Chapter 5 - Southern Europe - a city to leave

Athens is a terrible place and it’s no wonder I have felt disinclined to write for a few days now, on a boat out. The city lies like a cement blight on the earth, with the nearby sea struggling to be seen through thick pollution. A few green hills emerge from the muck, little oases in a grey desert. The only joy was getting a healthy stack of mail at the poste restante. I derive great strength from the most unlikely sources, and conversely I am often surprised at how some friends never write at all. Best of all though, I can respond or discard as I wish, not having to behave nicely like I have to in a conversation.

Sidney is full of the joys of motherhood, which is lovely to read, but very hard as well, and I can only read her words in small doses. Her life and happiness consume her. Sam is a little more sensitive, telling me very little about her social life. Or maybe it’s more because her social life is not all that main stream. She has shaved off all her hair and has a nose ring, which Mom and Dad don’t know about yet. Mom will freak. Good thing Sam doesn’t really care what anyone thinks of anything. Niki writes of her men and those she wishes to introduce to me “once I come home”. The most touching are from my previous students, badly spelled sentences telling me what they are studying this year, how they like their new teacher but not as much as me and how they read out my postcards in class then place them on a map for everyone to look at. My heart hurts when I read them. Those children are the only things from home I miss really. The people I’ve known the least amount of time but who have made such an impact, each one of them. I will remember all their names, first and last, all my livelong days.

Reading and writing letters were interspersed with visits to the Acropolis, the Agora and the Theatre of Dionysos, where I tried to imagine what it would have been like to see something by Euripides or Aristophanes so long ago. One of the museums had a model of what some ruins would have looked like originally, using only one original section of column. I am astounded as to how they can take one piece of stone and reconstruct an entire building out of it, but I guess it no more a feat than reading some voyager’s diary and creating a map.

One of the little museums was open yesterday so I wandered through and saw an exhibition of armour – all museums in Europe seem to have an inordinate amount of armour. And it always seems to be in the first hall one must go through. Armour always depresses me. All those young men, the pride of nations fighting for what they believed in. Where are they now? Bits of dust. Forgotten by all. Many of their causes dismissed outright by history’s stern assessment. And now all that's left are little pieces of metal, empty reminders of lives lived and lost.

Every day I received earnest and persistent offers for dinner or dancing or walking which I declined. Honestly, Greek men! Even the coffee defeated me, with its bitter sludge at the bottom. So to leave, but where? I laid out my map last night. North through Macedonia? The Peloponnese Peninsula? That certainly has a nice alliterative ring to it. And with it, Sparta, Tripolis, Mycenae, Olympia, famous, romantic names. But in the end the islands beckoned and I decided to take the first boat that left Piraeus this morning.

It actually did not leave until well in the afternoon and is so packed there are no seats available, even in the smokiest of rooms. Especially in the smokiest of rooms. I found a space on the deck, but know I won’t get any sleep. For one thing the lights stay on all night and for another I am beside some guy with incredibly smelly feet!