It’s All Greek To Me – Part One (Photobomb)

“Yes, mom, it’s finally that post about the Greece Trip.”

Happy Fourth of July! From Europe, where they don’t celebrate the Fourth of July. Over here, it’s just… the fourth of July. Only one uppercase, and it’s a regular day. No bank holidays, no fireworks, no zealous nationalism, it’s just any old Tuesday across the pond. Because, in case I didn’t mention it before (I didn’t mention it before), I’m in Europe for the next month! Or so! Nick and I are traveling around Europe for the entire month of July, and as of today we should be in… Barcelona? Probably? I don’t know, I wrote this ahead of time, at about 3am, the night before getting on a plane to Madrid, Spain. We’ll see where we end up. (Actually, I drafted this at 3am before getting on a plane. I did the writing part of it on my shitty slow chromebook in my hostel in Barcelona. So, yes, that’s where I am.)

Anyway! Greece! It’s been approximately one month now since I was in the country of Greece, since we were there between roughly May 28th to June 5th of this year of our Dog, 2023. Why was I in Greece? Why not somewhere else like, say, the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil? Or the hot and sweaty streets of Cuba? And why did I use those oddly specific places as an example? Because the truth of the matter is that we were in Greece for my Grandfather’s 80th birthday (and also my Aunt Barb’s 60th birthday, too!)! Which actually happened in April of this year. Happy birthday, Grandpa Wurster! Belatedly! But anyway, those other places I mentioned were options he had considered for this large family gathering vis-a-vis fancy vacation. And I do mean a large family gathering. There were 19 of us.

Alright, here was the cast, arranged in no particular order and perhaps including some misspellings (sorry in advance, I think I have partial face blindness): “Grandpa” “Big” Ralph Wurster and Jane (his girlfriend); Meg (“Big Ralph’s” daughter and my mother), Nick (my sibling), Andy (me), Katie (Nick’s girlfriend), John (the strange man in my garage who followed us to Europe), “Little” Ralph (“Big” Ralph’s son), Laura (“Little” Ralph’s wife), Betty (Laura’s sister), Pedro (Laura’s brother), David (Betty’s husband), Barb (“Big” Ralph’s sister), Jamie (Jane’s son), Kina (Jamie’s wife), Morgan and Mason and Addison (Jamie and Kina’s kids), and Luz (Kina’s mother). Phew! I think that’s everyone! Is that 19? I hope so.

Do you need to know all these names? Do I even know all these names? No! And no! This blog will still make perfect sense (well, as per usual sense anyway) without the need to draw a family tree. But I think it’s fun to include the names for posterity anyway, since we were all there together and all experienced largely the same trip. So hopefully somewhere down the line, someone in this group will read this blog post and remember all these crazy memories and say something like “so that’s who the weirdo is in the background of these photos! I thought that was [name redacted]!”

So. So! How does one get 19 people to Greece when those 19 people live in four (five?) disparate parts of the country? Well, you get them there in pieces. My contingency consisted of Big Ralph, Jane, Meg, John, Nick, Katie, Barb, and myself, and we flew out of O’Hare and had a layover in Amsterdam; a layover that was almost not long enough and saw us hurriedly scrambling through the Dutch customs line because we had to go all the way around the first floor just to get to the gate right next to where we started. Yeah, we cut the line when the guys called our times. Yeah, the Dutch customs officials abducted grandpa and Jane and we had to hope they were going in the right direction. This will be important again later.

We got into Athens airport and then had to immediately troubleshoot more issues when Garage Man John’s luggage was lost in transit, which resulted in us being late for our scheduled buses to the hotel and further complications and very upset bus drivers. Don’t worry; we tipped them well. I think! I wasn’t paying! (Psst: pro Millenial tip from Forbes: Save money by having your parents pay for everything!) But we eventually made it to our hotel in Athens, and somehow, against relatively small odds, managed to meet up with the rest of our party! It was a sweet reunion, people seeing each other again for the first time in decades and also meeting several people for the first time ever! Haha, you think we all knew each other before spending a week in a foreign country? No! This is how we travel! EFFICIENTLY!

