Greece with Kids: Ancient Delphi, Castalian Spring, and How We Lost Syd

Day 01 is here and here.
Day 02 is here.
Day 03 is here and here.

And here we are in Day 04!

Syd's doll, Zelda, joined us for breakfast this morning--



--where I also enjoyed my trifecta of The Perfect Breakfast:

Friends, that is Greek yogurt smothered in sour cherry spoon sweets and Nutella. It was heavenly. I dream about it. This picture is the wallpaper on my phone, I loved it so much.

Well-fortified for the morning, off we went as pilgrims to Delphi!

Before entering Delphi, you must purify yourself in the water from Castalian Spring. Everyone who entered Delphi, from the supplicants to the oracle, to the athletes competing in the Pythian Games, to the oracle herself came here first. You can still hike up the mountain to the original spring, but more recently (although still a long time ago...) a fountain was set below it. Our tour guide encouraged Syd to drink from the fountain--



--and then told everyone that local legend has it that girls who drink from the fountain will be married within the year:

Syd's face as she gives our tour guide the "I thought we were friends!" look

If you're already married, drinking from the fountain will cause you to fall even more deeply in love. So we all did our duty:


We followed the aqueducts that carried the spring water down to the gymnasium area, where athletes trained for the Pythian Games. The setup was much like that of Ancient Olympia's gymnasium, with a covered running track, hot and cold baths, and other athletic facilities:



The aqueducts also run even further south, where we hiked down to see the ruins of two temples to Athena:

As typical spring water, it is cold and refreshing!

The leaves of wild olives are smaller than those of domesticated olives.

But they still bear fruit! Here's a baby wild olive as proof.

Although the purpose of the two temples is clear, between them stands a piece of architecture that to this day nobody understands the purpose of:

This is the tholos. As you can see, it originally had twenty columns, three of which have been reconstructed.

Now that we've cleansed ourselves and paid our respects, let's travel on to Delphi!

Delphi was built into the face of Mount Parnassus, so as you walk it, you travel up and up and up the steep paths, all of which are as slick as ice. Next time we visit Greece, I will do so in new hiking boots, not my seven-year-old Keens.

We toured the archaeological museum first, and then hiked the ancient site, but I'm going to mix up my photos a little so that I can put the treasures that we saw with the places where they were displayed.

Here's the beginning of the winding pathway up:

Midway up the path, you can see the tops of the columns of the Temple of Apollo. We'll be hiking there and then going higher!

On the Sacred Way, these treasuries were built by city-states to show off their people's offerings:

Inside each nook would be statues and other beautiful gifts.

There are also inscriptions covering the walls along the path:

Can you see the Ancient Greek word for Delphi in that inscription?

Most offerings were small bronze statues, but wealthier city-states, or those who attributed the Oracle's advice to victories at war, would go all out, and the nicest treasuries were entire buildings. Here are the ruins of the Sikyonian and Siphnian Treasuries:
 



The Siphnian Treasury had one of my favorite architectural features, the caryatids!

Whenever you see holes in a sculpture,  you know that something used to be attached there. Usually it was metal embellishments, such as a wreath or a sword, but they'd also use that method to attach fiddly marble bits.

That same treasury also had friezes on all of its walls:

Gods fighting giants.

Here's my favorite one:


Because this!


All of these would have been brightly painted, which is hard to imagine now, though there are some remnants of Ancient Greek painting, such as these terracotta roof bits, extant:



These twins, an offering from Argos, are the oldest of the monumental offerings:



Up and up, we come to the Athenian Treasury, first dedicated with spoils from the Battle of Marathon (we saw more offerings from that victory at Ancient Olympia, remember):





It contained metopes celebrating the victories of Herakles and Theseus:

Remember that we saw metopes of Herakles' labors at Olympia, too. The Ancient Greeks LOVED Herakles!

 Past the Athenian Treasury, the path leads to the Rock of the Sybil, the origin point of the oracle of Delphi:





The oracle was later installed inside the Temple of Apollo, which you can see on the path above the rock:





Past the Rock of the Sybil, we scrambled around the ruins of  the Halos, a ritual space set at the location of the fountain where Apollo killed the Python:

Standing at the Halos, you can see the gymnasium and, farther off, the Tholos.

Up and up, past more inscribed walls--





--to the Temple of Apollo!













The Sphinx of Naxos, now in the archaeological museum, once stood here:



And this statue of Dionysus lived up on the temple's west pediment:



Also found in this Temple is one of the most beautiful works of art from the entire site, the Charioteer:



He's made of bronze and originally had much more of a scene around him, including his chariot. You can't tell from this photo, but every detail on the Charioteer is perfect--there are even thin wires of bronze that form his eyelashes.

