Greece, Day 4 - Olympia, Corinth

Our hotel is just a little bit away from Ancient Olympia, so we got to sleep in a bit. Oh! Last night, I discovered that the shower had multiple settings. There was a super cool flat rain shower head thing straight above, there was a handheld head, and there were 3 little jets that were placed vertically on the wall in front. I turned them on without realizing I was  going to get sprayed right in the face. I'm not sure why they're there, unless you really only want to get your front wet. Very strange. But, since I was feeling a bit snotty, I left the dial turned to the 3 jets setting. I wanted Max to get sprayed in the face when he took his morning shower. I hoped he wouldn't notice. He didn't. When he went in, we heard an "Ah!" It was really funny. Ha ha! I said.

Breakfast was included in this hotel, so we loaded up the car and went in to breakfast. The fare was pretty standard for European buffet breakfast, but it wasn't a buffet. The guy sat us down, and went away. We expected to get menus or something, since we hadn't seen a buffet (and we were the only people around) but he came back out with a tray full of food. We had hard boiled eggs, toast, Greek yogurt and honey, slices of some pound cake-ish thing, jam, a strata-type thing, and orange juice. Em & I had cocoa, while Max had coffee. It was pretty darn good.

It was off to Olympia. There is apparently a path from the hotel to the site, but it was a fair walk, and we didn't feel like making it. We were feeling the affects of climbing two mountains yesterday.

The detail on this capital amazes me

Little Roman soldier puppets

First thing was the museum. I like to visit the museums first. This one was pretty cool. It was big enough to be nice and modern, but small enough that we were allowed to take pictures. The museum is cool, because they have so much stuff. Olympia was first and foremost a religious place, so cities would bring offerings.

Bronze helmets

Priapus

Lots of little animal figurines

There were some really beautiful statues, and they had reconstructed the pediments from the temple of Zeus. You could see the figures at eye-level, and really understand the stories they told.

The Centauromachy

Then we walked the little way to the ancient site. I had a book, so I was able to tell Max & Em was things were. The thing that I really thought was the coolest was the hostel. I know, obviously, that the Ancient Greeks had to travel a long way to get to the games and to visit the sanctuary, but I never really thought about where they would stay. Turns out, they had hotels.

Cool stone work on the hostel wall

 It's hard to see in the picture, but the columns on the Zeus Temple were so wide!

Fallen column at the Zeus Temple

We wandered around a bit and finally got to the stadium.

Of course, we had to race. Also of course, Max was much faster than me. He slowed down enough to tease me, and I hit him with my hat, much to the amusement of the little boys who had finished racing just before us. Unfortunately, the video won't upload. Maybe it's too big?

Em had her bad ankle, so we didn't make her run the whole way, but I did make her run just in front of the camera, so I could get a video.

We heard drums coming from the sanctuary, and we had to go back that way to get out, so we thought to find the drums. We saw a bunch of medics standing around, and a large group of young adults with their stuff all over the ground. Then, we saw them set up a parabolic mirror and get out a torch. They were practicing for the torch lighting! The actual torch lighting isn't until May 10, but it was super cool to watch the rehearsal. I've not really thought about the torch before, except when I saw it in LA when I was a kid. It's going to mean something to us this year, though.

The torch and the parabolic mirror that is used to light it

The lady in the dress is being the high priestess

I remembered that we had seen postcards of the torch lighting in the museum shop, so we went back over there to buy a couple, since now we had seen it. Max really wanted to get it signed by the lady that played the high priestess, but Em & I didn't feel like walking all the way back over there. So, he took the postcards and a pen, and went back. But, his ticket had already been used, and they wouldn't let him back in. :(

Max has a couple of friends who are very interested in the Olympics, so he wanted to mail them postcards from Olympia. The modern town is quite small, but we drove over there anyway. It's just across a bridge. We saw a sign for a post office, so we parked. The post office is in the pedestrian area, so we had to park in a parking lot off to the side. Em was sore and tired, so she waited in the car while Max and I walked to the post office. Along the way, we found some fun souvenirs. Then, I realized we had forgotten the Olympia cache. Damn. Too late. I had 10 of them printed out, and we had only missed/not found 2, so we still had lots of chances.

