Greece Day Two

 We woke up and left with the teacher boy to explore by eight.  We walked past a Jewish cemetery and then up thousands of stairs to a lookout point at the top of the mountain with a beautiful church on top. We saw the white, crowded Athens from a bird’s perspective and once we were satisfied, we walked back down the mountain. Next, we brought a picnic to the beautiful Botanical Gardens, a huge park area filled with 16 million trees, a pond with hundreds of turtles, and dirt paths that twists and turn through the nature. We sat in the grass and ate cheese and tomato sandwiches, kettle chips, strawberries, and peach juice. While we were eating, we saw a red haired girl with a traveling backpack on eating by herself, so we waved her over to sit with us. Turns out, she’s currently in the Peace Cores in Albania and just recently graduated from the University of Madison (where I’m soon attending!). Also, her roommate was from Hopkins, the same school I go to! What a small world! 

Here's something I wrote while laying in the grass at the gardens:
  During your first few steps of life, the mysterious world is an uncovering story and every turn you make, you’re wide eyed with curiosity about the wonders of the universe. Firstly, your house is the most wonderful, amazing thing and your parents are hilarious and all knowing. You get older and then start exploring your neighborhood which is so big and for the first time, your experiencing things without your parents and the world is bigger then them. The world is so grand that you can’t wait to grow up and explore it. But then, before you grow up you become a spiteful teenager and the world “sucks” and everything is mundane and ordinary. Your parents are weird with funny accents, school is boring and the girls are mean, and the most important thing in the universe is you! Eventually, that stage thankfully passes and you become less ego-centric and start to realize that the world is a lot more complicated and important than you are. You throw away your hair brush and heels because that material stuff doesn’t matter to you anymore. Those people don’t matter- you want to surround yourself with positive, ardent energies and good spirited people like yourself. You come across new cultures, people, ideas and places and the curiosity that was once in the form of your former, child self, returns in a new form and the world once again starts to expand right before your eyes. You realize that you’re just an insignificant speck of matter in this huge, multifaceted world and at first, it’s a little damn depressing when you feel small and powerless. You wonder about the purpose of your existence and the meaning of your life. What can I do to make an impact in this world? is your tenacious question and you slowly abandon the idea of god because it’s too hard to wrap your head around and not believing is way easier. Then, your adulthood is approaching fast and the enormity and complexity of this world is exciting and wondrous and you’re just dying to be apart of it all! How can you connect more to the world, to people, to yourself? You try all sorts of things from sports to drugs to religion to music classes, to feel a connection to something bigger than you, something divine, something infinate. Maybe that “thing” is god. You’re desperate for something tangible to believe in, to desire! There’s so much to see and so many people to meet so you start off on your journey to find adventures and truths about the world and about yourself.