Wednesday, May 23, 2012

A city of ruins

Today we woke up and headed to Delos, a completely abandoned ancient city! Literally a pile of rocks on a bigger rock in the middle of the ocean. Ok, it was much nicer than that, but Delos hasn't had anyone living on it since about the 2nd century AD. It was the birth place of Apollo and Artemis and was created by Poseidon. It's the largest excavation site in all of Europe. Pretty cool statistic, I thought. The tour we took was expensive and not very informative. I got more from my two tour books than the woman and her hour and a half schpeil, but whatever....
 We saw a lot of doric and ionic columns. Lots of temples and even more shops than I thought was possible for an ancient city. What were these people buying?! How many pots can you possibly need in 167 AD?! One for water, one for piss, one for soup....
 We saw the famous lion statues that the Greeks put in place to guard their sacred lake....the lake is no longer there because modern day Greeks were worried about Malaria and had it drained. Hope no one is thirsty!
 Of course, every Greek city new and old, has a theater. So what do I do? I tap dance....or sing a song....or both. After being on the island for over 3 hours, we were making jokes about not missing the boat out. The last boat would be 1.5 hours later and we were in no mood to see MORE ruins.
 After Delos, we set out to find Little Venice....which we did. Yeah for us. It really does look like Venice except for the fact that there are no canals, it's one street, and there were no gondolas! I love the ocean water color there though. Much prettier than the canals of Venice.

Aha, the windmills. Since Mykonos is the island of wind, it makes sense that there are so many of them. It was pretty windy today too. These are no longer working though so we didn't see them move. After the windmills and lunch, we went to two more beaches; Kalafatis, known for water sports, and Elia, known for being a family beach. Neither struck us as OMG BEST BEACH EVER but they were relaxing.

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