Artifacts and Airports

 

September 10-12

Sunday we went to the National Archeological Museum. 

It was no surprise that several rooms are devoted almost exclusively to broken pots and bronze artifacts. The Minoan work is very old, and some of it is remarkably well preserved. 

There are cases where bits of frescoes have been reunited, and others with bronze swords, some with gold detailing, that were recovered from ancient graves. There are arrays of jewelry made variously of gold, precious stones, bronze, and seashells.

As always, the ancient sculpture is stunning. The early Minoan figures are downright eerie. The faces are flat ovals with the slightest hint of mouth, eyes, and nose. Very ghostlike.

The ancient Greek work, on the other hand, begins to bring in more realism. The Kouroi, a formal depiction of a naked youth, is an archaic form that reminded us of Egyptian sculpture, both in the posture and the treatment of the hair. I think Wikipedia has more on that.

The figure is always standing with one foot forward. They were carved in all sizes, including the 10-meter high version next to Joanna in the photo of the day.

Many pieces, including several devoted to Pan, are replicas. Ancient themselves, they are copies of originals carved two or more centuries earlier.

We had dinner later at Barbounaki Kolonaki, which specializes in seafood. We started with an eggplant salad, a spread similar the baba ghanoush that we ate on bread.

The main courses were all grilled: octopus, sardines, and sea bass.

The food is fantastic here.

Monday Larry and I went to one of the major markets. It’s mainly a wet market selling fish and meat. There are spreads of cuttlefish, squid, octopus, whole fish ranging in size from anchovies to some a meter long. They are set out on ice that melts and keeps the floor wet. I was using the cane and sometimes the tip would slip on the wet concrete.

We stopped for espresso and ouzo, then went to another stall to share a small plate of seafood—a couple of mussels, a shrimp, some anchovies, all in olive oil with a bit of bread.

We all had laundry to do, so we went to Easywash up the street from the apartment. I bought a birthday card for my granddaughter, Hailey, and walked about half a kilometer to the post office for stamps.

I was thirsty as hell when I got back, but still OK for more exercise.

We got a bum steer for dinner. We walked uphill to a place not far from the Barbounaki because it had gotten very good reviews. We have no idea who wrote the reviews. It was a steam-table joint manned by some surly character. 

It would have been like eating at the airport, except most of the people working at the airport were polite.

We went back downhill to Bread and Olive for souvlaki. We knew that was going to be fun.

Tuesday was checkout-by-11 day. We had booked our flights on our own. Larry was taking an Aegean Airlines plane leaving at four. Joanna and I were on Sky Express due to go around six.

We had hoped to spend an hour or so idling at Cue, but Vangeli must have been late getting up and the shop was closed.

We took a cab and reached the airport around noon.

Wifi was slow but adequate, so we were able to amuse ourselves. Larry took off for his gate around three.

Joanna and I had eaten yogurt and half a banana for breakfast. We were feeling a bit peckish a little after 4.

We were surrounded by a food court offering overpriced steam table food—15 euros for a piece of moussaka, for instance. When we ordered it, the lady behind the counter put it into a microwave oven. We also took a stuffed pepper and an order of spinach mixed with rice.

It was very surprisingly not as bad as you might expect. Borderline good, in fact. Maybe we were so damned hungry that anything would have tasted good.

The moussaka was dry but the ground lamb went very well with the other dishes. Besides rice, the spinach had a touch of something, maybe lemon, for a nice surprise.

When we polished that off, it was nearing time for our gate to open, so we strolled down to B13, where Aegean Airlines was still handling final call for a flight to Thessaloniki.

For some reason, boarding was delayed for our flight. It didn’t start till until maybe 25 minutes before scheduled departure time, but we left only a few minutes late.

The flight lasted less than an hour, so we touched down at Heraklion around 7:30.

We followed the swarm into the baggage claim. There were four carousels, each surrounded by a crowd.

We managed to see that bags from flight 214 were on carousel 4. We got a break. Our bag was the third one to come around.

We went outside, and saw the taxi stand about a hundred yards to our left. A man greeted us.

“Are you the dispatcher, sir?”

“I’m your driver, sir.”

Larry had rented us rooms in an unofficial hotel called Raise Kornarou City Stay. The driver found the building easily enough.

