Olive Oil in a Greek Bottle

So I stepped carefully into the men’s locker room where I changed into the “disposable underwear”

I didn’t take detailed notes at the time, but Greece was probably one of the first eight or nine places I knew about. If I had to guess, the list went roughly: New York, New Jersey, America writ large, Bikini Bottom, England, The 100 Acre Wood, Egypt, and then Greece. Growing up in the west, learning at schools decorated with scattered marble heads and busts, it’s weird how early Ancient Greece came into the conversation. Homer Simpson may have been more immediately familiar to me than Homer the bard, but by third grade somebody had told me about the Trojan war.

This mild fascination persisted for some time. In or around sixth grade, during computer class, we were tasked with planning a trip to a foreign country, planning out our meals and lodging, following a strict budget, and tracking it all in an Excel spreadsheet. Before trip advisor, we looked joints up in Fodor’s and took them at their word.

This culminated in a PowerPoint presentation. The trip I planned took some 18 years to materialize, but the planning process today was if anything more haphazard. In the interim, however…