The Great Museum-Off

Some experienced travellers claim you can't gain a true understanding of the world's myriad peoples by visiting museums, and that only by walking the streets and interacting with the locals will you really be able to appreciate foreign cultures.

But a lot of the time, the locals don't know anything and the streets are too strewn with innuendo to be of any cultural value. That's why sometimes, to truly appreciate a civilisation, you do need to visit a sterile museum and look at endless identical vases behind glass, viewed through the gaps in a Japanese crowd.

Farewell forever, Europe

...well, probably not, but I probably/hopefully won't be back in the continent for a very long time. To turn back time (zones) now would seem foolish, now that I've finally broken my Asian hymen.

Not literally, mother, if you're reading.

I'm writing this in Athens International Airport, waiting for a flight to Tel Aviv. That's right, regular readers (Oliver?), my self-imposed no-planes rule has now been broken twice, but it's not like I didn't exhaust and stress over all the other non-options for days.

From the Athens of the North to the Athens of Greece

Pointless mission accomplished - by land and sea, I travelled from the self-styled 'Athens of the North' (Edinburgh) to the bona fide 'Athens of Greece' (Athens), with just one cheating plane ride across the Alps.

Arriving by bus in a remote and smelly part of the city, my first impressions of Athens were pretty unfavourable. But I remembered I had a similar reaction to Florence at first, before getting to the nice, pedestrian-friendly tourism parts.

Like in Italian, the word pedestrian in Greek roughly translates as 'public footpath that nevertheless permits motorcycles, as if they aren't basically cars, and stupid bloody choo-choo trains.' With its speedy and sparkling clean metro system too, this shithole has had a major colonic irrigation, but the skidmarks are still clear to see if you venture too far...

Don't judge a man by the quality of his footwear

I've been on the tourist trail for almost a month, and today I was delighted to be approached by my first con artist, outside the Acropolis.

I say 'artist,' but he still had some way to go in perfecting his shtick, whatever it was. The fact that his opening gambit was to compliment the high quality of my shoes was a dead giveaway that something was awry:

My post-Acropalistic footwear