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    Cliff Notes

    August 16th, 2006 by steve

    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

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    Islands in the Sea

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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.

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    Notes for Mazzocco and Johanson

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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

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    Fun with Marble

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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.

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    History can be cool

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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…

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    Gyro-topia!

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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

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    Stomping on ancient history.

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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

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    It’s all Greek to us

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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

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    Trapped in the land of Muggles.

    August 4th, 2006 by steve

    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

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