Getting to Matera -where everything can be found "a la sinistra"

Tuesday afternoon we arrived in Bari. The plane we took there was our smallest one during the trip: it only had four seats across it. We took a city bus from the airport to the train station. It was hot and crowded because of the time (lunchtime) and a woman was yelling at her daughters. At the train station, we had just missed the train to Matera, so we had to wait an hour for the next one. Our train passed through Altamura. From it, I could see some church steeples and the newer part of the city. We passed through olive trees and fields along the way. The ground had low hills and was fairly dry because of the summer heat. In Matera we asked people how to get towards the center. Another traveler helped us. She was an Italian woman who spoke perfect English. She had been everywhere in the world: she lived in Japan for a while and her daughter (age 26) had been born there. She had spent time in South America, the USA, and South-East Asia. She had also just returned from a trip to the Middle East and was taking a short trip through Southern Italy.

Our hostel in Matera was actually a converted monastery. It had a chapel and still held cultural events like concerts. It was also a hotel that happened to have two dorm rooms in its basement. These rooms were naturally cooler and the beds were divided into smaller sub-rooms which meant Jess and I had our own little nook.

That evening we walked around Matera to get some food and see the town. The tourist office was not open – it’s unclear as to if one actually exists or not. We kept asking directions and people kept sending us to the left. Matera is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on Earth. There were prehistoric caves across the river and more recent ones in the same part as where we were staying. The “more recent” ones were without running water until about 40-50 years ago. They are called sassi and the town has been used to film commercials and movies like Passion of the Christ. They are divided in two parts: the Barisano and the Caveoso. Our hostel was in between the two, on a cliff and just off the Piazza di Duomo.

That evening we went to a hardware store so Jess could buy a flashlight to use as a reading light. It was somewhat difficult communicating that we wanted the light, but not batteries. Afterwards, we went and ate dinner. I had chicken with balsamic sauce and a veggie frittata. The food was simple, but really tasty. After dinner we had gelato – I had dark chocolate and coffee. Then we walked back to our hostel stopping to look down at the sassi at night.

The Oracle!

Monday morning we dropped our stuff at the hostel and ate breakfast. Then we took the bus to Delphi. Buses in Greece are strange. You don’t always pay as you board. In many cases, we picked up a person along the route who came down the aisle to take our tickets or money. You could be practically at your destination before you actually paid a dime. The ruins of Delphi were built into a steep hill. Built in the 6^th-century, the Temple of Apollo was a pilgrimage site. People went to consult the oracle, a middle-aged virgin, who sat there. The temple and the rest of the site was built on Mt. Parnassos and has views of the Gulf of Corinth. The temple was in ruins, but the floor was still visible, which was unique. Many times the columns are still standing, but nothing else. There were other structures on the grounds – lots of walls and some columns. Up the hill we came across the theater and the stadium. We’re not sure what kind of games or matches were held at the stadium, possibly running races. It was all the way up the hill, so it wouldn’t have been used for cart races. There was another ruin site across the street (and down the hill from this area). We checked that out then went to the site museum. The museum’s building was new and it housed statues and pieces of buildings on the site.

Afterward, we tried to find food for lunch. There was one small “supermarket” with bad lighting and practically no food. I bought stuffed vine leaves and chocolate to eat. Back in Athens, we were shown to our own room again! This was nice because we had to do some laundry before heading to Italy the next morning.

Crete

After Corinth, we grabbed our stuff and headed to Piraeus, the port a few kilometers south of Athens. It was insane there. We got out of the metro and were in a small plaza with an escalator going up to a pedestrian bridge to cross the busy road between the metro and the water. We found our company’s office and went to pick up our tickets. We were leaving from dock three, and there were about a dozen docking areas. Cars and people were everywhere because there were at least six ferries (almost all are car ferries) leaving that night. When we returned, early in the morning a few days later, nothing had changed: there were tons of early-morning ferries leaving and people rushing in all directions. It was like being at a really busy airport during the holiday rush except this was outdoors and it involved cars and trucks. We grabbed some dinner and headed for dock three.

