Hopelessly Devoted to You

We’re sitting in the economy deck of Blue Star Ferries’ Delos, cruising through the Aegean from Athens to Naxos, by way of Paros.  If you squint, the Delos looks a bit like a cruise ship, except there’s no casino and you have to pay for everything.  It’s a flawless day.  Hot.  The sky is clear and the sea is calm.  We apparently started a war with Iran.  The kids are lost in ipad land, unaware of the myriad ways the Boomers continue to destroy their future.  Has one generation ever extracted so much or paid fewer dues?  Malaka!

Yesterday was a huge vacation win of a day.  It begun inauspiciously, with James up for several hours in the night vomiting.  By some miracle of his youth he was 100% shipshape by morning and ready to go.  I got up and bought some takeout coffee and pastries from a café (my sludgy Greek coffee set my teeth on edge), and by 9am we were knee deep in junky antiques at the Sunday market at Monastraki Square.  The market is clearly more of a social activity than a serious business endeavor for most of the stall owners.  Getting there early means watching a bunch of haggard old hoarders unpack storage lockers of war memorabilia, tarnished jewelry, and other bits of flotsam and kitsch.  Then they sit around working their worry beads, chainsmoking over coffees, and watching tourists pick through it.  They can’t actually be selling much of this stuff. Surely it all goes right back into those lockers at night?   How many hundreds of times, for example, have those corroded World War II field radios been flogged unsuccessfully?  James and Juliet were more interested in the souvenir store section of the marketplace anyway, so we spent much time combing through dozens of stores all featuring the exact same tshirts, statuettes, and naughty keychains.  Erica bought a lovely sunhat.   

Hagglin'

Our next stop was the ancient agora of Athens, a place where Socrates once muckraked and the apostle Paul thundered against the local paganism. The Temple of Hephaestus, one of the best preserved Greek temples in existence, was a particular highlight, as was the reconstructed Stoa.  We also randomly saw a dried out-looking tortoise munching on a heel of bread and about a hundred stray cats, whom Juliet delighted in naming (“that one’s name is Boomerang!”)  Y'all should go, it was full of palm trees and ruins and various other orientalisms. 

The temple of Hephaestus

Searching the Stoa for a WC

Lunch was back near our apartment at a delightful little neighborhood bistro called Glykis (“Sweet”).  We sat in dappled sunlight under trestles of bougainvillea and had immaculately spiced dolmades and souvlaki.  As I had a Nissos beer,  I’ve now tried all the main beers you find in Greece.  They’re essentially identical (maybe Nissos had a bit more of a citrus lilt?), but I’m going with a top three of Vergina, Mythos, and Nissos.  Mamos, Kaiser, Amstel (the diesel version unavailable in America), and Fix will all do the trick when served stinging cold, though. 

From lunch, we took the Metro to a rather grubby part of the city where the National Archaeological Museum is.  Like its neighborhood, the facility has been allowed to go to seed, but its collection of ancient Greek and Roman-era statuary and pottery are world class.  Juliet spun around a lot, even amid the statues (terrifying her poor parents and some of the guards), but held it together well enough to earn herself a “granita”--a fruit-based, icee-type drink--at the end of our visit.  James LOVED the museum, showing real growth of character.  It wasn’t long ago that he would never have been able to stomach 90 minutes of statues.  But he patently attempted to identify the statues by the iconography, and even graciously listened to Dad go on about the mysterious and fascinating Antikythera Mechanism that he, Dad, was very excited to have discovered was housed in the museum as well.  (Basically, the Antikythera Mechanism was an astrolabe from the 3^rd-century BC--essentially an analog computer--which proved just how extraordinarily deep was the ancient Greeks’ understanding of the cosmos.  It even factored in the subtle irregularities in planetary orbits!  The mechanism was dredged from a shipwreck in the early 20^th century and sat for years on a backroom shelf before someone recognized that the random lump of rotten, barnacle-encrusted wood and metal had a gear in it.  The rest is history.  Did you know the ancient Greeks had the mathematical and astronomical knowledge that they, had they had the requisite accompanying material science, could have gone to the moon by the 1^st century?  [head exploding emoji]).

A horse and his boy

The Antikythera Mechanism: it's so cool!

Were we done for the day?  No!  From the museum, we tacked across town through the Athens National Gardens—a huge city park featuring turtle ponds and a giant playground where the kids blew off some steam—to the Panathinaikos Stadium, the original Olympic stadium.  It was first constructed in the 4^th century BC, then refurbished by the Roman emperor Hadrian in the first century AD (Hadrian seems to have lavished Athens with a bunch of gifts, must have been a fan).   The stadium was excavated and again reconstructed in time for the first modern Olympic games in 1896.  And it was even used as venue for the 2004 games held in Athens.  James and Juliet got to run around the track, and we posed as a family on the winners stand.  High recommend.

Turtles upon turtles (all the way down)

Dinner was near our place, and was kinda meh.  Great location along a pedestrian street on the edge of the shopping district, but perhaps a little too catered to the touristic crowd. 

Morning came early.  No one puked in the night for a change, though Erica woke up at 1am and couldn’t go back to sleep.  We were packed and on the Metro bound for the port by 6am.  Naxos, here we come!