Thursday, 10/3/2019

We assembled at 8am to bus to Akrotiri, to see the vast archaeological exhibit of a Bronze-age town destroyed by the Thera eruption. Mostly exposed in the 1960s, the dig site has been preserved under a huge roof. Visitors walk around on foot paths above the digging area.

The town was a busy seaport occupied by people doing trade with other places around the Mediterranean, in particular the Minoans of Crete, who we’ll be dropping in on soon. The town was buried under several meters of volcanic ash, preserving even some organic things like wooden furniture. No human remains have been found, unlike Pompeii (which happened 1700 years later). Possibly the inhabitants had been warned by earthquakes and escaped. There is evidence of buildings being damaged by earthquakes and being repaired and used again before the final kaboom.

Quite a few of the buildings were multi-story and the ground-floor areas have yet to be opened. There is little on-going work, and what is being done now is privately funded, largely by Kaspersky, the Russian whose anti-virus app was widely used in PCs for years. However, for the first time on this trip, there were actual archaeologists at work.

This woman was carefully sieving dirt for small objects. Slow work, archaeology.

The road to and from Akrotiri (which means “hilltop”) gave some great caldera views.

Back in town we went first to the Archaeological Museum where bits from the dig are displayed. Frescos that had been lifted off walls, and many pots and small objects.

After this we had free time to explore the town. If one walks to the topmost street, there is this view (as a panorama).

Behind you, as you look over this railing, are several streets worth of tourist bazaar.

We were on our own for lunch. I was walking along one of these streets and noted a tavern advertising Craft Beers. It was a pleasant place inside, an open veranda with a breeze and a view the other way, over rooftops to the distant sea. I had a slab of moussaka and a bottle of Red Donkey amber ale.

Back to the hotel to chill until 5 when we go out once again. Then we went to the winery where the famous vinsanto is made. The winery has a spectacular location on a bluff with a great view of the cliffs. They host a lot of groups and weddings, you can tell. Everyone in our group was given three glasses, and cheese and breadsticks, and a winery employee poured us small samples of three wines, explaining the virtues of each. The first two were dry whites and I could barely tell any difference between them, and barely detect any flavors. Not even good box wine in my opinion. The third was the vinsanto, which was more interesting. A pale red, it was extremely sweet but with other, spicy flavors. If I entertained, I could see keeping a bottle of it around for after-dinner sipping.

From here we went to a taverna where we had supper and then live music and dancing. The two musicians and three dancers were more than competent. The dancers worked hard to get people up to join them in dancing to the familiar tunes like “Never on Sunday” (and when will I get that out of my head again).

Tomorrow is a slow day: bags out at 9:30, depart at 10 for a couple of simple activities here, basically killing time until the ferry for Crete departs at 6pm.

But the real good news: my cold symptoms have completely gone and I feel normal again.

 

Wednesday, 10/2/2019

My minimal supper was quite satisfactory, thank you. When I checked at 7:30 I found that Anastasia had left a note at the desk, bags out at 9:30, depart at 11. With that resolved I felt free to retire and did. I woke several times in the next ten hours to cough or blow my nose. At some points I felt feverish and had a sore throat, so was not anticipating a good morning. Some time around 2am I managed to push the phone off the night table. It hit the marble floor and put a spiderweb crack in the corner of the screen.

Come the morning, the phone was working and so, amazingly, was I. The sore throat was gone, my nose was running much slower, and I felt nearly normal.

I had to kill time until 11, and didn’t go for anything ambitious, just hung out in the lobby. At 11, we got our final schedule. Lunch here on Paros, then a 2:30 ferry to Santorini, arriving about 5. The general strike has cost us half a day on Santorini but no real inconvenience.

We had some free time in town before lunch. Some went to the local archaeological museum, which would have been a laudable choice, but the previous day I had noted a hat store outside the old church. I found my way back to it and was able to get a nicely shaped white straw hat for 12 euros.

