Last weekend (yes, Im only getting around to writing about it now) Aaron and I met Kara in Athens. We arrived in Athens at 2:30 in the morning and decided the airport was too noisy to sleep in, so we took a bus to the center of town and slept on park benches outside of the parliament buildings. I actually fell asleep and dreamt, until I was woken up because the sprinkler system turned on. I had a brief moment of panic thinking “Where am I? Am I homeless?” Which ironically, I am homeless at the moment (I moved out of my apartment last week). We made our way to the Acropolis and watched the sunrise; it really wasn’t as magical as one might think (primarily because I was butt-tired and couldn’t find a coffee shop). We met up with Kara at the entrance to the Acropolis as it opened first thing in the morning which was brilliant because it was a bearable temperature. It was incredible to walk through the Acropolis and see the Parthenon, the Nike temple, and, uh, the other stuff (did you hear that? That was the collective sigh of all of my art and history teachers). As always, it’s really difficult to summarize the whole trip, so I’ll pick out some memorable moments.
We took a boat to the island of Hydra. It was an amazing place; everything is blue and white, and there are mules everywhere. We ate lunch beside the water, slept on the beach, drank “Freddicinos’, swam in the salt water, and didn’t get heat stroke. We took a tiny boat back to the other side of the island where an old Greek man looked at Kara and I and said something and laughed. I said “I don’t understand Greek” and the old woman beside him said “He said you look like lobsters without claws”; which I found hurtful, mostly because it reminded me of how much I wish I had claws. On the way back to Athens, the waters were really rough and it may have been the worst hour and a half of my life. I was one of probably 50 people who had to employ the use of the “Eurofast Sick bags” and kindly, Aaron slept (or pretended to sleep) through my whole episode of “Greek Salad Returneth”. It was pretty embarrassing but fortunately the crew member who was assigned to hand out barf bags in our aisle put his hand on my shoulder and said “It’s okay, this happens all the time.”…. Gross.
Greece really is everything I imagined. Kara and I decided that if we had to describe it in one word, it would be “Sweaty”. If we had two words to describe it, the next would be “Brunette” (It’s amazing how in such hot weather there’s just sea of brown heads. The heat of Greece also managed to reawaken the remnants of all of my misguided childhood perms but luckily, that made me fit in more into the Greek culture.) The third word would be “Magical”. I’m not sure why I’d ever be in a situation where I’d need to limit my adjectives like that, but it can be helpful to collect your thoughts sometimes. I will most certainly return to Greece one day.
