A few examples

Saturday reflections

This isn't really much of a reflections image, but who is going to notice when there are such enticing baked goods in the picture?

This was taken on the drive from Delphi to Olympia Thursday. I was very lucky that the group for this pre-cruise tour consisted of only three people, myself and a couple from Australia. (And that they turned out to be delightful travel companions.) When our guide announced we would be stopping for a bathroom break, one of my fellow travelers asked if it was possible to get a coffee as well.

So we stopped here, a small bakery-café called Furnos Kondyli, located just before the very long suspension bridge to the Peloponnese. I say “small,” but it was crammed with glass cases featuring at least a hundred varieties of cookies, plus breads and other pastries, and refrigerator cases along the walls full of cakes.

I'm still impressed that we each limited ourselves to one small pastry to have with our coffee.

Really, it's a tourist attraction

Hey, we were tourists and we were there.

The signs on this market were obviously intended to be understandable by non-Greeks, but one thing I've noticed over the past three days is how many businesses have their company names in Latin letters rather than Greek. Before this trip I'd only visited Greece briefly, and it was a long time ago, but I don't remember this being common then.

We've left Athens and are now heading for Crete, sailing through the winedark sea. I'm going to go sit on the balcony for a while and then go to bed.

Corinth Canal

This was the last stop on our Classical Greece tour, before heading to Piraeus and boarding our ship, and unlike the other sites we visited during the past three days, it can be covered quickly.

The Isthmus of Corinth separates the Peloponnese from the Greek mainland; this four-mile long canal links the Aegean and Ionian Seas through the isthmus. It opened in 1893, but was never used as much as expected. It's too narrow, and prone to landslides from those steep rock walls. It's mostly a tourist attraction now, though that does amuse me because you have to stand on a highway overpass to see into it, and though it is an impressive sight, it's hard to spend more than five minutes there.

The stadium

This large, rectangular plot of dirt is maybe the least impressive part of the site, although since it was where the competitions took place, it was one of the most important.

And apparently it wasn't any more impressive 2500 years ago; apart from the stone structure on the right which was where the officials sat, it probably hasn't changed that much. If you had asked me what I expected to see here I would have guessed something like a Roman amphitheatre, but this stadium wasn't round, and didn't offer any seats for the spectators. (Though it is very large—the woman walking at the far end gives you some idea of the scale.) Events like wrestling, long jump, and javelin throw were done here.

And races. There was no track—the athletes just ran from one end of the stadium to the other. And if there were multiple laps, they just stopped at the end and ran back in the other direction, like swimmers in the modern Olympics.

Olympia

Today we drove into the Peloponnese and visited the site of the original Olympic Games. This picture, taken near the entrance to the archaeological site, doesn't show any of the important structures, but does capture the mood of the day. The weather was perfect, there were few other tourists, and unlike Delphi, there were no stairs to climb. It was idyllic.

The Oracle will see you now

I got to Athens late last night, and left on the three day pre-cruise tour early this morning, so I'm too tired to do more than post this picture one of my fellow travelers kindly took this afternoon at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.

Other pictures will have to wait.

The cat is apparently alive

I went looking for water pictures and found this from Berkeley in April. A long way from the Mediterrean but peaceful water views have always been the thing I enjoyed most about ship travels.

I'm flying to Heathrow tonight, and on to Athens tomorrow afternoon. I have a pre-cruise tour of Classical Greek sites, and the cruise proper leaves on Friday.

I guess we're really doing this.

Urban poetry

I don't seem to have posted this picture: laundry drying from the windows of a high-rise in Lima.

Schrödinger's Cruise

I continue to be amazed by just how much work is required to create a weekly class, but that's only part of the reason I've had so little focus for posting here, especially in the last several weeks.

After my (mostly) wonderful trip to Peru in June, I decided that I was ready for a splurge, a big adventure, a chance to finally use some of the credits and points and miles I'd accumulated after having to cancel four planned trips in 2020 and not doing much traveling since then.

I almost booked a trip to Antarctica, this time including South Georgia, but it would have required missing the first three classes in the spring semester. Then I saw a reference somewhere to the scene in Lawrence of Arabia where he sees what appears to be a ship sailing through the sand dunes and realizes that it's the Suez Canal. I'd always loved that scene, and I remembered that I had once looked at a cruise that went from the Mediterranean to somewhere in the Middle East, transiting the canal. I don't remember why I decided against it—timing? money? both?—but it inspired me to look for Christmas cruises that went through the Suez Canal, and I found a perfect trip.

It was on a very deluxe cruise line, and a lot more money than I wanted to spend, but it included an overnight option in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and several stops in Saudi Arabia, and I decided that this would be my sort-of-post-pandemic Big Trip and I booked it. I spent the summer planning, looking at the shore excursions and planning a post-trip stay at the King David hotel in Jerusalem and honestly enjoying all of the logistics and possibilities for the first time since the world shut down.

Then Gaza happened. No post-cruise trip to Jerusalem, obviously, and I wasn't even really disappointed because the horrors of the war just made me grateful that I had the option of staying away. A few weeks later there were changes to the itinerary—first, no Sinai, then no Valley of the Kings. That was a disappointment, but the travel rep said that the canal and Saudi Arabia were still happening, and they added a stop in Ephesus, which although not the Valley of the Kings was a place I'd always wanted to see. But I was getting more and more uneasy about the trip and honestly wished I could just cancel the whole thing.

Now Yemeni rebels have been firing ballistic missiles at ships in the Red Sea, and I check my email ten times a day because surely they have to cancel the cruise now, right? It's not just that it no longer seems remotely safe to be putting myself inside a giant target in a volatile part of the world, it honestly feels obscene to go on a high-priced frolic in the middle of a war.

But as of this morning the cruise is still happening. The rep explained that the ship has to go through the Suez Canal no matter what because it has to get to Asia for the winter cruise season, but if they decide to avoid the Red Sea ports the cruise will probably end in Oman rather than in Jordan, with no Saudi Arabia. This is not a cruise I would ever have signed up for, especially not at this price. And I certainly have the option of staying home, but if I do, I lose all my money. I have travel insurance, but it turns out that cancellations because of “war, invasion, acts of foreign enemies, hostilities between nations (whether declared or not) or civil war” are NOT covered.

It’s so crazy. I never imagined that I would be in a situation where I actually had to worry about a war exclusion in an insurance policy. And so I sit here in New York, trying to focus on all the work I have to do but not knowing if I'm actually going to be flying to Athens the week after next and if I do, what will happen then? It's Schrödinger's Cruise and no one wants to open the box to see if it's going to happen or not.

(The picture is of the very rough Atlantic seas on my 2011 cruise out of Lisbon where they had seasickness bags available in all the public areas of the ship. Smooth sailing compared to this mess.)

Urban poetry

Two more classes and I'm done, but in the meantime I'm crazy busy.

But this picture made me smile on yet another gray cold day: El Parque John F. Kennedy in San José last year. I spent a lot of time waiting for buses next to this park.

Sunday bird blogging

This handsome fellow is the green-winged teal I went looking for yesterday. Remarkably, he was still exactly where everyone reported seeing him this week, and was actually the first bird I saw.