Olympia

Olympia, August 22, 2009

What a day.

Up at 7 a.m. and off to the train station which is just across the parking lot from our harbour. We boarded a 2 car very modern train (made by Bombardier) at 8:20 a.m. and set out for Olympia (50 minutes to the east). We travelled through a lovely fertile valley and up a gentle slope to our destination.

Olympia town itself is just a place for tourists. There are dozens of restaurants and dozens of souvenir shops and not much else. Well, that wasn't our destination anyway so we headed down the road which most of the people from the train were walking and got to the museum and fields of Olympia.

It is hard to believe that there is still so much remaining of history that goes back to centuries before Christ was born. There was one area where the artifacts were dated back as far as 2500 BC. Many hints of what would have been an overwhelmingly impressive place. The temple to Zeus still has the fallen columns around it – they are six feet in diameter and at one time the marble was glistening white. It has all since turned grey. I don't know if it can ever be restored. Fortunately there were many trees in this fertile land so we could walk from shade to shade and never got really overheated.

We spent several hours walking through the various areas of ruins, like Neros house, …..After that we went back to the museum and spent another hour wandering through there. Such amazing items still quite intact from the first century on. There were 12 rooms and each room seemed to concentrate on a particular century. They had everything from little ceramic pots to warrior armour hammered out of metal and then carefully decorated so that it would be destinctive to that warrior. We were awed by the beautiful statues. They were usually missing something – a nose, if nothing else, but still grand, and plentiful.

It's very hard here to understand when myth becomes religion and when religion becomes history.

We were all very satisfied with our day there.We walked back to the town and had lunch in one of the many cafes. I ordered cabbage rolls, in a lemon egg sauce. They were so good! Jim had a lovely baked pork dish, Lewis' had pizza.

After a relaxing walk around Olympia we boarded the train and were back at the boat by 5 p.m.