Winner of 2007's Most Eloquently Phrased Safety Notice Award

"You may inadvertently render the equipment inoperable"... you get a more articulate breed of safety notice in universities. Notice how even the typo has been ballpointed out by some waggish student?

Dating my first undergrad

The Arts Centre, enjoying a midday coffee. The University is beseiged by freshers, several thousand of whom are arriving this weeekend, and I end up offering the spare seats to what can only be described as a very young woman.

Her head tilts quizzically. "So you're a mature student here, then?"

I think for a second.

"Er... pretty immature, actually."

Make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh... we meet later for dinner, which is both fun and unnerving (I'm old enough to be her father, biologically if not legally) and I walk her back to to her accommodation. Ah, such innocent days.

And on the way back I pass the Student Union. Man, it's a ZOO down there! The hormones are so thick it's affecting local weather patterns!!!

When I die, I'm asking for those hours back

End of Induction Week. Warwick Business School is committed to diversity, so of course the week included a lengthy diversity lecture in the very first week. It finished about twenty minutes ago, and took nearly four hours.

And when I die, I want those four hours back.

The guest presenter - an affable French chap - did a reasonable job, considering the complexity of his PowerPoint material (approximately 88,0000 slides, each festooned with a different, stupefyingly complex, and largely inpenetrable diagram.) But I can't help feeling that all these endless nods to political correctness - understanding our differences, celebrating our cultural diversity - is having the opposite effect to the one intended.

All human difference constitutes a tiny fraction of one percent of DNA. The rest is just customs. And even these differences are relatively minor. The class is over 70% non-white non-British; there's not much you can teach anyone here about diversity. And yet we all get along, laughing at the same things, getting over our differences with a handshake and a coffee. It's just not a big problem for us. Or for anyone.

By constantly emphasising how very, very different we all are, isn't the huge and sprawling diversity industry (for it is an industry, and a growing one, growing thanks to fear of the PC brigade) making the problem worse? Driving a wedge between cultures, instead of bringing them together?

On second thoughts - well, of course that's the (unstated) intention. Driving such wedges is how the diversity industry grows. And everyone entering business is going to see a whole lot more of these PowerPoints, each one blowing up quirks of behaviour into huge, business-threatening issues, and the diversity consultants will grow fat on the back of it all.

Such presentations aren't about diversity, really. They're just about marketing.

New Economist MBA rankings

The Warwick MBA programme is now 27th in the world, a great jump. Other gainers include the other schools I had offers from: Cranfield shoots up to No. 11 (it FELT like it was having 'a moment' during my visits there, a real sense of pride and anticipation) and Ashridge at 19 now it's 'normalised' its somewhat idiosyncratic curriculum. At least that shows I'm not obsessed with rankings: I chose the school ranked lowest of the offers I got :-)

After all, rankings just measure a set of objective criteria; they can't give you that positive feel about a place that made me choose Warwick. Cranfield is a terrific school with a real drive for excellence, but do you really want to spend a year in the middle of a muddy field in Bedfordshire? And Ashridge - beautiful setting, wonderful architecture, great food, since it's a management centre and not a University. But a feast for the senses would be too distracting when you're trying to formulate a dissertation strategy. I'm happy to be here in Shakespeare country.

Suited and booted

It's MBA photo day for the Yearbook coming out in 2008, so on with the suit and tie. I wonder if they'll let me turn away from the camera?

An extraordinary morning

You know those times when you do something you thought you couldn't do, and it doesn't even seem hard once you've done it? I did one this morning. What's more, so did over half the class.

It's the POM part of the MBA, the only part I'm really here for: soft 'people' skills, the reason I never considered doing this thing by distance learning. A performance coach taught a simple memory technique, wrote the names of 20 objects on the board, and asked us to memorise the list.

Over two hours later (I've just checked) I can recall all 20 objects, IN THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY WERE LISTED. Wow. Double wow. Holy-f***ing-shit kind of double wow.

