Greece

We are on our second day in Greece.  Yesterday we went to visit the rules where the original Olympic Games started. It was quite a thrill to run down the track, it was just a long straight stretch about 190 meters long.  When they wanted to have a longer race they just ran back and forth.  

We had an excellent guide and she had all sorts of interesting anecdotes about the area, the ancient games and the construction in the area.   The columns were Doric and they were smooth on the inside where athletes and trainers would lean against them but they had vertical ridges on the outside, neat!

The Olympic site is situated in a lovely spot and the purple flowering Judas trees were in full bloom, just beautiful.  

We went through a museum and saw statues of the winged goddess Nike and the also the likeness of the perfect human body, Hermes, notice the detail of his right calf, wonderful. 

I really thought the bronze of the griffon suckling her baby was particularly well done.

Today we saw one of the most perfect and best preserved examples of a Greek theatres in Epidaurus.   It would seat over 13,000 people and the acoustics were astounding.  A priest stood in the middle and sang a prayer and I could hear him up at the top of the theatre.

Then we were off to Mycenae to see the ruins of a Royal Palace that was built on top of a hill.  It was some kind of an apolis, rather like Minneapolis, Indianapolis or even Annapolis !  There were huge crowds of people there but at one time there were 250,000 people that lived n the area.  The spring flowers were in bloom and were a wonderful contrast to the dour rocks. 

There were outstanding views from the top though, it was well worth the climb. Those are olive orchards in the background. We also saw winter oranges and lemons on the trees and the apricot trees are setting their fruit. it was a very enjoyable +20 day, great stuff, on to Athens tomorrow.