum was open for another 30 minutes, and was almost completely empty. The rest of my family headed back to the apartment, and I stayed and had the place entirely to myself, aside from a few disinterested guards. The experience was transcendent.

The Parthenon, a temple to Athena and the other gods, atop the Acropolis:

The Erectheion, a temple to Poseidon and Athena:
Pictured is the stone porch, its roof held up by six sculptures of women, called the Caryatids. All shown are casts. Five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum (Athens) and the sixth is in the British Museum (London), having been looted from Athens in 1901 or so by Lord Elgin. 

This is the back of one of the Caryatids, in the museum:

Athens

After arriving in Athens, we dropped our luggage off at our apartment and headed out to the National Park, where we found a few large tortoises which stole Ria's heart. The apartment has a large rooftop terrace, and I promised Ria that if she could find a tortoise no larger than a large jelly doughnut, she could keep it on our terrace for the week we're in Athens. Naturally, this meant that there would be no peace until we found such a tortoise ... and his name is Apollo. 

Ferry dock madness

The ferry stopped first at Symi, where madness ensued: walk-on passengers, passengers on scooters, passengers with bags and boxes and potted plants, people in cars, people in trucks, people in semi-trucks, and of course feral cats and loose dogs all milled about, going on and off the ferry, walking and riding and driving around, and amazingly no one was crushed. It was phenomenally entertaining.

Explosive liquids are a part of the scene ... 

This semi tractor backed off the boat as the blue truck behind it drove on

Overnight ferry to Athens

When we took a Blue Star ferry from the Åland Islands, in Finland, to Helsinki, the boat was a massive cruise-ship sized thing with multiple discos, casinos, fur coat shops, you name it. We'd expected something similar here, but it was just a ferry, with a few lounges, a restaurant, and a snack bar. Our room was quite nice — we'd chosen the Lux variety, which gave us a couch and two large windows — completely worth it. Dinner at the restaurant was surprisingly good, although we were the only diners there. Everyone else ate at the snack bar. Our waiter was delighted to have some company, and we chatted amiably about the islands, Greek food, his family.

Ria, as we were pulling out of Rhodes

Arriving at the pretty port in Symi, where we'd spent a day earlier in the trip

Ria's good-bye to Malona

Good-bye to Malona

Ria and I had a nice final dinner in the little town of Psinthos, at a taverna entirely empty save for us, attended to cheerfully by a motherly woman who prepared a meal for us based on my request that she serve us “the best food.” We didn’t use the menus at all, and the meal was quite good. 

Instead of flying back, we have abandoned our tickets and are taking an overnight ferry to Pireas, a port outside of Athens. Here's a last shot of Malona: the priest (in his robes, riding a tractor in the town square), the church, and the graveyard — an interesting variety of grave sites.

Making friends

Ria and I stopped at a panoramic pullout on the side of the road to get something to eat from a food cart there (called a Kantina here). A group of locals — friends and family of the woman running the cantina — was gathered there, sitting at a table on the edge of a cliff overlooking a roiling sea. One of the children invited Ria to play ("Gabriella, come to playing with us?") and one of the men invited me to come and drink ("Parakalo?"). Ria and four children played for an hour, and while the adults and I drank a local drink, tsipouro (which sounds a bit like "giggalo" when pronounced) and we all chatted in a mixture of English and Greek.

One man left the table, walked across the turnout, and disappeared behind a large rock for a while. I thought it was fairly obvious what he'd gone to do. But as soon as he reappeared, a massive cloud of smoke erupted from behind the rock. In shock, I said to the table, "I thought he'd gone back there to pee; what are we drinking?!" One man actually fell over in his chair laughing so hard, a combination of having been drinking all day and the fact that he grasped enough English to get the joke. More drinks all around ...

I saw a strange thing among the Greek men: they were vaping, smoking e-cigarettes (and one e-pipe). But this was in between real cigarettes (hand rolled, no filters). Their cardiologists must be having their own heart attacks.

Ria, Gavriel (9), and Maria (11)

The beach at Archangelos

The Castle at Archangelos

Just down the hill from Malona, on the coast, sits the rather touristy town of Archangelos. Above it looms a mammoth castle, and on a moody, mercurial day, Ria and I parked and scaled the grassy and rocky hill to it, crossing a wire fence on the way. (When the German women we met declared that the fence must be meant for goats not people, we agreed. Germans are not notorious lawbreakers, after all.) It was a bit of a scramble, over rocks and through fields scattered with spiky plants (painful for Ria in her flip flops), past horned goats and over piles of rubble. And all so worth it — the magnificent view, the grandeur of the space, the commanding feeling of being in such a defensible position. As we started to descend, a massive rain storm soaked us, and left the rocks glittering in the patches of sun streaming through holes in the clouds.

The church at Lindos

In a lovely little courtyard sits this pretty little church.

Spring is in the air

Spring has recently made a dramatic entry, and, as I was taught in the various Shakespeare courses I took at Reed, it manifests as sex and death.

Mating bugs

Ria named this egg Opal, and the other one she found Owen. Both were in the river, the victims of terribly poor nest siting by their mother ducks. 

More mating bugs

Goat on the beach

A crucifixion? 

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