The Poseidon Adventure

After all those rough ferry rides in the occasionally rough Aegean/Mediterranean, it now seems plausible that it took Odysseus 10 years to get home to Ithaca from Troy. Lesson: don't anger Poseidon (and desist from blinding his one-eyed son Polyphemus)! So we landed in Rafina instead of Athens on the Greek mainland, hired a car and driver (sort of a must in Greece), and made for Sounion, the place of Poseidon's Temple to pay due homage to the god of the sea and earthquakes. What a glorious, spiritual spot and well worth the trip.



The graceful column ruins (5th century BC) sit on a peninsula surrounded by the azure blue of the Aegean in a place of great peace and beauty. It was difficult to leave once there, and we would have dearly loved to have stayed for the sunset.

But we were due back in Athens to meet Phililp's friend/colleague D. who has also taken the brave leap of a year's sabbatical from Wall Street. On the way to Athens, we egged our driver on about Lord Elgin, "the thief" he called him, and the transit worker strike (he will lose the value of his very expensive limo license). But he also showed us the world's oldest amphitheater built to entertain the silver mine workers before the Golden Age--the Theater of Dionysus is only the second oldest theater.

We arrived in time to have drinks on the private roofdeck of our room in the Periscope with D. and his wife J.--it was a gorgeous night, that view of the Acropolis still stunning, and Lycabettus Hill behind our hotel was brilliantly lit as well.

We exchanged ideas, stories, blog addresses. I marvel at how much more difficult their year will be learning the language (a very difficult one) and negotiating the byzantine bureaucracy for which Greece is famous. One thing worth mentioning about Greece: whenever the Greeks break ground on new projects like the Metro and the Acropolis Museum, they find antiquities still buried--so apparently the metro is almost a museum; on display still underground are some of the treasures unearthed as they dug the tunnels.

It's quite a place, Greece. It makes me fantasize about being an archeologist.