A month in the States--Happy New Year!

It's been an entire month since we checked in with our intrepid travelers.  They made a successful transit from Athens to Seattle, although it involved Julie holding the flight for us while we struggled through security and raced through the airport.  (I've finally been unintelligibly paged in Charles de Gaulle airport--I can cross that off my life list!)  After a few days of jet-lag recovery in Seattle, we headed to Kansas City for a week with Alex's relatives (mom Beverly, stepdad Steve, dad Jonathan, brother Evan, sister-in-law Amy), punctuated by shopping, visits to the Truman and National World War I museums and Nelson Atkins Art Museum, more shopping, and finally Alex's birthday celebration.  Jonathan was a fabulous guide for Annabel through the history museums, especially the WWI museum, as military history is one of his greatest interests.  Annabel also got to go swimming at a small water park with her dad and Uncle Evan.  Then we saddled up for the return flight to Seattle, which felt ridiculously short and easy, and in a few days were joined there by Galen, who stayed until Christmas Eve.  Wait, that's a whole lot of words and miles--what about a picture or two?

Although it may not look like they're having fun in the top picture, we did actually have a good time at Lincoln Park, although it was cold enough to drive us off the beach before too long.  Which cousin is missing in the bottom picture?  Annabel actually asked her brother to teach her how to play the Call of Duty or whatever game they were playing, so she wouldn't be left out, but she hasn't taken to it yet.  In the top picture that's Quin on the left, Annabel, Galen, and Chace on the right.

We're having a marvelous time here in Seattle, with lots of laughs, golf (with Bill Russell playing in the foursome right behind us!), downhill skiing, beach walks and ferry rides, a big Picasso exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, movies, plenty of dog and cat fur, rapid changes in the weather, rivers of good booze, and all the ordinary amenities of the good old U. S. of A., like dryers and NFL games on TV and traffic that stops for pedestrians.  We're enjoying it while we're here, but looking forward to heading off to Oviedo in a few days.  What makes it so easy to spend a month living out of suitcases with our relatives is the incredible hospitality of those relatives, especially Lauren and Leon, starting with their decision to tear down their garage and build a new structure that includes guest space.  I could give you a picture of that space, but perhaps instead I'll supply an icon of my sister, Ste. Lauren, patron saint of hospitality and protector of all international travelers (or at least those that happen to be related to her).

I hope none of you were trapped for long in airports this storm-wracked holiday season.  I wish we could send the Fairbanks folks some of the relatively warm air we've been breathing, but you'll have to settle for our best wishes for a happy new year.

Points, High and Low

It's our bad luck to be suffering through a garbage collectors' strike for our last couple of weeks here.  Unfortunately, it precisely coincides with my mom's time in Greece, and it's getting more and more unpleasant for her to walk the few blocks between her apartment and ours.  I had to correct myself just now and say "garbage collectors' strike"--of course we all call it the "garbage strike."  If only that were so, and the garbage was itself refusing to accumulate.  What the heck would happen if garbage went on strike?  Would we be unable to open packages or cut up vegetables, or would it just all refuse to be put in the bin, or would it be just like what we have, nothing actually going to the landfill?  Technically the strike just ended, but it's going to take a while to catch up on the backlog.

This picture gets the graffiti and the garbage all in one shot.  Our apartment is just around the corner to the right, by that orange and green striped awning (which is a store that sells awnings, by the way).

Of course, it's not like Athens was all that sweet-smelling in the first place.  It hasn't rained now for a couple of weeks and so the poop is piling up as well.  It's probably a blessing that we haven't had one of those ferocious hard rains, actually, as I'd hate to see what that would do to the garbage piles.  And while we're on this subject, Julie (my mom) did not read all of my blog entries before coming to Athens (what kind of a mother is that, I ask you?), and so was surprised to learn of the no-paper-in-the-toilet policy, and naturally doesn't love the interaction of that policy and the garbage strike.

But perhaps least of all does she like the traffic patterns by which pedestrians have absolutely no rights.  Because of the trash piles she walks in the middle of the street, but that means lots of people honk at her as they gun their vehicles in her direction.  She swears that if she were to move to Athens, she would engage in a crusade for pedestrian rights.  As a loving son who wants to see his mother live many more years, I'm very glad she's not moving to Athens anytime soon.  Meanwhile, one more less-than-flattering view, to give you a sense of how much you have to stay on your toes while walking in Athens, looking up to make sure you don't smack into tree branches and down to make sure you don't splat into poo.

