A vignette from a visit to the Acropolis

We were in Athens earlier this year. While the wife and I had traveled individually last year to meet our families, this was our first vacation together after the pandemic.

Athens has a lot to offer and you can easily fill a week and not get bored. The biggest draw for most visitors is the ruins at the Acropolis. You can buy a combi-ticket for 30€ per person that gives you access to 7 key sites and in a way also gives you a ready-made itinerary to follow. You can beat the rush by buying it at one of the (relatively) less popular sites. We procured ours at the temple of the Olympian Zeus.

The temple of Olympian Zeus was the size of a large playground with a raised, rectangular patch in the center where heavily scaffolded Corinthian columns stood on one side and a single column without scaffolding stood next to them. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I realized only just then that Greek columns, especially the 17m+ (55ft+) variety are not monolithic but are usually made up of smaller cylindrical blocks stacked on top of each other.

Wikipedia informs me that:

Construction began in the 6th century BC during the rule of the Athenian tyrants, who envisaged building the greatest temple in the ancient world, but it was not completed until the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD, some 638 years after the project had begun.

638 years in the making. Talk about construction delays.

Various fragments of columns and other bits of masonry were scattered about at the perimeter of the site and were cordoned off. Feral cats roamed amidst the ruins - nothing was off-limits to them in Athens.

Right next to the site was The Arch of Hadrian - a Roman triumphal arch. If you stood facing it with your back to the Temple of the Olympian Zeus, you’d see a busy road with unrelenting traffic but if you looked a little further, you’d spot the Acropolis on a hill - our next destination.

On the way to the Acropolis were souvenir shops that were yet to open for the day. This in itself would have been utterly unremarkable had the shutters of these shops not been painted with cartoonish graffiti of ancient Greek myths:

We took a little break at one of the small cafeterias that dot the hilly streets in that area.

I try to think of how the Acropolis entered my consciousness and I am taken back to Yanni’s concert there in 1993. Whether it was broadcast live on national television in India or they showed only clips of it in the news, I don’t remember. But I do remember this long haired mustachioed man dressed in a flowing white shirt and his large orchestra making pleasant (if at that time a tad boring) music at this spectacular location at night. For a middle-class teenager growing up in India of the early 90s, the Acropolis was a distant place that might as well have been on another planet.

The ruins of the Acropolis are imposing even in their dilapidation. One can’t help but wonder how many people (and no doubt animals) it must’ve taken to erect those columns and how long it must’ve taken them without modern machinery and fossil fuels to do it.

The Parthenon, one of the main structures at the Acropolis, had been visible to us from the streets around our hotel. We were delighted to finally see it up close.

The Parthenon was undergoing repairs/restoration - and apparently has been for many years. One side of its facade was covered in scaffolding. With relatively few tourists visiting (given the early time of the year and the assortment of Covid restrictions still in effect), it was quiet here. The shrill buzz of a metal saw cutting stone would occasionally puncture the hush and remind us of the ongoing construction.

Bits of real, reconstructed and restored masonry were again haphazardly strewn all around us. A rather ancient looking guard post opposite the Parthenon had an old dust-covered modem lying inside. I knew the civilizations back then were quite advanced but this looked like a rather significant omission from our history books!

Feral cats were common here too and one of them briefly stopped to sip water pooled in a shallow pit in one of the rocks next to us.

Perhaps the most striking structure at the Acropolis is the Erechtheion, especially the porch of the maidens attached to it. It was cordoned off by rope barriers so we could only look at it from a few meters away but that took nothing away from its grandeur.

A low wall formed a perimeter around the Acropolis. In one corner of the perimeter you could climb a small raised platform and peer over the wall. From here you could see Athen’s dense urban sprawl stretching for miles and hear the distant roar of the traffic. We were even able spot the Arch of Hadrian and the Temple of The Olympian Zeus to our west.

We roamed around a bit longer soaking in the pleasant winter sun and admired other minor structures, amphitheatres and pine trees.