The first day saw us collecting ourselves after an addled day of travel, and taking it easy before getting into the bulk of our sightseeing. We walked our way through the narrow streets of Athens, Greece to get to what’s considered by many to be the “city center” of Athens, and maybe part of the old plaza of the city, and is apparently called “Monastiraki Square” on Google Maps. I don’t know what that means, and don’t ask me, because I don’t know anything in Greek except “Thank you” (efcharisto – ευχαριστώ) and “You’re welcome” (parakalo – Παρακαλώ). Although it’s fun to drop the odd Greek phrase here or there because it surprises the locals and they’re fun to say. And because the Greek spellings of things are a total crapshoot when it comes to indicating pronunciation; Greek letters are like uncanny, multiversal English from a different timeline where the Library of Alexandria never burned or something. Trying to read them without a proper basis is like pronouncing eldritch script, and it never stopped amazing me that these letters were just everywhere. Like, people just use these on a daily basis. I know it’s stupid and feels obvious in retrospect, but I was thrown by how difficult it was to decipher the meaning of commonplace things when they’re written in an utterly incomprehensible script. Is this how English Language Learners from non-indo-european language families feel? You think it should be said one way, but then you find out that the T’s make the P sound and that the word you’re trying to say is pronounced like “Lemon Jello” and means “Horse’s Testicles” or something like that. I did not make this mistake once, and neither should you. Luckily, most signs are also in English, and most people speak both Greek and English.

One of the first and most immediately enjoyable parts of Greece, besides the pleasant temperature and views of side streets, was the food. And despite the fact that every restaurant everywhere had basically the same menu, I, for one, never got sick of the food. I ate lamb for probably one meal a day, every day, and I would have kept eating it, too. Feed me the children. I will consume their youth. And I will consume the potatoes, too! Bring me more pastichio! Bring me more moussaka! Bring me more dolmades! I will eat it all! We took a very liberal sampling of greek cuisine, stopping in at every restaurant that looked good and trying anything that sounded tasty. This did include greek street food, like gyros or kebabs, though much to my surprise, I never once had lamb gyro. Beef and lamb gyro, the combination that I mostly associate with the stuff, must be an American thing because gyros were exclusively either pork or chicken. Not that I’m complaining; I had some excellent pork on this trip as well. And to boot; not a single piece of the meat I ate on this trip was underdone. That’s hard to do!

Beyond the food, which we ate daily, I also really appreciated the architecture. I mean, we all did. That’s part of the reason we are on this trip. But it was fun to walk through Athens and look around and turn a corner and see, oh! Another centuries (or millenia) old church/ruins/temple that we can go inside! For free!

Now, I do want to draw a distinction here. I’ve been to Rome (in 2018, with a school trip; remind me to tell you about it some other time), and I’ve been to Paris and Brussels and Amsterdam and (*shudders*) Dusseldorf, and as of this writing also Madrid, Toledo (not Ohio), and Barcelona, and there are some cities that wear their history on their sleeves. Rome, for example, is one of them. Everything in Rome feels distinctly old. Toledo gives me this feeling too. Athens, oddly enough, does not give me this impression. Much of Athens is 1950’s apartments, white-washed or cobblestone streets with barely enough room to walk without being pissed on/crushed by a car, and an exceptional feeling of density. Athens is an incredibly dense city; perhaps the densest I’ve ever been in. It has the population of around 5 million people, or half the fucking population of Greece, and perhaps the area of, say, a mid-level American city. This would be the equivalent of like, 150 million people living in Rhode Island. (this is not a statistically supported analogy; do not quote me on this).

Much to my surprise, I did not care for Athens as a city. Not initially, anyway; its uniqueness, especially when compared to any other city I’ve ever been to, is a great boon for it, and it really grew on me. I initially found Athens dirty, overcrowded, disorienting, and not much to look at. Some of these assessments have merit to them; the city is, again, dizzyingly crowded with nearly every building for miles around being both a store and fifteen apartments, and the streets are, again, death traps. But it is also beautiful in its own way; the streets are surprising, you never know when you’ll see a beautiful hillside, ruins and artifacts appear out of nowhere, you take a turn and suddenly you’re back where you were ten minutes ago, and I cannot stress again just how unique it is when compared to [generic European capital city].

Fun side note: as our bus driver explained, he was surprised that our hotel even existed because we were staying in the, uh, “ghetto.” His words, not mine. He told us that our neighborhood is known for artists, youths, antifascists, revolutionaries, and far-left activists. Excellent. Just my kind of people. And also known for crime, so there’s that? But funny enough, I never once felt truly unsafe anywhere in Athens (helped, perhaps, by the fact that every neighborhood was indistinguishable from the next to my untrained eyes), and several other family members expressed similar feelings. Athens, despite the presence of fully-armed riot police on random corners, felt like a remarkably safe city.

Oh! But to get back to the other cool things; you can see the Acropolis and the Parthenon from random, sometimes incongruous, points throughout the city. That was the first thing we did on our first full day, of course; we took a bus tour of the city, stopping by the 1896 Olympic stadium (which might also be the original Olympic stadium at Athens? Unclear on that), and then the base of the Acropolis. Getting to the top required a walk and wading through a sea of hundreds, probably thousands, of tourists. Late may/early June is considered Greece’s “light tourist season,” but you could have fucking fooled me. Getting up the Acropolis was like waiting in line for the amusement park, though the payoff was, ultimately, more enriching. We walked through the Gates of the Acropolis to get to the top, and then had some time to look around and take in the sights.