After a leisurely lunch we walked the short way to the ferry dock to await the Sea Jet. The Sea Jet line specializes in high speed connections and part of that is the quickest possible turnaround. I commented on the rapid mob exit onto Paros, but this boat is much larger. Where the prior one had let everyone off its one car ramp before others could board, this one had two ramps. One huge horde poured out on the right while our horde poured in on the left.

You don’t show your ticket yet. They just get the mob inside the cavernous car deck, raise the ramps, and away. People find places for their bags and finally queue to have their tickets torn and then can go upstairs and find a seat.

The whole process, boarding and later debarking, is a huge hustle, with crew members standing around gesturing and shouting, in Greek and English, “Hurry up!” and “The boat leaves immediately!” If I had been traveling alone it would be quite intimidating, but just following Anastasia, it was actually quite fun, like performance art or something.

An odd moment occurred during the 2-1/2 hour ride. There were TV sets all over, tuned to the Greek equivalent of ESPN, and I happened to be watching the screen at a moment when they ran a two-minute promo for professional women’s basketball, and there was Kristin Newlin, Stanford 2004-2008, driving and dishing a layup. She’s been with a Turkish team for several years now, and here she was, featured in a promo for EuroBasket, the female league.

So we arrive in Santorini. The scrum, at least 300 people, exit into the narrow dock of the new port and disperse toward the many waiting tour coaches and vans. And you look up:

Santorini is the remnant of a volcano that blew itself up 3 millennia ago (see Wikipedia link above) and in fact the west side of the island is shaped a lot like the east half of Crater Lake. If you imagine Crater Lake, lopped in half, and the missing half replaced with the Agean sea, and a bunch of whitewashed hotels set on the upper rim, there you are. The New port is scrunched on a narrow ledge at the bottom. The old port isn’t being used, but people who visited a decade ago might remember going up from the old port in some kind of cable car. Now it’s coaches climbing the switchbacks.

The view gets better as you go up.

We checked in to our hotel and almost immediately headed out for the evening’s activity, which was to watch the sunset from Ia, a town on a headland away over above the group of three cruise ships in the above pic. Apparently this is a thing, sunset from Ia, because a few thousand other people were already there in the town’s little streets.

We had dinner in a restaurant, then bused back to our hotel. I did some laundry, wrote this up, and so to bed.

By 5pm my nose was confirming what I had suspected in the previous night: I have a cold. When the group met I warned people but nobody seemed perturbed. At 6pm we headed out walking the narrow, side-walk-less streets of Paros. Actually the town’s name is Paraikia(?). There is absolutely no concession to the handicapped in the Greek islands (or Athens, now that I think back). In a wheel chair? κρίμα για σένα (kríma gia séna, too bad for you).

Anastasia’s first target was a combination of architecture and archaeology. She led us to a tiny chapel obviously made of old marble, on the edge of a bluff over the beach, and explained this was the butt-end of what had been a much longer temple to Artemis, but the hill collapsed into the sea, creating a big jumble of marble. Then for the next 20 minutes we went through the streets behind, spotting pieces of marble, slabs and the round drums of column segments, incorporated into houses and walls.

From there we wended through many narrow alleys to the historic 6th Century Church of Panaya of Ekatontapiliani, Church of Our Lady of 100 Doors. Whuh? There are supposedly 100 doors, or windows, not clear which, of which 99 are open but the 100th will not be opened until Byzantium is free of the Ottomans, i.e. never. I was feeling pretty tired by now, possibly with a bit of fever, so didn’t properly appreciate this place.

There we were met by our coach and bused to a restaurant for supper. This featured a glass of Ouzo for each. I can dig ouzo. Sipped slowly, the anise flavor is nice and complements food. Back at the hotel about 9:30 and I crashed.

Tuesday, 10/1/2019

I woke frequently to blow my nose, and decided to down-rate this hotel from 3.5 to maybe 1.5 stars. One: no A/C, the only way to cool the room is to open the french doors onto the garden (Correction! There is A/C, I just didn’t know how to start it). Also the room has no box of tissues, so I’m blowing my nose on toilet paper. And you aren’t supposed to drink the tap water, but they charge 50 cents for bottled water. And the wi-fi is one of those annoying ones where you have to “log in” to their landing page every time you close your laptop, although it makes up for that by being weak and slow.

