May 23: No Pain in the Ash…We are in Athens
May 28: The REALLY OLD stuff grand tour, continued
May 31: Naxos, Weather, and People
June 2: Step by Step by Step by Step by….Oh, Never Mind
...but only
briefly. This is just the stopover en route to Istanbul; we are flying out
(again) tomorrow afternoon. Our "real" stay in Athens is not for another 12
days or so. But the volcano and the rioters have been kind, and we had no
trouble getting here. (Though judging from the amount of time it took to get
our luggage, there may well be some kind of strike going on...) We were met
by a nice young woman from the travel agency, who escorted us to our hotel,
which is literally across the street from the airport (about a 200' walk).
Not much to report, obviously. We just had dinner in the very good hotel
restaurant (named "Mesoghaia", which I believe is pronounced "meshuggah").
And the surreal highlight of the day was a vending machine in the men's room
at the Munich airport (where we had a 4 hour stopover): it sold (and I quote)
"Vibrating Penis Rings". Now, I can see getting lucky for a quickie in an
airport, but for heaven's sake, man....keep it simple!
Weather in Athens is unseasonably cool: a pleasant 70F or so. We'll see about
Istanbul (not Constantinople!) tomorrow, where we will also celebrate Alice's
birthday.
Opa!
HEY YOU! You from America? Where? No kidding! My brother-in-law lives in Bethesda Chase! I been there lots of times! I go back and forth on business, buying rugs, the good stuff, none of that lousy tourist stuff. You want to buy a rug, you come to my store, right around the corner here. Come on in, have some tea, no pressure. See this rug? Genuine Ottoman virgin silk, my 12 year old daughter unwound the silkworm cocoons herself. Took her 3 years, now she´s blind, I need to raise money for her operation, you know how it goes. Have some more tea!
Istanbul, indeed. We have been here for 25 hours as I type this and have already had the above conversation four times. It is the city of a million stories, and every one of them involves selling you a rug. Seriously.
Our hotel room is unremarkable but the hotel itself has two big things going for it, being (1) a great location in the old city, down the street from the Topkapi Palace (rent the movie!), and (2) a spectacular view from the rooftop pool, looking out over the Bosphorus and thus having a commanding view of both the European and Asian sides of the city.
Had a city tour today...the Blue Mosque, Aya Sofia (Google them), and the Grand Bazaar. 4000 stores employing 30,000 people, and damned if every one of them doesn't have a relative in DC. Quite the experience: every stereotype that you have in your head about a Turkish bazaar is true.
Weather is perfect: sunny and mid-70's. Tomorrow we are taking a cruise down the Bosphorus.
More later...this Turkish keyboard is driving me nuts.
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Sailed the Bosphorus today, the body of water that separates Europe and Asia. I would like to report that it was thrilling, but, um, it wasn't. Like the Panama Canal, the concept of crossing it is a lot more interesting than the actual experience. But it's a warm sunny day, so nothing wrong with a nice boat ride. What was interesting was the amount of traffic on the waterway, which was immense: cruise ships, ferries, pleasure boats, everything.
We walked to the Spice Market afterwards -- today was a mosque-free day, I am happy to report -- which is like a scaled down version of the Grand Bazaar in which every single stall is selling pistachios, almonds, saffron, Turkish delight, saffron, almonds, Turkish delight, saffron, pistachios, and almonds. And Turkish delight. Here! Have a sample! Take some home! We make it special! You know the little girl who went blind unwinding the silkworm cocoons? Well, you don't need to see to make Turkish Delight, and she made this. You buy! And then my brother in law will show you his rugs.
(We actually did buy some lemon-flavored pistachios, which were great.)
On an unrelated note, we have observed that there are MANY feral cats in Istanbul: they are absolutely all over the place, everywhere, and they all look pretty healthy. I am not sure whether this is a good sign or a bad one as regards the overall cleanliness of the city. Conversely, there are no dogs, as in zero. Dogs are unclean in Islam (and pretty much everywhere else, but the Moslems actually worry about it). So no dogs running wild, and no dogs kept as pets. We have seen one dog used as a watchdog in an empty lot at night outside Topkapi, but that's it.
