Athens arrives before you expect it. The Acropolis appears above the motorway from the airport and does not disappear - it watches over the city from every angle, a fixed point in a metropolis of four million. No other city in the world lives so continuously in the shadow of its own most famous achievement.
The Parthenon is in perpetual restoration. Cranes and scaffolding are as much a part of its silhouette as its columns. But the building still possesses a authority that photographs cannot convey - you must stand beneath it to feel the weight of 2,500 years, to understand why the ancient Greeks considered their gods to actually live here.
Below the rock, the Monastiraki district offers a different Athens. The flea market sprawls across three neighbourhoods selling everything from vintage military uniforms to Byzantine icons to bootleg software on floppy disks. Coffee here is brewed Greek-style - thick, unfiltered, served with a glass of cold water - and consumed slowly, at length, while discussing nothing in particular.
The contemporary Athens art scene is one of Europe's most energetic, fuelled partly by crisis and partly by cheap rents. Galleries occupy former mechanics' workshops; bars occupy former tanneries; a generation of architects and designers is reimagining what the city can be. Athens is not a museum. It is a city very much alive with its own contradictions.