Where It All Began

Hello Greece! This morning we woke and spent our first day getting the lay of the land. We struck out to join the masses riding the bus transit, the metro transit, the rail transit, the taxi transit, and the transitory space between knowing your surroundings and becoming utterly and hopelessly reliant on every map, English speaking Greek or corner-side kiosk you can find. (Random side note: My dirty little secret is I'm actually writing this blog one week after the fact--I'm playing catch up--and I'm watching olympic beach volleyball out of the corner of my eye. When did olympic sports get courtside cheerleaders anyway?)

After finding ourselves (and not in a metaphorical sense) we arrived at the International Broadcasting Center (our home away from home) where we'd be working for the next month. Jim Owens gave us the grande tour of what is currently the most technologically advanced building in the world. We went to the heart of the AOB hub, a room of switchers and walls of t.v. monitors stretching yard upon yard down a long corridor. I felt like Captain Nemo. The Olympics are a testing ground, turns out, for cutting-edge technology. Panasonic, for example, is giving their new P2 model professional digital camera it's first test drive. This thing records on digital cards and never actually uses tape. It records for HDTV, looks really nifty and costs more than John Kerry's reputation. (You have to spend more to save face when your wife likes tell the press to shove it.)

Moving on from the IBC we spent the rest of our afternoon at the Acropolis. Amazing! Cobblestone streets, a theatre carved in the granite wall of the mountain with tiered granite seating, the Parthenon in the distance, and the mighty Agora. From the top of the Acropolis you can see a 360 degree swath of the ancient city of Athens.

Needless to say, we got an eyeful today. If I've learned one thing from this experience it is carpe' diem is not greek, digital cameras only hold so many photos and I need to write shorter blogs.