More from the lovely island of Paros

[First a word from our sponsor.  That break turned out to be very painful.  I wrote and edited a long account of the rest of our time in Paros, spending way too much time on it no doubt, and then previewed it for Alex to proof, and somehow the first third or more of it disappeared.  Gone into the ether.  That's apparently one of the serious risks of blogging.  Not only can you not compose elsewhere and paste it in, which would make lots of sense and would have enabled me to work on the blog while I couldn't access my site for a couple of weeks, but you also cannot recover stuff written on Blogger that goes away.  Or not in any way I could puzzle out from following all the links from other people who'd made pitiable inquiries after their own lost posts.  I will try to reconstruct it, but those of you who've lost hard-earned documents and had to re-do them from scratch will sympathize with my pain.]

We were headed to lunch at Naoussa, the town in the picture below, taken from a place obviously higher up and some distance away.  More on that place later.  First we wandered around the town, shoping in the places that were still open (many of them on their last weekend of the season).  Our finds included a beautiful moonstone necklace for Alex, turquoise rhinestone Converse for Annabel (for 10 euros!), the most expensive piece of jewelry Annabel had ever bought for herself which you may be lucky enough to see in person one day, and a very cool scarf for Alex.  We also had to buy some sunglasses for Annabel so she could survive the blinding sun off the white buildings at lunch--perhaps you will catch a glimpse of those rose-colored glasses in one of the photos below.

We ate at a dockside taverna, two kinds of fish straight off the boats in front of us, or so we chose to believe.  Our restaurant was just around the corner past the breakwater in the inlet above.  We ate in the lee of the wind, so it was very warm, and Annabel had another opportunity to feed cats.

After lunch we headed out to...you guessed it, another beach!  This was a really spectacular and strange place.  Annabel and I swam in the lovely water and took a water-eye-view of the rocks, while Alex lay in the warm sun out of the wind.  After she took these pictures, of course.

The weird sandstone rocks were extended up into the hills above us, and Annabel and I were seized with scrambling fever.  After drying off in the sun and getting dressed in the car (all the local facilities were shut down for the season), we drove a kilometer or so back in the direction of Naoussa, to the sign for an intriguing turn-off:  "Mycenaean Acropolis."  No one we'd talked to had said anything about this; it wasn't mentioned in any of the tourist literature we read.  But we thought it would be worth investigating, especially since it was in the direction we wanted to go anyway:  up those perfect scrambling rocks.

At what we presumed to be the right place there was a sign, and that's all.  No path, no directions, just rocks and a hill.  From our massive knowledge of acropoli, we concluded that it was probably in the "up" direction, and headed off.  After just enough scrambling to satisfy Annabel and me and not enough to dismay Alex, we found a path that wound up towards the summit, through a field of tall, bumble-bee-pestered flowers, which I later learned were asphodels.

Homer described asphodels in the fields of the dead, but even without knowing that, the effect was haunting.  As we continued upwards I had trouble keeping my eyes on the path, as there was so much to see in every direction, and the fabled Greek light was having its way with us.  The summit was, you may say, satisfying.  The views were dazzling in every direction.  There were two people there when we arrived, but they left soon, and there were two people nearing the top as we left, almost as if we were taking turns having the place to ourselves.  There was no evidence of tourist management, no signs except the one at the bottom, but clearly lots of people had been busy moving rocks around at this site in the several thousand years since the Mycenaeans had a sanctuary there.  There were small buildings of piled rocks as well as lots of those little stacks of rocks that humans seem compelled to raise in high, rocky places.  Annabel took her turn at making a stack of stones, then began gathering clay shards, especially those with traces of paint on them.  She was practicing for her career as an archeologist, pretending to be finding ancient Mycenaean artifacts, one of which would give us vital clues to a deeper understanding of Linear B.  I enjoyed her game but in my despicable pooh-poohing daddy way, said that there had been plenty of other people up here in the last few millenia and it wasn't likely there was any Mycenaean pottery still around.  Well, Daddy, in your face!  We showed the pictures to Michael, and he said that some of the pieces with paint on them were very likely particular kinds of ancient pottery.  I didn't hear the details so can't supply them--I was busy eating my delicious humble pie while Michael was explaining things to Annabel--but I was cured forever of any patronizing attitude toward Annabel's archaeological explorations.  (On our excursion in eastern Attica yesterday she found a shard that Michael identified as possibly the rim of a Hellenistic drinking cup--naturally, we left it where we found it, but Annabel was magnified in the eyes of not merely her doubting dad, but of all my students as well.)

We weren't entirely alone--these goats were climbing up the steep back side.  And as you've guessed, this is where I took that picture of Naoussa from a distance.  In the dying light and (finally) dying wind the place was magical, and we didn't want to descend.

