Vagabond sunbirds

We in New England, like folks in many parts of the US, are having a rough winter. Snow that won't quit and brutal, sub-zero temps. ("These are good days to teach kids about negative numbers," said Joan, a yoga-mate and retired math teacher.) Meteorologists tell us we're looking down the barrel of our fourth major snowstorm in as many weeks.

Ever since we began traveling Mike and I have made mental notes of cities, towns or villages that would make nice havens in winter, knowing that at some point we'll want to flee Boston's cold for somewhere else's relative warmth. Every once in a while -- including recently, with cheap foreclosures flooding the market -- we've been tempted to buy a place in Florida. But we'd be tied to it, and that's not what we want.

Our plan is to spend the coldest months of our retirement years in various places, renting our way around the world. No mortgage, no furniture to buy, no taxes, no maintenance, no feelings of obligation to go or guilt if you don't. We'd rather find a beachfront cottage or apartment in some pretty place, pay a few months rent, and settle in for an extended stay, immersing ourselves in our temporary neighborhoods and living like the locals. Then, the next year, put down seasonal stakes in a new place.

The Mediterranean and Aegean will no doubt figure in our future sunbird plans. We've scouted beautiful, quiet places like Albufeira, Portugal; Menton, France; Italy's Ligurian coastline; Chania on the island of Crete; Nafplion in Greece's Peloponnese; history-rich Antalya, Turkey; and fishing villages like Spain's Calella de Palafrugell, pictured above.

It's February in Calella in these photos, yet warm and sunny enough for a stroll on the beach or a relaxing rest on a bench overlooking the harbor. It may not be sunbathing weather, but it sure beats shoveling.

www.LoriHein.com

Flotsam, jetsam, seaglass and shards

There's a mosaic in my future.

All around my house, in glass vases, copper boxes and bowls that once belonged to Bedouins and Buddhist monks, are bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam from bodies of water, sidewalks and trash piles around the world, and I value these as highly as any travel souvenirs I've collected.

Someday, when I have nothing to do, I'll gather in one place these intriguing chunks of detritus, along with my scores of stones and seashells spirited from dozens of beaches, and I'll design a mosaic that gives each nugget a special spot in some big, bold picture.

Each piece brings me back to the place where I acquired it: water-worn teacup handles and porcelain dinnerware shards washed up on Lake Como's rocky shore; a hunk of marble paving stone from an old Lisbon sidewalk; pieces of painted wall tile from a junk heap beside an 18th-century Porto home undergoing renovation; black rocks with white circles in their middles -- eyeball rocks, I call them -- found on the French shore of Lake Geneva; charms that once hung from strands of Mardi Gras beads thrown from floats navigating the streets of New Orleans; shells and coral from the Red Sea; shells and salty stones from the Dead Sea; fragments of pottery and pavement from Petra and ancient Argos; cooled lava from an ancient eruption of Chile's Mount Osorno; and green, white, blue, amber and yellow seaglass from oceans and lakes around the globe.

I'm thinking my mosaic will be a map of the world.

www.LoriHein.com

Recovery...

Well, Blogger fixed the photo glitch as promised, and everybody's pix are back on their blogs. I lost some sleep last night wondering if five years' worth of photo posts were gone forever...

Here are some pretty sunsets -- over Greece and Rio -- to celebrate the save.

www.LoriHein.com

Wampsutta, monkey meat and other Thanksgiving thoughts

Unless you're a Native American, Thanksgiving is a happy feast day. In Plymouth, not far from where I live, there's food and celebration. But if you look deeper, you'll also find members of the Wampanoag tribe gathered for their National Day of Mourning, held since 1970 when Frank James, a Wampanoag known as Wampsutta, was disinvited to speak at a Thanksgiving dinner when organizers discovered his speech was about the real history of relations between the so-called pilgrims and the native people whose land they landed on. Read James's speech here. No mention of turkey or fixins'.

Thanksgiving. Giving thanks for the blessing of being able to get together with others to buy, cook and eat way too much food, store it as leftovers, and, a week later, figure out what to do with the still uneaten remains. (Pitch it. If you freeze it, it will still be there next Thanksgiving.)

