A record of a trip to Athens and Istanbul I took in 2023 using an itinerary for a trip my late wife Jo-hsin and I were supposed to take in 2020. We had everything planned, then Covid hit, then she got sick

 

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At the Blue Mosque another carpet seller says I look sad and asks why. I say it’s a long story and he says That’s ok, I have time. He says he just enjoys talking with visitors, to learn what they think about his country. Then he asks, have you seen any rugs up close?

 

A very old man observes a very old relic

A dog chases and bites the metro train

 

Chicken pudding
Blistering pinky toe

 

In the poem at the bottom of the scene, the seven-year-old boy Heleius, depicted in the relief, is told by himself that he was killed by a horse that quickly hit him

Oceanus is the river god. Here he is reclining without a nose or hand

Sneezing in the hall of ancient antiquities, dusty

 

Fifty percent of passengers wear sandals

A girl shows pictures to her friend, saying it’s from when she had pink eye

A young woman asks for a mimosa but the server doesn’t know what that is so she says Oh it’s orange juice and white wine. The server says Sorry, we only have orange juice or white wine, so the girl says Can I have white wine? Then a second later she says, Can I also have an orange juice?

 

Someone sneezes just like J

It feels empty here without her

She only ever had a single gray hair

Lovers kiss at the Bath House of the Winds

A tour guide says, See the things sticking out of the side? Looks like a stick? Time!
And the tourists all say Time!

The personifications of the eight main winds are depicted in relief, bearing their symbols

The elevation of the masonry inside the monument is divided into four zones formed by three architectural elements that run the perimeter of the edifice: two ionic cornices, with the second one being more elaborately decorated, whereas the third zone takes the form of a stylobate that supports eight decorative colonettes, which prop up a two-banded epistyle

 

I hear the end of a tour guide’s long story:
‘And then he died’

A shirt says Goat USA
A shirt says Chill Time

 

A woman talks about brushing her teeth
A man sells unlimited data like it’s a drug

Compact mirrors, tweezers, clay figurines resembling Gumby, made during the 5th century BCE

 

A ghost turns the pages of a menu to the vegetarian page as I pass. Even the spirits are hustling

 

An empty sour cream chip bag blows across Dionysus

 

Everyone has oddly shaped sunburns, secret insignia

Intense shouting in the night

Intense shouting in the day
A group of ten men punching another man on the ground
The sound of fists hitting flesh, echoing off marble

Birds doing their morning insanity

A pigeon has a noodle on its back

The writing on the wall says Papers for All

A Garfield sticker on a dumpster reminds me of our trip to Paris

Policemen stand with riot shields and gas masks

 

A pigeon walks into a meat market, turns back around

 

I get why there are so many nudes in antiquity but why so many lions?

 

The hotel menu features a Lettuce Trilogy

 

A man with a cloth and a spray bottle laboriously scrubs graffiti off the bank building

 

Everyone on this bus has a sound -- pleeps and plops, a handful of dings

The first stop is five centuries before Christ, says the tour guide
“This is Omonia Square. Now it is calm because it is very early but later people will come for... so many different reasons...”

 

People take shelter under a statue of Icarus

 

The guide’s speaking is punctuated with either Wow or Well, so it seems like she’s in constant amazement. Wow, wheat was the most important grain. Persephone is crying, Wow, Demeter has gone to the other world. Persephone is allowed to, Wow, live half the year here and half the year there

 

Their symbols include the poppy, wheat, the torch, cornucopia, the pig

 

It was a rule of the Fates that whoever consumed food or drink in the Underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Before Persephone was released to Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, Hades tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds (either six or four according to the telling)

 

We pass a pet store called Barf Market

 

Temples to Apollo were converted to temples to Christianity. The path we’re taking parallels the holy road pilgrims took to Eleusis. It took a while because they stopped constantly to pray

The driver is the drummer to the tour guide’s song, controlling her tempo

 

Now we are passing the Island of Salamina. It looks like a mountain, Wow, it’s Island of Salamina

 

Dr. God was a late addition to the 12 Olympian gods

 

The man talking to the guide is broadcasting his personal ramblings to everyone through her headset

