Greece Trip: Day 1

So, I am in Greece over Spring Break with a class trip from school.  We are going to be traveling to different parts of Greece to study both the ancient society and the development of the early church.  The main cities we'll be in are Athens, Delphi, Kalambaka, and Thessoliniki.  I have to write travel journals each day talking about what we did and thoughts about it.  So, as time allows, I will be trying to post those journals along with perhaps a few pictures each night (here, GMT +2).  I hope you enjoy.

Edit: Sorry I haven't finished my bit on George Friedman's book "The Next Decade." I have been rather busy at school leading up to spring break, but I will hopefully get my last post or so up shortly after Spring Break.

Hopps


Day 1: 10-March 2011

We left Longview at 5am on Wednesday Mar 9 to drive to DFW to fly through Newark to Athens. We arrived with no problems in our travel. As we approached Athens we came from over Europe crossing the eastern Alps and crossing over Kosovo, Macedonia, Greece, etc to get to Athens on the southern side of Greece. We could see many mountains and valleys all covered in snow, it was quite beautiful. Once we landed at Athens International on the outskirts of Athens we started the drive to our Hotel in the center, a about 45 minutes away. On the way our tour guide, Yonni, started giving as some information about Greece and Athens.

Athens has 2 million people and the metro area is about 4 million. They actually had snow yesterday, which only happens every 2-3 years, but it was gone by today and today was in the 40s, so cool, especially in the shade but not too bad. Athens is surrounded by mountains, as are most cities/former city states in Greece, because the mountains divide the country into numerous valleys that are somewhat separated causing them to initially develop rather individually.

The Olympic Center from the 2004 Olympics

The Acropolis

Athens is the capital of Greece and of Attica (kind of the county it is in). Athens is also home to the Athens University, the biggest in the country, with 100,000 students. Because of congestion and to encourage use public transit during the day on Mon-Fri only half the cars are allowed in the city center. This is determined by the last number of your license plate, if it is even or odd. While we were downtown today, while not a lot of cars, there are a ton of little vespa like scooters that dart everywhere, in and our of traffic, hardly paying any attention to where they are as long as it is reasonably paved. Whenever you cross the street you may be sharing the crossing with numerous scooters and even cars. Whenever a stoplight turns green all the scooters that had worked their way to the front in between cars during he light all dash off down the road with taxis and cars right behind them. Rather chaotic looking, but amusing looking. On the note of public transportation, when they made their subway system it took a long time because they kept finding artifacts, over 70,000 in all. In fact, many subway stations actually have museums in them. On the sides of many of the roads in the city are nice looking sour orange trees for decoration, but the oranges aren't really edible, except for making marmalade or something. We drove down one of the main avenues, Queen Sophia Avenue. Along this was the National Garden with over 7000 trees, Embassies, and the House of Parliament (Greece is a parliamentary system, as such their president is merely a figure head). The house of parliament is in the neoclassical design built in the 19^th century (I believe), and this was a popular design style in Greece during this time; it was modern but it still incorporated some ancient Greek elements, such as Ionic or Doric column styles.

Scooters Driving

A Public Inscription

After getting to our Hotel, we put our baggage in our room and started off at the National Inscription Museum. This is more of a scholarly type place where people study remnants found that have inscriptions on them.  Here we also learned a little bit about the development of the Greek alphabet. The Egyptians started very early with Hyroglyphs, the Jewish slaves, etc took some of this back and between them and the Phoenicians kind of simultaneously, developed a phonetic alphabet (though the Phoenicians did it first). This then moved to Greece where it developed into their alphabet from their earlier system called “Linear B”, a symbol based writing system.   There were two main local variants of the Greek alphabet, Ionic and Halkida from the island of Iubea.   The Ionic form developed into the modern Greek alphabet, helped by it becoming the official language of Athens in 403 B.C., but the Halkida form eventually moved to southern Italy and was the foundation of the Latin alphabet. Modern Greeks can understand much of ancient Greek still. About 60% of modern words were around then, most of the new words are technology related. In fact, the grammatical system back then was more complicated then currently. When the modern state of Greece was formed, the older more scholastic form was chosen as the official language over the common language version that was more lax and other stuff mixed in, but in 1980 the common language became the official language of Greece. Many inscriptions at the museum were public inscriptions that told laws or treaties or told of a sponsor of an event; in Ancient Greece rich people didn't have big fancy houses but spent their money to sponsor events such as theater or games, etc.

Looking up towards lunch and the Acropolis

Statue of Perakles

Capuccino

Police Bus

Peaceful Protestors

We then moved into walking around much of the downtown area of Athens. On the way we saw the Athens City Hall with a statue of Perakles, a famed and important ruler of ancient Athens and the one who started the Parthenon. Buildings within a certain distance of the Acropolis can't be more than 8 stories tall so was to preserve the view. We ate lunch at a little cafe on the side of this hill in the shadow of the Acropolis, it felt a little like the movies, which was pretty cool. :-) In the designated old part of the city you can't build new buildings, only preserve what is there which could be anywhere from 100-200 years old to over 1000 years old. Some of the areas we visited to get a general feel for Athens (not spending a lot of time any one place) included: Omonia square, Sindagma square, Kolonaki center square, Monastiraki square where there used to be monastery built 1000 years ago. We also saw reamins of the Library of Hadrian, one of the great libraries of the ancient world. While in Kolonaki square we were able to stop at a cafe called Da Capo and get some delicious cappacino (though not terribly cheap €2.50). A couple people also got some hot chocolate, but it was quite intense, it was a dark chocolate, almost syrup it was so thick. Kind of like melting chocolate chips in the microwave and adding a bit of milk then drinking that. Quite an experience. :-) On our way back to the hotel we had the opportunity to see a group of a few hundred people marching on the streets protesting. They were workers who had been laid off from a telecom company (I think as a result of the recent government austerity measures). They were pretty peaceful, just banners and megaphones, but I was excited to see it, protesting and rioting seems to practically be a national hobby in Greece so it was good to see it firsthand. :-) We had seen police around pretty visible all day. Standing around in groups and police buses waiting on the streets. Apparently this is because of both the protesting and the relatively recent influx of refugees from many places including Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places. Also on our way back, we passed a couple of streets to avoid, they are a center of drug dealing and using, there were people squatting down up those streets, etc, not very pleasant. It was good to get a general feel for the city, in many ways it reminded me more of traveling in San Jose, Costa Rica than say Jerusalem. While it has a mix of old places like Jerusalem, the many shops and kiosks and little scooters, etc seemed to give a more similar feel to San Jose. An enjoyable first day, and I'm surprisingly not as tired now as I thought I would be after all the traveling. Tomorrow we get to hit it strong, including the Acropolis.

I hope you enjoyed, and will enjoy over the next 9 days.

Hopps