Oliver Ames goes to Greece, final chapter: Go for the light alone

(To blog readers: This is the last of 10 posts about places my son will soon visit on a trip to Greece with Oliver Ames (OA) High School in Massachusetts. I hope you've enjoyed the stories, photos and links as much as I've enjoyed sharing them. The kids are taking off soon, and they're getting excited. Their parents are, well ... let's just say that "excited" doesn't quite cover it... A few of Adam's buddies are going on the trip, which is good. It might keep him from focusing too much on all the young ladies in the group. The ratio is 10 boys to 50 girls. Adam continues to prove how sharp he is. There are no flies on this kid (although he claims he didn't know the gender balance of the group when he signed up...). Anyway, I've advised him to stick with Niko, a senior who's spent summers since the age of two at his family's home on Crete, speaks fluent Greek, and knows that real men do, indeed, wear money belts. Which leads me to muse that I'm glad I'm the parent of a boy who wears big shorts and long t-shirts, the better to hide the money belt under. Sixteen-year-old girls wear jeans on their hips and tiny shirts that hover around the navel. Where will they hide their money belts? I'm glad I'm not one of the 50 mothers pondering this right now. Well, Godspeed, OA Argonauts. Make good decisions and excellent memories.)


Twenty islands, including the volcanic wonder that is Santorini, form the Cyclades, an Aegean archipelago named for the circle (kyklos) that the original 12 Cycladic islands formed around sacred Delos, birthplace of Apollo.

Today, the Cyclades, expanded to include islands not in the original dozen, are on most travelers’ must-see lists. The Cyclades burst with antiquities, ruins, ancient gods and myths (and beaches, tavernas, inter-island ferries, markets and shops, glorious food and drink, and excellent people-watching), but the sun and the magic that it creates are the main event.

Santorini has more than its fair share of Cycladic sunshine. The island is so blessed with sunlight that even the rocky interior plain that slopes eastward away from the island’s dramatic volcanic cliffs produces lush tomatoes and rich wine grapes.

I know they'll stay up late, but I hope the OA kids get up early on Santorini, because the play of light during the bookends of a Santorini day is one of God’s great gifts. Santorini is at its most splendid early and late, when sunrise and sunset turn the island’s signature cuboid houses and churches into white canvases that invite and absorb whatever colors nature decides to splash. On Santorini, dawn and dusk are not just times of day, but dramatic performances. Pull up a seat and enjoy one of the greatest shows on earth.

Go to Santorini -- and Greece -- for the light alone.


Comments or questions? Email me.

www.LoriHein.com

Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 9: Evening in Nafplio: Bouboulina and the Bourtzi

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April (the trip is getting close, and mom is getting nervous...) with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’ve devoted the last 9 daily posts to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary and will post a final Greece story tomorrow. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico...] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip. And, before I turn to the task of posting the meat of today's entry, a quick word of thanks to proud Texan and fellow Blogger, Wayne (aka Zippo the Pirate), for helping me navigate some of this software's rocky waters...)


Splendid Nafplio. A postcard-perfect place that gets up late, bustles from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, closes up siesta-tight during the afternoon’s hottest hours, works hard in early evening, dines at nine and later, then cruises the seafront promenade until the cool, early hours of tomorrow morning. I looked for holes in this lifestyle when I found myself living in it, but other than its not running according to my usual schedule, I found no weak spots. It’s mellow, sustainable, enviable.

Nafplio hangs out in two major places. Syndagma (Constitution) Square is a sweeping, marble-cobbled public space ringed by tavernas and anchored by fabulous architecture that tell Nafplio’s history. Sit at an al fresco café table and absorb a view that serves up the Palamidi, 700-foot-high Venetian fortress and crown of Nafplio; an imposing 18th-century Venetian naval warehouse-turned museum; an exquisite brick mosque built by the Ottoman Turks and reincarnated by the Greeks into a movie theater; the square itself, site of fervent demonstrations for Greek independence and a syndagma, a constitution, of their own.

Nafplio also hangs out on its seafront promenade, and evening is when things come alive. The place to be is quayside Bouboulina Street, named for Laskarina Bouboulina, a widowed mother of seven who commanded significant naval operations during the 1821 Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Turks and who participated personally in the siege of Nafplio.

Along Bouboulina Street couples stroll; grandmothers hold grandbabies in ample laps and tickle little chins; tiny boys hold their fathers’ hands and lean down over the water, looking for fish; young people cruise the promenade on motorbikes, stopping now and then for food and conversation; diners at tavernas like the Poseidon turn their chairs toward the sea and linger over meals of sparkling seafood; whole families walk the cobbles, slowly, sometimes holding hands; tourists try to capture the mellow mystery of this beautiful place, easing themselves into café seats, envying the people who live here; trios and quartets of big-bellied old men in short-sleeve shirts sit on waterfront benches and retell stories, nodding and grinning at each as if it were new.

And out in the harbor, where small wooden fishing boats bob at anchor, floats the Bourtzi (photo above), turned silhouette by a fireball sunset that throws orange and magenta onto the water and into the sky and paints the Argolid mountains purple. The Bourtzi is part of Nafplio’s architectural and historical signature. A castle on an island in the bay. Come evening, everyone is quayside, and there’s the Bourtzi, centerpiece of yet another Greek view that you try to fix securely inside somewhere so you'll never forget it. Holding your glass of wine, something white and crisp and citrusy, you try to figure out what you ever did to deserve this moment.

The Bourtzi looks like a dream, but the idyllic vision belies the building’s turbulent past. Built by the Venetians in 1471, it and its namesake island began life as Castel Pasqualigo, a fort to protect the entrance to what was then Venetian Napoli. After Venetians, Byzantines and Turks left the scene and Greeks regained control of Nafplio in 1822, the Bourtzi did a stint as a prison and then became the home of the town’s hangman. To keep the hangman a proper, decorous distance from townspeople, municipal leaders sequestered him out in the harbor in the cold stone rooms of the old fortress, where the prison worker became, effectively, a prisoner himself (although one who would keep his head).

Today, people sit in Nafplio and look out, wistfully, at the Bourtzi. Two hundred years ago, a man with a job considered necessary but too foul and distasteful for intercourse with the general populace sat in his clammy, sunless rooms in the Bourtzi and looked in, wistfully, at Nafplio.


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Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 8: Of Mycenae and men

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31 to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)


Oh, the intrigue that courses through this ancient place. It infuses every rock, wall, tomb and turn.

Fortress city of warrior-kings, the ruins of ancient Mycenae sit atop a rocky hill ringed by mountains. According to legend, Zeus’ son Perseus built Mycenae with the help of the Cyclops, a race of builder-giants with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads. The city of Cyclopean walls became the seat of the Atreids, a greedy and vengeful family whose sad, sordid story was told by Homer in the Iliad and by tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (proving that the writer’s nose for a good story goes back to ancient times).

