Athens

I can't say we saw 'all' of Athens.  We were there only a few days, and what follows are my impressions of a small sliver of this ancient city.  This is a packed together city reminiscent of the heart of other major cities.  The buildings are jammed together with little green space.  Here's the Athens twist:  Nothing is over six stories tall because it is legislated no structure can be taller and obstruct the view of the Parthenon/Acropolis area of Athens. That means you can see the Parthenon suddenly just by looking up!   

We took a taxi to a funicular and then rode to the top of a hill overlooking Athens.   I clicked several pictures.  The funicular ends at a small chapel, surrounded by panoramas of Athens.  It was lovely - built all in white marble - but for me it was treacherous.  I literally missed an unmarked step which was almost invisible, and I fell heavily to my freaking knees!  In my defense, this was not carelessness; even Drake didn't see this hazard.  I was pretty shaken up, and I wasn't able to enjoy the view.  Mainly, I just wanted to sit down since my knees were screaming at me.  

    It was while I was sitting on a marble shelf used for seats when I discovered an actual stonemason repairing part of the low wall surrounding the chapel.  I watched him for quite a while, and then I went over to try and to talk to him.  His son, who happily spoke English, came over and served as a translator.  He and his father were in partnership selling stonemason services.  The father had been a stonemason his entire life.  The old guy was visibly tickled I was interested in what he was doing, (well, duh!), and he graciously assented to a picture. Athens is actually a place a stonemason can make a living today.  According to the son, their business is always busy with small and large projects.  I can believe it.  I've never seen so much marble in all my life.  This place has more marble than Rome.  

The big tourist draw in Athens is the Acropolis area and the Parthenon.  The Acropolis is a large area on top of a hill.  Athens grew around this big hill.  We took a tour to the Acropolis, but I was only able to walk about 2/3rds of the way up.  I could have done the last multiple staircases, but I would have been slow and held up everyone else.  I parked myself on another marble ledge to wait for our tour to walk by, and I still found pictures to take!  Drake is responsible for the pictures close to the Parthenon.  According to him, it was so cold and windy, all everyone wanted to do was leave. 

The areas around the biggest tourist destinations was denser than Manhattan, New York.  I was grateful it was only moderately warm while we were there; I can't imagine this place in the heat of the summer.  Just rolling down the taxi windows gave the olfactory impression of being trapped below ground in a car parking structure during the heat of the Texas summer. The air was literally poisonous.  Aside:  Sometimes we forget how bad the air was when I was growing up (50's/60's); we have taken the government cleaning up the air for granted.  The center of Athens felt like a throwback in lots of other ways too.

This is a great city to walk about.  This is also one of the few places the shopping bug bit me.  It baffled Drake since I rarely get caught up in shopping.   I had to curb the amount of time I really wanted to spend shopping.  I came home with a few goodies anyway - olive wood olive fork.  I realize now I should have gotten a set of olive wood utensils.  They had some really nice ones.  I did buy more sponges.  I bought t-shirts, magnets, a table runner, and knickknacks.  The antique shops looked intriguing.  We stopped into one because I had seen some old embroidery pieces.  I thought if I could find one I liked, it would be a cool souvenir.  We were the only people in the store, so she was happy to bring out the embroidered piece.  It was $1,200 euros!  I just sighed and said it was too pricey not that it wasn't beautiful.  We chatted for a couple of minutes while I got a cursory look around.  I think it was the open air stalls - entire streets of stalls - that did Drake in.  He'd really been plugged in and mildly interested, but he finally threw in the towel.  I took pity on him, and we moved onto something else.  

We took a lot of taxis. I enjoy taxis just like I enjoy taking subways, buses and ferries.  I learned to use Google/Translator.  One helpful thing I did was write out the address of where I wanted to go whenever we went by taxi.  I wasn't too impressed by the hotel.  Genteel would be the pleasant way of saying shabby.  The service was impeccable which was a real plus.  Currently, this seesaw is tipping more toward a feeling of shabbiness.  

There was also a transportation strike.  There were no flights entering or leaving the airport.  Some of the people we met on the cruise were stranded an extra day in Athens because their flights were cancelled.  Fortunately, we had already planned to stay over a few days.  There was a big demonstration in the center of the city.  We would have been about 55 years too old for that event.  We skirted the demonstration by leaving our hotel early and going out away from the city center.  We also had the best 'off the ship meal' here at a Wine Bar just down the street from our hotel.  We had wine plus a charcutier 

plate we designed ourselves.  I had the best rose' I have ever tasted.  Like an idiot I didn't take a pic of the wine label.  Although, it really doesn't matter, since I'm sure I couldn't get it over here.  

