Salmon and Souvlaki

Today, I continue the story of our Summer 2008 trip to Greece.  To see all of our pictures, click here.  For most of the pictures, Nik has mapped them so you can see exactly where in Greece they were taken.  If you missed it, here’s the whole list. 

Part 4 (of 8 or maybe 9, we’ll see!)

Nik’s mother’s family lives in Nea Kallikratia, which is about a six-hour drive from Athens.  They are in Northern Greece, just south of Thessaloniki, which is the other major city in Greece.  In central Greece, there were two major important archeological sites that Nik wanted me to see.  So we decided to go to one of them on the drive up to Kallikratia and the other on the way home.  Both of them were a bit of a detour and made for a long day of driving.  But I’m so glad we went to see them!

On the way up to Kallikratia, we went to Delphi.  Delphi is one of the more important archeological sites in Greece.  It was home to the Delphi oracle (for those of you who remember your ancient Greek history!).

On the drive there, we first drove through the town of Arahova, which is known for its textiles – rugs, sheepskins, weavings, etc.  We didn’t end up buying any textiles there but we did buy some incredible bougatsa (cream-filled phyllo pastry) for breakfast.  It was still warm and I could have eaten two more of them!

I really enjoyed walking around the town.

Delphi was just a few miles past Arahova.  We spent a couple hours walking through the archeological sites.  It’s on the side of a mountain and so we just kept walking up and up and up.  The cliffs were really gorgeous. 

There was all kinds of writing carved into the rocks.  Nik was able to put his Greek school training to good use and managed to pick out a few words. 

This is the picture you usually see on postcards for Delphi.  This is the Temple of Athena.  There were originally columns all the way around the circle.  The three columns up now were reconstructed which is why the stone is two different colors.  Nik worked hard for this picture!  The sun was behind a cloud when we were there the first time but it peeked out after we’d walked away.  So he sprinted back to get the good picture with the sunshine and he just barely made it before the sun went back behind the cloud again!

After we left Delphi, we had a long drive ahead of us to Nea Kallikratia.  On this drive, I got to see Mount Olympus, the famous mountain of the gods, and also I ate gyro with ketchup and mustard for dinner!  This is evidently how the real Greeks eat gyros in northern Greece!  And around 8:30 in the evening, we arrived in Kallikratia, where I was to meet lots of relatives, hold a new little baby, and have lots of fun in the ocean!

To be continued…

Today, I continue the story of our Summer 2008 trip to Greece.  To see all of our pictures, click here.  For most of the pictures, Nik has mapped them so you can see exactly where in Greece they were taken.  If you missed the rest of the series, here is the whole list.

Part 3 (of 7 or maybe 8 or 9, we’ll see!)

After returning from Santorini, we had about a day and a half in Athens before we drove up to Northern Greece to be with Nik’s mom’s side of the family.  So we took that time to see the most famous of Greece’s archeological sites, the Parthenon.  Before we got there, we went to the Temple of Zeus.  As you can tell from Nik standing in the foreground, those columns are tall!  Originally, there were 104 of those columns.  For some reason, I liked the collapsed column the best.

 

We also walked by Olympic Stadium that was built for the first modern Olympics in 1896 and then renovated for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. 

There were ruins everywhere in Athens, including many surrounding the Parthenon.  So before we climbed the big hill to get to the Parthenon, we visited the Ancient Agora (or Marketplace).  It was really interesting to walk around and see where business had been transacted so long ago.  However, it was REALLY hot and my broken toe, while healing, was still bothering me.  So I probably didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I should have!

We finally walked up to the top of the hill and entered the Parthenon complex.  This is me pointing at a cloud, the first cloud we’d seen since we’d arrived in Greece a week earlier!  

 

Nik brilliantly figured out that the light would be perfect if we were at the Parthenon in the evening instead of the morning.  So we purposefully got there late in the afternoon and enjoyed the magic hour of sunset as you can see from the gorgeous light in these photos. 

 

And here is a self-portrait of us at the Parthenon, without any other people in it!  This took a few tries but we finally got it!  You know when you objectively know that something is real as in “I’ve seen pictures in books and heard about it my whole life” but that it doesn’t seem to really exist?  That’s how I’d always felt about the Parthenon.  But here I am, in real life, with the real thing.  It was cool.

As we were leaving, we saw a special church service going on because it was St. Paul’s Saint Day (as in, this only happens once a year).  Just down from the Parthenon, the rock with the cross on top of it is where Paul was said to have given sermons to the Athenians.  This was probably the highlight of my day there.

 

To be continued…