ATHENS

OCTOBER 17-19

Well on the 17th, after visiting the new Olympic stadium and being met by an Olympic gold metalist (albeit a long time ago) Rea took us to the hospital where a bone doctor (I forget what he is called) took a look at "our arm". He had us get a new x-ray and said we needed to wait a week and have it looked at again, when the swelling went down. Then, in another week we would need another x-ray to see what is up. We checked our schedule to make sure we would be in large enough cities at the right times, in order to decide if we should continue on to Turkey.

Since we are not at home now, we decided to continue.

Oct 18

Today we went to the old "agoras". An agora is the oldest mall. We went to the old Greek and the old Roman agoras. We also visited the museum at the agora. The most interesting thing was a stone monument, which was from the 6th century BC that was deciding a legal issue conserning a santuary. The fun part was that most of the print was one size, but as you got toward the bottom the print got smaller for several inches, and then smaller yet. Wow... their contracts had more small print than modern ones do.

We went to Pynx hill, the birthplace of democracy, where the greek forum met for the first time.

We accidently found the Malina Macury memrial exhibit. She was an actress who became the Minister of Culture. She helped get some old Greek artifacts repatriated. We saw the Tower of the winds. We walked back to the Acropolis and visited the Theatre of Dionysus, which is not fully excavated, and the Odeoin Herkles Atticus Theatre, which is used today for shows.

We ended up walking all around the Acropolis, which is the highest hill in Athens.

OCT 19

We flew to Istanbul, Turkey. Got to the hotel, looking forward to meeting our new guide. Things started out roughly. She did not meet us upon our arrival. She left word atv 6:30 when we were told she would be here, that she would be an hour late. Since our schedule showed we would be having dinner after our meeting, and since we had not eatten since the flight, at 10am, we were hungry. It turned out we did not get our meal and were on our own that night. Also, since it is fall here, the airconditioning in our otherwise lovely hotel, is off, even tho is 80 degrees out. When we open the windows for air, we also get noise and light. Oh well, another part of the adventure.