Sun Rising

Writing on a regular basis is hard when all you do is go to work and eat (and the food is covered by the food blog). To try to write more on my old blog, I would randomly choose a photo and then write about it. I think we'll do that here too (and tag them "Photo Diary"). Before, on my laptop, I used either the Windows photo viewer that sat on the desktop or my screensaver, and wrote about whatever came up. This time I picked a numerical combination and applied it to my web albums and came up with this:


Ah, Greece is such a beautiful country. We still haven't finished recapping our honeymoon (regular recaps or food recaps) but this photo was from the end of it. We were heading to the Athens airport for our flight to Munich. We were very sad because our honeymoon was over but excited to fly to Germany for a few hours.

It was early in the morning. We were catching either the first or second metro run of the morning and we were expecting it to be empty. It was anything but empty. By the time we switched trains at Syntagma (a very central stop), the platforms were packed with people, many of them returning home from a late Saturday night out. I had completely forgotten that, since the trains don't run late at night, people would have just stayed out until they could catch the first train home. There were lots of people sleeping on the metro, but also a lot of people who were very awake for 5:30 in the morning!

The line that goes to the airport terminates at either the airport or a stop called Doukissis Plakentias. The train we were originally on stopped at the latter, and we had to wait for the train that went to the airport (which I think only came every half an hour). The station was nice - not very exciting but unlike our subway stations, it was clean, there were seats and it wasn't unbearably hot and gross. We rested and shared a bologna and cheese sandwich that we got from our hotel before departing. Eventually the train came, we boarded with our luggage and then got to watch from the windows as the metro left the underground tunnels and journeyed through the suburbs outside Athens. (It rides along the highway reminding me of the blue line in Chicago.) At some point, the sun started to come up and the sunrise was gorgeous. I love early morning light. There's something so renewing and hopeful about it. The optimism of what the new day will bring and feeling like you have an entire full day ahead of you.

This is the only good photo I have of our outdoor ride to the airport. I think we were near an area called Kantza. Pretty soon after that, we had arrived at the airport and it was time for our last honeymoon adventure!