We returned to our hotel exhausted (we had walked 25km - the longest in a single day since the 2020 pandemic started) but with memories that we’ll cherish for many years to come.

p.s. While our ticket allowed entry into Acropolis proper just once, we visited the area around Acropolis several times. A couple of days later we caught a beautiful sunset over the Acropolis from our hotel’s terrace.

April 27, 2022

2021: My year in music

Art is how we decorate space; Music is how we decorate time.

― Jean Michel Basquiat

When I first started the ritual of making an annual playlist, I had no idea if I would be able to sustain it. Turns out, I quite enjoy doing this and look forward to it each year. Here is the sixth iteration with 54 tracks that I loved decorating my time with. With lockdowns of some form or the other throughout 2021 and practically no travel, there certainly was a lot of time to decorate.

Another aspect of this annual ritual used to be writing about tracks in the playlist - both their backstories and their personal significance to me. A bit like liner notes from the days of physical media. The stamina required to do this has definitely been a casualty of the pandemic. Only today, my inability to write these has been further impaired by the fatigue and fever induced by the Covid-19 booster shot the wife and I received just yesterday.

That said, I am more positive than last year about my ability to revisit this playlist throughout 2022 and fill in the stories over the coming days. We’ll see.

Anyway, here is hoping you’ll enjoy this year’s picks:

The 2021 playlist on Spotify

January 1, 2022

The stories of our plants: cosmos bipinnatus

Come spring and the grocery store here starts giving out a small kitchen garden “starter packs” of seeds for every 15€ or so of groceries purchased. Marketed as moestuin maatjes¹ in Dutch, each pack includes a couple of tiny cardboard pots (about 4-5 cm deep), a tablet of soil and different varieties of seeds. All you need to do is fill the pots with moist soil, sow the seeds about 0.5-1cm deep, keep the whole package moist and wait for the seeds to germinate. They even include tiny placards that you can cut out from the packaging and place them in the tiny pots to remind you about what you had planted and when.

Moestuin Maatjes

This annual spring time grocery store ritual must’ve been going on for several years but we never paid much heed to it before. The pandemic revived some atavistic agrarian need in us last year. When the cashiers at the grocery store started offering moestuinje packets around March this year, we took them with both hands.

The wife and I sowed two packs of seed each and waited for them to germinate. In anticipation of the seeds needing a bigger pot after a few weeks, we procured potting soil and clay pebbles. During one of our long weekend walks, we saw a set of empty outdoor planters that someone had left at a bench outside their home for anyone to take for free. Not wanting to cut our walk short or lug them along for our walk, we decided to pick them up on our way back. However, by the time we returned an hour or so later, they were gone. We picked the only one that remained - a small plastic pot with an outer metallic bucket painted bright pink.

A couple of camomile seeds I had sown, germinated some 7-8 days later. Another 5 or so days after that I transferred the two saplings to the planter we had procured on our walk. The growth of the plant stalled shortly thereafter. The cotyledons didn’t give way to true leaves and started withering away. I thought I had over watered the plants to their death. One Sunday morning, as I looked closely at the plant to diagnose what was going wrong, I saw the shoot of the remaining plant move a little. Since this wasn’t beanstalk from the English fairy tale it couldn’t be growing fast enough for me to spot it by merely staring at it for a few seconds. Nor was I on any medication that’d alter the way my mind percieved passage of time. So clearly, another rational interpretation was called for. A few more seconds of close inspection revealed my problem - a larva was gnawing at my plants’ roots and tender shoots.

And so the first batch of seeds came to nought. I let the pot lie fallow for a few days in the balcony while I thought about what I would plant next. We had one moestuin maatje with cosmos seeds lying around and I figured the plant’s beautiful pink flowers might go well with the planter’s outer metal shell and so that’s what I eventually planted.

It’d be a long wait before I’d see the first flower.

