20th Sun May, 19:50
9th Wed May, 17:32
You've been eating cupcakes wrong your whole life
Keep scrolling. Your world will be changed forever, I promise. Teach it to your children and they’ll teach it to their children and in a few generations, we’ll have a worldwide Utopia. You’re welcome.
OHHHHHHHHHHHMYYYYYYYGOOOOOOOD
never once crossed my mind
fuck
Dagnabbit! I’d better go make some cupcakes - just to test obviously…
3rd Thu May, 06:38Pizza and Tiffin
So two recipes I tried this weekend: pizza dough and tiffin Both worked very well. Josh and I made a half and half pizza with chicken, sausage and pepperoni on one side and four cheese on the other. Pretty darn scrumptious. What I liked most is how quick it is! Seriously, ten minutes making then just put stuff on it! We attempted to make stuffed crust but the mozzarella just disappeared… not quite sure how but oh wells!
The tiffin I made today is also pretty darn good. I used Dairy Milk chocolate though and I think I won’t do that next time. It has a very distinctive flavour which is a little jarring and over sweet so I might get ‘generic’ milk chocolate (or nice stuff). Word to the wise - I’ve used Tesco chocolate, the one which just says 85% or 70% in bright colours on a background, a bunch of times and it’s really good. The recipe asks for half milk and half dark which I’ve found is a pretty good rule of thumb *anyway*.
If you’ve got any good recipes you think I should try - let me know, I’d love to hear.
Willow xx
23rd Mon Apr, 19:0323rd Mon Apr, 18:01
What it's like to be brown
My bus to Vegas got stopped at the Border Patrol stop on the 5 freeway if you’re heading north.
no exaggeration. Two agents came on, asked for the IDs and birthplaces of every person who was brown, and did so in spanish, and even when i spoke english back to the guy, he still spoke to me in spanish.
then they skipped all the white people and the couple traveling from China
and left
post-racial america is awesome
And I thought we had advanced as a race…
22nd Sun Apr, 17:50Willow's 5 steps to self improvement
Hello again y’all. Now, many of you may know that I recently moved down to Bristol with my brother to start a new job etc. Less of you will know that my brother has decided to move back in with his mum for a time because it wasn’t going well for him and he was getting very down by the whole thing. Which makes me lonely girly…
To prevent another I-moved-here-for-a-job-and-now-I’m-really-depressed fiasco (see Rotterdam and Staines) I have decided upon a set of things I will do to be more productive and actually challenge myself *not* to eat a ton of ice cream, watch TV, talk only on IRC and general introverted lameness.
And so the completely untried or tested steps to self-improvement I will endeavour to undertake (I say endeavour because I will be a dreamer and *planner* to the end but I am easily distracted from my planned path…)
1. BE MORE ORGANISED
2. Meet new people
3. Eat new things
4. Learn new things
5. Challenge myself creatively
An explanation:
1. I can be hopelessly disorganised - this might not always be apparent because I know this fault and so try to *over* organise. I am sometimes the person who is 2.5 hours early to the airport. Seriously.
So therefore I am going to over organise my life in the hopes that the result will leave me relatively organised. To this end I am making far more use of my Google Calendar - I even have a ‘Bills’ calendar to tell me when to pay stuff, or to remind me that direct debits will be paid. Direct debits are half my bills but they’re still on my calendar. I have also started using www.clearchequebook.com which is so far pretty awesome.
I am going to set up blog reminders as well. Reminders to do coursework (see step 4) and most everything. We shall see how it goes.
2. Meet new people, simple as it sounds. I have already met a couple of people who I was supposed to be going to a show and meeting up with last Thursday but it was *pissing* it down so I kinda bailed. But next Monday (not tomorrow) I am going to be meeting up with the Bristol SF and Fantasy group which should be fun :D I have also joined the Bristol Photography Meetup Group so we shall see.
3. The problem with living by yourself is that you can get lazy food wise. There’s no challenge and more importantly no regular mealtimes. Thus, my challenge to myself is simply to cook one thing, one little thing - sweet or savoury, from a recipe book each week. Put some variety in my diet and learn more recipes.