Allow me to use Thanksgiving as a segue into a travel post by sharing with you some of the things I've eaten around the world: monkey stew in Peru; yakburgers in Tibet; boiled, mashed manioc root softened (I swear) with human spit in the Amazon; roasted guinea pig in Ecuador; octopus in Greece; rotten black eggs in Hong Kong; gelatinous green yolk balls in Taipei; tea brewed with coca plant leaves in the Andes.

OK, I didn't really eat the manioc mess -- I pretended to take a taste as the bowl was passed around -- it was probably still full when it returned to the hands of the Yagua Indian woman who'd made it. But all of the other dishes were at least marginally palatable. Some, like the monkey and guinea pig, were culinary treats.

I can't say that for the eel chunks in broth that I was served on a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. And positively foul were the snake bits I found hidden in half the dishes on nearly every lazy susan set in the middle of the table in most big-city Chinese restaurants. The Chinese habit of sneaking slices of slithery serpent into my food made me turn to the Power Bars and canned beans and tuna I had in my suitcase. Otherwise I might have starved.

www.LoriHein.com

Sun-addled in the Aegean

Seen hanging outside a shop on Crete:

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Losing your marbles: The Parthenon and beyond

Warning: Reading this post may make your brain explode. (If it doesn't, I guarantee you'll enjoy this post from 2005: "Has Charles Veley Been to the State of Chuuk?")

Athens' new Acropolis Museum, scheduled to fully open in September, has a rectangular, glass-walled gallery with a view of the nearby Parthenon. The old Acropolis museum, a narrow, cramped affair that managed, despite itself, to stun visitors with its rich collection of Greek antiquities, may, it's rumored, be turned into a coffee shop. The old museum's holdings, along with breathtaking artifacts from the Acropolis and other Greek sites, have been moved into the new venue.

Key among the new museum's exhibits will be the frieze that once adorned the Parthenon. A room was built to hold it. The rub, of course, is that Greece only owns a few pieces of the frieze.

Most of the pieces -- the marbles -- live in London in the British Museum, which bought them from the British government, which bought them from Thomas Bruce, the 7th earl of Elgin, who took them from the Acropolis in 1801 and shipped them off to England. Lord Elgin, serving as ambassador to Constantinople, had the sultan's permission to slice the frieze into pieces and remove it from then Ottoman-controlled Greece.

Greece would like the Elgin Marbles, which it calls the Parthenon Marbles, back, and the frieze gallery at the new museum is designed to be more than an artistic display; it's a plea for repatriation of priceless pieces of patrimony. The reconstructed frieze will consist of the few original pieces still in Greece's possession interspersed with reproductions of the pieces Elgin took. These lost marbles will be covered in netting, yielding, it's hoped, a powerful visual statement about the cultural crime Greece feels has been committed.

Should the British Museum give the Marbles back?

Loaded question leading to a web of loaded questions. Museums large and small, of all types, all over the world, have stuff that came from somewhere else. So...

If the British Museum gives the Marbles back, should other museums give stuff back, too?

Which museums should give stuff back? Some museums? All museums? Big museums? Small museums?

Which stuff should they give back? Big stuff? Small stuff? Some stuff? All stuff?

To whom should they give it back? To other museums? To countries? What if the countries aren't countries anymore? (Think Mesopotamia and Babylon.)

Should method of acquisition matter in the give-it-back-or-not determination? Museums acquire through purchase or donation, but how did whoever sold or donated get the piece in the first place? And what about absolute provenance -- how an object came to be removed from its true source? Removing outright theft, tomb-raiding, smuggling and other overtly illegal and illicit activity from the equation -- pieces thus acquired should clearly be returned -- what in a piece's bloodline -- from war, conquest and colonialism, to commerce and trade, to excavation and archaeology, both accidental and intentional, whether by amateur hacks or skilled scientists --should or might mark a piece for repatriation?

