Studying Abroad in Athens
Zach arrived from his study-abroad in Paris just before noon on a Thursday in mid-February. Once we got through the labyrinth of the National Gardens to my apartment, he was somehow raring to go, even after his flight. So after I introduced him to my roommates, all of whom were busy talking amongst themselves locking in plans for going to the nearby island of Aegina that evening, we took off again. This time with lighter loads.
I took him to Syntagma, the main square of Athens, and we had some strong, Greek coffee on the way. We walked down Ermou, a cobbled, bustling pedestrian street lined with so many shops and cafes that they seemed to spill out.
From there, after eating souvlaki down a side street, we walked around the Agora until dark, exploring the part of the city simultaneously decrepit and overly touristy, though the touristy fades out soon enough. Peeks of green emerged from the grey of crumbling buildings, and shocks of color blossomed abundantly all over the alleys in the form of street art. It was a part of town that I delighted in walking around, all the way at the other end of Ermou, a part where you felt like you could reach out and touch the ancient, beating heart of the city, and see how it bled colorful splatters onto the walls.
That night, we went back to my apartment to cook dinner and I made us pasta with one of my earlier attempts at recreating the distinctive spaghetti Bolognese that I had been having all over Greece. Tomato, mushroom, spinach, carrot, more tomato, red wine, and the key: cinnamon. We slurped it up and had yogurt and honey for desert.
“When I first tried this I nearly cried,” I said. “And all I could think was: how can yogurt possibly be this good?”
Zach had the same reaction as I had had.
The next morning, we woke up early enough to get to the Acropolis when it opened at 9 am.
Once we paid admission, we walked up worn stone steps on a steep side of the rock, surrounded by fixtures, ancient houses (Lovingly named ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C?’ by archaeologists) and some columns. Through the marble entrance way, up through a path lined with columns, we stepped onto the pockmarked ground covered in stones worn down and slippery from millennia of foot traffic. I showed Zach around, telling him all of the things I had learned in my classes about the Erechtheion and the Parthenon, the two great structures standing at the top of the rock. I pointed out the holes in the rock where wooden posts would have been driven to make pens for oxen being sacrificed to Athena, and I showed him all of the repurposed building parts that now made up the walls.
In the midst of this, I plopped down on top of a scraggly little line of rocks, hardly two feet high, entirely unremarkable and entirely un-roped-off. “This is my favorite part of the entire Acropolis,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s the oldest structure up here. And the most controversial. It’s a terrace in the style of the Mycenaean palaces, even though we haven’t found any evidence of a palace being built here. But this was put here twelve hundred years before that thing.” I pointed to the Parthenon to my left.
That afternoon, inspired by my roommates from the day before, we decided to go to Aegina. It is a small island about forty-five minutes by ferry from Pireaus, the port of Athens.
We took the subway to Pireaus, watching the city rush by from our aboveground, painted metrocar. Neither of us said much. We just watched.
We booked our tickets and had an hour to kill, so we wandered around the port, walking along the water and spying all the ships.
The ferry that we took was the boat equivalent of a puddle-jumper. It was small, one level, low to the water, and had the pontoons of a catamaran.
But the sun was out and shining that day, so warm that I hardly needed my cardigan, and we both watched the waves pass under us with excitement.
Once we arrived, we had a singular goal. Aegina was most famous for the temple to Artemis at its center, the Aphaia. We found a line of taxis at the port and paid one driver twenty euros to take us there, wait for thirty minutes, and then take us back.
During the drive up the hills of the island, the town faded out behind us and turned to fields of crops and gnarled olive and orange groves. We climbed up higher and higher on a single paved road, all the way up to a gate across the way from a single souvenir shop slash café.
We walked through the gate and walked up a little more, until we emerged from the dark brown and green of the trees and were walking not on dirt but on gravel and old stones, former pieces of the ruined complex before us.
The temple was the same design as the Parthenon, as any Greek temple, but it was made of blue-speckled limestone, not white marble aged beige. It stood tall, nearly complete, barely shambling at all. And as we walked around it, on all four sides there was a different vista. On one side, we looked down far, far below to the sea rolling onto a rocky beach, on the next we looked down upon acres and acres of farmland. On the next there was the grove of thick trees from which we had emerged, and on the last were more yellow hills towering and rolling into the distance. Below us were the remains of a plaza, white flowers and tall grass poking through every crevice. Above us the sun shone high.
We were the only people there, the only people, as far as we knew, for miles besides the cab driver who was behind us somewhere in the café lost in the impenetrable thicket of trees.
