Greece with Kids: Ancient Olympia, Little House on the Prairie Dubbed into Greek, and All the Feral Cats and Dogs

Day 01 of our trip to Greece is here and here.
Day 02 is here.

Welcome to Day 03!

Did I mention that we slept next to an olive grove?

We slept next to an olive grove!

Also check out the oleander in the foreground, blooming in all that heat!

I might have mentioned before that I LOVE watching local TV when we travel. The kids and I still look up the coral reef music video that played obsessively between TV shows in Hawaii, and I was just as obsessed with watching the Greek music channel, MAD TV, while we were in Athens--unlike our American MTV, this channel actually played actual music videos! You should search YouTube for Greek music videos, because they're pretty great.

Also pretty great?


It's Little House on the Prairie, dubbed into Greek! If you want to hear an excerpt that I filmed, click over to my Craft Knife Facebook page, because for some reason YouTube doesn't want me to film the TV.

Here's one of the many reasons why it's great to have a tour guide:



These little shrines are all over all the roads in Greece, and I had no idea what they were for until we stopped at one so our tour guide could show us. In Greece, if you have a minor accident, you're thankful that it wasn't worse and so you put up a little shrine out of thanks. If you have a big accident, you put up a shrine out of thanks that it wasn't even worse, and if someone was killed in your accident, you still put up a shrine, but you put a picture inside it of the person killed, so people know who to pray for.

Also in the shrine are images of your favorite saints (the kids were pretty stoked that this one had St. Nicholas, who we studied particularly in our Story of the World text), tokens and other offerings, an olive oil lamp, and the supplies to replenish the lamp. Our tour guide also showed us how grandparents use the warm oil from olive oil lamps to bless their children, so learning how to make an olive oil lamp and blessing my someday grandchildren is on my to-do list now.

Our first of many stops this day was the site of Ancient Olympia:

If you're paying attention to your Greek phonics, you can read Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο and Ολυμπίας, all of which are cognates and easily recognized in English.

In related news, here's a picture of Will wearing her cap smack on the top of her head, something that drives both Matt and I absolutely nuts:

If you don't want to look like a tourist overseas, don't wear a ballcap, because it's not a thing anywhere else. I don't care, though, because it's not as if people aren't going to take one look at us and not be able to otherwise tell that we're tourists.

One of the cool things about Ancient Olympia is the proliferation of oak trees, the sacred tree of Zeus, doncha know?

I didn't photograph every single oak tree, just almost every single oak tree.

Here are the remains of the gymnasium and palaestra, the training area for the Olympic athletes:











Here's a lizard:



And here's where the stoa stood. It's a kind of covered porch:

Remember that column reconstructions show you the height and location of the ceiling. Here's a kid for perspective.

Here's a bath house attached to the gymnasium:

Sure, you can just see the foundations now, but this place once had running hot water! The US barely had that in the late 1700s!

And here's what I was super excited to see: our very first Wonder of the Ancient World!







Well, not exactly--this is the site and partial reconstruction of the Temple of Zeus, which is where the statue of Zeus that was a Wonder of the Ancient World lived. It's long gone, now, as is most of the temple; when the temple was no longer supported by the city-state, it became impossible for the people who lived there to keep it in repair. I mean honestly, what random neighbor do YOU know with a crane big enough to maintain a Greek temple?

The site alone is impressive enough, however, even with just the few reconstructed columns that evidence its scale--it's almost more impressive to see the fallen columns all around you, because that makes it easier to visualize how BIG everything must have been! You'll also see in a minute that many of its sculptures and metopes survived and are in the nearby museum.

Imagine all of these massive columns actually in place. There's a lot of scope for the imagination in Greece.

Look! I'm here, too!

And here's an oak tree, fittingly right next to the Temple of Zeus.

Near the Temple of Zeus is a place equally awesome, the Temple of Hera:

Here's one view.

And then again with a kid for scale.

The altar in front of this temple is where the Olympic flame is lit:



Here's a recreation of that event:



Here's a YouTube video of the complete ceremony; the kids and I watched this after our vacation, coloring and chatting and playing games but taking it all in and looking up for the cool bits.

Next to it is the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus, because you gotta respect your nymphs:

Remember Herodes Atticus from the Acropolis? We're also going to see him the next day at Delphi!

There are the remains of another stoa on the way to the stadium--



--and some remains of the Treasuries, where offerings were given by other city-states--





--and then we come to this, the formerly underground entrance to the Olympic stadium:





And so finally here we are, at the site of the Ancient Olympic games!





