Our travel plans for the day consisted of taking a train from Rome to the airport, catching a flight to Athens, a nine hour layover (during which we would explore the city for a few hours), and then ferrying overnight to Crete.  For me, the most noticeable transition between Italy and Greece was the language difference.  I’m not at all fluent in Italian, but Italian being one of the Romance languages I was surprised how easy it was to pick up the general idea of what someone was saying, even if I couldn’t understand word for word.  Similarly, I could read enough Italian to get where I wanted to go and pronounce enough to say “thank you” and order food without much difficulty.

In Greece, it was the complete opposite.  Without obvious social cues it was almost impossible to understand speech.  As for reading, there are different ways of writing Greek.  There are the Greek characters, and then there is the English transliteration.  Even the English version was very difficult to pronounce.  Being so different, I was surprised how hard it was to even remember phrases.  I don’t think I was able to remember how to say “thank you” for longer than 15 minutes.

 

Athens itself was less than impressive.  Granted, my negative impression may have partially been due to the icy wind and threatening rainclouds, but I’m glad a whole day wasn’t spent in Athens.  Also, one has to factor in the economic difficulties Greece is currently undergoing.  Even though it was offseason for tourists, the city was very dirty in comparison to others, especially Venice.  After our first Greek lunch we only had time to visit one major site, but we found the Parthenon was both closed and covered in scaffolding.  However, the top of Philopappou Hill gave us a fantastic view for miles around the city.

Some of the best memories from Athens were of the countless stray dogs throughout the city.  I expected them to be somewhat unfriendly and constantly attempting to steal food, but this wasn’t the case.  All you had to do was treat them nicely – pet and sit with them for a while – and they would follow you around like guards, barking at and scaring off the aggressive beggars and street vendors that would try to approach you.  Then, at the end of their territory, they would nudge you one last time as if to say “bye” and sadly watch you walk away.

 

As darkness started to cover Athens, we arrived at our ferry and boarded for the nine hour ride to the last destination of spring break:  Crete!

 

 

Missed an earlier part?  Look at Part I or Part II

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