4. Love my job though I do it means I’m only expanding my knowledge in one direction. So after the suggestion of a colleague I have decided to sign up to TWO (why two, why!?) IT classes from www.udacity.com one that will teach me some Python and how to build my own search engine apparently. And one that will build on this Python knowledge and teach me how to build a web app. So I am going to set aside time every day (with Google reminders) to do homework/lessons etc.
5. This is the big one. Lately I feel like I’ve been languishing in an uncreative vortex. I haven’t taken a creative photo since I don’t know when. I haven’t done any more web comics. I haven’t done any drawing or web design. This is unacceptable.
So. I’ve already joined the photo meet up thing which should help. My sister and I have also decided that come June (when her AS Levels are over) we are going to set ourselves a topic - a word or phrase - and take a photo within this topic. Further to that we are going to restrict ourselves each month to only being able to take it within one of Animal, Mineral or Vegetable to be specified at the time. An example in case that doesn’t make sense: the topic could be ‘water’ but the restraint could be ‘Animal’. So you can’t just take a picture of waves it has to be something Animal and to do with Water. Should be fun…
I am also going to try to revitalise my website www.salixsys.org, build a website for my mum’s tearooms-to-be like I promised. Try to do more drawings/web comics. I might set one of these as an Art Topic of the Month actually - or do something completely different.
AND THEN! I’m gonna blog about it - yay for you dear reader. If you’re there. I will try to keep other blog posts much shorter than this. Words of encouragement are greatly appreciated. And if you have a challenge you’d like me to undertake as part of the creativity section feel free to suggest it :D
Willow xx
Nagios Timeperiod Hoo-ha
That’s right, hoo-ha. So I had a customer call in about two weeks ago wanting what was a seemingly complex set up so that he would get text alerts from his Nagios monitoring only in off work hours (believe me, it started out way more difficult than that*)
Want to know how I did it? Well it took a while to get everything down properly so here we go.
First, the setup. The customer and his team of unfortunate on-call co-workers have what they have dubbed the ‘bat phone’. That is, one phone that gets handed to the next guy who’s on call every Monday (or whatever). After sifting through what the customer actually wanted we narrowed it down to this: text and email alerts in non-work hours for critical/recovery service alerts and down/up host alerts.
In your Nagios set up you should have a few standard config files: contacts, contactgroups and timeperiods. We will use all of these.
The way I did set this up was:
1. Create yourself an on-call contact: we used ‘batgirl’
2. Specify the name, alias,contactgroup,service/host notification periods/options (and that they’re enabled)and thecontact details.See http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/objectdefinitions.html#contact
3. For us that meant that thenotification periodswere ‘nonworkhours’ and ‘bank holidays’ and that the options were critical/recovery/down/recovered. Like so:
define contact{
contact_name batgirl
alias On-call engineer
host_notifications_enabled 1
service_notifications_enabled 1
service_notification_period batgirl-oncall
host_notification_period batgirl-oncall
service_notification_options c,r
host_notification_options d,r
service_notification_commands notify-by-email,notify-by-sms
host_notification_commands host-notify-by-email,host-notify-by-sms
email batgirl@batcave.com
pager 07777 777 777
}
Got that? OK!
4. To the contactgroups.cfg- now, I was updating a pre-existing set up so what I had to do was add thebatgirluser to the contact groups that were already defined. A contact group is the group of people who will be notified of a particular event. You can have lots of these. This customer had ones which only notified certain people if a certain machine went down because they were the only ones who knew how to fix it. Very smart. Anyway, addbatgirlto your ‘on call’ contactgroup.
5. The time periods. So this is the bit that *really* screwed me over. I used this as a guide but still had some serious issues because maybe our version of Nagios is different or because they weren’t explained well, who knows?