We've been revisiting some of the sights while Julie's been here, places like Aegina and Delphi and the Acropolis itself, and it's interesting to go back with more information than we had the first time.  It's sort of a test to see how much we've retained of what Michael has taught us, almost like a final exam for his class (which we don't have to take, thank goodness).  It's also a chance to fix particular things in memory.  I don't believe I really know a book until I've read it twice, and in some ways it doesn't seem like I can begin to know a place until I've been there at least twice.

But the list of places we'll be able to see again is growing very short indeed, as are our days in Greece.  Less than a week left.  Time to be eating up everything in the cupboards, throwing in the trash rather than the laundry those clothes that are not returning with us to the States, deciding which restaurant we really have to go to one last time, and thinking about which pictures you might want to see from our time in Greece that you haven't yet.  One of those is a view (or two) of the temple of Poseidon at Sunio, a gorgeous place that Annabel and I visited on excursion and that I was hoping to show Alex and Julie, but now realize we won't make it back to.  The sanctuary is on a high headland sticking out into the Aegean at the southeastern tip of Attica, another of those amazing locations for sacred places that the Greeks selected back when they were openly practicing paganism.

Nice postcards, eh?  There have been tourists here for a long time, of course.  The pillars and stylobate are covered with graffiti, some of it by celebrities.  Zoom in on the center of the next picture and check out that lighter spot.  I'm guessing it's lighter because so many people rubbed their hands on it before our more enlightened times when the tourists are roped off from the temple itself.

The trip to Delphi with Julie was especially nice because the weather cooperated.  When we first got there Zeus was flinging around his thunderbolts, and they echoed over Parnassus and down around our heads in a most suitably scary fashion.  But while we were in the museum the weather blew over and we got a gorgeous afternoon back out in the sanctuary of Apollo Pythias, including a hike for me up to the stadium (which had been closed off the first time we came) while Julie sat and sketched down by the temple of Apollo and the treasury of Athens.

At the bathroom/cigarette break our bus took, at a cafe rest stop on a hill just outside Livadia, I looked back at the sun setting behind Parnassus, which from that distance I could see as indeed one very big mountain, rather than the whole range of mountains it appeared to be from Delphi.  There was snow in the valleys near the top, though we'd been warm in T-shirts on the site after the sun came out.  Our whole bus ride back through the Greek hills as the dusk gathered was powerful.  It got dark about the time we got to the flatter country and the bigger highway.  I wished I'd had my camera out near Athens when we passed a large, well-lit sign that said "EuroDrip."  It was fun to speculate on what the heck that place made or did.

Our first visit to the island of Aegina was the very first weekend we were in Athens, before the program had actually started up, and before I'd read page one of my copy of History of Ancient Greece.  We did one of those I'll-take-your-picture-and-you-take-ours swaps to get a shot of all of us with the temple at Aphaia in the background, on another flawless day, just before we headed back down to Agia Marina for what looks like it will be our last dip in the ocean in 2010.  The whole town was closed up, the beach was covered with trash and seaweed, and it looked nothing at all like it looked that first weekend.  But the water was still warm and beautiful.  The best place we saw on Aegina was something we missed the first time, Paliachora, the inland Byzantine town site where folks moved to get away from the pirates, and where there's nothing left but 34 churches, in varying states of disrepair, but all (including the most ruined) still containing icons and other signs of their status as active shrines.  This is Greek Orthodox culture at its most pagan, and incidentally provided Annabel and me with some first-class scrambling.

Julie has been taking lots of photographs of the kinds of places she likes to make paintings of, mostly urban decay and odd angles and colors, and for the last three months I've generally avoided posting pictures of that sort, although I've taken plenty, generally while thinking, "This is the kind of thing Julie would just love to paint."  Now that she's had a crack at them for herself, I can post a few of my pictures of graffiti and odd walls and the jungle of plants poking out from under the awnings on the upper floors and things like that.

There's a cantina at the port with a sign that Alex loved and just had to add to her collection, for professional reasons, of course.  Luckily on this last trip to Aegina we had a camera ready as we passed by on our way to the ferry.

There haven't been a lot of obvious clues that the seasons are changing while we've been in Athens, but one that I very much appreciated was the grapevines turning bright red.  Now all the leaves have fallen off and the vines are bare, but for a couple of weeks they were gorgeous.