Should there be an international marble quid pro quo, a supervised global game of marble trading wherein museums -- or countries, universities, foundations, families...-- that get marbles back have to then return marbles they've held, sometimes for centuries, that came from somewhere else?

Imagine trucks and trains and ships and planes loaded with statues and stelae, paintings and pottery, sculpture and sarcophogi, crisscrossing the globe, the transported objects taking each others' places in cases and galleries and on shelves and pedestals. Eventually, if you imagine an endgame in which every item ever removed by any means from its original in situ state finds its way through this great marble trade back to where it was created, every museum in the world would end up being a homogeneous warehouse of stuff from just its own little corner of the world. To see gold and lapis Egyptian death masks, you'd have to go to Egypt. A peek at sublime Tang Dynasty terra cotta figurines would require a ticket to China. To ogle Aztec headdresses, you'd need to book a flight to Mexico. After returning pieces to the places they were born, institutions like the Louvre and the Met could consolidate their remaining holdings into a few rooms and rent out the rest of their space for other uses. Gaze at a Goya then head down the hall for a few strings at the Prado Bowladrome?

Who's got other people's marbles? Nearly everybody. (But not, it seems, the Egyptians or Greeks. Their marbles fit pretty justifiably into some aspect, phase, layer, race or period in their long, complex histories. They've got so many marbles of their own that they've never needed to take anyone else's.)

You can find other people's marbles all over the world.

One day a few years ago, Adam and I followed our guide to the summit of ancient Pergamum (Pergamom, Pergamon), a glorious citadel-ruin that rises above the modern city of Bergama, Turkey. We came to a large, pedestal-like structure shaded by a few hearty trees that grew in its empty center. "There's not much here now," said our guide of the stripped platform. "The great Altar of Zeus was here, but the Germans took it to Berlin." Indeed, the star attraction and raison d'etre of Berlin's Pergamom Museum is the massive Zeus Altar excavated by engineer Carl Humann during the building of a rail line and sent, in pieces, to Berlin, where it was reassembled.

If Germany gave the Zeus Altar back to Turkey, would Turkey consider giving some of the goodies it's been holding back to Egypt and other places? Istanbul's Archaeological Museum houses artifacts "discovered" in Cyprus, Palestine, the Arab world and ancient Mesopotamia. It has a collection of sarcophogi found at Sidon, in ancient Syria, and owns mosaic panels from Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar's Ishtar Gate. And, piercing the sky near the minarets of Istanbul's sublime Blue Mosque is a 16th-century BC Egyptian obelisk from the temple of Luxor that was appropriated and replanted by Byzantine emperor Theodosius in 390 AD. There are only 28 Egyptian obelisks left in the world -- only a few in Egypt. (New York has one, Italy has about a dozen...)

If the give-me-back-my-marbles game really took hold, Italy would be mighty busy. It would be on the receiving end of countless Roman, Etruscan and other treasures from museums and venues worldwide. And, it would have some items it might consider shipping back to their places of origin.

Even the Vatican has marbles. (I know, Vatican City is not politically Italy, but if you've ever stood in line in the hot sun to see the Sistine Chapel then, after contemplating the masterwork, sought relief at the gelato shop next door, which sits in Italy, the Vatican is in Rome.) The Vatican's Egyptian Museum holds items won by conquest: the Roman Empire was one heck of a far-reaching enterprise. But if conquest-gotten gains count in the you-should-really-return-this column, the Vatican might have to part with seals from Mesopotamia (we'd better shore up and secure the Baghdad Museum) and bas-reliefs from Assyria, which spans today's Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

And Venice has marbles. Those four bronze horses over the portal of the Basilica of San Marco? They once adorned an arch that the Romans built in Constantinople (today's Istanbul). And the Romans allegedly nabbed the equine arch decorations from Greece...

Should Greece get its frieze back from England?

I've lost more than a few marbles just thinking about it.

LoriHein.com

Cool pools

I love finding reasonably priced hotels with pools. Now I appreciate them for their workout value, but when the kids were younger, I searched them out because kids love pool breaks -- give them an hour or two of splash-happy fun and get three or four sightseeing hours in return. I've been traveling most of my life, the last two decades of it with kids. If asked to distill my traveling-with-kids advice to a single word, it'd be "pool."