The line-up of accursed, tragic figures who lived, loved, ruled, killed and debauched within and without Mycenae’s walls include Atreus (killed his brother’s sons and served them at a banquet); Menelaus (Atreus’ son and king of Sparta whose gorgeous wife, Helen – the face that launched a thousand ships -- indirectly started the Trojan War); Agamemnon (king of Mycenae who, responsible for leading the fight against King Priam and the Trojans, agreed to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in exchange for a favorable wind on which to sail to Troy. The goddess Artemis came to the rescue, pulling Iphigenia from the chopping block and sliding a deer in her place.); Orestes (persuaded by his sister, Electra, to kill his mother, Clytemnestra).

Mycenae is not on the list of favorite places to hold a family reunion.

After more than three thousand years, enter Heinrich Schliemann. A retired German businessman obsessed with characters from Homer’s epics, Schliemann began calling himself an archaeologist and persuaded the Turks to let him excavate the presumed site of ancient Troy. He found, and many say irreparably damaged, King Priam’s city, which sits at the mouth of the Dardanelles Strait, across the Aegean from Greece.

Jazzed by what his Trojan excavation yielded – there had, indeed, been a war there in ancient times – Schliemann, who lived and breathed Homer’s Trojan War epic, the Iliad, set out to fit the Mycenaean piece of the Homeric puzzle into its proper historical slots. If Priam and the Trojans had existed on one side of the supposed battle, then Agamemnon and the Mycenaeans must exist on the other.

And he found them. In 1876, Schliemann, using lines from ancient texts and stories as clues, started digging inside and to the right of Mycenae’s powerful Lion Gate entrance. He quickly found underground tombs, shaped like beehives (photo above), containing 19 royal corpses festooned with golden face masks, golden breast plates, gold necklaces, bracelets and headdresses. The Atreus clan. Agamemnon and kin.

Schliemann’s discovery was and remains, like Mycenae itself, colored with controversy and intrigue. (Newspapers rode the “Treasure of Atreus” story like seasoned jockeys: from “Amateur archaeologist declares, ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!’” to stories damning Schliemann’s crude excavation practices, poking holes in his “face of Agamemnon” assertion, and portraying Schliemann and his wife, Sophia, who sat for a photograph wearing pounds of found gold on her head, as thieves and opportunists.) Treasure of Atreus or not, 31 pounds of spectacular gold relics unearthed at Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann form the centerpiece of the Athens Museum’s Mycenaean Room.

Mycenae is not a joyful place. It broods, in its Cyclopean weightiness, on a gray, weather-beaten hillside.

But everything has its counterpoint. As you wander the ruins, listen for a sparkling tinkle, soft then sonorous, of bells tied to the necks of a thousand sheep being led across the rock-strewn mountaintop by a single shepherd.


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www.LoriHein.com

Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 7: Epidauros: Can you hear me now?

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31 to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)


“MAPMAPMA.” Signs for it are everywhere, fenced yards overflow with stacks of it, and trucks filled with slabs of it ply the pine-covered mountain roads that rise from the coast near Nafplio and meander to the incomparable theater at Epidauros. "Marmara. " Marble. We found ourselves behind lumbering marble trucks many times as we made our way up to Epidauros, and on one particularly long ascent, when we weren’t going anywhere any faster than the groaning marble-filled flatbed in front of us, I used the time to contemplate this splendid stone. Nature’s gift to people in hot places. Something about this rock makes it stay cool when the world around it blisters and burns. On a searing day in Greece, park yourself on a slab of marble and feel its chill go to work, soaking into your being and ratcheting your body temperature down a few degrees. Run your palms across its magnificent smoothness. Even a raw unsculpted slab is a thing of beauty. Eternal, strong, majestic.

Like the exquisite theater at Epidauros. Carved into one mountain and facing another, both the setting and structure send a shiver of awe through your bones. Timeless, powerful, perfect.

And its perfection is its hallmark. At the base of the theater’s 56 semi-circular stone rows of seats, which accommodate 14,000, lies the orchestra, a flat area where the chorus sang and danced. In the orchestra’s center is the base of an altar. On this spot, you can test the mathematical, scientific and architectural abilities of one Polyclitus the Younger.

Epidauros is generally attributed to Polyclitus, and scholars consider Epidauros the most perfect example of ancient theatrical architecture. Polyclitus used intricate mathematical formulas to mesh the audience’s sight lines with crystal clear acoustics. The theater is not completely concentric with the circular stage and orchestra area because his quest for visual and audible perfection led Polyclitus to nudge this and that a degree or two here and there. Imagine him walking the job, asking, “Can you hear me now?” to workmen 30, 40, 60, 70 feet below, adjusting cuts in the mountainside and repositioning stone seats, aisles and actors’ spaces to deliver maximum enjoyment to theatergoers. "People will be coming to see gory Greek tragedies, men, and I want them to have a good time!"

The result of Polyclitus’ pursuit of the perfect visual and acoustical experience is that average Joes in the cheap seats see and hear almost as well as those sitting front and center. At Epidauros, even the nosebleed seats at the top of the house are good seats – very good seats. Even up there, you can hear the whisper of an actor or the rustle of sheet music.

Grab a friend. Stand on the altar base in the middle of the orchestra. Send your friend to the 56th row, some 75 feet up the mountainside from the orchestra. When you ask, “Can you hear me now?” and your friend waves, nods or shouts in the affirmative, know that Polyclitus is smiling. A life’s work well done. Bravo, Polyclitus. Take a bow.


Comments or questions? Email me.


www.LoriHein.com

Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 6: Corinth: A canal runs through it

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31 to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)

The Corinth Canal both divides and connects. Cut through a narrow neck of land between the Attic and Peloponnesian peninsulas, the four-mile-long waterway separates Athens and Greece’s northern mainland from the storied cities – Corinth, Mycenae, Nafplio, Epidauros, Olympia, Mystra, Sparta – of the Peloponnese, a rocky, mountainous land filled with mystery and antiquities.

While it separates Greece’s mainland regions, the canal, only 82-feet wide and 26-feet deep, unites bays and gulfs and oceans to allow ships of up to 10,000 tons to move between the Adriatic and Ionian seas north and west of Greece and the Aegean, south and east, without negotiating the long water route around the Peloponnesian peninsula.