The other thing we have observed is that Turkey has the most goddamn complicated history imaginable. I have read the history section of the guidebook about four times now but it is just impossible to keep it all straight. (The so-called summary timeline at the bottom of each page runs for 16 pages...really.) It all goes back 5000 years to the Hittites, and at various times you've got your Mongols, Macedonians, Romans, Greeks, Byzantines, Ottomans (whose empire fell when they all got lazy and started putting their feet up on big comfy cushions), and I have already forgotten who else. What a mess. But SOMEBODY built a whole lot of quite astoundingly impressive mosques. When I find out who, I'll let you know.
We're flying to Ephesus tomorrow for an elaborate day trip, then off to Mykonos on Friday. Further bulletins as events warrant...
Hey, I can recommend some really good Turkish restaurants to everybody. They are all in Washington, DC.
Turkish food is actually a limited number of permutations of about five ingredients, two of which are minced lamb. And despite the existence of the Spice Market in Istanbul, most meals are not actually encumbered by any seasonings. We learned to compensate for this by going heavy on the salt, then noticed that the Turks do the same thing...they pour tons of the stuff on their food when eating. Which leads to the obvious question of why they don't season it WHILE THEY'RE COOKING IT. Ah, the mysterious east. After four days we couldn't take it any more and sought out the one and only Indian restaurant in Istanbul (really) and had a meal that we really enjoyed. We also had a rooftop table that overlooked the spectacular Ayasofia mosque (see http://farm1.static.flickr.com/28/100424174_7c207e34fc.jpg), so all in all that one meal was a great success. But we're grateful to be in Greece.
On Thursday we flew to Ephesus (http://www.travelsnt.com/Images/ephesus.jpg), which was spectacular. Built in about 300 AD, it was the largest city in the eastern Roman Empire at the time and the ruins alone are impressive still, including a surprisingly intact amphitheater that seats 24,000 (http://www.hellenesonline.com/go/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/ephesus_theater021.jpg). And afterwards, our guide took us to.....a carpet factory! Yes! Incredibly enough, the owner had a relative in the US! (IN Idaho, however, instead of Washington DC). And, most entertainingly in the light of my previous emails, we saw a girl unwinding silkworm cocoons. However, she did not appear to be going blind and in fact seemed pretty cheery; she was using a spinning-wheel-like machine that took a lot of the drudgery out of it...it was pretty cool to watch, actually. But we still did not buy a carpet. (Though the stuff the owner showed us was beautiful. He showed us one positive masterpiece, about 9' x 7', made of 1000 knot per inch silk that took 2 people 3 years to make. He said, with admirable candor, "I won't even bother telling you how much this cost", then when I reached out to feel it, triumphantly shouted "Hah! You touched it! THAT MEANS YOU HAVE TO BUY IT!!" Good line but I still don't know how much it cost.
Speaking of relatives, I did mention to our various guides, drivers, etc., that my great-grandfather hailed from Izmir, which is where Ephesus is. That bit of information invariably provoked two questions in rapid succession: (1) did I speak Turkish? (no), and (2) was I Jewish? (yes). Izmir had a substantial Jewish population back in the da, and there are still a number of synagogues there.
But moving in, both narratively and geographically....
We spent this morning visiting the Topkapi Palace, right down the street from our hotel, and were very taken by it. Elaborate, sprawling, and the very picture of a sultan's palace as you would imagine it. The family quarters (harem, etc) in particular were most impressive. And of course, we saw the famous dagger that Peter Ustinov and Melina Mercouri tried to steal in the 1964 movie. Emeralds the size of eggs...garish.
