Tripoli, nothing to see here.

Olympia was a huge site. There were Greek and Roman structures. I wish I could explain the site, but think of lots of fallen columns, lots of rocks, lots of square "rooms" surrounded by old rocks.

Olympia
 

 
 

Ancient Olympia

Αρχαια Ολυμπια


The next morning I went to pay the bill, but the credit card machine was down. I had enough cash for one night, but the guy told me there were ATMs in the city (which was down that 1000 stairs), so I accosted Lin-Wei, who was already up by the car, and had her cough up the rest of the money. That taken care of, we could be on our way. Westward lies Ancient Olympia, and Lin-Wei's shining moment as navigator.

Halfway there we had to drive through the city of Tripoli, and we got totally lost. The highways in Greece aren't your standard highways in the US, and the one we were on was a busy city street. We got completely lost, but Lin-Wei was all of the sudden able to translate from Math to English, and thought she saw a sign that said Pirgos -- Πργοσ (which was the direction that Olympia lay). Turning around, we saw that indeed she was correct, and our "highway" continued down an even narrower street that looked more like an alley. We were on the right track though, exited the city, and after a couple of hours driving through the mountains of central Greece, we were at Ancient Olympia. Don't ask Lin-Wei how she liked the drive. She slept through most of it...

 
At the entrance to the ancient Stadium
Our tour of Olympia was pretty standard. There were two parts: The site itself (including the actual stadium where they ran the foot races). The other half was an awesome museum where they housed all the statues, artifacts, and (for lack of a better work) riches that they found on the site. It would have been even cooler to see all this stuff placed where it was in ancient times (because the ruins looked very bare without adornments), but it was nice to see nonetheless.

 
Pillar pieces


Another cool thing to see was the ancient temple of Zeus. All the pillars had fallen down during one of the many earthquakes in Greece, so you could really see how the whole thing was constructed. It was our thought that the pillars in these temples were all one solid piece, but in actuality they have many sections that are pancaked on top of each other.

The only weird thing that happened there was when we were eating lunch. We got sandwiches at the snack shop, and as we were eating, we heard a man having an aweful argument on the phone. He was psychotic, just screaming into the phone, and it was pretty harsh. Lin-Wei was uncomfortable, but I was digging it.

We had a little tour of the city, some dinner where I had a delicious fish dish, and we retired relatively early. The next couple of days I was excited about. We were finally granted our audience with the Oracle at Delphi!