As they head for their visit to ancient Corinth, the OA kids may get a glimpse of the canal from the Corinth superhighway, an ugly stretch of high-speed concrete that’s carried over the canal by a high bridge (background in above photo). But blink, and you’ll miss the canal: eighty-two feet goes by quickly when you’re rolling along at 60 miles per hour. (In fact, since the bus driver will be doing all the work, the Corinth superhighway is a good place for the OA kids to snooze and rest up for a night out in Nafplio, because the roadside scenery between Athens and Corinth, while interesting in the what-makes-this-area-tick sense, is largely unattractive and chock-full of heavy industry, oil refineries, cranes and shipyards, and tankers plying the Saronic Gulf.)

There is a viewing area on the highway road bridge, but better views of the canal can be had by lowering oneself to its level. At Isthmia, where the above photo was taken, you can stand on the small bridge that crosses the waterway and leads into town – a bridge mechanically lowered and submerged when a ship enters the watery conduit. Standing here, looking up at the canal’s 260-foot-high severe rock walls and down its unerringly straight deep-blue length, you realize you’re staring at a spectacular undertaking, something that took a mix of dreamers, madmen, geniuses, logical thinkers, engineers and strong-backed laborers to create.

Begun in 1882 by a French company that went bankrupt and left the scene, the Corinth Canal was completed by the Greeks in 1893. But traders since ancient times have tried to turn the Isthmus of Corinth into a Peloponnesian shortcut. As early as the 7th century B.C., a Greek ruler tried, unsuccessfully, to chop through the Isthmus. In A.D. 67, Emperor Nero himself attended a canal ground-breaking ceremony. When the Romans and their army of laborers, mainly Jewish slaves from Palestine, were interrupted by the small matter of uprisings in Gaul, canal work stopped completely. So, until 1893, merchants wishing to avoid sailing around the entire Peloponnese moved their ships across the narrow spit of land the old-fashioned way: they hauled them. On the canal’s west end, at Possidonia near Corinth, one can see traces of the ancient diolkos, the ruts and slipways used to drag ships, on chariots or wooden rollers, between seas now connected by the Corinth Canal.


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www.LoriHein.com

Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 5: Let them eat octopus

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31 to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)


We stopped for gas and learned about olives. The white stucco gas station sat on a thin, gray road between Nafplio and Xiropigado, a beach resort town on the Arcadian coast. Olive groves surrounded the station on three sides and spread to the horizon. Another endless grove sat across the road.

After he finished pumping, the gas station owner handed us a brochure describing seafront apartments he owned in Xiropigado and tried, in a mixture of English and Italian, to persuade us to decamp from our Nafplio hotel and move to the beach. We were very happy in Nafplio, but promised to consider his property the next time we visited the Peloponnese.

We asked about the armies of olive trees that marched up the hillsides, and it turned out that some of the groves belonged to our enterprising friend. I asked whether the olives were picked by hand. “Yes, by hand. There are plenty of people – some are gypsies from Bulgaria and Romania – who work when it is time to pick the olives.” We learned that the fruit of an olive tree is picked every two years and that November and December are the prime picking months.

Inside his gas station, our friend had a row of liter water bottles filled with hand-pressed olive oil. He picked one up and offered it to us. We were staying in hotels and had no cooking facilities, so we declined his gesture but did accept the next gift he offered. He plucked a pink carnation and a sprig of basil from a window box and passed the scented herb under my nose. “Vassiliki,” he said. “So you will not forget Greece.” I assured him that was impossible.

The gas station set in a sea of olive trees and selling hand-pressed oil from those trees is a metaphor for the close connection Greeks have to their food and its sources. Greeks harvest the sea and land around them. Greek food is invariably fresh and often eaten close to its source. Greek tavernas, restaurants, markets, shops and bakeries offer a beautiful, bountiful array. Americans, accustomed, sadly, to the packaged, processed and chemically preserved products purveyed without love or care by corporate food factories and monolithic agribusinesses, should find the Greek table a refreshingly flavorful experience, one to be savored. Greek fare is good, simple and healthy. Linger and enjoy.

While in Greece, I developed a weakness for octopus (oktapodia) and squid (kalimari), marinated and charbroiled on an open grill, often right in the street. Fish of the gods. Some of the other lovely, fresh foods to experiment with and appreciate:

Almonds (amigdala); apricots (verikoka); dates (chourmas); figs (sika); honey (meli); olives (elies); nuts (fistika); yogurt with chopped cucumber and garlic (tzatziki); stuffed grape leaves (dolmades); cheese pie/quiche (tiropitakia); mussels (mithia); Santorini’s famed bean soup (fassoulata); sardines (sardeles); prawns (garides); meat kabobs (souvlakia); bread (psomi); eggplant casserole (moussaka); salad with tomato, cuke, onion, pepper and a raft of feta (salata horiatiki); rice (risi); grapes (stafilia).

Eat and be happy. As for the charbroiled octopus that left me weak in the knees and contemplating never going home, Harry’s Greece Travel Guide offers this (very straightforward) recipe for do-it-yourselfers:


BROILED BABY OCTOPUS FOR SIX

2 LBS. FRESH BABY OCTOPUS ½ CUP LEMON JUICE
SALT AND PEPPER TO TASTE ½ CUP OLIVE OIL

- WASH the octopus
- DRY the octopus
- POUND the octopus with a meat hammer until it begins to shred
- CUT the octopus crosswise into pieces
- MIX other ingredients in a bowl
- ADD the octopus and marinate one hour
- SKEWER the octopus
- BROIL the octopus on a charcoal burner or oven broiler rack, 10 minutes each side

Chow.



Comments or questions? Email me

www.LoriHein.com

Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 4: What's up, Acropolis?

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31 to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)

Acro – upper. Polis – city. Athens’ Acropolis, the soaring limestone hill crowned by the still majestic Parthenon, is a place you have to see with your own eyes. Countless people have seen it before you, and thousands of photographs have been made of it, but when your turn comes to look upon this powerful high place, it knows it’s being seen again for the first time, and it delivers its millionth debut with quiet strength and grace.

Walk quietly among its stones and columns, consider its seminal role in the development of democracy and civil freedoms, and accord it respect and awe. The lady may be old – in this case, she’s in ruins – but she’s beautiful, and full of stories. All you have to do is look and listen. To Athens' rocks.

The Acropolis and the area that surrounds it hold countless sights and treasures. The Parthenon, while missing more than a few of its “marbles” – massive pieces of the structure spirited from Greece by Britain’s Lord Elgin in 1801 after a sweetheart deal with the occupying Turks, housed ever since in London’s British Museum, and pursued for centuries by the Greeks, who’d like them back – is just one of the wonders of the Acropolis. (Called the Elgin Marbles for centuries, the massive sculptures and pieces of the Parthenon's main frieze are, in a nod to political and cultural correctness, increasingly referred to as the Parthenon Marbles to signify both their provenance and the place to which many hope they will return.)

