Greece: Delphi

Today we went to Delphi. Well, that was the principle point of the day. I'm enjoying my attempts to read the Greek alphabet on all the road signs. Most of the letters are pretty familiar. And they should for anyone who took math and physics in college. Fluid mechanics too. Lots of Greek letters in fluid mechanics. A few look unfamiliar, especially omicron. I think that's because it doesn't get much play in technical fields because it looks like a zero.

For instance, let's check out a couple photos. (Bear with me; these were taking from a moving car.) In this first one, you see the names of two cities: Larisa and Karditsa. It's pretty easy to see how these are spelled out in Greek. Larisa has that capital lambda followed by alpha, rho, iota, sigma, alpha. The rho, which resembles out 'p' and the sigma, which is like an 'o' with a tail are the big differences. The iota and alpha look a lot like our counterparts. With Karditsa, you have the capital kappa, then an alpha, rho, delta, iota, tau, sigma, alpha. In this other photo we see a lot of the same letters, but also a couple new ones. Note how our letter 'p', which looks like a rho, is of course represented by pi. Also, that thing that looks like a 'v' is really a nu to correspond to 'n'. In the bottom word, you get to see the lowercase lambda and a mu for 'm' which looks like a 'u' with extras. The puzzler is that last character, which looks more like a zeta than anything else. I'm still mulling it over.

There are little shrines all along the highway. I'm not quire sure what they signify, but they vary in condition from totally forgotten to rather elaborate. Any ideas? I'd take a photo so people can see but we haven't exactly been stopping in the middle of the road. (Editorial follow-up: I never managed to get a good photo of one of these.)

Delphi was interesting, but not very informative. In retrospect the Acropolis was nice in that it had descriptive plaques in front of things. Delphi had some labels, but no descriptive information. There was a stadium at the top of the old city that was a short, but solid hike to get to. In the end, the city was a bunch of stones. I'm told that there are lots of stones all over the country or so say my family who toured the Peloponnesian Peninsula last week.

We're spending the night in a town called Lamia. Not much to say, except that they have very poor city planning. That seems to be a problem that afflicts a lot of this country. We tried some local dessert products. One of them was this round gelatinous product with walnuts in the middle and sesame seeds on the outside. It tasted exactly like Cracker Jacks. Very odd.