Greece with Kids: Corinth Canal, Ancient Mycenae, and Nafplio

Our first day in Greece is here and here.

I should mention that in Greece, we ate all. The. Food. We ate all the Greek dishes, the spinach pies and moussaka and spoon sweets with yogurt, but we also ate all the other European dishes that were on offer; I ate an English breakfast and then a big bowl of yogurt with toppings for breakfast every single morning, for instance, and check out these two, whom I simply asked to smile for me:


The kid has her mouth stuffed with chocolate croissant, and Matt has forked up a pig's worth of prosciutto. Also notice that he has fresh-squeezed orange juice in his glass, while the kid is enjoying her morning cuppa, thanks to a waitress who brought a personal kettle of hot water right to the table for her. The luxury!

Anyway, on to Corinth! On another visit, I'll visit the Archaeological Museum there, and there must be some good New Testament-era sites to see, as the Corinthians were naughty enough during New Testament times for St. Paul to feel that he had to write them tons of letters to tell them how to behave, but on this trip, we stopped at the Corinth Canal, which separates the Greek mainland from the Peloponnese.

On one side of the bridge, you can follow the canal to the Saronic Gulf, which is part of the Aegean Sea:

Our tour guide said that tying stuff to the bridge is a tourist thing, NOT a Greek thing.

And on the other side, the canal leads to the Gulf of Corinth, which is part of the Ionian Sea:

Apparently the canal is too narrow to be of much commercial use these days, but the kids and I saw birds nesting in the high rock faces, and our tour guide says there's a booming business for bungee jumping off the lower level of this bridge. Shudder.

Normally one of the fun things that we like to do when we travel is buy weird, regional junk food, but we were fed too well on this trip to want much in the way of snacks. Fortunately, though(?), it was always hot, so a beverage with some Greek wording is always a welcome purchase!

Here's an example of how much you can read if you just know Greek phonics:



The letters in the name of that restaurant are Mu Alpha Rho Gamma Alpha Rho Iota Tau Alpha. Forget how Rho looks, because it says "r." Gamma says "g." The name of that restaurant, then?

MARGARITA!!!

I doubt it actually serves margaritas, because "margarita" in Greek could also refer to a daisy or a pearl, and it's a girl's name, but still. You can read it!

Corinth is also the growing area for a very particular type of grape, which is then dried into a very particular type of sultana:

Delicious!

But enough about raisins and canals--let's go to the Bronze Age!

Mycenaean Greece was the period before the Sea People and way before the Classical Age, so it's one of the settings of Homer, who was writing about those long-ago, mythologized days. Ancient Mycenae was led by Agamemnon, who was the brother of Menelaus (and if you want to see a messed-up family, you should check out THEIR childhood!), and so when Paris stole Helen away from Menelaus, Agamemnon led the forces to retrieve her.

And when he couldn't get a favorable wind for his fleet, he sacrificed his daughter for it. I'm telling you, they were MESSED. UP!

And remember, Agamemnon also causes the inciting incident of The Iliad when he demands that Achilles give him his slave, Briseis, and Achilles throws a fit and refuses to fight anymore. But it's okay, because when Agamemnon finally goes home after the Trojan War he's murdered by his wife and her lover.

Treasures discovered while excavating Mycenae are now on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, which you might remember I'd wanted to go see but instead I had a shower and took a nap. Next time!

This example of a tholos tomb that we toured first is sometimes called Agamemnon's tomb, but this particular tholos is actually too early to be his.

This is one of the most impressive tholoi ever discovered--see that corbel arch over the door, and the keyhole opening that keeps the load from being to heavy?

Inside is a dome that our tour guide assured us looks much higher than it is.

And here's the way back out.

Matt forcibly took the camera from me for a minute. Thanks, Matt!

The tomb, though, is a little way outside of Mycenae. Here's how you get there--down the road--

--up the hill--

These were called Cyclopean walls, because only a Cyclops would have been big and strong enough to build one!