Athens offers much to the visitor, and while on the Acropolis, be sure to see:

*** The Beule Gate – You’ll enter the Acropolis from here, after climbing a long series of steps from the street below. As you walk beneath the gate, consider that it’s 1,738 years old – and built from destroyed Dorian buildings older than that. If stones could talk…

*** The Propylaia – The monumental entranceway just inside the gate, incorporating the Temple of Athena Nike. Stand before the Propylaia and look up. Its massive size and position at the edge of the Acropolis hillside induce both wonder and vertigo. The Nike temple is crisp, efficient, compact and elegant. Nike is the ancient Greek goddess of victory. The sneaker people didn’t invent the name. They borrowed it. In the land that birthed the Olympics and the marathon and raised sport to an art form, Nike’s been putting wings on feet for thousands of years.

*** The Erechtheion – Look for six chicks holding a whole porch up on their heads. The stone ladies are caryatids, architectural support columns sculpted into human shapes, usually female. The Erectheion’s Porch of the Caryatids shows that women have been carrying their share of the load since ancient times.

*** The Acropolis Museum – No groans. If the word “museum” describes a place you’d rather pass on given the choice, hang on. It’s the word that’s the problem, and it shouldn't be. “Museum” derives from the Muses, nine Greek goddesses who breathed life into poetry, music, drama, science. Inspiration. The Muses also lend their name to the words “music” and “mosaic,” things of beauty created by men to adorn and celebrate life. A museum is a place with beautiful or interesting things to look at. The Acropolis Museum is a quick take on art, history, commerce, politics -- well worth a few minutes of musing. Enjoyable and easy to digest (cool, too – you’ll welcome the temporary relief from the hot Acropolis sun). Go in one side and come out the other enriched.

*** The theaters – There’d be no Oscars without the Greeks. They invented theater . (Giving the world democracy wasn’t enough.) As you stand on the Acropolis, look down at the Odeon and the Theatre of Dionysus. Imagine the citizenry of ancient Athens gathered on a hot night, dark waters of the Saronic Gulf sparkling in the distance, hooting at the biting wit of an Aristophanes comedy or wringing their hands over the tribulations of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Audiences gather in these ancient stone seats still today for plays and concerts.

*** The slopes – The Acropolis is a hill. Hills have slopes, and these slopes have treasures. Plaka, an ancient neighborhood under the Acropolis, is history layered on history. I remember standing in an old Plaka street built into the Acropolis’ slope and taking in six ages of history and architecture in a single sweep of my eyes: the Parthenon of ancient Greece; the Agora, a market and public gathering place built by the Romans; a Byzantine church; Venetian houses, restored and refurbished; the ruins of a mosque built by the Turks during the Ottoman occupation; high-rise concrete apartment buildings of modern Athens. Six distinct epochs of history in one eyeful. Not far from Plaka is the old neighborhood of Monastiraki, where you'll find more locals than tourists (who are in Plaka). A walk around the bottom perimeter of the Acropolis’ slopes yields hints and pieces of antiquity hiding under trees, behind bushes. Patches of ancient Roman mosaic floors. If you peer beyond the fences that separate the Acropolis hill from the city’s street level, you may spy remnants of hand-laid stone floors that Roman patricians, merchants and civic leaders walked on two thousand years ago. Hidden in the gray-green oak scrub, forgotten, except by you.


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Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 3: Working out in Nafplio

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31 to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)

OA's spring sports season is already underway, and many of the kids going to Greece in April will be missing practices, games, meets and matches. Kids, assure your coaches that you’ll keep those calves and quads tuned by taking advantage of the superlative workout opportunities your Greek journey will put literally in your path.

In Athens, a brisk sprint up the Acropolis hill. On Santorini, dashes up, down and through Fira’s steep, stepped streets. And in Nafplio, a vertigo-inducing run (or spirited walk if the sun is high and hot) up the 857 steps of Palamidi Fortress (photo above -- note zigzag stairs hanging onto the mountainside), the 17th-century Venetian bastion that sits 700-feet above the beautiful town, sea and Argolid plain. The Palamidi is Nafplio’s crown. If you take on this great outdoor Stairmaster, you’ll be rewarded at the top with views sure to take away any breath you’re lucky or fit enough to have left.

Nafplio (variously spelled Nauplio, Nauplion, Nauplia, Nafplion, Navplio...) is named for its legendary founder, Nauplios, son of Poseidon. The Palamidi is named for Nauplios’ son, Palamedes, an enterprising young man with an eclectic array of hobbies and pursuits. The ancient Greeks considered him to be king of inventors. (Odysseus and Diomedes, jealous of his genius, considered him a too-brilliant rival and had him killed.)

In addition to arranging letters introduced by the Phoenician, Cadmos, and inventing the order that turned them into the Greek alphabet, legend credits Palamedes with inventing lighthouses, money, numbers, weights and measures, and military tactics. Not content to be an ordinary overachiever, Palamedes became a great doctor and a celebrated astronomer.

He is also said to have been on the battlefield at Troy, where he invented pastimes that the poker players in the OA group (I believe there are one or two…) will appreciate: dice and board games to keep his fellow soldiers occupied while they waited for the siege order.


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www.LoriHein.com

Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 2: The Santorini explosion

(To blog readers: My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31 to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)


A few hours after arriving on Santorini, I made my daily journal entry, part of which reads, “Incomparable. Glorious. The setting by itself makes a trip halfway across the globe, even for an hour, worthwhile.”

The OA kids have more than an hour to spend on Santorini, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Whether called by its ancient name, Thira, for an 8th-century Spartan colonizer, or by the more recent Byzantine name evoking Saint Irene, the island, shaped by an epic volcanic explosion that caused a tidal wave that rolled as far as Crete and perhaps wiped out King Minos and his Minoans, is a place of a lifetime.

The OA kids are taking a ferry to Santorini, and the sea approach is mind-blowing. Santorini may or may not be the volcanic vestige of lost Atlantis, but when your ship carves through the Aegean and puts you face to face with the dramatic cliff-faced island thrust a thousand feet above the sea, white-washed houses and blue-domed churches sprinkled across the rim of the ancient volcano like sparkling cubes of sugar, you’re in a mood to believe any myth or legend.

From the ferry terminal, it’s a 587-step walk or donkey ride up the cobbled, switchback path from the sea to Fira, the island’s main town. There’s also a vertiginous road, plied by taxis and buses.

Fira town, where the OA kids are staying, is tourist central. Travelers from all over the world walk Fira’s streets in shorts and sandals looking for cheap food, lodging and ferry rates to Paros, Naxos, Ios, Crete, Piraeus. Fira’s streets are good for eating, shopping, people watching.

