I have finally decided to shake off the cobwebs in my mind and write a little bit before I retire for the evening. A lot has happened since I last updated this blog and at least some of it is noteworthy.
The morning after my excellent final dinner at the Paramythi Taverna with Helene and Amandine, I bought my train ticket back to Athens to meet my HISA classmates and prepare for the ferry trip to Paros. I was pleasantly surprised the morning of my departure from Kalambaka to see both of my new friends on their way to town from Kastraki. As it turns out, we were taking the same train, at least for the first bit of our journey. Between lunch and my train's departure at 6 PM, I alternated between grocery shopping and drinking coffee. The portion of my train ride with my friends consisted mostly of a French card game I'd never heard of before. Their connection to Thessaloniki came about an hour into my 5 hour trip, unfortunately.
My arrival in Athens was uneventful, and I successfully navigated both the metro and the Plaka streets to find the Dioskounos Hotel where our group was to meet. As luck would have it, I met one of the HISA teachers and one assistant (Sarah and Adam) as I approached the door to the hostel. After settling my bill with the hostel owner, I did my best not to wake up my room mate while settling in.
The next couple of days were a mixture of catching up on sleep (I missed alot between the train ride and late night Plaka excursions with my new friends) and trying to remember names. We visited the new Acropolis museum, which as luck would have it is filled mostly with plasters casts of the friezes the British stole from Greece in previous centuries. There are still many excellent sculptures and artifacts held there, but most of the finest friezes from the Parthenon reside in the British Museum (denoted on the Acropolis Museum signage by a discrete 'BM'). It seems to me that if I wanted to study Greek sculpture of that time period, it might be more prudent to visit England than Greece. I was somewhat disappointed in the condition of the vast majority of the sculpture held in Athens. Not because I didn't expect weathering on 3000 year old sculptures, but because so much of what I saw from the same time period in Thessaloniki was in still-polished condition. I'm not sure how a city that is almost unknown to non-Greek tourists managed to get finer specimens of sculpture than Athens did. Perhaps they have an innate fear that the British will take them if they can find them.
The Parthenon is truly a wondrous sight to behold in person. I have seen hundreds of photos of it through my life, but none of them do the building itself justice. Although weathered, ruined, and partially obscured by scaffolding, it is still easy to see the magnificence and beauty of the building, still intact although its walls are not. The Athena temple near the Parthenon is also outstanding. It isn't hard to see how such buildings, in their prime, could have inspired the kinds of reactions I had to the monasteries both in Thessaloniki and the Meteora.
The marble the building itself is hewn from is actually somewhat more translucent than normal marble, so the bright lighting it receives at night makes it even more impressive and ethereal. It's too bad that visitors aren't allowed at night, seeing the building up close while lit in that manner would be truly breathtaking.
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