Athens: getting my sea legs

I feel like I have been on a boat ever since arriving in Athens. I found my hotel on a pedestrian side street in the dark after 48+ hours of travel, but I have been lost ever since. Right out the door of the hotel, I followed the next”street”up three flights of stairs. Many of the streets are stairwells lined with potted plants and all the rest of the streets climb or fall with the hills underfoot. There is also a time warp. Today at the Acropolis museum all the floors were glass exposing the archeological dig below. It is one thing to know that ancient people lived and died in the place you now tread but in Athens that history keeps breaking through the surface.

Whether the accuracy of marble statutes or whether time is nonlinear, I get the sense much is still happening and I am strolling through the layers of time.

There have been so many temples in this city it is easier to make note of whose missing. Hera, Zeus’ wife was vilified in most myths, but widely worshipped among women hoping for good marriages. Maybe there was a temple for her in the old city I just missed, since most temples in that section are squares of rubble recognizable only by the signage. Poseidon is also missing. Myths tell us that he and Athena fought over the city. Poseidon lost, big time it seems.

On the other hand the sheer massiveness of the Parthenon and Zeus temples are mind blowing. It’s one thing to believe the gods will help you, but to honor them with temples that they require decades to rebuild with modern equipment when the original builders were in the Bronze Age living in houses of stacked stone is a remarkable leap of faith.

The sense of time warp is only exacerbated by the cats. They are guarding every temple, graveyard and ruin with those crazy eyes that see only one time. Did ancient gods leave them here to hold down the fort or act as spies? I know: they are acting as unregistered foreign agents for the aliens that were powerful enough to put the “fear of god” in primitive people inspiring them to build such incomprehensible edifices.