But the view’s the thing, and all eyes inevitably, irresistibly turn outward toward the Aegean and the wondrous physical beauty of a place created by one of the biggest natural blasts in history. Four thousand years ago, Thira was a mountain, a volcano rising from the sea. When the volcano exploded, the mountain collapsed, and its slopes became today’s croissant-shaped island. Santorini is the rim of the exploded volcano, and its spectacular bay – yellow, gold, orange, blue, magenta or wine-dark depending on the position of the sun – is the crater, a seven-mile-wide, sea-filled caldera.

Santorini. Ancient inferno turned paradise.


Comments or questions? Email me.

www.LoriHein.com

Oliver Ames goes to Greece, part 1: It's Greek to me

(To blog readers: : My son is traveling to Greece in April with a group from Massachusetts’ Oliver Ames [OA] High School [see March 5 post]. To give students and parents a glimpse of some of the places on the group’s itinerary and to provide links to sites the travelers may find helpful, I’m devoting 10 consecutive daily posts from March 22 through March 31st to places on the kids’ Greek itinerary. [I can’t think of a better place than Greece to hang, really or virtually, but if you’d like to go elsewhere, cruise the archives to visit scores of other great places, from Jamaica to Jordan, Malta to Mexico.] Wherever you end up, Kalo taxidi! Have a good trip.)

You start to see them the minute you step off the plane in Athens – strange-looking letters, some of which have no equivalent in the Latin alphabet you’re used to, strung into strange-looking words. Time to break out your secret decoder ring (a chart like this one, showing upper and lower case Greek letters and their pronunciations. Print this or one of the other charts linked to in this post, or make sure there’s a good one in your guidebook).

This post is a quiz of sorts. The taverna menu in the photo above is a good example of what you’ll see everyday in Greece. Crack the Greek alphabet code, and you’ll be able to tell whether this taverna, whose menu is written entirely in Greek with no transliteration into Roman letters, offers souvlaki, those mouthwatering grilled meat kebabs you’ve been itching to try.

Let’s start at the top of the menu. The Greek and Roman alphabets share many common letters with identical or similar pronunciations, reducing the amount of decoding work you actually have to do. But all is not as it seems. You might think “TABEPNA” is pronounced “ta-BEP-na.” Nope. In Greek, the B isn’t b and the P isn’t p. B is the upper case form of vita, pronounced “v.” P is the upper case form of ro, pronounced like a rolling “r.” So, TABEPNA is “ta-VER-na.” (Make sure your decoder ring…er, alphabet chart, shows both upper and lower cases, as the lower case versions of some letters look nothing like their upper case parents – Y and v, and H and n, for example – all of which are pronounced “ee.”)

So what can you get at the Lantern Taverna in the stunning city of Nafplio? (The words under TABEPNA transliterate to “Ta Fanaria” – “at the lanterns.”)

Consulting your decoder ring letter chart, you decipher that the first three items under the establishment’s name are Orektika – hors d’oeuvres like olives, cocktail onions, almonds, hard-boiled eggs, bits of squid; Salates – salads; and Tiria – cheeses.

Your turn. Find the potatoes. Two hints: the Greek word transliterates to patates, and the “p” is that good old Greek letter you learned in math, pi. Once you’ve nailed the potatoes, find the souvlaki. It’s there, twice, and it starts with a letter that looks like a sideways “M” but is really sigma, the Greek “s” sound. If you find the souvlaki, sniffing out the moussaka will be easy. Sigma’s in moussaka, too.

It may still be Greek to you, but with a little detective work, at least you’ll know how to pronounce it.

Now, put your pronunciation skills to work learning some key Greek words and phrases. Little things really do mean a lot, and by attempting a few Greek words, you become an ambassador for your country and a very cool citizen of the planet. Your guidebook should have a basic vocabulary, and these links to smartphrase.com and greece.org offer some, as well.

Before traveling to any country, you should, at a minimum, learn to say hello, good-bye, thank-you, please, yes, no, good, sorry. You’ll be amazed at the goodwill you’ll generate by attempting these few simple words. Your effort to say something – anything – in a country’s native tongue demonstrates respect. And, you’ll be amazed at how useful these eight words can be. Coupled with body language – smiling, pointing, shrugging, head-knodding, hand gestures – these eight words, alone or in combination, can carry you through quite a few encounters. You can, for example, complement a cook, restaurant owner or waiter on a wonderful meal by pointing to your plate, smiling, and saying, “Good. Thank-you.” If your guide raises an invisible camera to his eyes, his way of asking if you’d like to stop and take a photo, “Yes, please” will stop the bus. And, if you accidentally bump into a fetching member of the opposite sex, you can excuse yourself and indicate interest by saying, with a smile, “Sorry! Hello…” Endless combinations and possibilities…

Here’s the easiest way to say hello, good-bye, thank-you, please, yes, no, good and sorry in Greek (transliterated into super-simplified sounds so you can start practicing right away without consulting your decoder ring...):

Hello: YA-soo
Goodbye: an-DEE-o
Thank-you: ef-ar-ee-STO
Please: pa-ra-ka-LO
Yes: neh
No: O-hee
Good: ka-LO
Sorry: sig-NO-mee

Eight magic words, in any language.



Comments or questions? Email me

www.LoriHein.com

Send me no flowers

Flowers wilt and chocolates melt.

For Mother's Day, May 8, give a few hours of joy and adventure. You can order online, but if you'd liked signed copies of Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America for moms, wives, sisters, grandmothers and friends, it's not too early to order. (If you'd like a special inscription, please include desired message with your order. ) Proceeds continue to go to tsunami releif.

"Wonderfully textured and beautifully written...a testament not only to this country, but also to family." -- Jordan Rich, WBZ NewsRadio, Boston

"No trains, no ships, just a reliable minivan captained by a loving mother determined to ensure that her children discover America's heart and each other... I highly recommend sharing Ribbons of Highway with those you love." -- Lynda Lukow, reviewer, MyShelf.com

"May this book serve as a reminder that all events, large or small, will shape your relationship with your children as well as their view of the world around them." -- inscription requested by Nora, a reader (and Pilates instructor extraordinaire), for the gift copies she gave to her six best friends

Michael's memories of Ireland

Last evening, to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, the residents of a Boston-area senior housing complex took a one-hour trip to Ireland. Their guide was 91-year-old Michael Saparoff, and their mode of transport was Michael’s travel slide collection. For the past five years, Michael has treated fellow residents to a monthly travelogue, taking his friends to far-off places most have never seen and now, surely never will, except through Michael’s words and pictures.

I wrote a newspaper story about Michael as part of a series about vibrant, giving seniors who prove wrong the notion that growing old means growing less useful, less alive. When I interviewed him last summer, I learned about the hours of preparation and practice Michael invests in each travelogue evening. He does this, he told me, “because it’s very good for the mind.” He also does it for Delphine.