Save for a handful of warm days, the summer in Amsterdam this year has been mild. So much so that it has felt like protracted spring. Encouraged by the long days and gentle weather, three of the four cosmos seeds I had planted began to germinate. One of them wilted away after a week but the remaining two started to thrive. Their thread-like² leaves look delicate and like the mother of a child studying in a boarding school worrying about the child eating right, I wondered if they had enough chlorophyll to photosynthesise sufficient food for the plants. The plants also grow quite tall for something this delicate.

Cosmos plant’s linear-filiform leaves

After three months or so of regular care and one round of light application of liquid fertilizer, the first buds began to appear on one of the plants. The stem that seemed to be effortlessly supporting the plant’s 30-40cm height while braving Amsterdam’s windy days, began to buckle a little under the weight of the buds. One of the buds grew to the size of a large blackberry and made it clear that it’d be the first one to blossom. But it gave no sense of what colour the flowers would be.

The anticipation was driving me crazy. A short sampling of my stream of consciousness:

Should I make tiny incision and take a peek inside? No. Would there even be incipient petals that’d give away the colour? No idea. Should’ve paid more attention to botany lectures in school. Should I be throwing the equivalent of a gender reveal party? Not unless I wanted to be locked away in a padded cell.

I did none of the above things and just waited patiently. Each morning, while I wait for the water in the kettle to boil for our tea, I check on the plants in the balcony. A week ago, I was overjoyed to find a large, white cosmos flower where one of the buds had been the day before! While my grand plan to match the colour of the flowers to that of the planter had been scuppered by the flower’s white colour, it was impossible not to run around the house with the pot held like Rafiki raising Simba - for it was the outcome of weeks of worrying, care and waiting (mostly waiting).

White cosmos flowers

The cosmos plant in a pink planter

Also, the second plant is yet to flower. We might still have a match…

Update: Between the time I took me to start writing this and post this, the second plant has begun to blossom. The flowers are pink!

The pink cosmos flower

September 11, 2021

Utrecht

The wife and I had a day off together a couple of weeks ago. Between me being fully vaccinated, her having had her first shot for a few days and the community transmission being low¹ here in Netherlands, we decided that it was time to finally get on a train for a short trip to another city. We ended up picking Utrecht because we hadn’t been there in a while and because the station there has a Pret that we both love.

The trains here have a silent coach where you are supposed to sit quietly. We prefer them on most days but given what we now know about how covid spreads, it felt like an especially good idea. Face masks are still mandatory in public transport and the vending machines at the station will gladly dispense you a pack of 5 for a mere 4€. Since we were traveling during off-peak hours, our coach was mostly empty. I played Chikku Bukku Rayile from the 1993 Tamil film Gentleman on my headphones as a private celebration of being inside a train again after more than year.²

Our train arrived at Utrecht Centraal in no time. To our dismay, the Pret here had vanished without a trace so we decided to look for lunch elsewhere. The Hooge Catharijn mall across from one of the station’s exit also serves as a passageway into the city centre. That’s where we first went. Being inside a mall felt a bit surreal - as if we were in Singapore after a mere 30 minutes on the train. While the mall did offer a lot of food options, it felt like a copout. Also, neither of us would have felt safe spending a long time in an indoor space shared by hundreds of strangers. Out into the city centre we walked.

Utrecht’s centre is ringed by canals and dotted with shops and cafés. This being afternoon on a working day, we weren’t expecting things to be as busy as they were. It was a cloudy but an otherwise pleasant summer day and I guess everyone was enjoying the relative freedom that has come with the easing of the lockdowns. We eventually found a place at a small restaurant called Soep-er (a world play on soup - spelled as soep in Dutch - and super) that served delicious, creamy soups with several vegetarian choices and bread.

We wandered without any specific destination in mind and enjoyed the city’s architecture, the occasional windmill, sculpture and street art.

A poster by Dik Bruna³ that encouraged people of Utrecht to take good care of each other, could be seen displayed behind the windows of many homes and shops throughout the city⁴.