The boat itself was nice. It wasn’t the nicest ferry I have been on, but it wasn’t the worst. Cars were downstairs and we boarded along the side, taking escalators up to the sixth or seventh deck. We had booked airplane-style, “Pullman” seats. We wanted to get there early to pick our seats. The Pullman section was already crowded with families and people spread out everywhere. There were seats left, but a lot of the floor space had been claimed. We saw a few other backpackers, but many of the people were Roma and a lot looked pretty sketchy. I went to the bathroom to brush and floss. The other women in the bathroom basically stared me down as I did this. I slept on the floor because it was more comfortable than sleeping in a chair. My floor space was actually in a row, so people couldn’t really bother me. Getting to the bathroom during the night proved challenging because I had to dodge people and climb over chairs. When I woke up, the sun was rising and we were arriving in Crete.

Friday morning, we were given fresh-squeezed orange juice as we disembarked from the boat. It was reasonably warm in Iraklio/Heraklion, but not hot (it was 6:30am). It took us a few minutes to find the hostel. When we got there, we were allowed to check in and sleep for a bit. That day, we went to Knossos, the ruins of the Minoan palace. This is where the legendary Minotaur, half-man half-bull, lived in a labyrinth. The palace was huge. We started on one side of it and from that point couldn’t see many ruins. I figured, “okay, this will be a relatively-small palace, a few rocks, nothing major.” Boy, was I wrong. We started on the higher side and didn’t realize how far down the hill the palace extended. There were various smaller areas and reproductiosn of frescoes found at the site. Many parts of the palace had been reconstructed by Arther Evans, who uncovered the ruins in 1900. In my opinion, he was too liberal with his reconstruction. Many of the rooms were named based on the functions he prescribed to them, rather than carefully studying the objects he found. For example, he found a chair near one room, so it immediately became the throne room. One interesting tidbit about Knossos is that the oldest stairs in Europe are here. The 3700-year-old staircase goes down the back of the palace. People are not allowed to walk on it, but we could see it from above and below. The stairs are not particularly impressive, but their age certainly is.

That night we ate at a restaurant on the central plaza. Jess had chicken stuffed with cheese and in a date sauce. I had a salad with avocado and smoked salmon. We also tried oozo which was similar to raki, but came pre-mixed.

Saturday we took a bus to Chania, another port city on the northern coast of the island. We walked around the Venician port to the lighthouse at the end of it. Then we got homemade ice cream at an Italian gelateria. I had dark chocolate and banana. We walked out the other end of the port towards the newer harbor and the beach. Luckily I had brought my bathing suit. The water was really clear and warm. We didn’t stay too long because we hadn’t brought towels and Jess didn’t have her swimsuit. Then we walked back towards town. Along the way we saw octopus hanging on a string near a restaurant. Then I had another Greek salad for dinner and more ice cream. The bus ride took almost three hours because of the windy, mountain roads. Along the way, we passed five separate weddings going on. Back at the hostel, there were new people in our room. One woman decided she did not want the fan on during the night. She kept turning it off and we kept trying to explain that there were too many of us and there was no way anyone would get any sleep if the fan was not on. Finally, after three passive-aggressive, silent fan battles, she got up and had the hostel change her room. I had tried pointing out that she should either get another sheet or put some pants on to sleep in. In all the hostels I’ve stayed at, I’ve never actually seen anyone switch rooms during the night.

Sunday morning we slept late and then walked around Heraklion, which was basically dead. We walked dorn the old Venician harbor and then climbed up the ramp at the fort to see it all from above. We also sat and read at café for a while. I had a strawberry juice, which was somewhat like a smoothie. There wasn’t much to do, so we walked around a bit more and ate lunch at fast food place right across the street form the water. I had yet another Greek salad and we watched mTV for a bit. Then we used the internet and went back to the hostel and finished our books. We tried to read in town, but got sick of the people bothering us. One man approached us and put a magnet in my book. I took it out and place it next to me on the bench. When I did this, he began to hit my book to try to get my attention. I liked Crete, but I was getting seriously tired of the attention paid to us. I’ve traveled many places, but have never felt this bothered by people. That evening we took the ferry back to Athens, leaving behind Heraklion and its three Starbucks. This was probably the highest concentration of Starbucks we had seen on our entire trip. The town wasn’t that large and you could easily walk between the three. The ferry ride back was much emptier. It was, however, much more difficult to sleep because it was freezing cold. The air conditioner was up way too high and I had trouble falling asleep.

