Reflections before the final day

Anonymous

Tonight is our last night in Rhodes. It has been a fascinating experience exploring the medieval castle city and the ruins around it. We walked the slippery cobbled streets rain and shine, finding favorites cafes on the waterfront and jewelers in the old town. Rhodes for me has been an intimate experience. I have a passion of medieval and crusader anthropology and history that I was able to explore here better than anywhere else in the sense that everywhere in some places I was simply surrounded by the architecture of the Knights of St John. I just got back from one last night watching the lightning flash silently over the Aegean at a favorite café and sampling deliciously fresh mastic and pistachio ice cream at a Lebanese sweet shop. The diversity of people on this island is amazing. I chatted with a pair of old men from Tel Aviv on vacation, a British family on forced layover, and an old Italian soldier that was stationed in the town of Lindos during the Italian occupation. Rhodes is a crossroads of cultures and it can be seen externally in structures and stores but can also be felt in the air. Athens felt very different than Rhodes. The intimate village life here seems to be surviving tooth and claw in tandem with tourism in the summer. The people are very friendly but at the same time you can see in their eyes a great complexity of culture that I know I cannot truly comprehend because I am not Greek. Hellenistic culture is alive and thriving and I feel lucky that we as a group were able to get at least a slight glimpse of what that culture represents. There is seemingly no way to fully comprehend a culture because the only way to know the ins and outs is to live it, and by living it you leave behind the objectivity that lets you know the differences between what you are living and what everyone else does. There is a fine line to walk in evaluating culture and the closest you can really get is appreciating the apparent differences and analyzing the similarities in a way that relates to humanity as a whole. We are all the same people, but made different through our traditions.