Last night

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We are almost home.
Sunday night we spend our last night in Athens at Monastiraki. On restaurant row. we had been there before.Tonight we sit on the promenade. against the fence. flocks of pedestrians pass by. as we wait for our meal we notice a number of marble plinths and other assorted antiquities lying in a small fenced off area between us and the rail line. We are next to the Agora. In 1913 part of the Agora was ripped up to make way for the railway. So it goes. This is a city so steeped in history that it can aford to have antiquities lying around like a kind of marble dump. The promenade is lined with hawkers peddling their wares. In Europe, footpath hawkers are part of the landscape. Gucci sunglasses and Prada bags at warehouse prices. I decide to buy some presents from a hawker. I bargain with him. i get carried away with the bargaining and talk him down to a very low price. afterwards i feel guilty and want to give him some money back. But he has gone.
Liz and i walk home. it is a silent walk. Before we go to bed we sit on the balcony for more than an hour gazing mostly at the ACROPOLIS. Silently, with our thoughts. Liz doesn't want to come home.
Counting the trip to sydney we have been away for 58 days. It has been an extraordinary time.
over the past couple of days I've been trying to put the experience into some kind of coherent form but i only get flashes of insight. Strange synergies. Ajax one of the heroes of the Trojan war was the first king of Salamis. Aeschylus, the first of the great Athenian dramatists was born there. He fought at the battle in 479bc. Sophocles his successor was also born there and helped organise the victory celebrations. And Euripides the third great athenian dramatist was also born there ON THE DAY OF THE BATTLE IN 479 BC.
Our journey has been the most significant experience for us outside of our relationship and our family. Yet for each of the people we have met here, our contact has been in most cases the most fleeting of meetings. For us it is the great adventure. For most of the rest of the world we are a tiny blip on the radar of their daily lives. And this is our fate that awaits us when we return. When we return we will slip back into normality, albeit with an absolute commitment to travel more starting with Kakadu and Broome.
It's a cliche i know but we only know about extraordinary experiences because we experience the ordinary. The ordinary allows us to contrast it with the extraordinary. I'm not sure whether it was WC Fields or Dean Martin who said it must be terrible to go to bed knowing that when you woke up that was the best you were going to feel all day. He has a point although i don't think it's an absolute winning arfgument in favour of alcoholism.
Raymond williams wrote that Culture is ordinary. It is our daily lives which provides us with the "meat and gravy" for our existence. While i've been concentrating on the big events Liz has been savouring the minutiae, the day to day items from antiquity. We forget that for every Marathon and Salamis ordinary people lived their lives, had families, did their work and got on with their lives. And so it is with the people we have met. If you count trains and museums and airports they number in the the tens of thousands. They, many of them, have had profound impact upon our experience. But the train driver who takes us to the Acropolis has 10 more trips to do that day and he has a morgage and his kids are giving him a hard time and his football team lost at the weekend.
We are exceptionally privileged to have had the opportunity to have this experience. The great majority of the world won't have that opportunity.

For what it's worth here are some likes and dislikes

Won't miss
SMOKING
SMOKING
SMOKING
public toilets
packing and loadng bags most mornings
carrying our shoulder bags with valuables in them


what we will miss
The people
the places
the experiences
the magic moments that jumped out at us.
difference
france, italy, turkey and particularly greece.

finally,
this blog has been a wonderful tool for me in particular to reflect on the trip. i hope that this reflection has provided some insight into the wonderful experience that we have shared.
Liz has copious diary notes so she can fill in the blanks. 😊

see you soon.

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Comments

[Michelle]

The End
A suitably poignant and sentimental final blog :) It's wonderful to see that this will be a stepping stone to further travel and exploration. Once you've got the bug.... It'll be nice to see you home :) But you know that Europe and all the other parts of the world you want to explore aren't going anywhere, you just got to lock them in and they'll be waiting to play host. See you soon!