I know I promised to continue our journey through Greece — Corinth, Mycenæ, Olympia, Delphi, the islands — after I rested up, but it turns out I have a different story to tell. You may want to skip this one and come back tomorrow for the stuff I promised you yesterday.

On the bus all Tuesday afternoon, after Olympia heading to Delphi, I felt twinges of discomfort in my abdominal area, and by bedtime I was in pain. Since I had not had a bowel movement since Monday morning, I presumed it was constipation.

By 2:00 am the pain was serious, so I went downstairs. The front desk did not have any laxatives on hand, and of course the pharmacy was closed. I decided to tough it out the rest of the night, hit the pharmacy in the morning, and give the Oracle ruins a pass.

By 4 am, however, the pain was too much. The front desk called my Lovely First Wife and me a taxi, and away we went down the mountain, zigging and zagging those switchback roads at high speed. (I closed my eyes and lay down.)

We were headed up another mountain to Amfissa and its small hospital. There we were ushered into the ER, where I was treated by a lovely young doctor and her assistant.

I had two sets of x-rays; an ultrasound (for which we had to wait until the technician came in to work); two pain shots; had another, older doctor consult (he was a bit of an asshole; gave off a whole “little lady” vibe to my main care giver); and a very handsome urologist who told me that I indeed had a kidney stone (1 cm); and a whole laundry list of other issues to follow up on when I got back home, not all of them dealing with the kidney stone, which they told me was not actually moving.

Amfissa’s hospital is an older facility, and while the care I received was first-rate, we were surprised at the old-fashioned procedures, like my doctor writing down everything in a ledger book instead of typing it into the computer. No one wore nametags nor introduced themselves. (The equipment, I hasten to add, was thoroughly modern.)

When I asked to pay, there was some confusion, but eventually the front office came up with a bill for €89.72.

Eighty-nine euros. In real money, that’s about $140. For an ER visit.

But wait, there’s more.

We were able to rejoin the tour, literally on the road halfway up the mountain to Delphi, and set out for Itea, a seaside town where we stopped for lunch. I was still not feeling well, and realized that they had not prescribed any pain meds for me.

Then we began the long drive north towards Meteora, during which I was supposed to be catching you up on Monday and Tuesday, but by the time we hit the rest stop on the way to Kalambaka I was retching from the pain. Our fabulous tour director Efi called a cab, and we left the tour again to head to Lamia, where a much larger hospital ER awaited us.

There was I given a CT-scan and held overnight for fluids, pain meds, and observation. (Once again, the medical staff was TV/movie attractive; a flock of handsome EMT trainees watched my IV being inserted.)

I was put in the men’s three-bed emergency ward.

My wardmate was an older man who was not only garrulous but stentorian. He roared constantly; I put in my foam earplugs. Eventually the Lovely First Wife, now becoming best friends with Gate 1’s emergency-handling person, was whisked away to the Fthia Hotel.

At one point in the evening, I woke to find a very ill man in the bed next to me, tracheotomy and all. The loud man’s treatment was finally deemed satisfactory and his daughter took him home. Quietude descended. I slept, until the pain meds began to wear off and I was back where I started.

They continued to pump me full of antibiotics, pain meds, saline solution, and finally a laxative, which I requested by using translate.google.com. (Yes, our friend Sue had given me a gizmo that translates the spoken word, but did I remember to bring it? Of course not.)

Twenty-four hours after we got there, I was released. Here’s a group photo of my team and me — we need vacation shots, after all.

We went to the pharmacy next door, where prescriptions for Ciproxin, Celebrex, and Lonarid cost us €16.

We headed back to the hotel that Gate 1 had found for my Lovely First Wife, the Fthia Hotel. It’s small, perfectly modern, and convenient to the hospital, just in case you need to know that. After a shower, a shave, and some snacks, I was feeling just about human.

We are staying the night and working out with Gate 1 how to get back to Athens and fly home as soon as we can, so no Greek islands for you. (And no Cretan labyrinth/Minotaur for me.)

Oh, and how much does an overnight stay in an ER, complete with CT scan and drugs? Zero.

“It’s a public hospital.”

When one is on a river cruise, Viking for example, you are essentially in a hotel that moves, i.e., you can unpack and not worry about stuff until the end of the cruise. The hotel moves, and you have a lot of time to collect your thoughts and blog.

On a bus tour, Gate 1 for example, it is you who is on the move, living out of a suitcase from day to day. You may have some downtime on the the bus, but if you’re exhausted from climbing through the ruins of Mycenæ and perhaps didn’t sleep well because of torn meniscus, for example, you may choose to nap instead of collecting your thoughts and blogging.

So it has happened here.

We’ve decamped in Delphi—great gods in Olympia (where we were today), how the hell did this civilization develop when all its cultural centers were all so inaccessible?—and tomorrow is a very long bus ride to Meteora, so I’ll get Day 3 and Day 4 done on that ride.

To tide you over, here are two kittens napping in the artemisia outside the museum at Olympia. (You’ll get their lovely, affectionate mother tomorrow.)

