Greece - Athens

“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.”        Acts 17:22

Most Americans of legal age are familiar with standing in line at the DMV or some other government facility waiting endlessly as the few, often surly, staff members try to serve the needs of a large, impatient queue of citizens.  I would wager that most people are not familiar with standing in line in the cramped office of the consular division of the Chinese embassy in Greece trying to obtain a Chinese visa with an American passport amidst an angry crowd shouting multi-lingual curses at the one clerk on duty.  Fair warning:  if you should ever complain to me about standing in line at the DMV, I will at best grant you a three-second sympathetic nod before dismissing anything else you have to say about your experience.  

We overslept a bit after a long travel day from Rome, Italy, to Athens, Greece, that involved planes, trains, and automobiles.  Since the Chinese embassy is open only from 9:00-12:00 we needed to be there to start the process of securing visas for our trip to China in January.  Obtaining one of these visas in a foreign country is difficult, but Greece offers decent fees compared to other countries, and with only three days in Athens, the clock was ticking.  We threw on some clothes and rushed out the door to find a taxi and grab a few pastries at a nearby bakery on the way to the neighborhood square.  We saw an open taxi and showed the driver the address, and he smiled and nodded for us to get in.  The driver’s name was George, and once he found out my first name is George and my son’s first name is George, and my father's first name was George, we became instant friends, and we had a driver for our entire time in Athens.  We used the metro a few times to get around, but for most destinations we called George who was always ten minutes away, with rates not much higher than the metro, a warm smile, and good advice delivered in decent English.

George dropped us off at the Chinese embassy, and seeing no one around, I pushed the button on the security panel, and an austere Chinese lady opened the door and told us we were in the wrong place.  She made walking gestures with her fingers, and we ascertained that we needed to walk somewhere else, and with the help of Google maps, we were soon entering our second home in Athens, the Chinese consular office a few blocks away.  We had done a lot of homework on the visa application process, but some of the instructions for filling out the forms were ambiguous, so we knew we were in for a struggle.  My handwriting is illegible, so Deena spent hours the day before filling out a four-page form for each one of us, and they looked good...but not good enough.  We spent all morning in the office going back and forth from the work desk to the visa window receiving layers of instructions until everyone in the cramped room began calling us “the people with the American passports.”  Finally, we realized that we were up against closing time, and the clerk told us to come back the next day and gave us our homework assignments.  We left the office dejected, but a delicious lunch of roast turkey and potatoes from a nearby bistro cheered us up, and we called our buddy George for a ride back to the apartment.  

We all took showers and settled in a bit more, and I tried to sleep off a splitting headache to no avail, so Deena and I walked to a nearby internet point to print some documents needed for the visa applications.  We sat at a workstation behind two guys who were viewing some naughty websites on their monitors, and we did our best to ignore the world around us and focus on our task.  With reams of documents in hand, we went back to our apartment and spent the rest of the afternoon working on our applications, stopping only for a brief dinner at a restaurant around the corner.  The kitchen in our apartment was not very well equipped, so we ended up spending more money on food than we have in a while, but we enjoyed going out to eat for a change.  

Next day we were up early again, and after a quick continental breakfast, George picked us up and delivered us to the Chinese consular office ready for another round with the clerk.  So far we had seen nothing interesting or historical in Athens, and just driving around the busy streets packed with insane Greek drivers offered no inspiration at all.  The city looks a lot like a Florida beach town except bigger, older, and dirtier.  Most of the buildings are four story concrete blocks with balconies crowned by rows of antennas and satellite dishes and anchored with graffiti covered first story walls.  Many apartment dwellers have filled their balconies with plants which soften the edges of the buildings a bit, and clusters of orange and palm trees on street corners add color to an otherwise drab cityscape.  Athens does have the Acropolis going for it, though, and occasional glimpses of this legendary landmark from the taxi windows fueled our inspiration to get the government red tape behind us.

The office was crowded again, and we resigned ourselves to another long morning of bureaucracy, but we smiled a lot and tried to be as gracious as possible when dealing with the clerk and our fellow visa hopefuls.  To our utter frustration, the clerk would start shifting through our paperwork and then stop and accept a handful of applications from someone else behind us while we were swept out of the queue.  We would make our way back to the front of the line, and the process would repeat.  We just kept smiling behind clenched teeth and hoped our calm, appreciateive demeanor would somehow turn the tide in our favor.  At one point, a supervisor was prepared to deny our whole procedure until we could definitively prove where we had entered Europe. By furtively flipping through our passports to the faded ink stamp of Ireland, we offered the proof she needed.  With that hurdle crossed, the clerk finally accepted our applications and gave us a pink slip which had to be delivered to the National Bank of Greece, where we would then deposit our application fees directly to the account of the Chinese Embassy.  We walked two kilometers to the bank and went through another rigamarole to deposit the money, and while I won’t divulge the amount with which we parted for an expedited process, I will say that all that cash would have kept us in beef chow mein for a long time.  After another long morning, we rewarded ourselves with some more homestyle Greek food from the bistro knowing that we had to make one more trip to the consular office the next day with our visa status still in limbo.

