Yesterday afternoon, Sawsan (Syrian mentee and marvelous human) and I had class. It had not been a particularly uplifting topic. We were ready to leave it and the city behind us.

(Visual: whiteboard with terms like  “SICK,” fever,” “cold,” “sore throat”)

Stratos (“like stratosphere, only without the fear”)  arrived, and we snaked our way through Friday traffic. As we passed the French Embassy, he slammed on the brakes and cried out, “Why the French? We like the French!”

(Visual: French Embassy with blood-like paint dripping from the outside walls and windows)

in Exarchia, where I’m living these months – Elizabeth’s studio apartment – it’s nothing to see exotic decoration, amazing graffiti.

3 Visuals: 3 examples, Exarchia neighborhood graffiti: 1.) : b&w geometric “city” superimposed on the ground floor of a building painted red, with a black, red, and white:”Talking Breads” sign . 2.) 6-stormy building with a white arm& hand grasping by the wrist and lifting up an extended black arm and hand3.) 2 (6-foot High)hands, open to reveal an uncapped fountain pen.

The French Embassy was a jolt inexplicable to all three of us, but honestly? We quickly left it behind us.

Once out of the city and heading south, we drove along the Saronic Gulf, part of the Aegean . We stopped to look at these hot springs in a gorge formed a few millennia ago. Those dots of white in the background, on the right are umbrellas over tables at a cafe-restaurant. The place is a draw for the young & trendy as well as the old & arthritic. I resisted because we were on a mission.

But first, dinner. We ate outside, about 10 feet above the sea: fried calamari, the unfailingly delicious salad of feta and etc ( I could eat that cheese at every meal, and sometimes I do). For Sawsan, it was “potatoes,” by which she means fries – as ubiquitous as my Greek salad.

No photos from dinner, where we were much closer to the sea than this picture suggests, but you get the idea: sailboats and a few yachts are set against  Aegean Blue.

Our goal, however, wasn’t the sea, at least not directly,  but [the ruins of] Poseidon’s Temple. Built of marble in 444 BC, same year as the Parthenon, it stands sixty-five meters above the gulf, so is nicely placed if you’re trying to placate the god of the sea. Since the Cape of Sounion is the southernmost tip,  sailors knew they were nearly home when they saw the gleaming marble.

We were there when the sun was setting.

Sawsan – Temple of Poseidon

(Visual: BOTTOM –  My friend, Sawsan, standing, hidden in shadow,  beneath  this view of the Temple of Poseidon:  an orange-hued sky against the 16 remaining Doric columns, in 2 rows, with what looks like a giant urn in the center; TOP –  yellow-orange sun reflected in a pink sea, enclosed, foreground and background, by rocky terrain)

I remembered Byron had loved Greece, fought for Greece, and died here, but I’d forgotten his reference to Sounion (“Sunium”). Thank you, Lonely Planet for summoning it up in these lines from Don Juan:

  Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep
Where nothing save the waves and I
   May hear our mutual murmurs sweep.

You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for them as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt (Lv 19:33-34). 

I’ve been back in Exarchia a couple weeks now, an alien amidst aliens — a statement I don’t make lightly. It’s just that, even after all these years, I’ve never actually considered who and how I am here. Two of my children have lived for some time in foreign parts (and I don’t see that changing for them very soon, possibly ever?). Anyhow, from them I’m beginning to learn how vital it is to absorb what is around me. Possibly because I flit in and out, I’ve been an Outside Observer in Athens. Unlike my two children, I never even learned the language.

But still I persist

The women at Melissa, quite as familiar with me as I am with them, are from Congo, Gabon, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. So we’re all from all over. Except there is this: I’m here by choice.

This element, this luck, I mean, allows me to continue to come and go, and this means being an American tourist when it’s convenient. At this morning’s Saturday Market, four fuzzy peaches found a place in my shopping bag next to Nespresso capsules I’d just picked up at abMarket, a habit (Nespresso) I’m not proud of, as I’ve yet to follow the capsule- recycling instructions.

(And, yes, this book is another luxury…)

One more (“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking” — John Dickerson quoting Joan Didion, and speaking to my condition this morning, as this blogpost testifies to!). It’s that luxury of being able to photograph what a recent tagger did to the best piece of graffiti on my street. I’ve nodded at that rif on Magritte’s iconic painting for years — as I’m sure Elizabeth and Teresa have as well, when they’ve been here. Probably photographed it, as I have, too, back in the day.

It’s tempting to speculate about what Rene Magritte himself, so caught up in the visible and invisible, might have to say about this morning’s defacement:

For me, the tagger just yielded up a new reflection on an increasingly familiar reality– impermanence!