At 4:30am the local roosters started crowing. The first lorry went by at 5:30, so I got up.

I’m feeling better this morning. Very possibly this virus will be a light one. Washed myself and my laundry. Went out to the lobby at 6:15. Breakfast service won’t begin until 7:30. Anastasia had pointed out a bakery down the road so I walked there, but it wasn’t open. There turns out to be a lot of people staying here, mostly Greek. At breakfast, which was available by 7:20, there are at least 50 people chattering loudly and cheerfully in Greek, plus our scatter of Road Scholars.

At 9:30 we boarded our coach for three stops. First was the quarry where for from before 1000 BCE fine white marble was dug to make the statues and columns of the classic temples. Unfortunately it isn’t much to look at now. There’s a deep hole in the hillside from which marble was once dug, and some buildings that remain from an unsuccessful attempt in the 1990s to revive the marble operation. We got to look at some samples of marble and admire how you can hold an inch-thick chunk of the real stuff up to the sun and see the sunlight passing through it.

On the way to the quarry, driving across central Paros, I could see that this island is quite a bit more fertile, less desert-like, than Mykonos, although still not exactly lush.

Anastasia pointed out a grove of particularly ancient olives.

Next stop was the town of Lefkes, the original capitol of the island, sited high on a hill in the center from when people wanted to be safe from pirates. Here we walked around a bit, looking at this and that. I was feeling somewhat ratty with my cold, and having to blow my nose every few minutes. In the central square, Anastasia declared a free hour and pointed out two different routes people could take, to look at an old church and graveyard, or something else. I opted to sit in the shade and drink a cold coke.

We returned to the coach and went to Nauosa, pleasure-boat port on the northern coast, for lunch in a restaurant. After lunch we had another free period. I wandered the town center a bit, looking at tourist shops, then bought an ice cream and found a shady wall to sit on.

The architecture of this town, like the preceding ones, is cubical stone buildings covered in stucco, piled up in interesting and seemingly random orientations around steep, twisting, narrow streets. The decorating rule seems to be, if it doesn’t move, whitewash it, unless if it sticks out, paint it blue. See the picture in Day 301.

I am still slightly puzzled by the absence of any tiled roofs. All house roofs are flat; the only non-flat roofs are barrel-vaulted roofs on the many little churches. In Italy and the south of France, all roofs are sloped and tiled, and the climate can’t be that different. Or can it? Maybe they didn’t have clay for tiles; I note even the Roman-built structures appear to use brick sparingly. But how do they seal the flat roofs?

During the ride back to the hotel, Anastasia announced a “teeny tiny problem”. It seems there might be a general strike in Athens tomorrow, and if so, the Blue Star ferry that we were to take to the next island will not run. In which case we’ll take the Sea Jet. So: if a strike, we leave at 8am, if no strike, at 11am. She hopes to know for sure by 5pm. (Who wants to be a tour guide? Can you imagine the phone calls?)

Meanwhile we are on our own for supper tonight. I decided I will hole up in my room and not try to find a restaurant. I walked to the Mini Mart across the street and bought PowerAde, a protein bar, and trail mix. If I get hungry that will do. Otherwise I will just chill in the room.

 

 

Monday, 9/30/2019

We have a slow departure day today: “bags out” at 10am, meet to get on the bus at 11am. I enjoy the posh breakfast bar one more time — how do you know it’s a five-star hotel? One item in the breakfast bar is a large bowl of macadamia nuts. Another is a large honeycomb (not honey, an actual comb) to scrape onto your yogurt — and then had to kill some time. I went for a short walk, up a hill hoping for a view, but didn’t get one. Then I just went to the lobby meeting point and sat.