Heavy storms were predicted for the afternoon, so we chose to stay indoors and finally dive into some ancient Greek history through two museum visits:  the Acropolis Museum first, followed by the National Archeology Museum of Athens.  The Acropolis Museum is located at the bottom of the famous Athenian hill and is built over an extensive archeological site which visitors can view through thick plexiglass walkways.  The exhibits inside are statues, friezes, and many types of architectural elements from the Parthenon and the other temples located on the Acropolis, and they are fabulous.  We saw many artifacts from the Parthenon in the British Museum during our time in London, and the Greeks make sure that their museum visitors understand how their historical treasures were looted by the dastardly Lord Elgin in the early 1800s—it was fascinating to see both sides of this centuries-old acrimony.  The museum presents the entire history of the Acropolis through multimedia exhibits and excellent restorative work on original pieces that left us with full understanding of the history and power of ancient Greece and the city-state of Athens.  The museum tour wraps up on the third level on a large balcony which looks out to the Acropolis, and we got some good pictures of the Parthenon with dark storm clouds approaching.  

We hoofed it to the nearby metro station and made it underground before the clouds opened, hoping to get to the next museum with enough time for a fruitful visit.  The pedestrians we encountered after ascending the metro escalator were soaked with a shell-shocked look in their eyes, and we later learned that we had escaped a terrifying thunderstorm accompanied by falafel-sized hail.  Counting our blessings, we climbed the marble steps and entered the vast foyer of the National Archaeological Museum.  It was 3:00, and to our dismay, we discovered that the museum closed at 4:00 that day.  Undaunted, we boldly paid our admission fee and began a whirlwind tour that was hugely productive and satisfying.  We were aided by the fact that the museum’s content is 15% mind-blowing, ancient treasure and 85% old painted pots.  No disrespect to archeologists that dig (so to speak) two-thousand-year-old amphorae with depictions of Hercules and other naked Greek heroes with big muscles, but that’s not our thing.  We had plenty of time to learn about the ancient Mycenaeans and saw some of their incredible three-thousand-year-old frescos.  We saw delicately crafted solid gold chalices and the famous Mask of Agamemnon along with ancient bronze sculptures of Zeus and Poseidon.  The marble statues were graceful and showed the skill and precision associated with ancient Greece during its classical period.  We seriously made up for lost time on this fun afternoon, and with one more Chinese consular visit looming, we were still excited about our plans to visit the Acropolis the next day.

The following morning George drove us to the Chinese consular office one more time and waited for us down the block in anticipation of what we hoped would be a quick visit.  There was no one in line at the cashier’s window, a normal sight because very few make it that far in the process, and we handed over our bank deposit receipt like it was a fragile copy of an ancient document.  The cashier looked it over, pulled our passports from an organized box of multicolored documents, looked them over, and passed them through the window.  We gingerly opened them up and beheld glorious, full-page visas allowing us to visit the mysterious land of China for a few days in January.  We walked over to the visa clerk’s window and pushed our way to the front of the line so we could thank her.  With a wide, surprised smile, she wished us a good trip—it was obvious that she doesn’t get thanked much.  We burst from the confines of the cramped office like calves leaping from the stall, and George, seeing the look of joy on our faces, raised his arms and exclaimed, “We win!”

George drove us to the area near the Acropolis, and I noticed that he was sipping a coffee-type beverage, and being a fellow connoisseur, I enquired about its composition.  “Ees frappe” he said reverently.  “Greek coffee, very strong.  You drink, you want to fight.”  I’m not much of a fighter, but I love good coffee and told him I would give it a try later that day.  “Good,” he exclaimed with a grin, “You drink, we fight.”  On the way through town he told us about an attack on the French embassy in Athens that morning, and described how men on bicycles lobbed a grenade into the compound injuring a security guard.  We secured George’s services for an airport transfer the next day, and after he dropped us off at a store we needed to visit, we were finally making our way to the Acropolis.  Along the way we passed a large building blocked with high walls and a metal gate painted green like the ones we had seen at the Chinese embassy, and there was a flock of men carrying cameras milling about.  We realized it was the French embassy, and we noted the fresh bullet holes in the guard shack glass as we got the heck out of there.  We walked through Constitution Square and watched the uniquely uniformed guards march back and forth in front of the capitol building and stopped for while to admire Hadrian’s Arch near the ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.  