We've played in some interesting pools. Like the near-to-boiling, sulphur-infused, subterranean venues in Turkey and Iceland fed by geothermal vents and touted as therapeutic for everything from acne to arthritis. And the indoor, clothing-optional oases in Bolivia and Germany that were tricked out like sultry grottoes of hedonism. Who'd've thunk you could go to a hotel on the Bolivian Altiplano and find a mist-bound, basement lagoon that fell just short of absolutely demanding you enter naked? Or to a hotel in straight-up, Protestant Wurzburg, Germany and find a spa with a self-appointed totally nude pool policeman who followed the clothed (us) around, tallying their (our) transgressions and reporting them to the reception desk? Great, weird stuff!

But the pools I've loved most are outdoor basins with signature settings or stellar views where, while enjoying the water and recreation, you're visually, physically and spiritually connected to the place you came to see. You're not taking a pool break, you're communing with a city, culture, island, environment. You just happen to be all wet while doing it.

Some of our favorite spots include the compact, rooftop oasis at the Best Western Coral Hotel in Paleo Faliron, a seaside suburb of Athens, where Adam and Mike would position themselves under the lion-head waterspouts and see who could stay put longest. The hotel is on the direct approach to Athens airport, and jumbo jets from all corners of the world flew directly over us. We could see human shapes in the planes' windows and knew the travelers could look down and see us in the pool. We spent a lot of time on that rooftop, soaking in the cool water, watching the great jets come and go, and sharing beers with other travelers, like the steel company sales reps from Holland who told Heinekein-induced insider tales about the Greek shipbuilding business.

Another great oasis was the infinity pool on the roof of the Eden Aparthotel in Lisbon. This place was a find, and it's a favorite of flight attendants on Lisbon layovers. The pool afforded marvelous views of the Tagus River and the ochre-colored castle of St. George sitting on its hilltop above the Alfama, the oldest part of Lisbon. The management had installed clear glass panels as fencing so you could take in the view while swimming. Panels of mirrors along the hotel's back wall captured the castle in the glass, and in brilliant sun, bounced it back off and into the water with you.

And the pool at the Grotto Villas on Santorini, a paradise. The pool sat on a cliff edge overlooking the sea-filled, ancient crater of the exploded volcano that some believe is legendary Atlantis. From the pool, you looked down to the sea, dotted with ferries and cruise ships, and up and sideways to volcanic cliff faces peppered with Santorini's stark-white signature cube houses whose terraces were planted with flowers and striped umbrellas.

I love immersion travel.


www.LoriHein.com

Water, water everywhere, but is it safe to drink?

Ian Frazier has an entertaining article in the August issue of Outside. In "A kielbasa too far," Frazier recounts episodes of malady in foreign lands. Getting sick or not in a foreign country boils down pretty neatly to where you are and what you choose to eat and drink while you’re there. And we sometimes choose to eat skewered meat from street carts and drink neon-colored soft drink concoctions from women sitting under umbrellas, babies tucked into their bosoms.

Actually, when I say "we" I mean other people, because I don’t eat the skewered meat or the suspect drinks. I err, almost always, on the side of caution.

I carried pounds of tinned food to China so I could avoid eating the steamed wonton balls and roasted sweet potatoes from the hawkers – people that blow their noses into their hands and then touch the food – that line Beijing’s streets. (Folks I traveled with succumbed to the sweet potatoes and spent a Beijing night puking in their hotel toilets.) I packed a case of granola and Power bars when I went to India so I could walk past the skinny chickens and roasted nuts on offer along Delhi’s sidewalks. I look at fish, produce and meat markets in undeveloped countries as cultural stops and photo ops, not places to fuel my body. Click, click. Time for a Power Bar.

Young people on vagabond journeys with time to kill should try the local street stuff. Older folks with planes to catch and lives and incomes to get back to should graze conservatively.

