The thing that struck me at the Hill of the Muses here was how so many statues had their heads cut off. But walked along the sun-lit promenade for a little trek to the Filopappou hill, which accorded some stunning views of the Acropolis, the ancient part of the city as well as the bustling buildings of modern Athens and the glistening Aegean Sea. For Easter weekend, everything shuts down in Greece, and so, we couldn’t get inside the Acropolis right away and had to save it for later. I seem to have an amazing sense of time when deciding to go to a place! Last year it was Egypt during the fasting month of Ramzan, and this year, it happened to be Easter at Greece. And so, after having relished such a life from a far part of the country right at the centre of the capital city, we walked along the promenade near the most famous monument here – the Acropolis. The striking thing is that different groups of islands have evolved their own unique culture and customs, but today are all united under a single nation. Those little pieces, right up to the tiniest bit, are said to form up to 6000 individual islands around the continental mainland of Greece, with around 200 being inhabited. To explain the significance, one has to understand that Greece is the name you would call a place after you take a piece of land and then pass about a fifth of it through a shredder, but then carefully collect every little piece and toss the same on the sea around the four-fifths mainland, like a farmer would throw his handful of seeds in a field. I initially thought that all of Athens is going to be like this, but only later learned that this place we were casually treading on was something special – a slice of life from the islands, situated in the mainland. Bright, white walls blazing in the sun with contrasting bright hued windows, streets pouncing up and down with no rhyme or reason, many hidden corners to investigate, cats lazing about, and pots smiling at you – A place that was a delight to explore. Somehow, without following directions, without even knowing of its existence there, arrived at this quaint little village within the city called ‘Anafiotika’. Liking to start things right away, we decided to walk with no-agenda along the streets near our hotel. It was springtime in Athens and a warm, sunny breeze greeted us on arrival. To get to the very beginning of the Western Civilization that has written on the history of our world with its indelible ink, we need to go to where it all began, and that surprisingly is a nation of islands – Greece.Īnd so, we journeyed to Greece, heading first to its ancient and living capital – Athens. However, for a continent that’s not even worthy of its name, geologically speaking, it has monumentally shifted the lives of people on every other one. In the current stage of earth’s continental shift, there’s nothing major dividing Europe and Asia. I have often come across this argument in movies and books that Europe should not even be considered a separate continent. In our second round of continents around the globe, the next stop happened to be Europe.
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