"On an island in the sun..." or "Please please please, Sister Socrates..." or "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all..."

After a long bus ride from Sofia, Bulgaria, I finally arrived in Athens, the historic capital of Greece. I was expecting to meet some family there in a few days (Maggie and Bob). However, in an amazing display of generosity, Bob offered (and insisted) on getting me out to Santorini to meet them immediately. That’s how, after only one afternoon in Athens, I found myself on a puddle-jumper plane towards the Greek Isles. I arrived in Santorini late at night and promptly met Maggie and Bob at their hotel, a beautiful resort of white clay buildings overlooking the pristine coast of the island. The view from our room was beyond postcard material, and it was exactly how I'd always imagined the picturesque beaches of Greece. The hotel itself was luxurious and something to see. After months in dingy hostels, the Perivolas resort felt beyond delux to me. It was wonderful to rest and soak in the views. We drove all over the small island, went snorkeling, lounged on the black sand and stone beaches, and browsed the upscale tourist shops. Of all the places I've been, Santorini is a serious contender for the most beautiful. Here are some photos:

View from our hotel in Santorini.

Again.

Church in Santorini.

View around sunset.

Sunset in Santorini.

We left Santorini for Athens after a few days. I really enjoyed the city during the afternoon I was there, so I was glad to get back and see it more deeply. Athens radiates with a sense of history. It’s extremely cool to just walk around. It’s a fully functioning city, but it all exists in the shadow of breathtaking ruins like the Acropolis and such. There are millennia-old ruins everywhere. It really puts human history in perspective to hear someone say, “Yeah, those Ionic columns were built around the 4th century B.C.” We toured the Acropolis. I saw the Temple of Olympian Zeus. I also visited the Ancient Agora, which is where Socrates used to hang out in his philosophical heyday. I’ve always been a big fan of Socrates, so I was really stunned to be able to check that out. Again, all of those sights are especially amazing because they are right in the heart of a bustling modern city. Here are some photos of Athens:

Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens.

The Ancient Agora, where Socrates used to hang out.

The Parthenon.

Another view of the Parthenon.

Statues outside a temple on the Acropolis.

Maggie and I in Athens, with the Acropolis in the background.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the news these past few weeks, you’re probably under the impression that Greece’s economy and stability have gone to Hell in a hand basket, as they say. Indeed, when I decided to visit Greece, I received several emails warning me of riots in Athens over the crumbling economy and the incompetency of the government. I had not been paying attention to the news, so I was unaware of just how bad the economy in Greece had gotten. Bob’s travel agent even recommended that he switch hotels in Athens (which we did) due to security concerns near the city center. In other words: if there’s a rebellion, you don’t want to be there.

My first day in Athens (the single afternoon by myself before I flew to Santorini to meet them), I accidentally wandered into Constitution Square, an open area downtown that houses the Parliament Building. If you’ve seen newscasters reporting on the riots and mass demonstrations in front of hoards of protestors, they are probably broadcasting from Constitution Square. Anyway, I accidentally wandered over there and found tons of people camped out in front of Parliament. There were political booths, rally signs, and literature all over the place. I strolled around, and everything was fine.

Word.

Protest sign in Constitution Square, Athens.

When I arrived back in Athens with Bob and Maggie a few days later, the hotel’s concierge told us that the demonstrations would start around 7, so we might want to “avoid” the Parliament Building after that. Instead, we ended up right in the middle of the crowd. The scene was pretty amazing: young protestors with megaphones, crowds shouting slogans, people booing members of Parliament as they walked into the building, et cetera. Demonstrators, and later police, blocked off the road to cars. We hung around for a bit and soaked it all in. If I could understand Greek, I probably would have appreciated it more. Here’s what it looked like:

Flag waving.

Demonstrators.

Chanting slogans.

 

Barricades: demostrators vs. police.

Mass demonstrations (not riots) outside the Parliament Building.