The ground floor consists entirely of stores. Our driver, Stelios, got out, talked to someone in one of the shops, and found the entry door for us.

The place had billed itself as an “elevator building.” Yeah, there’s an elevator, but you have to lug your bags up a flight of 30 stairs to get to it above the commercial level.

After that, the going up becomes easy.

The rooms have kitchenettes and they call them studios. I emailed Larry a little after 8 that we were settling in to our studio, which is number 42.

Actually, I wrote that we were “settling in at Studio 42” and “cranking up the disco fever.”

Larry emailed back a few minutes later: “What is studio 42? It's not on the map.”

He had been watching for a cab to pull up and had missed it. He thought we were lost somewhere in the neighborhood.

We straightened that out and went to a gem of a restaurant called Avli. The name, we were told, means “yard.”

All the seating is in a courtyard open to the sky.

It’s run by a family. The father, Tosos,  and daughter, Marilena, cover the front end. The mother, Katerina, is an artist who did much of the painting that decorates the interior and is a brilliant cook.

This is a neighborhood place. The menu is only in Greek, so the Marilena sat down with us and went over the menu to take our order.

We shared an assortment of appetizers. There were snails that we dug out of the shell with tiny forks. We had cuttlefish in ink cooked so tender we could cut it with a fork. There was an eggplant salad. All were delicious and full of rich flavors—citrus, oregano, maybe cinnamon.

Another plate was fried goat’s milk mixed with a runny egg. That was spread on toast, which came to us in a paper bag to keep it warm.

Joanna and I were crammed full by the time those plates were finished. 

Larry hadn’t eaten that afternoon, so he had a plate with octopus and a small casserole.

We had a bottle of a white wine, whose details I didn’t get. Joanna found it delightful. She generally prefers reds on those occasions when she drinks wine. This white, she said, may have been her favorite.

At the end of the meal we were served a complimentary dessert, pieces of fruit in honey, a small coconut cake, and slices of watermelon. That came with a small carafe of a semi-sweet liqueur called raki.

We liked the inventiveness and preparation of the food so much that we booked a table for next Saturday evening, our last night in town.

Larry asked if we could have goat and maybe something else different. 

Be well, everyone. May your flights be on time and your bags early on the carousel.

Love to everybody.

Joanna and Harry

High Life

September 8-9

On the way to get to the apartment, we passed a piece of public sculpture on the main drag. It is appears to be assembled from slabs of glass, or maybe plastic, to suggest the blur of a figure in rapid motion.

Joanna said it reminded her of the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota. As it stands now, the only recognizable parts of Crazy Horse are the face and the outstretched arm, pointing in much the same way as the wings of the figure in Athens. 

We’re starting to get a feel for our Athens neighborhood. There’s a coffee shop on every block. We have at least two bakeries to choose from. We’ve been to the supermarket. There are at least two, maybe three, pharmacies, in case we get sick.

Larry even found a top wine shop up the block and around the corner from us.

There are numerous eateries, too. Cue is part of our building. When we first got here and had trouble getting into the apartment, it was raining heavily. We could step from the alcove with the stairs and pass right under Cue’s awning without getting wet.

We go there at least once a day. Joanna and I had eggs fried in a very flavorful olive oil for breakfast on Wednesday morning. I had a couple of cups of Greek coffee. My second came with a warning from Vangeli that it should be my limit. 

I was drinking doubles, and the stuff has so much sediment that it left a quarter inch of sludge in the bottom of the cup. Very good indeed.

We go to Vangeli for directions, of course, and for all kinds of advice. We said we were going to the bakery. There’s one close by.

That's Vangeli in the middle. 

He said, “Don’t go there,” and told us where to find another tucked around a corner a block or two in the other direction.

Larry has been ducking out and coming back with bags that have contained sausages, grilled octopus, cheeses, eggs, and varieties of bread. I don’t know where he gets it all.

Larry directed us up the street to a place called Psomi kai Elia, which translates to Bread and Olive. Remembering Charles Lamb’s pen name, Elia, I thought it was a reference to the lamb in a gyro.

Oho, clever Yankee, fooled again.

