By Alexis Iliopoulos
When I used to think of Greece I thought of the beautiful weather and the delicious food, but since my recent (seventh) trip to Greece, I noticed that it’s not all about that. In my heart, Greece serves a purpose more than its weather and food, it holds all the beautiful memories, the kind people I have met and of course, the beautiful scenery.
Greece is a place where every couple of years my family and I travel to and offload our negative energy, so when we come back to Australia, we’re people reborn, like a snake shedding from its skin.
The Greek Youth Camp which I and 15 other Greek Australian students attended at the end of September and early October this year, was organised by the Greek Community of Melbourne (GCM) and the Prefecture of Attica. It was a place for making friends, creating memories, visiting landmarks, playing sport, and most memorably, deciding who was going to sleep on the couch or the rock-hard bed.
Having spent the previous month with my family in Greece, I joined my new family for the week. Our home for the next five days was Agios Andreas on the coast, 30 minutes outside of the centre of Athens. In the beginning, as I arrived to meet everyone, I entered the room and knew that I would get along with them as they matched my energy.
Over the five days that I was at the youth camp, we ate an unreasonable amount of food, became picky eaters, spoke to the kind kiosk managers scattered around Athens, and visited extremely significant historical landmarks in Attica (including Athens) and parts of the Peloponnese. This included visiting the Acropolis Museum and the Parthenon and taking a photo every single time the ground looked different.
I learnt that many of the museums around Europe and the world borrow and display artifacts from Greece (except the British Museum, but that’s another story). We walked around the sites of Mycenae, Epidaurus, the Corinth Canal and Nafplion. One of the most memorable places was the Lion’s Gate of Mycenae because of the immense attention to detail on both lions carved into the stone and the purpose of their existence.
The Greek Youth Camp was one of the most memorable experiences of my life that will stay with me for the rest of it. Although I left Greece feeling fulfilled, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad leaving the country. But as I left, I also felt reborn. I thank everyone involved, including the hosts and chaperones, Meg, Tass, Andreas and the staff of the venue.