Anastasia announced a change of plan. The itinerary called for a 12pm ferry to Paros, and lunch there. However, that had assumed the summer ferry schedule and they’d just switched to the winter one, with a 1:30 departure. So now we would walk around the harbor and have lunch at a Mykonos restaurant. The sun was very bright and I’d now walked the perimeter of the little harbor four times before. But the lunch was quite good.

The ferry was a “Sea Jet”, a big catamaran hull. It backs up to the dock and lowers a ramp. A large mob of people get off, all pulling roller bags, and disperse to waiting buses and cars. Then the Paros-bound mob, of which we are a tiny part, pull our bags up the ramp and find places to stack them in metal racks just inside the car deck. Then upstairs to a very comfortable large cabin with big seats, and by that time the ship is well away.

Forty minutes later the announcement comes (announcements are always in Greek then English by the way) that we are docking in Paros. The mob descends to the car deck, everyone finds their bags, and we wait for the rear ramp to lower. I have a good picture of this but it is taking forever to upload from the phone on this hotel’s wifi. OK here we are. Note that Paros appears to be much like Mykonos, except the hills are higher.

So we bus to the Hotel Aegeon, which is clean and charming but quite a step down from five stars. Maybe 3.5. Anastasia announces we will meet for a walk to town and supper at 5:50, so, time for a nap. I think I will publish this and put in the evening’s activities in tomorrow’s post.

Sunday, 9/29/2019

Want to know if you are in a five-star hotel? In the breakfast bar you pour orange juice from a pitcher and taste it and it is fresh-pressed. Not to mention there are platters of cute little cold-cuts and platters of different kinds of cheeses and fruit and…

I made sure to be in good time for the 9am departure meeting. We bused around to the opposite end of town, and then walked around the inner harbor to the smaller ferries that go to Delos. Ours was the Orca. What, in the Agean sea? I thoroughly enjoyed the half-hour cruise to Delos. The temperature was about 72F, the sea deep blue, and a brisk breeze had swept the sky clean and made waves just big enough to make the boat move around in a pleasant way. I stood by a railing the whole way and got my glasses all gunked up with salt spray.

Delos is another bare, brown, rocky island, with even less vegetation than Mykonos. However the whole foreshore is covered with ruins. This picture spans less than a fourth of them.

We walked a lot (health app says, 12,200 steps for the day). There are a whole lot of old stones, many loose, many forming partial walls. Anastasia tried to make it interesting.

I wasn’t enjoying it, much. I think we weren’t prepped enough, or I wasn’t, at least. The ruins include evidence from 1,000 years. The island was a religious center for the Naxians, people from the island of Naxos, who made it the site of really big temples around 800BC. Then the Athenians became top dogs and they took it over and built stuff for several centuries. The the Romans decided it would be a duty-free port, and for a couple of centuries it was a commercial hub for trading vessels from all over and a population of over 30,000 — all living on imported food because no crops grow there. Then Mithradates, an ambitious dude from Anatolia, in one of his three wars with the Romans, destroyed the whole thing. So about 50BC it was abandoned by everybody and gradually covered over, until the 1800s when French archaeologists started uncovering it. But what’s left is just stones, jumbled together, and a lot of 3- to 5-foot high walls. It isn’t obvious what’s early Greek, Athenian, or Roman. The archaeologists can say, this little square of broken wall was a temple to Artemis, and this line of broken columns was put up by Philip of Macedon, and so on. But it’s just broken masonry. Anastasia tried but I’m not sure anybody could make it exciting. I just got hot, dehydrated (well, I should have brought a water bottle) and a bit grumpy, although I didn’t express that.

So back we came and walked through old town Mykonos to a restaurant for lunch. I should say that the Greek cuisine has been nice. Actually today wasn’t especially Greek, the entree was a pork chop.

After lunch we were at liberty, and supper tonight is on us individually, not provided. I spent an hour walking around the old town shops, hoping to find a nice straw hat, but all the shops had the same Chinese-made straw or paper fedoras, and none in my size. Took some pictures.