Fun fact: Did you know that Athens’ sewage system is so ancient that they don’t want you flushing “paper” down the toilet? Instead, there are little bins in which you deposit your used Charmin. (They are emptied by staff.)

After a good night’s rest — finally — we were up early for breakfast. The little restaurant downstairs is lavishly appointed, and the buffet was staggering in its variety. (We’re staying at the Divani Caravel.) But the architecturally unnecessary steps down to the buffet were… disorienting.

The hotel as a whole is lavish. Here’s the grand stairway leading down to the big halls:

Onto the bus, where our wonderful tour guide Efi greeted us. Today was going to be a bit disorienting for her, since there was a bicycle race through the city and she was not sure where we were going to be to able to go and how we were going to get there. But we set off, past the original stadium built for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896…

… heading towards the Acropolis.

You may as well know now that there is no such thing as too many photos of the Parthenon.

How bus drivers navigate streets that were never built for buses (or for the number of cars used by 5 million people), I will never know. We actually made it past the bicycle race barricades just as they were going up.

It’s a hike up.

But the views are spectacular. Here’s a monument on top of another mountain, the name of which I didn’t catch. Feel free to inform me in comments.

Before you reach the Propylæa, the monumental gates to the Acropolis, you overlook the Odeion, the theatre build in Roman times.

You will perhaps recognize it from Yanni: Live at the Acropolis. Oh yes you do.

Here is my Lovely First Wife, perhaps not understanding that for one’s “death shot” (our term for that photo inevitably used for one’s obituary) one removes one’s face mask. (Although Covid restrictions have been largely lifted in Greece, face masks are still required in certain settings and encouraged in others.)

The Propylæa.

Originally a fortress, a walled city, eventually the Acropolis became a place of temples and worship. The buildings still remaining were built when Athens became an independent, wealthy city-state, and they’re all of marble.

This patch in the wall of the Proplyæa interested me. I am presuming it may have been damage from a cannonball, perhaps. The takeaway is that those who patched it were clearly nowhere on the same level as those who built it.

The Parthenon.

As the couple from Nashville quipped, “Ours has a roof.”

Good shot, I thought.

The good thing about getting there early was that it was not quite as hot — temperatures have been in the 90s — and the crowds were just beginning to get there.

The Erechtheion, which I presume you remember from your art history class.

At the other end of the Parthenon, it was astounding to be able to see how not-straight the whole thing is. Every line is slightly curved, mathematically calculated to fool the human eye into thinking it is all straight.

It’s even hard to see in the photograph. You just have to go and see for yourself.

Down below, the theatre of Dionysus. Where it all started. When Proteus says at the opening of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “The theatre is a temple,” that’s not a joke. (It has always amused me that the two main roots of Western theatre are religious: Dionysus worship in ancient Greece, and the Quem queritas from medieval Catholicism.)

The place is littered with pieces of the past.

A couples death shot. Yes, I’m wearing a kilt the entire trip; I am definitely the rara avis on this trip.

The Erechtheion from the side. I didn’t get a photo, but the wall at the end is still intact and has windows.

Then it was down the hill to the Acropolis Museum, a fabulous new building. On the way, I kept noticing the letter phi inscribed the marble paving stones.

I asked Elfi what it might mean, but she had no answer. I also saw a couple of chi‘s, so they may be just stonecutters marks.

Ooh, and also on the way, there was a private residence whose front doors had these for handles:

Woot!

The Acropolis Museum is beautiful, ultramodern.

When they began excavation for the new building, no one should have been surprised that they discovered layer upon layer of ur-Athens beneath. Not a problem: the architects pivoted and installed glass floors in the entrance  and first floor so you can see the ruins beneath. (I should have gotten a picture.)

A comedy mask.

One of the original caryatids from the Erchtheion. They removed all of them, cleaned them of centuries of smoke and pollution, and installed them here. The ones on the Acropolis are replicas.

The top floor of the museum pivots to be parallel to the Parthenon and is a replica of its floor plan: It has the same number of columns, and the metopes from the frieze are displayed in the appropriate location. Some are original, but many are replicas of the ones removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin. (This is a sore subject for the Greeks.)

The view from the museum:

After a nice lunch, we retreated to the hotel and took a nap. Thus endeth the first part of the first day.

 

Have I mentioned how much I hate to fly? Across country is one thing, but across the globe is quite another: an 11-hour flight from Atlanta to Greece, nonstop, which started late because Delta overbooked the flight and no one would take their increasingly attractive offers to give up their seats — possibly because we all had to be somewhere the next day on time — and our seats were not the ones we had signed up for — an aisle and window — but instead were the two middle seats in steerage Kenneth AND DO YOU THINK I GOT ANY REAL SLEEP?

So, here we are in Athens, and such is my delirium that I have no photos to show you, except for this one, snapped outside the cafe where we resorted to get a little something in our stomachs after an execrable breakfast and to tide us over before a late dinner. (Greeks don’t eat dinner until 9:00 or so.)

Yes, it’s a golden human hand made up of other humans, and it does appear to be shooting a bird, with a bird on top of it.

Welcome to Athens.

I’ll do better tomorrow.