The plan is: create a ‘nonworkhours’ time periodtemplateand a ‘bankholidays’template.The template bit is important and wasn’t clear in the link above. I’ll give you examples of mine with comments (and a little theory)
define timeperiod{
name nonworkhours ; Why three names? I think because the 'name' needs to be used
timeperiod_name nonworkhours ; so it can be referred to as a template plus 'timeperiod_name;
alias nonworkhours ; and 'alias' are mandatory
sunday 00:00-24:00 ; all day
monday 00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00 ; Midnight till nine, five-thirty till midnight
tuesday 00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
wednesday 00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
thursday 00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
friday 00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
saturday 00:00-24:00
}
For bank holidays I had:
define timeperiod{
name bankholidays
timeperiod_name bankholidays
alias bankholidays
january 1 00:00-24:00 ; New Year's Day
monday 1 may 00:00-24:00 ; First Monday in May
monday -1 may 00:00-24:00 ; Last Monday in May
monday -1 august 00:00-24:00 ; Last Monday in August
december 25 00:00-24:00 ; Christmas
december 26 00:00-24:00 ; Boxing Day
december 31 17:00-24:00 ; New Year's Eve (5pm onwards)
}
Pretty self-explanatory. Obviously as Easter moves we can’t fit that in but this is the best we’ve got. So those are your templates.
6. The last time period definition is the easy one:
define timeperiod{
timeperiod_name batgirl-oncall
alias On Call Officer
use nonworkhours,bankholidays
}
So now we reference this nice and uncomplex time period just once in the contact definition. She’s referenced in the contact groups and so your poor bat girl should be alerted out of hours for critical services and down servers and their recoveries.
Reload Nagios and hope to hell it works.
I hope that was even vaguely useful. If it helps at least one person a little bit before this information goes out of date I will be happy.
Willow xx
16th Mon Apr, 19:09Right then...
I am re-purposing this blog. Mostly because I’m not going traveling but think I should blog more. I probably won’t but there you go. Things I hope to blog about:
1. Photography - pictures what I took innit
2. Crafts - if I get round to making stuff
3. Any traveling I actually do (probably mostly Bristol stuff)
4. Techie stuff - because sometimes you Google stuff and it ain’t sodding there, but Willow has the answer
5. Other stuff that takes my fancy ^_^
Feel free to unfollow :P
Willow xx
16th Mon Apr, 18:3212th Thu Apr, 21:52
10th Tue Apr, 18:57
22nd Sun Jan, 16:23
Real Life Monopoly
Well, it was pretty cool. Took us longer to get round the board than I expected but that’s mostly ‘cos we moseyed! In the end there were five of us so we decided to split into a Boy’s Team - Alex, Dan and Welp and a Girl’s Team - Me and Lucy. We decided to assign each colour-group a point value, the tax squares and jail negative points and another 2 points for passing ‘Go’. I made up some Chance Cards but we ignored the Community Chests.
We set Waterloo as our ‘Go’ point and after some much needed coffee, rolled our dice and set off. Lucy and I got Pall Mall and the boys got Chance Street (one of two ‘Chance’ locations). I hadn’t realised how close Pall Mall was to Trafalgar Square, it really was easy to find and it was a nice day so we saw lots of interesting things going on.
Some pictures:
http://salixsys.org/images/Grass-Monet.jpg
http://salixsys.org/images/Darth%20Vader.jpg
http://salixsys.org/images/Artist.jpg
http://salixsys.org/images/Barbarian.jpg
See? Pretty cool. Also, Lucy at Pall Mall:
We rolled the dice and got Chancery Lane. Lucy has the photo for that unfortunately. It’s a pretty small street though in Holborn. Our Chance Card was to take a photo with a police officer if an obliging one could be found. The Chance Cards were more challenges to be undertaken during the day so we postponed that one and rolled our dice. Next stop - Piccadilly Circus!
We decided to detour via Cool Britannia, Tokyo Toys in The Trocadero and M&M world before setting off to our next destination - Mayfair.