The problem is in transliteration. The word for lamb in Greek begins with eta, the vowel whose cap form looks like a Roman H. In the store name Elia starts with epsilon, a shorter vowel that usually looks like the Roman E.

What’s more, I learned that not only does Bread and Olive not have any lamb, but gyros in the homeland are not made with lamb at all. They are either chicken or pork. 

I opted for a pork version that was the best gyro I’ve ever tasted. Joanna had chicken souvlaki. 

They came wrapped in pitas, which as far as we’ve seen here, are not pockets but more like soft, slightly leavened tortillas. The wraps were dressed with onion, tomato, lettuce, and French fries, wrapped together in the bread and flavored with tzatziki sauce and a dash of paprika.

Saturday we finally got to the Acropolis. We took a cab that brought us partway up the big hill. 

There was still a lot of climbing to do. I can see why they call it the High Town. After all, it was a citadel as well as a holy place closer to the sky.

Even though it was a weekend, the ticket line wasn’t too bad—probably less than a half hour. We’re coming in after the high season, when the lines can be taxing. 

Then we climbed to the ticket gate and climbed some more to the stops leading through the Propylaia, the monumental gateway to the hilltop itself.

We came out into the wind. The only place higher above Athens is a conical hill about a kilometer or so away. 

You can see the Erechtheion, the temple with the Caryatids, far off to the left. The Parthenon—what’s left of it—stands close on the right, covered in scaffolding.

Joanna was excited to see the Caryatids. If these aren’t the first ever built, they are the most famous. The photo of the day is Joanna’s view of them.

The six under the portico are replicas. Five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum. One was taken by Lord Elgin and sent to the British Museum.

Meanwhile, people were losing hats right and left. Which Joanna was taking the photo a fedora rolled across the hillside out of reach.

Later, a lady stood taking snaps of her family or friends. She had both hands on the camera, when her hat blew off and hit the ground in front of my feet. I was able to pin the hat in place with the tip of my cane.

She put the hat back on her head, and it came off again. This time she had a hand free to catch it. 

Every once in a while, we had to pass single-file through tour groups that managed to block the road.

Holding our hats, we walked all around the Parthenon. The far side is where they store the restoration work in progress—sections of columns, for instance, and equipment for moving the pieces. 

There is also a rail track that looks very old. Not Classical, I know, and it could still be in use for all I could tell. But maybe it’s old enough that Lord Elgin could have used it to start his Marbles and the Caryatid on their trip to London.

There is not much left of the Parthenon besides the columns and some lintels and the pediments where the Elgin Marbles once stood.

The hilltop is largely bare. There is not as much to see as there is in the Roman Forum.

Both have been looted: the Forum primarily by Renaissance architects who used it as a marble quarry, and the Acropolis by Ottomans who blew up the Parthenon and by the Brits who looted everywhere.

I feel privileged that I have walked through both of places in this life.

We took an Uber ride back to the ranch. We sat in the Cue with a bottle of white and plotted were to go for dinner. The food is varied and fantastic here.

Larry, as expected, had some solid suggestions. We opted for grilled lamb at O Petros (the Stone) on a street called Persefonis. 

The place was mostly empty but they sat us at a table next to an extended family gathering.

The people were friendly enough, greeting us warmly when we sat down. The man sitting closest to Joanna’s elbow told us he was Albanian. I tried to tell him about our encounter with the Albanian language at the Globe Theater in London. As if he could care, right?

His wife introduced herself and called herself a Gypsy. The guy’s mother was there. His brother showed up a little later. There were at least five kids, who started to grow restless. 

Before the parents cracked down on them, they were running up and down the sidewalk outside the restaurant, chasing each other around the tables inside, and generally raising hell.

They were clearly miffed when they found themselves forcibly seated by the grown-ups.

We ordered half a liter of red wine, which came chilled. We poured out glasses and let them sit to warm up. Knowing it would be half bone, we opted for a kilo of grilled lamb, along with a plate of salad, and some fries.

The salad had greens, grated carrot, grated cabbage, olives, tomato. 

The food came all at once. It was terrific fun. The whole bill, even with an additional quarter liter of red, came to less than 60 bucks U.S.

Be well, everyone, and stay happy. Remember: when you’re high, hold onto your hat.

Love to all.

Joanna and Harry