I’m no gastronomic weenie. I’ve eaten snake, eel, monkey, yak, guinea pig, and eggs whose yolks had been jellied into a sinister mash of sick, gray-green softness. But trust your gut. If intuition says, "Don’t eat that," then don’t eat that. (I should have listened when it issued the snake warning. Talk about nasty...)

Water’s a tricky thing. You need it every day, in decent quantities. But is the water safe to drink? Sometimes, yes. Often, no. Again, trust your gut (the part of you that will take the hit if you get it wrong).

In developed countries, I take a few gargantuan sips of tap water on my first day. If I’m still standing on Day Two, I gulp some more. If Day Three greets me quietly with no gastrointestinal emergencies, then tap water it is. I proclaim the water safe for the family, and we stop buying the bottled stuff. I’ve learned how to order tap water in several European languages ("Leitungswasser, bitte," and "L’eau robinet, s’il vous plait..."), which shaves major bucks from restaurant tabs. When I was a literally starving student in Paris and ordered tap water with my cheap croque monsieur cheese sandwiches, the waiters sniffed down their noses at me and made me feel like a social pariah, a bumpkinish misfit. Now that I’m more well-heeled, the waiters’ looks border on admiration that I know what they know – the free tap water is just fine, and the pricey bottled stuff – a fountain of income for the restaurants – is unnecessary.

When we were in France a few weeks ago, we stayed in Thonon-les-Bains, a Lake Geneva spa town with its own signature water, Thonon. The town sits next to Evian-les-Bains, home of world-renowned Evian water, which is actually bottled in an ugly factory not in Evian, but in next door Amphion. We were in the epicenter of chic bottled water and drank nothing but tap water. I figured the stuff flowing from the faucets in these towns is probably superior to bottled stuff elsewhere.

In developing or undeveloped countries, I forego the tap water experiment entirely and stock up on factory-sealed bottled water.

If you’re traveling with kids, you need to make sure they stay hydrated. If you’re in a place with an undeveloped sanitary infrastructure, you train your kids not to drink from the tap as they’re used to doing at home. You lodge a bottle of store-bought water by the bathroom sink and tell them to rinse their toothbrushes and mouths with this, not the water from the faucet. When they get lazy or forget and come moaning to you in the night, you give them Pepto-Bismol or Immodium, pat them on the head, and tell them they’ll feel better in the morning, which they usually do. Every once in a while, you’ll pass a weird, perversely fulfilling night with a feverish kid wrapped around you, a kid who wakes up to the sun cool and healthy and spiritually quieted. If that breakthrough doesn’t come by morning, get thee to a clinic.

In Frazier’s article, he talks a bit about bottled water. He quotes a Toronto doctor who specializes in travelers’ ailments and who warns that even bottled water can be unsafe because it might actually be a literful of counterfeit faucet issue. Best to go for the carbonated stuff, he says, as carbonation is hard to fake. Frazier writes that when he used to travel in Russia, his Russian friends would laugh when foreigners ordered bottled water because it was nothing but a dupe, tap water packaged up with a label and a cap, just for tourists.

Is there fake bottled water out there? You bet your bubbles. Had I not seen a water forgery in action, I might not believe it. Now I know better: crack the seal yourself or drink at your own risk.

We were in Greece, at Tolo, a beach town on the Peloponnesean peninsula near Nafplion. While the family swam, I went for a run. In order to eke a decent number of miles from the town’s limited road network, I had to head uphill, away from the beach, shops and tavernas, toward a municipal dump and a series of dusty streets lined with hardscrabble little houses. I made repeated loops through these streets and kept passing a public well, a pump imbedded into a concrete platform roughly six feet square.

Two streets below the pump, closer to the beach and the main drag where the tourists hung out, was a taverna. It had inviting umbrella tables, arbor with shade-producing vines, rusty olive oil tins reincarnated as flower pots, and the day’s menu written on a chalkboard propped against a sun-glinty whitewashed wall.