On reaching Mayfair however we remembered that it was an area not a street so we cheated and went to Park Lane. Despite the fact that we were *also* stood by a map people thought we looked pretty knowledgeable and we had two separate groups of people asking us for directions o_O Anyways, our next roll was The Angel Islington which took us past ‘Go’ for this game I decided we should actually stop at Waterloo on each circuit so you can remember how many times you went round the board. I was designated photographee at Park Lane so here is Lucy at Waterloo looking exceptionally blurred:
We then set off for The Angel Islington, as that is another location not a road we took photos outside the station. As some of you may know The Angel has the longest escalator of any Underground station in London, Lucy videoed some of our descent but it really is a long way! We took photos of each other outside Angel
Just a little explanation, we both held up a fairy on our journeys round London as she was our playing piece :D
We returned to King’s Cross to meet up with boy’s team who didn’t play properly *scowls* then set off (all 200m) to Pentonville Road
Plus a very sexy face from welp at the side. Probably should have cropped him out…oh well! After that it was about four pm and we were at a slight loss as to what to do. We decided to return to Leicester Square to see if we could find anything to do. Lucy and I popped into the Haagen Dazs shop where I got my favourite ice cream flavour: Chocolate Midnight Cookies! It’s chocolate ice cream, chocolate cookies and chocolate syrup. I haven’t seen it over here though they may sell it in Waitrose (I’ve seen it on Ocado) but mostly I had it when I was in Rotterdam on *especially* low days.
We decided to go see Cowboys and Aliens at the Odeon. Where they have leopard print seats!! Wow… It was a pretty good movie, more jumpy and bloody than I thought it was going to be but good fun. As welp put it, ‘I think Daniel Craig was good in it because he looked like he was in pain the whole time’. Not *entirely* sure that’s a good thing but it was very enjoyable. Plus we got 2 for 1 vouchers for use by 25th September so we’re going to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy next week!
We went to a pub after as Lucy and I were still a little hungry, I don’t remember what it was called but it was near Leicester Square, down the road from some theatres…yeah that doesn’t help - it was green? Anyway! Lucy and I had a ‘mini burger’ platter. It was supposed to comprise of 2 mini burgers, 2 mini cheeseburgers and 2 mini cheese and bacon burgers. However we got 4 cheese and bacon and 2 cheese. You won’t hear me complaining though! Very tasty. Then it was hometime so we trekked back to Leicester Square station (about the fourth/fifth Lucy and I had been there), said our goodbyes and set off home.
All in all a pretty awesome day. Definitely want to do it again with more people though.
Also, having been through Leicester Square so much we saw the banners for Much Ado About Nothing with Catherine Tate and David Tenant. I now feel I have to go… Has anyone been? Is it any good? It’s my favourite Shakespeare play so I don’t want it ruined >_>
Let me know if you want to join in another one - I’m thinking Spring/Summer next year!
Willow xx
P.S. The girls won - despite Welp’s claim we can’t read maps.
4th Sun Sep, 13:42Greece - Naxos and Return to Athens
What a day. It’s been pretty long I can tell you. Both Rhi and I slept badly, sunburn and the heat were becoming a bit overwhelming I think. Didn’t rise too late but took a while to get going. We checked out of the lovely Hotel Soula about midday, leaving our bags there.
We went to the travel agent to pick up our ferry tickets then bought ourselves sandwiches from Kales Diakopes (I think) which is this fabulous sandwicherie, patisserie, gelaterie. The pastries looked divine - I simply will have to go back and sample ;) We set off for the beach again planning to chillax on some sunloungers in the shade.
Although the beach is free (unlike some I believe) all the sunloungers are owned by various bars and need to be paid for. But for 7EUR we got two loungers plus table and umbrella for as long as we wanted which wasn’t such a bad deal. I can’t remember the name of the bar but they had some good old fashioned ‘chill out’ music playing and the sun, sea and sand were wonderful. Rhi had a phenomenal looking fruit salad. We lazed there till about half four when we headed back to the Hotel, via a supermarket for yet more water (I don’t know how much water I’ve drunk this week, probably an ocean full) and were very kindly driven to the port. We then dumped our luggage at a storage place as we weren’t leaving till nine and went in search of something to drink or eat.
Something we’d noticed about Naxos: half the places along the harbour were cafe-cocktail bars. They had the most amazing happy hours, 16:00 - 20:00 or, like the one we went to: 2pm to 2am. I’m not sure what the Greek definition of happy hour is but the cocktails were 4EUR so whatever. Rhi had an ‘Endless Summer’ and I decided to try what they called an Italian Vanilla Frappe. It was frothed vanilla milk over ice with Disarrona Amaretto at the bottom. It was superb, will definitely have to make one for myself.
