A Touch of Spice

When we were given our blog topic today, it was an obvious reference to food. This was the title of the movie we watched today, which was about a man looking back on his life and his love for cooking. And to be honest, the food in Greece has overall been really good. For lunch today I ate roasted lamb with potatoes in a sauce to die for, and at dinner I have pasta with bolonez sauce.

While food was the first thing I thought of, I also was thinking about what gives Athens spice, what makes the city more unique and cool. It hit me that one of the things I love about Europe is the graffiti. It's everywhere, and they turn it into an art form rather than just writing gang signs on the sides of buildings like in the states. There have been a lot that I've seen that are really in-depth paintings featuring flowers, people, words written really fancily, etc. This morning a group of us went to watch the sunrise and take pictures of the Acropolis up close, and on the way back we ran into a ton of walls with graffiti on them. We saw a lot of lizards and different flowers and paintings of people and things. It does make me somewhat sad when you see the side of a really old church or building with writing all over the back of it, but most of the time it's not just writing, it's art.

Like I said earlier, today some of us went to watch the sunrise. Although it was really hard to get out of bed and the skies were overcast, the view was incredible. It made me think about the fact that this city is filled with old and new, a constant comparison between the ancient and the present. You can be walking down a modern day street and there right next to you is a church built hundreds or sometime thousands of years ago. The most moving experience I had today and maybe of the whole trip was standing and looking out at the city of Athens from the rock where Paul stood when he was addressing the Athenians. There are so many times when I forget that Paul was an actual person, that he lived life just like us now and that you can visit places where he stood. Looking out on the city, I loved seeing the old buildings mixed in with the new ones, seeing Byzantine churches next to H&M. The cities spice does partially come from the food, but the graffiti and the old mixed with the new adds some extra zest.