--and through the Lion Gate!

Headless lions--their heads have never been recovered, nor do we know what they looked like.

Here's where you place your offerings after entering through the gate:



And here's why it's often called a citadel--it's up high!





Here's Grave Circle A inside the city--it's where a lot of treasures were discovered during the archaeological excavations:







You could see all those olive trees in the vista in the previous photos, but there are also some right here:



Many of the tourists in our group were remarking on the strange insects that were calling so loudly on this blazingly hot day, but to me it just sounded like back home in Indiana:



Here's the hike up to the palace (another acropolis!) and then back down again:

I forgot to ask our tour guide about this hill, but don't you think it looks volcanic? It's so perfectly cone-shaped!

On our way back down from the palace

Out of all the places that we visited, Mycenae is by far the hardest to visualize. Go check out a guidebook or find a good pictorial work on Ancient Greece and look at the graphic restorations--it's pretty amazing. You can see the places marked on Google Maps, but you really need to view a reconstruction to visualize what you're actually looking at.

Thanks to the heat and the climbing, we were all wiped out after Ancient Mycenae, so our tour group drove to the seaside town of Ναύπλιο for a late lunch and a small wander. Even though I'd asked the older kid approximately 18 times before our trip to tell me if her sandals were still comfortable and if her swim trunks still fit, and she'd rudely blown me off every single time, it turned out that her sandals were actually too small (so, in fact, would her swim trunks turn out to be...), so here's where I learned the Greek word for pharmacy, and where a Greek pharmacy attendant and I bonded over the impossibility of acting out the word "blister"--finally I just called the kid over and made her show her heels, because understanding was just not going to happen without visual aids.

We did not, then, hike to the top of the Palamidi fortress:



--but we ate Greek salad, saw our first Roma children begging (you're not supposed to give them any money, because their parents have no incentive to send them to school if they can instead use them to make money begging from tourists), touched the water of the Aegean Sea--

I don't have a photo, but when the kids kneeled down here and stuck their hands in the water, all these random fish swam up to be petted.

-

-and admired the water castle of Bourtzi, which the Venetians, who used to be freaking hard-core invaders, used to anchor a chain that they could pull across the gulf to keep more invaders out:



One of the best parts of our days was the fact that all of our hotels on this land tour had swimming pools! There was no better feeling on the planet than getting to our hotel, hot and sweaty and exhausted after all the hiking and sightseeing, and then immediately changing into our swim gear and jumping into the cool, refreshing water. Little troopers who were dead on the feet were immediately rejuvenated.

Big troopers, too!

We generally only had an hour or so of pool time, as all the pools during our entire trip bizarrely closed at 8 pm, but it actually worked out perfectly to hit the pool until it closed, run back up to the room and change clothes, meet the rest of our tour group for drinks (ouzo for the win!) and dinner, and by the time we were at the dessert course the kids were ready to excuse themselves from the table and head up to bed while the adults lingered to chat over just one more glass of mousse or slice of watermelon.

And then we'd go check on the kids and head to bed ourselves, of course, because tomorrow was yet another big day!

P.S. I post on my Craft Knife Facebook page all. The. Time, sometimes even while I'm in Greece! Come see!

Greece with Kids: Hadrian's Arch, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and the Changing of the Guard

Here's the first part of Day 01 in Greece.

My dream had been to spend the afternoon in the National Archaeological Museum, especially to see the Mycenean antiquities since we were going to Ancient Mycenea the next day. But after a much-needed cool shower and a much, MUCH needed nap, it was starting to get a little late for that, so instead we decided to go back out and just wander. During our bus tour earlier that day we'd seen a couple of structures that it would be nice to walk closer to, and we hadn't been able to visit the Presidential Palace at all, on account of there'd been a protest there by the garbage workers, who were on strike--and that explains why there were huge piles of garbage all over the streets!

