When I was a child, I was enamored by Greek and Roman mythology. My mom told me she was the same at that age.
Thirty years later, I was finally able to visit Greece.
However, it was not my first choice. I wanted to go somewhere reasonably close that I had not visited previously and was outside of Central Asia. My mom expressed her disapproval of my wanting to visit Bucharest because of its proximity to Ukraine. I was actively trying to find flights that did not have Russian connecting flights. As a result, I had to say "no" to Bulgaria and "no" to Armenia. Regionally, I had already visited Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and India. This all proved more difficult than I imagined.
Then, there was Greece.
I had always imagined doing Greece properly by staying there a couple of weeks and leisurely hitting all of the ancient landmarks. And going to Santorini, of course.
But what if I just went to Athens in the same way that I had just done Tbilisi, Baku, and Budapest: stay for a week and really get acquainted with the city. This is the path I decided to take.
My itineraries to and from Athens were eventful, to say the least. Well, really it was the waiting to board the flights that was eventful.
While waiting for my plane in the Tashkent airport, I noticed the Russian men in their late 20s or early 30s running around in a panicked fashion. It seemed as though they had lost something. After passing them while I was going down the stairs, they came to the same area of the waiting room. One of them sat down and the other came over with a laptop and threw the laptop at the one who was sitting down.
After getting a better look at both of them, they both looked like they were TRIPPIN' BALLZ. Their pupils were dilated, and they had that wide-eyed stare that people get when they take any of several kinds of drugs. Plus, their paranoia was obvious.
After the kerfluffle with the laptop, the one standing went to go sit in a different area of the waiting room, far away from his friend. Then the one who had gotten the laptop thrown at him stood up, walked over to his friend, and started kicking his friend's legs.
I was hoping that they were on the flight to Moscow and not on my flight to Istanbul. Luckily, that was the case. I'm sure they had a very interesting flight.
The other incident happened while I was waiting to board my flight from Istanbul to Tashkent. It was something like two or three in the morning when the flight started boarding. I remained sitting down waiting for the line to dwindle down. All of the sudden, I hear an English-speaking woman's voice gradually become louder and more distressed.
I looked over. A tiny woman with tattoos who seemed to have the suburban hippie vibe was absolutely losing her shit. She started screaming and kicked her baggage as it wheeled away from her. All the while, her young boy was standing next to her, also looking increasingly distraught. This was no random woman. It was a colleague from work.
I was deciding between intervening to comfort her or laying low. I decided on the latter to avoid embarrassing her, but I can't say that I'm so confident that I made the right decision.
It seemed as though the issue was that Uzbekistan had recently changed its policies so that you only needed to have proof of vaccination in lieu of a negative PCR test. My impression was that the Turkish Airlines employees were not privy to this information. I'm guessing she only had the vaccination certificate and not the PCR test. I believe she eventually freaked out long enough that it convinced the Turkish Airlines employees to actually consult the internet to determine if her claim was true.
It was. I can only assume she and her boy made it on the plane.
Besides those two airport shitshows, my time in Athens was wonderful.
On my first full day there, I was walking around a large park and saw a great number of people flowing into a building. Not being able to read the Greek on the large sign in front of the building, I assumed it was the opening day of an art exhibit.
I found someone with a badge who looked like she could answer my question.
"Excuse me, what is this?"
"(unrecognizable words in thick Greek accent) exhibit."
"Oh...OK!"
I walked in and paid the required 15 euros. As I was paying I looked around and noticed a collection of wine glasses idly sitting on the table near the exit from the ticket kiosks. I saw a small group of women take a few.
"Oh, that's weird," I thought. I was directed to take my own wine glass. Maybe they are serving wine as part of the art exhibition opening.
As I walked into the main building, I saw everyone else holding wine glasses. As I walked further in, I saw tables full of wine bottles. "Ohhh, a WINE exhibition," I realized.
For the next two hours, I stumbled around the circular building - literally going in circles - sampling a range of wines, mostly from Greece and Cyprus, free of cost. I tried syrahs, chardonnays, cabernets, and basically anything that people seemed to be jostling to try.
After I developed a healthy buzz, I discarded my wine glass behind a toilet in the bathroom and decided that this was the moment I was going to ascend the Acropolis.
The Acropolis was a twenty- or thirty-minute walk from the building that held the wine exhibition. The combo ticket I had wisely procured earlier at the Temple of Olympian Zeus (just past Hadrian's Arch) allowed me to enter without anyone detecting any sign of inebriation.
The twisting path up to the Acropolis first led to the Theater of Dionysus and then to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.
Finally, I reached the Acropolis and the Parthenon, still in somewhat of a haze.
I tried to imagine myself looking over Athens like an ancient Athenian might have. With an air of pride knowing that your civilization had reached such a point in which you could openly debate ethics, metaphysics, and political theory.
What possibilities.
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