And it was nice that we share the same tailor. (He namechecked The English Tailor, and I knew instantly he was talking about Thomas Mahon.)

Quote unquote

Hey, I don't think I deserved this rather accusatory email!

"I have to admit I was slightly concerned about you moving into shared uni accommodation. I had vague mental images of you putting very neatly printed labels on all your food in the fridge to make sure no-one nicked your posh food, leaving you with nowt but a packet of supernoodles and a tin of spaghetti hoops :)"

Undergraduate overacting

It wasn't even a minute since I'd jokingly asked a fellow MBA in Costcutter if I had a chance of getting an undergraduate girlfriend on campus, and a fine example of such an undergrad interposed herself announcing, 'I'LL be your undergraduate girlfriend!' Sheer theatre.

Pringle jingle

You know those tubes of Pringles that seem to go on forever? They're really useful when you've got your first accounting assignment and you can't be bothered with dinner.

Induction indictment

How,exactly, did I get 4 hours of homework when the course hasn't officially begun?

Teamwork? More like a lynch mob

First team-building day on the MBA course, where we're put into groups and required to solve a task as a team. And it was... disastrous. Despite my group coming second of 8 teams.

You put ten people who don't know each other into a room, many with similar skills, and ask them to organise into a clear project team and execute a project. OF COURSE it's going to be a disaster; that's the whole point. Learning by failure. Especially when the task itself is fairly simple, and the problem is of too many cooks, not an absence of brains.

So... the first, expected 'bad' day. But teamwork is a big part of what I'm here to do - to quote 'Batman Begins': "You know how to fight six men. We will teach you to engage six hundred." So there's a lot more of this stuff to suffer through.

GHOST U

Early Sunday. I sleep fitfully; presumably this building's been in mothballs over summer, and the pipes and vents are gurgling and coughing their way back to life. At 7.15am I head for the kitchen to make my first cup of tea in my new home.

I've still got the place to myself. Eight bedrooms in a postgrad building, and I haven't seen a single person in the entire 20-flat block yet. Only one of the eight cupboards in the shared kitchen/lounge is full (mine.) Outside, only the geese are wandering about.

A memory comes rushing back: a computer game from the 80s, those primitive-but-thrilling text adventures by Infocom. 'The Lurking Horror'. It was set in a University, and there was something in the game's background, stalking you, always there, terrifying. Those text-only games were as immersive as any thriller novel.

This deserted campus feels like that University.

Is there a reason I hadn't heard of Warwick University until I started researching MBAs? Is there a reason it... isn't in Warwick?

Have I somehow enrolled at ... GHOST UNIVERSITY?

Some sort of dimension-wandering educational apparition, popping up for a few days here and there all over the cosmos, picking up lost souls like the Black Pearl did evil sailors?

Perhaps it feeds itself on creative wanderers like me. When you're feeling down, as I was earlier this year, it senses your pain, and 'makes itself available', carefully inserting itself into your consciousness and scooping you into its dreaming maw. To the University, I am food.

Are the geese and ducks outside merely... the shades of past souls Ghost U has absorbed?

Now it has me, it will surely dematerialise soon, and reappear in some distant galaxy to collect more educationally erratic miscreants. I am on campus now, drawn into this little self-contained world. There can be no escape.

How many others will share my fate? Or am I the only one?

Mi 1st day at skool.

By Chris. Aged 36 and three quarters.

Yes, I'm here!

I'm officially a fulltime MBA student from today, signed up and on campus. Going all the way, living like a 'real' student at Warwick University.

My home for the next year: a 4m x 4m study bedroom in a corridor (the accepted nomenclature in eduland is 'flat') bookended by a shared kitchen and 'lounge'. The inverted commas are because there are no sofas in it. Although it's just 36 hours until the first lecture (I'm writing this Saturday night pre-weblink), there doesn't seem to be anyone else (of 8 bedrooms I share the facilities with) here yet. (The U has 1000 postgrads enrolling this week. The week after, some 16,000 undergrads arrive. I have a week to prep myself for that.)

