Day 25. Cairo.

I am watching Looney Tunes in Cairo. One of those "best-laid plans" situations- I got a phone call, in my cab, from my carefully-researched pension, telling me I was staying somewhere else tonight, and moving tomorrow. I'm not sure why- I was struggling with my cab driver's bluetooth thingy- but, when you get cab phone calls of this nature, really, you just go with it. Plans of an evening to re-group, do laundry, catch up on correspondence- on hold. This place is super sketchy. The streets around me are pitch black at 6 pm, and I'm looking at the back side of a giant row of billboards onto a superhighway. Thank heavens I have earplugs. I made it as far as the corner store for water, and some kind of sweet flaky unidentifiable bread. I am a relatively bold traveler, but striking out from this particular locale, in the dark, is a Bad Idea.

The great news? I have 378 channels. What are the odds, really, in a place that doesn't have a sign on the street? I mean, faucets are dripping and I just heard an epic catfight, actual caterwauling, from the airshaft below me, and it's a "provide your own towel" kind of place. Again I say, 378 channels. Now, I wasn't born yesterday, and I know that even in a foreign language, 300 of those channels will have nothing decent on. But still- I am simultaneously watching Looney Toons, and the Simpsons Movie, and old Bradley Cooper/Jennifer Garner movie, and about 6 soccer games. I have BBC, CNN, and an Arabic MTV, where fully-covered women are doing solid-gold dances. I have both Nickelodeon, and Al Jazeera Child, which looks like a version of the Muppetts. Al Jazeera itself has just done what can only be described as a loving and sentimental tribute, in English, to the New Orleans Saints and the passion behind their Super Bowl win. I have TV Korea, TV Jordan, TV Saudi. And I'm not making fun, really, but so far there are 3 channels of camels.

I feel sure there's a B-movie or two in my future*- our most mediocre films, the kinds featuring Vin Diesel or the Rock, seem to be showing up a lot here. But tomorrow: Pyramids, Memphis, Saqqara. More soon!


*addendum to this post, immediately after writing I flipped to a Billy Baldwin movie. But I settled on Once Upon A Time in Mexico, because who doesn't love a good shoot-out involving Johnny Depp and Antonio Banderas?

Day 24. Last in Athens. Overuse of the word "lovely."

5:15 am arrival in Athens; harrowing dreamlike trip back to hotel on 3 trains, one bus; total 1 hour and 45 sleep-deprived minutes, including a 20-minute walk through the dark Port of Piraeus. And now:

Lovely lovely hotel let me check in at dawn. Sleep till 1:30 pm. Lovely lovely rainy snack and Greek coffee in the Plaka. Later, lovely lovely fish dinner with Kristen H's lovely lovely Greek friend Ellie. Lovely lovely evening channel-flipping in my hotel. Hair clean. Clothes clean. Legs shaved. Packed for Cairo. All is well.

Day 23: Labyrinth.

I am pretty seriously amused right now. I have just toured the Palace of Knossos- home of the ancient Minoan civilization, on the island of Crete. We studied this place in school, with it's off-kilter upside-down columnst and lustral basins and ridiculously intricate floor plan. For some reason, as I was paring down my list of must-sees along the way, I just couldn't drop this one off, as long as it was within striking distance of Athens.

"Striking distance" is actually a bit of a stretch, depending on your definition. Because of the off-season ferry schedules, there was no painless way to get here and back, so I've committed myself to two consecutive overnight ferries. Arriving here in the dark at 6 am. Returning tomorrow to Athens at 5 am, doubly painful because the subway doesn't run until 5:50, and my hotel check-in is at 2. So, this was work. I figured that when a boat big enough to have goth a swimming pool and a night club comes ashore at dawn, someone would have coffee brewing somewhere- not exactly. Because I am just that smart, I also managed to store my Heraklion map in my luggage, locked up at the hotel in Athens. So, having no better option, I went with the "walk uphill" tactic hoping to find something promising in the dark. Other than a stand serving french fries (??) to cab drivers, the streets were dark.

6 am dark, though, isn't as scary as, say, 1 am dark. For starters, you know the sun will eventually come up; also, it's not like there are drunkies stumbling out of bars around you or something. Wrong again: 6 am and the music is still thumping, and bouncers are still camped out in their doorways from last night. Two women, I'd say early 50's, sail out into the street dressed as pirates. Thankfully, about 15 minutes uphill in the dark, there were signs of life- coffee and a 24/7 internet cafe, full of adolescent gamers before dawn. Good place to pull up a map, at least, and watch the sun come up.