We then went in search of food and stopped by a place called Popi’s Grill. Just an FYI, either be made of stern stuff or don’t look at the menu if you’re just looking. You will be (nicely) accosted by the ladies who work there:
“We have souvlaki, big souvlaki, look over there, chicken, pork, aubergines, moussaka, cheese pie, spinach pie, very nice. Traditional Greek food, very nice.” - from the first lady. In a dazed state you will pick a table and get a similar list of food from another lady working there. With, for some reason, particular emphasis on “Cheese pie, spinach pie.” We overheard them say that to multiple other customers. Rhi did get the spinach pie so it must have worked! She said it was quite nice. I decided to try the moussaka again and I’m not sure it was better than the one I had before. It may have been freshly prepared from scratch but it had been on the heat all day from what I could which meant that the corners had caramelised till they were kind of chewy/crunchy…in a bad way. But it was quite tasty, and not too expensive - fine by me!
We decided to stop by the Milkato ice cream bar again because their ice cream was so nice. Today we both had two scoops, Rhi had Strawberry Cheesecake (which I had yesterday - lush!) and Coconut as they were out of Creme Brulee :( I had Kinder Bueno and Straciatella, both wonderful.
We collected our bags and waited by the ‘gate’ for the ferry. There was a luggage store in the main car deck and when we got upstairs even the economy section was beautiful. The chairs were so comfy, even against sunburnt skin. I watched a bit of TV, read and had a bit of a nap. Rhi got a bit more sleep than me. It was a high speed ferry though so we got in just after one. We disembarked and read the instructions for the bus stations but they weren’t particularly clear and we wandered about and sat down near where we thought a station should be. After 40 minutes (we’d read online they were every 40 minutes) we decided to do some further investigation. I wandered down to one of the many ice-cream/drinks/chocolate/biscuit/misc stands that line the streets of all the Greek towns we visited and asked where the bus was. We were pointed in the right direction but stopped before then as we saw another bus stop for our bus. Waited there for about 15 minutes until a taxi driver told us we’d be better off going to the bus terminal as the buses went from there every 15 minutes, not once an hour. We thanked him, hurried to the terminal and the X96 bus we had to catch had just been boarded by the driver! Perfect timing methinks. It took just over an hour to get here and now I’m sitting in Athens Airport by a sleeping RhiRhi, waiting for our counter to open. It’s been a verrrrrry long day.
And an awesome holiday. I will add pictures to the posts I’ve already put up tomorrow or this weeked. Plus some other posts with hilarious quotes from Rhi, 10 things we learnt about Greece and a list of all the hotels we stayed at/restaurants we visited with reviews and photos. Oh, and that map I promised!
Much love,
Willow xxx
7th Thu Jul, 02:51Greece - Naxos Town
So after a day of getting accidentally lobsterified (yes that’s a word) we decided to pass on beachtimes for the Tuesday. Instead we got up deliciously late and wandered around Naxos town. We went to an awesome Gelateria called Milkato with fab ice creams - pictures to arrive shortly - and just generally explored. Not too much though, it was soooo hot.
Naxos really is beautiful, one of the typical Greek towns you see, all white buildings and blue shutters. Truly gorgeous. Most people drive around on mopeds and quadbikes and everyone seems quite friendly. I think I could quite happily return year after year. Though probably not in July again. We felt like we were melting!
After some wandering we decided to be very mediterranean and have a nap!
We went to a restaurant called Kali Kardia and had what was probably the best food since arriving in Greece. Rhi had a ‘vegetarian platter’ which was much appreciated as it did sometimes seem like the Greeks don’t quite understand vegetarianism… I had a ‘complete meal’ which was chicken and chips - not very Greek I know - until you add delicious pitta breads and tzatziki, a spicy one at that. And wonderfully prepared.
Not a particularly eventful day but then, we *were* on holiday. Home, bed.
7th Thu Jul, 02:24Greece - Naxos!
Greece - Day 5 - Naxos
After a nice long sleep we decided we really ought to get up and see the island or at least the beach. I used the shower here which was quite nice but, in our experience, showers don’t come with overhead shower-head-hanger-things. Which makes for a new experience certainly. Anyway, it was warm, it was powerful and a great way to wake up.