Also note that my guidebook warned that the National Garden, which we'd be walking through to get to the Presidential Palace, hosted a large feral cat colony, and that was the last of us sold on the hike.

We'd visited the Plaka earlier but hadn't crossed the busy street to see the Arch of Hadrian, but on this trip, we stayed on that side of the street and so got to see it up close:

For those of you playing the at-home game of orienting yourself in Athens, please note that you can see the southeast corner of the Parthenon through the Arch of Hadrian. I'm pretty proud of this shot.

Yes, this is the same Hadrian who had the wall built in Great Britain, and that's something else that I want to take the kids to see someday.

The Arch is filthy because of pollution. Poor Matt is just filthy because he's all sweaty and it's 100 degrees outside!

Here, as well, is a great spot for viewing the Temple of Olympian Zeus--remember you could see it in the distance when we were up on the Acropolis earlier?

Remember that the columns that are reconstructed are there to show you how high the ceiling was--in other words, HIGH!

We wandered on through the National Garden (although we did not see the famed feral cats, we did see a lot of interesting birds and one turtle)--

I really liked this seating that was made to look like archaeological ruins. At least, I *hope* it was seating that was just made to look like ruins...

Syd was super into taking photos for a couple of days, but then just stopped. Will brought her camera, but didn't snap a single photo. Matt didn't bring a camera. Good thing I'm so reliable about photographing ALL THE THINGS!!!

We'll get into some different landscapes later, but Athens actually looks a LOT like the San Jose area in California; everyone noted it, even the kids.

--and to the Presidential Palace. Even though I'd wanted to when we were in DC, I've never gotten around to showing the kids a changing of the guard or a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, so we had a lot to talk about and look at, as well as a lot of pigeons to chase, while we waited for the top of the hour:

Look, everyone! A trireme!!! Also, the best way to get Will to smile for photos, apparently, is to get her punch-drunk.

The Hellenic Army has a mandatory male conscription of nine months. Actually, we found that Greece has a lot of mandatory, state-run institutions and regulations, and the Greek people as a whole are expected to do a lot of things the same way. Everyone feeds their kids the same way and at the same times of day, for instance, and our tour guide never could quite wrap her head around what we meant by homeschooling, no matter how many questions she asked, because it's apparently not something that anyone would even think of doing in Greece. To be fair, Greece has excellent foreign language education, so I wouldn't dream of homeschooling there, either!

These are the Εύζωνες, or Evzones if you Anglicize it. They were first mentioned in the Iliad, although it didn't refer to these exact soldiers, who are now the Presidential Guard.

Like a typical palace guard, they have to stand stock still, although they had a commander who'd come around and fuss over them and keep the tourists back. At one point, he made them go into their little boxes for a while, I guess to shade them from the sun, although it had to have been even hotter inside them.

And at 6:00 pm on the dot (that's 11:00 am in Indiana), this happened!







On Sundays, the changing of the guard is even fancier, and I heard that there's even a military band.

One of the things that our tour guide emphasized was that in Greece, if you dig, you will find something. You'll find the remains of Byzantine civilizations, and if you dig deeper, you'll find Roman ones. Dig deeper, and you'll find Classical Greek civilizations. Deeper, and you'll find evidence of the Bronze age. It was fun, then, to see, as we walked back to our hotel a slightly different way, the excavation of these Roman baths, found when the city wanted to dig a tunnel:



The find was so important that the city moved the location of the tunnel, and covered and preserved this excavation.

And one last look at the Arch of Hadrian--



--before we headed back to the hotel. We took more cool showers, Matt got us fish and chips, and we ate sitting on our beds and watching Greek game shows on TV, with the air turned down to 20 degrees Celsius. It was heaven.

Greece with Kids: The Acropolis, Falafel, and Feral Cats

Y'all, this is about to get ridiculous. Our entire trip to Greece was seven days, but that included two full days of traveling, so although I took a couple of pictures of fun/not fun travel logistical stuff, let's just say that I took five days' worth of photos.

