 Athens was not part of the original plan - actually the whole of Europe was not on the original plan. The plan was to go for a romp in Russia and spend time there till it was time to hop over to Oslo to catch the cruise to the Arctic. Russia is cheap, big, beautiful and full of vodka! What more can one ask for? Unfortunately Putin had an attack of empire-itis and attacked Ukraine - in fact, war was declared on the day I applied for the visa! That was 8000 bucks I wont see again. I hoped that it might turn out to be nothing more than a bit of roughhousing which would last only for a couple of days - but as events proved, it didn't. I could still have gone to Moscow of course, but it might have been difficult to transfer from Russia to Europe later. So Bharathi had to change all plans at the last minute - again - and decided to route me through a bunch of European capitals instead. She had first planned to start somewhere else - but then she found an Abu Dhabi - Athens ticket for just $40! WOOHOO! I duly landed in Athens and took a train to Monastiraki, in the heart of old Athens where SWMBO had booked a nice hotel for me, just 500 m from the station. What a killer location! I could actually see the Parthenon from my room!  I spent the next four days traipsing around old Athens and saw all the sites - the Acropolis and the Parthenon on the ‘sacred rock’ and a number of other places. As a spectacle - it frankly isn’t much. The place has been attacked and looted so many times over the centuries that there isn’t anything left. There are just a few cracked pillars and rubble and a few carvings here and there.  Even the Athens museums don't have too much of stuff. That is because the other Europeans came and shamelessly looted the place - you will find more Ancient Greek artefacts in the British Museum and the Louvre than in Greece. The most shameless example of them all are the ‘Elgin marbles’ - a British ‘Nobleman’ Lord Elgin came and stripped the Parthenon of all the carved panels he could lay his grubby hands on and shipped them off to his house in England. After he got bored of them, he conned the British government into buying his collection for 35000 pounds (a fortune in those days) and it is now in the British museum and they are refusing to give it back to Greece.
(We know the Elgin family - his son, the next Lord Elgin, came to India and looted us as well) |
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Hi thereI blog about my travels - and the thoughts they set off! Sometimes the simplest destinations can be the most thought-provoking! 
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