Corinth

Thursday morning we took a train to Corinth. From the center we took two buses to old Corinth where we saw some ruins and an attached museum. Corinth is where Paul wrote letters as he tried to “spread the word of god.” The Temple of Apollo had only a few columns standing, but the rest of the ruins were great. They weren’t ruins of temples or extremely important buildings. Instead, Corinth was basically a town of ruins. We could see where the main street had been and where shops were. There had been a bunch of churches and a synagogue, all constructed at various times and all in various states of ruin. From the ruins (a site called Ancient Corinth) we could actually see the sea and the mountains across an inlet. The museum wasn’t anything spectacular. Many of the artifacts had actually been stolen a few years back. They were recovered, in Miami, and returned, but not everything is on display. We could also peek into a room just off the museum where a man was restoring a vase. We couldn’t watch for too long, but it was interesting to see him work. It completed our visit. We mailed some postcards and caught our buses back to the train station from where we took two trains and a subway to get back to our hostel. The trains were comfortable, but they really need to run more cars. Many people from Athens take day trips out towards Peloponnese because of the beaches. We got seats because we got on at the train’s second stop. There were only two cars, and most people had to stand (for an hour) on the very crowded train.

Athens

Tuesday we visited the Acropolis. It was full of other tourists but I still enjoyed seeing the ruins, along with the other sites there. The Temple of Athena Nike was off to one side as we went up the Propylaia. There were tons of people standing on the steps taking pictures. Up top, the stones were pretty slippery to walk on. We saw the Parthenon, which was completed in 438 BC. and had doric columns (the most simple ones). A large chunk of the side of the Parthenon was pretty much destroyed and men were working on the rest of the structure. The pediments and friezes had been restored/reconstructed. The best bits of the building are actually in London at the London Museum. Lord Elegin took them in 1801 and they’ve been protected/on display since then. We walked around the back of the structure and then over towards the Erechtheion, which I think I might have liked more than the Parthenon. It’s a smaller temple and has ionic columns on one side of it. On the other side, there is a small porch-like area where caryatids held up the roof. (Now plaster casts of the originals are in their place.) A caryatid is a column in the form of a figure (these are female), which serves as both decoration and structural support.

We descended from the Acropolis and entered the Theater of Dionysos which was built between 340-330 BC. It’s located on the hill just south of the Parthenon. We could actually see it when we sat on a wall next to the Parthenon, which is above the city and could be seen from a distance. The theater wasn’t particularly remarkable, so we didn’t stay there too long. Next, we went to the Temple of Olympian Zeus which was begun in the 6^th century BC. Hadrian’s Arch, located just outside the temple grounds, was completed in AD 131. The temple only had a few columns standing. These were, however, really tall: about 17 meters. One had been toppled and was in slices. From here, we had a great view looking up towards the Parthenon. Getting here was a bit of a challenge because crossing the street in Athens takes skills. They traffic lights are clearly designed to favor automobiles. People are barely given enough time to run across four-six lanes of traffic before the light changes. If there is an island in the center, you will be stopping there. No question about it; there’s no way you have enough time. You could sprint, but it’s 95ºF by 10 am, so that’s out of the question.

We wandered through the tourist-kitsch-filled streets to the Roman Agora, located on the other side of the Acropolis (closer to our hostel). It was a kind of forum like space used during the Roman time period, hence the name. We didn’t bother going inside because we could see the whole thing from outside the fence, and really it just looked like a bunch of rocks. We did, however, enter Hadrian’s Library, which was pretty cool. It was a series of buildings. The scrolls were stored towards the back flanked by two mini-auditoria. This is according to the reconstruction drawings on signs because there wasn’t really much left for us to see.

Our final site was the Ancient Agora, Athens’ marketplace and civic center. They had reconstructed the Stoa of Attalos which was a long, narrow building with two rows of columns in front of it. It housed a small museum of assorted vases and objects found at the site. The “museum” was very well air-conditioned and it explained how the site had been used over time. There was an 11^th-Century church on the grounds. We also climbed a hill to the Temple of Hephaestus which was from ancient times and really well preserved. The rest of the Agora was a jumble of rocks, all of which were labeled, but you had to use your imagination to see what they used to be.