Somehow, amid the heroic volume of luggage I packed into my sister's SUV, I forgot the very basics: a wire to connect me to the University net, a plate to eat off, a corkscrew. Especially the corkscrew. (Got my folding knive/fork/spoon set - because I take that everywhere - but technically I still 'forgot' kitchenware.)

But the University itself is really rather nice.

My quarters are sort of like a midrange hotel: clean room, ensuite, big desk and lots of power sockets. A single bed - haven't slept in one of those for ages - but a great location: my (large) window overlooks the quadrangle formed by the various buildings so I'll know what's going on, and the building itself is adjacent to a little river that runs through campus, a little wooden bridge spanning the water nearby. I always wanted to spend some time on a University campus with a river and a bridge.

It has an ensuite bathroom, with an actual bath.

It has a desk with lots of shelves.

It has an unfeasibly large noticeboard.

Outside, the ducks and geese walk around everywhere, unafraid.

The central campus is 10min away on foot, a simple path past setting sun and green fields and assorted buildings with names like Physics, Humanities, Engineering. That's why I chose Warwick. A real University, not a thousand-year reputation like Oxford or Cambridge, but a solid top-tier name that earned it through giving value and sweating effort. I already like this place.

Slightly outside the main campus - where the 'Warwick: Intellectual Capital' banners cease - is the Varsity Pub, a pleasant drinking hole where we have lunch. (My younger sister, who did all this stuff a decade ago, has brought me up with her husband in her thankfully capacious SUV.) It's a good place. 'Unreal' somehow, from the 'If you were my homework, I'd be doing you now' greetings cards (you choose a slogan, then fill in your name and email and hand it to the student you fancy) to the incredible array of sex toys in the toilets. (They've come on from condoms: mini-vibrators and inflatable attachments are in vogue from £1.) This detached-from-reality is what I like.

I feel.... excited, yet at peace.

Maybe this, in the end, is my strength. I can adapt to anything. After just a few hours, this place seems like home. A mob of buildings from the ultramodern to the redbrick traditional, yet they all hang together. The Physics Department (which looks like a high-tech establishment.) The Social Studies (which is trying hard to be taken seriously but is architecturally lightweight.) The Business School (solid and reassuringly competent.) It all works. And the central campus - Student Union, Arts Centre - is totally Flash Gordon, all spiky spires and whizzy blocky geometry reaching to the sky for the sheer thrill of it.

Everytime I step back and think 'What the f**k am I doing here?', the reality kicks in and I admit I'm enjoying the adventure. Driving in today, I almost had butterflies for the first time in decades.

And comforting. Like being part of a big family. Eating my CostCutter curry off a plastic plate tonight, I can see the other Lakeside buildings coming alive as students arrive, people exploring their kitchens and the common areas, new and exciting.

My iPod's feeding Bowie through Cambridge Soundworks. It's rare I listen to music, even in the background. But you've got to have it in a campus bedroom.

I think - far from any capital or capital flow, in a land I was born in with no danger of collapse or coup or any of the edgy experiences which I thought made life worth living - this could, perhaps, be the best year of my life.

Happy tonight, I think.

Goodbye to a great pad

So my house lies empty awaiting its tenants, floor and walls naked, no furniture or ornaments at all.

In other words, it looks much the same as when I was living in it, except perhaps for the bookshelf.

It was a great house. Easy to take care of, no carpets or curtains, just hard floors and geometric shapes that took less than an hour to clean. Small but adequate, three little storeys and some outside space, a ten-minute wak from a Tube or a huge Tesco, one minute from a park with a running track. I enjoyed living there.

And now I'm heading for a four-metre rented room in a flat shared with others, on the campus of a university. Well, I knew the next stage of life meant making a BIG change, and for me they don't get any bigger than this.

