...a neighbor on his way to the shower in Nafplion.

It’s difficult to become enthusiastic about leaving a hotel like the Nafplion Palace. What a place? In this ancient hillside hotel, the rooms are so modern that Margaret and I spent a little time figuring out how the fancy shower works... and turning on the lights wasn’t a simple matter of flipping a switch. Until we learned how to stop it and reduce it to one traditional sprinkling of water from an overhead nozzle, the shower explodes into a frenzy of spray from eight fierce nozzles on the wall, a big overhead sprinkler that makes rain, and a hand held telephone-like nozzle over to one side. I’m guessing that in a palace like this in 450 B.C. there would have been slaves to apply water wherever and however the bather wanted it. Modern life is a challenge.

We are the barbarians in Greece. Beginning at least 3000 years ago the Greeks lived in confidence that their place on earth was blessed by the gods. They were convinced that all people not Greek wanted to be. They came from all directions chattering in languages that sounded to the Greeks like sheep bleating. Non-Greek languages weren’t considered beautiful; remember beauty is truth and truth is beauty, so how could there be any truth or beauty in baa-baaing. The Greeks gave us the word barbarian for such speakers because they sounded like the baa-baaing of sheep when they talked.

We stopped at Corinth on the drive from Nafplion to Athens. Everybody in the Western World knows Corinth from the letter of St. Paul to the first century Christians who lived there. The city of ancient Corinth was located on the slopes of the hill of Akrokorinthos, where the ruins of a fortress from early Byzantine times are still to this day in pretty good shape. The site was occupied continuously from the Neolithic period to the Middle Ages and found new life and relative prosperity lower down on the plain below the mountain after the canal was built between the Corinthian Gulf and the Aegean Sea in the late 1800s.

We’re back at the Intercontinental Hotel in Athens for a couple of days.

...just kidding. The Intercontinental is at least a step up from this place on the north bank of the canal.