So, it was time for Ancient Corinth. It was "3" hours away.  (In American hours, that's 4 1/2) We had about half as many mountains to go through as we had on the way to Olympia, but that was still a lot of mountains. But, I was able to get some good pictures of a mountain town his time. We drove through so many towns that looked just like this, but this was the only one that had a good picture spot.

The town

This cemetery went in terraces down the mountain

Every town had a fountain

A closeup of the town

Sheep!

We got there at about 3:30.

Pretty church in Corinth

Guess what? It was closed. It had closed at 3. Well, we were disappointed, but not terribly surprised. We got a few pictures through the fence.

Corinth

Sheep in the road in Corinth

sheep again

We thought we would try Acrocorinth, the huge fortress on the hill above the city. The guide book had it as being open later than the ancient site, and said that it was free, so I thought maybe it would still be open. Nope. Ah, well.

Acrocorinth

pretty flowers on a house in Corinth

It was on to Delphi, where we were spending the night. Delphi is another 3 (5) hours away. I wanted to see the Corinth Canal, since it is such an amazing feat of engineering. I set Metis for the visitors' center. She took us to the completely wrong place. We were also following the signs on the freeway, but, like so many other places, the signs just stopped. We passed over the canal (but I didn't have my camera ready, since we were on our way to the visitors' center, right?) We ended up back on the freeway to Athens. We had to pay a toll. Max knew that I would be disappointed if I didn't get some pictures, so he got off that the first possible place (about 4.5 miles) and turned around. We had to pay another toll to get back on the freeway towards Corinth. This time, we just followed the signs. My guidebook had said it was well marked. It wasn't. Again, signs stopped. Again, we turned around. This time, though, we knew where NOT to turn. We pulled off in this dirt parking lot in front of a tacky souvenir/food poisoning shop. We got out and walked back to the bridge. It has a nice pedestrian walkway beside it. It was really cool to see.

Then it was back in the car to Delphi. For real this time. Max was really hungry, and wanted to eat at the food poisoning shop. I wasn't hungry, nor was Emma. Since we had snacks in the car, the two not hungries won, and Max ate a car snack. After we paid another toll and got back onto the Athens side of things, we stopped at a gas station/rest stop. We took a potty break (real toilets!) and Max looked at the food offerings. Nothing looked appealing to him, so it was back in the car.

We drove for quite a while, with minimal detouring. We passed back through the crap hole that is Thebes. I felt pretty cool that I recognized it, though. Oh, I have to say that by this point, I was feeling pretty rad in my ability to read some Greek. I now knew enough about the different ways that the place names are translated into English, and I could tell which Greek letters are the same as which English ones. So, Thebes = Thiva = Θήβα. Here are some others I learned to recognize


Athens - Αθήνα (Athena)
Delphi - Δελφοί (Delphoi)
Sparta - Σπάρτη (Sparte)
Monemvassia - Μονεμβασία (Monemvasia)
Olympia - Ολυμπία
Corinth - Κόρινθος (Korinthos)
Stop - Στοπ
Taverna - Tαβέρνα

You can see that the B looking thing is a v in English, which explains why we saw so many things that are v in English mistranslated to have a b. For instance, in many restaurants, liver was misspelled as liber. We saw Stop on the toll booths in Attica, but I wasn't quick enough to catch it, since it changed to the amount we had to pay pretty much as soon as we got to the booth. I thought it looked like "Eton" and was quite proud of myself when I figured out that it meant stop. As you can see, a lot of the Greek letters translate directly to English ones. The θ means "th", and the φ means "ph", but otherwise they're pretty much one for one, at least the ones I was able to recognize. There were enough words like that that I got really frustrated when there were words I couldn't decipher. It was kind of annoying when the foreign language part of Greek got in my way. Speaking of Greek as a foreign language, we only ran into one person the entire time who didn't speak English - a guy at a gas station in the middle of nowhere on the way to Delphi.