Once RhiRhi was up too we decided to head down to the beach, stopping via the supermarket to get some food for breakfast. Some mini croissants, fruit, yoghurt and honey should suffice for the next couple of days. We carried all this back to our room and set off in search of the sea!
Despite the fact that Greek metres are longer than British metres (by an as yet undiscovered amount) it really was not much more than the “200m down the road” we had been promised. And it. Was. Glorious. Perfect blue, blazing sunshine and real sand to boot. The ‘George Beach’ was lovely. The beach forms the edge of a whole cove so we walked round it to where we could see a calmer patch with less children etc. Along the beach were loads of cafes and all that sort of thing, sun loungers too.
We set up camp in a fairly empty area and lay down to soak up the sun and read our books. Don’t worry, dear reader, we did of course venture into the sea! It was a bit cold for Rhi but I thought it was grand! As we hadn’t left our hotel till gone eleven and had eaten breakfast not much earlier we decided to eat lunch more around 3pm. We went to a ‘sports cafe’ called Flisvos and ordered some amazing food. Rhi got a ‘Grilled Greek’ sandwich and I just had potato wedges, enoooormous potato wedges. There was quite a variety of prices so if you want something more than a sandwich or a large side then it’s going to cost more along the lines of 7/8/9EUR. They also did amazing smoothies and other blended drinks. I had a yoghurt smoothie with my choice of nectarines, strawberries and bananas - delicious. Rhi had a smoothie with pineapple, honey, banana, orange and…other stuff, we can’t remember. We also ordered some yummy crepes and a second drink each, I a cappuccino freddo and Rhi another smoothie with melon in.
Then it was back to the beach! We stayed on the beach till about eight o’clock when Rhi started getting hungry again so we headed back, slathered on a lot of after-sun and headed out to ‘The best Mexican restaurant in town’ (URL may be broken). It was described thusly by a Norwegian guy I’d sat next to in the minibus the night before. Now, I’m not sure how many Mexican restaurants they have in Naxos but he’d been coming there every year for ten years (and staying at the Hotel Soula) so his opinion was pretty good.
The restaurant was brilliant. Unlike a lot of texmex places where the options are: enchiladas, fajitas, salad, meat there was real variety in the menu which made it quite hard to choose. I wasn’t hungry so I ordered and appetizer of chicken ‘Chimichangas’ and Rhi a burrito, both portions were suitably large and excellent value for money. Again a range of prices means you can’t assume you’ll only spend 15EUR or whatever but the food was great. They also did loooooooooads of cocktails which we considered but decided that as we weren’t really tequila people, we’d pass on.
They bring you a ‘shot’ each with your bill; along the lines of the Granite we’d had on our first day in Athens. As Rhi had ordered beer and I ordered an ice tea we suspect that the lime flavour Rhi was given had a hint of alcohol in and mine was a plain strawberry. Very yummy and the alcohol didn’t seem to be overpowering, just a hint but it’s worth knowing.
Then is was home and bed for us after a wonderfully lazy day. Tomorrow we’re going to visit the port to pick up our tickets and ascertain where the ferry goes from.
7th Thu Jul, 02:12Greece - Piraeus to Naxos
Greece - Day 4 - Piraeus
We had a 5:30 ferry to catch to Naxos on Sunday so we decided to hike our bags over to Piraeus in the morning and just sit around in the port. Lucky for us we found some baggage lockers so we dumped our stuff in there, picked up our tickets and sat in a cafe all afternoon.
It was a pretty chill day!
The ferry ride was incredibly calm; RhiRhi, who can get boatsick, didn’t feel unwell at all. We played cards at the start, much to the amusement of some Greek people who sat down next to us; frankly I think they were amused by most of the things we did - they kept looking at us and smiling. Most odd. However, for our amusing ways they offered us some baklava each which was very lovely of them. We were picked up from the port and driven to the Hotel Soula.
The hotel is very lovely, full of ‘marble’ (I don’t know how to tell between real and faux marble), quite comfortable beds and we had an ensuite. The bathroom is odd though - the shower curtain covers one side of the shower and…keeps going, so the toilet is curtained off too. Very strange. Plus standard “No paper in the toilet”. Which, honestly, is a bit gross. Come on Greece - sort it out! You’re a first world country, have first world sewers already!
