Excuse me miss, have you seen the Acropolis?

One of my favorite columns in any newspaper is the "36 Hours in X awesome place" in the New York Times. This column appears every now and again and gives a sample, 36 hour itinerary in some interesting place where I usually want to travel. The column describes museums, food, and nightlife.

This week's column is about the fair concrete city of Athens: http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/travel/04hours.html

When I was a wee one still in college, I spent a semester in the Mediterranean. As this was months after the attacks on the US in September, 2001, our college was rightly skittish about sending a pack of twenty year olds anywhere that might have been a hot zone. And so we stayed out of Egypt, Israel and the West Bank, away from the protesting Italians, and for most of the term, out of Turkey as well. Athens, our intended jumping off point for exploring the Mediterranean became our home for four months.

Scooters, strong coffee, and gyros were the name of the game. Yet the predominant idea and image that comes to mind when I think of Athens is that of stone. There are remains of the classical world--the Acropolis and her queen the Parthenon, theatres, and monuments all over the place. But even stronger than the stone monuments of Athens is the cultural heritage of Greece. From Alexander the Great to Greek Orthodoxy, the collective memory of Greece is a monument itself. This memory, and the laws of Greece, which state that being Greek is synonymous with being Greek Orthodox, create an interesting expression of what is and what is not Greek. It's a bewitching place, with bewitching religiosity, history and mythology.