All that aside, I made it to the Palace. Frankly, it's mostly rubble. You can at least trace the massive web of foundations around this giant complex. The most fun, though, is the re-invented areas. I'd say "re-constructed" or "preserved" but those are pretty far off the mark. At some point in time, a guy from Oxford got involved with this place and gained permission to excavate. In his day I don't think his methods raised any eyebrows, but by our standards of historic preservation, he took some giant liberties. Because the crumbling sparkly gypsum foundations were so badly weathered, he thought concrete reinforcement might be a good idea. He pieced together some rooms here, some corners there, with a good dose of both imagination and European flair. He painted things. He built things. He detailed faux wood grain in paint on the concrete beams, for effect. He vividly described "lustral basins" as sacred ritual pools, although there's no evidence they actually held water. He named one reconstruction the "Piano Nobile," as if this were a Venetian Palazzo. He conjectured "tri-columnar shrines" and made up all kinds of purposes for rooms, which he lovingly re-imaged with a combination of original stone, concrete, and liberal paint. It's as if a 12-year old were given a set of legos and an hour, and you said, "GO! See what this might have been."

And it is, after all, really interesting. Seeing it in person, I think this man was at least a little nutty, if not downright Quixotic, but his handprint is everywhere, and you can't help but like him. The bright colors do bring the place to life, a little, and lustral basins seem as plausible an explanation as any other, and who's to say that wasn't a throne room, after all? In some places, sure, he was way off (faux wood-grain concrete, for example) but he did make some sound educated guesses about Minoan architecture and culture. At some point I went from, "Hmm, interesting foundation patterns," to "this guy is a combination of Indiana Jones and the Mad Hatter and Walt Disney." It's worth a trip.

The real reason I came, I confess, wasn't for the Palace at all. It was for the myth of King Minos and the Minotaur, because I am seriously just a big kid. I know, academically, that there wasn't really a labyrinth here, if "here" is actually the origin of that story as rumored. If you look at a floor plan, you'd just have to describe it as "labyrinthine," because that's just how those cagey Minoans built. Probably it did keep people from barging into the king's throne room, as there's no direct way to get anywhere. Even so. I wanted to see the seeds of that story, and traipse around the labyrinth. And I did. I feel a little like I did when I went to Loch Ness years ago, and tried really, really hard to see the Loch Ness Monster. And I'd do it again today. I know. Unlikely on every level. To try and spot one of these mythical creatures defies all logic- but really, deep down, don't you want to believe that you could?

Day 22. Acropolis. Contains both ranting, and gushing, about architecture.

Woke up to another gorgeous day- perfect Acropolis weather, cool and sunny. Surprisingly, it's a very short hike to the top, for all the talk about the importance of the processional route. I was kind of expecting an epic journey. The Acropolis was good; it's really a huge construction site, with a multi-decade restoration in progress. It's not really a "Look out for the wrath of the gods!" experience, so much as a "Look out, here comes that guy with the bobcat again!" situation. I have lost count of the major monuments I've visited shrouded in scaffolding- so it's really no big deal. I can't tell how extensive this restoration is- it looks like they're inserting placeholder stones, so I don't know whether they're just rebuilding key spots, or rebuilding major sections? The Parthenon, more than anything else, is in ruins because the in the 1600s it was occupied by the Ottoman Turks, who used it for munitions storage. It was hit by a bomb from below and the munitions exploded, causing the major damage we see today. There's a big historical lesson embedded in here somewhere....

More impressive than the Parthenon to me, though, is the Erectheion. There is something so graceful about the way it negotiates the change in grade and changes each face to accommodate a different function. I love the famous caryatid porch, although all the original caryatids are down the hill in the museum. It's tiny, compared to the Parthenon, but really lovely. The temple of Athena Nike is completelyenclosed in construction, so I didn't see that. The Propylaea was pretty cool- as intended, I was so dazed winding up the stairs and seeing the full framed view of the Parthenon that I kind of missed it, and had to go back in and look for the transition points, and the way it re-orients you and captures the view after climbing the hill.. Spent a couple of hours up there and came down to re-group and find food- fiercely hungry. I needed to re-energize before tackling the museum.