We did, however, want to spend a little time at the fabulous house, and needed to get cleaned up before dinner, so when the next couple of people arrived at the summit we surrendered the site and headed down the hill, back to the car, and back to the house.  Over a glass of wine on the veranda in the last of the light we read in an English-language magazine a glowing review of a restaurant near Naoussa and decided to eat there.  It sounded from the review like the place to go for a fancy meal on Paros, but the summer crowd had thinned out and we were eating very early by Greek standards, so we didn't worry about a reservation.  It's a good thing we were so early.  They seemed strangely reluctant to seat us even though there wasn't a single diner in the restaurant when we arrived.  But it filled up very quickly, and I think towards the end of our meal the people who had reserved our table were sitting at the bar impatiently.  As we were eating the first course, of vegetable puree soup that even Annabel pronounced delicious, we recognized the voices at the table behind us.  Sitting down right next to us were the only people we knew on the whole island, a couple we had met two weeks earlier at a reception at the Athens Centre.  He turned out to be the architect of Rosemary's house, which we praised copiously.  Petros and Marilyn were also the source for the information I mentioned earlier, about the marble for Rosemary's house coming from Naxos and the history of Lefkes.  The happy coincidence of this meeting gave me a powerful impression of how small the island was, and indeed how small Greece is.  Thus do we magnify chance into significance, as any of the six or seven million people in Athens might remind me.  I said it was a powerful impression; I didn't say it was accurate.

The next morning we enjoyed the sunrise over Naxos in a complete absence of wind, and dawdled with our packing, reluctant to say goodbye to the house.  Among other things we also said goodbye to the sad pink bathing suit, which could no longer be tolerated even by Annabel.  As we were of course leaving all of Rosemary's towels behind at the house as well, we had to tell Annabel not to expect any swimming on our last day.  But conditions were the best they'd been all weekend, and Annabel was quite sad about the prospect of staying dry.  As we made our sweep around the south end of the island, along the prime beach stretch, she insisted on seeing the Punda Beach Club, which had sponsored the printing of our map of the island, covering the borders of that map with photos of throngs of happy bikini-ed young women.  It looked like spring break in Tampa.  So we turned off at the sign and wound down to the beach.  We expected the place to be quiet.  We just didn't expect it to be desolate.

I tried to capture the rotting planks and pennants of the Punda Beach Club, in hopes of contrasting it with the beauty of the wide, sandy, absolutely empty beach.  Perhaps the fierce wind tore up those flags in just one summer.  But it sure looked like it had been closed for more than a week or two.  Sometime between the printing of our map and the present, the mighty Punda Beach Club had fallen very far, perhaps a victim of the "crisis," as it is referred to here.  As you can see from the complete absence of waves in the last picture, the wind had died completely by this time, and it was a balmy, if not exactly hot, day.  We had some fun with Annabel up in the lifeguard chair looking out for nonexistent swimmers.  But then I found an abandoned beach towel, which we concluded must have been a gift from Poseidon, and Annabel decided she had to go in, suit or no suit.  The last picture is of her out there in the altogether, a picture which she insisted on approving before I could post it, naturally.  She had a good swim, but then people arrived simultaneously at both ends of the beach, and she had to scramble out of the water and pick her hurried way among the rusty nails and missing boards of the Punda Beach Club to a safe location to dry off and get dressed.

Oh, but wait.  I almost forgot.  Before we headed to the Punda Beach Club, even before we stopped for delicious pastries and coffees in Maripissa, we had followed one of the standard brown tourist locale signs to a site near Rosemary's house.  This was perhaps the biggest anticlimax of the weekend.  In the picture Annabel is trying to catch a butterfly.  We did see our first Greek lizard, which was something.  But as archeological sites go, this was something of a bust.  You're seeing pretty much the whole thing.  Of course, we had to call it by its complete and proper name, which you may read on the sign.

Back to chronological order.  The southern coast of Paros was very beautiful, and we especially enjoyed the very charming little town of Drios, where we picked up handfuls of salt that had dried in the tide pools, watched fish swimming more than fifteen feet down in the perfectly clear and perfectly still water, jumped around on rocks, and even picked up a shell or two.  One of which Annabel regretted picking up some five minutes into the walk back to the car, when something pinched her.

We put the little hermit crab in a water bottle to keep him hydrated, then returned him to the sea in Parikia.  On the way up the western coast we turned inland and up a steep road to the "butterfly valley," an oasis of green in the otherwise dry landscape where a particularly flashy species is abundant.  We were disappointed to find it all locked up, but as the very helpful signs informed us, "butterflies gone--not in season."  Hmmm....  I suppose we should have figured that out on our on, perhaps from the guidebook descriptions that talk about them storing up energy for their winter migration.  Nevertheless, it was a little odd to find the entire "valley" locked behind a high fence.  We would have enjoyed walking under the big trees.  Perhaps I was wrong about the Tower of Hellenistic Period; perhaps Butterfly Valley was our biggest disappointment.