 

I see a hospice from the 5th century BCE

 

The wind is in the olives

 

Goat bells and man farts
(goat bells are distant, man farts not so much)

 

Chicken skewers, spaghetti, nectarines


A passenger singing a gospel song

I’m eating on the sidewalk, in swim trunks and a fancy shirt. All the euros fall out of my wallet and when I scoop them up there’s a leaf in the middle

 

The stench of death is not a stench I relish

 

Symbols include fire, donkeys, hammers, tongs, and quail


The surviving traces of paint suggest that the figure was red, with brown hair, against a blue background. The border was also red

 

A Small Sanctuary With a Marble Altar in Front of the Sacred Gate

A nude youth, standing and holding a wreath and a flower, is depicted on an originally red background

 

Traces of paint are preserved: blue for the background, yellow for the hair, red band beneath the figure’s feet

 

A brother and sister joke about a horse being a cannon. The horse becomes the cannon, the boy says. It’s not a cannon, it’s a horse, the girl says. Then the girl says, but if it is a cannon the horse probably shoots carrots

The girl says some of the best artists were starving and adds that Van Gogh was starving

 

I go to the bar but the hostess addresses an older male behind me, then after a while I wave to her and say I’m not with them, and she says Oh, solo? I say yes, solo

 

I order the Nostalgia Painkiller

 

The song is a club mix of What is Love

 

The bartender says, Nostalgia, sir, hope you enjoy it --

 

A man looks like he’s about to cry watching football on TV

 

It’s Father’s Day, and Dad has been working on buying a headstone for an ancestor. He tells me on the phone the cemetery people need to find Frank with a long stick before they can put up the headstone. They know he’s around somewhere, just not exactly where

 

Four boys practice secret handshakes in the park

 

A man on a motorcycle calls out I love you to an elderly man standing near a garage entrance

 

Rather than pay for another night at the hotel I decide to go to a movie double-header

 

I ask the guy at hotel front desk to translate the movie listings from Greek, so he translates everything including the descriptions. Pamfir wants to be a family man. Challenged by the circumstances, he is forced to give up on honest work to help his family

 

He promises movies are always in English with Greek subtitles, but I’m like, these films showed at Cannes, I don’t think so. In any case I’d rather watch Ukrainian and Chinese films without subtitles than most Hollywood movies in English

 

How do you call it when a farmer plants a seed not for food but for love? he continues. The Seed of Love, maybe. Ma and Cao have been cast off by their families and forced into an arranged marriage. To survive, they have to come together and build a home

 

Pamfir is an interesting film out of context with costumes and pagan celebrations. The woman who chastised another audience member for being slow to sit down is crinkling a plastic bag and answering a ringing phone throughout the movie

 

The wife in the second film dies young. Return to the Dust is the title. I keep hoping to learn what to do, how to be, hoping the filmmaker is bold enough to let the widower live (in the end he gives up his donkey and walks into the sunset)

 

At the intermission I leave the 60s posters I bought next to my seat, go to the bathroom, see a quote written in the stall that says A thing of beauty is a joy forever (Yeats), go out for a pains chocolat, then come back and watch the second film, then suddenly wonder where I left the posters, so I go back to the bathroom, then back to my original seat where I see the blue bag but then I look inside and find that it’s empty. Who would take the contents but leave the bag, I wonder, so I go to the ticket kiosk and explain that I had some posters in a bag, showing them the blue bag, and one of the ticket takers says, where did you have the posters? So I point into the empty bag, but they both just shrug, like, well dummy if you leave things sitting around someone is bound to take them. So I go outside, look around for a moment, and see a man shoveling popcorn into his mouth with cardboard under his arm and our eyes lock. I point to the cardboard and say, Are those… and then he says Ah! I thought they were The Lady’s. I say I thought they were lost. He stops and looks at me seriously with a piece of popcorn stuck on his lip and says, What did you say? And for a second I think he’s going to deck me, so I say again, with caution, I thought the posters were lost, I am happy, and he seems to accept this

 

I wake up mid-flight to see the flight attendant mopping something up from the overhead compartment with a handful of tissues, holding my blue bag in his other hand