October 3, 2017:
The old stomping grounds, majorly massively upgraded for the new millennium.
Color, vibrance, motion: polynational crowds at the tavernas, or queued for the museum, or browsing the shops. When before it was gray, soot-colored, empty: an environment that mirrored my fatigue and then-broken heart.
Greece's disastrous debt-crisis was in part triggered by the urban renewal which improved the Plaka for the Olympics of 2004. In this spot you don't feel their pain. Here it's thriving, optimistic, sunny, new, renewed. Where sunlight and Tzatziki begin the process of dissipating sad old ghosts.