We did have one more very big and very pleasant surprise.  On Sunday afternoon in Parikia some things were closed, including many stores and the archeological museum.  But the church of St. Constantine was open--in fact, it was just about the most open of any church I've ever been in, and as you'll see in a minute, we were even able to peek behind the iconostasis down into the mysteries behind.  The church has an associated monastery, and the courtyard was beautiful and very quiet.  But we were not prepared for what we found in the church itself.  Alex is, as I may have mentioned before, even more into the Byzantine church stuff than the Bronze Age and Hellenistic stuff, and she was happy to spend more than an hour here, sitting, wandering, purchasing small stamped tin squares for hanging on the icon of your choice (with pictures representing what you were interested in having God intervene about, from isolated body parts to symbols of love), and just generally soaking in the ancient Christianity of it all.

We wandered around the main floor at first, looking up and around and peeking through the iconostasis, the wall that divides the congregation from all the mysterious actions the priests are doing behind the scenes, behavior way too sacred for lay people to witness.  I included a picture taken by pressing the camera up against the screen of the iconostasis--they were deliberately made so that by standing very close the congregants could see through to the beautiful altars and icons behind the screen, especially in the two side chapels.  But what looked like a figure of Christ from my keyhole view turned out from above and behind to have a disturbing resemblance to the big cut-outs of actors you see in the cineplex, or the stand-up advertisements for movies and games on display at the Comic Shop.  Once we'd discovered that the upstairs was open, and we could wander all around the back and side, peeking down behind the iconostasis, I started snapping pictures like mad.  I've just given you a few.  There had been a church on this site since the fifth century, and some of the parts we could see were very old, as old as the oldest churches we've been in in Spain.  There were only traces of the original frescoes on the walls.  There had been any number of re-modelings over the centuries.  The Greek Orthodox Church makes for some fascinating comparisons with Roman Catholicism, but I'm still digesting what I've seen, and don't have anything to contribute on the subject at this time.  Annabel seemed as impressed as either of her parents, and no one was in a hurry to leave.  Well, maybe Annabel was in a little bit of a hurry.  She wanted one last swim in the town beaches just past the port.  We couldn't find a girl's suit, but I came up with the brilliant suggestion of a boy's suit and a t-shirt, and it worked fine.  We still weren't sure how much of her sea-bathing experience was actual fun and how much was a kind of defiance of the seasons, but we indulged her, and admired her spunk, and had a drink and read the Athens News at a table in the sand, while she walked carefully out into the sea over the somewhat rocky and less-than-pristine town beach.  This, my friends, was no Punda Beach Club.  But it had more people.

We returned our rental car by depositing it on the curb sort of close to the office and a little further away from where we'd picked it up, and informing the people in the desks near our rental company's desk (which was unoccupied), who said that would be fine, and just leave the keys on the desk there.  When we rented it there had been none of that business of looking over the car to confirm dents, no discussion of whether you want insurance or not, just plunked down our money, and then had some trouble actually getting out from behind another car parked directly behind us (and not connected in any way with the rental car agency).  Clearly the car rental business in Paros is pretty relaxed.  The port was bustling with three evening ferries coming in and going out in close succession, but apparently it's a small town, they know what their car looks like, and they'll find it if we leave it anywhere in the vicinity.  Indeed, as we were having coffee and waiting for our boat, the last of the three that evening, we saw our rental agent George go by, and I started to tell him where the car was, and he waved me off with "Yes, yes, fine."  Okay.  I guess it was fine.

(By the way, half the men in Greece are named Georgios, and the other half are named Costas.  Makes it very easy to remember men's names, there being only those two.  Well, and the odd Iannis.  Greeks name children for their grandparents, so names are cycled and recycled.  Sorry for the digression.)

I'll leave you with a final couple of pictures, taken after we left the church and before we went to the beach.  One of the local sites in Parikia that couldn't close, because it didn't have any fence around it, was a Roman-era site just sitting there alongside the road, about a block off the main drag in an industrial area.  I took some pictures of the nice mosaics, but I was more interested in the cricket game going on in the vacant lot next door, to the accompaniment of what we guessed to be Pakistani or Afghani music.  For some reason I couldn't stop thinking about who these men were, and about how they established their Sunday-evening cricket game in this gravelly lot on the edge of this particular town in this particular island in the middle of the Aegean.  If I learn anything relevant about it, I'll be sure to tell you.

