As I wrote in the last post, I spent a couple of weeks in Athens for the winter school Migration in the Margins of Europe. Even though the course was packed with content, there was enough time to explore the city and its surrounding areas with my classmates. In this post, I share some pictures and the best experiences I had during this time in Greece!

Who would say it’s winter? We had such lovely weather in the weeks I spent there. To be honest, it seems that it was colder indoors than outdoors, due to some weird ways that the heating system works in some places. This is quite a different experience of spending the winter in England, where the weather invites us to watch Netflix in our free time!

I used to watch this Knights of the Zodiac anime (Japanese cartoon) when I was a kid (not only as a kid to be honest…). The plot was like this: young people were chosen by the gods to protect a girl who was the resurrection of the Greek goddess Athena. They had to wear these amazing coloured armors to protect her and fight against evil forces. Everything happened with this Greek Mythology and Astrology background. In one of the seasons Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas himself, was the final boss!

Ever since then, I’m totally in love with Mythology and Ancient Greek/Roman stories. I love the tales of monsters and heroes and those gods full of jealousy and other human feelings! Athens has a lot to offer on both sides. They preserve colossal buildings from thousands of years ago that you actually wonder how that would be possible. They are older than my whole country! Also, there are plenty of museums and archaeological sites around the city centre.

Athens is probably the place where another one of my passions was born: drama and Theatre. I was introduced to Greek tragedy during highschool and almost ended up studying Literature at Uni. Seeing the Theatre of Dionysius in person, very close as it really was in the Archaic period, made me burst into tears!

On top of all this, the Greeks also invented the most famous sports competition in the world, the Olympics. I’m not a very sporty person myself, but I recognise how it was groundbreaking and how it impacted on millions of people all around the world. These Greeks were clever, right?

I really didn’t want to make anyone feel jealous about my trip but also didn’t want to make it sounds like a tourism blog — you can find loads of information on what to see when you visit Athens elsewhere. To make you beans feel comfortable, you probably appreciate how much I miss Feta cheese already and all the other inexpensive and delicious Greek food. On top of that, teaching has started here at Surrey and I have a lot of classes to prepare — this semester I’m teaching first-year undergrad students a module on methodology. But I’ll leave that piece of news for another post!

Thanks for reading! 🙂