Trip to Greece
Athens to Tolo, Tuesday, April 6
On Tuesday morning, the car rental agency I'd made arrangements to rent from over the Internet delivered our minivan to the hotel. The agency, Morphis, seems to be a mom-and-pop shop, and I was a bit concerned initially that they might not come through, but in the end, it all worked out fine. The van, a Nissan Serena, was a bit long in the tooth and turned out to be gutless as heck, but it got great gas mileage (as everything in Europe seems to) and we all fit fairly comfortably, though it was a bit of a squeeze with all the luggage!
Once loaded and checked out of the hotel, the fun--namely, trying to get out of Athens--began. I had our route all figured out on the map, but (as inevitably happens when you're trying to navigate in a strange city in a foreign country) we made a crucial error early in the proceedings and wound up on the wrong road out of town. Because of the difficulty in finding street signage, however, it wasn't clear for quite some time that it was the wrong road and so we drove up and down it several times looking for a turn-off that, of course, never materialized. Eventually, we did figure it out and got onto the right road heading for Corinth and the Peloponnese, but it took us about an hour to get straighted out. Our payoff for this extra time was seeing and getting a photo of the wonderful statue of Hermes, the messenger god, shown above. The statue is made entirely of flat sheets of glass--a truly remarkable piece of modern art.
Now, one thing I must mention is that I didn't find Greece anywhere near as difficult to navigate in as I did Italy. That may come as a bit of surprise to some folks, considering that the Greeks have a completely different alphabet. I suppose I was helped by the fact that I can read the Greek alphabet reasonably well (though I have better command of lowercase than uppercase letters because most ancient texts are printed in lowercase, and, to my dismay, most signage is in upper case), but the real savior for the foreigner in Greece is that nearly everything is at least transliterated into Western characters and many signs are translated into English. That said, the transliterations aren't always the same and sometimes, the translations are downright funny. My favorite of these mistranslations was on a sign on the way from Athens to Corinth for the "Dafni Monstery." We had a lot of fun imagining what a "monstery" would be like, but concluded it would probably be much more entertaining than a monastery!
We crossed the Corinth Canal at a little before 1:00 in the afternoon (and it does not take long to cross it; one could easily be forgiven for missing the experience altogether) and stopped in modern Corinth for lunch. Modern Corinth is a dumpy town and not a place I'd recommend going if you have a choice, and after we left, we found (to our chagrin) a very darling town with plenty of tavernas right next to the ruins of Roman Corinth. Of course, we weren't hungry any more, but there was a great playground across from the ruins and we decided to let the kids out to let off some steam. I must admit, it was pretty cool to watch my kids play directly across from the site where St. Paul was accused of heresy by the Corinthians and in the shadow of Acrocorinth, where the 1,000 sacred prostitutes who prompted his first letter to the Corinthians once practiced their faith!
