Today I did another trip with SAS. I went to see Epidaurus, Mycenae, and the Corinth Canal. This trip started incredibly early, 7 am to be precise and our first stop was the Corinth Canal. The canal connects the Aegean Sea and the Adriatic Sea and you could see boats taking the short trip between the two. I couldn’t believe how deep the canal was; just from looking at the side of the canal you could not see the bottom.
After the canal, we went to Epidaurus, this is a set of ruins, surprise surprise. But what was really neat was that this set of ruins contained an amphitheater with almost perfectly build acoustics. It reminded me a lot of the how the Hollywood Bowl is set up, and I am sure whoever built the Hollywood Bowl (sorry Kathy I feel like that is something I should know) was inspired by amphitheaters like this one. There are actually three centers of acoustics in the theater and when standing on the triangle that these three create, your voice can be heard up to the top seat. O and by the way this is one of the oldest theaters around, 2400 years old, and it survived only because the Romans had no interest in modifying it.
Next we stopped at the 2nd capital of Greece, Napalou. We only had a couple of minutes here but it was a nice walled city on the ocean. From there we went to Mycenae, and if anyone ever read any Homer you will recognize the name because this is the city which Agamemnon once ruled over. Here is the oldest sculpture in Europe, the Lions Gate which greets people at the gate of the city, is 3300 years old and absolutely huge. There are nine tombs and one outside of the city. There is little known about the one outside of the city, and it has been given the name Agamemnon’s Tomb because it just seems to fit even though Agamemnon probably was not buried there. By the way, it was 41 degrees Celsius here that translates into 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Let’s just say it was hot.
When I got back to the ship, Amanda and I headed out to the Greek island Hydra for the night. We took a hydrofoil, or a really fast ferry, to get to the island and I managed to start feeling sea sick, it sucked. After, we arrived on the island Amanda and I found our hotel, which turned out to be very nice, then went to get some food. We walked around the city for a while and enjoyed many different jewelry shops, I guess that is what Hydra is known for. We decided to go back to our hotel for a little bit to get something, but as we walked up the street we noticed this guy following us, literally, and I stopped just to make sure and he stopped to. Amanda and I walked back the opposite way back to the main road where there were many people. He followed us back out of the little street and kept walking away. I haven't felt in any danger this whole trip up until this point. Good thing we were aware of surroundings and nothing truly bad happened. We ended up going out to a little club/bar and were literally the only Americans there. It was nice though to mingle with local people around my age. I talked to the waiter and he had just gotten back from his mandatory military service (that is one plus in America that there is no required military service).
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