Travel Notes on Greece | Flying West at Night

October 30

24:00

Before boarding

One hour left to board the flight to Greece.

At the end of last year, Gao Xiaosong gave three episodes of "Greece". After listening to this, a thought came to my mind: "Greece seems pretty good..."

JF came back after spending 50 days in Rome and Florence. He said he had seen a lot of cultural relics about the ancient Roman period and wanted to see ancient Greece.

We thought about it together. But JF suggested going in early winter. During the off-season, there are fewer people and you don’t have to queue anywhere. And southern Europe is not cold.

It was a long time, I thought it would take a long, long time, but as the days passed, it arrived. And those days that you have been waiting for, such as the college entrance examination, were passed by, but it was already more than ten years ago.

I remember when I was very young, I squatted on the ground and watched the ants crawling around. In that extremely quiet and boring time, I thought: when the ant crawled to this position, at the moment when it was still in that position, where did it go? Where is it? When it climbs to that position again, where will it go at this moment?

November 1

01:25

Flying west at night

The flight took more than nine hours, flying westward, and a long night.

In the cabin, the lights were dim and the night was cold. With the roaring melody, I fell into an intermittent drowsiness. Slowly, the smell of baking food warms the cold night, making people slowly come out of their drowsiness. But the lights were still dim, and there was an occasional cough or two in the silence.

"Night Flight West", the title of the book, was immersed in my sleepy and ethereal thoughts over and over again. It is like "Out of Africa", full of love emotions, just like the atmosphere of this long night flight.

It turns out that this is the feeling of flying westward in the long night. The long night is longer and charming.

05:30

Doha transit

Early morning is approaching and we arrive at the transit city, Doha.

Passing the seat next to me, I glanced out the window and saw the bright lights of the city in a corner. The person sitting next to me had messy hair, hugged a blanket, and leaned against the window, staring blankly at the city.

After getting off the plane, you need to take a shuttle bus to the terminal. It was dawn at this time, and patches of red and purple were drawn on the dark gray sky. There was some coolness and moisture in the air, there was a breeze, and it was quiet, as if people had not yet woken up from a dream.

In the Doha Airport, there are fragrant clothes and a dazzling array of products, including perfumes, cosmetics, wine, chocolates, watches, gold, luxury cars... People from all over the world shuttle around, including Middle Easterners, Europeans, Indians, and East Asians.

"What a nice figure!" A tall blonde beauty with dark brown skin, exposed waistcoat line, and tight-fitting clothes looked at each other and walked gracefully from the side, leaving me with a sigh.

"The advantages of human race are incomparable." JF said.

When I boarded the flight from Doha to Athens, I saw a four or five-year-old girl and two women in their thirties and forties. Their profiles, from the eye sockets, nose, cheek to chin, looked like Greek sculpture faces. It is said that the profile is the most standard way to test whether a woman is beautiful. From this point of view, I think they are all beautiful women.

What exactly is a "Greek nose"?

Encyclopedia says: The bridge of the nose protrudes straight from the root to the slender nose wing.

Indeed, the gods and goddesses in ancient Greek sculptures are like this. The root of the bridge of the nose is not concave, but extends from the line between the eyebrows to the wings of the nose.

I originally thought that a small, delicate nose with a slightly raised nose was a Greek nose.

According to this standard, JF and I began to consciously or unconsciously pay attention to the noses of Greeks (perhaps they may not necessarily be Greeks). Then I discovered that in fact, the root of the bridge of the nose of many people is not straight, but instead sinks and then straightens up. This look is probably the "Roman nose" mentioned in the encyclopedia, right?

As for the Greek nose with a straight bridge, I didn't see any of them.

So, the people we see in Greece today may no longer be pure ancient Greeks?

Perhaps, in China, there are still more Greek noses. Although some of us still inherit the flat noses from the Terracotta Warriors of Qin Shihuang.

11:50

Arriving in Athens

We did not enter the city center of Athens, but went directly from the airport to the port of Piraeus, which is seven or eight kilometers away from the Acropolis.

The Corniche Road, some distance away from the port, is said to be the leisure resort area of ​​Athens. There are many hotels and apartment buildings on the roadside facing the Sunshine Coast. Each building has many balconies, and leisurely tables and chairs are supported under half-covered parasols. However, the messiness and desolation of this place made me feel like an urban-rural fringe. I don’t know how many of the people I see here are Greeks, but they seem to be mostly people who work and live here, or people who want to take ferries from here to the dotted islands - not quite like the imagined Greece. The people, the sculptural Greeks, are a bit like the Near East and North Africa.

Because I had read or heard Greek mythology and Aesop’s fables when I was young, I felt like Greece was a familiar place. But Greece is very strange. It is still unclear what the special skills of Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Athena, Prometheus, Heracles and Odysseus are. The so-called classical period, Hellenistic period, and Roman period cannot remember that the Cretan civilization preceded the Mycenaean civilization, let alone what Socrates and Aristotle said, and even mistakenly thought that Oedipus the King It was Shakespeare's first creation... Therefore, my small goal during this trip to Greece is to clear up the pot of Greek mush in my mind.

18:30

Going to Crete

I was so happy when I boarded the cruise ship and saw the bed. Although it's just a bed not much bigger than a massage bed.

On the cruise to Crete, the cabins are small but fully equipped. At around 7pm, I took a good shower and washed myself. My whole body felt loose and sleepy. But I still wrote a diary, fearing that I would lose the will to keep recording on the road if I was lazy.

After writing until about eight o'clock, JF also went to take a shower. The cruise ship set sail at nine o'clock in the evening, but I couldn't wait to be awake and experience the rhythm of its departure. Putting on the blindfold, he fell asleep.

At five o'clock in the morning, I was woken up by the alarm clock set on my mobile phone. I pulled open the curtain of the porthole and saw nothing.

JF said that the cruise ship was late last night and didn’t set sail yet at 9:30.

Oh, in that case, wouldn’t it be possible to arrive at six o’clock?

I also wanted to sleep a little longer, it was so comfortable.

But after lying down for a while, I got up. We had no choice but to be self-disciplined, so we got up and washed up and tidied up.

At about 5:40, a broadcast came, saying that it would arrive in Heraklion, Crete in a few minutes... Open the porthole curtains, and sure enough, the lights entering the harbor appeared outside.

After packing my luggage, I went down to the central hall on the 7th floor and saw the very charming morning light of the island on the deck.

Why do I always like this feeling of arriving at a place at dawn? There is warmth in the coldness, and there are some human fireworks in the silence. People came out of the cruise ship and stood at the port. Some people went directly to their destinations. Some people stood on the roadside smoking cigarettes. Some people talked in groups. A dog wanted to break free from the reins held by its owner. There were still some Sleepy people carrying large and small bags walked out of the pedestrian passage of the cruise ship...

We pushed our suitcases and headed towards the hotel we booked. Gradually leaving the port, but looking back, I saw the huge cruise ship emitting water smoke in the gradually clear blue-gray sea and sky. At that moment, I was very nostalgic, like Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, Bospur Istanbul on the Russ Strait.