On the way back to the hostel, we stopped at a market to pick up food for dinner. The produce at our local grocery store was terrible: moldy carrots, dead-looking tomatoes. We breezed through the meat market, where men held up lamb heads for us to see. They tried to guess where we were from. I was generally ignored, but Jess was told she was from Singapore and Kazakhstan. From the market we headed up the street towards Omonia, a central transportation area and large square. There were people setting up for an anarchist protest. We didn’t hang around because there were police everywhere: streets were closed off, police vans were parked and there appeared to be riot gear ready to go. Our hostel was only a few blocks away and we could hear some drum banging later on that evening, but the protest seemed peaceful (or at least we didn’t hear about any backlash.

On Wednesday we tried to go to Delphi, but we had missed the bus. Instead we went back toward the Acropolis and walked around a few blocks filled with religious shops. Jess’s dad really likes Eastern Orthodox icons so she was looking to buy him one. The shops were all the same: store owners sitting inside, looking rather bored, and smoking a cigarette. They were somewhat confused as to why two American girls would be in their shop. She didn’t buy anything and, instead, we went to the New Acropolis Museum. The building was finished this year and the museum had only been open for five weeks. It was built by a New York based architect, who designed the building on top of some ruins. Large areas of the floor were glass, so people could look down at the ruins below. You entered in the bottom of the museum and walked up a slight incline, meant to represent the walk up to the Acropolis. That walkway was inclined and lit by natural light from the glass floor and ceiling of the third story of the museum. The second level was full of sculptures, including the originals of the caryatids (except for the one in London). These were really interesting to see up close because no two of the six were identical. Their hair was all done differently, and their clothing was slightly different as well. Up on the third floor, we watched a movie about the Parthenon. This floor had been constructed with the dimensions of the Parthenon in mind. The room where the movie was shown was meant to be “inside” the Parthenon. On either side exits lead to a glassed-in room which had the originals (and plaster casts of the parts taken by Lord Eligin) of the inner and outer friezes. The pediment statues were also at either end of the O-shaped room. I really liked the way the ruins had been displayed because it gave visitors a way to experience the friezes as they should have looked.

Leaving the air-conditioned (we were actually cold) modern building, we headed towards the tourist streets to find some lunch. I had grilled octopus and feta cheese. The octopus had been sliced vertically instead of in rings. It was delicious. Jess had orzo and lamb in a light tomato sauce which she really liked. Then we tried to go sit in a park and read but that didn’t work out because people kept bothering us. One guy actually followed us when we tried to switch benches. There weren’t many people just sitting around in the park. There were some people walking through it, but the only people “hanging out” were really sketchy-looking, so we left.

That evening I went to Carrefour for some groceries and a Priest was speaking in the center of Omonia. There were police again, but far fewer than had been patrolling the previous evening.

Athens

Athens is huge. It’s absolutely enormously huge. Okay, it’s probably not as big as Mexico City (land size) and it does only have a population of 3.7 million (Lonely Planet’s figure). From the plane it was gigantic. We flew over the city, passing it completely, then did a u-turn over the sea and spun back, landing 30 km away in the countryside. After getting off the plane, we took a bus into the center of the city and walked to our ho(s)tel. We booked the place online (on a hostel-booking website), but it’s nothing like the other hostels we’ve been staying at. When we arrived, the place was virtually deserted. We rang the bell and were buzzed in, but no one was in the common-room when we entered. Finally the people emerged. The owner is from Guam, and his English isn’t that great, but he laughs a lot. His “business partner” looks as though he hasn’t showered in year and tried to give us more change than he was supposed to. We corrected him and he put us in our own room for the night. It has two beds and a cot, so we might be getting a roommate for the evening. It’s got a kitchen (well fridge and hot plate), but no microwave, which is fine. We’re close enough to walk to the ruins and the airport bus, but we’re not in the super tourist section. The hostel is also on the 5^th floor of building and our window looks out to other apartments. Everyone has their windows wide open and laundry strung across the shutters (us included). It’s hot here. We have three fans in the room and no top-sheet or blankets. We don’t want them. As soon as we got here, we went to the grocery store to get stuff for dinner. On the way there we passed a Swedish family (mom, dad, two little kids – ages four and five maybe) who was just arriving. When we got back from the store a French couple (in their 20s) was cooking dinner. Everyone seemed kind of scared or had a look like, “where are we and what have we gotten ourselves into?” Thus far, the impression we have of our Greek neighbors is that they are loud. Music plays a lot and people have no qualms about screaming from one window to another across the airshaft in between the buildings. The hostel is fine. It’s clean enough and works for the price and location. We’re pretty pleased, and as Jess pointed out, “we HAD to stay somewhere like this in our travels.”….although I did just hear someone throw yet another plastic bottle out their window and onto the roof below us.

