Welcome to the Western World

It has been a great releif to us to arrive in Greece and find that the locals are pretty ambivalent to tourists here. It's nice to roam the narrow ancient streets up the hills and down again at a leisurely pace. We went to the Acropolis yesterday and spent about 4 hours there just looking and taking pictures. It is still in the process of being restored so there is plenty of scaffolding everywhere. The views of the Athens were terrific and the sky was the perfect bright blue with very few clouds.

Our first full day here, on the 27th, we changed our hotel from Tempi to John's, a slightly cheaper one that has a heater, found the post office, went to the tourist office, and went shopping for some sweaters. We are going to run way over budget here but what can you do? I expect Spain will be the same way.

After our sightseeing yesterday we went to a local place where we met an American poet who has been living in Greece for 20 years. His name is Timothy Jennings. He writes in Greek and he read some of his poems to me (in english). I enjoyed them very much. He directed us to a restaurant where we had a good meal and some retsina (homemade) which is much much better than the stuff we have had in the States.

Yesterday afternoon, while we were having a bread and cheese snack in our hotel room, there was a demonstration of about 400,000 school children from all over Greece down the major street near our hotel. They were protesting the impending war with Iraq. I knew something was going on because we saw the street was blocked off. It would have been fascinating to see.

Tomorrow we will continue the site-seeing with the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Ancient Agora, and whatever else we feel up to doing. It's great no longer having a schedule or deadline that we have to meet but we will be setting up one as soon as we buy our ticket for our flight to Spain. Then the clock really starts running.

Our original plan was to spend some time in Athens, then bus it up to Delphi for a couple of days and then travel down through the Peloponnese. We would take the ferry to Crete spend about a week there and then ferry to Santorini. We have to come back to Athens since there are no direct international flights out elsewhere. We will probably go to Spain around the 20th of March.

We didn't get much done today so really there's not much to say. Just wanted you all to know that we made it here and are still having a good time. Hope all is well back home.