Athens

 ... standing at the Acropolis with Athens behind me

Chicken Parmesan, Chicken Galantine, Coq au Vin – you can’t fool me.   I have been eating a lot of chicken.  Now, the choice for supper?  Chicken again, but the idea of having it smothered in wine was enough to tempt me into ordering it.

I can't stop myself from enjoying the infinite variety. 

Wyona and Greg attended an elite buffet, since they are the charmed members of a club for people who cruise often.

I slipped off at the same time to my favourite of events that occur onboard:  the historical lecture on Greece.

The first slide included a famous painting of philosophers – Socrates, Plato, all of them gathered on the steps of a building, one figure lounging on the stairs.  “Knock me over,” I thought. “I know that picture.  I attended one hour lecture in Calgary that spotlighted only the reclining figure on the stairs.

I must have been preparing for tomorrow’s adventure into Athens for my whole life.”  Yes, there was Raphael’s School of the Philosophers.

Athens

Athens, the city where democracy was born. 

Greg and I spent the afternoon walking around the columns of the Acropolis and agreeing that it is not the structure itself, but what it represents – the belief that man can govern himself, the careful logic, the columns laid out so carefully that if you draw a line through all of them, at one place in the heavens, those lines will intersect. 

 ...looking down from the Acropolis on a Greek theatre...
  ...be still my beating heart...

Is it the architecture, the literature, the math, the science, the medicine, the detailed attention, for the first time in the history of man, to the human body?   

Walking on the marble, stepping on the cobblestones,  -- I didn’t ever dream I would be standing near those sacred Greek pillars.   

Amazing.  Just amazing!