The rest of the trip will be written from Malta and posted starting 24 July (approx.).

Prague Summer (not Spring)

We arrived in Prague midday on Saturday. It’s a small city with a lot of historical buildings which are still in tact. The Jewish section is especially well preserved because it is rumored that Hitler wanted to maintain it as a “Museum to an Extinct Exotic Race.” This means the city suffered very little damage during either world war. It has been used as a movie set for scenes from old European cities (“Amadeus” was filmed there). Most of the streets are narrow and windy. The center is very touristy, as was the area near the castle, where I saw (horror of all horrors) an Ed Hardy store.

As soon as we arrived, I dumped my stuff at the hostel and went up to Prague Castle. The complex is from the 9-10^th Century and is still in use today as the official residence of the Czech president. As soon as I got there, I went inside St. Vitus Cathedral, a gothic structure with colorful stained- and painted-glass windows. Jess had told me to look for a stained-glass window by Czech illustrator Alfons Mucha. I had some trouble figuring out which one it was and, in the end, wound up taking pictures of most of the windows and having Jess ID it later. The church itself was probably one of the top-five nicest churches I’ve been to. The windows were brilliantly colored and it had a huge tomb in the back. I especially liked a spiral staircase leading up to the second level (above a side-chapel). It was carved with a vine over it.

As I was waiting to get into the church it was drizzling. That slowed down as I left the church and headed toward the Old Royal Palace where I entered at the Vladislav Hall, a large space with arched ceilings. The Palace itself wasn’t that interesting, as there wasn’t much to see inside. I could only visit a four rooms and a chapel. I did really like the Basilica of St. George. It was a small-ish church, connected to a cloisters that I could not visit. The church had some frescoes on the apse, but my favorite part was the stairs. The altar was raised above the crypt and on either side a large (for the space) staircase gave you the option of going up (to the altar) or down (to the crypt). It was like a staircase you wound find in an entrance foyer of a large house, but this one over-filled the space and was in a church.

The last place I visited inside the castle grounds was Golden Lane. In the 16^th century, tradesmen lived in tiny houses in the castle’s wall. Above the houses you can walk down a hallway the castle guards used as a lookout. The houses themselves are really tiny. I fit through all the doorways, but many people did not. The rooms inside were about the size of a Tufts single, some as large as a double. The houses are used as souvenir shops today; I browsed around, but nothing was worth buying.

Leaving the castle, I walked down and crossed the river to the Staromestske nam, the square in Prague’s old town. The square is bordered by buildings and churches, which are as old as the 14^th century. At one end is the Old Town Hall where an astronomical clock (it’s a partial replica) from 1410 stands. It’s large and chimes on the hour (apparently apostles parade out of the top of it, but I never saw it). In the center of the square sits a statue to Jan Hus, a religious reformer of the 15^th century.

Back at the hostel, I made rice and a mock red-curry for dinner (broccoli and carrots in tomato sauce with curry). Our hostel was one of the nicer ones we’ve encountered. Jess and I both got bottom bunks in a room overlooking a plaza. Our room had three (!!!) windows and, therefore, a cross-breeze. The hostel also had a full kitchen and wifi.

Sunday I woke up and took a free walking tour of Prague. (Jess had been to Prague before and didn’t really want/need to do the touristy stuff.) The tour guide was from Colorado and had only been living in Prague for two months. She’s there to teach English. We started in the old town square and moved on to see a church where an arm hangs. Legend has it that a man was trying to steel from the church. As punishment his arm was cut off and left hanging to remind others not to steel. Pretty much it looked like a brown dog bone 20 feet in the air hanging from a small chain.