In spite of all of the demonstrations, all of the protestors, all of the discontent, and all of the reports of riots, there was never a moment of actual danger throughout my time in Athens. One night, we came back to our hotel immediately after leaving the night-time demonstrations at Constitution Square. I turned on CNN and BBC, only to see their reporters sensationalizing the reality on the ground. Later, in a lead-in to a story about the Greek economy, CNN ran a photo of a group of rioters being dispersed in a cloud of smoke. The implication: Athens is crumbling! Save yourselves!

Keep in mind: I had just left the area of town they were discussing. However, there were no riots there. There wasn’t even any threatening language. Actually, the whole thing seemed frustratingly benign. These were not anarchists tossing Molotovs into corporate windows. They weren’t setting fire to overturned police cars. It bared more resemblance to Bonnaroo than a revolution. There were food vendors and street performers, for God’s sake.

Which leads me to another thing I’ve learned while traveling (on this trip and others): things are hardly ever as bad as the media and fear-mongers in the United States present them to be. On this trip, I have been in several supposedly “compromising” or “unsafe” situations. I was in Thailand when the border war with Cambodia flared up early this year. I visited Burma, a military state that even I was shocked I could enter. I was in India (Pakistan’s unwelcome neighbor) riding public transportation as the U.S. embassies all over the world issued warnings not to do that in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death. Jobi and I were planning a trip to Morocco until a terrorist bombing in Marrakech forced us to reconsider. This week, I was in downtown Athens amid the “riots.”

And what’s amazing is that I never—not once—felt the least bit concerned about my safety. There was almost no actual danger in these places for a traveler like me.

The media deserves some of the blame. After all, any for-profit newspaper would much rather print a photo of the one guy tossing a brick through a window rather than the thousands of others who are peacefully demonstrating in front of the Parliament Building. That’s understandable, I suppose.

Another part of the blame belongs to something even more nebulous than the media, though. A lot of it is the culture of fear that pervades America. While on a bus in Bulgaria, I met an American girl who had traveled by herself to Kabul—yes, the capital of Afghanistan—in 2008. In Belgium, I met an Argentinian guy who was encouraging me to go to Cairo because of the cheap deals and great times he’d found there in the wake of the recent rebellion. Last week, I met a couple of French guys who were on their way to Iran on a tourist visa. These people did not seem obsessed with security concerns, and their travels were all the more enriching for it. Indeed, they, too, found that “unfriendly” countries are a lot more accommodating than we might imagine.

We are constantly indoctrinated with a certain fear of “the other.” It’s not conspiratorial or calculated, but it exists. We can see it in school textbooks (e.g., terms like “Third World”), in the “us against them” language of politicians, in the excessively cautious advisories issued by the State Department, in the sensationalist media outlets, and in the well intentioned fears of family and friends.

The sad truth is that bad things happen everywhere in the world all the time, yet I have felt safer throughout my travels than I feel in many cities in the United States. I understand the security concerns of America. I understand that I can’t waltz around the streets of Baghdad without accepting a certain level of risk. However, it’s important to keep these fears in perspective. If a single American female traveler can navigate the streets of Kabul, then I think that’s proof enough that we should pump the breaks when it comes to the fear rhetoric. These places are accommodating, and often the xenophobia subtly cultivated by our society is completely unfounded. I didn’t get arrested by the government of Burma; I wasn’t swept up in the so-called “riots” of Athens; the military skirmish in Thailand wasn’t anywhere near affecting me; and India was business-as-usual in the wake of Osama’s killing. Was I tempting fate in all of these cases? No. I wasn’t “lucky.” If it seems that way, it's only because we have such fearful and negative expectations when it comes to Americans traveling abroad.

I often say that traveling is good for people because it forces them out of their comfort zones. However, the implication is a bit misleading. By escaping my comfort zone, I don’t become uncomfortable (or unsafe). Rather, I simply realize that I have restricted my comfort zone too conservatively, that most people in the world mean me no harm at all, and that the world can be a pretty welcoming place if you return the sentiment. I haven’t been proven wrong yet, and I don’t think it’s because I’m lucky.

“Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

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