Cities have rhythms, the beats are different in each...if you are quiet enough, if you are aware enough, you feel them. Maybe that is why Paris didn’t catch me, its rhythm didn’t work for me; maybe I had been too absorbed in my work and finding my way to and from the library. I just couldn’t get the café or park thing. But Athens...even as I was flying into the city, I opened up the window sash and below me saw the outline of the Greek mainland, and the blue Aegean surrounding it, I felt the pull of something, a force. An image came into my mind, a painting by Correggio, a 16th century version of the myth of Zeus and Io. In the painting Zeus is shown as a cloud coming from out of the background; Io, in the foreground is naked, leaning towards the cloud which almost engulfs her; Zeus’s face can be seen emerging from the cloud. Io completely gives into Zeus, and suffers a fate that most women did when they succumbed to Zeus’ ploys. Athens. City of the Greek gods, and a favorite of Athena, the daughter of Zeus who sprang full-grown from his head. The land of wine and feta, olives and grilled octopus. Home of Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Herodotus. What doesn’t Greece signify in the minds of us western folk? We trace our roots back to this rocky land, our government, as our capital, modeled after its forms.

Luggage thankfully present, I found my cabbie. Reading about the horrors of Greek cab drivers, I had gone with the suggestion of a travel site and booked a ride with George the cab driver. A bit more expensive, but guaranteed to get me to my hotel without an unexpected tour of the suburbs. George spoke English well, having lived in the US for a time. He had decided to move home where his family was, because, he explained, “family is what life is about.”

A handsome man, with olive skin and greased back hair, so Mediterranean, gave me my first introduction to Athens, to Greece.

As we sped along the newly built highway connecting the new airport to the city, he asked about America, where I was from, what I was doing there. But as we neared the city, going across the mountains separating Athens from the country, he became more animated, more informative. As we rounded the final bend in the road and came around a mountain to see Athens below, he said, “isn’t she beautiful?” And who could not think so? Sprawled out between the peaks we were driving along and others in the distance, with a faint indication of the port Pireaus in the distance, the city of Athens was so unlike Paris, so old, so enticing. It pulls in you as you drive along the side of a mountain, spiraling down to the mass of low-rise white buildings below, the Acropolis in the distance.

The calm, serene ride in ended with a mad dash through crowded city streets. Athens is Greece’s largest city, five million people live here, and all of them own cars or motorcycles. As we sat at a light, behind a dozen or more cars, with the beginnings of grid lock ahead, George informed me that the Greeks love cars, and they also love protesting. So everyday you are guaranteed that traffic comes to a dead stop somewhere. Ah, this is my type of city, its rhythm could be heard in the distance, a throbbing I had not felt in Paris. As George made his way down back allies and using short cuts to avoid the worst traffic I arrived at my hotel, safe, tired but exhilarated.

Later, as I walk about the city, I can feel the pulsing of this ancient city. There is an energy to it I cannot describe. I cannot understand it, nor did I want to. Athens’ rhythm was drawing me in...and I, like Io with Zeus, had given in to its seduction.