4/7/25 to 4/15/25 – Athens and Rhodes, Greece; Niort, France
Crew – My Mother (for half the trip) and I
“Niort is very much a French part of France” – Nina.
I’ve been running this blog for a hell of a lot longer than I expected to at this point. Like honestly I started it 6 years now and I’m still writing. I expected it to fizzle out like most of my hobbies but I’m pleasantly proud of where it is now!
Sitting at about 218 pages of text if you don’t include pictures, and is large enough that I have to use a bunch of spreadsheets to keep track of what I want to talk about and if I’ve talked about it before. Set it up while stuck during a particularly long layover.
This trip came about by per usual trick of tricking friends into letting me visit them and stay at their place. I’m very similar to a vampire in that require. If you give me express permission I will visit and you will probably regret it. And my friend Nina from High School, was teaching English out in France for about 2/3rds of a year and decided to ask me if I wanted to visit.
It took me about 30 seconds to decide about that offer, with 28 of those seconds be due to figuring out my credit card and then throwing it at United Airlines as fast as possible.
I’ll talk more about Nina in a bit, but she let me crash her place at Brown once too about two years back and seemingly hadn’t learned her lesson.
Turns out though, that my mother was going to be in Turkey and then Greece around the window I was trying to visit Nina. And the original window needed to move because I accidentally booked it on top of a camping trip with some friends (Yeah yeah my calendar really needs to be kept up to date). So the plan became I go visit Greece with my mother for a few days and then go visit Nina in France afterward! That way I pay for exactly zero hotels along the route as well as a few other things
Greece
On the list of countries that I really expected to have visited by now is Greece. A trip to visit had gotten delayed or cancelled on two separate occasions and as someone who obsessively read every single Percy Jackson book of the first series multiple times I was going to be interested in this country.
The first place we saw was Athens, the capital of Greece, the Birthplace of Democracy, and the original hub of Western philosophy. Not a bad title.
Athens well, anyone reading this knows what Athens is known for, but we got to see it! Which is cool!
The Acropolis at the top of the city was pretty easy to get into. And gives you a crazy view of Athens. Athens, according to our taxi driver, had a law saying that all buildings need to be shorter than a certain height, so you can see the Acropolis from any point in the city.
The Acropolis (meaning citadel), had several structures inside of it. Most famous is the Parthenon: a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena (kinda given away by the city’s name). It remains in ok shape after two and a half millennia. Most sources have the construction of it around the fifth century BC. The other buildings include a theater of Dionysus, the Temple of Athena Nike, and about two dozen other structures. [https://web.archive.org/web/20191024154934/http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/3/eh351.jsp?obj_id=2384]
The earliest settlement would have probably been around the 6th millennia BC, the earliest artifacts come from closer to the 3rd millennia BC. We also know there was a Bronze age palace and archaic era acropolis in the same location that predates the one that still stands.
Even after the fall of the Greek religion it remained in alright shape, the Christians converted it into a church and while they punched out some priceless wall statues to make room fro windows and doors, it still was relatively together.
… And then the Venetians decided to store gunpowder in it during a siege in the Enlightenment period, and a stray cannonball during one of the wars hit the stores and detonated it. Promptly turning it into the ruin of today.
Near it they have a very modern museum, build in the last decade or so with various artifacts. More than that though the space is very open and well-designed: Construction models, 3D renderings, and plaster copies that have been painted to show how the statues would have once looked. Common misconception but Greek and Roman statues were generally painted, the paint has just worn away and we assume that the bare marble was the original state.
The museum is also not in the slightest bit subtle about its opinion of other Western museums. Largely the British Museum. To try and summarize a very complex issue very quickly, when the British archaeologists showed up in vaguely the world, they took a wide variety of artifacts back to the British Museum in London. Many of those countries now want them back. But the Greek museum takes it a step further. One exhibit has five Greek pillars, a sixth with only spotlights, and an empty pedestal where the sixth one should be.
Every missing piece of a larger scope has a little marker saying what the museum currently has instead of it, and there were even some videos explaining with visual aids how the British physically chipped at their ancient ruins and stole their stuff.