Then I walked on back to the hotel, up a fairly steep hill. There I took a pleasant shower — this has been my pattern for a couple of days, take a shower in the afternoon and change into tomorrow’s clothes for the evening — and did some hand-laundry. Later I think I will have the prix fixe menu at our posh hotel.

Saturday, 9/28/2019

The phone made a single tentative “kerbloop?” noise at 5am and that was the wakeup call, but it was enough. Did indeed have my bag out at 5:10, and as scheduled we were on the bus at 6am for the 20-minute drive through predawn darkness to Piraeus to board the Blue Star ferry.

It was a large ferry, with several decks, more than one bar, and large comfortable assigned seats inside. The ride on the calm, deep-blue Adriatic under brilliant sun was about five hours long. I spent some time on two different large, roofed decks with chairs and tables open to the breeze, most occupied by Greeks having cheerful conversations and smoking (lots of second-hand smoke); and some time in my assigned armchair reading a book on my phone. Eventually we reached Mykonos where we picked up our bags and Anastasia led us to our bus past an extremely large cruise boat.

The bus driver exercised amazing skill driving a large coach through extremely narrow twisting streets to our restaurant for lunch. Quite a nice place and a good meal. Also, squid.

Squid aside, this is pretty much what all of Mykonos looks like: very dry barren dirt, no trees, brilliant sun, blue water, lots of little white buildings. From lunch our coach took us to our hotel which is actually a five-star and very posh one. Really, really fancy. Here’s the view from my balcony.

We are at liberty until 6pm and… oh my gosh it is 6:09 and the phone is ringing! I held up the whole group and I am so embarrassed!

We all hopped on the coach and were trucked around to the opposite end of the town, the North end where the ferry dock is, and let off to walk through the tiny streets of the town. Mykonos is almost totally a resort; Anastasia says there are almost no farmers, fishermen, or other “ordinary” people living here. Everyone works in retail, hotel, or restaurants to service the constant flow of tourists. The town center is basically a big mall formed of a maze of tiny winding streets. Just the same it is photogenic as all get-out, especially tonight because we were just at the golden hour fading to an orange sunset. Instead of the relatively tedious process of getting WordPress to display pictures, I will point to a Smugmug gallery of unedited images.

After walking all the way through the center of town north to south, we turned around and went back along the waterfront south to north, ending at a restaurant for supper. This process was slowed a bit when one of the group tripped on rough cobbles and fell, hitting hard enough that she got a bit of an abrasion above one eye, and needed a while to recover. Frankly I’m surprised it took this long for someone to fall. The sidewalks in the Plaka, the entire top of the Acropolis, and every foot of road in Mykonos, are a minefield of irregular pavement, sudden steps, cobbles, lumps, intrusive curbs.

Anyway, back to the hotel. Tomorrow we start at a civilized 9am to visit the famous archaeologic site on the nearby island of Delos.

 

Friday, 9/27/2019

Slept very well, more than 8 hours sack time. Woke early enough to read email and the news before breakfast.

At 7am I went to the breakfast room. By 8am most of the tour were in the lobby and we headed out.

We walked around two sides of the rock and up to the, um, I guess it’s the western end, where is the only entrance/exit to the park grounds. Here we looked down on some famous places, the site of the Agora where (among many others) Sophocles like to sit and ask uncomfortable questions, the Pnyx, the hill where the Athenian citizens met to debate and vote, etc.

From Anastasia’s talk I suddenly realized how differently, all right, how incorrectly, I’ve been pronouncing Greek terms. Take the Temple of Dionysus. I’ve always read that as “DIE Oh NIGH Sus” but she says, “dee ONNY shush”.

We got to the top and entered about 9am. The strong morning sun was making the old columns glow.

From the south side we looked down on the theater where Sophocles’ plays were staged, and beyond to the Acropolis Museum.

After a while there were quite a few people with us.

At 10:30 we met and walked down to the Museum. A dramatic building outside and in, the displays are mostly the bits of the friezes and statuary from the temples on the Acropolis. A repeated theme was, “the ones that are pure white are plaster casts of the originals which are in the British Museum.” Lord Elgin, who originally looted the best friezes, and the British Museum which so far refuses to repatriate them, are not well regarded here.