Okay, it's not much to look at, but when you're at the place where the Ancient Olympic games were actually really held, you KNOW there's only one thing that you really want to do:







Because we'd all run so well, our tour guide handed around the laurel wreath that she'd made during our walk. Usually laurel wreaths were just that, made from the bay laurel tree, but at Olympia they were made from the wild olive trees that grew on the site--just like this one!

Oh, just hanging out at Olympia, having won her race and wearing her laurel wreath.

Wild olives have much smaller leaves than the cultivated olives that we saw throughout our trip.

Something else you should know is that while we'd been touring this site, gaping at the architecture and marveling over the structures, Syd had been doing some particular sightseeing of her own, and was quickly developing her own obsessions:





Yes, those animals are ALL at Olympia! After seeing several friendly, collared but seemingly owner-less dogs at the Presidential Palace, I went back to our hotel and Googled it--I mean of course! It turns out that Greece has a massive number of stray and/or feral animals. In Athens, at least, there's an organized program to vaccinate, sterilize, and tag them, which is why all of the dogs we saw had bright yellow collars.

Outside of Athens, however, there don't seem to be any such programs. To be fair, though, the dogs and cats that we saw everywhere other than Ancient Delphi all seemed happy, friendly, and well-fed--in fact, on the last night of our trip, Matt and I happened to be walking again through the Plaka in the evening, when all the stray cats of the city seemingly came out of nowhere, from every rooftop (literally!) and alley, and all began to chow down on dishes of cat food that had magically appeared on the sidewalks for them. Do the shopkeepers feed them, or the city? I don't know, but they were being fed, at least.

For now, though, here at Ancient Olympia, Syd had mostly been sightseeing the animals, and as we left the stadium--



--to go wander some more, she declared that she just wanted to go find the animals, and so we let her run off alone. Sure, the archaeological sites are big, and she doesn't speak Greek, but our tour guide had given us all business cards that had her cell # on them, and I made the kids both put the card into their lanyards, and their instructions were, if they got lost, to go up to another tour guide (trust me--they were everywhere) and ask them to call Militsa. As you will see, Syd repeatedly wandered off to find animals wherever she went, and she'd also disappear and then meet us at the front entrance of a site, or even once at the bus--it was hot, the bus was air-conditioned, and the kid is no fool.

So that's why Syd isn't in any of these next pictures--she's off having her own adventure and making her own memories while the rest of us saw more ruins:

Here's a different side of the Temple of Zeus.

This is the front door, but you can see the huge column that we saw earlier in the background.

Here's the location of the Nike of Paeonius, which we're going to see in the museum later:

Back to the Temple of Hera to walk around it for a closer look.

And look who we bumped into in front of the Philippeion!



After seeing all of the archaeological site of Ancient Olympia, we went to the museum to see all of the treasures that were found at the site:

These lion-head gargoyles are from the Temple of Zeus.

We ran into an interesting rule here, that would be the case for all the rest of the museums that we visited on this trip: inside the museum, you could take photographs OF the exhibits, but you could not take photographs WITH the exhibits.

A bit of a bummer, because all I really want of life is a photo of myself with a real Spartan helmet, but at least I got to see all the Spartan helmets. Maybe Matt can photoshop me into them later.

The metopes from the Temple of Zeus depict the best thing EVER: the twelve labors of Heracles! We studied him, remember, so we were always on the lookout for his depictions:

Here he is holding up the sky while Atlas fetches him an apple.

Here he is killing Cerberus.

And the sculptures in the Temple depict, of COURSE, the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the wedding feast of Pirithous. The Greeks loooooved the imagery of this myth, and we saw it an awful lot. In the myth. the Centaurs are invited to a wedding, although why on earth you would invite Centaurs to your wedding I do not know, because the first thing they did was get drunk, and the second thing they did was try to rape all the women and children.

I told you about Centaurs.

This Centaur is just fighting, at least. The one to his right is fighting and being rapey at the same time.

Now turn your eyes away from the Centaurs, children, and look at these nice sculptures instead. They're going to have a lovely chariot race!



We saw the stand for the Nike of Paeonius outside at Olympia, but here's beautiful Nike, herself!



There's another whole room just for Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, which used to reside in the Temple of Hera:



But this, I think, was my favorite artifact in the museum:

It's a votive offering by Miltiades after his victory at the Battle of Marathon.

And other helmets!

Do they look familiar?

And finally back outside, where you CAN take your picture with the sculptures!



I know you also want to hear about the olive oil and wine tasting that we went to after this, and then the lunch hosted by a family in a small mountain village that we went to after that, and then the seaside town where we stopped to taste mastika and hit the beach after that, and you obviously want to see how beautiful it was when we swam in our hotel pool that night with the Delphi mountains behind us, but I'll tell you that another time.

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.