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Dust in the Wind
"The best meals in life are eaten barefoot." - Anthony Bourdain
I think we block out our most bizarre travel experiences. So far outside our comfort zone are they, and perhaps occurring in the midst of a surreal jet-lag haze, our brain fails to register them fully, and they are the first to fade from memory, the way a dream is erased by the following afternoon.
It was 2AM at the airport in Oslo when I sat next to a pair of Norwegians in the only open bar in the place. Listening to them drift in and out of English as they discussed, very seriously, the theory that the human race is descended from aliens, it was clear they were on their fourth or fifth beer. Sensing my glassy gaze, they glanced over at me. I didn't even try to disguise the fact that I was staring. I was halfway through an overnight layover following my flight from Pula at 9PM. There is no way I'm going to remember this tomorrow, I thought, unless I write it down.
There were only about ten people on the flight to Athens, an eerie sight on a plane built for two hundred. I guess Greece isn't a popular destination for Norwegians. I found myself battling not only the weight of my eyelids, but also my old nemesis, Worry, while in the air. I thought of my luggage checked in Pula. The woman behind the desk had promised it would go straight to Athens, that I wouldn't have to pick it up in Oslo. I'd heard that before, and had to go without brushing my teeth or charging my electronics for two days as a result of trusting them. I wondered what I would do if my luggage got lost permanently. How would I take care of even my most basic needs? Would I be forced to buy so many replacements that I would have to cut the trip short?
It was well past 9AM. We should be landing by now, I thought. Why was my flight an hour longer than it said on my itinerary? Was there perhaps another Athens in the world that I'd gotten the Greek one mixed up with? Was I even going to the right country?
I looked out the window. Miles below I saw islands of varying sizes blooming in a picturesque sweep of cerulean blue. Beyond it, green and grey mountains freckled with olive trees. Granted I had never been to the country before and had only travel documentaries and my Classical Studies classes as a reference. Still, I thought, that could ONLY be Greece. Then the stewardess made an announcement in what could only be Greek, and we flew over what could only be the Acropolis of Athens, and any last traces of doubt evaporated. Had it not, it would have been a bit like flying over the Eiffel Tower and wondering if you really were in Paris. I wasn't that naive.
And guess what. My bag was first out of the chute on the luggage belt, and I made it to my host's front door on the first try. Looking out the window on the cab ride there, I felt my brain contort uncomfortably, incapable of taking in the sheer scope of the city I'd landed in. An ocean of small white houses with red terracotta roofs stretched as far as the eye could see, interspersed with modern skyrises and ancient stadiums. Athens was a metropolis such as I'd never seen in my life - it put even Rome to shame - and I wondered how I was ever going to manage it.
Character is the only word that could adequately describe my new host. Antonio, when he answered the door in shorts and a sweater, was a towering Sasquatch of a man, shaped like an upside-down triangle with bare feet and thick, curly hair that stretched past his line-backer shoulders. My hand was like an infant's in his blood-stained paw. "Sorry," he apologized and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. He was cleaning fish from the market, he explained. Glancing under his arm, I saw a pyramid of fresh mackerel stacked by the sink, heads and eyes still intact.
Antonio's first question was predictable. "Did you eat?"
"You don't want to know," I answered cryptically, thinking of the dried fig cake and bacon-wrapped hotdog I'd had in the airport in Oslo. I told Antonio what I really needed was a shower and a rest, and he showed me where the switch was for the water tank. "In five minutes," he promised, "it will be hot."
I have this weird way of gauging the livability of a place by the bathroom. Showers especially are something I can be a bit fetishistic about. My room had four bunk beds (empty, thankfully) and was cluttered with debris from years of couch surfers (so long, San Rocco), but the bathroom was spacious and the shower was a good one. The water was hot, as promised, and the pressure was high. This was ultimately all that mattered to me as I climbed beneath the threadbare blanket and laid my head on the single pillow that was waiting on one of the naked mattresses.
When my stomach finally woke me up, Antonio asked again if I was hungry. This time I responded with an ardent nod. Fresh salad, olives and homemade lemonade were already laid out on the wooden table in the kitchen, and Antonio had the backdoor wide open to the garden where he grew his own olives, letting in the afternoon sunlight. Having gone to bed with my feet still drying from the shower, I was barefoot like Antonio as I sat down to the healthiest meal I'd had probably since I left home. The tomatoes and onions Antonio got from the local market, the bread and lettuce from his mother. He even made the olive oil and cured the olives in his own brine, he said, and invited me to try one. They were like no olives I'd ever tasted.
Antonio spent the next four hours explaining to me how everything worthwhile and constructive in the world ultimately stemmed from Greek brilliance - democracy, philosophy, the Olympics, the circus, the rodeo, bull-fighting, the analogue computer, even entire ethnicities. The long arm of the Greek Empire, he said, had reached across oceans thousands of years ago, influencing not only Mexican and Brazilian cultures, but Chinese and Indian as well. So convincing was he that I almost believed him when he told me I was Greek. "Do you know your heritage?" He asked. I told him that, like most Canadians, I was a mix-breed of French, English and Irish probably with some other lineage that went too far back to trace, and he nodded, his suspicions apparently confirmed. "You must be Greek," he insisted. "You look Greek, and Alexandra is a Greek name." I'd heard my name pronounced with many different accents in my travels - Alejandra, Alessandra.... Here, though, on Antonio's lips, it actually sounded right.
The Romans, he said, had used Greek ideas as a model in their construction of things like the Coliseum and Forum, and the Ancient Greeks had known the dimensions of the solar system while fourteenth-century scholars still thought the earth was flat. This, I admitted, was very true. Too many people, I told him, underestimated ancient cultures. I said I was going to Peru next month, to see Machu Picchu, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
"Do you know the truth about Machu Picchu?" Antonio asked.
"Let me guess," I replied. "The Greeks built it?"
"I haven't found a way to prove it," he said, "but I will."
I thought of the Norwegians in the airport in Oslo and cracked a smile. "You know," I picked up a new line of conversation, "some people think humans are actually descended from aliens, and they are the ones who built Machu Picchu."
"No!" Antonio exclaimed, raising both bear-like hands in the air in dramatic outrage. "That's ridiculous! Aliens are descended from Greeks!"
Eventually Antonio looked at the clock and said he had to meet a friend at the theatre for a show, which had already started. Before he left he made me a cup of strong green tea. "When I get back I will tell you the story of this tea," he promised, handing me the mug. "The army of Alexander the Great drank it."
It's always my stomach that eventually lures me out of my room. I refused to leave the apartment the next morning without a city map, and rooted through the refuse until I found one, though it turned out to be unnecessary. A short walk down the street brought me to a busy intersection fringed on all sides with cafes and snack shops. All the menus were in Greek, but cappuccino was a word I recognized, and thanks to Anthony Bourdain I was able to identify at least one of the breakfast pastries inside the coffee shop's display case. Bougatsa is phyllo dough stuffed with salted cheese or custard, baked and served warm and sprinkled with sugar.
Gnawing hunger taken care of, I continued on my way toward the city centre. I followed Antonio's advice and walked along the metro tracks, which led straight to the major sites. "The train goes twenty kilometres an hour," he'd told me the night before. "It can't kill you."
Hiking the switchbacks up the hill to the Acropolis, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was that there was a reason the ancient Greeks made this climb on horseback. The second was that I'd been here before. The path brought me past toppled column drums and weathered engravings on votive statue ruins, and years of university lectures flooded my memory. My eyes matched the images before me with powerpoint photos of these exact sites, and my mind reeled with the reality of where I was standing.
Mounting the stairs to the Propylaea, the ancient gateway to the Acropolis, I felt as though I were passing into a dream. On the other side of the monumental, pillared entrance, positioned strategically for dramatic effect, sits the Parthenon, perched on its citadel overlooking the city like a king on his thrown. Even encased in restoration scaffolding, the enormous temple is sublime in its unparalleled symmetry and proportions. Incorrigible perfectionists, the Greek architects had even added delicate curves to the massive marble columns to compensate for the bowing illusion of intersected parallel lines.
I stopped. I looked. I had to remind myself to breathe. I wasn't sure if it was this that caused my eyes to tear up, or the wind blowing ancient dust in my face, or the fact that I never thought I would actually get to see this. I'd memorized pages upon pages of handwritten notes on Greek temples - on THIS temple - for final exams. I'd written an entire research paper on the West Frieze designed to adorn the upper part of the Parthenon's naos. I could tell you about the Golden Ratio approximated by its facade and about the chryselephantine cult statue of Athena Parthenos that used to be housed inside, but those facts were the farthest thing from my mind as I stood there fighting the surreality of it all.
'You are here,' I had to reassure myself. 'Now. Forget what you know. What do you feel?' I closed my eyes. It's the wind on this high rocky outcropping that's truly magical. It seems to have an intelligence about it, a life and purpose of its own, carrying ghosts of column dust and the voices of those who'd walked here millennia ago, their sandals making the same sound as mine on the stones and packed earth.
I was torn from my musings by an Asian girl in her early twenties asking if I wouldn't mind taking a picture for her, since she was travelling alone. "Only if you take one for me," was my cheery reply.
"Try to get it very close," she instructed as I stepped back and centred her in the frame.
I smiled good-naturedly. "You want a profile pic?" I guessed.
"Yes, exactly," she laughed. "How did you know?"
I traded iPads with her. "I want one, too."
After that I made my way over to the old Temple of Athena and ran my palm over the face of one of the huge blocks which littered the Acropolis, wanting to feel the texture of history, to stamp this moment with more than a visual memory. I expected the stone to be worn smooth, but it was grainier than I thought, like a cat's tongue. Tenacious. Resilient.
I broke all my rules on the way down toward the Ancient Agora. I glanced over my shoulder several times, even stopping here and there to turn back completely, painfully aware of my chances of ever seeing this place again.
I walked through the Agora to the Temple of Hephaestus. As much as I hated the thought of interrupting this magnificent afternoon for something to eat, my hunger was becoming a distraction, so I stopped for a quick snack of Greek yogurt with pine honey and walnuts and then continued across the street to the Temple of Zeus, the largest temple in Ancient Greece. I knew already as I crossed the grassy expanse to the feet of its towering columns that it would be my favourite. It took me a full fifteen minutes to make a complete circle around it, taking in the fifteen 17-metre trunks that are still standing, like giant redwoods, and trying to envision the original hundred-and-four. I imagined the sheer magnitude of this place in its glory days, and for the thousandth time raised a mental glass to the ingenuity of the ancients. Even now, human beings don't have the technology to stack marble drums of that size and architectural refinement, let alone carve them.
I arrived back at my guesthouse just in time to say goodbye to the young Japanese couple that had stayed in the room next to mine the night before. The Japanese, I think, might have even Canadians beat in their innate politeness, bowing and saying thank-you when I said it was nice to meet them. The man presented me with a small square of yellowed parchment, on which was painted a character of Japanese calligraphy. "This is a present," he said, bowing again. "It means like...'bright'. 'Spark'." I'd known these people a grand total of twenty-four hours, but suddenly I felt myself tearing up for the second time today.
- comments
Mom I decided on naming you Alexandra as soon as I saw it in a baby name book, before you were born. I loved that the meaning was 'defender of mankind' , and yes, it is of Greek origin lol.