As I woke up on my last day in Greece I was both sad and terribly excited at the same time. Even though I would never be back to Greece, at least not in the near future, I hadn’t been back to Colorado for more than five days at a time. Actually overall, both semesters combined, I spent a total of 11 days at home. I was ready to see my family and my mountains again.
But before I could see my family, I had to see Athens. Our first stop was the Parthenon, ancient and modern Greece’s crown jewel. Here is a fun fact about the Parthenon: it took a total of eight days to build the entire Parthenon. When we were standing there looking up in awe of the sheer size of this massive temple, a man walked up next to us and said that he had visited Greece when he graduated from college 60 years prior and since his first trip, the scaffolding that has been put up for the restoration team to use hasn’t moved an inch. In 60 years. So it took all of eight years to build, and in 60 the restoration team hadn’t made enough progress to move the scaffolding that covered one end of the structure. That speaks, I believe, not only to the level of caution the restoration team uses everyday, but it also speaks to the quality of the construction. Built in eight, survived for thousands of years, and restored literally inch by inch. That is something else.
Our final day in Greece was capped first by visiting the National Museum and second by playing our final game. The National Museum was pretty awesome. Not as spectacular as the museum in Delphi, but pretty spectacular nonetheless. I did see the other two famous bronze sculptures at this museum though: the sculpture of Zeus or Poseidon (they’re not sure who it is because the lighting bolt or trident is missing from the sculpture) and the famous Jockey Artémision.
The Jockey is the first sculpture traveling or foreign artists see when they’re in Greece. They choose to visit it first because it is the only sculpture from the ancient world where a horse is actually in motion. In all the other sculptures, worldwide, the horses are always standing. But in the Jockey, the horse is in a sprinting motion, with a young boy riding bareback. What makes this so attractive to artists is that, without the help of cameras, the Greek sculptures perfectly captured the image of a sprinting horse. From the flexing of the leg muscles, to the straining of the facial tendons, to the bulging veins around the eyes. The Greeks got it perfect. In fact, they got it so perfect that when a photograph was compared to that of the sculpture, the images were exactly the same. Now those were true artists!
Our final scheduled event was our final game. We played an American college in Greece. The team we played was a scrappy one, and the officiating was questionable, but we still played hard. Even though we lost, we could care less. We were ticked at the result but after five minutes we remembered where we were and who we were with and the anger and emotion went out the window. We spent our final night exploring downtown Athens and celebrating two of our teammates’ birthdays. Then it was all over.
Looking back now, almost two months after my return flight to Denver, I can’t help but think how lucky I was to have been a member of the 42 person party that traveled to Greece to explore and play basketball. I was truly blessed to have an experience like this during my entire college career, let alone my Freshman year. Thank you for reading my thoughts and following my stories. I know they can get random, but that’s just the way I am. I’m a random guy. Also a special thanks to Hailley for letting me write this piece for her blog. It means a lot!!!
Peace, love, and happiness,
Max Stanford
Coe College 2014
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