Other nearby artworks included this statue of Aghias--



--and the Dancers of Delphi:

Notice how cleverly I'm thwarting the rule that you can't take photos of people "with" the artwork. Why, that child just happens to be in the background of my photo--can't help that!

The most important, however, is the omphalos, otherwise know as the bellybutton of the world:



Zeus wanted to find the center of the world, so he let loose two eagles to fly in opposite directions, at the same speed. Where they met is where he placed this rock.

It's unknown exactly who this statue represents--possibly a priest of Apollo or possibly a philosopher--but I was mostly struck by the backdrop that shows the dig where he was discovered. How amazing is that!



You can always find Roman artifacts, as well, from the time when it had conquered Greece. Here's a bust of the Roman consul Titus Quinctius Flaminimus, the guy who conquered Delphi for the Roman Empire:

I like his stubble. And that hair!

Up and up and up, then, to the stadium above the Temple of Apollo:



Here's the view down to the Temple of Apollo:

You can still just see the gymnasium in the distance, with the Tholos just out of sight.

I wanted to see the whole stadium all at once, so you know what that means... up and up and up!

Made it!

One thing you should know about me is that my face gets beet-red when I'm hot. I get hot when I work hard, and I get hot when it's, you know, over 100 degrees out. Both situations applied on this morning, so much so that total strangers stopped me to ask if I was feeling well, and to suggest that I sit down and rest.

Solicitous strangers subdued, sit down and rest I did, practically on top of the world:


Syd regretted coming up with us when it was clear that we were just looking at the same stuff you could see from lower down (Will had declined making the extra hike), and soon got our permission to head down and wait for us at the entrance.


And that's when we lost her.

The rest of us made our way down much more leisurely than that little mountain goat; to tell the truth, I personally made my way back down the path clutching hands with another tourist, and yes, we DID slip a couple of times. That old marble is SLICK!!! Our homeschooling family is a novelty wherever we go, so Will and I also regaled this fellow tourist, a retired teacher, with relevant tales from Story of the World, and I patiently answered all of her questions (but what about socialization? Writing instruction? College?).

Thanks to our extra hike and our ginger descent, we were among the last of our group to return to the entrance, so it was a while before I noticed that Syd wasn't where she'd said she would be.

I was really only worried because there were several feral cats at the entrance to Delphi, and I couldn't imagine that Syd would willingly wander away from feral cats. We asked around and none of the other members of our group had seen her, so our tour guide called the bus driver, waiting in the parking lot, and he bizarrely said that she was there, with him!

It was very bizarre, because the bus dropped us off at the entrance before parking, and so Syd shouldn't have known where it was, but indeed, when the rest of us made it to the bus there she was, cool and comfy in the air conditioning. I asked her how she'd known where the bus was, and she just shrugged and said she'd asked someone. I'm still not sure if she asked another member of our group where our specific bus was, or if she asked some random person where the buses in general were, but it turns out that what had actually happened is that Syd had gone to the entrance to wait for us, like she was supposed to, and she had stopped to pet all of the feral cats, like I'd assumed she would. But petting the feral cats reminded her that she'd stolen a bunch of lunch meat from our breakfast buffet that morning, and it was all wrapped in a napkin in her backpack, which was on the bus.

Her next move, then, was apparently to figure out where our bus was parked, then to hike there all by herself, get our bus driver to let her in, get the meat from her backpack, leave the bus and hike back to the entrance to Delphi, and feed all the feral kitties. When she was out of meat, she remembered that the bus was nice and cool, and so she decided to just go back there and meet us.

If you're wondering if foreign travel builds a child's confidence, independence, and problem-solving abilities... yeah, I'd say that it does!

I have more wonders from this day to share--fields of sunflowers, Greek cheeses, traditional dance--but now I have to move on with my real-life day. We're making solar ovens to cook our lunch, I have to figure out a troop meeting schedule to prep for the big workshop we're running in a couple of weeks, and a friend is coming over tomorrow to make soap with me, so I should probably clean the kitchen and, you know, pick out a soap recipe. And I need to plant the fall garden. And get my 10,000 steps and 45 minutes of aerobic activity completed. And check the kids' math...

I'll daydream about our trip from Delphi to Meteora another day!

Greece with Kids: The Gulf of Corinth, Spoon Sweets, and We Gave the Children Wine

Day 01 is here and here.
Day 02 is here.
Day 03 part one is here.

Welcome to the rest of Day 03!

Who's got two thumbs and also her computer back?!?!?!?

Thank goodness for warranties, computer shops who charge way less than a hundred bucks to clone my hard drive before it's sent for repair since you KNOW they're going to wipe it, and my husband who dealt with it all so that I didn't have to freak out about losing all of my photographs and writing.

And now that I have back all of my photographs and writing, I can continue for you the riveting tale of our family trip through Greece!