Earlier this afternoon we were hounded out of the country for being too snarky and are now on the island of Mykonos, Greece. We have a room overlooking the Aegean...helluva view, and finally had a decent meal. Thank god for Greek food. The town itself is much like beach resort towns anywhere, with typical Greek whitewashed buildings and a rather more upscale set of tchtochkes for sale than in Ocean City MD. So tomorrow is pretty strictly a beach day to compensate for all the intellectual enrichment of the past five days. The only big decision will be which beach to go to: the uncrowded, beautiful, family-friendly beach, or the very crowded, noisy, party-scene beach with all the topless students on spring break? Alice is looking at me funny, so I am taking the 5th for the moment.
All for now....
In case you were wondering after yesterday's missive which beach we went to, the answer is: both. We walked to the town square this morning deciding to let the Greek gods decide our beachgoing fate by simply taking the first bus that went to a beach. That turned out to be one of the "family-friendly" beaches which, as it turned out, also sported its share of unfettered mammaries. (Some of these, alas, belonged to 260-lb Russian grandmothers, a sight that once seen can never be unseen.) It was a beautiful beach, mainly for the rock formations and whitewashed buildings along the coastline; the water was clear and bluegreen but somewhat on the cold side, and the sand was very coarse...not much like the New Jersey shore. But we dozed, we read, we went in the water, and we had an excellent lunch at one of the restaurants on the beach. We then noticed off at the dge of the beach a ferry service to the other beaches. So we hopped one -- an oversize motorboat that held about 15 people, all but us in their 20's -- and took a 20-minute ride to one of the "party" beaches.
We lasted an hour. The entire beach was packed shoulder to shoulder with twentysomethings, and at the back of the sand strip was a bar filled to the density of the Black Hole of Calcutta, pumping out about 150 decibels of thumping rock through subwoofers last seen at a Who concert. The age range of EVERYONE on the beach except for us was between 18 and 28... it was like we had drawn the short straw in some kind of cosmic chaperone lottery. Remember the Island of Lost Boys in Pinocchio, where all the naughty children go to have a great time and do whatever they want (smoke cigarettes!) until they start turning into donkeys? It somehow felt like we were watching it. Lots of teeny tiny bikinis but no donkey ears, however. The name of this beach, by the way, was Super Paradise. Which it might be, if you were on spring break from Ohio State.
The ferry took us back to our original beach (Plata Galios, if you want to look it up), then we took the bus back to town and vegged out till dinner, wending our way through the warrens of the shopping/restaurant district -- an utter maze of alleys -- and failing for the second night in a row to find the restaurant we were looking for. So we ate somewhere else.
Tomorrow: ferry to Naxos, our next island.
Well, those skeptics among you who believed that we were
physically incapable of taking a full day of down time have been proven
correct. By the time we finished breakfast this morning the prospect of an
entire day by the pool or on the beach seemed a bit too much to bear, so we
rented a car and toured the island on our own instead. Cars here are really
cheap to rent: we got a pathetically underpowered Hyundai (I believe it was the
Kimchee model) for only 25 euros (about $32). Of course, gas costs close to 8
bucks a gallon (that is not a typo) so the bargain literally evaporates pretty
quickly. (That astronomical cost of gas is not a result of being on an island;
it was about the same price in Turkey.)
So off we went across the island, a rocky mountainous landscape liberally
studded with olive trees and paved exclusively with steering-wheel-clenching
mountainside hairpin- and S-curves. Very tiring driving, but greatly leavened
by the spectacular views of the sun-drenched terrain and the Aegean.
Before I continue, please make note of my accurate and mandatory use of the word
"sun-drenched" in the previous sentence. All Greek islands are officially and
perennially sun-drenched (TM): it is the National Adjective and must appear at
least once every other paragraph in all tourism literature. Without
sun-drenching, you could not have Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan singing bad
covers of ABBA songs on their Greek island. Indeed, the only time that the
islands are not allowed to be sun-drenched -- say, under some heavy clouds, or
even a shower -- is during the breakup of a love affair under comical
circumstances, frequently involving a mistaken identity. But later everything
is cleared up, the lovers are reunited, and the sun starts drenching again.
