Epilogos

Our last full day here is a good illustration of how much of the trip has gone. We did a mere two museums. The first was one we had been to before and failed to completely cover. That turned out to be a nuisance because the galleries we went to see were closed without explanation for a few hours, an we had to juggle and kill time to get to them. It threw off our lunch plans, and we ended up with bad tourist food. All of that happened frequently enough that we might have predicted it.

And the other was the Epigraphic Museum. I guess most tourists don't know what an epigraphic museum is, and I've been to three of them on this trip (and never saw another tourist.) When we arrived this morning, the guard tried to tell us that we wanted to go around the corner to the National Archaeological Museum. (Nope, we've been there twice already.) And when he let us in he had to go find the guy who sells the tickets.

Ancient epigraphic instruments?

We did stumble on one other lonely soul in there, an American graduate student in history working on his dissertation. I won't give away his thesis here, but it involved improving his database of epigraphic evidence directly from the source, examining one letter after another on steles and comparing them to the spreadsheet on his laptop. That could have been one of us, I was thinking, and I'm pretty sure he was wishing it wasn't him right then. He sounded pretty weary when I asked him about it.

Lucky us, we get to go home and just be armchair readers on his focus area and on a hundred other questions that engaged us. Ilene has a new hunger to understand the influence of the Byzantine era on Hellenism. I want to read up a lot more on the middle ages in the territories of the Roman empire and on Renaissance art.

The idea of another long trip like this sounds overwhelming, but I did tell Ilene once a few weeks ago that next time we should reproduce the English major's semester abroad and tour England for a few months. It's been a long, exhausting trip -- probably about a week too long -- but we definitely made the right decision to limit the number of stops and to dig in deep at those. 

Last Days In Athens

We've been here around 11 days I think, and we've just about seen everything a tourist could see I suppose. Somewhere along about last Thursday we were going through a museum where each room was a microcosm of what had been the focus of entire museums we had seen the previous few days, and I sat down on a bench and decided I had learned enough and seen enough and was ready to take the final exam and go home for the summer. Naturally, we've been to several museums and archaeological sites since then.

To name some of the places we've visited since I wrote last:

• The Acropolis
• The Temple of Olympian Zeus
• The Panathenaic Stadium
• The Roman Agora
• The Ancient Agora and museum
• Hadrian's Library
• A return visit to the Acropolis Museum
• The Museum of Traditional Pottery
• The National Gardens
• The Benaki Museum
• The Museum of Cycladic Art
• The Museum of Byzantine and Christian Art
• Lykavittos Hill
• Filopappou Hill
• Pynx Hill
• The Heraklaidon Museum
• Keramikos Cemetery and Museum

We also got a private Sunday tour of an exhibit at the library of the American School of Classical Studies, thanks to a colleague of Ilene's who is a native and happens to be here now, along with some other inside dope, and today we took the long tram ride out to Glyfada Beach to try out the Aegean. Tomorrow we're making a quick side trip to Delphi, and on Tuesday we're knocking off a measly two wings of the National Archaeological Museum that we didn't get to on the first visit, and then we're done.

It has been a somewhat bittersweet trip.  It's been hard to enjoy while we see so much suffering around us. As you probably know, the Greek economy has been doing very poorly for several years and things are coming to a head this weekend. The employment rate has been stuck at 25% for years, with youth unemployment at 50%, and public sector workers who do have jobs have had significant pay cuts. I know that I underestimated before what 25% unemployment really means. It's like the first year of the Great Depression, except in this case it's seven years on now, the recovery hasn't started yet, and there aren't New Deal programs to get people working.

I'm no expert in this stuff, but it's plain to us walking around that this is a pretty desperate situation for local residents. Store fronts are empty everywhere you look, graffiti covers everything, there are empty buildings and empty lots everywhere, usually with people living in them, and the city literally smells like shit. In shops and cafes, everyone is courteous, but on the street and subways, everyone looks angry all the time. People are begging on every subway car and at every subway entrance. There are tons of stray dogs, bu the funny thing is none of them are mutts. They are all either thoroughbreds or just a generation removed from the breeders. Except for being dirty and being unaccompanied, they look like they ought to be somebody's pet.

In other ways, we can see that the city is holding it together. The subways run on time and are clean. The parks are clean. The museums look great. We can hear the trash trucks collecting from he bins on our street every night. The tram out to the beaches was packed today.