Dik Bruna poster

While the buildings in Utrecht were not radically different from the sort of buildings you would come across in Amsterdam, or for that matter, in most Dutch cities, the street lamp posts were quite distinct. Baskets of flowers hung from several lamp posts. The wife drew my attention to colours of the flowers - the red and white had been carefully chosen to match the colours of the flag of Utrecht.

Utrecht has recently witnessed an amazing transformation to its urban landscape. The Catharijnesingel used to be a canal but was landfilled into a motorway in the 1970s and that is how it remained for the next many decades. A few years ago they started a project to bring the canal back. This finished last year. To walk on a placid, green, tree-lined stretch along the canal was to walk on a stretch of land where the clock had been miraculously turned back.

The video shows this transformation from Jul 2014 to Dec 2020 through a series of Google Street View photos. In Jul 2014, there is just a highway. The next year a bike lane comes up followed by a bike parking alongside. Eventually, the highway is dug up and metamorphoses into a canal!

Even though this trip was short⁵ enough to have been a mere detour from our daily walks, it left us feeling refreshed and reminded us how much we miss traveling.

July 18, 2021

Amsterdam’s architecture under dramatic May skies

What the title says…

June 6, 2021

My Covid-19 vaccination story

PostNL informs you via a notification in their app when a mail is on your way. They even include a picture of the envelope so you can guess what to expect. The wife uses the app diligently so she knew a few hours in advance that my invitation to get vaccinated was on the way. When it arrived, she tore it open and booked me a spot online at the earliest possible date.

My invitation to get vaccinated

My vaccination center was somewhere near Schiphol Airport. It would take two changes of public transport and an hour to reach. I didn’t want to risk being late for something this important, so decided to call an Uber instead. Uber now offers you a choice between a regular cab and a “green” option - meaning an electric or a hybrid taxi. Since they were the same price, I picked the latter. Because there are way more regular cars out there than electric, it can take a while for your ride to arrive. In my case it was a 15 minute wait on an unseasonably cold and rainy May morning.

As I sat in the cab with my mask, my glasses fogged up. The driver asked in an English accent, which was at once familiar and marks you as being college educated from somewhere in the northern part of the subcontinent, if I had considered getting laser surgery. I mentioned my eyesight was probably too far gone for it and that I didn’t find wearing glasses inconvenient (of course except when they fog up when I wear the mask). He went on to regale me about how his wife had signed up for her LASIK surgery but had also negotiated a surgery for him for the same price¹, the weeklong recovery period that followed and an emergency visit to the surgeon when he had foolishly rubbed one of the eyes.

He then told me about how extenuating family circumstances had brought him to the Netherlands from Dubai in 2009. Back then, Europe was in the throes of the financial crises and so he could not find work in his preferred line of work. This was relatable given the wife’s struggles when we had arrived here in 2011. By the time the crisis blew over circa 2013, he had sat out for too long. Unable to reintegrate back into the workforce, he started driving a cab instead. Apparently the regular cab companies in Amsterdam pay well. However, driving a regular cab requires waiting for the next customer for hours at a time. He didn’t enjoy this. So while he could earn two to three times what he’d make on a typical day with Uber, he drives for Uber exclusively.

Naturally, our conversation then drifted towards how the Covid lockdowns had affected him last year. I was relieved to learn that the government provided adequate financial support and he didn’t have to struggle to make ends meet. Once the lockdown lifted after three months, things weren’t as good as 2019 of course - mostly because the high frequency and relatively higher value trips between the airport and the city center were way down - but he got by.

We soon arrived at the vaccination center. He dropped me near the entrance and took off for his next ride.

