Daffnee

Nothing helps a cold like tea, a bit of honey and a litre of lemon juice.

Has anyone been following the forest fires in Greece, now encroaching on Olympia? The BBC did a headlining story on it, but all they have to show by way of pictures are the typical damn-my-house-is-a-pile-of-charred-wood photos. Nothing on what Olympia looks like pre-cooked.

 
 
 
 

We're back! And off to Iceland again on Tuesday. Happy to report that the car is still here, the house was not broken into, and that we have a bumper crop of sweet peppers.

Greece photos are here.

Home. Hungry. Hate planes.

I'm coming home tomorrow!

We've been in Athens for 2 days, and I think we've hit all the major sites that we're going to hit. The Acropolis was crowded and not nearly as fun as the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which the LP annoyingly puts down despite its hugeness and awesomeness. We spent 6 hours at the National Museum of Archaeology today, which comes out to about 1 euro and hour for the ticket price -- the cheapest entertainment we've had all trip!

Before Athens, we spent 4 days on an organized tour of the main archaeological/historical sites of the Greek mainland: Epidarous, Olympia, Dephi, and Meteora. We were going to try doing it on our own, but it turns out that Greece is very strict with regards to licensing tour guides, and the cost of the packaged tour was a lot less. So, we got to share a bus with retirees and families for a few days. Main spots:

Corinth Canal. Not sure why we stopped there, but seeing a cruise ship pulled through a canal by a tugboat is kind of amusing (even though it was the French that completed the canal in the 19th century).

Mycenae and the Tomb of Atreus. The Atredies family is supposed to be well-known through Homer and myth, but I must have missed that memo. Mycenae was the intermediate civilization between the Minoan and the Classical Greek city-state era, placing it pretty close to when the Trojan War should have happened (i.e. the age of Greek myth). Mycenae was supposed to be the city of Agammemnon. The ruins were excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, and there are circular royal tombs with jewelery and death-masks now on display at the National Museum. The site itself was fun to romp through, because it's an entire excavated city -- you can progress from the city walls up to the palace, and to the rear where the artisans' workshops were.

Olympia. Pretty much what you would expect for the site of the Olympic Games -- temples, gymnasiums, baths and a stadium. Pretty columns and olive trees. Emperor Nero amusingly built a house for himself there that he only used for a single visit.

Delphi. Absolutely beautiful. It's in a mountain range, so it's constantly buffeted by winds, and the town is small (but not too small). The sanctuary has been partially reconstructed, and you drive through the biggest olive grove in Greece to get there. There's also a temple to Artemis and cold springs. You can see the grove wrap around the mountain and extend down the valley if you look down from Delphi.

Meteora. Not a Classical site, but possibly the most stunning one -- Meteora's cliffs house 26 monasteries built about 600 years ago, and 6 of them are still active. To get to the monasteries (or convents), you have to climb hundreds of steps or get hauled up by net and rope (like their supplies).

Athens itself is quiet right now, because everyone is on vacation. It's still very big city though, and reminds me of fast-growing cities in Asia -- things are a little grubby, pretty crowded, and no one subscribes to standardized operating hours. Our travel agent pulled through for us and got us a hotel in the middle of almost everything, though, so it's been a good stay. I'd recommend that anyone interested in visiting Athens go see the archaeological sites later in the day; the Acropolis is swarming with tour groups in the morning. The Acropolis isn't the best site anyway -- Ancient Agora and the Temple of Olympian Zeus are far more interesting to poke around.

Anyway, I'm ready to go home -- it'll be nice to give my clothes a full washing, instead of a half-washing in a hotel sink!

Sunday's lesson was: never, ever, order the mix plate. Sunday was the day of the Mix Plate Disasters. Lunch was a Meat Mix Plate; dinner was a Seafood Mix Plate. They probably took off 5 years of my life each, never mind the complementary raki (i.e. grape liquor from home stills).