Everywhere we looked, there was something being excavated or displayed all over the city.  We also went to a wonderful archeological museum of the antiquities of 

Ancient Greece.  We discovered the other place to see Greek antiquities was the British Museum.  I'd always heard of the 'Elgin Marbles'.  It turns out that Lord Elgin, a British peer made a deal with the ruling government of the time (early 1800's) to take anything he wanted from the Acropolis.  The British Museum today has most of those antiquities displayed including the only complete statue from the Parthenon. 

In reflection, I was happy to be able to see sites I'd read about my whole life.  Athens is really a unique place.  As always, I took a ton of photographs in two albums.

 https://photos.app.goo.gl/oVCihiH8y6ahKwqx6

https://photos.app.goo.gl/7WhUr5S4vsuXC8Nk6

John Sargent Exhibition

 Quick post today.  We’re in NYC, and we hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to see the John Sargent exhibition.  I’ve been really eager to see this.  Most people consider Sargent to be one of the finest portrait painters because he captured the nature of the person in his portraits.  

Basically, I just snapped pix.  I mostly didn’t bother with explanation placards since this exhibition was super crowded, and portraiture is pretty self explanatory.  Sargent grew up overseas in Florence, Italy.  He went to Paris when he was 18 to paint, and he was a sensation.  He was incredibly young when he was painting portraits of important people.  Portraiture is not like snapping a photograph.  You have to 'sit' for the painter sometimes for hours.  Sargent was not the moody, tortured artist.  He was a fun guy who liked people and they liked him back.  He painted many people in their homes, and he was often a 'house guest' during many of the paintings.  He was so charming that his personality often got him his next commission.    

The Met owns his most famous portrait - It’s called Madame X, and was considered to be scandalous because SHE USED COSMETICS.  The dress was also quite suggestive for the time.  Sargent wanted to paint one of the dress straps falling off her shoulder, but changed it at the last minute since he considered he might be pushing the portrait past good taste.  Well, turned out he was, but that didn't stop the picture from being a sensation that everyone wanted to see.  He sold the portrait to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916 commenting that it was his best work.  Aren't we lucky it is in a museum.

 

Enjoy the other pictures by clicking on the link.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Rz2Buqz26c3Wlznbc9

Hellenistic Gold

When you travel on a small boat, things like arriving and leaving can sometimes become flexible.  A weather front came through and the Captain decided to stay in port cozied up to the dock rather than sail in bad weather.  The upshot was we got extra time in Athens by skipping one port and heading straight there.  The ship's entertainment staff worked overtime to produce some 'tours' in Athens at the last minute.  

One of the tours was to the Benaki Museum.  It has bunches of the traditional Greek treasures like black and orange pottery, but what I wanted to see was the Hellenistic Gold exhibition.  (I had already marked it out as something I wanted to see even before we arrived.)  The young flustered tour guide didn't care for my demand to see the exhibition, but I hardly allowed her displeasure at my request to bother me.  Drake and I and another woman peeled off and went in search of the gold.  We found the gatekeeper (aka the ticket seller to the special exhibition) and bought tickets for 7 euros each.  

We walked into a large space filled with glass topped museum cases displaying exquisite beaten gold in many forms.  I especially liked the leaves and flowers.

In addition to the Greek version of tiaras, there were pendants, necklaces, rings, earrings as well as some pieces of beaten gold fashioned into loose leaves.  Something I'd never seen fashioned out of gold were the snoods.  A snood is a net fashioned to be worn over a bun.  It's a hair ornament that comes and goes in popularity over the centuries.

While 'snoods' may have fallen out of fashion, I did see something in this collection which reinforced the idea that 'there's nothing new under the sun' especially in fashion.  Bell bottoms are back!  Mini skirts are probably next.  In this exhibition, here's something which made me smile.

Sequins!

There were also some very lovely small sculptures and other knickknacks which were easy to imagine gracing this Greek woman's house.  Here's her jewelry box.

 

While the pieces were extraordinary, I found the probable story of how all these precious objects came to be found to be the most interesting.  Every item in this exhibition was found stuffed into a large buried amphora.  Archeologists supposed this could indicate everything was owned by one person who buried the amphora to save the contents from being taken.  Think Confederate women burying their silver to save it from the Yankees.  In my opinion, this makes the discovery more personal and relatable.  Imagine the woman who owned all of this, and what could have caused a burial to hide it all.