(The Louvre and Smithsonian, I should point out, are not exactly free of blame here either. In fact, they’re probably thankful the British Museum takes all the flak for this one.)
Changing topics, being a Mediterranean country there were cats EVERYWHERE. All the adorable kitties on sidewalks and looking down at you from windowsills. Often not really looking for food either, just curious.
I mean I’m biased towards this as I did get a cat a few weeks back. I tried to cram talking about this more and the SPCA into here but made the post too long. One of those weird things I imagined I would have talked about now. So maybe next post.
Unsurprisingly Greece is one of those countries where there’s so many ruins some of them just basically get a fence and placard saying “This temple was built in 300 BC” and they call it good to go. If you too like staring at marble rubble you’ll love the place. I just kept walking around seeing different ones.
Also did by on my own at the temple of Hephestus because I would like a promotion, and raise, and needed to make sure I passed the CA seismic exam. Best to be sure about these things.
Rhodes is the original site of the Colossus of Rhodes, a 100-foot-tall bronze statue of Helios welcoming visitors to the city. It was even made one of the seven ancient wonders. Didn’t last particularly long; however, it was brought down because of an earthquake, probably only 60 years after construction was completed. It ended up being sold a century later.1
Of the other it’s a whole skew, I asked Nick and Luca, my resident archaeology and ancient history nerds (who both have degrees in it), they both gave me the look of “You asked for it” before diving into a whole tangent on it.
Much like the natural and main wonders of the world, there’s seven. And of the seven only one still stands, the Pyramids, ironically the oldest (by a long shot). Of the remaining six we have five that we know existed and one that we think existed, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Of those five, many of them lasted until the enlightenment and later so that makes it easy.
To go chronologically, the Temple of Artemis in Greece is destroyed permanently in the 3rd century AD. The statue of Zeus in Olympia was destroyed in the 6th century AD. The lighthouse of Alexandria went down by Earthquake somewhere in the 14th century. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was destroyed somewhere in the 12th-15th century range.
The colossus is an exception as it was gone long before (226 BC) then BUT the merchants recording it every time someone sailed into the harbor in basically their travel blogs plus its sale makes us pretty confident it did really exist. But other details like “Where it actually” stood we have truly no idea.
Overall many of the details about the ancient wonders have mysterious historical questions that have been lost to antiquity. Adds to the legend in my opinion.
Rhodes, besides the ruin,s is unsurprisingly great. It was the tourism off-season which was honestly really nice. The crowds weren’t really present and the temperature was reasonable. The only downside was that a bunch of the restaurants weren’t open but I’m not enough of a foodie for that to be a genuine downside.
If you do live under a travel rock all the Greek islands are incredibly popular and well-liked due to their beautiful water, old cobblestone towns, and generally relaxing vibes. If anything I didn’t get a lot of the relaxation as I was only in town for one day but the rest is very true. There’s no denying compared to Phoenix what an actually beautiful and quiet town looks like.
You can’t go wrong with any of the islands. Some are much bigger than others and many have reputations: Ex. party life, historical, quietest, most authentic, etc. Plenty of guides on the internet going over which ones are known for what2
France
Nina is overall patient, quiet, well-spoken, and a cultured human. Making her approximately the literal opposite of my existence on this Earth. Plus she let me crash her at Brown 2 years ago (That story is here) and somehow never learned her lesson after that experience.
She was out in France teaching English at a nearby public school. Very similar to most English teaching programs where you get subsidized housing and spend a year teaching classes. Nina was assigned High schoolers, and some of her friends got elementary schools.
Getting to her actually proved to be a bit of a nightmare. She isn’t particularly near an airport so the best option was to fly into Paris and then take a train. But Rhodes to Paris doesn’t exist. So I had to take a flight from Rhodes to Athens, Athens to Paris, then catch a train. In one day. Which looking back was a bit bold.
