One month before going to Greece, I bought two books, one was "The Time of the Gods on Earth" and the other was "The Story of the Greeks".
However, throughout October, most of my thoughts were focused on the "Watercolor Sketching Journey from Fuchun River to Xin'an River" project, so I hurriedly hit the road without reading a few pages of the book.
On the day of departure, I packed my luggage and stuffed the third volume of "Tale of the Greeks" into my carry-on backpack. The whole set of books is very thick, and I only read a dozen or so pages of the first volume. After flipping through it roughly, I saw some familiar names such as "Socrates", "Plato", "Aristotle" and "Alexander" in the third volume, so I picked them up.
But then, I still didn’t study much on the road. During the entire 16-day trip, I read thirty or forty pages in the first 15 days, and on the 16th day, during the nine-hour flight back home after a layover in Doha, I read 377 pages.
That feeling is so hearty!
After I got home, I read the first two volumes in one go.
This is indeed a good book, starting with the first Olympic Games in 776 BC and ending with Alexander the Great's last words "Leave it to better men" in 323 BC. The history of ancient Greece for more than 450 years, the characters who took turns to appear, the competition between city-states, the heroism of the Greco-Persian War, the momentum of the Macedonian army sweeping across the Middle East, reading it gives you the pleasure of the Three Kingdoms, and all these details Let's enjoy the absurdity and humor of history and human nature with the author.
It's a pity that I couldn't finish reading this book before walking in Greece, or read more while walking. Otherwise, I should have a deeper experience of the journey.
Before setting off, I asked Allah, or said to myself: "If I were to write a travel diary on the road, from what angle should I write it?"
He seemed too lazy to answer and said, "Write what you feel."
You can only write about what you feel. Because from my brain to my heart, there is basically no information about Greece stored, except for a few words.
During the 16-day trip, my friend JF is not a person who likes nightlife, nor is he a chatty person, so our entire trip was "lived very regularly" every day.
Basically, every night at seven or eight o'clock, we quietly do our own things in the room. Therefore, I was able to hug an iPad, quietly lie on the bed, and write down some of my "own feelings" during the trip.
End the journey and return home.
I've always prided myself on being "jet lag free", but I don't know what happened this time.
During the first week, I seemed to be immersed in "Greek time" and couldn't extricate myself. I wasn't sleepy at 1 or 2 o'clock in the evening and couldn't get up at 11 or 2 o'clock in the morning. One day, I went to visit Mr. Niang Ben, the master of Thangka. At three o'clock in the afternoon, he was very sleepy. He said that he had been back from New York for a few days and could not sleep every night. He did not dare to sleep more during the day for fear that he would not be able to sleep at night. He also asked me how I fell asleep... I said I went for a massage, but he said he went for a massage every night and still couldn't fall asleep.
And it’s been ten days since then. The jet lag is gone, but I still feel that half of my soul is in Greece and has not come back. I often feel that I am still in the Peloponnese, in Athens, in the Parthenon, and in Hadrian's Library.
Actually, I don’t like Greece that much.
At least not as much as I like Türkiye, Switzerland, Japan, or Bali. But I have never had such a vague and strong feeling, why is my soul still wandering there? Why haven't you come back yet?
Probably, Greece is a place that makes people both bored and reluctant to leave.