This vine ran up three stories on a house we pass by often en route to Syndagma, the central square.  These are merely decorative vines, I assume, since the grapes are tiny.  But they grow everywhere, along with bougainvillea and several species of flower and flowering tree that I can't identify.  I get tired of ducking under the trees as we're walking on the sidewalks, but while they were flowering, it was worth it.  And some of them are still flowering.  There are olives everywhere, falling ripe from the trees, which seems entirely normal, but there are also oranges ripening everywhere, and limes, and that seems very odd for November.  In fact the oranges are kind of a mess wherever they are ripening and falling on the street, squishing and rolling.  I'm torn--I like being in a place where the oranges apparently fall from the trees all winter, but I don't like having more things to dodge on the sidewalks.

At least here the oranges are out of the main thoroughfare.  I'll leave you with a couple shots from "Cemetery A," the oldest in Athens, adjacent to Julie's student apartment and just a half-dozen blocks from our house.  I'd been vowing to go there for months, since it was closed the first time we tried, and I finally made it today.  It was much more interesting than I'd imagined, and now I want to get back one more time before we go, but likely won't.  The pictures I took deserve their own blog entry, and may get one, but you'll have to settle for these for now.

Pretty, pretty Peloponnese (2)

When last we saw our intrepid travelers, they were still only partway through their first day in the Peloponnese.  Don't worry, the next three days will go by a lot more quickly.  We finished our day in Nafplio, briefly the capital of newly independent Greece before Athens inherited the mantle, and it's an utterly adorable little town, with a cute harbor, a former prison island in the harbor, a ruined castle on the hills above the town, and a gi-normous fortress atop an even larger hill even further above the town.  We never made it up to the higher, bigger fortress, which was closed anyway, but we had a blast wandering around the castle remains above the town, crawling through tunnels and along the battlements, exploring paths through the brush, peering over parapets and straight down hundreds of feet to the sea--you know, really keen stuff.  I couldn't believe that we could just walk into long tunnels built into the thick walls with no signs or warnings or explanations of where we were headed or anything.  It wasn't like a tourist site--it was like my 10-year-old fantasy playground.  I'll just give you one picture, which I took the next morning, because Annabel has not yet supplied me with her pictures--she carried her camera that first day and I didn't.

The next morning, when I took these pictures, we spent an hour or so at the beach, where Annabel was only allowed to wade, but where the fabulous rock-hunting almost made up for not being able to swim.

I kind of hated to leave Nafplio--I can see why it's the most popular weekend destination for Athenians--but we still had lots to see.  This was Sunday, election day round two, and some sites were closed, hence the relaxed schedule and our opportunity to wander around for the entire morning.  Nafplio is on one side of a peninsula, with the castle on top looking out to the water both directions, and this beach on the other side of the peninsula from the town.  We took an attractive, relatively new walkway all around the base of the peninsula, although we'd heard that it was closed.  Turns out on the other side, the town side, there were signs to that effect, and warnings of falling rock.  But from our side this was the first notice we had of anything potentially hazardous.

The drive from Nafplio was gorgeous, up into and through the mountains, to a small town way up in Arcadia, the original Arcadia, with nothing around but sheep and farms, and almost nothing open, although the proprietors gladly opened up their restaurant for our bonanza of thirteen customers (seven students, three Fitts-Heynes, Michael, Vassia our Athens Centre rep, and Vangelis our skilled driver).  There was one other thing nearby, a temple of Apollo that was lost, found, lost again, found again, and is now being carefully restored under the biggest and most heavily engineered tent I have ever seen.  Barnum and Bailey have nothing on this particular attraction.

Our twenty-minute drive from Andritsen to the temple passed by a number of circular stone threshing floors, dramatic features in the landscape since ancient times, but no longer used for their original purpose, of course.  Michael filled us in on their role in Greek culture, including supporting annual dances celebrating the harvest, leading Greeks to dance in circles even to this day.  Here's a picture of one (the stones here covered with grass, so not as dramatically set against the landscape, but in the middle of a working farm--I accidentally captured the farmer in the picture), and another shot of the very cute pension in which we stayed in Andritsen.