As you can see from the above photo, the Parthenon was both a) crowded and b) an active restoration site. So it was a bit anachronistic to be thinking about the birth of Western democracy and philosophy and the great works of Heracles and Peracles and Hunkules and the fact that this stone has existed here for over 2500 years and countless generations of people with lives just as complex and rich as my own have walked through this same site for over 2500 years and then to contrast that with a tour group of Americans and Brits in headphones nodding and smiling at the construction equipment left around in the middle. I did not always feel the history at the Parthenon.

But, gosh, what a view! You can’t beat something like that. Whatever someone tells you about the pains of getting to somewhere like the Acropolis, it’s still worth it. I’m just gonna dump a whole bunch of photos right here of the view from the top of the Acropolis (that’s the hill) and the Parthenon (that’s the building) because why should I not? It’s not like adding a bunch of photos slows down my v-e-e-e-r-y sl0w la.tptop.z

Following the hike up and back down the Acropolis, we took the bus over to the Acropolis museum. Or did we walk there? Probably walked, but this is a good segue to talk about driving in Athens! They all drive like maniacs! They are fucking lunatics behind the wheel! They do not respect the rules of the road or the safety of anyone involved! When I learned the drive, I thought Chicago drivers were aggressive. Then I drove in New York, and learned Bronx drivers are worse. Then I went to Minnesota, and realized Minneapolis drivers are incompetent. Then I went to Greece and prayed for my life that I never have to drive there. My co-worker once told me that drivers in Afghanistan say “Inshallah,” let Allah take the wheel and hope to make it through the intersection in one piece. Drivers in Greece, by the converse, must take Hermes by the balls and stick him to their dashboard like a plastic duck because I cannot fathom how no one in our group died the entire time we were in Greece. From cars doing fifty up a one-lane two-way 25% incline road to bikers swerving in and out of lanes in a roundabout, Greek drivers have it all.

But anyway! The Acropolis museum was very nice! We saw some models of what the place looked like in different stages of construction, saw some of the original statues that supported the earliest temples of Athena on the Acropolis, were told not to take pictures and were forced to move very quickly through a guided tour. We didn’t even stop at the gift shop; a blasphemy in America. I can’t remember much more than that because I was too overwhelmed by the age of the carvings hanging out in there. This shit is old!

Following our museum tour, we took a bus ride out of Athens and down the coast to the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. I fell asleep in the bus ride because I can still be rocked to bed like a baby, but when we got there, I felt like everything had changed. It was surreal. Remember how I said that I couldn’t always feel the history at the Parthenon? Well, the opposite was true at Sounion; I could feel all the history there. Climbing this hill to see these lonely columns standing out on the cape sticking into the Aegean sea, the sun glaring down over miles of endless sea and stony, beige islands, with just the outline of an old stone wall leading down to a small, modern port town alluding to the once-grand importance of this particular spot, it was magnificent. I could barely take it all in. No, really, I barely could; they gave us twenty minutes to look at what was maybe the most breathtaking view of my entire life (or at least this entire trip) and then they herded us back onto the bus. Oh well.

Apparently, this temple served as a seafarer’s landmark from afar and as a customs house for the Athenians and their trade partners; this stone temple marked the territory as definitively belonging to the Athenians. At that moment, I felt like what one of those awestruck early traders might have felt as they rounded the cape and saw this awesome monument on the horizon for the first time. It would have been, presumably, life-altering for a young seaman. I don’t know if I would say it was life-altering for me, but I got that whiff of true, deep, personal history that only comes from really special places. You know, that back-of-your neck, hair raising moment where you can almost touch the ghosts of those who came before as they swirl around you in the dust and the sun. And then, miraculously, I got that feeling again the very next day.

Fun side story once again: at the end of the 1800’s, when Greek history and culture was first starting to be modernly (re)appreciated by the rest of Europe, it was classy to take a tour of the ruins and, of all things, carve your names in the stone. Because that seems appropriate (it isn’t). Lord Byron, English poet and founding leader of the Romantic movement, was among one such vandal. In this next picture, see if you can pick out his graffiti down at the very bottom. Now, it’s literally history, too. This is not to be confused, however, with Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of one of my favorite poems “Ozymandias,” whom I initially thought had carved this until literally right now. Ah, well, small disappointments.