We now continue our scheduled broadcast

Did you miss me while I was unable to access my Blogger account?  What, you didn't even notice?  Well, I noticed, and I was getting more and more panicky by the day.  But with the help of my new friend, the Google account expert at the UAF Helpdesk, I'm back.  And boy do we have a backlog of pictures to catch up on!

The AHA Site Director for Athens, Rosemary Donnelly, generously offered us the use of her house on Paros, a fairly big island in the central Aegean.  We took the giant "slow" ferry (which actually moves extremely rapidly) through very rough seas for four hours, arriving in Paros mid-day, in time to pick up our rental car, put our stuff in it, then grab some lunch.

Yes, you heard that right--we rented a car.  Eric actually drove in Greece.  As Rosemary had assured us, Paros was nothing like Athens.  My confidence level was so boosted by this experience that I'm even considering renting a car elsewhere, on the mainland, although only if I can manage to completely avoid Athens.

Rosemary's house is on the other end of the island from Parikia (where the ferries dock), which meant a drive of maybe half an hour.  Although a big island for the Cyclades, it's actually very small.  Having a car to tool around in was perfect.  We managed to mess up Rosemary's directions right at the end, but we got straightened out and found the house.  And we were gobsmacked.

We were expecting perhaps a small house, no doubt beautiful if it belonged to Rosemary, but nothing like this.  Can you tell that Annabel is amazed?  The first shot is into the living room, the second out the living room door, the third looking back toward the island from the roof, and the fourth the living room and kitchen itself, into that same door.  Don't worry, there will be more of the house and pool later.  But you won't get any more interior pictures.  And it's hard looking at it from outside to get a sense of just how big it really is.  Rosemary owns it with her sister, who has a large bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room of the living room.  Then there is the whole other wing where we stayed, two more bedrooms with their own bath. And there are more rooms and the garage in back that we never explored.  All of this on 8000 square meters of land, most of it planted in olives, on top of a headland looking east across the channel to Naxos, and with spectacular views in every direction.  Perhaps you can get some sense of the exquisite landscaping from those pictures.  We were there at a good time, as flowers were blooming again after the hot, dry summer.

One reason the house doesn't look as large as it really is is that it keeps a very low profile.  Paros is very windy, and the house is on top of a headland exposed to the north wind, so it's built close to the ground with its back to the north, opening to the south so that the large patio and pool areas are reasonably sheltered.

Reasonably sheltered.  Remember those rough seas I mentioned?  It was extremely windy, the windiest conditions I've every been in for more than a few minutes, and when the wind failed to die down after nightfall as I'd expected it to, we wondered if it was just always like this, and if so, how people could live in it.  It turned out that this was an unusually windy day, and from Saturday morning on it got more and more calm, until by Sunday afternoon the water was like glass.

But we're still in Friday afternoon.  And Annabel is determined to go for a swim.  There are beaches on both sides of our headland, one in a small village, the other more isolated (and also somewhat protected from the wind), so we gave in to Annabel's request and went swimming here.

Annabel is on a mission, you see, to extend the beach season as long as possible.  She made it into the ocean four times and the pool twice during those three days, sometimes under hazardous conditions, as you will learn.  Swimming in a warm ocean, in a protected cove, on a cold and windy day, was nothing, although I was the first to be driven out of the warm water simply because my head was absolutely freezing.  It was very much like being at Chena Hot Springs in winter on a -20 day:  your body is loving the warm water, but your head can only take so much of the cold.  We did a little beach-combing while we dried out, and then headed back up to the house to shower and dress.  But as evening came on Annabel was determined to get wet again, and put her suit back on and went in the pool, perhaps more to prove something than out of any anticipation of actual enjoyment.

I show you pictures with both Alex and me huddled in the background not merely to emphasize how cold it was, but also to show views both of the house and of Naxos across the way.  I got a little obsessed with the wind for a while, and the point of the third shot is to show the whitecaps in my wine glass.   The water was crashing at the other end of the pool as well, but I didn't take a shot looking that way.  Annabel didn't stay in long once she had proved her point--she took another shower to warm up, and we headed down to the beach and village in the other direction for a delicious dinner.

Oh, but notice that swimming suit, which Alex purchased for Annabel in Matala on Crete, because the suit she brought to Greece was getting too small for her, because the suit she was supposed to bring to Greece she left at the gym in Fairbanks.  That little pink bikini was too big for her and fell off at every opportunity.  More on that later.