Anyway, it was late so into bed we got and slept we did.
7th Thu Jul, 02:08Greece - Delphi Ruins
A slightly less lazy morning today as we had to be up to make the 10:30 am bus to Delphi. We caught the Metro up to Attiki and set off in search of the bus station - the wrong way… We decided to catch a taxi in the right direction which gave us fifteen minutes to spare before the bus departed, five of which was spent waiting for the guy at the ticket counter to notice us standing right in front of him! But we made it onto the bus, onto the very last seats it would seem and spent three glorious hours cramped at the back of a coach lol. We stopped on the way for a loo break and coffee or, in our case, a kind of frozen profiterole cream chocolate dessert we ate with our fingers due to lack of spoons.
We got to Delphi at about half one and decided to get some food. Between us we’re doing quite well on the ‘eat like the Greeks’ front having had; greek salad, moussaka, tzatziki, souvlaki and real greek yoghurt. And Rhi has eaten looooads of olives! We’ve also had fruit granites as I’ve mentioned and we had iced coffee yesterday - not too shabby! So anyways, nice lunch and then off to the Ruins of Delphi.
I’m going to take a moment to make a sidenote: Greek measurements are different to British ones. What you or I, fellow Brits, might consider 1 metre is about half or a third smaller than a Greek metre. So if ever you ask a Greek how far away something is and they give you a distance in metres, double it at least. If it’s less than that, you’ll be happy but if you don’t you’ll end up getting annoyed at Greeks-who-can’t-measure-stuff. Like we did. Three times. Today.
We only went to the actual Archaeological site ‘cos the museum was closed and frankly, it was enough. Rhi was already a bit tired so I set off up the hill by myself. The first thing I noticed about Delphi, as I was going up the site, was the commanding view. Set on a hillside overlooking a great valley surrounded by mountains it was really quite spectacular. The mountains are steep and covered in olive groves with zigzag paths cutting across them.
The ruins themselves are quite a mixed lot, some parts just chunks of rock or a series of them, pointing to the sky (looking like very close packed tombstones) and then the Theatre, the Stadium or the Treasury of the Athenians. The latter is the most complete structure on the site, a (now-)roofless building in the style of a temple.
The Temple of Apollo is barely there any more, just five columns stand proud against the sky. Apparently it has gone through 3 incarnations; the last being built in 330BC if I recall correctly. There are quite a few paths through the ruins and, despite being a Saturday, I didn’t bump into too many people. I had the Theatre entirely to myself. The seats there are no longer usable but you can actually walk on the ‘stage’. I felt a need to perform something, an offering to the Gods of old but didn’t have a monologue prepared… maybe next time. Further on up, all the way at the top there was the Stadium where the Pythian Games were held. Quite intact too though again, the strict no-touch policy was in place and you couldn’t enter the Stadium.
Unless I was looking in the wrong place; you can’t actually see where the Delphi prophesied. I believe it was near/under the Temple of Apollo which was a bit unfortunate but it was certainly interesting being in these places. Many of the paths take you past what once must have been walls but in some cases it’s hard to tell what was stonework and what is/was rock. Until you see the ‘Do not touch’ signs which make you look closer and you realise that these corner stones are engraved with Greek writing too…
On the whole: I love classics, ancient worlds and I find it inspiring to be in places that were built thousands of years ago, to know that thousands of generations have walked where I’m walking. That is fabulous to me but… if that doesn’t interest you in the slightest, I’ll be honest, probably not much point making the pilgrimage to Delphi unless to say you’ve been there. There aren’t a lot of signs to tell you what’s what, no awe-inspiring structures like the Parthenon; just the broken remnants of a lost civilisation.
Oh. And an awesome slushie-cafe where you can get a nice slushie of a myriad of flavours for 4EUR - woop!
7th Thu Jul, 02:01Greece - The Acropolis etc.
So last night we realised that we had booked the Naxos hotel for Sunday night to Wednesday morning - rather than tonight to Monday…whoops! So we went to the nice guy who runs the hotel we were staying at and asked if we could stay another two nights. Sadly not, he was fully booked but he directed us to the sister hotel which is a whole (hewl) star above the Neos Olympos! Goodness me. It’s quite nice, similar sort of set up but en suite bathrooms. Huzzah!