Next we walked through the Jewish quarter and saw the cemetery from the outside. Then we walked across the Charles Bridge, which has statues lining the sides of it. These are all plaster casts because the originals won’t survive the elements. The statues are mostly of saints and the bridge was crowded with tourists and people selling things. On the other side of the bridge, we visited a small, man-made island. Prague floods every few years and some times this island is completely submerged. A restaurant marks the water level of the various floods. A few years ago, the entire first floor of every building was flooded. From here we saw a wall where people sprayed their opinions of communism and love on a wall. During the 80s, a Mexican university student painted “All we need is love” onto the wall and kept painting it after the police painted over the graffiti. The idea lasted (even though communism did not) and people still spray-paint messages of love onto this wall. The tour ended up at the castle.

I walked back down the hill and to the old part of the city where I went to the Jewish Museum, which is actually a series of buildings. The first one I entered was the Pinkas Synagogue from 1535. The walls have been painted with the names of 80,000 Jews from Moravia and Bohemia who died during the Holocaust. These names are arranged by location and are all over the main part and women’s gallery. Upstairs there was an exhibition of art work by children who lived in Terezín before being moved to the concentration camps. Their teacher, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, kept their work in a turn and it was discovered, preserved and donated to the museum. Next, I went through the Old Jewish Cemetery which was established in the 15^th century. It has almost 12,000 tombstones, but more people are buried there without markers. The stones are literally smashed up against one another. Because space was at a premium, and the Jews were not given many other areas, people were buried in layers. The ground at the cemetery is actually slightly higher than the streets around it. The oldest grave is from 1439, but it was really hard to even tell that the rock I saw was marking a grave. There were some tombs in the walls of the cemetery, but most of the people had been buried “underground.” After the cemetery, I went to the Ceremonial Hall, a building used by the Prague Burial Society. Inside I encountered an exhibition about death in the Jewish religion as well as objects used by the society, including tableware from their annual banquet. It was believed that their job was so depressing that they deserved a yearly break.

Next, I visited the Klausen Synagogue, which was the result of taking three smaller buildings and turning them into one larger space. The space was set up as museum on Jewish traditions and they had installed a bimah with a torah in a glass case to show how it would look during services. This synagogue was built in the 1600s and was the largest in the ghetto. The third synagogue I visited was the Maisel Synagogue. This one was dedicated to the history of Jews in Moravia and Bohemia. The building was built in 1590-2 and had three naves. It was much squarer than the previous two synagogues I had been inside. It too had the arc symbolically set up, but no bimah. I saved the Spanish Synagogue for last because I knew it was the most opulent of the four. It was in the baroque style and housed an exhibit on the history of Jews in Moravia and Bohemia from emancipation to the present. It also had a room full of torah-pointers and other old silver objects. I liked the set-up of the museum, that you had to walk between the spaces, but the actually cases were dark and there was tons of text in each. The Berlin museum was much better in that the exhibitions included hands-on elements and the lighting made it easy to see everything.

I walked through the newer part of Prague, up to Wenceslas Square, where I saw a statue of him on a horse. Wenceslas was known as the “good king” and he is well loved in Prague. I stopped at Tesco for some groceries and wanted to pay with my ATM card because I only had enough Czech crown/krona to get to the airport the next day. The card machines weren’t working and I asked if I could pay with euros. I only had a 20-euro note and was spending the Czech equivalent of one euro. While I was trying to explain to the woman that I could pay her with euro, but I wanted euro back as change the man behind me paid for my groceries. I was shocked and embarrassed but he said, “ah, no problem. You can pay next time.”

That evening, I went on a mini-excursion to DM (a combo CVS/health food store) for wheat-free pretzels. Jess had found the store and told me where to go. On the way, I got turned around in this gallery and wound up encountering a statue of Wenceslas on an upside horse which was suspended from the ceiling. I had known about the statue because it is by the same artist who put statues of babies on the TV tower in the city. From far away, they don’t really look like babies, but Jess had know about it and told me.