Greece

Arrived in Athens at 10:30 Sunday morning on July 9th and it was raining. I guess this is about as rare as Jerry Taft (local Milwaukee, fat, TV news reader) winning the New York marathon. The rain subsided in an hour and within three we were eating lunch at the base of the Acropolis and Agora sipping Greek wine and eating olives in the blistering 85 degree dry heat (we were warned by many of the unbearable heat of Athens in July-it has been the opposite-dry and breazy and cool at night).

Monday morning we decided on the major site of Athens, the Acropolis, Agora, etc... This "park" is at the center of the city overlooking the modern, but low rise-I think it is an earthquake issue-capital. A nice part of the park is that you pay the princely fee of €12 (around $14) for five tickets which allows the vistor repeat visits to the different museums and site but only once for the top of the mount which houses the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, and the Temple of Nike. My public school prose cannot do justice to this monument to Western idolatry and experiment in male self rule but it certainly is impressive. The size-you can tell I took in the subtleties-of the shrines/Stoa themselves is awesome with a level detail in the sculptureure and friezes that I did not expect.

On the way up to the Acroplis from the southeast there are two theatres that were most impressive The Theater of Dionysos and The Odeum. Quite a site and given that up to 15,000 watched the early plays of western dramedy and satire added some gravitas.

Our tour of the Acropolis was interupted by a day by a jaunt to one of the closer islands, Aegina. Aegina was once a rival to Athens as a city state but now serves as a tourist destination for Athenians on the weekend. We ate cheap fresh fish, worshipped Rah and generally soaked in a very tranquil vacation village. It was nice to get out of the city for a day given the horrible time we have been having in Athens with its unbearable heat, high prices and smog (none of this is true, it has been just the opposite).

On Wednesday we headed back to the Agora which is part of the Acropolis park. The Agora, we thought, was just the public market place of classical Greece but we found out that this part of the site is actualy much more. As you enter there is an entirely renovated (most of the money came from JD Rockafeller and lots of Greek-Americans) stoa that houses a musem and an exhibit explaining the the rennovations of the 1930's. The site actually was occupied by housine for a few hundred years and all of the houses had to be bought out and destroyed. By the way when the new Metro was built for the Olympics around 7 years ago thousands of artifacts were found as they discovered that old wells became depositories of broken vases, pitchers, plates, etc... Needless to say this slowed the schedule down a mite. Anyhoo, The Agora was also the center of early democratic rule. The meeting places, speech'ifying and all that took place here. In other words Plato, Aristotle and other cats of this grandee style hung out here. As part of the rennovation the landscape was totally redone in what was researched as the shrubbery of the time. The time-lapse fotos of these changes were quite compelling. You should come here some day!

Last night Tele, Julia (friends of Paul from Georgia Tech-that I actually had stay in Milwaukee one night aroung 8 years ago-I told hime not to make idle invites) and their two daughters took us out to dinner at a fabulous Greek restaraunt in a park in the city. Needless to say another Bachanalian orgy!

Today off to Delphi to stay the night at Tele and Julia's.

Opa!