Michael and his wife came to the senior community together, some half-dozen years ago, but an infection left Delphine needing permanent physical care, so she moved to a nursing home. Michael visits her twice daily, “at eleven, and again at four.”

When Michael presents a travelogue, Delphine is in the audience, and last evening she traveled to Ireland again with her husband. “I bring my wife over every time,” Michael told me. “She comes for dinner, and people make a big to-do about her. She’s the good-looking girl in the slides.” Pausing, he added, “She’s ninety, and she’s still a good-looking girl.”

Much about Ireland has changed since Michael’s visit. The Celtic Tiger has created a robust, technology-based economy with a GDP envied by the traditional European powerhouses. Rather than leave, young Irish stay, in droves, because there’s work. Today’s visitors see fewer picturesque thatched-roof cottages, increasingly demolished in favor of modern housing, and they see sights Michael didn’t see, like the stainless steel spike, a new monument to Ireland’s vigor, that towers over O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main boulevard.

But Ireland’s an ancient place, and Michael’s photographs are, today, as valid a record of Irish culture, history and architecture as they were when he made them. A few decades haven’t changed the magnificent gray stonework of Dublin’s thousand-year-old Christchurch Cathedral; the venerable quadrangle of Trinity College, whose soaring library houses the Book of Kells, an illuminated medieval manuscript that is a wonder to look upon; the 27 Dublin acres of blooms and lawns and historic buildings that are St. Stephen’s Green; the romantic, roofless late Gothic remains of 15th-century Muckross Abbey (photo above) floating on green grass above purple-misted Lower Killarney Lake; the powerful ruins of Donegal Castle, built astride the River Eske by a 16th-century O’Donnell family chieftain.

Like Michael and his memories, timeless.


www.LoriHein.com

RibbonsofHighway.blogspot.com is Good Housekeeping Site of the Day pick

I love waking up to nice emails, and I got one this morning.

This blog, Ribbons of Highway, has been selected as a Good Housekeeping Site of the Day and will be featured on March 23rd at GH's DailyInbox.com.

Thanks for continuing to visit for fresh doses of travel writing and photography.

Like the blog? You'll love the book.

Boston: On the run in Southie

"Too bad they changed the course,” said the guy walking next to me as we entered Boston’s World Trade Center early yesterday morning. We were two of the 8,500 people who’d signed up for Boston’s Run To Remember, a new half-marathon honoring the over 280 Massachusetts law enforcement officers lost in the line of duty. Net proceeds from the race will benefit the Boston Police Foundation’s Kids at Risk Program and help provide safe, active, kid-friendly alternatives to hanging out on the street or spending endless hours home alone.

“Changed the course??!! You’re kidding!” I stopped walking and stared at my new friend.

“No. It’s changed. We’re not going along the river. We don’t even go over that way. We’re going through South Boston. Down by the docks.”

I wasn’t happy. Not only did I have the original 13.1-mile route through the heart of the city down pat in my head, visualization being a key component of my distance-running strategy, but I was going to be cheated out of spending time down by the banks of the river Charles, that formerly dirty water extolled by The Standells in their backhanded 1966 love song. Running the Charles, both its Boston and Cambridge sides, is one of the running world's great urban experiences, and I was counting on the incomparable city and river views and excellent people-watching to make a fair chunk of the race’s miles go down easier.

Thoreau wrote, “A river touching the back of a town is like a wing. River towns are winged towns.” The Charles gives Boston its wings. We’re a city on the ocean, but the Charles is our waterfront. Our ocean side, the front of the town to Thoreau’s back, isn’t people friendly, given over as it is to pricey hotels and condos, warehouses, the airport, and ship terminals and docks. Instead of the graceful stone arches of the Longfellow Bridge, which spans the Charles and carries the shiny cars of the "T's" Red Line, it looked like I was going to get an eyeful of docks, and not the picturesque, peeling-paint, sleepy fishing village variety.

My morning was off to an inauspicious start. Course change; no Charles; not enough toilets or time to accommodate the full bladders of 8,500 super-hydrated athletes; only static on the 10 stations I’d preset into my radio (around mile seven I’d catch a snatch of Mick Jagger wailing Beast of Burden, and I felt like one. My second wind usually kicks in around seven, but my first hadn’t even made an appearance yet); warnings from race officials to watch out for potholes; deep slush puddles birthed by last night’s snowstorm; a pesky sesmoid bone in my right foot that flared up after last weekend’s 18-mile marathon training run. The gun went off, and I decided to look for nothing more from this outing than thirteen pain-free miles.

The first five miles were a familiar jaunt through Boston’s historic center. Past Faneuil Hall and the Old State House, where the Declaration of Independence was first read publicly from a balcony overlooking State Street below. Along the cobbles of Downtown Crossing’s pedestrian zone (photo above) to Boston Common, start of the Freedom Trail. Near the Common, a big knot of men stood outside the homeless shelter where they’d spent the night. Forced to vacate the shelter during daylight hours, they were visibly and audibly delighted at the unexpected 9 am sight of thousands of women running by in Spandex. We ran to Beacon Hill, where those who hadn’t focused on hill training groaned – the course change required that we run up it. But the gold dome of the State House at Beacon Street’s crest acted like a magnet and pulled us to the top.

At five miles, the thousands who’d signed up to run just that distance finished their race, and the half-marathoners headed for South Boston, a part of the city that some argue has its own language and a part that I don’t know very well. On this course, I expected only the cargo terminals and warehouses of streets like Black Falcon and Dry Dock Avenues, but as we pushed farther into Southie, we were treated to slices of neighborhood life and groups of spectators who’d come out of their triple-deckers to stand on the sidewalk and cheer us on. Southie is the epicenter of Boston’s Irish community (and on the day of the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade, March 20 this year, epicenter of holiday fun for more than a half million "Irishmen" of all nationalities).

At a turnaround marked by parked police cars with blue lights flashing, we passed the Curley Community Center's M Street facility, smack on the ocean. Dedicated in 1931 by colorful mayor James Michael Curley to promote fitness among South Boston residents, the Center’s beachfront annexes at K, L and M Streets collectively offer activities that include bingo, boxing, kid camps and senior lunches, a men’s card room, aerobic and cardio training, handball, weights, a solarium. And running and swimming. The L Street facility, just up the broad seafront avenue from the turnaround point, is better known outside Southie than its K and M counterparts, largely because of its harriers and human polar bears.

The L Street Running Club, which offers members long run camaraderie during Boston Marathon training season, takes to the streets the rest of the year under the motto, “No Pace too Slow – No Distance too Short.” And the L Street Brownies have been plunging into the L Street Beach’s chilly Atlantic waters since the early 1900’s, often for charity. Their coldest and most famous dunk is their Annual New Year’s Day Swim.