If you'd like to see the additional pieces hidden in the amphora, click on the pix.

Hellenistic Jewelry

The Corinth Canal

 One hallmark of the 19th century (1800's) is the development of complicated construction projects.  The leading example was the railroad, arguably as big an element of change to the 19th century as the computer was to the 20th century.  Railroads aside, there were other construction projects which heralded consequential economic change.  One of these is THE CANAL.  Erie Canal 1825 put New York State and New York City on the map.  The French constructed the Suez Canal, the first modern canal.  It had immediate economic success.  It connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.  You could now sail/steam from the North Atlantic Ocean through the Mediterranean Sea, thru the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, and into the Indian Ocean, an entry point into the Far East.   

In the late 19th century, the French, flush with the success of the Suez Canal, start construction on a 51 mile canal to cross the Isthmus of Panama.  After 9 years and 20,000 lives lost mostly to Yellow Fever, the French abandon the project.  In 1904 under Teddy Roosevelt, the Americans take up the construction of the Panama Canal cutting through the Isthmus of Panama connecting the Caribbean Sea (North Atlantic) with the Pacific Ocean.  There were still difficult construction problems as well  the persistent Yellow Fever problem, but Americans completed the Panama Canal in 1914.

In 1882 the Greeks decide they can internally improve trade by cutting a 3.9 mile canal across the Isthmus of Corinth.  Nero started this project, but the canal idea was dropped with Nero's demise.  The canal would allow ships to cut across the Peloponnesian Peninsula (see inset picture) instead of sailing around it.

This was  literally digging (blasting) a trench through limestone cliffs, but there were no locks since the length of the canal was at sea level.  It is only 26 feet deep and is quite narrow (82 feet wide at the water level/69 feet at bottom of canal).  Today, this is more of a tourist attraction.  Modern ships can't use it since it's too narrow and not deep enough.

It was a good tourist attraction.  Led by a pilot boat, so we could stay in the deepest part of the canal, we sailed down the canal towards Athens with the towering limestone cliffs on both sides of our ship.  They were so close, it felt like you could reach out and touch them.  We also saw birds nesting in pockets and holes in the limestone.  I kept focusing my camera to try and catch some to identify.  I was surprised to see 'rock doves'.  You will know them by their new urban name:  Pigeons.  Cliffs were their preferred nesting sites until they discovered skyscrapers in the urban environment of humans.  

The Corinth Canal, opened in 1893 (11 years of construction) was never the expected economic boon.  Railroads, automobiles (trucks) and construction of larger and larger commercial trading ships quickly made it almost obsolete for trade vessels. 

It was really fun to sail through.  Initially, we started viewing at the front of the boat, but even competing with only 180 people, it was crowded.  We moved to the back of the boat with fewer people, and really enjoyed this experience.  You can still see some of the blasting marks on the limestone, as well as this mysterious group of letters.

There are two submergible bridges at each end of the canal, as well as railroad bridges and an automobile bridge over the canal today.  As always, the pictures tell the story.

Corinth Canal Pictures   

   

A UNESCO Site: Hosios Loukas Monastery

One of the greatest things about this trip was several of the excursions were to UNESCO World Heritage Sites.  The Hosios Loukas Monastery built in the 10th century was one of those sites.  The monastery was located on top of a mountain - well, actually, a big hill.  The scenery outside the bus ride was lovely.  It was early spring and the trees had just leafed out.  We also passed a cloister on our way up to the monastery.  

When we arrived at the site, we walked up a set of terraced stairs.  On each side were fields of wild flowers.

These are poppies, and there were also daisies and lots of other delicate early spring wildflowers.

From the first view of this church/monastery, it was obviously a very special place.  This is a working monastery, so there are some parts which are off-limits.  This church is famous for it's frescoes and mosaics which show the Byzantine influence when this church was built.

This is one of the paintings on the ceiling surrounded by mosaics

The frescoes are in rough shape in comparison to the ceilings.  

They also had a 'tomb' to show what one from 1000 years ago actually looked like when it was originally dug.

No one mentioned who was removed from this tomb.  

Everywhere I looked, I just kept thinking about the people who were the original builders right down to the stones picked and laid down as walkways prior to 'concrete'.  

I think the pictures really tell the story here.  This was a great outing.  Instead of being annoying, the bus ride to the site was interesting, and short.  This site was steeped in a 1000 years of history without shoving lots of details in your face.  It felt holy and spiritual.  There were lots of places to just sit and enjoy the beautiful day and contemplate the atmosphere of this marvelous place.

