9 March 2010 (Tuesday #6) – Argolis day

Argolis tour - lunch, pottery, and back to Athens

This is my last post about Tuesday, the 9^th of March, 2010! (Tomorrow I start the next set of endless posts,  which will be about Ancient Delphi in Greece.)

Recapping . . . Conrad and I took the Argolis Excursion around the Argolis region of the Peloponnese peninsula in Greece. We went from Athens to Corinth (canal) to Epidaurus (theater) to Nafplion (photo op) to Mycenae (ruins of fortified citadel).

Before we returned to Athens, we made two more stops in the Argolis region of the Peloponnese.

First, we stopped for “lunch” (although it was late in the afternoon by this time) at a restaurant in a nice seaside resort. We ate with our new friends Ronnie and Marilyn, who told us more about the national riots that would occur on Thursday. The summary of their info was that we were all going to die. We could expect bullet holes in our hotel windows and probably some fires, too.

For lunch we were served that crazy Greek salad with no greens. (The abundance of oil makes up for the lack of greenery.) The main course was lamb and . . . yes! French fries!  Here’s my plate with the food half gone:

Dessert was . . . an orange. Seriously? An orange?? Here in the land of plentiful pastries and scrumptious, sticky sweets, you give us an orange??

And what is with the French fries on everything?

After lunch we re-boarded that bus, sitting on the right side, and we were off to a pottery factory.

A cute little ole man gave us a demonstration of how pottery is made:

Pottery making might be hazardous to one's health, judging by the nasty boo-boo on his hand:

He was a happy potter!

While he made his little pot, his daughter explained the pottery-making process to us.

There are different kinds of clay, different ways to finish the pottery, and things like that. (By this time, my mind was beyond processing details.)

See the largest pot in the middle (the tan-colored one)?

I never knew they make large pots in sections and glue them together, but it makes sense. The line about 2/3 down shows where the two pieces for this pot have been stacked one on top of the other before gluing.

His daughter also told us about the drinking habits (as in, alcohol) of Greek workers in days gone by. At first the bosses let them drink on their breaks, but this soon got out of hand. Then the workers were limited to one drink per break. Some tried to fill their cups to just this side of overflowing, which also caused them to drink too much. So someone invented this cup:

If you fill it above the white thing in the center, the entire contents of the glass pour out of the bottom and the worker gets no drink. Clever!

At last, as evening was falling, we boarded the bus for one last time to return to Athens, via The National Road, of course. Conrad + bus = zzzzzzzzz.

Upon our arrival at our hotel, I went to our room to do the shower shuffle. (Click on the blue words to see the post about having to do the shower shuffle in our hotel bathroom.) Conrad, fresh from his nap on the bus, ran all over our part of Athens. He ran by the Parthenon and got these cool shots:

The Parthenon is always lit up at night.

Finally, before returning to the hotel, he went through Plaka and got us some baklava and spanakopita or something tasty.

Praise the Lord I have finished reporting on the Argolis Excursion!