Lest I sound too cynical (moi?), the weather here is in fact, well,
sun-drenched. Which is to say, mercilessly hot and surprisingly humid. Because
there is so little rain, at least at this time of year, there is a fair amount
of suspended dust in the atmosphere, which gives the sunlight, though intense, a
rather diffuse quality. It is noticeably very different from the sere, crisp
sunlight of, say, New Mexico or (perfect weather alert!) San Diego. There are a
lot of scattered very thin clouds and haze, and the sun is kind of spread-out
looking. Make no mistake -- it is real hot and bright here. But the somewhat
diffuse quality of the light gives a slightly softer look to the spare
architecture: the whitewashed churches with blue domed roofs perched on the
rocky hillsides.
Our peregrination across the island brought us to some relatively remote corners
and in contact with somewhat different species of tourists than we encountered
on Mykonos. That's probably worth a digression in itself, so here goes.
I mentioned earlier that Mykonos was a bit jet-setty, the shopping very upscale
and the tourists generally very youthful and (apparently) monied. There were a
lot of Russians and Turks there.... oil money, maybe. So here is your Mykonos
beach-going tourist girl: she is 22 years old, stands 5'4" tall and weighs 89
lbs, or 104 if you count the weapons-grade platform shoes. Her name is
Svetlana
or Valentina but she goes by some nickname that doesn't sound at all like her
given name, Shmooki or something. Shmooki has blond hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and
a vaguely bored and disdainful expression; this is because it is part of the
honor code of her species that she cannot be seen smiling in the presence of
anyone over the age of 29 unless he owns a yacht. Shmooki is accompanied on
Mykonos by her recently-acquired boyfriend Dmitri or Vassily. Dmitiri has tight
dark curly hair and the requisite bronzed skin. He wears sunglasses all the
time, even when he sleeps. And he is very careful to shave before he goes to bed
every night so that he sports the correct amount of stubble the following day.
That's Mykonos. Naxos is another story altogether. Here, you see different
types of people depending on whether you are in the main port town of Hora or
out in the hinterlands as we were today. In Hora, Shmooki's counterpart is
Doris, who is from either Chicago or the northeast. She's overweight, likes to
talk about what a great deal she got on this trip through her travel agent, and
is occasionally discomfited by hot flashes. You can take it from there. On the
other side of the island, however, we find the youthful adventurer types who are
either hiking or have rented ATVs (if you are thinking of my children here,
you've got it), as well as leathery-looking 50- and 60-something German and
English couples equipped with high-tech walking sticks.
So now you know who we're dealing with. But in truth, on the far side of the
island, the tourist density is way, way down. We took one 7-mile dead-end road
-- a truly treacherous and exhausting collection of snaky curves from the
mountainside all the way down to the sea -- to find a nearly deserted fishing
village (Moutsouna) where we had a most excellent lunch of fresh seafood at an
open-air restaurant by the beach (and where, for the first half hour, we and the
waiter/cook were the only human beings). I had a plateful of gigantic shrimp
that were about half the size of lobster tails, and Alice had a grilled octopus
tentacle that will haunt my dreams. This thing was last seen attacking Captain
Nemo's submarine. No exaggeration, fully uncurled it would have been easily 16"
long and close to 2" in diameter at the base, with suckers the size of nickels.
Alice pronounced it excellent, but I was too busy crouched at the ready with my
knife in case it moved on its own.
We also visited the main "sight" in the central part of the island, which is the
town of Halki (also written Chalki and Chalkion; the first letter is actually
the Greek guttural chi). It is the home of some local fruit-based specialties,
notably a drink called Kitron which, as you might guess, is a liqueur made from
citrus fruits. My drinking tastes being what they are, you would also correctly
suppose that I did not like it: it tasted like the unholy spawn of lemonade and
vodka as distilled by Manischewitz. But it was interesting insofar as it is
distilled in the same still that has been used since 1896, and which we saw: a
Victorian-looking assemblage of brass vessels and tubes that looked like Edgar
Allen Poe's unsuccessful attempt to build a steam engine.
Bottom line: we are tired and sweaty and failed to relax today, and are better
tourists for it. Tomorrow: off to Santorini.
