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May 10 StrayThe other thing I noticed in Athens was the dogs. Everywhere you go, there they are. Up at the acropolis there were so many they had to be a gang. I called them 'The Acropolis boys' and I believe its hard to gain membership. The site is a good one after all. It offers shade and wide, sunny pavements to sleep on, and lots of people for diversion.
All the dogs are strays, don't be fooled by the collars. They are looked after by an animal charity that makes sure they don't starve, and are neutered. (Apparently the reason there are so many is because Greek men are so precious about their manhood that they can't bear to sterilise their pets!) So the numbers of stray dogs is amazing. They all looked the same type to me too - large dogs, a cross between an alsatian and a retriever - mostly golden in colour. They lie around flaked out on the stonework, oblivious to everyone, and when you see one, there will be another, and more. There were seven I counted in the Acropolis gang.
The thing that amazed me is how sweet natured the dogs are. Their life can't have been easy, yet they were not frightening or aggressive in any way and most seemed well looked after. Only once did that change. I took a coach to the coast one day, and in the middle of a small town the traffic ground to a halt and I looked down out of the window and there, making its way through the cars and coaches was the memory of a dog - a dead dog walking, just a skeleton. Its head hung down, it staggered and seemed not to care about the danger it was in. Maybe it hoped something would put an end to it, I don't know. I wanted to get off the coach and do something. I wondered why the people allowed it to go on. It spoilt my day. It was a far cry from the Acropolis boys.
Here's a bit of a You tube vid. showing some of the dogs, taken by some Americans (yes, that's a disclaimer. I'm kidding ok?)
I didn't see a single act of aggression, or even much barking, and they were everywhere you looked. Really cute beasts, though ithey do have a forlorn look about them. It seems they should be hunting the steppes, tossing snow up into the wind, chasing down prey across the mountains, but here they are, snoozing in the streets of Athens, dreaming of the past. Aristotole with a big juicy bone perhaps. Archimedes with a plate of ham.
I had to post this because I mentioned I would say something about cats and dogs and I wasn't in the mood, but here you are, best get it over with and never commit myself to a definite again!
May 04 No paperI took a short break in Athens a little while ago. I was just in the mood for wandering, as I often have been, over the years. People grow up and they develop their ways. Not all noble, not all the stuff of legend, but all of it part of what life has made us.
Walking the streets of Athens with my i-pod was an interesting experience. It's a modern city of course, yet at the same time its a city surrounded, illuminated and limited by its past - rather like all of us I guess. To walk about in it is to be struck by the burden that the past is. It's something you can't get away from. Even if you build new things there are limits. Boundaries you can't cross, areas you can't get to, and even in the middle of modernity you only have to turn round and there is the past again, looking right over your shoulder. It's hard to know what to do with it.
In Greece, the past is so close you can almost have a consultation with the people who went before, and instead of being remote and strange, there is something about the ruins that is almost contemporary. You can tell these people were really just like us, that nothing has changed, that there were dopes like me wandering around contemplating their own folly in just the same way as now - except I have to wonder if the toilets weren't better back then. I really do.
In Greece you cannot flush paper. You can't. You really cannot flush paper. There's a sign over every toilet asking you not to, and a little bin - not the sort of ladybox-industrial waste-used syringe type of box you might expect either - but a little flip top steel thing like the ones you put your tissues in, with an open top plastic bag for the poor maids to take out every morning. No way! In contrast, if you walk in the gardens below the acropolis you can see the drains the guys there had going all that time ago, and beautiful they are too - branching away east and west beneath the city under great slabs of stone - I bet there was no problem with the Andrex then.
Personally I couldn't bear the thought of my nice room maids who brought a chocolate and a clean towel to my room each evening having to sift through my 'personal-tissue-unwanteds' bearing anything more than a gentle evening pee, so I took to visiting the loos just about anywhere else I could find, which was fine until I hit somewhere where the water was turned off for two days to 'mend the cisterns'.
This experience, including having to wash my hands in bottled lemonade provided by the management was enough to put my system on strike until I reached home again, but what would travel be without such pleasures?
Wherever you go in Athens, you will rub your back on a piece of antiquity. You can have dinner next to a fallen temple with the tower of the four winds looking down on you. You can stroll out - as I did - onto your hotel balcony and look across the road with its insane drivers swerving and honking - to the ruined temple of Zeus just across the other side, and have breakfast looking out of the window and up the hill to the Acropolis while the sun glances off the cats and satellite dishes of the terracotta roofs below.
You can follow the sound of flutes over a long distance, certain that they will lead you back in time to find priestesses dancing behind an olive grove - only to find it is the wind playing beautiful music in the metal piping of a barrier fence. It's that sort of place - like the front and back of a shadow, the past as close as the turning of a page in the wind.
Here's a Youtube tour of some of the main places, to give you an idea if you've not been there:
next time, a word about dogs and cats.
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