I know it was only about 12 hours ago that I posted, but it really is the next day for me, and I'll be gone from the apartment 1-9 p.m. today, so I thought it best to do this in the morning.

This is not the monastery but one of many small chapels located throughout the countryside. I may be making a horrible overgeneralization, but from what I have seen, many of these small churches serve as places for personal devotion rather than as some place for congregating (hence our term congregation).
These small spaces serve as convenient locations for locals to pay a brief visit, light a candle and venerate an icon. Many times I have been visiting some centuries-old church to see a local enter, light a candle and spend a moment in prayer, taking less time that it takes me to look at the church. Don't get me wrong - Orthodox churches have services and they can be much longer than a Roman Catholic service - but I don't believe that to be the function of these small chapels. If I'm wrong, the Orthodox church would have to have an unbelievable number of priests.

The blogging camera I use is tremendously convenient. It fits in a pocket, has a USB connection built in, can shoot video, and is nearly indestructible. But, it has no optical zoom and only a 3X digital zoom which, when used, gives fuzzy pictures like this one. I tried getting an artsy picture on our walk back from the monastery across the channel but as you can see (or rather as you can't see) it's blurred. I'll have to leave the artistic pictures to Kim. She's uploaded over a thousand photos to her Facebook. Another limitation of the blogging camera I have is that it only holds 100 pictures or videos so I feel compelled to unload pix to the
blog to make room for others.


We encountered this cute little kid just outside the chapel above. His grandma has a shop/cafe just next door and he was playing in the street just outside. We noticed the helmet but didn't see a bike. Mark asked him in Greek if the motorcycle parked nearby was his, and he just beamed. We found out why he was wearing the helmet just a short time later. As we continued walking, he was sort of trailing behind us. His grandma called him to come back but he wouldn't and no way could she catch him. She called to us

asking that we stop him, so I caught him and carried him back to her. Later Mark told me that she said a few days ago they found him walking along the top of the rock wall. The helmet was not for bike riding but rather for his quite daring style of play. I would think a leash would probably be more appropriate.


A digression about Greeks and children. I think Greeks revere children like the Italians do. I haven't been around that many families with small children so I really have no business making such an observation, but I see them out and about.

Yet another small chapel. I asked Kim to stand in the doorway to provide the relative size. This is less than 2 miles from the previous small chapel where we saw the small boy. As you can see, this one is outlined in lights.


There really do seem to be a lot of flowers here. I know that when Kim and I take walks through our Muncie neighborhood we see some but it's not the same. Here it seems people have a lot
more flowers planted. It's true in Athens but it's even more the case outside the city.


We stopped for lunch at Hotel New Agli. Mark and Martha had taught us a new canasta-like game on the ferry boat so we started by having cool drinks and appetizers while we played cards. I took the video below so I could show the panorama. Sitting in the shade it was very comfortable. It was a shame to have to look down at the cards because it meant taking my eyes off the vista.

As I said in yesterday's post, the slower ferries may be the better mode of transport because they have lots of space out on the deck. We came back from Poros on a fast boat, though. This one was somewhat larger than the fast boat we took back from Aegina the month earlier. I came to find out that they even have large fast boats capable of transporting cars and trucks. Still, you sit inside. I even managed to fall asleep for a short nap on this boat. We were all somewhat tired when we got back to the port, so though we took public transit to get to the port, we took a cab back to the apartment.

This is the first of a few pictures I took of the gathering we had at our apartment Saturday. From left is 1/3 of Kim, Hilda Giordano (wife of a Fulbrighter), Mark and Martha.

I wanted to mention that we watched some of the Eurovision Song Contest. Greece made the finals but the winner was Norway. Abba is probably the most famous winner in the 53 years of the contest. You can watch the Greek entry on YouTube, too.