Here are the pictures:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/MrsmDbcVxstquf787

 

Olympus, Mountain of the Greek Gods

 Even though I was almost well from my tourista (e-coli infection) bout, I was still pretty weak from not eating for 36 hours.  I stayed behind and let Drake do the excursion to Olympus.  As it turned out, I probably could have gone because, although it was advertised as 'no seating' during the archeological excavation portion of the trip, there were actually benches scattered throughout where I could have sat and recovered my energy.

The Greeks were very serious about their Gods just like every civilization.  They decorated the mountain with statuary, temples and other tangible tributes to the gods - especially to Zeus.  Drake described this place as utterly fascinating to see the 'dig' uncovering treasures from both the Hellenistic society and the Roman society.  

Olympus Archeological Site

The prize of this World Heritage Site is the unbroken line of columns still in place.  There is so much material to save, it's been fairly easy to see what this sanctuary to the gods looked like in its heyday.  

Artistic rendering of what an important portion of this site looked like

Drake took great pictures of the archeological site.  This is one of my favorites:

As you can see, we caught Greece in the early Spring

In addition to the outdoor site, there's a museum showcasing the items which have been excavated over the years.  

In addition to pottery, there are quite a few bronze items.

It's difficult to write about something not personally seen, but we can all enjoy Drake's pictures.

Mount Olympus

San Sperate, Sardinia

 Sometimes when you travel you run across something which just blows your sox off.  Some things which spring to my mind are:  Volcano Park, Hilo, Hawaii; Icebergs floating by, Twillingate, Newfoundland; Miniature famous buildings, Nova Scotia; Colosseum, Rome, Italy.  There are bunches of others, some of which are small such as the old Aquarena Springs in Texas, to the buried Cadillacs in West Texas, to the Cabinetry Museum in New Braunfels.  It's totally delightful when one pops up unexpectedly.

For some reason, I got up at dawn the day of this excursion, and that early rising resulted in what I think is one of my best photos of the trip.  Here is sunrise coming into the port on the island of Sardinia

We took the excursion to San Sperate, Sardinia to see the frescos painted on the village walls.  The village, which has become the home of various artists because of this fresco project, wanted life depicted in the village from 1890 to 2022.  The spearhead artist developed a new artistry using the native rocks.

Fresco on the wall of the village of Sciola and his daughter

His full name is Punuccio Sciola, and he discovered when you cut open different types of rocks, you can make them sing.  I managed to record his daughter who now runs the "Open Air Museum" making a rock sing.  Here's a picture of some of the museum contents

Different varieties of rocks have different tones.  The way they are cut will open up different tones.  To find the tone, you take a hand held rock and drag it across the rock face with the cuts.  Some rocks are cut completely through leaving bands of rock.

These two pictures are of the same rock - you can see daylight through it.  I don't know if the algae affects the tonal quality of the rock.

As we left the museum - no gift shop which I thought was the height of stupidity -, we gathered at a local cafe for a luncheon snack.  Coincidentally (sure), there was a fresco artist who claimed to have painted most of the 'important frescos' in the village.  His wife was also there rolling her eyes, and snorting at him.  

Fresco Artist

I thought he was pretty interesting to talk to.  His age made him a contemporary of Sciola, and the fresco outside the cafe was one he painted.

His wife, Marcella 

 

  

Fresco painted by the artist we met in the cafe

The most prominent fresco upon entering the village is the one which tells the village history.  Here it is:

Village Life

The upper part of the fresco shows current village life.  The bottom of the fresco, particularly the bottom right shows the village is built upon its antiquities emphasizing its longevity in this very spot.  

I loved San Sperate, but San Sperate did not love me.  I managed to get tourista (ecoli infection in your gut) which took me out of commission for two days.  I was so mad after I finally started feeling better.  Got acquainted with the ship's doctor.  He saw me twice, and I finally got everything back under control after 36 hours and some medication.  I kicked myself because I thought about getting anti-diarrhea meds from my doctor before I left, but  I let it slip through the cracks.  Never again!  

I did get some great pictures of this town, the frescos and the singing stones.  Here are the pix

San Sperate, Sardinia

Finally, people think there are great sunsets at sea.  That happens rarely.  Usually, the sun just drops below the horizon and it's like turning out a light.  However, upon leaving Saradinia, there was the rare sunset picture.  Here it is: