Reflections, credits and bits I missed on Greece

I've said goodbye to Greece and I'm on my way to Turkey.  Greece is a lovely country and I am particularly enamoured with Athens - perhaps because of my three Greek friends - Marcella, Despoina and Kostantinos - all of whom helped plan my trip and made Athens special.  Marcella met me at the airport and spent the best part of three days showing me the sights, adding colour to them with her own stories and knowledge, and put up with my jetlagged state.  Despoina made me feel like a VIP with a special bottle of wine delivered to my room on my first day.  And Kostantinos had dinner with me in Plaka on my last night.  I particularly liked his description that Greek laws last about two months before people start to ignore them and go back to the way they did things before.  Both he and Yannis described the Greeks in a similar way - the 20 euro they have in their pocket may be all the money they have, but they will spend it to buy you a drink.

I had planned to spend my last day in Greece on Hydra but I was quite tired from all the travelling a couple of late nights so I decided to have quiet morning  in the studio apartment I was sharing with 4 strangers, a slow afternoon walk from near the Acropolis to Syntagma via some of the sights I had already seen and a nice evening walk with Kostantinos around the acropolis to Plaka seeing all the old stuff lit up at nice (and we ran into Yannis and a couple of people from my tour),  We have a fabulous dinner with a  mixed plate of meats - even Maurice would have been impressed by the size of the meal!  They refused to give me the bill until I had eaten the on the house nutcake (it's a tough life when you're forced to eat dessert).  In an aside, the in flight meal includes a quite nice applecake but I had a bit of a laugh to myself to see the label that describes it as homemade.  I have visions of some poor turkish grandma beavering away in a hot kitchen day and night to feed thousands of passengers daily.

There were a couple of stories that I forgot to include along the way so I might mention them now. 
- The Greek resistance during WWII was inspired by a couple of university students who snuck up to the Acropolis and raised the Greek flag in an act of defiance.   - The autonomy of their universities was so highly valued that the revolt against Turk rule was initiated as a result of their contravention of this autonomy.
- Greek figs are delicious when liberated straight from the tree by Yannis, not as nice (but still good) when bought from a street stall.
- There is an olive tree in Crete that is 2-3000 years old - and that's not even the oldest in the world.
- someone way back when, invented a cup to prevent his workers from demanding more grog.  If you fill it to the line, all good and you can drink away.  Fill above the line and the whole lot empties out the bottom.  The moral of the story: don't be greedy or you'll lose everything.
- Delphi is the centre of the world (aka the navel) and has a giant belly button sculpture to prove it - must have been an outie though.