As I ran by the taverna, I noticed an older man, presumably the owner, exit through the back door and make his way up toward the water pump. Normally, I’d have taken no notice, but the man carried something that piqued my curiosity – a big plastic tray filled with empty plastic bottles – bottles that bore the label of the water we’d been buying in stores and tavernas since we’d landed in Greece.

I hid behind a stone wall and watched this guy chug up to the pump and proceed to fill each of those tall "bottled water" bottles with the water from the public well, which sat about an eighth of a mile downhill from the municipal dump. Garbage trucks were busy up there on the hill, coming and going, discharging their loads then heading out to refill.

After he’d filled the bottles, the old man picked up the heavy plastic tray and carried it down to his restaurant, and I watched the tray of tap water disappear into the taverna’s rear kitchen door.

I didn’t stick around long enough to see it emerge on the taverna’s patio where it would be served to unsuspecting travelers, maybe to a family like mine. To watch would have made me sick.


www.LoriHein.com

Santorini: Go for the light alone

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 the must-see lists of most travelers to Greece. The island chain bursts with antiquities, ruins, ancient gods and myths -- and black pebble beaches, tavernas, inter-island ferries, markets and shops, glorious food and drink, and excellent people-watching.

But the sun and the magic it creates are the main event.

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

On Santorini, stay up late, but get up early, too, because the play of light during the bookends of a Santorini day is one of nature’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 God decides to splash. Here, dawn and dusk are not times of day, but dramatic performances.

Go to Santorini for the light alone.

www.LoriHein.com

Nafplio: Bouboulina and the Bourtzi

(A version of this story appeared in March 2005.)

Nafplio, Greece may be the Peloponnesean peninsula's most beautiful town, and life there moves at the unhurried, languid pace of hot places. When in Nafplio, visitors who live by the "early to bed, early to rise" maxim at home find themselves making adjustments to their usual routines.

Old, cobbled, twisting and whitewashed, Nafplio rises late, bustles from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, closes up tight for rest and family meals during the afternoon’s hottest hours, goes back to work for a bit in the early evening, dines at ten and later, then cruises the seafront promenade until the cool, early hours of tomorrow morning.

Nafplio's action centers around Syndagma (Constitution) Square and the quay built along the Aegean.

Syndagma is a sweeping, marble-cobbled public space ringed by tavernas and anchored by fabulous architecture that tells Nafplio’s history. Sit at an al fresco café table and absorb a view that serves up the Palamidi, the 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 as a movie theater; and the square itself, site of fervent demonstrations for Greek independence and a Greek constitution.

Nafplio also hangs out on its seafront promenade (small photo), 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 sit with grandbabies on their laps; small boys hold their fathers’ hands and lean down over the water looking for fish; young people cruise the promenade on motorbikes; taverna diners turn their chairs toward the sea and linger over meals of sparkling seafood served by places like the Poseidon (large photo); whole families walk the cobbles, 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, stare out at the rippling water, and retell worn, treasured stories.

Out in the bay, where boats bob at anchor, floats the Bourtzi (peeking between the palm fronds in the bottom photo), turned silhouette by a fireball sunset that paints the sea and sky orange and magenta and the Argolid mountains purple.

The Bourtzi looks like a dream, but the vision belies the building’s turbulent past. Built by the Venetians in 1471, it and its namesake island began life as a fort – Castel Pasqualigo – built 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.

It later became home of the town’s hangman. Town elders had to ensure that Nafplio’s citizenry wasn’t sullied by contact with the man with the dirty job. So, to keep him a proper, decorous distance from townspeople, municipal leaders sequestered the hangman out in the harbor in the cold stone rooms of the old prison, where he effectively became a prisoner himself.

Today, people sit in Nafplio and look wistfully out at the Bourtzi. A hundred and fifty years ago, a man with a job considered necessary but too foul to allow intercourse with the general populace sat in the clammy, sunless rooms of the Bourtzi and looked wistfully in at Nafplio.


www.LoriHein.com

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.


Comments or questions? Email me.

www.LoriHein.com

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.


Comments or questions? Email me.



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.


Comments or questions? Email me.

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