The name of the
island of Santorini actually comes from two ancient Greek words: "santo",
meaning "knee", and "rini", meaning "replacement surgery". It is a
spectacular island where the local dialect has no words for "handicapped
accessible". The island is a collapsed volcanic caldera from a monumental
eruption and everything is built into the cliffsides on the collapsed crater,
like this:
http://www.dilos.com/picture/location/144 That is our hotel in the
foreground, and I have to say that the view is easily the most spectacular
room view we have ever had, looking directly out over the sea and the volcanic
cinder cone from high up on the cliffs, like this:
http://www.greecead.com/gadhome/images/santorini/dana_santorini.jpg.
Everything is carved into the cliffside.
That's the good news. Now you might ask, how do you GET to the room? Well,
once the limo drops you off at the street, you walk down 79 steps to reception
(yes, we counted them). Then, once you have the key, you walk down another
116 steps to our room. For those of you keep score, that's 195 steps down to
the room. Or, more to the point, it is 195 steps UP from our room to the
street. And no, the Santorinians do not recognize the concept of the
"elevator". The bellboys who shlepped our bags down to the room have
off-season jobs as Himalayan Sherpas. (Ours was named "Tenzing Papadaopoulos",
as I recall.)
Fortunately the patio in front of our room is directly at the pool and jacuzzi,
so the only thing that forces us out and up is the hunt for food. More on
that in a moment.
Our room, like much else here, is rather vertically oriented. When you walk
in, you are in a small living room area with a couch, wet bar, bathroom...and
staircase leading up to the bed. That is to say, the bed is by itself at the
top of the stairs in a loft. Very romantic, to be sure, but if you have to
get up to pee in the middle of the night, you damn well better not be too
groggy to negotiate a flight of narrow stairs in the dark, since as I
mentioned, the bathroom is downstairs. If this were a hotel in America, every
room would come equipped with its own tort attorney.
But despite the verticality of it all, we surfaced to hunt for dinner. The
manager at the reception desk highly recommended a seafood restaurant at the
northern tip of the island. "You can take the public bus to the town of Oia,"
he explained, then just walk down the steps from the bus stop to the old port,
and the restaurant is rght there." What the heck, we're game. So we walked
into town, found the bus station and the bus to Oia, and proceeded per
instructions. His directions were entirely accurate, if incomplete in one
tiny detail, namely that the "steps from the bus stop to the old port" were
TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE in number. "Better be a damn good restaurant",
we muttered as our knees screamed silently at us, oblivious to the glorious
cliffs and Aegean vistas before us. And, happily, it was. We picked out our
own freshly-caught fish from beds of ice, and they grilled them for us: red
snapper for me, sea bream for Alice. Excellent.
And the best part was, we took a taxi back to the hotel.
Tomorrow, boat ride to the volcano.
We booked a boat trip to the heart of the volcano, i.e. the
cinder cone that sets at the center of what used to be the whole island. (The
island is now a crescent-shaped remnant surrounding the old caldera, which is
now ocean; the central cone is two separate islands -- Nea Kameni and its
partner -- peeking out of the water at the focus of the crescent. See the map:
http://casarima.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/santorini-map.jpg.)
But the boat leaves from the port, and the port is at the water's edge, and the
water is WAY below our hotel. The solution is simple: there is a cable car from
the center of town down to the port. And that simple solution vanished like the
morning haze because late this morning two ginormous cruise ships -- the Royal
Caribbean Glutton of the Seas, and I forget the other one -- disgorged their
245,000 passengers, every one of whom wanted to ride the cable car. So we
WALKED down to the port. On the STEPS. The MANY, MANY steps. (The sign at the
bottom informed us that there were 578 of them.) What fun! And what a great
opportunity to open an arthroscopic surgery center!
The boat ride was enjoyable -- the volcano was the usual pile of rough rock,
reasonably cool but no different from what we have seen elsewhere (e.g.,
Hawaii). It included a stop to swim at a volcanic hot springs, which had to be
the world's coldest hot spring: the water was 72 F, which is pretty chilly. But
it was a lot warmer than the ocean (63 F), and they wouldn't get far by
advertising a dip in the famous Santorini Chilly Springs, so there you go.
