Athens- I had a slightly longer than expected layover than expected in the modern Greek capital yesterday and made a mad dash into the city centre to try and visit the Acropolis before racing back to my onward flight to Cyprus. The challenge was partly motivated by my trying to learn how to use a new GoPro 11 Hero Black with hopes of starting a small personal video series. My last travels before the world closed up shop were here in Greece in October 2019 and on my last day of that trip I trekked to the Hellenic heart of the pre-Christian world.
According to google it said the Acropolis was open until 20h and although almost sure that was not accurate, especially in the dead of winter, I thought I would go there and see what I see. It closed at 17h, 2 minutes before I got to the visitors entrance. But still just to run around beneath it in its lowlands of dirt, dusty scrub and graying marble was enough for my longing heart. I pasted up some of my #fabledcity stuff on an ancient 20th century phone booth and then went on the hunt for street food before getting back on the metro to the airport. I didn’t have time for a proper sit down meal (nor the budget for an over prced tourist spot) and was looking for some sort of fun street food. And boy did I find exactly what I was looking for in the shape of Dirty Manh, a hip stall adjacent the Akropoli metro station.
Transferring at Syntagma Square, I got on the blue line back to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Or so I naively thought. Having shot some content on the new GoPro, I wanted to pat myself on the back for having partly accomplished what I set out to do. Then while nodding my head to the longer awaited Cheat Codes album by Black Thought, I suddenly noticed the train was boomeranging back toward central Athens. What?! Oh I suddenly realised that only about every 4th iteration of the blue line goes all the way to tp the end of the line to the air terminals. More often than not it terminates at a station called Plakentias and then with no warning (at least if you’re not Athenian or have headphones in your ears) quietly starts reverting back on the same track. In a way it was utterly reminiscent of thw well-known pitfalls endemic to New York City’s notorious transit system so I knew I had to run up multiple flights of stairs across an upper floor and scramble down more flights to the other side of the tracks to get back in the right direction until a blue line arrived that was going the full length of the line. So in sum I barely made the next flight to Larnaca. And damn it felt good. The rush, linguistic interpolation, and physicality of my own little challenge was just what I needed. An exercise in mental muscle memory.