mebtravelling

… two of today’s purchases hold this promise: “Complete instructions on brochure,” and the brochure is entirely in Greek, and I don’t mean, as in, “It’s Greek to me.”

… everything I eat contains lemons or thyme, often lemons and thyme, including the hotel breakfast, whose buffet also offers baklava.

… streets look like this: 

…two visits to nearby churches reveal no Ash Wednesday liturgy possibilities. “Try in a week,” says an Orthodox friend, gently reminding me I’m no longer 3 blocks from the RC Cathedral of St Paul.

… I run into this suggestion – for a honeyed liqueur – at the shop next door:

And finally, I wake up to this, realizing there’s nothing sub-zero or icy here. Really!

What a difference a year makes, and at so many levels, but I digress.
Last 6th of January, Jeanne and I were wearing linen capris on Aegina, watching the long-robed, high-hatted priests disappear in a cloud of incense.
Waiting outside the cathedral for the #21 this morning – in the wind – these line from Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” roiled (as do, now I’m home and reading the poem, those later lines about the old dispensation!)

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter…’

Tim Martin’s reading:

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

 Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running strean and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

 All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

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.

         (INAUGURATION Day 2017)

Tempting though an escape from the Trump years may be, time to get back and get to work — amazing to see friends and family marching the day after the election– and to be with family and friends. Videos and FaceTime are not all no substitute!