GREECE AND TURKEY

PIRAEUS, ATHENS & THE ACROPOLIS Our tour to the Acropolis was in the morning of Saturday. Once we got there, the crowds were tremendous but not as many people as the Vatican. Anyway, a short climb to a magnificent location. I do believe that I managed to get a few pretty good photos. I thought that I might be getting a little blasé about ancient buildings but not these. It was a great adventure. We drove around Piraeus where the ship is docked. This place, too, was bombed during the war so Piraeus is mostly new and we really didn’t see much of Athens. Except for the Acropolis, this was not our best tour. Today we took what we thought was a little tour of Izmir (Smyrna in Biblical times), Turkey. Our guide spoke the best English of all. We visited the ruins from the Roman times. The city was founded 8500 years ago according to the archeological evidence but as of now they don’t know exactly who those people were. Those ruins were still being excavated and it just seemed to me to be more “approachable” and interesting. Water is still running thru the terracotta pipes. Next we stopped in a square and visited in the narrow streets. It was Sunday and only a few (still a lot) of the shops were open. We stopped for Turkish coffee and a sweet in a very authentic little coffee shop. One of the customers spoke English so he took our orders. After returning to the bus, we were taken to a Turkish rug finishing and distributing shop. We were shown the wool that is used and told how they send the wool out to the different small villages where the women weave the rugs. The government will pay for the girls to learn to weave if they are not taught at home. They give them a salary too during this time. Child labor is not used in Turkey although to us 16 seems young. Anyway it was so interesting to see a young woman working on double knotting a carpet. She was doing about 200 knots per inch but some of the silk rugs are 500 knots per inch. Of course they showed up many, many rugs and gave us good price. Really. The salesman we got has been to Seattle. His wife is Greek from Shoreline and she is beautiful. He has two daughters one of which is going to be working in TV in New York. She was trained by Joyce Taylor from - is it KIRO or one of those stations. Joe and MicK bought a rug and he did give them a very good price.. Lots of other stuff --- but now we are one the ship, resting and reading and writing. Tomorrow we are in Istanbul, Turkey.