Today Stelios (my department chair) and his wife Katherine picked us up to take us a short distance outside of Athens (26 miles, to be exact) to Marathon. The long distance run gets its name from the distance from Marathon to Athens, run by a messenger after the Greeks defeated the Persians in 490 BC. Nowadays, Marathon is best known for the lake, created in the 1920s by building a dam. The lake was the major water supply for Athens, and still supplies some of its water.

This one-lane road is actually the top of the dam.

The weather was fantastic. We stopped along the way at an apartment complex where they have their summer home. Like many Europeans they have a place they go just for a part of the year - in their case from the end of the school year (around June 20) to the start of the next year (around mid Sept). They have been going to Rafina (the town) for the summer for decades and said that it has really grown. Athens just continues to grow outward and the sprawl has reached what used to be a sleepy little town.

This is actually where we stopped late afternoon for iced coffee/ice cream. It was a nice, relaxing way to sit and talk and look out at the lake.

Earlier in the day we had lunch at Vasilis Restaurant. We could tell it was a nice place, but then Stelios told us that the Prime Minister eats there, so we knew it must be good. As has happened so many times with Greeks, we never looked at a menu - Stelios and Katherine just ordered...and ordered...and ordered. We got a ton
of food, and ate almost all of it. Not sure whether you can tell from the photo that we ate outside.

When we got back to Athens in the early evening (still light out) traffic was awful. There had been demonstrations in the city center, so things were pretty bottled up. It was frustrating to Stelios who had to drive in it, but Kim and I actually enjoyed the opportunity to go down streets in Athens that we haven't traveled. When they heard that Kim likes Ikea, they wished they had known sooner because we would have gone: Stelios also likes Ikea.


I'm cleaning out old pictures. I had one more overhead shot of the tram , so I'll just mention something else I forgot to report about tram protocol. Every mass transit system has an expectation that people forfeit their seats for elderly/invalid, but Greeks are very good about it. People who have raced to take one of the prime seats will ungrudgingly get up and offer their seats should an elderly person come near when there are no empty seats. There's no gender difference, though.

Last weekend we went with Mark and Martha to Lake Vouliagmeni. It's a brackish lake located at the base of limestone cliffs. The water temperature is always a little warmer than other bodies of water. What's more, it is considered to be therapeutic, either because of the temperature, or the minerals in the water, or something. The charge for going in (8 Euros) is not a small amount, but people who get a doctor's prescription can get a portion of it paid by insurance. Mark and Martha told us they see a person each years with crippling arthritis who has to be helped into the water. After going in every day for a couple of weeks, the person is able to walk again. The effect lasts a few weeks.

The four of us took up a position outside the fenced-in pay area to sit and have coffee/tea. Mark and I never intended to go swimming. Martha did, and Kim was considering it based on the water temperature. The attendant let her go in to feel the water, and Kim thought it best not to push it. Maybe in another week or two.

Inside the fenced area people were sunning
themselves, drinking and visiting. A few were even in the water. I saw one woman who must've been on her cell phone well over half an hour. I can understand paying 8 Euros to use the lake, but if all you're going to do is sit in a recliner and talk on the phone, or catch some rays, why not do it somewhere else? Oh well.

One more thing: the admission price is reduced if you're a Vouliagmeni resident. Martha joked that she could sell her apartment in Paleo Faliro, pay twice the price for a Vouliagmeni apartment and save a few dollars.

The last two leftover pictures are from our trip up Lycabettus Hill. I just thought it would be pretty neat to have this picture, since this is what I can see from my apartment several miles away: the flag and the bell tower.

Irrelevant to the pictures: the conference wrapped up with a very nice dinner last night at a Cretan restaurant. I presented my paper yesterday (the session started about 30 minutes late) to a good-sized crowd: more than I expected for the last session of the afternoon.

I heard presentations from scholars from 14 different countries: US, Greece, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, Portugal, Finland, Canada, the UK, Spain, France, Ireland, Turkey, Cyprus and Brazil.

Conference buzzwords (never used by me) were cannibalization, shovelware, citizen journalism, user-generated content, paradigm shift and business model.


Today's news: Student elections are Wednesday, and those in the know believe that turnout will be down, largely because the students are so disenchanted with Greece's political system.