Galen goes abroad

Such a travelogue you've been getting from us.  All the highlights, the exotic locales, the full-on academic-tourist experience.  But we've been home in Athens a lot as well, and for one week we were lucky enough to have Galen (Annabel's brother) here with us.  I mentioned taking him to the airport back in the zoo trip story, so you know it's already been some time since he left.  It seemed as though his week here just flew by, as will the next couple of weeks, our last in Athens.  We're already making our reservations for domestic travel over Christmas, as well as the spring trip to Paris from Oviedo.  But for now we're trying to remain as fully as possible in the Greek moment.

Galen did come along on two short field trips the week he was here:  our guided tours of the National Archeological Museum and of the Agora and Pnyx, led of course by the indomitable Michael.  Our museum trip was cut short by the imposition of winter hours.  All over Greece, apparently, archeological sites are shutting down at 3:00 in the afternoon.  This has been a bit of an inconvenience over the last few weeks, and will require more careful planning once Julie (my mom) gets here tomorrow.  Our latest and last big excursion, to the Peloponnese, required working around election day closures as well, but the highly resourceful Athens Centre staff was up to the challenge.  Anyway, here are a couple of shots from our walk around the sites west and northwest of the Acropolis.

Galen brought fabulous weather for the entire week he was here, such that a few days into his visit he asked me if it ever clouded up in Athens.  But as you can see from the third shot, the air was not entirely clear.  I was struck by the contrast between the white buildings below the smog and the brown ones behind it, and took a lot of pictures to try to capture it.

The bottom picture is the site of Socrates' cell, and the place where he took the hemlock.  Michael gave us a kind of philosocratic tour of the Agora, with evidence for how we know the location of the shoemaker's shop, just outside the wall of the sanctuary, where Socrates taught, as well as the cell where he spent his last days.  Lots of great stories, and topographical tidbits like the plaque marking the site where St. Paul preached to the Athenians.  He was really in his element at the museum in Olympia last week, where we sat in the large central room looking at the relief sculptures from the temple of Zeus, and he told us in juicy detail the stories of the Battle with the Centaurs and the hero Pelops' cheating chariot victory over his bloodthirsty prospective father-in-law.  (Here's a link to a short version of the latter story, for you mythology buffs:  http://www.theoi.com/Heros/Pelops.html.)

As the sharp-eyed among you noticed regarding the first picture above, our group has doubled in size lately, at least for the local excursions.  There's another cadre of students at the Athens Centre right now, from Colorado College, taking intensive Greek language classes, and it's been fun for our students to mix with a slightly larger group (especially the three boys).

After the formal excursion ended, we went to the Keramikos, the main gate of ancient Athens, where Annabel wanted to show Galen not only the ruins and artifacts, but also the wildlife.  Or maybe not-so-wild-life.  We never found any of the frogs we'd seen on our earlier trip, but there were some critters to be seen.

 
The bottom picture shows the three of them patiently waiting for dad, as he dawdles in the museum taking pictures.  At this point they were all approaching archeological burn-out, but they didn't rush me.

I'll leave you with a couple pictures of one of the two streets Annabel calls Cat Alley.  Whenever she doesn't have her camera along, she asks me to take pictures for her, still accumulating the database for her photo-essay (which she's actually begun working on, at last).  The second picture is the house belonging to Rosemary Donnelly, whose other house (on Paros) you've already seen.  We've been the fortunate recipients of her hospitality twice in this beautiful house, which is just a couple of blocks from the Athens Centre.  Getting here means we're almost home.

Between busy Markou Mouroussou
and the quiet pines of the marble stadium grounds
there is a street she calls Cat Alley.
It is your refuge and reward for having survived
the murderous motorbikes gunning for you
on Arditou, the heat and bus exhaust
on the long walk south from Monasteraki,
the gauntlet of tourist shops and street vendors.
All that is behind you now,
as you ascend the hills of Pagrati
by this peaceful back way.  The cats know
this refuge, and Rosemary, wise
as Odysseus, has chosen it for her home.
A statue of Athena looks down from the gable
of a house at the top of its two short blocks,
and if you're lucky (as we were for those
brief weeks) you might see a tortoise
stray across the pavement like an archaic
traveller, bewildered at the pace of our lives.