Tomorrow: into Shakespeare country. To my new home.

Back to school

Just two days before I'm a student, whoo hoo. It's odd that despite having looked at the curriculum and visited the University, I don't really know what to expect; an MBA isn't quite like other degrees, and the academic world is very different to business. I just hope I can get to grips with its peculiar internal value system without too many frustrations.

DON'T say 'Don't tase me...'

I must admit, if I'd been a politician for 37 years, I'd feel a guilty pleasure at a disruptive questioner getting tased. They would have loved these in the House of Commons back when Blair was around.

But: could it have been the cops just having a bit of fun? I mean, imagine the average doughnut-stuffing American cop:

BBBBZZZZZZZ!

Cop: "Huh? Did you say something?"
Kid: "Don't tase me!"
Cop: BZBZZZZZZZZZ!
Cop: "Oh, DON'T tase me? Sorry, I thought you said... TASE ME!"
BBBZZZZZZZZ!

It's a fact of politics that anything intended to subdue ends up being used to punish, from weapons to laws. That's the problem with Tasers - unlike a revolver, they're non-damaging enough not to need careful thought before using. I'd rather be tased than shot, but in Britain's ever-encroaching police state I'm not sure I'd have the option.

Frozen mountains, the stuff of dreams

Check out this shot of an ice cream shop in Nafplio. Now THAT'S the way to serve gelato.

Dreaming of Nafplio

Back in London, and thinking about the last two weeks. I quite like this shot of Nafplio down the hillside towards the harbour, the 28-300mm zoom lens still letting in plenty of light. Not something a pro photographer would be proud of, but given my minimal lensmanship skills it's a triumph :-)

Back in town

Hands on a proper keyboard (instead of a PDA thumbboard) for the first time in two weeks; working down a list of 20 things to do. I needed that break. And it was great to finally discover ancient Greece, the cradle of Western civilisation, and see the places the classics came from, majestic ruins among which the protagonists of wars Trojan, Persian, and Peloponnesian walked.

Now to concentrate on a to-do list: everything from a CRM project to a house move to Warwick. Life is exciting again.

Night over Nafplio

It's been a relaxing last 48 hours here: wandering the ancient streets at dawn, basking up on the fort in the midday sun, chilling with cocktails on the harbourfront, enjoying freshly-caught swordfish and shrimp in the evenings. With 15 archaeological sites, half a dozen long bus rides, and several 10km walks between villages clocked up, it's been a real holiday.

(1pm: club sandwich on the seafront, watching the board walkers, an hour of human theatre caught on camera.)

It's also a fitting climax to my recovery. Four months ago I was ready to put a bullet in my brain; I was so below my best that I barely scraped into the top 10% on the GMAT, terrible. Now someone else could pull the trigger for me and the round'd just bounce off. Indestructible again. What an ache its absence has been. For a brief time I was as vulnerable and weak as any normal human being: it was frightening. Humbling, too. None of us is truly invincible; I just make a better go of it than most.

(6pm: green apple and melon gelato at the ice cream shop next to the Hotel Othon, where they display the goods not in tubs but in huge heaped mountains stuck with fruit and flakes.)

And in barely more than a week I start my year as a student, leaving London behind for now. Becoming a landlord, leveraging an asset giving 7% ROI; with luck capital growth in the London property market will pay my tuition fees and I'll come out ahead.

(7pm: buying honey to take home, sweet jars of nectar with the combs still in them. To mix with simple Greek yoghurt when I get home, tangy bee-syrup cut by sour milkiness, the perfect breakfast.)

And realising what my goals are: the next client/company I join has to be a GROWTH one, venture-funded looking to be a billion-plus concern, not these fun-but-chaotic consultancies that've been the mainstay of my roster for four years. Real action, real money.

(8pm: seafood platter next to the town square, six kinds of fish grilled simply in olive oil with eggplant on the side.)

