Olympia (And Grade 11 English Class)

Next we docked at Katakolon, a seaside town in Greece. The main attraction here was Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, and there was no shortage of tour companies offering to take us there. After walking past the Customs House and onto the main street of the village, we picked a large tour bus.

 

The drive was leisurely and the rolling hills were beautiful to take in. It was also neat to see the houses. Many are perpetually under construction, with columns and slabs exposed on the upper levels and rebar sticking out. This is intentional. As the generations living in the house age, they can simply finish the next floor up for the younger generations to move into with their growing families.

We finally arrived at Olympia and were met with a traffic nightmare. We smartly took a photo of the license plate of our bus because we were not sure how we would find it when it was time to leave otherwise. We started by touring the archeological site. After so many years of art history in high school and mechanics in university, it was neat to see the columns up close. It was hard to believe that there were still some left standing after thousands of years. The ones that had fallen over were also not what you would expect, as they were carved in pieces and stacked on top of one another. They are still excavating parts of the site today.

 

Next we walked through the museum. We came across a lizard friend near the entrance and he was a natural in front of our cameras. Inside, we saw many sculptures that were still remarkably well intact and had been found at the nearby ruins during excavations. We also came across a sculpture of Hermes, which took me back to a Grade 11 English class where I worked on a project about Hermes as part of a Greek mythology unit.

After the museum, it was time to leave, so we headed back to find our bus, which fortunately we were able to pretty easily! When we arrived back at the port, we had a bit of time left over, so we wandered around the village, got separated from each other briefly, but all managed to make it back on the ship.