When you last saw us, we were just leaving Ancient Olympia. Our tale continues in this random tourist shop, where we were treated to an olive oil and wine tasting. Friends, there are SO many olive oils in Greece, and they all taste completely different and also delicious:

Many people in Greece don't actually buy commercial olive oil like this, even though it's all local. People have their own olive trees, and so they have their own olives pressed to make their own olive oil, and that's all they use. They even get picky at the press because they want to make sure that they're only getting THEIR olives, not a neighbor's olives mixed in.

Alas, we're too stingy to 1) pay for checked luggage on our domestic flight or 2) pay for shipping, so there was no question of bringing any of this delicious olive oil home with us. Might as well gorge on it while we're in Greece, then!

Same with the wine, which is also made from local grapes, and which we also tasted all of.

Our tour guide didn't want the children left out, so she shuffled around the wine bottles for a bit, then proudly presented them with... WINE! At first, I thought that she was telling me that this was "children's" wine, something of low alcohol, perhaps, that was suitable for children? But what she actually meant was that it was Μαυροδάφνη, a kind of wine that all children in Greece commonly taste, because it's the most common wine used in the Greek Orthodox churches there.

So not a children's wine, but a wine that Greek children are familiar with. And as everyone knows, when in Greece, you do what the Greeks do! Therefore, I present to you my children's first wine tasting:

Unfazed by her first taste of wine.

How about this one? Also unfazed?

Negative. The subject is highly fazed.

Of course, just because we're not shoppers doesn't mean that we can't appreciate all of that tourist crap. Case in point:

I did, as a matter of fact, want every single small figure of mythological beings cast in bronze (and later I did treat myself to a teeny bronze Spartan helmet). But as I often tell myself, we can afford to travel OR we can afford to buy a bunch of stuff. We choose travel.

One set of photos that I am NOT showing you are the NSFW pics that I took of penises everywhere in all of the tourist shops. Matt and I were kind of baffled by this the first time we saw it, but I did some research, and y'all, the penises are a legitimate thing! Ancient Greece was ALL ABOUT the penises! Not only did they have endless phallus processions and herms on practically every street corner, but I read a lot of Aristophanes in AP English in high school, and one very important thing that my teacher seems to have forgotten to tell us is that Ancient Greek comedies were deeply wrapped up in the penis. Costumes, by rule, consisted of short togas that allowed gigantic red leather penises to be seen hanging beneath them, and some sources say they could even be raised and lowered for comic effect. I don't know how I missed the veiled references and double entendre in these plays, other than that I was more focused on what I thought would actually appear on the test.

So yes, expect to see lots of penis statuary and pottery... and, um, bottle openers and key chains and coffee mugs and whatever in Greek tourist shops. You have been warned.

Usually, lunch was on our own at one of the day's stops, but on this day we had something special planned for us: a meal at a private residence in a small Greek village near Patras. The bus wound up a series of small roads, giving us better and better views of the miles of olive groves on all sides of us. Matt and I were sitting in the very front of the bus on this day, with an unobstructed view out the picture window (our tour guide switched up our seats every day, so we could all have a turn in the seats with the best views), and we helplessly clutched each other in horror at every corner turned with centimeters to spare, every fence post just missed on every narrow road, every moped driver zipping through every small gap that happened to turn out to be exactly big enough to fit a moped driver.

You're probably somewhat familiar with Greece's economic downturn, and I doubt you'll be surprised when I tell you that the austerity measures that the government continues to put in place to help it recover primarily affect, and are devastating to, lower-wage earners. Measures such as pension reductions and increases in health care costs are far more debilitating to those who have less money to spare--this seems obvious, yes? I mean, remember the garbage worker strike that we saw evidence of in Athens? It was because the government was keeping the workers on short-term, low-wage contracts instead of allowing them full-time employment. They can't live on that salary, but if they quit, then someone else desperate for any kind of money would be happy to take the trash out instead of them. But of course, they wouldn't be paid a living wage, either, so the cycle will simply continue.

Life can also be economically hard even in these small villages far away from the strikes and protests of Athens. Young adults often move to the cities to find employment, which means that village life is slowly dissolving, and especially means that fewer children are being born into village life. It's hard to keep the local schools going without enough children, and that means the schools close and the kids are bussed hours away every single day. And when that happens, that's one more disincentive for families to stay in their villages, and so that cycle continues, too.

You might think that it's not safe to travel to a country that's experiencing unrest, but tourism is great for local economies--we bring money into the country, and we leave it there. Our tour company's relationship with this small village, then, is the small-scale version of a really cool concept: they support the village, and then a couple of times a week a tour bus rolls in, tourists tumble out, and villagers escort them through the village and feed them lunch:

bread, cheese, rice, fava beans stewed with tomatoes, watermelon and cucumber salad, spanakopita, meatballs, wine, and bottled water (it isn't safe to drink local water outside of major cities) 

Oh, and Greek coffee!



