After long days of looking at ruins and reading inscriptions of Greek mythology we typically go back to the hotel to vegetate. This gives us the opportunity to enjoy the three American shows the Greek have imported: Hercules, Zena, and Charmed. The commonalities are striking: myth, magic, heroes, and epic cheesiness. It comes full circle when you see you the 2,500 year old marble reliefs depicting the trials of Hercules and then later that night watch Kevin Sorbo do it for real.
-Mary

We’re hopping through the Greek Islands now on our way to Turkey. We’ve been through Paros and Santorini so far. We head to Mykonos tomorrow and probably Samos after that. Samos is then swimming distance to Turkey.

The islands really do look like every postcard you’ve ever seen. The whitewashed cubist houses cling to each other and the cliffs. Walkways and streets form a maze

apparently meant to confuse pirates before tourists. The only part that I don’t care for is that the popular islands we’ve been on are completely dedicated to tourism with maybe some agriculture in the back yard. It is a little sad to see villages made entirely of marble that have been whitewashed to fit into the postcard images tourists want to see. On the other hand, they do look pretty cool.

Here’s a bit of the rest of Santorini. These first two are from the tiny inner islands of the caldera, one of which is still volcanically active and last blew steam in the 1920s or so and have warm and sulfur springs.

Red Beach on the southeast

These cool shades were found on the beach at Kamala. They’re all the rage here.

Wine is everywhere in Greece. It make Italy look like an amateur. In Athens, there were wine supply stores and regular hardware stores selling equipment on the street.

And, of course, the monks in Meteora know what they are doing…

The best is still the fine wine sold in plastic water bottles. İ cannt wait until Trader Joes sees this

We learned very quickly that the Greeks take their statues very seriously. No flash photography, no touching, no posing near the statues and absolutely no putting your head on someone else’s body.

We got a good talking to for this one. The museum guard lady was so angry for the picture but flustered she couldn’t tell us to delete the picture in English that she finally just gave up yelling at us and stormed off.

This one is ok. In the outdoor parks, they just blow whistles at you when you’re doing something bad. Come to think of it, I don’t recall any signs that said no impersonating a statue.

You can’t help but run into a few museums flaunting the cradle of civilization when traveling in Greece. They are full of the usual statuary, pottery shards, words and all, but you can only look at so much of that before your eyes cross. Here’s some of the more interesting artifacts we found between Athens, Delphi and Olympia. Most of this stuff is from 2000-1000BC.

Gumby was ripped off from the ancient Mycenians.

They played ping pong (ok, it’s really a mirror, but that’s not interesting enough to take a picture of)

I don’t recall what the real purpose of these was, but Mary wanted a pair as earings.

Good thing for me the museum shop was closed.

One theater had comical faces on it before they were stolen for the Athens Archeological Museum. Could this one be the inspiration for Yosemite Sam?

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto. It’s actually an infant burial garb.

I only have eyes for you…

I cannot count how many gyros we’ve had in the two weeks we have been in Greece. They put french fries inside the pita, genius! So good and so cheap it’s suspicious. They have all kinds of yoghurt and cream sauces that they apply liberally. When school house rock said “don’t drown your food with mayo, ketchup or goo,” they were directing the goo at the Greek. We’ve grown a liking to moussaka, which is like an eggplant and potato lasagne. Souvlaki is also found everywhere and it’s basically shish kebab.

One of my favorite snacks, other than ice cream bars, is corn roasted over wood chips seasoned with a dash of salt. They have sour cherry juice that we are quite fond of too.

We did finally try grilled octopus yesterday and it was rather tasty. Not chewy at all and the suction cups were kinda fun to crunch down on, although they lose their suction when you cook ‘em.

-Mary

They have a lot of rocks here. And they like to pile them up, especially way up on the tippy top of rocks and hills. Then the raids, earthquakes and gods messed up the neat piles so now ruins are scattered all over Greece. There’s so much of the stuff that you can’t build a subway or foundation without unearthing some millennia old artifact, much less walk down the street without tripping over some temple to Zeus.

We clambered our way up to the top of the Acropolis to see the Pantheon, dragged our feet up through Delphi to see the Temple of Apollo, braved the tour groups at Olympia to stand in the original Olympic stadium, used the fallen city of Mystra as our jungle gym, and threw caution high into the wind to explore the monasteries built on rocky cliffs in Meteora. Twice we hiked to the top of Meteora…

-Mary

We landed in Greece July 15th and were faced with yet another language – and alphabet…

So our engineering degrees are finally coming in handy. We can decipher the road signs using mind numbing engineering mathematics to theorize that DLFI = Delphi. It’s slow reading but it works.

-Mary

They filmed the Harry Potter train scene at King’s Cross station a block from where we were stayed in London. Steve gave it a go, but apparently he’s too old for Hogwart’s. I’m actually reading my first Potter book, the latest one. It was either that or Dicken’s Oliver Twist. Yikes, I “saved” that one for Steve.

-Mary

London’s been fun. We spent 4 days here taking in the basic sites. London is cool and all, but the most impressive part was probably that we had 4 days of absolute sunshine. It’s been beautiful here. The local papers even talked about the heat wave that’s been disrupting everyone’s life.

Aside from the remarkable weather and the usual stuff, we noticed a few cool things here:

#1 The first is actually not very cool. Everything costs twice here what it does in the states. a can of coke is $2-3. We saw Pirates of the Caribbean at the (rather nice) cheapie movie theaters with a student discount for $40. that’s just the tickets. The bus is $3 and the subway is $7 a trip. Day pass on the subway for 2 people: $25. People look a bit thinner here – because they can only afford walking and a cup o’ noodles. Speaking of movies, you get assigned seats (which we moved from because we’re Americans) and there is literally 25 minutes of ads before the movie starts. Oh – remember that some of Pirates was filmed in Dominica? The bog scene with the witch is definitely the river we were on. cool.

#2 Spending an afternoon sleeping in Hyde Park is more fun than walking around museums. Although, we saw the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. Mary thinks that’s super cool. They also have a Moai from Easter Island. It’s a little kiddy one. Kinda cute, but not so impressive as the mondo ones on the island.

#3 We are being followed by the film industry. Minding our own business taking pictures of the London Bridge, two helicopters spun into the viewfinder. Right in front of the bridge, one came down and picked a car off a barge on the river and then swung it around in front of us for 15 minutes. The second copter was the film crew doing an ad for the new Opel Corsa. Then we’re looking to go see Pirates and there’s a huge crowd in front of the theater. It’s some kind of premier for Stormbreaker(?) and there’s paparazzi cameras everywhere. We just missed the big stars and only got to see some girls that we don’t know the names of. BUT – I saw a picture of Ewan McGregor taken not 5 minutes before we showed up on the camera of one excited girl. And another had his autograph. Sue excitin.

#4 Italians know amore. The BBC holds a summer concert series at the Royal Albert Hall called the Promenade or commonly “Prom”. We saw Mozart’s opera “Cosi Fan Tutte”. The title translates to “All women behave like this!” I expect the literal Italian is more like “they’re all the same”, but the printed program has the first translation. Mozart was very wise and is my newest hero.
Oh, the concert was broadcast live on BBC3 radio, so our clapping was ‘heard round the world.