We were in for one more treat on the South Boston course. A last major turnaround that would tee us up for the push to and through the home stretch came at Castle Island, a piece of strategic oceanfront real estate fortified since 1634 by a succession of forts built to protect Boston from sea-based attacks. As we looped around the island’s parking lot, using precious energy to leap over puddles and potholes, giant jetliners on approach to nearby Logan Airport soared and whistled, landing gear engaged, just over our heads. We must have been a sight to see from the air – a twisty, moving, several mile-long chain of runners clad in black and pastels and primary colors.

In the final two miles, my radio sprang to life and gifted me with enough Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac to energize me for a bolt to the finish. Incredibly, despite the race’s unpromising beginning, I was on target to beat my best half-marathon time. If a PR (personal record) is within reach, most runners dig deep and kick whatever they’ve got left into overdrive.

It was a Run To Remember. I PR’ed. My foot didn’t hurt. My entry fee went to help kids. And I had a rewarding tour of South Boston, a slice of the city I’d too long overlooked.


www.LoriHein.com

Iceland's banana tree

The kids thought they’d have a snow day today. I had a feeling they wouldn’t. They’ve had so many already this winter that they’ll be lucky if they’re free by the 4th of July... Some Boston-area towns have held or are threatening to hold classes on Saturdays to meet the state requirement that public school students get a full 185 days a year.

Last night around 10pm, Adam looked out the window at the raging whiteout and said, grinning hugely, “They haven’t even started to plow yet.” I warned against counting unhatched chickens and predicted that town officials would have roads and sidewalks cleared by morning. They did.

The world was a white wonderland at 5:30 this morning when I went outside to start digging out. The air was so cold it cut like a knife as it traveled from my nose and mouth to my lungs. Crisp, icy, like the color blue. The snow crunched and made a satisfying, grinding sound underfoot. The sound iceberg lettuce makes when you break it apart.

I shoveled my way down the walkway and stood in the street. The rising sun was just clearing the peak of the O'Briens' roof, and it threw a glorious orange-magenta blaze onto Reynolds Street. The plows had packed the street snow down to a hard, sparkling, mother-of-pearl surface. My neighbors were still in bed, and I had the white world to myself. Fences and tree limbs, porches and eaves, yards and driveways sat draped in a pure, crystalline coat. It looked like Iceland.

Winter can be harsh and brutal, but days like today and places like Iceland let the season show its other face – clean, fresh, unsullied, intense, brilliant.

A few years ago, on a day like this when cold and light and crispness become animate forces that bite and pierce and penetrate, I joined a day tour that started in Reykjavik, Iceland and traveled through a winter world of staggering beauty. I scrambled up the lip of extinct Kerio Volcano and peered into its ancient, snow-filled crater. I took in the icy massiveness of still active Mt. Hekla, which commanded the horizon for miles. I bought handmade red glass earrings from an artisan in Hverageroi, a geothermal town that’s harnessed the energy it sits on and created a greenhouse industry that supplies Icelanders with tomatoes and cucumbers year round. (A banana tree grows in Iceland, and I have a picture to prove it.) I stood on the wooden walkway overlooking Gulfoss, Europe’s largest waterfall, parts of it thundering and rushing down the canyon, other parts suspended into dreamlike ice sculptures of epic proportions. In the Geysir region, the hot spring Strokkur, Iceland’s Old Faithful, blew its steaming insides far into the cobalt sky.

And between sites, I sat in my front row bus seat and watched Icelandic ponies run free along the road. Their breath formed clouds as they cantered ahead of us.

www.LoriHein.com

Join me at the Boomer Women Speak Travel Forum in May

Dotsie Bregel, the wonderful founder and editor of BoomerWomenSpeak.com, an online community designed to "encourage, connect and support baby boomer women," has invited me to act as travel expert on the site's Travel Forum during the month of May. Please join me! Boomer Women Speak is fast becoming a major women's website, with a half million visitor hits in January alone. I'm honored at Dotsie's invitation and eager to "talk travel" with women everywhere.

I'll check in with the forum each day in May to answer questions about trip planning, foreign travel, travel with kids, women traveling, intergenerational travel, staying safe while traveling -- any travel-related topic of interest to Boomer Women. I'll also discuss and answer questions about my book, Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America," which Dotsie is kindly featuring in the books section of her site, complete with a link to Amazon. (Thanks a million, Dotsie...). Dotsie, who read and "thoroughly enjoyed" Ribbons, felt May would be a good month for me to be available, as women will be thinking about and planning for summer travel -- perhaps even a cross-country trip of their own.

Click on Boomer Women Speak and sign up for Dotsie's free newsletter, and jump into some of the great discussion forums on the site. Boomer Women Speak is "a place to share stories, give and receive advice, and meet new friends."

Email this post to let your friends know about Boomer Women Speak, and please pop by the Travel Forum in May. I'd love to chat with all of you.

(Ribbons proceeds continue to aid tsunami relief.)

Mrs. Johnson's Ten Commandments of Travel

Adam, 16, is going to Greece. Without me. He's going on an ACIS-sponsored trip with a group from his high school. He's been to all the places the group will visit, but he'll be seeing things with the eyes of a young man, not a boy on vacation with his family. I'll encourage him to try things like marinated octopus and to take along and consult my Michelin Green Guide , but on this trip, he'll make his own decisions.

Mrs. Eveline Johnson, a social studies teacher, is leading the group of some 60 students and 17 adult chaperones. She's been leading these tours for many years and has developed the following Ten Commandments of Travel to help the young voyagers make good decisions and appreciate and enjoy their experience. These commandments should be carved onto stone tablets and placed in the international departures lounges of the world's airports:

The Ten Commandments of Travel

1. Thou shalt not expect to find things as thou hast them at home, for thou hast left home to find things different.

2. Thou shalt not take anything too seriously, for a care-free mind is the beginning of fine travelling.

3. Thou shall not let others get on thy nerves for thou art paying good money to enjoy thyself.

4. Remember to take only half of the clothes thou thinks thou needs - and twice the money.

5. Know at all times where thy passport is, for a person without a passport is a person without a country.

6. Remember that if we had been expected to stay in one place, we would have been created with roots.

7. Thou shalt not worry, for he that worrieth hath no pleasure - few things are truly fatal.

8. When in Rome, be prepared to do somewhat as the Romans do. Same goes for Athens, Santorini and Nauplion.

9. Thou shalt not judge the people of a country by the one person who hast given them trouble.

10. Remember, thou art a guest in other lands, and he that treateth his host with respect will be honoured.

To that I say, "Amen."