I felt a sense of belonging there. A feeling I always seemed to get whenever stumbling upon the ruins of another Greek temple. The feeling that the building was built there because it made profound, profound sense. Because here the huntress goddess of wild things could preside, still out in the wilds, over each and every piece of her domain apart from humanity.
We got back in the cab promptly thirty minutes later and began the long, winding drive in reverse.
Midway through, though, the driver pulled off the road to another. Zach shot me a sideways glance of alarm. Then we pulled off the road completely, into a driveway for a house set on the side of a hill.
Zach’s glance turned to fully-fledged terror. Especially when the taxi was put into park and the driver got out of the car.
I was worried, a little, as well, before I remembered that we had paid in advance and there wasn’t a meter running.
When the driver was rummaging in the trunk of the cab, Zach’s nostrils flared. “Emily…” he said.
“What?” I replied.
The driver poked his head through the window. “Sorry. This is my house,” he said. He was smiling.
He walked down the driveway and into the building, clutching an empty Tupperware container.
A woman greeted him at the door, also smiling.
“Emily…” Zach was gripping the seat, anticipating his impending murder.
“He’ll be back,” I said.
He was, too. And we got dropped off back downtown, where we walked around a bit.
“How were you so calm?” Zach asked.
I shrugged. “It’s Greece.”
We stayed on Aegina until sunset, seeing the temple to Apollo a walking distance outside town, and coming back for a late lunch of fried fish and grilled octopus by the water.
When we got back to Athens, we both had faces pink from sunburn, and were tired and sluggish on our commute back. But we had plans to go to one of my favorite restaurants that night. And Zach was still determined to go out clubbing, despite how long the day had been, and I was determined to show him the town.
We got changed and ready before heading out to a 10:30 pm dinner reservation (as you do in Greece). We went through a few carafes of wine, a hearty meal, and five massive jugs of water before we were finished, and we both had to pick our tired heads off the table multiple times. We ordered strong coffee for dessert, and I really was trying to stay awake, but after a day in the sun, I was ready to go to sleep.
“Emily, you gotta rally,” Zach said. “You promised.”
“I know, I know,” I grumbled.
We got back from the restaurant before midnight and I took a thirty-minute nap. Then I resolved to drink enough ouzo that I forgot I was tired.
We piled into a cab to head to Gazi at two in the morning (as you do in Greece). And when we piled out, we went to multiple clubs, dancing so much that the night turned into a blur. I fell over a table at one point and barely noticed, and we both continued to sway, moving around each other in a partner dance that we somehow intuited from each other.
Zach had us both do a tequila shot at every new bar we walked into, which was great until it wasn’t. I ended up brutally nauseous on a couch outside the last club, head spinning, feeling at the peak of misery.
“Are you going to make it?” Zach asked.
I’d told him that we were going to end the night a way that I had long wanted to, but never tried before. One of the hills in Athens, Philopappos, is a public park that never closes, and has a divine and unobstructed view of the whole city, as well as the Acropolis at the center. I wanted to end a night out there, staying up to watch the sunrise before stumbling home.
“Nuh-uh,” I said.
“Did you vom?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
We ended up back at my apartment at 5:45 am, thirty minutes shy of the sunrise goal.
I woke up the next morning with a wicked hangover and a swollen ankle. I thought it was sprained before I realized that no, it was just a gigantic bruise. It might have had something to do with the table I danced into.
We spent the whole day walking around, bopping into shops, going to the meat and fish market.
That night, we turned in early, and set early alarms. Zach dragged me out of bed forty-five minutes to sunrise, and we began the trek to Philopappos.
We walked through a sleeping, grey city, cobblestones underfoot once we passed the Temple of Olympian Zeus, going down the winding path to the park.
We passed from the grey street to the shrouded path of brown pine needles and dirt, enveloped by trees as we climbed the steep hill.
Several times, I wondered idly if it was a good idea to be so shrouded in the dark, to be trudging with all the noise of tired Americans through a secluded public hill. But we encountered nobody on the way.
We emerged onto stones like the ones of the Acropolis, though these were less flat and less trafficked.
It was cold in the dark, and the sky was cloudy, but we sat on the stones and we watched the sun slowly begin its ascent over the Acropolis, over the city.
The colors were beautiful, despite the clouds, worming their way through to make the sky purple then blue. The lights of the city faded into the creeping sunlight, the white and beige of the buildings thrown more and more into glowing relief with each moment.
Even the cold breeze warmed a little, and I found myself recalled in time, wondering how many had sat in this very spot and watched this very phenomenon crest over how many different iterations of this same city.
