Greece: Part I of II

Note, my photos from my trip to Greece are here: Vijay’s photos of Greece.

The first part of my three-country June/July excursion to Europe began in Athens. I flew from Newark on a nice 10 hour non-stop (not including the standard one-hour airplane traffic jam on the EWR runway). But, since I was in business class (thanks to a free upgrade Northwest gave me), I ate a pretty decent meal, with 2 appetizers, a bunch of decent pasta and unlimited refills. After reading a book (“Fooling some of the people all the time”) for a bit, I popped a melatonin — it totally cures jetlag, by the way — and passed out. Despite my fears (I was sitting close to two toddlers), I had a great, uninterrupted 6.5 hour sleep. The children were pretty amazingly well-behaved.

After waiting in a taxi line for 20 minutes, I got a cool young cab driver who drove me straight to the hotel. (And while we’re on this topic, why is it that pretty much every airport taxi rank in the world is horribly inefficient? There’s no reason it should take 15 minutes to load 50 people into taxis, especially when there were about 60 taxis queued up. If I ever run an airport, I’d make the taxi contract include a penalty with for each person-minute wasted .) The cab driver strongly suggested I hit up this place called “Room”, which seems to have had a series of names. “They re-name it every year to keep it fresh,” he said.

Upon hearing of my trip to Athens, Gabor (and others) told me about this brand new, highly anticipated museum: the new Acropolis museum had just opened the previous weekend. As luck would have it, I arrived on the first day that entry was permitted without prior bookings (which had been sold out for a long time). The museum is pretty striking; designed by some Swiss architect whose name I’ve forgotten, it looks nothing like the surrounding area: it’s totally concrete and glass.

It’s built atop an archaeological site — this required them to use a number of pillars to vault the whole thing over the dig site, and has a many glass floor panels through which one can examine excavations. The interior design is quite open; one can see most of the interesting areas from at least two floors. There are many fascinating statues, carvings, and other historical artefacts. However, most of the marble statues and carvings that adorned the acropolis initially were stolen/borrowed/preserved my the Scottish Lord Elgin, and currently reside in the British Museum in London. There are a few plaster casts that were sent back to Greece in the 1800s which are displayed in this museum.

Walking around the “plaka” (a.k.a. old city) is kind of interesting. Lots of little shops, and a bunch of tourists. It kind of looks like the Montmantre in Paris.

At dinner that night, I ended up sitting at a table next to this guy — he was very nice, offering advice and even offering to share his drink. After talking to him for a while, it turned out he was from Edmonton, and was the president of the MS association there; just in Greece on a vacation. But that was just the beginning of the coolest random meeting I’ve had in years! It turns out that he used to play in the NHL!! He played as a backup goalie with the North Stars when Casey was in goal, was the backup in LA with Kelly Hrudey in the early 90s. Which, of course meant that he played with WAYNE GRETZKY!!! I was so speechless. I am now officially 1 degree of separation from The Great One!! Oh, he also played with Andy Moog for some time before injuries sidelined him. But he’s dedicated his life to MS since he has a few friends severely afflicted by it. What a guy!!

The first thing on the menu Thursday was a guided walking tour of the Acropolis. I found the tour very elucidating and interesting on the whole. The guide clearly knew her stuff, and though she often stressed the obvious, did add a lot of interesting info. (note to self: ask Erin about the PhD tour guides in some country). First up was a kind of goofy changing of the guard at the parliament buildings. I’ll try to find a photo of the guards surrounded by pigeons. After being pursued by some pretty aggressive stray dogs, we went to see the temple of Jupiter, which was erected by a Roman emperor who wanted to make a new Athens, but died before he could see it through.

Oh, about the strays: Athens is overrun with them. It’s not as bad as India, but it’s quite annoying. It turns out that the city wanted to put down all the strays before the Olympics but the locals were so incensed that they went around and put collars on all the strays in a (successful) effort to stymie the culling.

The expansion of the metro for the Olympics posed a substantial challenge for engineers. The entire area is covered with ancient Greek ruins; one place they wanted to put an air vent turned out to be the site of an ancient bath-house with important historical implications!

The Acropolis is pretty cool; I won’t write too much about the history of it. Though we did see the rock on which Paul supposedly gave his famed “sermon on the mount“. The whole area surrounding the Acropolis (a fort since prehistoric times) is dotted with all sorts of ruins, but they’re not set up in a way that’s particularly educational, especially if you don’t have a guide and can’t read ancient Greek. Here are a couple of photos: