Athens...many little things that fill our days.

Athens is turning out just fine.

THE NEGATIVE:

I shall get the negative out of the way. I try to include both as they are important to me and my future memories. If 5 years from now I am excited or down on a city, I should remember why..anywhay.... We have had some problems with maps, closed museums, wrong schedules, taxi drivers who don't know where things are or how to read a map but...these are just things travelers deal with, we just were hit with an unusual amount of them here. The result has been too much time walking, waiting, looking for nothing. There, that is the negative, and this has nothing to do with Athens itself, just bad luck or lack of karma, and personal foolishness to settle on the free guide books at the hotel rather than purchase a proper guide book and a map, now for the positve.

THE SITES:

Yes, we have seen many sites, Temple os Zeus, Hadrians gate, etc. We have been a little light on the museums on the kids request. We did go to some malls as we needed a resupply of books and some new toys...and a third computer. However, we do like to see malls in other contries for it does tell us more about their current culture than a museum does. For example, a simple thing that the stores, including gorcery stores are closed on Sunday and most museum/gallaries are open Sunday but closed Monday..like Canada 20+ years ago...that is interesting...especially as store hours was an example in Benjamins Social textbook related to Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so much discussion occured.

I know that some of you are agast that we did not get out of the city to see things like Delphi but...you probably never compared Greek toy stores to Canadian ones...same toys but no Greek toy store has electonic games in them because they are not toys for kids, electonic games are sold only in electronic computer stores...and Disney has little influence here...and copyright infringment is less inforced here but more so than in Asia. These are cultural things about Greek values that you don't see at another pile of old rocks out of town. Oh, and book stores. In Istanbul the books were mostly nonfiction intellectual books...art, history, politics. In Greece it is mostly fiction, 3000 years of myth telling will do that to a culture.

THE SHOWS.

As mentioned before, there was a Street Theater Festival here in Athens. We love street theater and make every atempt to catch shows in any town we are in. We saw the opening evening act which included fire, stilts, and acrobates. The show was good enough that it did not matter that we did not understand the story which was in Greek. The next day we tried to see more shows but the festival, which was thier first, was too disorganised. We did get to see puppeteers, clown acts, slapstick, and oddly the highlight was an act of dragon things on stilts that we saw in Toronto a few years ago.

LYDIA'S GOOD IDEA:

Understandably the boys do not always appreciate great vistas, beautiful parks, well crafted statues, temples with two columns still standing...so to make this more fun, Lydia remembered that we had our GPS with us so we went Geocaching. For those who don't know, there is a global network of people who hide things and post the geographical position coordinates on the internet. Then people like us enter coordinates into our GPS (Global Positioning Systems) unit and seek what was hidden. These little treasures are everywhere in the world including Fort McMurray. This is becoming more common as most phones now have GPS capabilitys. The point is, rather than just walking up a high hill to see another church and a view of Athens, now this is a hunt for something unknown following satelite coordinates that takes you up a high hill beside another church with a view of Athens. We did this four times and saw the church, a theater, a famous statue (The Runner) and the National Garden zoo all because the kids were looking for the geocache. If you do not know what I am talking about go to www.geocache.com

GREEK TOLERANCE

The Greek people seem very tolerant. When we are recognised as English speaking tourist the Greek people happily switch to English or, in the rare case they don't speak English, they joyfully call over someone who does. There have been no audible sighs, no eyerolls, no repeating statements louder for our understandings. Turkey, Thailand. Malaysia, Taiwan all had a few who showed frusrtation with English speakers...but not here...not once. This has made Greece a very easy place to be in. We have also seen lots of tolerance with the traffic, how the drivers deal with each other, where they park and how they deal with each other on the subway. Yes, things are chaotic compared to Canadian trafic but here it works with lots of horns, but no yelling or accidents, people just seem to deal with each other with a shrug. We had heard that Greek traffic/drivers were insane but that has not been the case for us in our two weeks. Compared to Fort McMurry yes, but after Istanbul and having been to Bankock, no the greek trafic is fine.

TREES

Trees, trees and more trees. Every street seems to have trees. The trees are in all neighbourhoods, including downtown, that we have been in. These trees cool the city, they look lovely and they are a window into the values of the Greek people. Odd thing though, the trees are short, which is not odd due to poor soil condition, but the short trees are not visable above most buildings so, when looking at Athens from some high point, you just see roof tops and no trees. From a hill Athens looks like a rather miserable concrete city, but from the street it is a constant green walkway.

SUBWAY TRUST

At the subway there are no turnstiles to allow people to pass. There are poles with validators for your tickets but the only people to need these are those with single tickets. Passholders just walk through. So what? People are trusted to pay. It is an honour system. If you are asked to show your ticket/pass and you don't have one the fine is 60 times the price of the ticket but...you are trusted and this really speeds things up. Most other subways I have been on have line ups for people to buy tickets, line ups to validate, lineups to pass the turnstiles all to ensure that all pay, all slowing down the process, here in Greece the trust system makes for a very smooth system.

LAST DAY

One final day to see a few things, and then we are off to Rome.

Oct 20, 2009

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