When we woke up it was still windy, but the wind died down gradually all day, as I said.  We had two days to explore the island, and decided to break it up into north and east on Saturday, south and west on Sunday.  We headed up to Lefkes, the largest inland town and a former capital in the days of the pirates when there was something to be said for not being on the water.  This village is absolutely beautiful, built on the slopes of the central mountain (and perfectly framed at night in our bedroom window below), with lots of tiny streets, the classic white-washed houses trimmed in blue (and occasionally other colors), a large church currently under reconstruction, and, of course, tons of cats.  There was actually a greater density of cats on Paros than in Athens, and that's saying something.  Annabel's camera battery died, so I had to take this one of a particularly aggressive kitten.

I could have wandered around Lefkes taking pictures for many more hours, but I was a little self-conscious about pointing my camera at people's windows.  The town was eerily empty.  We thought it was just because it was Saturday morning, but we heard later that there are actually lots of empty houses, some owned by people in Athens, others just unoccupied.  Levkes is rather forlorn, although blindingly beautiful.  Plenty of cats wandering those tiny, winding streets, however, as I believe I mentioned, and a lot of care taken with the appearance of the streets and houses, either for touristic purposes or because the people who do live here make the effort out of civic pride or aesthetic sensibilities.

We had one more stop to make before lunch, the fabled marble quarries of old Paros at Marathi, which produced the marble for the Venus de Milo, among other projects.  The signs billed them as "Marble Ancient Quarries," so of course that's the term we used for them, full name only.  We couldn't go down into the underground part, but Annabel climbed all over the upper sections.

We found out that night (from the same person who filled us in about Lefkes) that the white marble is all long gone from Paros, and the beautiful stone used in the floors, lintels, bathrooms, and elsewhere in Rosemary's house had come from Naxos.  Which only increased the sense of melancholy I was feeling about Paros, a version of what I've been feeling often about Greece in general, something to do with the glories of the ancient past and the frustrations of the present economic situation juxtaposed in a way that is not really ironic, as I would tell my students, or even tragic exactly, but is certainly poignant.

That's a lot of pictures for you to download, and we're only about halfway through our time in Paros.  Perhaps it's time for a break.  We'll eat lunch in Naoussa while you let your download link cool off.  And for those of you who've been studying your map of Paros all this time, Naoussa is on the north end.  Wait, you don't have a map?  Well, why didn't you say so?

http://www.parosweb.gr/map.htm

Rosemary's house is by Ampelas, on the northwest coast.  See you soon.

More on weather, ancient stuff, poop--you know, life in Athens

It's time to catch up on some of our questions from faithful readers.  Wait, what's that?  We don't have any faithful readers?  To quote Giorgios Carlin, "Eau contraire, mon frere!"  We do in fact have four, count 'em, FOUR comments on the blog.  They may all be from the same person, but hey! that's pretty darn faithful of you, Tim.  And so in response to his request, here's a picture of our coffee place, where I've been practicing my very complicated coffee orders for over a month, and just when I had it down--"Espresso fredo, metrio, mai ligo galla fresco"--the weather changed (see weather note below), and I had to learn a new order.

It's been very nice to sit here, across the street (most tavernas and coffee houses have outdoor sections more or less adjacent to their indoor areas), with wireless access when needed, enjoying a cold fredo on a hot day.  But even before the weather changed I'd begun ordering most of my afternoon coffees "ya exo" on the way somewhere, often to Modern Greek class at 4:00.

We don't have any other regular "watering hole" (sorry, Tim) as we generally just grab a drink wherever we are when we're out.  Annabel has no problem being left alone, which we've done in order to go to the local farmer's market or on some other errand, but we haven't left her alone in bed at night.  (When her grandfather Jonathan arrives later this week, we'll no doubt get out on a date or two.)  Alex has gradually gotten used to letting Annabel go alone to the bakery, or home from someplace nearby when we want to sit a little longer.  But we hate to leave Annabel home alone at night, partly out of parental over-protection and partly because we just hate to make her hang out alone.  She's very much looking forward to the first meeting this Saturday of an annual winter local kid's group, Drama Kings and Queens, for English-speaking 8-12 year-olds.  She's also been enjoying Skyping with her friends Aspen and Sophie during those all-too-brief windows in the space-time continuum.

But there are still plenty of fun things for her to do around here, especially when Dad's not busy with work.  Annabel and I had a wonderful outing two weeks ago, a VERY long walk that began with us climbing Likavitos hill.  Here's a picture of it from near our apartment--you can sort of see the cool little church on top--and a couple more pictures looking out over the city from the summit.  It's an astounding view, with all of Athens at your feet, disappearing into the faint distance to the north and southwest past Piraeus, and the sea and the three mountains surrounding Athens seeming very close indeed.  In the second picture below, the Acropolis is over Annabel's left shoulder, and in the bottom one Annabel is getting out her camera in preparation for taking a picture of a cat, as she spends a lot of time doing whenever we're walking around Athens and she has her camera.

