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ode to a grecian urn

Friday, November 30, 2001 2:32 AM
We left italy by ferry after accidentally eating a bunch of raw bacon, and slept most of the way on the floor (it was a night ferry) after talking to some montreal'ers. we had to wait in the bus station in Igoumenitsa for an hour and a half, where an albanian lady fed us oranges and we met a man name leon, who was going to athens. we talked briefly and he decided to go to the next town with us. we arrived Ionina and made our connecting bus by about 3 nanoseconds--it was actually pulling out as we ran up and jumped on. The seats were all full so we sat on our packs feeling something like cowboys as the bus rattled through the pindhos mountains.

we watched the amazing scenery and talked with each other and with leon (who had decided on the last bus that he would travel to the next town with us again).

we arrived at kalambaka just as the sun was setting and got a preview of some of the gorgeous rock formations we would explore the next day--a "forest of rocks" up to 400 m high, beaten and shaped by an old river or sea, by earthquakes, wind, and rain. they're known locally as "the meteora" (and 'officially' the "monastic city of rocks" by the monasteries that are built on various of te rocks) we saw the 6 active monasteries and a few of the ruined ones (there were 24 active at one point).

I guess in the 11th century monks began to crawl up the rock faces and! live in small cavities in the mountainside until the 14th century when they began to build monasteries--which they had to haul people up in bags on ropes because they're on sheer cliff edges (now they have stairs carved into rock). some great old frescoes in the chapels and natually, amazing views from the top. this was a place where every two steps the landscape and the space seems to have shifted dramatically and it should be a must-see for any grecian visit.

leon was still with us and we were starting to get a little ... ready to say goodbye to him, and ashamed to go places with him (he whines a lot about prices and harps on things continually, e.g. the meal we had one night--he keeps referring to it and the fact that there was no mousaka left. he tries to bargain for everything even though it's not really cultural here, i don't think, and he has a fradulent student card he got forged in turkey, even though he's about 50 and is a realtor in california. in short, we didn't want to be associated with him anymore--and were a little weirded out by the way that he was changing his mind about his travel plans to match ours, etc--by this time he had changed his plans twice to follow us, was thinking about getting a wind/waterproof vest like mine, was considering growing a beard, and kept asking questions like "what did you get?" in the grocery store, implying he wanted to get it too, and "where are you going next?" when we l! ooked in the guidebook. so we started to be a little ambiguous and decided not to decide until the last minute, and then we left in the morning and got on a bus that he wasn't on.

we went to delphi, "the navel of the earth" according to the roadsigns (i guess they used to think it was the center of the world here) and decided to brave the elements and camp there--we saw bright sun, blue sky, overcast clouds, strong wind, rain, and even snow throughout the course of that day, but we did it, and slept 12 or 13 hours somehow. the ruins here were surrounded by mountains and blue sky. in olden times there was a chasm here which gave off some kind of fumes that "reduced all comers to frenzied, incoherent and prophetic mutterings." (editorial: i'm not sure why they call it the navel of the earth. if i found a place where i crack issued forth prophetic gasses, i might be tempted to call it something else... but i digress) they think this chasm was closed by earthquakes, but we found an unidentified little kind of a hole in the ground and so i leaned down and took a sniff and launched into my best gibberish, which pat interpreted as "i think it's saying, 'go to war.'" patrick leaned down too, but all the oracle gave him was, "Mmm. cigarette butts." which was hard to translate, because, well, it was already english.

athens was next, and we stumbled across a hostel that gave us cheap rates. i talked with the man behind the counter and when he heard we had been to the monasteries at meteora, he told me i should go to mount athos--a mountain ruled by monks (it's actually semi-autonomous from the greek state, and you need to apply at a consulate to visit and everything. oh, and women are forbidden to go there, and boats containing women have to remain at least 500 metres from shore)--he said he knew two people who had gone at different times, and when they came back after 3 or 6 months, they t a l k e d r e a l s l o w l y. they told stories of men who had lived alone on the mountain for 40 years and now "when they walk, they can fly," but maybe, he said, "they were drinking Ouzo." [ouzo is a kind of a greek national drink; a liquor tasting like black licorice.]

athens has a rural/urban mix--new cars and seemingly home-made vehicles, fashion shops and turkish-style bazaars--because the population has increased from 700 000 at the end of wwii, to 3.5 million today. the big up-cropping of rock in the middle (the acropolis) contains all the trademark items like the parthenon and a few old temples, etc, which are swathed in scaffolding for a large part right now. we walked up some slippery stone steps onto a part of the rock known as the areopagus, where they held the court of criminal justice at one point (pat did some research and found this exact spot mentioned in the bible: acts 17:16-34) it's kind of neat to have this thing in the middle of the city, surrounded by 360 degrees of athens.

we wandered the streets to see byzantine churches, ruins of temples and what used to be socrates prison, where classical athens met as a democratic assembly, and found athens stadium (the 1896 stadium where the first olympic games were he! ld and where "the" olympic flame resides in non-olympic times--there's going to be a ceremony transferring the flame to the US for salt lake early next week. if you see it on TV, just picture the two of us running the track--we each took a lap on it, breathing heavily afterwards).

the spectre of leon haunted us from time to time, as we worried we would bump into him in this city and he would re-attach himself to our itinerary...but we didn't, he didn't. we went to korinthos, tracing the coast down in a standing-room only train and explored ancient corinth ruins (a 5th century bc temple to apollo, and remains of the tribunal paul preached from) that night, we sat on our wrap-around balcony looking out over the water, with a mountain in the backround (cheapest room in town!).

from here we were transported from place to place for a long time--train back to athens, metro to the harbour, ferry to rhodes island (which took 20 hours instead of the 14 they told us when we bought the ticket--bad weater). the intercom woke me at 2:30 am and i wandered onto the deck. the ferry had touched down on an island to make some transfers, and (this will sound overly dramatic, but at the time it really was, and i was just woken up) the wind was whipping in all directions across the deck, pulling my hair all over, and the sea was churning, and dry sheet lightnight illuminated the island of patmos, where john received the revelation of the apocalypse. the next morning, when we realized we weren't there yet, we began to wander the decks, full of unused energy, looking for places to do chin-ups. i stood on the deck and belted a few lines of great big sea into the wind ("we'll rant and we'll roar...") when we got to rhodes a man was waiting to sell us his room and he drove us right to it, and so we had time to wander the old town--a fortress with huge medieval walls and buildings (it reminds patrick of the "el dorado" lego sets). we were planning to rent mopeds and bomb around this island today, but discovered that our next ship leaves shortly, and the next one is next week, so we're going to try to leave today.

------------------------ VOCAB:

[i've got to transfer some funds into another account]----will be recognizable to anyone familar with the lexicon of rachel's house, circa new year's; it is a derivative of "i've got to make a deposit" 'nuff said.

[we'll save that for later]-----euphamism for "boy, that really sucks we can't see that now." used when we have to skip something (like mount olympus, visiting patmos).

[mousakAAAA]-----something good is happening (e.g. the bus to athens finally arrives and we see it coming down the street towards us, where we've been waiting.) ---------------------------

bye for now; laryn and patrick.

ps. i'm sick of being laughed at. especially the instantaneous, open-mouthed laughter. they don't even take a moment to get to know us as people. :(