We're still in Chania, awaiting the overnight ferry back to Piraeus. The first time we did the overnight was on a GA Ferries liner, 24 hours after we had left DC. We were rather smelly -- even me, who generally believes that Asians don't smell. That was a pretty nasty voyage. Tonight's ship is run by Hellenic Seaways, so I'm hoping it's going to be less nasty

I think fiscal discipline might need to start being imposed on this trip, too. Getting used to paying in euros kind of breaks the bank, especially when you're going to be traveling for awhile. We've been kind of drawn to restaurants with food that we haven't tried yet, which makes for more interesting meals (including the Kokoretsi Disaster and Retsina Experience). We were halfway tempted to try Greek Chinese food, but not yet. I just stole a menu for any upcoming scrapbooks.

Later addition:

I saw a kri-kri!! We were trying to find the post office, got lost, and instead ended up in the Chania city gardens where they have kri-kris (indigenous Cretan goats) -- 3 adult males, 2 adult females and 2 kids. Those kids can jump 2-3 times their own height, and are way cuter than I ever imagined goats could be. Yay goats.

We spent all yesterday scootering around Rethymno, which is in central Crete. We were going to try to make it to Anogia, touted by LP as a traditional Cretan village, but it turned out that scooters couldn't make it up the mountain so we ended up going south instead. The scooter rental guy wouldn't even let us go. He's like, "Anogia? Why do you want to go there? It's boring. If you go, we will have to send search out for you." So we ended up going to Spili (mountain town in central Crete), Plakias (boring beach town), and Frankigastello (smallish Venetian castle on the southern shore). Got a good Crete map here. The fun is in the scootering, though. Being the passenger on the b**** seat, I get to see the scenery go by, and that's very fun. Especially because I apparently don't get motion sickness on scooters.

Before I came to Greece, I thought this was a lush country. It's not. It's very barren and reminds me of Colorado, or a very warm Scotland -- lots of rocks, dry dirt, big hills, scrub, and no trees. Anything even resembling a tree is an olive tree/bush, and the only animals I've seen on this trip besides dogs and stray cats are goats and sheep. The landscape makes for stunning scenery, but it's obviously a hard country (to farm, at least). Small towns still manage to poke up every couple kilometers, though, and there's always a couple of old guys in the local ouzeri wasting time and watching the world go by. Impressive, considering LP tags the domestic unemployment rate at 9.6%. I'm not sure if they count self-employed farmers and goatherds, but that figure is close to what Canada expects during a bad economic year.

We're in Chania until tomorrow night, when we take the overnight ferry back to Piraeus/Athens. Chania is probably the most picturesque city we've been to on Crete -- the old town is very Venetian, with cobbled roads and pink and yellow buildings. There also seem to be a lot more genuine artisans here. Instead of the main pedestrian routes being 100% touristy stuff, it's about 70% touristy stuff with 30% extremely expensive, but beautiful, crafts. I'm not really in a position to bring a 300 euro chessboard back with me, but I'd really like to. We hung around a restaurant for most of the siesta hours and then clambered up to a bastion on the edge of the old city wall, which gives you a good view of the city's churches, rooftops, local drying laundry and solar-powered hot water tanks.

Side note: It seems like our accommodations are getting better over time, or at least the bathrooms are. In the beginning, in Mykonos, we had a shower that was literally stationed over a toilet. Now we have a shower in a new bathroom that has a weird modern shower curtain thing that unfolds, almost umbrella-style. It's all very strange.

Also very strange is the preoccupation with souvenirs depicting humping. I don't just mean your run-of-the-mill Greek calendar or coasters depicting some questionable acts, amphorae-style; I mean humping everything -- turtles, goats, pigs, humans, etc. And in all mediums, too: ceramic (salt and pepper shakers), wood (corkscrew and bottle openers, statues), metal. It's kind of disturbing. The ceramic turtle shakers were actually really cute, but for the abovementioned activity.

I also went souvenier-crazy today, so there's probably more than enough even for the people I secretly forgot. I hope. I wanted to find the evil-eye charm factory where they make the glass blue charms that you see everywhere, but JP pointed out that it's probably in China. Oh well. I find the idea of a Chinese factory turning out Greek evil-eye charms strangely satisfying.

I just looked over, and instead of writing meaningful emails to his parents like I thought he was, JP is playing at being a pirate.

We fly halfway around the world, and we are back to blogging and playing video games.

