we were on aegina island (which is itself a story for another time), and saw this pillar sticking up over the trees while we were at lunch. so, off to investigate.
the temple of apollo at aegina, with its sole remaining column pointing to the sky, was built in the 6th century b.c. it was excavated at the turn of the 20th century.
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i’m sure there will be many more temples of apollo to photograph in the next three years.
this is the public market in athens between monastiraki and omonoia square, for those of you who know the area.
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| you can buy olives here … | … or here. | at the cheaper end of the spectrum. |
not everyone sells olives, of course.
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at the meat market.
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| some butchers are busy | others, not so much. | you can’t get as much of the goat as you could get in india, but some things are the same. |
if only … getting the hyper focal distance right is tricky on this camera. either the x100s does not measure distances correctly, or i don’t – one or the other (or both).
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we enjoyed the supermoon from the top of an enormous rock across from the acropolis.
i just cleaned up the previous post. formatting posts on an iphone is for the birds, so i’m sitting in a café with good wifi, and typing.
i was prepared to do a long post on the national archaeological museum, but i realized that the photos i’d taken on my iphone (again, why don’t i carry my camera everywhere i go?) turned out to be pretty bad. i will do a post on the museum soon-ish, since the museum is pretty amazing. in the meantime, though, i got the idea of taking the metro to the end of one of the lines, and then walking back into town and photographing what i saw. i chose to get off at agia marina (άγια μαρίνα), which i first translated as the agia marina – i.e., where they dock the boats – but then realized it means “saint marina.”
so up i popped at saint marina station, and i found myself on ιερά όδος, the holy road. “this oughta be good,” i said to myself. not so much. so the question is, can i walk down the holy road and find photos worth taking, or is this going to be three years to taking pictures just of ancient ruins and islands?
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| the guy in the middle asked me why i was taking this photo, and i really couldn’t come up with a good reason except that i liked the dog. | ||
the photos i did take, for the most part, were pretty awful, but when it cools down a bit, i’m going to go back and try again.
however, just past this exurban blight:
i came upon this:
which is the base of a once five-arched bridge over the kifissios river. the river used to run through an olive grove that flanked the sacred way (holy road), and it provided the water for plato’s academy, which was active in the fourth century b.c. archaeologists found these bases while the city was excavating the area for the metro station.
so, basically, it doesn’t matter how awful a neighborhood you’re in, something interesting was there about 2500 years ago.
apparently, i can upload photos and compose posts from my phone. poorly, and expensively. so, a quick post:
this is athens …
but so is this …
… and this. more on this theme later.
