Delphi (Greece 9)

I suppose that the day really started at 2:30 am when I awoke from my sleep and started coughing for half an hour. This wasn't as bad as the previous night but still not much fun. As I understand things, this is a side effect of pertussis: the bacteria weaken the closure to the lungs and make it harder to extricate all the phlegm which collects there.

The next stage in day was executed with military precision: the alarm went off at 5:45 am, my wife showered then prepared tea. We left our room at 6:55 am to be in the breakfast room at opening time (7 am) in order to meet the bus outside our hotel at 7:30 am (actually the bus was late). The speed at which we ate breakfast did indeed remind me of breakfast during basic training: we used to be so hungry and hopped up that we would eat in 5 minutes then hang around for another 15. It took several days before the penny dropped that we could eat at a more leisurely pace and still be ready on time. The other differences are of course that this morning we had a much wider choice of foods of much better quality.

The bus then went around down-town Athens picking up people scheduled for various trips. At about 8:45 am, we alighted the bus which would take us to Delphi. I was quite surprised at how many people were on the bus - but this was nothing compared to when we got to Delphi. There must have been six or seven tour groups who arrived near enough at the same time, making the place crowded (and difficult to take photographs without anyone else in them).

After a pit stop somewhere (along with the aforementioned six or seven other tour groups), at around 11:15 am we passed through the pretty town of Arahova which is on Mount Parnassus, about 1000 m above sea level. This is a ski resort, although there is no snow left now. Half an hour later and we were in Delphi - 180 km from Athens.

Although I knew a little bit about the ruins and the stories of Apollo and his temple, I didn't realise that the ruins are on a hill side which required no small amount of exertion to access. This is the stage at which I will explain the origin of the name 'Delphi' for the programming language (which was originally to be called AppBuilder, or something similar): the language's developers were very proud of the simplicity of the database connections built into Delphi, and as one of the leading databases of the time (1990) was Oracle, the expression arose "go ask the Oracle". Where was the oracle? In Delphi.

The ruins were very impressive as was the small museum, although again the number of people visiting simultaneously was more than problematic.

After the tour, the bus set off for a restaurant where lunch would be served. For various reasons, we had declined to pay for the fixed lunch; I thought that we would be dropped off in the quaint town of Delphi itself where we could find something to eat, but no, we (and the other five who elected not to have the fixed lunch) were taken to the same restaurant ... which was also hosting a few other tour groups. I wasn't at all hungry which only justified the decision to pay for what we ate: in the end, we had spaghetti alla pomodora along with a Greek salad.

There was a gift shop in the restaurant which was far better than the gift shop in the museum, although I got the impression from one of the workers in the museum gift shop that they were limited to selling only government approved goods (or something similar), whereas of course the restaurant gift shop had a free hand to stock whatever it wanted. Two t-shirts and two guide books were the result of two gift shops.

Coming back (this is already around 3:30 pm), we had a twenty minute stop in Arahova, which was somewhat unnecessary, although it did give us the chance to film the main street. I also filmed the nearby mountains along with its cloud cover. Finally we set off for Athens, being dropped off at our hotel a minute before 7 pm as advertised. The centre of Athens (Syntagma Square) is closed as the Greek Prime Minister is giving a speech there, two days before the elections to the European Parliament.

I coughed almost non-stop all the way back, but after a few cups of tea and cough medicine, the coughing has subsided for now. I spent the time on the way back reading 'The little drummer girl', especially the part where Gadi/Joseph/Salim and Charlie are in Delphi.