The Museum is built on columns that support it above an archaeological dig, and the floor is made of glass so you look down into the old foundation stones underneath.

By the time we’d finished with the Museum and started walking to our lunch destination it was 1pm, and it turned out the restaurant was a good kilometer away on the far side of the Plaka. The walks to the restaurant, and back to the hotel, were via different shopping streets in the Plaka. Lots and lots of shops, selling all varieties of tourist things. Quite a few have cheap straw hats, and I wouldn’t mind getting one, but it isn’t convenient just now.

As of 4pm, back at the hotel, the Health app shows 12,188 steps for the day. At 6pm we meet in a conference room for a nice presentation by an archaeology professor on the history and methods of archaeology in Greece and Europe. At 7:15 or so we go up to our hotel’s roof garden restaurant for dinner. I sit with a couple who take three trips a year(!) and have been to Africa 10 times. As well as many South American and European countries.

The plan for tomorrow is to transfer to Mykonos, by a ferry that leaves Piraeus, the port of Athens, at 8am. Which means we have to get on a bus at 6am. Which means a wakeup call at 5am and “bags out” at 5:15. Other than the early start it is expected to be an easy day, with a 5-hour boat ride, and one sight-seeing thing after.

 

Thursday, 9/27/2019

The transition from Wednesday to Thursday occurred in the air over the Atlantic. Just under eight hours in the seat, if I include the 20 minutes of taxi time after pushback at JFK. I managed some sleep, mixed into probably four hours of eyes-closed quiet time not quite sleeping.

The approach to Athens passes over a lot of the rugged land of Southern Greece, all of which has a strong resemblance to Southern California, including steep rounded hills blanketed in what probably is not, technically, chaparral, but looks like it. Even on final approach the resemblance to, maybe, Bakersfield or Simi Valley, was strong to me, except for many orderly groves of olive trees.

I came out of the arrivals door into a semicircle of at least 20 people holding signs, waiting for specific people or names of tours. But no Road Scholar. I walked around the semicircle four times. Then I decided to call the tour leader but my phone, despite having connected happily while the plane was taxiing to the gate, now had “no service”. All the pay phones required phone cards. The information desk directed me to a phone that took coins (I had some Euro notes and coins, left over from Italy two years ago). Anastasia told me the driver was there, with three other tour members, go back to the arrivals area. Anyway, found him. Met three other members and we had a nice half hour ride in a posh Mercedes van to our hotel.

Anastasia met us. The group will be 21 in all. Four are already here, arriving yesterday. My little quartet came on the same flight (and don’t ask me how I failed to connect with the other three and our driver, earlier) and the rest are coming in this afternoon.

Our rooms weren’t ready (it was only noon) so she led the four of us on a short walk. The hotel is just down the street from the Acropolis Museum, a huge modern building we’ll visit tomorrow, and the Plaka, the old town, which, because a couple of cruise ships are in port, was jammed with tourists and people selling things to tourists. Got a view looking up at the Acropolis which I may put in here later.

Back to the hotel for a very welcome shower and change of clothes, connect to wifi, make this entry. Worked out a method of getting pics off the phone, into my Dropbox folder, down from the Dropbox folder onto the Chromebook, so that WordPress could find them and upload them to a blog post (see above). Nothing more to do until 6pm. I washed my shirt, shorts and socks from the flight and put on tomorrow’s clothes.

The group assembled at 6pm and Anastasia gave us an overview of tomorrow and the following days. We introduced ourselves around the circle. I am the only Californian, to my surprise. Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida well represented. Then we all trooped out to a restaurant maybe 8 blocks away. Standard Greek fare, well presented. Moussaka is what you would get if you made ravioli, but instead of pasta ribbons, you used thin strips of eggplant, and instead of tomato, cumin and spinach.

Back to the hotel to post this and stay awake long enough (it’s already 8pm) for digestion to start, then crash.