Its the terror of knowing what the world is about...

I just saw the Prime Minister. In fact, a car full of her Men In Suits With Ear Pieces nearly ran me over. No bloody manners. That was a bit exciting though. Not the nearly being run over bit, but seeing Helen. Yay.

I was doing some note-taking today in a classics class, and they were talking about the introduction of coins into the Greek Empire etc, and then the lecturer put up a slide of some coins that were from where I used to live!! Again with the exciting.
OK, bit of background: for nearly six months in 2001 I lived in Rodos (Rhodes), which is a small island in the north east group of the Greek Islands called the Dodecanese, a couple of hours away from Turkey. I lived in a proper Greek village on a hill called Kalitheas, and worked on a beach (not on the hill. At the bottom of it) that was crawling with British tourists.

I got to throw them from great heights.

Unfortunately, the company made sure the bungy cord was firmly attached to their feet before they jumped, and I didn't so much get to throw them, as sign them up and take their money, but still.

Anyway, these maps of Ancient Greece that the lecturer was showing had Rodos in some detail and I could have pointed out for the benefit of the class the old town that was walled in by the Knights of St John in the Crusades, to keep out the Turks, and the Acropolis of Lindos, which is where I used to go on my days off cos they had really good icecreams and the beach was much nicer and had less tourists, and the part of Turkey that I went to which in ancient times was part of Lydia but is now a really crappy town, and another island called Thera which is now called Santorini where I stayed for a few days and theres still a village there called Thera but they call it Fira and theres another one up the road called Firastefani, and a volcano across the Caldera that I walked up and the ground was warm and steam was coming out of it.

It made me think a bit.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong (yeah, right!) but I think there have been people in NZ for about a thousand years. Its difficult for me to comprehend the age of some of the places I've been to. The Acropolis at Lindos is about three thousand years old, and thats just a minor thing. This lecturer was talking about places that I've been to, that I can tell you stories about, and they are part of history. Ancient history, even. These kids were studying it, and paying attention to all these interesting stories about these places, and I wanted to jump up and yell out "I've been there, and don't waste your time in Athens cos its a messy dirty city, go out to the islands and you can sit on monuments that are literally part of history".
I've been to the temple on Kos where Hippocrates used to teach, and while its not exactly standing, there remains the outer walls of the temple, and the accomodation quarters, and a lot of the columns and sculptures have been excavated and restored, and this is the birthplace of medicine as we understand it.
I find that extremely hard to get my head around. Three thousand years. The oldest thing in this country I can think of is only about two thousand years old. And thats a tree, not a civilisation.

Anyway.
What will they marvel about in another three thousand years, do you think? The way we managed to completely roger the planet up? Our primitive machinery? That we lived only on one planet?

Personally I always think its the buildings, being in the physical presence of something that has seen more history than we can comprehend.
Walking around the stone walls of the Old Town in Rodos, you truly understand the meaning of the old cliche: "Man, if these walls could talk".

Although, they'd probably talk in Greek....