And five days' worth of photos is?

Ummm.... 874 photos.

In my defense, we were in GREECE!!!! Where everything is new and amazing. Where the ancient architecture makes lovely angles. Where there's a beautiful alphabet on every street sign. Where the skies were blue and sported nary a cloud. Where my family never all smiled or kept their eyes open at the same time, necessitating fourteen shots for every final photo, and even in that final one not everyone would have their eyes open or be smiling.

In conclusion, buckle up for lots of posts with lots of photos and lots of gushing words.

The children seem happy enough for airplane adventures, so even a full 24 hours of travel and three separate airplanes and three separate security screenings didn't wear them down too much. I normally get pretty near assaulted by TSA officials every time I travel (I have a theory that every middle-aged mom they target allows them to profile 20 or so brown-skinned people while still keeping their numbers looking even), but that didn't happen nearly as much overseas--I didn't even have to take my shoes off during one screening!

Of course, round that off with the fact that we randomly had to remove all of our books for the security screening at the Indianapolis airport (do you KNOW how many books Will and I had packed?!?) but the kids got to keep their shoes on, and that we didn't have to remove our books (although I had prepared for this) at JFK but DID have to remove our tablets and the kids had to remove their shoes, and in between those we unpacked all of our stuff and repacked 90% of it, because United doesn't have free checked bags and Swiss Air does, so on our United flights we packed all of our crap into our carry-ons, along with two rolled up duffels, and then before we checked in for our Swiss Air flight we got out the duffels and switched most of our stuff so that we could take a break from being pack ponies.

You know what else Swiss Air gives you? A meal on every flight, even a two-hour one! And on our eight-hour flight we got two meals! And personal screens so that we could numb our discomfort with movies. I watched Passengers and referred to it so much in Greece that I made Matt watch it on the way back so we could talk about it together.

Also, I just need to tell you this: if you recline your airplane seat, you are a bad person, full stop. No excuses, unless the seat behind you is vacant, which you know it's not. I don't care that you can't sleep if your seat is not reclined, because you being only slightly more comfortable is not worth the misery of the person behind you. On all of my flights, the person in front of me reclined their seat from the second they were told they could until the flight attendant had to come by and make them put it up again as we were landing, and I promise you that it was hell to live with. And I am very short. Please don't be a seat recliner.

Here are the kids just before our last flight. We're about 20 hours into the journey that began the previous day at 8 am, and we still have that flight, then customs and baggage claim, then our van ride to the hotel, and then we can check in.


You can tell they're tired, but they claimed to still be having fun, and in fact, during this entire trip, they barely complained and they fought even less. It was a pleasure to take them traveling.

In that photo of Syd, she's getting her doll out of her bag to play with. Remember in the winter, when Syd worked her tush off to sell over 1,000 Girl Scout cookies? She wanted to use her cookie profits to help the Humane Society (and this summer, she IS! It's her Bronze Award project!), but she also really, really, REALLY wanted the 1,000+ prize, which had a few options, one of which was an American Girl doll. I'll tell you more about her another time, but in short, please meet Zelda, Syd's new American Girl doll.

In that photo of Will, you can see to the left an older fellow. He took approximately 40,000 photos of Syd blithely immersed in her doll, and I think even some video of her brushing her doll's hair and futzing with her outfit, etc. Syd was completely oblivious, and although it's tacky, for sure, to photograph someone without their permission, he was so clearly some random tourist from some random country that I gave him a pass. We were about to do so much gazing about at other people's everyday lives that it didn't really bother me to spend some time being the object of another gawker's gaze.

Speaking of something to gaze at... check out the clown car that we flew to Athens in:


Apparently, Swiss Air likes to customize the livery on some of their planes.

