Alexandroupolis

I was born in this place mid June, 1953, and left in 1971 to go study in Athens, like most of my fellow high school students, right after graduation. In the years that followed, I have returned just a few times only, and this for very short intervals, and since 1980 no more... until 2003! I spent 4 days then, meeting old friends and long forgotten places, the house I was born, and those two other houses we moved in later a couple of blocks away... my kindergarten, elementary and high school, our old football stadium, a few parks, the harbor, the lighthouse... An old friend, with whom I was raised as a kid, Takis Myrisides (we were like two brothers) spent good deal of my stay to show me around... how the town had grown, got a University, a large hospital, new residential areas, and, God forbid, a few monumental new Christian Orthodox churches!

As I was wasting weekend leisure time yesterday, I launched Google Earth and revisited via satellite imagery the town of my birth. To my surprise, I discovered dozens of Panoramio photographs of excellent quality attached to the most important parts of the town. Surprisingly, their resolution was sufficiently high to assemble them into a YouTube short clip, with some iMovie transition effects, background sound of my all time favorite Moody Blues song and simple opening and closing titles... A nostalgic contribution to a large part of my past life... that seems to have gone by, but not entirely perished...