From Catania, you can buzz over to Athens in 1h40m in a Bombardier turboprop (in the right season, on some days of the week). Aegean Air even passes out sandwiches and snacks, though turbulence means they hand out a few sandwiches, disappear, dart back out, sandwiches, retreat, etc. And the trip from Syracuse ends up being a long day, because there's a bus to Catania airport -- when the driver fired it up, loud Italian radio jolted on, and we pulled out of town to "Total Eclipse of the Heart" -- and then there's the question of getting to downtown Athens from the airport.
It's an hour-long ride to Monastiraki on Athens' gleaming, ad-free metro system. Beggars work their way through the train; people shift out of their way politely, but seem to have seen these performances before. The internet's very insistent that the Athens metro is one of the best places in the world to get pickpocketed. One of the things I did to kill 15 hours in Gatwick was to buy luggage locks, so I used those. Another popular solution seems to be to hug your luggage tightly to your chest and roll your eyes suspiciously around the car, so as to deter thieves by your apparent mental state.
Monastiraki station gives out onto a busy, sunlit square where I almost step into some sort of folk-dancing performance. In my experience, there's too much fuss about petty theft, and too little about the risk of a troupe of folk dancers sweeping you off into a life you don't understand. (I did look at my backpack once or twice to find it half-unzipped. The usual advice is to carry it on your front, but having nothing more valuable than a cheese sandwich in it is also effective, and you get these interesting demonstrations of skill.)
If I'd turned around I would have seen the Acropolis, but instead the first impression of Athens was of glum mid-rises covered in graffiti. It's a little bit like Taipei, if someone had left Taipei lying around in 1970s New York. (The feeling is, if you didn't want it tagged, you shouldn't have put it in Athens.) The city had dwindled to a little village before it was made the capital of newly-independent Greece, and then grew explosively after WWII, so that's the unfortunate moment in architectural history that crystallized here: 1960s crappiness is to Athens what Sicilian Baroque is to Ragusa and Syracuse.
Life for pedestrians, on the other hand, isn't as bad as expected. I'd take it over southern Italy, mostly because it has more lights and fewer zebra crossings. With signals, you at least know who's in the right; zebra crossings are strange negotiable zones where audacity usually prevails. The motorcycle situation, admittedly, is not so good. They're ridden like bicycles in Toronto: wherever. I passed one furious exchange between two riders, who had pulled up together in the middle of the street. I don't know Greek, but from context I think it was something like: "look at us! We are a hazard to all! Is your remorse as great as mine?"
"Greater! We are the worst menace to Athenian public life since Hippias the tyrant!"
"We are agreed!"
It's a town of unexpected noises. On the corner, a shop is trying to sell an automated roasting spit. To assist in this, they've rigged it up with a piglet-like mass of wrapping, and to this wrapping they have affixed small cowbells, so the spit, as it turns, makes continual clanging noises audible up and down Sophokleous street. You're tempted to buy the spit as a favour to the city; but realize they probably have a basement full of spits, and an attic full of bells; and, anyway, success will just encourage them ("we've had good luck with the bells, but I'm worried there are still three senses we're not assaulting...")
There's also the meat market, which is a bit of a chamber of horrors, with everything supermarkets conceal proudly on display. It's mostly the practice of hanging internal organs up in their original arrangement. There's a lot of salesmanship in the markets in general. One of the fishmongers was trying to sell to a small tourist boy who had wandered ahead of his mother. You know what makes a great souvenir, son? Bream!
Up towards the main tourist sites, things get sillier by degrees. The shops sell t-shirts commemorating the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae. In the restaurants, there are more bazoukis. Here, a woman's dancing on a chair. There, a busker in a clown nose is blowing a whistle at a group of tourists, who seem to be enjoying that.