There are several kinds of roads in Greece. There are large freeways with lots of tolls, there are tiny, curving mountain roads, there are city streets, and there are roads that are pretty major arteries, but are still only one lane in each direction. These roads tend to have very wide shoulders, though. (Of course, I'm basing my observations on the relatively small part of Greece that we saw, but I'm going to act like an authority on all of Greece right now). There are also roads with road work that has never been completed. If you look at this picture, you can see that the right half of the road was being worked on. But, it had been so long that it was covered in dust/dirt that blew up as the truck in front of us drove by it.

We learned on this trip that on those wide-shouldered, two-lane roads that the proper place to drive is almost all the way in the shoulder. This is done because people want to pass you, and it's much safer for them to do so if you're over to the right. Everybody does it, and we learned it pretty quickly. 

When we got up into the mountains, though, there was a guy who hadn't learned it. I was fulfilling my role as Reader of the Mental Floss, so I didn't notice right away, and Max was pretty angry with the guy by the time I looked up. There was quite a line of people behind us, too. A bunch of them cut in front of us and were then stopped by the slow guy. They all eventually got around him, but we were stuck. We were on a hybrid of a curvy mountain road and wide-shouldered road, and we just never felt like we could see far enough around this guy to pass him when he was taking up the whole lane. We saw a number of near collisions as other people passed him, and we didn't feel like risking ourselves like that. The problem was that he sped way up on the straightaways, so we couldn't pass him then, either. I observed his rental car sticker and figured that he was probably speeding up on the straightaways to try and make up for his lack of speed on the curves, because it was pretty darn obvious that everybody on the road was peeved with him. 


Anyway, we did finally get to Delphi. It was another night when we were really afraid we might miss our check-in deadline, so we didn't stop for food. Greek dining is much like German dining. You may as well settle in and enjoy yourself, 'cause you're in it for the long haul. 


Delphi is a mountain-clinging town, and has one major street. There are also a few that run about parallel with the main street, but it's a pretty small place. The street our hotel is on is one way, so we basically had to go all the way through Delphi and turn back around. The problem is that Metis kept wanting us to turn down streets that weren't car streets. Once we got on a street we could actually drive on, though, we found it easily. The hotel had advertised free parking, but all we saw was street parking. The street was pretty packed with hotels and tavernas, so we weren't sure if overnight parking was OK, or if there was another lot somewhere. But, no, the street it was. No worries, there was actually a spot just across the street. 

We checked in and immediately headed to dinner. Poor Max was digesting his own liber by now, so we needed a tabepva, stat. Luckily, there were like 25 on that block. We picked the first one. We were the only people there. They sat us on the terrace, which was quite nice. A bit scary, perhaps. Remember that Delphi is on the side of a mountain, and the terrace was pretty much hanging off. But, anyway. The food was quite good. I had souvlaki, of course, and Max & Em had gyros. 


We got back to the hotel, and we settled in. The room was a family room, and had four beds. A double and 3 singles. I have never before seen that many beds in a hotel room, especially not in Europe. Usually, it's difficult to find a room even just for the three of us. Em is almost always in a rollaway. This time, Em walked in first, flopped down on the double, and claimed it as her own. I objected at first, but Max said, why not? True, a double is really too small for both Max & me, so we let her have the double while we took two of the singles.

We needed to rearrange all of our suitcases and such, since we needed to turn in the rental car the next day. We had to be compact, so we could load it all into a taxi to get to our Athens hotel. We did that, and then, holy of holies, I took a bath. Bathtubs are a rare luxury in European hotels. My knee and hips were hurting so very badly that a nice hot bath was just what I needed. Lovely. 


Emma says - During breakfast, we had a conversation about the different kinds of swallows, because there were a bunch there. Mom didn't realize there were so many kinds. It was funny when Mom hit Dad with a hat in their race. That was neato when we watched the torch lighting, we're going to watch the real one online. The canal was scary! I was really glad when Dad tapped me on the shoulder and said it scared him, too.

Post script 5/10 - We watched the actual torch lighting ceremony as it streamed live from Olympia. It was fun to see the parts we hadn't seen in the rehearsal, and even more fun to recognize the people and dances that we had seen. Em was excited that she recognized one guy who had been afraid of a bee at the rehearsal.