Children of Light, Children of Darkness

Anonymous
For most of yesterday, I was unsure how to approach this blog topic/title. Discussion of the Qumranic texts from the Dead Sea caves sparked this title for this blog and, other than the name, everything else is open. After a week and a half of blogging, its getting tough to do something a simple as pairing a topic with a given title. Well, at least for me. Last night, after dinner in the Plaka, Rob, John, Ivory, and Ted brought me to this cafe that they found one day when they were lost (what they neglected to tell me was that they needed to get lost again to find it). It was worth it though. The cafe had a very tacky, inviting feel and spending several hours sitting outside in strange couches under heat lamps sipping our drinks was easy. We then hopped on the Metro to meet some others from the program back at the karaoke bar we visited last week. Finally, after a bit of a preamble, we reach my topic for this blog title. Public transport here, especially the Athens Metro system, is incomparable to those of the United States. The Metro and all of its stations, are almost eerily clean. Compared to the subway system and L tracks in the states, the Greek stations look like monuments to mass transit. After the world financial crisis that has hit Greece so hard the riots that ensued, I feared the previously pristine network of tracks and their cars would suffer. I thought that the trains would be vandalized, damaged, and trashed. They're not. I have heard tourists describe Monastiraki and Syntagma stations (the two main connecting hubs) as "...museums in of themselves." Yesterday in class, Dr. Finitsis described the Greek way of life as trusting that the overall sense of chaos that governs this country will work. If you are able to that, then the rest of the public transportation is a breeze as well. You buy your bus tickets from news paper kiosks. The bus drivers wear normal street clothes in place of uniforms and tread their monstrosities threw tinny streets. The tram drivers, also in street cloths, periodically get on and off at stations, seemingly on a whim and another driver just happens to replace him. This can be a bit disconcerting as it seems that anyone is jumping on to drive. There are transportation strikes in response to current government regulations quite frequently, but if you can deal with those and the chaos of everything else, Athenian public transportation is quite enjoyable.