We were also introduced here to what is now my favorite food. This, my friends, is a spoon sweet:



Spoon sweets are local fruits, boiled gently down with honey or sugar--our tour guide said honey, as Greeks use honey for all of their sweetening, but all of the recipes that I've been able to find, because I deeply want to recreate this delicacy, call for sugar, not honey, and our tour guide *did* also say that she can't cook and so her husband does all the cooking in their house, so maybe she doesn't really know how they're made...

If you or someone you love is Greek, please tell me how to make spoon sweets!

Per usual, a feral cat came meowing up as we were hanging out on our hostess' front porch. Syd immediately went over to it and crouched down, trying to make friends, but this village kitty was skittish, and didn't want her to touch it. Our hostess, who didn't speak English, slipped inside her house and brought out a napkin filled with meatballs, which she gave to Syd, gesturing that she should use them to feed the kitty. Syd happily fed the kitty meatball after meatball while the hostess' son videotaped her on his smartphone, apparently tickled to death at yet one more crazy thing these tourists were doing.

On the first day of our land trip, we crossed the Gulf of Corinth over the Corinth Canal; on this day, we recrossed the Gulf of Corinth, this time over the cable-stayed bridge the Γέφυρα Ρίου-Αντιρρίου--

I have a bad habit of muttering to myself, so that on this trip Matt was constantly asking me, "Sorry, what?" and listening to me tell him that oh, I wasn't talking to him, I was just trying to pronounce the name of that restaurant, or remember Herakles' twelfth labor, etc. I muttered to myself about this bridge for several minutes--"Is it a type of suspension bridge? No, not with cables like that. A cable-stayed bridge? Do they use a series of cable-stays for that or is it called something else?"--until our tour guide happened to mention the answer in her spiel. 

--and into Nafpaktos (Ναύπακτος). We stopped at a bar to drink shots of mastika--our tour guide was not going to consider her job done until we'd tasted all of the indigenous alcohol of Greece!--and then we hit the beach!

The way to the beach led through this arch under a medieval fort and castle, because of course it did. The history here stuns me with how easily it's integrated into the everyday tapestry of the cities.

Here we are, then, happily paddling our feet and finding interesting rocks on the edge of the Gulf of Corinth:

Another view of the bridge!

Because life is the same everywhere, there was a group of teen/tween boys taking turns jumping off the pier into the harbor, aiming for a gap about two feet wide between two fishing boats, teasing the one boy who was too timid to turn a couple of somersaults on the way down. I reviewed my CPR and first aid training as I watched and held my own two kids back from leaping off the pier along with them.

From the Gulf of Corinth, we drove northeast up the mainland to Delphi, and to our hotel at the top of... a cliff? Seriously, the entire village that we stayed in looked like it was hanging onto the side of a mountain. And there were higher mountains beyond:



All of our dinners were included in the price of the tour, and hosted in the hotels that we stayed in. These dinners are certainly more inauthentic than wandering the town and finding a little restaurant, but they sure are convenient, especially when all the kids really want to do is swim, eat, and go to bed. On several nights, the dinners also included wine for the adults and sodas for the kids, and on this night dinner included two different types of fancy cakes, to celebrate the birthday and the anniversary of some of the other people in our group.

On the whole, then, I was a fan:


And so were they!


See those tired and happy faces? They were sound asleep within the hour, and we weren't far behind them. There was going to be more mountain climbing in the morning, when we were going to Delphi!

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

How to Make Glittered and Painted Shells

As part of the prehistoric fashion unit of our History of Fashion study, Syd and I had a project to embellish shells and make them wearable.

We didn't use exactly the methods that prehistoric people would have, but we achieved the same results: decorative, wearable fashion accessories!



Sure, the prehistoric peoples probably had different ideas than we do about what looks decorative, but they didn't have glitter and gold paint to work with.

We used artist's-quality acrylic paints and my favorite paint pens for the shells, with no priming needed:





To glitter a shell, first spray it with Aleene's Tacky Spray (this item is one of my crafting secrets, by the way--I use it ALL the time!)--

Notice the tons of newspaper we put down, and I still wouldn't have let Syd use the spray in the house if it hadn't been raining outside. I got this stuff on that very table once upon a time, and it's still there--I'm one of the main reasons why we don't have nice things.

--and then glitter it until it begs for mercy:



After it begs, give it a little more glitter anyway:



Because of course you can't have too much glitter!



I'll tell you more about the other resources and activities that we've used for this prehistoric fashion unit another time. Right now, though, Syd and I are throwing a party for her American Girl dolls out on the driveway. There will be cake on real dishes, and tea in real cups.

It's gonna be a great afternoon!

P.S. Here's how to drill those holes that you can see in some of the shells.