We've made it to Heraklion, the biggest city on Crete. As a favor to anyone that might be thinking about visiting Greece in the future, please avoid taking any G.A. Ferries. They haven't been updated since the 70s, are kind of dangerous and are always 2 hours late. Hellenic Seaways and Blue Star are great, though. And here we were, wondering why G.A. Ferries didn't even have a listing in the Lonely Planet. They should mention these things!

It's a bit weird to be back in a biggish city with buildings taller than 3 stories. Our last few days in the Cyclades were on Santorini, in the seaside town of Perissa. LP calls it a "small resort", but it's really just a few restaurants, a campground and a whole lot of black sand and basalt pebbles. And it was lovely! I've actually never spent a full day on the beach before, and it was really, really nice. Got to catch up on my brainless reading (lots of free falling-apart books at the hostel/hotel) and live my own little Corona ad. With Amstel. And with little black pebbles instead of sand, which are actually way better than sand because they don't stick to you and fall out of your sandals really readily.

We also found a restaurant (the "Ancient Thera Restaurant") on a back road in Perissa that makes just about everything tasty, and give out the house wine in carafes of a litre. JP got through 2/3 of the carafe on his own before he realized it was more than a regular bottle of wine, and that was after some experimental swigs of retsina, a Greek white wine with pine resin. (Retsina isn't so great. Must be an acquired taste, like ouzo...) There were also tiny stray cats, so we spent the evening sneaking bits of food to the little ginger one in the hopes that he would grow up big and strong and beat up the tortoiseshell that pretty clearly stole all his food. Poor kitty.

After that it was a very slow ferry ride to Heraklion, and a day of seeing all the historical sites in the area: the archaeological museum of Heraklion (with the bee pin!), the Minoan palace at Knossos, and the Venetian castle. Strangely, the Venetian castle was the most fun. No tour guides, not many tourists, right on the water and fun to poke around. There's ramps and stairs everywhere, ramparts on the roof, and a surprise cannonball storeroom where there's hundreds of cannonballs. Cannonballs come in different sizes (I didn't know that) and are really heavy. I guess they have to be. It seems like many of the museums in Greece are under renovation this summer, so the museum exhibits were relocated to a smaller room. Still cool, though. I was partial to the bull-head libation vase thingy, but most people like the crazy snake goddess. We spent almost an hour looking for a good goddess replica to take back to JP's brother's g/f. Most of them either had funny-looking snakes or a goddess with a face like a man.

Knossos was pretty disappointing after Delos, where the guides let you romp around the ruins and climb up buildings and hills after a short guided tour. Some moron called Arthur Evans decided that he could pour concrete and try to remake the palace because he happened to be the one that discovered it. Now everything there is roped off, and what isn't has been restored with signs stating annoyingly Evans-centric speculation (as if no one else has an opinion about what the palace looked like). Ugh.

We stuffed ourselves silly last night at a seafood grill on the waterfront, where I learned that mullet is not just a hockey haircut but a very tasty fried fish. Tomorrow we're heading to Rethymno, where we'll probably get a scooter and check out the smaller villages in the middle of the island. Apparently people there still use donkeys for moving stuff around and Greek macho culture is much in evidence. I'm more interested in the weaving and pottery, but am sadly limited by my 30L backpack.

We scootered! And I didn't die!

I have always had traveling issues, so ironically I was very happy when it took us 36 hours to get to Mykonos because it means the rest of my trip is almost guaranteed to go well. (2 hour delay to Philadelphia, then to Frankfurt, to Athens, and then overnight ferry to Mykonos).

I'm in Paros right now, and not the only blogger in the cafe. So far -- I knew Mykonos would be bad when InStyle asked the actress of Big Love for their favorite vacation photos and 2 of them chose Mykonos. Total tourist trap. Delos (historical birthplace of Apollo and Aretemis) was a big rocky island of historical fun, but Mykonos nightlife isn't much after NY.

Paros, on the other hand, is the kind of Greek island where I'd want to buy real estate on. The only detraction so far was the born-again Christian second-hand bookstore person that didn't want my copy of Middlesex because the subject matter was "dodgy". As if hermaphrodites had a choice as to how they turned out. And it's a Greek hermaphrodite, too!

We're scootering across the island tomorrow, so nobody tell my Mum. Some random dude gave us a beach umbrella as we got off the ferry, so I feel obligated to pitch it somewhere and catch up on my dodgy reading.