And I was proven to be a bit optimistic when I fucked up getting my bag off a flight and then whiffed the connection to Paris. So instead I had to spend an extra night in Paris. Which sucked. To say I was pissed would be putting it nicely lol since I had plans to go out with Nina and her friends that night. Plus I got into Paris at like 11 pm so I didn’t actually see Paris lol. And couldn’t find food.
But at 7 a.m. the next day, I made it onto my train with not a lot of time to spare, knocked myself out for 2 hours as it made its way out of Paris and into Southern France, and then ran into Nina!
(You would think I would’ve learned my lesson but it was absurdly cheaper to buy your ticket at the station, like 70 euros cheaper, and the console only had a French option to a French station and the helper person was unhelpful. Also, I’d never been to the train hub before. Wooh once again REALLY relying on a lot of things to go well in a row).
But bitching aside I made it to her town and she met me at the bus stop so we got to catch up while walking over to her apartment. Afterwards, we had an afternoon to kill so she dragged me to the medieval dungeon they just kept in the middle of the town (casual small French city things). Went thrift shopping, a bookstore, and went to a coffee shop she liked. As I said Nina has always been a more refined person than me.
Luckily, alcohol can corrupt anything, and I met four of her friends at the apartment that quickly turned into six, but what they wanted out of me was gossip about her. Which I mean, I’m more than happy to give out. She had been in the last seven months really quiet about her personal life back home so I just had to do the important and noble thing and make sure everyone was aligned on the current progress of her life.
After a few pointed questions, inferences, and pantomimed motions, plus killing every half-drunk wine bottle in sight, the group was hollering at her. Credit to Nina for being a good sport and actually coughing up info as well. And for her friends who, despite having English not as their first language, knew multiple NSFW innuendos.
(and when they went upstairs to get ready to go out apologized to her while she was making dinner to make sure I wasn’t promptly kicked out of her apartment and sleeping on the street).
Plus, we convinced them to go to the club since we were wine drunk and that was a blast. Conversation descended into three languages, we got drunk enough and I felt very inadequate about the whole “I only speak English well” thing. Calling it a club is a little inaccurate, much closer to a rowdy bar but you had to fight to get to the front of the line at the counter to buy bottles of wine for the table.
(Buying bottles of wine for a table is weird. I’m not opposed to it in any way, but that’s a genuine fun quirk of drinking outside the US.)
The next day we went to La Rochelle: a coastal city. Lots of French folks on bikes and some cute donkeys. They in the olden days were used in the salt mines, one of the city’s big exports, and are both larger than your average donkey and quite fluffy. Also wore pants when working. These days they’re just kept around hanging out and for tourism but they’re sweet.
Niort also has the absolutely phenomenal main myth of a dragon just coming into the town and killing people during medieval times. Eventually, a knight rode out to kill it and slayed it, but with its final breath, the dragon fried the Niort . So both went down in legend, and they now just have statues of knights and mainly dragons everywhere.
(When I first heard the story, I went “Wow, that’s so similar to the Grishaverse story of St. Juris”3 and then realized that’s stupid, of course she got her inspiration from European stories, albeit largely Eastern Europe. Of course, plenty of cities have similar myths. Pretty common). Also, Nina was the person who got me into Shadow and Bone when I was a senior in High School, which seems like an eternity now. It seems fitting that we end up in a town that helped inspire the series.
I’ve been to Paris twice before, but never any other part of France. Was a good chance to try and see somewhere new. And yeah they don’t speak English here. Nina and her friends were kind enough to translate.
I also had an entire other film roll on my AE-1 program that turned out to be busted because the film wasn’t loading correctly and I didn’t know what the indicator was to make sure it was loading correctly while I was shooting photos. So of course my first ever lost roll of film isn’t a test roll, potluck night, or even a camping trip: But rather Athens.
What I deserve for shooting on such a medium and I took backup photos out of paranoia on my phone. So we’ll take the loss, accept it’s gotta happen eventually, and go on.
But that about wrapped up the trip. We watched Letters to Juliet and the next day I got up too damn early once again to catch a flight back to the US. Once again barely making it onto the flight. For no good reason, this trip had a lot of those. I just think the breakneck speed of it was just particularly rough.
Dead Man Travelling 