 

This last picture I took because it's got our neighborhood in the background.  If you have computer skills and can zoom into this picture, you'll get a look at Pagrati where we live; if not you'll just have to squint.  Annabel and I had approached the hill via that road running directly up the middle of the picture.  Above Annabel's head are the National Gardens and just to the left the original Athenian games stadium.  (There were four or five major athletic/religious competitions in Greece, including one at this site in Athens, among which the one in Olympia has triumphed as eponymous--hence our tendency to refer to this as the "Olympic" stadium.)  Equidistant from the top left corner of the stadium and the top end of that street in the center of the picture, and a little above both of them, is a very big church, kind of a brown blob to those of you looking at a small version of the picture.  We live very close to that blob--er, church--close enough to hear the bells quite clearly--quite, quite clearly.

Across much of the top of both pictures is the Aegean, though it's hard to tell.  I know I promised better pictures, and some of them are better (aren't they?), but this was a very hazy day, shooting into the sun to get these shots, and the light was challenging.  At least it never rained on our long walk, although it threatened to at first and I lugged an umbrella the whole way.  We had planned to take the funicular up the hill, but once we got to where it started (at the top (or near end) of that same street in the middle of the bottom picture), and we found out it cost seven-and-a-half euros each, and ran underground so that there wasn't even any view from it, we just walked the rest of the way up, and were glad we did.  (For those of you not familiar with our family's current favorite word in the English language, a "funicular" is a kind of tram.)

Around the time Annabel and I had gotten our fill of the heady view and started down, our Saturday walk turned into a marathon.  Actually, I should be careful about throwing the word "marathon" around lightly.  In a couple of weeks they're holding a race to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the original marathon--yes that extra zero is not a mistake--covering the original route, starting from--you guessed it--Marathon.  Participating in that would be something unforgettable for a runner.  We were thinking of signing up for the 5K version, but it's the day Galen arrives, and the day after we return from Istanbul, and things will be kind of hectic, so unfortunately we'll have to settle for trying to watch a little of it.  I don't know where it's going to finish, but it seems likely that it will be at that original stadium very close to our apartment, so we might be able to get a look down at it even if we can't get too close because of crowds.

Enough of ancient history and modern athletics--back to our stroll.  From the top of the hill we headed off towards downtown, at a right angle from the route by which we'd come, through the fancy shopping area and past the main square, down into the tourist areas near the Acropolis where we knew stuff would still be open on Saturday afternoon.  We had lunch, did a little window shopping, and then headed back home.  I asked if she wanted to take a cab, which I was planning all along to do if we got tired, but she was game to walk home, and so we completed a roughly equilateral triangle with a couple of miles on each side, and a lot of vertical mixed in.  How about a view of the Acropolis (again, bad light) on our way down from Likavitos, framed by a fancy neighborhood, along a line of banisters that proved to be just too tempting?

Annabel likes to set challenges for herself, and in this case she insisted on sliding down ALL the banisters.  Dad did one just to say he did, but kind of wishes he'd done more.

So far this entry has been mostly about one day's outing, and it was supposed to be a chance to catch up on all kinds of stuff.  Well, how about the weather?  I know I already talked about it, but can I talk about it some more, please?  Have you ever noticed that human responses to weather are completely relative?  Like when the March temperatures in Fairbanks reach +20 and students are walking around in shorts and t-shirts?  Well, we northwestern Americans from Oregon and Washington and Alaska went from roasting to freezing the minute the temperature dipped into the high sixties.  It's true, the weather did actually change (thank goodness), and it was fairly dramatic.  Autumn came in with the month of October, and suddenly it felt, not exactly like October, but perhaps like August in Oregon rather than in Florida.  It was a great relief, but it also provoked almost comical responses from the students of being suddenly "freezing."  It also threatened to end the beach season.  I say "threatened" because Annabel would have none of that, and in the next blog installment, detailing our most extremely fabulous weekend on the island of Paros, you will see that ain't no weather gonna keep that girl out of the water.

But what about the poop update I promised?  Okay, how about a pigeon crapping on my underwear as it was hanging outside on the line?  There's a whole lot of irony there.  It shouldn't be all that disgusting, I guess, as all I had to do was wash them again, but there just shouldn't be any excrement on my undies that wasn't originally mine, is how I feel about the situation.  No picture, once again.  Sorry, Tim.

Where were we, before poopus interruptus?  Oh, yes, heading back up the hill to Pagrati from downtown.  As we approached home on our long walk, Annabel continued to take pictures of cats for her planned photo-essay, and I took a picture of her taking a picture of a cat on a staircase we pass by often on our way downtown.  Halfway up the block I spotted for the first time (the students had seen it some time ago) this statue up in the corner of a decrepit old building.

May Athena and her owl watch over you and protect you, as they clearly have this building.