Boat ride complete, the problem then arose, how to get back up. There are
exactly three options: (1) walk up 578 steps (ha!), (2) take the cable car since
the cruise passengers had cleared out, or (3) ride the donkeys. Yes, the
donkeys. Santorini is famous for its donkeys that take people up and down those
#$%$#^ 578 steps. Alice opted for the cable car (wimp), and I took a donkey,
which gave me exactly the kind of ride you'd expect. Donkey's do what donkey's
want, and these eventually make it up all those steps with more than a few fits
and starts, every now and then just stopping and standing stock still for a few
minutes to contemplate whatever it is that donkeys think about. But it got me
there. (You can read more about the donkeys here:
http://www.greeka.com/cyclades/santorini/santorini-excursions/santorini-donkey.htm.)
That, and a museum, was Santorini in a day. Tomorrow, an early flight to
Athens, and the mainland leg of the trip begins.
Well, now that the strike is over, traffic indeed flows
more smoothly, which is to say that it is merely terrible instead of
unbelievably bad. (As I mentioned, there is another strike scheduled for
Saturday, which will not affect us. Our driver was surprised that it was
scheduled for a Saturday, explaining "Strikes are usually on Thursday. That way
they take Friday off and get a four day weekend." Pretty clever, these Greek
trade unionists...) Our driver Paul (actually "Paraskevas") spent 25
years on the US (in northern NJ) and so speaks only lightly accented but
essentially perfect idiomatic English. But he is still very much Greek, which
is to say that the conversation is nonstop and voluble, especially when some
miscreant driver cuts him off in the near-standstill traffic. All Greek
conversations, regardless of the topic and nature, involve much shouting and
gesticulating. You will see random pairs of Greek firing away incomprehensibly
at each other -- "SOUVLAKI SPANAKOPITA OUZO! MOUSSAKA! MOUSSAKA!" -- and it is
very difficult to tell whether they are sharing some wonderful news or swearing
to kill each others' families.
Anyway, our driver and guide arrived on time this morning and we were happily
among the first people to arrive at the Acropolis. This is a very good thing
indeed: once the cruise ship tours and the school groups show up, the place is
said to be wall to wall people. As it is, we had the place nearly to ourselves
-- very dramatic, even evocative -- and by the time we left a few hours later it
was starting to seriously fill up. There's a major reconstruction effort going
on at the Parthenon, which means scaffolding and cranes. (This seems to be a
feature of our travels.) But you can't see them from every angle, so the view
is not badly spoiled. We learned a lot: our guide was actually trained as an
archaeologist; he was unable to find a research job and so now does university
tutoring and tour guiding. His English was excellent.
Afterwards, we headed down to Cape Sounion, which is the southernmost point of
the mainland (and thus the southernmost point of continental Europe if you
arbitrarily choose not to count the Peloponnese as part of anything). The big
attraction there is the view, which is spectacular, and the temple to Poseidon
perched almost poetically on the limestone promontory hundreds of feet above the
Aegean. The mythos of this spot is that it is where the Aegean got its name.
Story is, that King Aegeas was the father of Theseus, who went off the Crete to
kill the minotaur. Aegeas told him to sail away with black sails and to return
flying white sails if he was successful. Theseus did slay the minotaur, as you
know, but forgot to fly white sails on the trip home, returning with the black
ones instead. (This would not have happened if Theseus had a had a Jewish
mother: "Remember the white sails, Theseus! You know how your father worries!
Oy!") Anyway, Aegeas, waiting at the cape, saw the black sails of the returning
ships and -- being a hasty sort -- assumed that Theseus had been slain by the
monster, and promptly threw himself off the cliff into the azure waters below.
(This would also not have happened if *he* had had a Jewish mother: "Aegeas, at
least wait till the ships are in port! How did I raise you? Oy!") So as a
consolation prize they named the Aegean Sea after him.
