Points, High and Low

It's our bad luck to be suffering through a garbage collectors' strike for our last couple of weeks here.  Unfortunately, it precisely coincides with my mom's time in Greece, and it's getting more and more unpleasant for her to walk the few blocks between her apartment and ours.  I had to correct myself just now and say "garbage collectors' strike"--of course we all call it the "garbage strike."  If only that were so, and the garbage was itself refusing to accumulate.  What the heck would happen if garbage went on strike?  Would we be unable to open packages or cut up vegetables, or would it just all refuse to be put in the bin, or would it be just like what we have, nothing actually going to the landfill?  Technically the strike just ended, but it's going to take a while to catch up on the backlog.

This picture gets the graffiti and the garbage all in one shot.  Our apartment is just around the corner to the right, by that orange and green striped awning (which is a store that sells awnings, by the way).

Of course, it's not like Athens was all that sweet-smelling in the first place.  It hasn't rained now for a couple of weeks and so the poop is piling up as well.  It's probably a blessing that we haven't had one of those ferocious hard rains, actually, as I'd hate to see what that would do to the garbage piles.  And while we're on this subject, Julie (my mom) did not read all of my blog entries before coming to Athens (what kind of a mother is that, I ask you?), and so was surprised to learn of the no-paper-in-the-toilet policy, and naturally doesn't love the interaction of that policy and the garbage strike.

But perhaps least of all does she like the traffic patterns by which pedestrians have absolutely no rights.  Because of the trash piles she walks in the middle of the street, but that means lots of people honk at her as they gun their vehicles in her direction.  She swears that if she were to move to Athens, she would engage in a crusade for pedestrian rights.  As a loving son who wants to see his mother live many more years, I'm very glad she's not moving to Athens anytime soon.  Meanwhile, one more less-than-flattering view, to give you a sense of how much you have to stay on your toes while walking in Athens, looking up to make sure you don't smack into tree branches and down to make sure you don't splat into poo.

We've been revisiting some of the sights while Julie's been here, places like Aegina and Delphi and the Acropolis itself, and it's interesting to go back with more information than we had the first time.  It's sort of a test to see how much we've retained of what Michael has taught us, almost like a final exam for his class (which we don't have to take, thank goodness).  It's also a chance to fix particular things in memory.  I don't believe I really know a book until I've read it twice, and in some ways it doesn't seem like I can begin to know a place until I've been there at least twice.

But the list of places we'll be able to see again is growing very short indeed, as are our days in Greece.  Less than a week left.  Time to be eating up everything in the cupboards, throwing in the trash rather than the laundry those clothes that are not returning with us to the States, deciding which restaurant we really have to go to one last time, and thinking about which pictures you might want to see from our time in Greece that you haven't yet.  One of those is a view (or two) of the temple of Poseidon at Sunio, a gorgeous place that Annabel and I visited on excursion and that I was hoping to show Alex and Julie, but now realize we won't make it back to.  The sanctuary is on a high headland sticking out into the Aegean at the southeastern tip of Attica, another of those amazing locations for sacred places that the Greeks selected back when they were openly practicing paganism.

Nice postcards, eh?  There have been tourists here for a long time, of course.  The pillars and stylobate are covered with graffiti, some of it by celebrities.  Zoom in on the center of the next picture and check out that lighter spot.  I'm guessing it's lighter because so many people rubbed their hands on it before our more enlightened times when the tourists are roped off from the temple itself.

The trip to Delphi with Julie was especially nice because the weather cooperated.  When we first got there Zeus was flinging around his thunderbolts, and they echoed over Parnassus and down around our heads in a most suitably scary fashion.  But while we were in the museum the weather blew over and we got a gorgeous afternoon back out in the sanctuary of Apollo Pythias, including a hike for me up to the stadium (which had been closed off the first time we came) while Julie sat and sketched down by the temple of Apollo and the treasury of Athens.

At the bathroom/cigarette break our bus took, at a cafe rest stop on a hill just outside Livadia, I looked back at the sun setting behind Parnassus, which from that distance I could see as indeed one very big mountain, rather than the whole range of mountains it appeared to be from Delphi.  There was snow in the valleys near the top, though we'd been warm in T-shirts on the site after the sun came out.  Our whole bus ride back through the Greek hills as the dusk gathered was powerful.  It got dark about the time we got to the flatter country and the bigger highway.  I wished I'd had my camera out near Athens when we passed a large, well-lit sign that said "EuroDrip."  It was fun to speculate on what the heck that place made or did.

Our first visit to the island of Aegina was the very first weekend we were in Athens, before the program had actually started up, and before I'd read page one of my copy of History of Ancient Greece.  We did one of those I'll-take-your-picture-and-you-take-ours swaps to get a shot of all of us with the temple at Aphaia in the background, on another flawless day, just before we headed back down to Agia Marina for what looks like it will be our last dip in the ocean in 2010.  The whole town was closed up, the beach was covered with trash and seaweed, and it looked nothing at all like it looked that first weekend.  But the water was still warm and beautiful.  The best place we saw on Aegina was something we missed the first time, Paliachora, the inland Byzantine town site where folks moved to get away from the pirates, and where there's nothing left but 34 churches, in varying states of disrepair, but all (including the most ruined) still containing icons and other signs of their status as active shrines.  This is Greek Orthodox culture at its most pagan, and incidentally provided Annabel and me with some first-class scrambling.

Julie has been taking lots of photographs of the kinds of places she likes to make paintings of, mostly urban decay and odd angles and colors, and for the last three months I've generally avoided posting pictures of that sort, although I've taken plenty, generally while thinking, "This is the kind of thing Julie would just love to paint."  Now that she's had a crack at them for herself, I can post a few of my pictures of graffiti and odd walls and the jungle of plants poking out from under the awnings on the upper floors and things like that.

There's a cantina at the port with a sign that Alex loved and just had to add to her collection, for professional reasons, of course.  Luckily on this last trip to Aegina we had a camera ready as we passed by on our way to the ferry.

There haven't been a lot of obvious clues that the seasons are changing while we've been in Athens, but one that I very much appreciated was the grapevines turning bright red.  Now all the leaves have fallen off and the vines are bare, but for a couple of weeks they were gorgeous.

This vine ran up three stories on a house we pass by often en route to Syndagma, the central square.  These are merely decorative vines, I assume, since the grapes are tiny.  But they grow everywhere, along with bougainvillea and several species of flower and flowering tree that I can't identify.  I get tired of ducking under the trees as we're walking on the sidewalks, but while they were flowering, it was worth it.  And some of them are still flowering.  There are olives everywhere, falling ripe from the trees, which seems entirely normal, but there are also oranges ripening everywhere, and limes, and that seems very odd for November.  In fact the oranges are kind of a mess wherever they are ripening and falling on the street, squishing and rolling.  I'm torn--I like being in a place where the oranges apparently fall from the trees all winter, but I don't like having more things to dodge on the sidewalks.

At least here the oranges are out of the main thoroughfare.  I'll leave you with a couple shots from "Cemetery A," the oldest in Athens, adjacent to Julie's student apartment and just a half-dozen blocks from our house.  I'd been vowing to go there for months, since it was closed the first time we tried, and I finally made it today.  It was much more interesting than I'd imagined, and now I want to get back one more time before we go, but likely won't.  The pictures I took deserve their own blog entry, and may get one, but you'll have to settle for these for now.