And secondly: to be international again. Zipping around the world setting up programmes and tweaking ROI to hike combined bottom lines from 30,000 feet. It sounds strange, but I miss airports. I really do.

So it's Athens tomorrow for a quick hop home, and then I start packing.

I'm back!

Byzantine building regulations

Mystras!

Regional seat of old Constantinople, a town atop a mountain built from the debris of ancient Sparta!

It's a huge site, upper and lower towns of ruined citadells, streets, churches and houses, at least a km across and a hundred metres up and down. Exploring it means countless stone steps and cobbled paths, but you can take shortcuts by leaping through arched windows or through gaps in a half-crumbled wall. I had the plce virtually to myself, and it felt like playing the first level of a first-person-shooter videogame. (You know, the stage where you're getting used to the game's controls and conventions, immersing yourself in its universe before the alien hordes start fragging you.)

Wandering the twisting streets, it's a bit of a shame that 'Byzantine' has come to mean overly bureaucratic and needlessly complex; actual Byzantine regulations were a model of social policy, balancing public services with private property. The building code gave householders full property rights in return for compliance with a list of public goods: public space on the ground floor, no drainpipes to expel outside the house's borders, no windows below a certain size to keep the town fortified. These regs led to a city with good plumbing, a street scene, and the social security that leads to a solid economy.

Afterwards I walked back to Sparta, some 6km from the foot of the hill, a pleasant walk through wooded countryside and mountain views. A great way to end these few days in the Peloponnese interior.

This ... Is... SPAAARTAAAH!

... And it lives up to its name, the term it gave the world to connote plainness and conformity. It's as generic as a suburb of LA. (Except Los Angeles has more men in red leather underpants walking about.)

The journey here was suitably rugged. Packed local buses down twisting mountain paths from Arcadia at the crack of dawn, then a backpacked jaunt across Tripoli to find the right bus station (Greek towns have several.) Which turned out, like so many, to be less of a station and more a sort of counter with buses stopping outside it. With the idiosyncratic timetabling, obscure stopping points, and punctuated network - not to mention an alphabet I can't read without concentrating, where 'Sparta' looks like 'Enapta' - bussing around this first world EU member has been tougher than doing the same in undeveloped Egypt.

Ancient ruins are a bit sparse, too - the Spartans didn't fortify their towns, probably believing fortifications were for wusses, so preserved architecture is limited to a ruined acropolis and theatre. There is a good archaeological museum, and ancient Mystras is nearby (the reason there's so little of ancient Sparta to see - much of its stone was cannibalised to build Mystras, 6km away) so that's tomorrow taken care of.

I'm running out of time, so this is as far south as I go. No Diros caverns, no Gytheio, but no problem: I'll get to see Nafplio again, with no need to return to Athens. Which makes this trip one to remember.

Up where the air is clear

Today I bussed high into the central Peloponnese, ancient Arcadia itself. A classical landscape unchanged in two and a half thousand years....

...until five days ago.

Yes, Arcadia is suffering. Great hillside tracts have been reamed by the fire, whole mountains baked into stony blackness. I hear even Olympia, site of the first Games, has just been lost.

But the good news is: there's plenty left.

I've found a guesthouse in the hillside town of Dimitsana, a four-tavern town where the hostess produces an exercise book full of vocab as the menu. (I take whatever she points at - potatoes, spicy sausage, fried cheese - and it's all really, really good.) My room has a balcony the juts out over a hundred metres of absolute nothingness; vertigo comes at no extra charge. The hotel is glued to a steep hill and the gradient from its foundations into the Louisos Gorge must be 10 in 1. It's fantastic in every way.

Not least of which is the way I can see clouds BELOW me.

Mycenae: city of gold and blood

Mycenae!

City of Agamemnon and the players of the Trojan War, of fabulous wealth and of the classical world's most dysfunctional family!