As we made our way through the Athenian streets, we caught glimpses of the approaching Acropolis surrounded by a blue sky full of fluffy clouds.  The storm the day before had flushed out all the humidity, and the air felt crisp and fresh.  I love living in North Carolina, and my home state has some pretty cool places within its borders...not Acropolis cool though.  School children in my neck of the woods back home go on field trips to the bank or the strawberry patch which are fun outings, but school children in Athens spend a day visiting the Parthenon for crying out loud, and there were a bunch of them in the area, with chaperones at their wits’ end trying to rein them in.  

We felt the need to fortify ourselves before ascending the hill, so we walked around the area known as the Plaka looking for inexpensive food, and at last we stumbled upon a little hole-in-the-wall cafe.  I can’t remember its name, but we christened it, The Greek Lunch Counter From Heaven.  Oh my goodness—we had souvlaki with roast pork and chicken wrapped up in hot pita bread with fresh vegetables and herbs and served steaming in a paper cone.  I asked the man at the counter to hold the onions on my order, and he looked perplexed and said, “Ok, no onions, you want potatoes?”  I tried to peer around his shoulders to see if he had angel wings restrained by the strap of his apron.  Deveny wanted to try the falafel, and it was a savory delight also served in a hot pita with tomatoes and crunchy cucumbers.  We shared a giant Greek salad of which even Joseph, the carnivore, sang the praises—it was an herb-flecked masterpiece loaded with ripe tomatoes, olives, feta cheese and drenched in rich olive oil.  The entire meal set us back about twelve bucks.

Considering the amount of historical wonder we received in return, the admission fee was a pittance, and we began our long ascent to the top of the Acropolis on wide crushed-stone switchbacks.  We stopped for a while and sat in the Theater of Dionysus where Greek tragedy was born and made our way past the much larger and magnificent Odeon of Herodes Atticus where Led Zepplinikus and the Rolling Stonicles must have played back in the day.  At the top of the hill, the views of Athens were intense, and we could see the ocean past the mountains with the houses in the valley sweeping up the sides.  

We climbed the final section of marble stairs and for the next couple of hours, we wandered around the ancient buildings as the winds blew through the temples like they have for many centuries.  There is perpetual restoration work going on in the complex, but the sight of modern cranes and scaffolding does nothing to take away from the power of these ruins, and no number of pictures can fully recreate the memory of the Acropolis.  In addition to the mammoth Parthenon, there are other buildings there, including the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike—so the Greeks invented branding strategies along with democracy and a bunch of other stuff.  Finally sensing it was time to leave, we made our way down from the Acropolis using a different route in order to see one more place near the entrance to the complex.  With the help of a friendly docent, we found Mars Hill, or the Areopagus where the Apostle Paul delivered his powerful sermon to the men of Athens recorded in the seventeenth chapter of the Book of Acts.  Though many of his listeners were skeptical after hearing Paul’s words,  there were some who believed him, and his words carry no less power and hope today.  We climbed the slippery rocks to the top of the hill and sat for a while in the sunshine completely given over to the history and significance of the place of our respite.

The Areopagus - Paul preached here

With the daylight diminishing, we walked back down to the streets of Athens, passing through the ancient Agora lined with orange trees and tufted evergreens where lime green parrots darted in and out of the dense foliage of the trees.  We stopped for a while in a cafe to recover from the historical assault with ice cream, and I finally got to try a frappe.  This type of coffee is served cold—not my thing, but due to the excellent preparation by the barista, I found myself enjoying it immensely.  Even though George is at least twenty years my junior, I could have fought him and won after ingesting this caffeine bomb.  The metro carried us back to our neighborhood where we enjoyed a simple pasta dinner at the corner restaurant before heading home to pack.  George was set to pick us up in the square at 5:15 the next morning, and it was time to move on.

After a 4:00 wake up, we left our apartment at 5:00 and per the instructions from our host, locked the keys inside to be retrieved by the cleaners.  After exiting the building, we discovered that the four-foot tall, pointed metal gate was locked and the key to open it and gain entry to the street was fastened to the ring secured within our locked apartment.  We had no choice but to complete a family team-building exercise, which involved a technical scaling operation that ended with us and our luggage standing safely in the street suffering only a few minor scratches.  George picked us up right on time, and we spent the thirty-minute taxi ride to the airport soaking up his advice on Santorini and the Peloponnese, the next places on our itinerary.  After helping us with our bags, George bid us goodbye with handshakes and his warm, toothy grin.  He was a good friend who helped us during challenging and fun times, and we were glad we could help him support his family—it was hard to leave another friend, and we felt another unavoidable sting underneath the reward and fond memories of world travel.