Anyways, so lazy morning, packed, dragged our stuff over to the 100m-down-the-road Delta Hotel (more like 500 metres - the Greeks don’t measure properly #fact) and shoving our stuff in their kitchen - it’s a classy joint - we set off with our hearts full of joy! Or something.
We decided to catch one of the site-seeing tour buses to the Acropolis ‘cos it was too far to walk but we didn’t listen to the audio ‘cos quite frankly, it wasn’t that interesting ;) The bus stopped as close at it could to the Acropolis and we were BOILING. It was seriously hot. So we bought some of the most overpriced drinks and ice cream and sat down for 15 minutes in the shade before making our way up.
N.B. Don’t get the ‘Unified Ticket (or Full Price Ticket)’ unless you really are going to see all those sites. Bai Bai 6EUR
Anyways, it’s a pretty gentle climb from the bus stop up but with slippery, marble slopes so wear good shoes. Once up there - what a view. Basically, anywhere could be *an* acropolis because it just means “bunch of rock we built stuff on” as far as my guidebook is concerned. But this is THE Acropolis and Athens sprawls out around it in every direction. I’ll get to the Parthenon in a sec but seriously. It feels like you’re on top of the world, minute houses below, sun glinting off windows and the sea in the distance one way, hills/mountains the other. Amazing.
The Parthenon and associated ruins were also pretty cool. The Theatre of Dionysus was very well preserved it seems though it wasn’t open today. The main temple is huge and another example of the power of these people. I haven’t seen the Pyramids so I can’t compare but just thinking about the fact that these buildings are thousands or years old is amazing to me. The fact they’re still standing at all is wondrous. Unfortunately, what with restoration going on there’s an awful lot of banging and scaffolding everywhere but hey ho, so it goes.
We moseyed on down to some of the smaller ruins, parts of temples, tombs and the like. Interesting as well though most statues seemed to consist of feet and everything else being lost -how they know whose feet they are is suprising but there we go.
We then headed down to the Acropolis Museum and had lunch - very nice, very cheap :D The museum has lots of small items; figurines, dolls, ‘vessels’ etc. as well as huge parts of statues; feet, horses with no riders, faces with no noses - kind of depressing really. Here’s this amazing culture and all we have are its broken remains. Well, we can blame Persia for that really ;) There are some really huge statues (or parts) and also lots of friezes or motifs that must have run around the edges of the temples. A lot of these were in plaster, why? Because the originals are in the British Museum… ¬_¬ They also had a plaster mockup of what the front piece of the temple would probably look like were all the statues whole which was kind of neat.
the Acropolis Museum is actually interesting in its own right as it is built above some other Greek ruins and in many cases the floor is glass so you can look right down into them. It appears that you can actually walk around them but either we couldn’t find the way down or it wasn’t open today. Such is life.
We caught the Athens Tour Bus around Athens seeing Syntagma square for the 2nd and 3rd time that day! Athens is a mixed-up city: modern buildings brushing against crumbling derelict houses. Tall buildings separated by smaller ones, huge rich embassies and complete dives. And almost every apartment we drove past in the bus had plants on its balcony, seriously, I’ve never seen such vegetation! The buildings were half green. I’ve a lot of pictures of all the juxtaposition between old and new but those will have to wait till I’m back in Britain so I can sort through all my photos.
We decided to get off the bus near Omonia and go for dinner, we found a little restaurant called: PLATEIA KOTZIA
7th Thu Jul, 01:58A restaurant called restaurant
…That’s where we ate tonight! Little local type place it looked like on the square nearby. About ten minutes walk from the hotel. We had a proper Greek salad, Tzatziki and bread to start. Then I had Moussaka and Rhi had Spaghetti with Mushrooms. Both were yummy! Now back at the hotel, re-planning our week after we booked our hotel in Naxos for the wrong days - d’oh! Looks like we’re going to the Parthenon tomorrow - SQUEE!
I shall be making a Google map of all the places we’ve been, I’ll make a new post with the link :D
Willow and Rhi xx
30th Thu Jun, 20:24