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No English, no Piraeus, no Odyssey

In Athens, as I attempted to leave town, I managed to flag down a taxi driver who knew no English. I mean, no English. He didn’t even know the English words for Greek cities. Never heard of Piraeus, which is the port for Athens. For all I know, he had never heard the English word Athens, either.

After I threw my suitcase in his trunk, we lurched around for a few blocks before the full extent of the dilemma was clear.

Wandering Athens, eating well

Among the occasional advantages of advancing age are the opportunities to return to special places, destinations with meanings from the past. I suspect that I look to see what has changed, and usually I have changed the most.

In my first visit to Athens and the Acropolis, images from books, study, and expectations came alive for my wife and me in the early 1980s. Both of us lovers of human history, we soaked up the words from our tour guides and called the visit one of our best trips.

My second tour was at the guiding hand of my art-history-educated daughter, after her graduation from college. That trip I saw through her eyes the wonders of Greek art and culture as she took it all in for the first time. “Dad, this is huge,” she kept saying, explaining yet another unknown to me.

This time, with fewer expectations, I returned to the wonder of the Acropolis, visited the outstanding new Acropolis Museum, then roamed the area around Monastiraki with a goal of relaxing and eating with the locals.