See you on Paros.

First you lustrate, then you libate (3)

When we left our intrepid explorers, they were in the port city of Heraklion, in roughly the middle of the island of Crete on the north coast.  I started to type "the Cretan city of Heraklion," but given my twelve-year-old sense of humor, I can't stop myself from giggling every time someone uses "Cretan" as an adjective.  When our Greek language professor was filling us in on what to expect on the trip, she used the word "Cretan" ten or twenty times a minute (she speaks rapidly), and the whole class was having difficulty keeping a straight face.  Childish, yes, maybe even culturally insensitive, but I'm still going to avoid saying that word if I can help it.  Except to say that Ianna warned us (that is, warned the young female students) that "Cretan men are very hairy."  And so they were.  Sorry, no pictures.

Pardon that Beavis and Butthead paragraph.  It won't happen again.

We boarded our bus bright (all Greek mornings are bright, as far as I can tell) and early for Malia, an hour east along the coast.  Michael had actually worked at this site some years ago, and it clearly had a special place in his heart.  One separate and very interesting area that he had expected to be closed off was open, and so we were able to see some of the section he worked on.  Construction at Malia used three different materials, including red-mud bricks and two different kinds of stone, so the coloring of the ruins was quite dramatic, as you might be able to see in the first picture below.

Things were very conveniently labeled at Malia.  Not that we needed the label in this case--by our third day in Crete everyone in the group could have identified an L.B. at a glance.

There were some unique features at Malia.  I particularly liked this  sort of lazy Susan for the gods, except that I don't think it actually rotated.  Little token offerings were put in each of the depressions, maybe a few olives here, some grapes there, some saffron flowers or wheat grains in the next, and so on.  Again, note the handy label:  "Offering table." 

One of the protected areas (under the modern roofs dotting some of the sites, keeping out rain that would wear the softer stone and mud away) was a very large "magazine," a storage area, in this case for large jugs of olive oil, as we can tell by the trenches in the middle designed to catch any spillage and funnel it down to where it could be collected and used for all those things one uses dirty olive oil for--say, lamp fuel.

Being one of those people who feels compelled to know as many things as possible, or, more precisely, who hates not knowing what's going on around him, I especially enjoyed those aspects of Malia that Micheal felt we could actually understand with some confidence, which helps explain the pictures I selected.  Clearly there are other people who also like to know what's going on with all these ruins, since halfway through our tour of Malia we picked up a couple of extra students.  At first they hung about on the fringes, but when we scooted through the open gate and over to the other part of the site, they were right there with us, and as we stood on a narrow walkway above some rooms and Michael explained what we were looking at, they were both breathing down his neck, practically elbowing us out of the way.  It was comical, especially since the mother and daughter were both well over six feet tall and hardly unobtrusive anyway.  I think they should have bought Michael lunch.

Speaking of which, after eating our bag lunches in Malia (no eating allowed on the Mercedes, naturally), we boarded and doubled back on our tracks through Heraklion and on to the west.  Our first stop was a small site high up in the hills above the city, with absolutely no one else there when we arrived.  It was fun to have a site to ourselves.  I think that made me feel all the more warm towards it.  Besides the Minoan ruins we also saw several very interesting bugs at this site, and I also liked the drainage system and cistern installed by later inhabitants (probably those pesky Mycenaeans).  And just for good measure, we have a second-floor pier-and-door partition balanced above a passageway, and a picture of Annabel deep in an L.B.

(Doctor Who fans, please note:  Annabel is wearing her "The Angels have the phone box" t-shirt, which luckily arrived in the mail just days before we left Fairbanks.  We've got the Weeping Angels episode of the latest season ready to go on the computer, and will be watching it sometime this weekend.  The verdict from the Fitts-Heynes on the new Doctor?  He's no David Tennant, but he'll do just fine.)

From Tylissos we had our longest stretch of bus ride, west to Hania, a beautiful town with a Venetian fort guarding the snug harbor, cool little hotels in the old buildings above narrow medieval streets that reminded us of Spain, and lots of tourist shops that stayed open on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, which was lucky for us, since that's when we were there.  More than lucky--vital, in fact.  Hania was added to the itinerary not for the archaeology, but for the shopping.  This is where Katja put us all to shame, spending perhaps eight hours in one store.  (To be fair, she spent a lot of it talking over coffee with the employees, but still....)  We did look at one small Minoan site in the middle of town, on a large hill that was actually entirely man-made, built up by successive centuries of construction by many different cultures.  Here's the site, once again protected from the elements, but otherwise almost unmarked and easily overlooked in the middle of a residential area.

Did you spot those pier-and-door partitions, which I located near the middle of the shot purely for your convenience?  I sure hope so.