We did a little wandering around on foot when we got to Athens later that afternoon, found sunscreen, got ourselves fed, but let's just fast-forward to the next day, after a good ten hours of sleep and a nice, big breakfast (our hotel's buffet was short the full English breakfast by the beans and the black pudding, but had a doohickey that let you fresh-squeeze your own orange juice, and real Greek yogurt is even more delicious and not as tangy as American Greek yogurt, and you're allowed to stir jam and honey into it and put walnuts on top!), when we met up with our tour group for a tour of the Acropolis.

These devices that you'll see in all of our photos look super dorky, but they're genius:


When we wear these and the connecting single earbud, our tour guide can talk to us at a normal volume, and we can hear her entire spiel at both the super-crowded outdoor sites and inside the super-quiet museums. I was ambivalent about how it was going to be, touring in a herd led by a guide, but actually, it was awesome. I always want to know all the things about everything, and tour guides both know all the things and deeply desire to tell them, as well, to you. We understood what we were looking at and why far more than if we'd toured on our own.

And here's what we were looking at!

This is actually the view of the Acropolis from the third floor of the Acropolis Museum, which you'll see later, but it's my best shot from outside the area.

I was surprised to learn that lots of Greek cities had an acropolis, since in Greek it just means the "highest point in the city," from the Greek άκρος and πόλiς (my Greek improved a LOT during this trip!), but this one, of course, is THE acropolis.

Here's what you can see before you ascend:

In the foreground you can see the facade of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a concert venue since 161 AD through the present day. In the background is the Temple of Athena Nike, which used to have a "wingless victory" statue, because if your Victory doesn't have wings, then she can't fly away, can she?

Here's my admission ticket, with the Parthenon in the background. I told you that before we left for this trip, the kids and I were learning Greek phonics so that we could sound out words. I had a harder time with diphthongs and blends, but since there are so many Greek root words in the English language, I found out that if I could sound out a word, I could often figure out its meaning, as it was often a cognate.  I spent the entire trip trying to sound out every single word I could find--I simply couldn't help myself. It reminded me of the kids when they were learning to read--I wonder if they experienced that same compulsion, because I know they, too, tried to read every word they saw!

This one's not a cognate, but it's good to memorize so that you always know where the entrance is.

You climb the hill to the Acropolis, then enter via the Propylaea, with the Temple of Athena Nike past that on your right. Here's more of the Propylaea:

I've cropped out most of the tourists, but this place was packed. It was by far the most crowded site of our trip, but it was about par for the course in temperature; on most days, the temperature where we were hovered between 38-40 Celsius. For those of you who haven't had a crash course in temperature conversion, that's 100-104 Fahrenheit. And we were generally on bare, baked ground surrounded by marble ruins. The kids quickly got used to it, and there was little complaining, and the tour guide kept us well hydrated, but it was distinctly uncomfortable, and apparently my face would get so red that total strangers would become concerned for my health.

Interesting fact: if a column is completely reconstructed, it's to show you where the ceiling was and how high it was.

Here's more of the Temple of Athena Nike:

At this site, the original marble is the weathered brown, and the restorations are white. In other places, the marble weathers differently, though, so you can't always use that as your guide between old and new.

Once you make it up the path, whose original steps are as slick as ice (the Greek people must just be used to walking on all that marble all the time, but I about fell on my butt eight thousand times on this trip--marble is SLICK!), you really are at the highest point in the city:

This spot is Areopagus Hill, where there was a court where Ares, for one, was tried for murder (regular people were also tried there), and where the apostle Paul gave a famous sermon (Paul had a LOT of things to say to and about Greece). It was decorated on this day because it was Paul's feast day.

Here's what you really want to see, though: the Parthenon!

It's taking a lot longer to restore the Parthenon than it took to build it, which makes sense when you realize how many prior "restorations" are having to be repaired and redone, as well.

