I went on a five-and-a-half-hour food tour of central Athens and need to process it all in the next day or so. In the meantime, please accept my favorite unrelated image from today's walk, in which my camera aperture met a bodiless kiosk vendor suspended in an aperture of his own, in the scrappy Omonia neighborhood. I have since returned to Omonia, and it has an undeniable energy not easily reproduced in this mostly laid-back metropolis.
In one of his letters, Freud describes a trip to Athens with his brother. Upon seeing the Holy Rock he said he remembered thinking, "So this all really does exist, just as we learned in school!" He went on to explain that he never disbelieved the existence of the Acropolis, but that he did doubt he would ever see it in person. "There was something dubious and unreal about the situation." Sing it, my man. At least twice on this trip I have turned to a stranger and said, "I can't believe I'm here." There is a shared exuberance on the hilltop. People skip with joy, handing their phones to strangers, hoping for a perfectly framed photo. Often, the picture-taker will return the request: "Now do me!" I noticed a similar giddiness among visitors at the Baalbek ruins. Maybe it has to do with the colossal nature of these monuments. They are not relatable on a human scale, leaving us a bit dizzy. There are many ways to attack Acropolis Hill, bu...
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