The thrills continue. Mycenae isn't just part of Western history; it's part of the Western literary canon, enshrined in Homeric verse. And I'm here!

King Agamemnon himself actually paced these ruined streets, gazed on the double lions at the entrance, rested his head with Klytemnestra within these very walls. His city, the richest in the Peloponnese, must have been marvellous in its heyday: richly-daubed walls, finely carved sculptures and architecture, gold arriving by the bucketload to pay for it all. And Agamemnon in charge.

But let's face it: you wouldn't want to BE Agamemnon. Your own father slaughtered your male cousins; your uncle had a child with his surviving daughter to restock; that child grew up to murder your Dad and then start an affair with your own wife for good measure! And as if that weren't enough, when you arrive back from Troy (where you've been helping your cuckolded brother get his wife back from Paris) your wife and her toyboy (who's got his own problems, having a Mum and a sister who are THE SAME PERSON, ditto father and grandfather) BUMP YOU OFF without even letting your head hit the pillow. Your own kids will avenge you - committing both matricide and step-patricide - but that's small comfort at this stage.

The only moral it's possible to draw here is that killing your brother's kids can lead to a fair bit of family friction, but that'd be stating the bleedin' obvious.

Corinthians 1.0: scorched earth policy

In ancient Corinth, the earth is talking to me.

It's my first brush with the fires that have swept the Peloponnese: the old seat of Corinth. There are two sites, the forum of ancient Corinth and the hilltop acropolis of Acrocorinth. Acrocorinth is a 4km walk, mostly straight upwards, and so in 34 degree midday heat I decide to walk it.

The 1.5L bottle of water dematerialises in the first km. I'm climbing straight into into Dante's inferno. (Isn't hell supposed to be downwards? I never did have much sense of direction. Oh well, I always did like the name Virgil.)

One whole side of the hill has been turned into a thousand-acre barbecue pit. The fire's still visible through cracks in the earth; the ground is warm to the touch, everywhere. The stench of blackness hangs in the air, sucking the energy out of the land and biting whole chunks off the already narrow road, tarmac cracked and tumbled away where the intense heat has crumbled the ground it lay on.

And it's not quiet.

As the earth slowly cools, it's making a noise, a rustling and creaking of land settling back into place. The sound of the earth renewing itself after injury, a billion fried lizards and crisped twigs being absorbed, feeding the creation of something new. And some things spat back; a soft puddle of what I realise is melted bottles is going the other way, floating on top of the newly claybaked crust rather than sinking beneath.

I stand here for a long time, listening to the earth talk.

When I reach the Acropolis it's almost an anticlimax. It's impressive enough set into the hilltop, with a long series of stone staircases leading to the summit. But surrounded by smoking earth and scorched fauna, it looks uncomfortably like the apocalyptic last chapter of a religious novel. I don't stay long in case I turn out to be the protagonist.

The walk back down is easier, with cool breezes scraping the sweat off my back. I'm glad I made this effort today. Despite the choking air, I feel somehow ... cleansed.

I'm not sure what it is about the Mediterreanean landscape that gets me right there. The rolling hills you see from the south of France to the Spanish Costas to the Greek islands (well, technically the Aegean, but let's not split hairs) are anything but natural - it's all been intensely cultivated since the 5th century BC - but they're beautiful nonetheless.

I think it's the complexity of it. Civilisation brings lawyers and contracts and ownership, and with a market economy comes the need to delineate, to mark off your territory. In France, the 'appellation' system leads to adjacent fields producing entirely different wines, separated only by a road geographically, but by centuries of salting and chalking and fertilising agriculturally, by different families who've passed their particular secret sauce down the generations. Two rows of vines a mere fence apart are growing in 'terroir' from different planets.

Greece is the same. Between the hills, every square metre of land is being used in some way - but not the same way everywhere. Here are olive trees; here an orange grove; next door goats graze on grass. On slopes too steep to cultivate stand squat shrubs here, tall cedars there, a mosaic of diversity. Over the thousands of acres visible from any roadside stop, all this patchworked randomness comes together to create... something wonderful.

