The first four pictures today are the last from Nafplio. They are all taken at Palamidi, the 17th Century Venetian fortress that sits on the mountain overlooking Nafplio. We were "lazy" by driving up to the fortress rather than walking up the 857 steps from the town below. Can't swear she walked the whole way, but we saw a woman in stiletto heels coming up the steps.

The fortress is neat because of all the different constructions. There's a church up there, and a

prison/dungeon, different bastions built or

fortified at different times, and seeing wildflowers growing out of the walls is cool. Of course the most spectacular part of all is the view.

Athens is great, but I'm not a big city guy. My favorite Greece experiences have been the excursions we've taken outside of Athens, getting to smaller towns. Delphi was about 3,000 people and Nafplio is fewer than 20,000.

Tomorrow in Greece, as most of Europe, is a
holiday. May 1 is "labor day," which is slightly
different here: usually accompanied by a strike or two. But the strikes are scheduled, with start and stop times. For example, the Metro is not running tomorrow 5:30-9 a.m. and after 11 p.m. I interpret this as action against any businesses wanting to be open on the holiday, but still allowing people to use the Metro to get to the big May 1 celebrations that start at 10:30.


On Tuesday after Easter (Apr. 21), it was finally time to leave Nafplio and head back to Athens. But we wanted to be sure not to leave too early
because some people who went away from the
city for Easter would wait until Tuesday morning (Monday's a holiday) and drive back in time for work. We headed out of the hotel around noon and decided we would make a brief stop in Mycenae, a short distance from Nafplio and relatively on the way back to Athens.


<--Nafplio, NOT Mycenae

Now, we're talking really old. The civilization existed approximately 2000-1000 BC. What most fascinated me was the size of the stones that they used to build. They didn't have the sophistication of later civilizations, so they made
things strong by making them big.


This is supposedly the tomb of Agamemnon, though there is no guarantee. It's good for tourism to say it is, since it is still in perfect order. My camera couldn't get a picture in the darkened central room, but someone else has one here. Whether it's his or not really doesn't matter, as it's quite impressive. The acoustics in there are quite amazing and again, the size of everything is incredible. Look at the people in comparison to the size of the stones (no mortar - just stone on top of stone). The legend is that everything in
Mycenae was built by the cyclops. Actually that
explanation sounds about as plausible to me as believing that people 3000 years ago could have moved anything that big, and stacked it that high.

In the background is the Mycenae acropolis. In the foreground are the ongoing excavations of the cemetery. The following picture is also of the excavations, just looking down from above.


There is also a museum on the site with a lot of the artifacts they found at the location, but NOT the most important. The mask of Agamemnon is a gold funeral mask. The real thing is in the archaeological museum in Athens, but they've made a replica for the Mycenae museum. Actually the real mask is probably not his, either, since it's been dated to somewhere around 1500 BC - too recent for Ag., but still pretty damned old. The man who discovered the ruins in the 19th century and most of Mycenae - not just the mask - are mired in controversy (as Jim might say: Greeks, Controversy? How can that be?).


This is the Lion's Gate in Mycenae, the largest existing relief in Europe. The lions' heads are missing. Unlike the rest of the lions, they were protruding forward, so they would have been most susceptible to damage.

The drive back to Athens did take longer than normal. There was a back-up at the toll plaza between Corinth and Athens. There is a law in Greece that of the traffic is backed up more than 3 km (about 2 miles) they stop collecting tolls to get the traffic to flow better. We were just a few

minutes ahead of when they were going to stop collecting.

Back in Athens. Back to reporting about "everyday life."

Some streets in downtown Athens have wide sidewalks, but some don't, and almost none in our little suburb are big. I wanted to show why people walk in the streets. Cars want to park, but they want to leave enough room for traffic to get through, so they pull over as far as they can,

which often means pulling up onto the sidewalks. Since people then can't walk on the sidewalks, this means they have to walk in the streets, which further clogs the crowded street. You can see how there's just enough room for one car and one pedestrian to pass at the same time. I understood it a lot more when we were inside the wall of a medieval town, where streets were never built for cars, but here?