I also needed to come down and adjust my attitude, as I was by this point irritated with people at major world monuments on cell phones, and general crowd behavior. "People," as Seinfeld says. "They're the worst." I've somehow managed to stay out of sync here; show up at Hadrian's Library and the Ancient Agora, only to be turned away because they close at 2:30. (Why?? Why 2:30??) No problem- hike to the temple of Olympic Zeuss- sorry, we closed at 3. Meanwhile, I was also working up to a pretty good architecture rant, some of which I'll re-create here, as it relates to the view in all directions for miles and miles from the Acropolis. Athens, apart from the ancient monuments and the really lovely pedestrian Plaka at its feet, is egregiously unlovely. My friend Jessica R, correct in this as in all other things, had told me that a day in Athens itself would be plenty. To be sure, some of the wonders of the ancient world are here- the Acropolis alone was reason enough to make this a non-negotiable stop. But outside the historic district- offensively bad 60's brutalism, concrete buildings ringed in shabby motel-style porches and walkways, or struggling to support crumbling faux-Corb bris-soleils. From the Acropolis to the Port of Piraeus, which I've traversed twice, is about a 10 mile avenue lined with strip clubs and car dealerships, interspersed with mottled concrete messes of multi-story something-or-other. To further put it in perspective, the fabric out past the old city is more or less on an architectural par with Jakarta. At first I registered all this as anger, but I realized today it's more architectural despair- because if ATHENS, birthplace of so much in terms of democracy and philosophy and culture that we hold dear, can let this happen, then what does that mean for the rest of us? If the primary avenue from the ancient Acropolis to your major maritime port of entry into the city, for crying out loud, has deteriorated into a XXX version of Raleigh's Capital Boulevard, what hope does, say, Cary have? or my beloved Raleigh, or really, Anytown, USA? Where were the designers when this happened, or the historians and preservationists, or even the neighbors? NOBODY looked at this atrocious concrete mess at the foot of the Acropolis and said, "We can do better?" This is all so depressing.

Rant complete, and it's not entirely a fair one, for sure, but this was my frame of mind as I grumbled off from all the closed monuments and approached the New Acropolis Museum. At which point my attitude underwent a radical reversal.

The Museum. It looks modern from the outside- and yet, not jarringly so. You come down a set of stairs from the street, only to look down and discover you're standing on glass floor panels. This whole museum is built atop ancient archeological digs, and built so you can peer down into them and watch people work. Parts of the excavations, sheltered by a large overhang, are wide open. The digs are about 20' below you, so it's a tiny bit dizzying- but the glass is printed with small black dots, for traction and visual orientation.

Upward into the museum- you pass through a ticket gate and onto a gentle, wide, sloping pathway, like the climb to the Acropolis itself. More archeological sites underfoot. As you climb you see a giant pediment come into focus on the floor above, orienting you to the hall of statues. Halls of statues, actually, usually make my eyes glaze over pretty quickly- other then a few standout masterpieces, I have a hard time breathing much life into them. These are really elegantly displayed, though. Many of them are fragments, so they're sometimes pieced together with plaster inserts, or held in proper alignment, with the negative space left to your imagination, with stainless steel supports. A fragment of a capital, for example, is displayed on a fan of stainless steel bars- implying, but not replicating, the missing fluted column on which it sat.

More loveliness- the east and west sides of the gallery are shaded with a gentle screen. The statues are deliberately displayed in daylight, as intended by their creators. The screen, though, cuts down on the glare, and- even better- abstracts the decidedly unlovely fabric of contemporary Athens into a dynamic silhouette. In this light, even the rows of satellilte dishes and bris-soleils look like a united, coherent urban fabric; a modern chapter of this continual city.

Top floor: flawless. You step off the escalator onto the Parthenon level, where freizes and sculptures are displayed around the perimeter. It is so subtle at first that it takes a minute to register- these sculptures are in their exact positions around the gallery, which itself abstracts the marble columns in slender stainless steel, but maintains the proportions of the Parthenon perfectly. As you walk around the gallery, you get frequent glimpses of the actual Parthenon, just out the window and about 200 yards uphill. You also realize that, at some point since your entry, the museum has made a subtle transition to align itself perfectly with the orientation of the original, so you can compare each piece visually with its location on the hill. Then, my favorite detail- you step out into the center of the top floor gallery, onto more glass panels. Here you look straight down, through the strolling visitors on the lower two floors, and back down into the archaeological digs, 80' or so below. Simple but unmistakeable metaphor: looking from your current spot, back through layers and layers of history. Nice? Very nice. Hope renewed. Faith restored.

Note to the British Museum: Athens wants its marbles back - and their place is much nicer than yours. Lord Elgin was wrong. Cough 'em up. It's time.