Let it rain

Rainfall!

At precisely 9pm on 3rd Sep, it starts raining in Nafplio for the first time in four months. Big splashy raindrops, half a cupful each, that splatter on impact with feeling. And the crowd goes wild.

On the square, Greeks of all ages start spontaneously singing and dancing. A hundred villages across the Peloponnese that might have been given to the fire will now survive. I guess that 80% of the people on this squre tonight have relatives elsewhere in the Peloponnese.You can just tell.

What an amazing moment. I climb the steps back to my hotel, soaked, through the sea of smiling faces.

Our plumes will blot out the sun

Wow. A huge wall of dark smoke has just obscured the eastern Peloponnese across the bay; must be a new battlefront opening up in southern Greece's war against forest fires. Three large beige seaplanes, presumably the water-dumpers used to fight fires, have just flown overhead. Something tells me I'd better check the news before heading down the coast...

Top of the world

Palamidi Fort, high above the town.

I like towns with upper and lower sides; a bit of geography, topography, up and down bits to keep things interesting. (It was the only decent concept in Dave Sim's warrior aardvark comic: an upper and lower city connected by a staircase so long that if you fell down it you had a major expedition on your hands.)

I must have sweated off the entire 1.5l bottle of water climbing 400-odd steps, but the view is worth it. I've fallen for this little town in a crushing, futile, she's-a-decade-younger-and-dates-guys-with-much-more-money kind of way. There's a three-storey wreck on the hillside near my inn, and I'm seriously considering making 'em an offer.

I think Thermopylae and Delphi are off my itinerary now; there's so much in the Peloponnese and heading for Northern Greece (which means a trip back to Athens) would take three days out of my precious 'miniature gap year'. The events that defined western civilisation happened here, in the Peloponnese: there's enough here to fill the next twelve days.

The perfect square

In the town of Nafplio, there lies a perfect square.

No, I don't mean 9 or 16 or anything; Pythagoras & co got that stuff cased millennia ago, and anyway I've had enough of mathematics for a few months post-GMAT, I just mean a village square, lined with cafes and museums and shops, with just the right vibe to make a planned hike uphill seem non-vital.

It's called the Plateia Syntagmatos - there's a square by this name in every town in Greece. On one side the Palamidi fortress, an outpost of Venice when it started its franchising arm, sits atop a hill studded with steep stone steps and streets layered most of the way up like strata in a cleft rockface. And on the other side, the berry-blue Med with a couple of 100ft yachts taking up most of it.

(I took some shots of the boats from my balcony earlier, and overheard my neighbour say inside her room in German "looks like we have a paparazzi in the hotel!" Well, it IS rather an impressive lens. Seriously, if any tabloid editors are reading and are interested in snaps of whoever's on the 'Loretta Anne' and 'Geosand' yachts, give me a call. Can't make out his face from 200m, but on the 'Geosand' is a shirtless guy in yellow trousers who seems to be in charge.)

Yes, Plateia syntagmatos is the perfect square; scenic and happening. I think I'll head back later for a bite.

The agony and the arteries

Transport terminii are where you see a city's soul.

The bureacracy to navigate, the crowds, the undercurrent of uncertainty. They're also the best places to indulge my 'jason bourne' image: nobody knows who you are or what you're up to, whether you're adrift or purposeful. In a station, you can be whoever you want to be. Not a bad deal for an 11 euro ticket.

I've slept next to the sleepers in Asian railways, watched in fascination at the way Egyptians simply jump down onto tracks to reach other platforms, slumbered in Greyhound stations the breadth of the USA fending off those society left behind. Long distance stations, especially, mark off the paragraphs between different stages of life, much as this Greek odyssey is doing with mine.

Stations are cool.

They also allow you to write blogs that are TOTALLY UP THEMSELVES.