The Acropolis
The Acropolis is like a sea mount in the middle of modern Athens. It was probably an important part of the spot's appeal to early settlers; it's possible that four million people live here now, ultimately, because the Acropolis is an easy spot to defend against angry people with spears. It's a bit of a construction site, and has been since Greek independence, partly because of the cycle whereby each generation undoes the "restoration" work of the last. The current works -- an elevator, a short cart track, a crane, and much scaffolding on the Parthenon -- are apparently actually being done to be as reversible as possible.
Visiting this place, and everywhere else in Athens, early in the morning in March is actually quite a good idea. Prices go up at the beginning of April, there aren't that many tourists, and school groups don't congest the bottlenecks until about 9:40AM. Much of a Greek student's life seems to be spent in museums and archaeological sites. From the top of the Acropolis, you can see them down below dutifully circling various ruins.
It's possible that the best place to appreciate the Parthenon is Nashville, which has a full-sized reconstruction. Even the Royal Ontario Museum, down the street from where I live, has a scale model, with a doll-sized Athena Parthenos and two tiny guys, probably Pericles and Pheidias, striding across the floor making that expansive "is it not magnificent here in Classical Athens, which is where we are?" gesture you also see in things like the School of Athens. Even so, it's fairly amazing to visit what's left. Sitting in the Theatre of Dionysius is also sort of an interesting thing to get to do.
The Greek Agora
There's not too much left, here, compared to places like the Roman forum. Signs at the entrance explain which cairn of blasted marble chunks corresponds to which great public building, and another describes the plants with which they are overgrown. The pamphlet details the six times the Agora was destroyed, ending with the ceremonial blowing up of the rubble in the Greek war of independence. Along one side is a defensive wall, thrown up in the unneighbourly third century AD, that used quite a lot of the marble from earlier buildings.
Further in, there are some remains where stones are still on top of other stones, and then to the east is the Temple of Hephaestus, a spectacular Doric temple. Less happily, there's the electric railway line that was cut right through the corner of the site, where graffiti-covered trains stil rumble past. In the northeastern bit are quiet pathways through mossy ruins and little fields of wildflowers; in the background, always the sound and smell of gas-powered weed-whackers grinding through the fascinating plants the sign was going on about.
For anyone wishing to purchase the musical spit, it is offered for sale daily from 10AM to 9PM at the corner of Athinas and Sophokleous.
It's an hour-long ride to Monastiraki on Athens' gleaming, ad-free metro system. Beggars work their way through the train; people shift out of their way politely, but seem to have seen these performances before. The internet's very insistent that the Athens metro is one of the best places in the world to get pickpocketed. One of the things I did to kill 15 hours in Gatwick was to buy luggage locks, so I used those. Another popular solution seems to be to hug your luggage tightly to your chest and roll your eyes suspiciously around the car, so as to deter thieves by your apparent mental state.
Monastiraki station gives out onto a busy, sunlit square where I almost step into some sort of folk-dancing performance. In my experience, there's too much fuss about petty theft, and too little about the risk of a troupe of folk dancers sweeping you off into a life you don't understand. (I did look at my backpack once or twice to find it half-unzipped. The usual advice is to carry it on your front, but having nothing more valuable than a cheese sandwich in it is also effective, and you get these interesting demonstrations of skill.)
If I'd turned around I would have seen the Acropolis, but instead the first impression of Athens was of glum mid-rises covered in graffiti. It's a little bit like Taipei, if someone had left Taipei lying around in 1970s New York. (The feeling is, if you didn't want it tagged, you shouldn't have put it in Athens.) The city had dwindled to a little village before it was made the capital of newly-independent Greece, and then grew explosively after WWII, so that's the unfortunate moment in architectural history that crystallized here: 1960s crappiness is to Athens what Sicilian Baroque is to Ragusa and Syracuse.