Poseidon himself is a big deal in Athens, since there was a mythological dispute
as to whether he or Athena would be the patron god of the city. The agreed to
let the citizens of the city decide. Poseidon stuck his trident into the ground
and the sea burst forth, indicating to the citizenry the power and bounty that
would flow to them from the sea. Athena countered by sticking her spear into
the ground, and an olive tree sprouted, the symbol of prosperity and wisdom.
Not having been educated in the value of investing in beachfront property, the
citizens voted for the olive tree, and so the city became Athens instead of, I
don't know, Poseidonopolis or something. And that is today's history lesson.
We've spent the last couple of days traveling around the
Peloponese -- Corinth, Mycenae, and Olympia -- and the past day or so back on
the mainland, at Delphi and Meteora. And without a doubt my dominant memory of
this part of the trip will be: columns. The golden age of ancient Greece lasted
from about 450 BC (when they built the Parthenon) till about 350 AD, when the
Christians took over and everybody stopped having any fun. And during that 800
year period, it was the sworn duty of every member of the Panhellenic
city-states to build at least one marble column per week from the age of 10
until whenever they died, usually by having a column fall on top of them. Doric
columns, Ionic columns, Byzantine columns -- it is said that Socrates even
invented the op-ed column, nearly 2000 years before the invention of newspapers.
In short, sorting out our photos is going to be an interesting challenge.
Ever since Lord Elgin stole all the good stuff for the British Museum at the
beginning of the 1800's, the Greeks have been really touchy about preserving
their heritage, despite the apparent abundance of columns lying all over the
place. When walking around Olympia, Delphia, etc., you must be careful not to
climb on or touch them, lest a guard accost you. There is a temptation to say,
"Why? Are you running low on columns?" But discretion prevails.
We've had excellent guides in most of the places we've visited: personable,
knowledgeable, and excellent English speakers. The only exception was at
Olympia, where our guide had apparently studied English from that guy who used
to do the Federal Express commercials. She was supposed to guide us for two
hours, managed to compress her entire spiel into one, then abandoned us in the
middle of the site of the ancient Olympic games, bolting like an Olympic runner
and leaving a cartoon cloud of marble dust suspended in the air, shaped like
herself. So we walked the site ourselves, pacing off the field, and learning that
Hercules must have had much bigger feet than either of us since the field is a
fixed number of his paces.
This morning we walked around the Oracle of Delphi, perched dramatically on a
steep hillside some 2000' above the town. We walked around the Temple of Apollo
where the priestess made her predictions, though we were not allowed down into
the chamber where this supposedly happened. I pressed Alice for a prophecy, she
considers herself the spiritual descendent of the priestess ever since she
correctly predicted the date that COBE's liquid helium would run out, 20 years
ago. She uttered a dire prediction about failing to lose the weight that we've
picked up from sampling the baklava in every town we've visited. Not very
oracular as these things go -- too specific -- but that's what you get for
failing to make the appropriate offering to Apollo.
We arrived in Meteora this afternoon, which, amazingly, has no columns. What it
has is spectacular scenery, sort of a cross between Colorado's Garden of the
Gods and Italy's Dolomites. It's big attraction -- and it is quite a sight --
are half a dozen monasteries built at the top of rock columns hundreds of feet
high. See
http://www.google.gr/images?q=meteora&hl=el&client=firefox-a&hs=5pz&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=ivm&source=lnms&tbs=isch:1&ei=YBQNTLyzLoqs4QaDg4hx&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&ved=0CBQQ_AU
for pictures.
We visited one of the monasteries today and will look at a couple of more
tomorrow before heading back to Athens and concluding the trip. We're planning
on stopping at Thermopylae on the way ("WE ARE SPARTA!"), possibly picking up
298 friends along the way to get the full effect.
We fly out Wednesday morning, but have a ridiculously tight connection in Munich
and so may or may not be back home Wednesday night. Tonight I will sacrifice
100 oxen to Zeus in the hope that we make our connection. (After dinner tonight
we will go shopping in town for 100 oxen.)