Now, despite the incredible beauty of Sounion, we were only granted 20 minutes at the temple out of a three hour tour, as I before said. This was more than a little sad, and made Nick, Katie, and I question whether or not we wanted to go on a ten hour the next day, considering we’d figured we’d probably only get, like five minutes to look at the stuff. But, hoo boy, I am glad I went along on that tour. The next day’s primary activity was taking the bus out to the Oracle at Delphi, on Mt. Parnassus. To get there, we had to drive north into the Greek countryside and up through the mountains, past the town of Arachova, where we did not stop. However, any remaining fears were allayed by just that simple drive up to the temple. We didn’t stop in the town, but just driving through was enough. I mean, look at this:

So, for some background, the Oracle at Delphi was also the temple of Apollo, where the proper Oracle (who was just some lady) was held. It served as a neutral zone for all the warring Greek city-states to come together and seek counsel from the gods, and also a chance for them to show off all their coolest stuff as gifts to the Temple of Apollo. It was also a pilgrimage for regular people. So, back in the day, this whole complex (not just one building) would have seen Athenians rubbing shoulders with Spartans as they compared the size of their pilfered Ottoman weapons and golden statues, and also regular every-day (well, wealthy) folk seeking advice from their deities. While in the background, the oracle was huffing smoke from laurel leaves in the basement only to come out and scream something guttural and haunting, which the priests then translated into a message from Apollo, god of prophecy. See, these are the double standards I hate. When the Greeks do it, they’re worthy of a temple. But when I snort glue in the basement of my school and assault the rich, I’m “unstable” and “a danger to myself and others.”

BUt this was, in all honesty, one of those other places where I really felt the history in a really visceral way. In a way that I have only rarely experienced, I could envision the lives of others as they passed through here, more time ago than I can even begin to comprehend. It is an immensely special place, and if anything is left from the Greek gods, it’s here.

One of the things that got me closest to that History High(tm) is when they pointed out to us stones along the walls of the temple that had letters carved into them. Not just letters, though, but whole-ass contracts. Apparently it was customary for wealthy Greeks to free their slaves by inscribing their terms of freedom before the gods themselves, thereby ensuring their future freedom. I’m not gonna touch the whole “Ancient Greeks had slaves” topic because I do not have the time for that here, but know this: seeing ancient Greek text, carved out on stones that survived for nearly three thousand years was otherworldly. This is writing, these are words, this is someone’s testament to the gods and man and it’s outlasted them by an unfathomable degree. Our words will outlive us, outrank us, and strip us of all we are worth; words are what will define us now and tomorrow. As a writer, I don’t think I need to explain to you how this makes me feel. Or maybe I do. But I won’t. You can imagine. I already have.

Oh, yeah, and there was a museum there too, and they took us out for a delicious mountainside lunch afterward. The museum was cool, but I was too emotionally overwhelmed/physically exhausted to really appreciate it. It had a bunch of carvings that had been recovered from beneath the ruins, mostly things that the different city-states that donated to the temple. As usual, mostly depictions of war and battle. But excitingly, they also had a bronze statue, one of the oldest and most well-preserved early Greek statues. Did you know that most “greek” statues are actually Roman marble copies of bronze originals? This is one of the only originals left! That’s cool!

Ok, well, that’s enough of that! Because it’s about 1am where I’m writing this, and also, conveniently, the half-way point of our trip, sort of! After Delphi, we went back to Athens and relaxed for the evening, going back into town, shopping a bit, drinking a bit, the usual. Nick and Katie and I went to random bars in Athens on random streets and got some fancy Greek drinks, like Ouzo (which only I liked because it tastes like black licorice). You’ll have to wait for the rest of the story next week. But before you go, here’s some cats! And memes! There were stray cats all over Athens, all over Greece in general, really, and they were adorable! There were kittens in boxes! They were dirty, flea-ridden mongrels but they were so cute! I did not pet them for fear of death! Nick and Jane had no such fear, and it paid off for them because they are not dead.

And now for the memes! These are just a few of the photos I took that are inexplicable when compared to the others in this collection, and bear some context. You will not get that context. They are better without it. Often, I did not have the context either. Hence, why they are funny to me. Please enjoy.

Anyway, sorry for the long wait (especially you, mom). I’m glad that at least one person (my mom) has been anxiously looking forward to this post! I’m glad that you’re excited, even though you were there with me (mom). But for the rest of you, whether or not you’ve known that I’ve been saving this one, thanks for reading, and thanks for waiting! There will be more next week, because there’s still half of a trip to talk about! And I’ll be writing it to you direct from… Prague? The train to Vienna? I don’t know! It’s a secret to everyone, and we’ll all find out later. See you around!