The next morning we drove through some more beautiful mountains, then dropped to the coastal plain and the wide river valley on which Olympia sits.  When we pulled up to the site, we could hardly make our way to the gate for all the tourist buses and hordes of people with numbered stickers on their lapels.  Turns out that Mondays and Thursdays are the cruise ship days.  Luckily for us, they were all just finishing their tour and heading for lunch.  Once we'd fought our way through all the people streaming in the opposite direction, we found ourselves almost alone in the huge site.  One of the highlights is, of course, the ancient Olympic stadium, the real Olympic stadium.  Annabel challenged all comers to a run, but only Courtney was brave enough to take her on.  Here they are at the starting line (cut in the stone) and then posing together on the winner's podium stand.

The site was impressive in size and quantity of ruins, but I really would have had no idea what I was looking at if it weren't for Michael's guidance.  For instance, the altar of Zeus was just an ash pile where the remains of the burnt offerings were left, and into which small offerings of clay and bronze were thrown.  Although it got pretty big by the time the site was no longer being used for sacrifices to Zeus, there's currently nothing there but a grassy, empty space, perhaps a little greener than the surrounding grass for having been well fertilized over the millenia.  The remains of the huge temple of Zeus were pretty obvious, and all the more impressive for having been left lying where the earthquake put them.  But even with the guidance of the signs I wouldn't have known that the statues and columns that had once perched on this particular series of bases were paid for entirely by fines against cheaters in the games.  Apparently there has been cheating for as long as there has been athletic competition.  Gives new meaning to the term "spirit of the Olympics."  They even had banned substances, I gather, although the most common form of cheating was bribing the opposition.

We toured two of the three museums, the museum of the ancient Olympic Games, organized in preparation for the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and containing game-related artifacts loaned from all over Greece, and the main archeological museum of Olympia, which included stunning sculptures and all kinds of offerings.  The first picture below is a drinking cup picturing a runner in the same starting position earlier assumed by Annabel and Courtney (and even earlier in this very blog, in Delphi,  by Annabel, Mackenzie, Meredith, and Kerri).  The second picture is a sampling of the thousands of small items that were found beneath the site of that ash-pit altar. 

The last thing we did before leaving Olympia was sit in the middle of the large center room of the archeological museum while Michael told us stories, three stories mainly, with a few juicy digressions, and we looked at the pedimental and frieze sculptures all around the room.  First the by-now familiar story of the kentauromachy, the battle with the centaurs, which we had seen depicted in other places include the Parthenon and Delphi.  This was the best version, both Michael's narrative and the one in stone that we were looking at, which included very realistic scenes of those nasty brutish centaurs groping the womenfolk and biting the arms of the noble Greeks who attempted to fight them off.

The second main story was less familiar, the story of Pelops and his chariot-race win over King Oinomaos for the hand of his daughter Hippodameia.  Oinomaos would only surrender his daughter (and kingdom) to a suitor who could beat him in a chariot race, but he always won by running his opponents through from behind with a spear, and then finished up by mounting their heads for trophies on the city walls.  Pelops had the assistance of his former lover Poseidon (the first time I ever heard of a homosexual dalliance between god and mortal, among all those heterosexual ones), who supplied him with excellent horses, but he hedged his bets by accepting the offer of Oinomaos' chariot driver to throw the race, in exchange for first crack at first prize, Hippodameia.  Pelops won, Oinomaos cursed the driver, Pelops killed the driver rather than handing over his new bride, and the driver cursed Pelops, which curse eventuated in such doomed offspring as Menelaus and Agamemnon.  And that's only a very short summary of a very small part of the story.  For instance, one of Pelops' descendants was Herakles (Hercules to you Roman-lovers), and his twelve labors were also depicted in stone around the walls of the museum room as well as recounted for us by Michael.  My favorite of the labors was the one involving temporarily relieving Atlas of his burden, depicted below (with that hero-loving goddess Athena looking on), right after a shot of the entire Pelops pediment.

We left Olympia on Sunday morning, still relatively early, for the long drive back around the west and north ends of the Peloponnese (and yes, you guessed it, the peninsula was named for Pelops).  We had only one stop on the way, at a seaside temple of Hera north of Corinth, a very isolated and gorgeous setting (once again--those Greeks and their sanctuary sites!) with three people fishing from the rocks, a couple making out in a shelter high above, but otherwise our group alone on the site itself.  Once again we were blessed by the gods, through the aegis of their faithful servants at the Athens Centre.

Please, please, pretty Peloponnese

I apologize for that title.  Annabel and I have been watching too many goofy videos on uTube.