(We exited the bus in Hania so quickly (because we were double-parked with a couple of cops behind us) that we only barely had time to say goodbye to our marvelous driver.  Hania is so small that we had no need of further wheeled transportation, except to the ferry terminal (some miles away) late the next day, and that last trip on a big fat bus only made me miss our Mercedes the more.  Meanwhile, he had turned around immediately after dropping us off and doubled back to Heraklion.)

We had one more archaeological stop on this trip, at the museum in Hania, which was fabulous.  I took pictures galore, and had to delete a couple, when I didn't at first notice the small "Unpublished materials--no pictures" sign in the corner of the display case.  But even with some stuff off limits, there was lots to look at, and it was great to wander around in this nearly empty place and ask Michael to explain anything we wanted explained.

Like these Minoan Dixie cups, for instance, mass-produced for single-occasion use.  Sometimes it's good to see what those ancient aristocrats did when they weren't holding religious ceremonies or feasting visiting dignitaries.  There must have nights when they just didn't feel like hosting people, much less gods.  But when they did have people (and gods) in, they brought out the good stuff, like this drinking bowl with an appropriately Dionysian picture on the inside, and on the outside crazy eyeballs which at least one expert claimed were to indicate the drunken state in which you'll find yourself if you have too many bowls of that strong Cretan wine.

There were lots of Roman-era items in the Hania museum, including beautiful floor mosaics like this one, in which the fighting cocks (at the top--with apologies for the dark photo) symbolize the domestic argument this pair of married immortals were having with each other.

Of course Annabel was taken by some of the statues that, although not strictly angels and not covering their eyes, are nevertheless evocative of a certain race of Lonely Assassins.

I caught Michael taking a picture of the next piece, which he said was unique, and when we asked him about it, he explained that the entire air-conditioned wing containing this and many of the other best pieces (including the drinking bowl above) were from the collection of a former prime minister, and mostly looted illegally, which explained why the locations where they were found were not provided in the labels.  Archaeologists are fairly sure where this particular piece comes from, but the collection as a whole is a kind of slap in the face to people who care deeply about the proper treatment of ancient artifacts.

And thus endeth the archaeology lesson for the day.  We still had most of the day free until our ferry rendezvous at 7:15, so we signed up for an excursion with Captain "Nick the Greek," as he introduced himself on the side of the boat and in person, when we learned that "Nick" and "Greek" rhyme, which makes it a lot catchier.  He was very sweet, and we were glad we chose the Aphrodite from the several boats lined up along the dock offering identical cruises.  Not at all superstitious, we selected the "three-hour tour," although I couldn't help humming the theme to Gilligan's Island as we sipped iced coffee in the cafe opposite the quay while waiting for our departure.

Captain Nick made Annabel drive the boat, of course--I think she was the only person on board under 18--but he didn't let her drive it for long, because the headwind was fierce and growing fiercer.  It looks pretty calm out there in front of Annabel, but in fact we were forced to turn around and give up on two highly touted features of the trip:  a swing around a national park island inhabited by native long-horned goats, and a peer through the glass bottom at the wreck of a German WW II bomber.  He offered free do-overs to those who were staying another day (and admitted that the airplane wasn't really in great shape after more than sixty years underwater), but we were ecstatic with the decision and needed no persuading, as the boat was going WAAAYYY up and WAAAYYY down, and we had chosen seats near the front in order to minimize seasickness, but found ourselves in front of the screen lowered for protection from spray (with no other seats available), treated to an excellent view of the waves looming above us in the troughs, and soaking wet from the spray coming over the gunwale.  Yes, yes, turning around was fine with us, we voted for that, and with a strong tailwind we were very quickly at the last stop on the tour, the very small island and former leper colony of Lazarete, where we had plenty of time to snorkel, and where Captain Nick managed to roust out an octopus for us, which everyone who wanted to got to touch, and which some people even held in hand or on shoulder, before he returned it to a comfortable hole in the rocks.

I'm sort of sorry, but not really, you can't really make out Captain Nick's speedo in that top photo.  He cut a dashing figure in mask and snorkel, leading a troop of us out to various sites and making five-meter dives below us to pry out the octopus.  But the dashingness was somewhat undercut on land by the speedo.

I'll leave you with a shot of the harbor as we returned, and skip over the ferry ride home, on which we slept anyway, except to mention that the heavy seas tossed even our extremely large ferry about rather noticeably, so that the creaking and swaying kept Alex and I awake for a while, and several of us commented later that we'd had odd moments of wave-like motion, while on dry land, for several days afterward.  Those in our group sleeping two decks lower claimed not to have felt it, but we who are still reeling find that hard to believe.  Yah sas, Hania.  Yas sas, Crete.