(I will devote 10 consecutive blog posts to Greece and the destinations that my son's group will visit so the kids' parents can enjoy a virtual journey. The Greece posts will begin on Tuesday, March 22 and run daily through Thursday, March 31. Watch for more octopus, a funky Acropolis, world-class sunsets, Venetian fortresses, beehive tombs and the most beautiful island on the planet (yep, Santorini). )

Newsweek's Quindlen calls Gates "Ode to Joy, in Bright Orange"

My third and last post about Christo's Gates (see Feb 17 and Feb 21). I promised a photo. I managed to squeeze off a few before my beloved Nikon, 31 years old, decided to quit on me. I guess she didn't feel like working in the 16-degree midtown freeze. She's at the camera hospital as I type this. This is a camera that you fix. A camera that makes people on the street stop and stare, some whistling words like, "What a beauty!" or "That's a camera..." Some people ask to hold it, and they hand it back with appreciation and reluctance. If they take a picture with it, they marvel at and comment on its substantial, steel heft and the rich, deep tone of the shutter as it clicks.

In the March 7, 2005 issue of Newsweek, columnist Anna Quindlen wrote a piece about The Gates titled "Ode to Joy, in Bright Orange." Like me, Quindlen found it important that "'The Gates' made the people walking beneath its swaying curtains smile."

She writes, "We've lost sight of rituals of happiness. Oh, we've become adept, even mechanical, at remembrance and regret...But the public gestures that make us smile have slipped away..."

Noting that "All over this country there are cities and towns troubled by natural disasters, personal loss, tragedies," Quindlen, like so many others, found joy in The Gates simply because "For lots of people, the installation made them happy for no reason, the way a spring day does..."

May you find some joy today.


Ribbons of Highway book proceeds continue to go to tsunami relief.

Srinagar, India: Houseboats, wedding barges and beer

(Postscript right up front: Travel today, while bountifully rich in rewards, carries risks, and it’s wise to assess a destination’s security situation before visiting. This post describes a sojourn in an area of India considered by some governments to be, as of this date, unsafe for travel. Please see the end of this post for links to sources of information on travel safety, security and the threat of terrorism.)


We’d rented a houseboat, Mother India, which sat in Dal Lake in Srinagar, the contested and still strife-torn summer capital of northwest India's Himalayan department of Jammu and Kashmir. With a large Muslim population and history and culture shaped by centuries of Mogul rule, Srinagar is one of the pieces of real estate over which predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan continue to butt heads. Srinagar erupts periodically with clashes, many deadly, between Kashmir’s Muslim separatists and Indian government troops.

Things were peaceful when we visited, but we managed to create our own bit of intercultural friction.

It was chilly inside Mother India, but the furnishings were luxurious, and the whole place was finished in deep, patrician tones of gold and navy, rust and cinnamon, cream and hunter green. Brass fittings; mahogany paneling and furniture; lace and damask curtains; richly brocaded sofa and chairs; plush hand-loomed Asian carpets; elegant blood-orange flowers in a sparkling crystal vase.

And a houseboy.

I don’t do luxe very well – I have trouble getting past the waste and inequity of it – and Mother India’s interior – and certainly the young Muslim man assigned to cater to our whims – made me uncomfortable. But we’d spent other nights in India in seven-dollar hotel rooms that were little more than clammy concrete cells, so we rolled with it and decided to enjoy this floating mini-palace that looked like the Raj hadn’t ended and Queen Victoria was expected for tea.

We scoped out the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty, save for a big brown bottle of Indian beer. As our boat attendant was Muslim, we figured the beer was for us. A welcome present from the management, like chocolates on the pillow or chocolate chip cookies at the front desk. We grabbed the bottle and sat on the lime green and fuchsia upholstered banquette on Mother India’s front porch to watch life float by on Dal Lake, ringed by stark, snow-topped Himalayas and capped by a vivid blue snowglobe sky.

Only after the houseboy turned surly, stopped cleaning, and stopped hailing us shikara, the narrow, colorful, canopied water taxis that ply the lake, poled along by thin men with close-cropped beards, did we realize we’d drunk our Muslim friend’s beer. We should have asked rather than assumed.

Feeling badly, we knew we had to make amends, so we made our way down the gangway that connected Mother India to a string of other houseboats and waved our arms until a shikara made its way over and picked us up. Once deposited in Srinagar town, we roamed the warren of old streets lined with tall, ancient wooden houses, many with storefronts or workshops cut into their ground floors. We found a market and bought two big bottles of beer.

Back on Mother India, we put one bottle in the refrigerator as a gesture of international entente. Night was falling, and we took the other bottle out to the porch, settled into the lime-fuchsia banquette and put our feet up on the railing. We’d done what we could to assuage ill feelings, so there was nothing left but to kick back and enjoy the rest of our Srinagar stay. We clinked glasses and hoped the rest of the evening would be pleasant. There was still time for something nice to happen.

As we stared into the moonlit ripples playing in the water in front of us, we heard bagpipes. They grew louder, and suddenly an immense two-story barge appeared in the channel where our boat was moored. Crammed on both decks with loud revelers and lit with hundreds of rainbow-colored bulbs, the party barge was the venue for an Indian wedding, and the magnificent leviathan was ferrying the entire wedding complement to a lavish, oversized houseboat anchored not far from ours. The spectacular craft, which appeared like a vision, passed less than a hundred feet from where we sat. We could see detail on the women’s opulent silk saris and the broad, proud grin of the bride’s father, who stood at the bow on the top deck, shaking guests’ hands. People swayed to the stirring strains of the bagpipes, at once gorgeous and incongruent. Scottish Highlands sounds, vestiges of bygone colonialism, grace notes to a modern Indian marriage ceremony.

Just as the incredible wedding boat passed in front of Mother India, the celebrants shot fireworks into the Himalayan sky. The spent chutes of color and light floated downward. They created fleeting mirror images on Dal’s surface, then were joyously swallowed by the black lake.

---
*Conflict continues in Jammu and Kashmir and in Srinagar itself. As of the date of this post, March 1, 2005, the governments of both the United Kingdom and Australia were “strongly advising against all travel to Jammu and Kashmir, with the exceptions of Ladakh via Manali or air to Leh.” The region does not appear on today’s US State Department travel warnings list.

Travelers should check several trusted travel warning sources before visiting contested regions or countries and comparing US, UK and Australian government advice provides a broad view. It’s also helpful – and enlightening – to read online editions of newspapers from a country or region to gauge the local mood and situation. Where freedom of the press exists, you should be able to access several news sources, including independent, non-government outlets. Find links to world newspapers at www.World-Newspapers.com and www.OnlineNewspapers.com.