Life for pedestrians, on the other hand, isn't as bad as expected. I'd take it over southern Italy, mostly because it has more lights and fewer zebra crossings. With signals, you at least know who's in the right; zebra crossings are strange negotiable zones where audacity usually prevails. The motorcycle situation, admittedly, is not so good. They're ridden like bicycles in Toronto: wherever. I passed one furious exchange between two riders, who had pulled up together in the middle of the street. I don't know Greek, but from context I think it was something like: "look at us! We are a hazard to all! Is your remorse as great as mine?"
"Greater! We are the worst menace to Athenian public life since Hippias the tyrant!"
"We are agreed!"
It's a town of unexpected noises. On the corner, a shop is trying to sell an automated roasting spit. To assist in this, they've rigged it up with a piglet-like mass of wrapping, and to this wrapping they have affixed small cowbells, so the spit, as it turns, makes continual clanging noises audible up and down Sophokleous street. You're tempted to buy the spit as a favour to the city; but realize they probably have a basement full of spits, and an attic full of bells; and, anyway, success will just encourage them ("we've had good luck with the bells, but I'm worried there are still three senses we're not assaulting...")
There's also the meat market, which is a bit of a chamber of horrors, with everything supermarkets conceal proudly on display. It's mostly the practice of hanging internal organs up in their original arrangement. There's a lot of salesmanship in the markets in general. One of the fishmongers was trying to sell to a small tourist boy who had wandered ahead of his mother. You know what makes a great souvenir, son? Bream!
Up towards the main tourist sites, things get sillier by degrees. The shops sell t-shirts commemorating the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae. In the restaurants, there are more bazoukis. Here, a woman's dancing on a chair. There, a busker in a clown nose is blowing a whistle at a group of tourists, who seem to be enjoying that.
The Acropolis
The Acropolis is like a sea mount in the middle of modern Athens. It was probably an important part of the spot's appeal to early settlers; it's possible that four million people live here now, ultimately, because the Acropolis is an easy spot to defend against angry people with spears. It's a bit of a construction site, and has been since Greek independence, partly because of the cycle whereby each generation undoes the "restoration" work of the last. The current works -- an elevator, a short cart track, a crane, and much scaffolding on the Parthenon -- are apparently actually being done to be as reversible as possible.
Visiting this place, and everywhere else in Athens, early in the morning in March is actually quite a good idea. Prices go up at the beginning of April, there aren't that many tourists, and school groups don't congest the bottlenecks until about 9:40AM. Much of a Greek student's life seems to be spent in museums and archaeological sites. From the top of the Acropolis, you can see them down below dutifully circling various ruins.
It's possible that the best place to appreciate the Parthenon is Nashville, which has a full-sized reconstruction. Even the Royal Ontario Museum, down the street from where I live, has a scale model, with a doll-sized Athena Parthenos and two tiny guys, probably Pericles and Pheidias, striding across the floor making that expansive "is it not magnificent here in Classical Athens, which is where we are?" gesture you also see in things like the School of Athens. Even so, it's fairly amazing to visit what's left. Sitting in the Theatre of Dionysius is also sort of an interesting thing to get to do.
The Greek Agora
There's not too much left, here, compared to places like the Roman forum. Signs at the entrance explain which cairn of blasted marble chunks corresponds to which great public building, and another describes the plants with which they are overgrown. The pamphlet details the six times the Agora was destroyed, ending with the ceremonial blowing up of the rubble in the Greek war of independence. Along one side is a defensive wall, thrown up in the unneighbourly third century AD, that used quite a lot of the marble from earlier buildings.
Further in, there are some remains where stones are still on top of other stones, and then to the east is the Temple of Hephaestus, a spectacular Doric temple. Less happily, there's the electric railway line that was cut right through the corner of the site, where graffiti-covered trains stil rumble past. In the northeastern bit are quiet pathways through mossy ruins and little fields of wildflowers; in the background, always the sound and smell of gas-powered weed-whackers grinding through the fascinating plants the sign was going on about.
For anyone wishing to purchase the musical spit, it is offered for sale daily from 10AM to 9PM at the corner of Athinas and Sophokleous.