Where, you might ask, is the Peloponnese?  All you know about it is something to do with a war, and maybe those Spartans.  Or maybe you know a whole lot more than that.  Maybe YOU should be teaching in Greece instead of me.

Sorry.  Those were some very silly, very snappish videos.

The Peloponnese is, of course, the large southern peninsula of mainland Greece, just across the isthmus of Corinth from Attica.  The French-fueled canal-building frenzy of the late 19th century also produced the Corinthian canal, turning the Peloponnese into an island of sorts.

There was a very in-your-face little old lady at the canal rest stop, urging everyone in sight, in no uncertain terms, to buy her little...um...grass....things.  Sort of hanging down and twirly.  Michael and Vassia had no idea what they were either, but said she'd been in business there for a very long time.  I think this is a perfect symbol of something to do with the Greek economy, but I can't quite work it out at the moment--maybe later.

The original schedule for our four-day trip was disrupted by the second round of elections on Sunday, which meant the closing of a couple of sites, so we had a very busy first day, including our next stop, Mycenea.  Yes, THAT Mycenea.  In another of those spectacular mountain locations.  It rained off and on, blew Vassia's umbrella out, but later in the day the sun finally came out, and the weather was decent for the rest of our trip. I guess we must have been appropriately respectful at Mycenea.

Unlike these dogs.  Michael tolerated these very cute, friendly, and muddy dogs doing their best to compete with his commmentary.  But it looked to me like these pups transgressed the boundaries of appropriate archeological-site behavior.  I didn't get a picture of one of them digging under a protective tarp, but I did capture these two playing on top of a roof over part of the lower palace site, where we were not even allowed to go.  All I can say is, Bad Doggie!

That top picture is of the famous Lion Gate, which is much more impressive in person.  I for one would not have wanted to try to capture Mycenea while that gate was being defended.  I took pictures when I could, in between squalls, sneaking the camera out from under my jacket and trying to balance the umbrella while aiming the lens.

The little pointy hill in the background of the first shot is ancient Argos, and between lies the fertile Argive plain, noisily disputed by Mycenea and Argos in the Bronze Age as well as by their Iron Age successors among the Greek city-states.  The second and third shots are exterior and interior views of the massive tholos tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus.  This had long ago been cleaned out by grave robbers when archeologists came on the scene.  The vast hoard of gold objects found at Mycenea and currently almost all at the National Archeological Museum in Athens (where we saw them with Galen) were found in less architecturally impressive shaft tombs up in the fortifications.  But even empty this tomb was daunting, a measure, along with the lion gate, of the scale of buildings and of men in the Bronze Age.  Exactly as they would have wanted us to remember them, no doubt.

As I said, most of the loot here was shipped off to Athens, but the museum on site was still interesting.  I absolutely loved these little hand-held or stick-mounted idols, or whatever they were (Michael's not sure, and so I'm not sure), which were not fancy or expensive or massive (about 18 inches high), but nevertheless evoked something about this culture and this religion that made me I wish I knew more about it.

Check out those platform shoes!

The museum had all kinds of smaller objects from two millenia of pre-history and history recovered at this site, sometimes randomly preserved, like a cache of double axe-heads that someone hid from the attackers and never got back to dig up.  I liked the museum's chronological design.  As usual, Michael moved quickly, hitting only the high points, but the bits of fresco and ceramic and gold and bronze, weapons and pots and offerings, were all the more interesting because by this point in the term I actually had some idea what I was looking at.  Not enough to pass Michael's final, probably, but enough to enjoy the exhibits.  Like this one, proof that the Myceneans liked their souvlaki as much as modern Greeks.

I'll leave you with just one picture from the next site we visited, Epidavros, the sanctuary of Asclipeus the healer.  This was not even remotely the end of our fun day, but it's enough for now.  The temples at Epidavros have been reconstructed with horrific enthusiasm, although work stopped partway when somebody who knew better got a look at the ratio of original to reconstruction--or what our students like to call "real" and "not real."  But the site still had plenty of authentic dazzle.  This is Annabel at center stage of the theater of Dionysus (which is redundant, since all the real Greek theaters belonged to Dionysus), a place whose acoustics even in its dilapidated state allow a stage whisper to be heard in the very back of the house.  They still perform here, and Annabel is making plans to return, this time in a professional capacity.