I really like this photo Matt took, in which you can see all of the restoration equipment. Also, see how the vertical columns are perfectly parallel? If you've paid much attention to tall buildings, or even railroad tracks, you know that straight lines don't look parallel from a distance. These columns actually taper, so gently that they'll come to a point 3 miles up, but so perfectly that they correct our vision distortion.

You can also see the pieces labeled and organized around it, ready to be replaced.

As you move around the Parthenon, you can get perspectives that aren't so busy with construction equipment.

Only one of them has her eyes closed, and they're all smiling!

Oh, look! I'm here, too!

I really like this photo Matt took of me: neck craned like a tourist, open-mouthed in awe, face beet red, getting myself some more water, wearing my dorky orange Whisper, the Temple of Olympian Zeus in the background.

Here's what you can see from the Southern side of the Parthenon:

Theatre of Dionysus, where Greek tragedy was invented

Temple of Olympian Zeus--we walked over there later in the day, so I'll show you more of that later.

another perspective of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus

The cleanest views of the Parthenon are of its east side:

Check out the tops of the columns, waiting to be replaced.

There's also more original surface to walk on here:

Slick as ice, I assure you, although worth it to step on the footprints of thousands of years.

You go around, then, to the north side--

Check out the intricacy of the reconstructions added to the original pieces. How on earth could they place these broken pieces in exactly the right spot?

--and to the Erechtheion, which is my favorite structure of the Acropolis:

My favorite structure of the entire trip may have been the Porch of the Caryatids, here with reconstructions so that the Caryatids can live in the Acropolis Museum. I'll show you the real Caryatids in a minute.

After drinking our fill of the structures, we walked back through the Propylaea--

See my two adventurers, with the Temple of Athena Nike in the background? See that slick-as-ice marble under their feet?

--and met back up with our tour group to walk over to the Acropolis Museum. One of our fellow tourists had bought herself an ice cream; I was super jealous.

During construction of the Acropolis Museum, archaeologists had discovered settlements from the Byzantine and Roman times, so they put a glass roof over them, and you can see them throughout the ground floor of the museum:







Pictures aren't permitted in most of the Acropolis Museum, but my second favorite part was the floor dedicated to the surviving relics damaged when the Persians sacked the Acropolis during the Greco-Persian War. This was after the Battle of Thermopylae, the site of which I'll show you later! The Persians deliberately broke up all of the statuary that they could find, and when the Greeks  regained the city,  they simply buried their desecrated things. This was lucky, because it enabled archaeologists to discover them later and they're displayed in the museum with the damage purposefully not restored, but the pieces set up so you can see them as a whole despite the missing parts. I'm not describing it well, unfortunately--too bad I couldn't take any photos!

Here's my first favorite part of the museum, and something that we COULD take photos of:

Here are the original Caryatids from the porch of the Erechtheion, on a raised pedestal so you can walk all round them. Lord Elgin took the sixth one,  so her spot is left blank.

See me fangirl!

You can also take pictures on the top floor, where the original metopes and friezes from the Parthenon (the ones that Lord Elgin didn't remove with dubious permission and that the British Museum absolutely refuses to give back)

The pieces are displayed as they were on the Parthenon, in a room lit by natural light during the day but illuminated at night, and surrounded by picture windows that look out at the city, but most particularly at the Parthenon just across the street.

Many of these pieces are damaged because Elgin, even if he didn't want an entire metope or frieze, would chisel out a piece that he did want, an elegant turn of the foot, say, or an enchanting background.

In Greek mythology, centaurs do a lot of raping and murdering. Every time we came across a centaur sculpture, I'd sigh to myself, knowing that the kids were about to get an eyeful.

I love seeing my kids so enthralled.

After the rest of our tour, we ended up back on the Plaka adjacent to the Acropolis, where we ate some gyros--



--petted one of the hundreds of seemingly happily feral cats of Greece--



--and walked around a little more in history before going back to our hotel for a shower and a nap.

And then we went out again and saw even more things!