Greece

January has been a good month so far. Plenty of travelling as most bankers are just returning from vacations, so work has been generally on the lull. So, finally have been finding time to resume my travels.

R, who has finished lazing around after that 2 year vacation called the MBA, has now started her consulting assignments. Latest one being in Greece, where R is currently frauding some unsuspecting enterprise of millions of pounds :-) - reminds me of Warren Buffet’s opening letter in the 2005 Berkshire Hathway Annual Report – well, I promised never to bring the investment banking world to this blog – so suffice to say it was something about how consultants, bankers and the rest of the ‘helper’ class are generally upto no good :-) and should be cleansed from the system. Interesting write-up, but cause of much controversy as BH owns significant stakes in several of the ‘helper’ companies and shareholders were not pleased! Anyways, coming back to R, we realised that despite 23 years of speaking almost every day with each other, we had never done any travel together….So, we decided to make the most of R’s client and planned a quick weekend trip to Greece. S, our dear friend, with whom we did our last trip to Italy together is in Philly, still enjoying the 2 year holiday in Wharton and was sorely missed :-) Ok, so were B, Sm and A before you start complaining :-)) Gaah...Women!!!

I find exploring places with friends/ family to be quite a different experience from visitng places alone. For one, the nights are longer – unless you want to experiment in potentially interesting ways ;-) But despite being unmoulded generally, years of living in Bombay have made me quite uptight about dealing with the fishy category (‘Machlis’ as R refers to the lot :-) ), enough experiences in the past have done their bit to ward me off late night ventures. Second, the sense of connection with a place appears to be much stronger when one is exploring in isolation. A completely free enjoyment - perhaps silence and company of one’s thoughts makes the not so obvious stand out. Third, if you are an arty museum geek like I am, you can spend days standing and staring at paintings without any feeling of guilt :-) Having said that, the truly wonderful thing about travelling with someone is that the trip is always associated with the someone and adds on beautifully to the repertoire of many wonderful shared memories.

Anyways, our Greek friends (a total of 2) and lonely planet recommended a maximum of a day's stay at Athens, so we decided to spend the next day exploring some of the other Greek islands. As they say, Greece is really about the Acropolis and the islands. The country has been invaded so many times by the Romans, the Turks etc that very little of their rich heritage has been preserved. The Acropolis is quite spectacular, it is one of the things to knock off on the list of things to see, but much of the architecture is in ruins. The Partheon had to be reconstructed several times over to restore its beauty. The Acropolis is constructed on top of a hill and can be viewed from most parts of Athens, at night it is spectacularly lit up and really stands out as a beautiful monument.

Athens as a city is quite well constructed – wide roads resulting into shocking speeds of automobiles (R and I have miraculously escaped seeing our ends on foreign soil – several times over. With our constant chatter and consequent absent mindedness of the existence and purpose of traffic lights, we have only slightly missed instant death!). But it is far from being comparable to the richness of Rome, for eg, another city wih equally rich heritage, but the Italians have done a great job of preserving their past.

Streets in Athens are covered with orange trees, its quite pretty to see little trees full of oranges all over the city. Vegetarians would find it really tough, very few non-Europeans live here and hence an Italian restaurant would be your best bet to a good meal, unless of course, you fancy the Greek salad with tons of Feta cheese as your staple diet :-). The population is predominantly Greek orthodox, the Roman and Turkish invasions have not resulted into any sizeable Roman Catholic or Muslim population. But eastern influences are seen in many of the Greek artwork – vibrant red and blue colors with Arabic designs in the porcelain ware, handicrafts, shawls and other artwork which are sold in every little street tourist shop.

The other interesting thing was the Greek alphabets. We are all familiar with the many Greek alphabets from school math days – the alpha, beta, gamma, lambda, pie, epsilon, sigmas and the rest – but memory has always placed each of these alphabets individually. Seeing it come together in words was quite bizarre to the eye :-). Learnt that the first letter of these words is indeed how the alphabet is spelt ie A in Greek is written as alpha, beta stands for B, sigma for S, pie for p and so on. Quite amusing.

One thing that has to be mentioned is the Greek male obsession with leather jackets!!! Every alternate man on the street has the trademark leather jacket on. The female equivalent of this is fur. Greek women apparently love having a little fur stitched onto their overcoats, many times its just fur all the way. And a significant portion of the people are constantly seen with ciggies in their mouth – apparently smoking is permissible even in offices, let alone public places. Cabbies don’t think twice about lighting up even when they are driving you, most times they are happy to offer a smoke to you as well.

Day 2 was spent in a cruise to one of the Greek islands Hydra. A very pretty little town. R and me decided to get to our adventurous best and huffed and puffed our way up to the top of the mountain which constitutes this island. We were rewarded with a spectacular view of the sea from the top, v panoramic. But the island was filled with atleast a gazillion cats!!!! I have never seen so many cats together at one place ever – of all shapes, sizes and colors. R, who is a cat lover since time immemorial was at most times walking around like pied piper with a stream of cats in tow behind. Lonely planet had mentioned sad-eyed cats in the Acropolis (though the one R petted was far from being sad eyed and left R with a nice scratch to show for affection!), but this was an island where there were more cats, sad-eyed or otherwise than people!!

And yes, for that one person who was enquiring (you know who you are), didnt meet any Greek Gods :-) Atleast, none yet...

Anyways, that was the end of one quick Greece visit. Off to Amsterdam next week, let see what the Dutch are like! Some pics below.....

Snapshot of Hydra



The Plaka - a pretty little street near the Acropolis



The Acropolis - as seen from the city



The Acropolis - close up of the Partheon