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孤独的地球 三  By [ 张一帆 ]  2009-4-13 23:02:03

写旅行博客的计划快要进行不下去了，原因不是因为记忆的淡漠，其实不然，好像还活在旅行途中，没有醒过来一样，懒得写。干脆就拔一篇途中给朋友们发的邮件贴在下面。今天在读Robert Byron的Road To Oxiana，他在巴勒斯坦的经历，虽然是80年前，我还是有不少共鸣，说明文化的延续性，可以这么长、这么短。邮件是2008年12月底在希腊Delphi的一家咖啡馆写的，还记得上网费是每小时3欧元。一些雅典的照片，贴在邮件最后。

From: 张一帆
Subject: Greetings from Delphi
Date: 27 December 2008 19:57:41 GMT
To: omitted

A belated Happy Christmas to everyone! Hope you are chilled out enough to read the following correspondence.

Good news, I have overtaken Arthur's James Cook boat in the Virtual Regatta, despite starting much later than him. This is partly due to me being terribly available as Captain during my lonely but highly spiritual trip.

I visited the famed monasteries of Meteora yesterday (of which I heard nothing about until this Wednesday), so named because they live on cliff tops, looking as if suspended in air. What impressed me the most is 1) the Olympic games of 2004 obviously prompted the Hellenic Republic to improve the monasteries a lot, to the extent that now they look like Swiss chalets worthy of featuring in the Architectural Digest; 2) the bigger monasteries somehow got talked into hosting certain nationalistic propaganda exhibitions featuring anti-Italian and anti-Turkish narratives. I think the European Commission should be alerted of this unhelpful pettiness among brothers and would be step-brothers.



One irony only became apparent to me yesterday is that the only two books I have with me on this trip are Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul and Nicholas Ostler's "Ad infinitvm, a biography of Latin". Somehow customs officers did not confiscate these edifications of Greece's ex-owners and put me through a re-education programme does say something about, er.... something I am sure.

Another observation I have is that Greece mainland is a highly abstract and somewhat snobbish destination. (I have not been to Corfu, aka Kensington-on-sea, or other islands so cannot report to you on their merits.) On the mainland, depends where you are, you have to be your own movie director. So in Delphi, the seat of the greatest of all Oracles, unless you can conjure up the image of Alexander the Great beating up Apollo's spokeswoman until she 'foretold' his victory, and enjoy doing so, you are likely to find paying twenty euro daily to visit piles of stones on various inaccessible outdoor (sometimes wet) grounds a trying experience.

Being Chinese, I naturally find an ally in another ancient civilisation. However we do have a few remaining governmental infrastructure standing, and observable from outer space, as our Soviet comrades told us in the 50s (but we could not verify this in our recent space voyages), I am starting to find one UN heritage site after another increasingly tedious.

Of course, the great heritage of Greek culture lives in its literature
(I read none) and philosophy (ditto), it is practically a waste of time to visit the modern version of the country even if you did know it all. I suggest you visit your local library instead.

With that note, I am going to do some catch up reading on Wikipedia before my tour tomorrow, and wish you a very happy interval between one hypothetical birthday and a very un-Chinese new year.

Next destination is Cairo. Land there on 30 December. I am looking forward to it a lot, despite finding out that the Ptolemy dynasty is actually Greek. I hope there are Egyptian stuff to see. Like the, rather than some crappy stony foundation sold as Isis and Orisis' mating ground.

Finally, for comic effect, some learning points from reading that Latin book mentioned earlier:

Useful to say: Modo bene, et controversiam facere non est bonum libero
homini et patri familias. (Okay then, it's not right for a free man
and a householder to have an argument.)

More useful to say: Cinge sabana. Terge mihi capvt et pedes. Bene
lavasti, bene tibi sit. (Put towels round me. Dry my head and my feet.
You gave me a good bath, thanks very much.)

PS: My gourmet review: Greek food is both tragic and scary. Tragic may
be it is Greek; scary mainly because how tragic it is.

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