The vaccination site looked like a temporary (semi-permanent?) structure purpose built for, well, vaccinating people. The entrance door opened into a waiting hall where everyone queued in lanes made by stanchions and stood on the designated yellow stickers 1.5m apart. While there was enough room to keep your distance from the person ahead of you, the ones adjacent felt uncomfortably close. At least everyone was properly masked up. There were notices on the walls prohibiting photography. Wall-mounted LCD screens switched between important vaccination related information, such as the common side effects. Midway through the queue, a couple of guys asked to show the invitation letter - not unlike the security queue at an airport where you’d be asked to show your passport and boarding pass. Just the mere possession of a printed A4 sheet in my hands seemed to satisfy their curiosity. In the early days of the vaccination program, there were reports of people simply showing up at the vaccination sites and pleading to be vaccinated. I guess they might’ve turned those sorts back from here. The queue moved fast - though more people kept joining the queue at the rear end. It was certainly a busy day. Outside, the drizzle was turning into a downpour and I worried that either we’d have to get closer together or people would be left outside in the rain. None of this happened. Given that I hadn’t been at a gathering of humans this large - indoors or outdoors - in over a year, perhaps my anxiety was justified.

At the end of the waiting hall was the main vaccination area. There were two parallel rows of booths where the vaccines were being administered. All white, gleaming and brightly lit. Very reassuring. The sort of reassurance you want a vaccination site to exude. But first I had to walk a few paces to my right and present my vaccination invite, a form with miscellaneous questions about current medication, upcoming surgery etc. and my identity card at the registration counter. A man wearing a face mask at the other end of the Plexiglas examined my paperwork, logged something in the computer on his desk and asked if this was my first dose. It was hard to hear him through the Plexiglas. There was a microphone on his desk he was supposed to speak into but I guess he must’ve been new. Voices were raised, languages were switched (him English, me Dutch and vice versa), the microphone was rediscovered and my paperwork was returned with a yellow sticker affixed to the medical questionnaire.

I walked back to my spot at the entrance of the vaccination hall and waited five or so minutes for my turn. I was told to go to booth 13 and present my paperwork once more. The person at the booth again logged something at their computer and told me to come inside. At a shelf behind her, 4 syringes, presumably pre-filled with the vaccine, were already resting on a kidney dish - ready to go into arms. Another person offered me a seat, told me to hang my backpack and my jacket² on the hooks attached to the temporary partition wall and present my arm for the jab. I felt nothing, not even a pinch. But as the Band-Aid affixed to my upper arm and the printed paper handed to me would indicate, at 9:21 AM, 0.3ml of Pfizer/BioNTech COMIRNATY vaccine had been administered to me. I collected my things, muttered tot volgende keer³ and walked out at the other end of the hall.

Attached to the vaccination room was the waiting room where everyone taking the shot was supposed to wait for 15 minutes and watch for any severe side-effects that would require medical attention. It was a large hall with rows of cubicles that had a chair to sit on. If you spotted an empty cubicle you just took it or you waited until a Red Cross volunteer found you one. I found one quickly and my 15-minute wait was uneventful.

It was pouring outside when I stepped out. I called for a cab and waited in the busy parking lot outside the vaccination center with my umbrella. Having chosen a regular cab this time, I didn’t have to wait for long. This time, Uber assigned an elderly sikh gentleman with a large black van. As I settled down in the cab he asked me what I had been here for. I mentioned Covid vaccine and he was justifiably alarmed because he misheard it as covid testing - a reasonable confusion given the testing site’s close vicinity to the vaccination site. I reassured him that I wasn’t experiencing any Covid symptoms and was here just for the jab. We spoke about the recent terrible Covid outbreak in India and were thankful that no one in our immediate circle had been affected. The remainder of the journey passed in silence and soon I was home.

The whole thing took some 2 hours. I felt fine during the day and could attend to work normally. At night my left arm was a little sore so I slept lightly but otherwise didn’t experience any adverse side effects on the first night. On the second day the pain in the left arm had already subsided and the right arm was beginning to develop a dull phantom ache in sympathy. On the fourth day I felt tired - it was as if I had been walking for hours. A couple of hours of sleep put an end to that but the next morning it took some effort to get out of the bed. By day five I felt completely normal. Curious to see what the second does will bring and hoping that the wife will be getting one soon so we can start taking our first tentative steps towards some semblance of normalcy…

May 24, 2021