Italian Cruise Day 3: Olympia

 Again, we woke up to find ourselves coming into a new port in another country. Greece was beautiful, and looked like every postcard and picture you've seen. The water was so impossibly blue!

I called this "Elephant Head Island".

Room service was free on our ship, aside from a 2 euro service charge. Since we had to be ready to leave the boat for our excursion to Olympia by 7am, we decided to have breakfast sent to us so we would have lots of time. Unfortunately, room service sucked at doing things in a timely fashion and at 6:45 I found myself wolfing my delicious Eggs Benedict without being able to enjoy it. Boo!

Once on shore, we didn't spend any time in the port of Katakolon but got on a tour bus right away for Olympia. (It just so happened that on this tour bus, in Greece, Tom ended up sitting next to a woman from Bismarck, ND. What are the odds of that??) It took about 30 minutes to get there, and it was an interesting drive through the Greek countryside. It looked just how I imagined it would: dusty, sunny, hot, olive trees everywhere, oleander, tall grassy plant things and scrubby grass and bushes. It was very brown and green, broken up by beautiful oleander of different colors, and very dry. We passed a couple of little villages, all with little white houses and  flat or almost-flat roofs. There were also olive tree groves and watermelon fields next to little farmhouses. It all looked ageless and traditional. I would definitely be interested in seeing more of Greece!

We had a Greek tour guide, who was very informational and gave us a lot of information on Olympia's history as well as a crash course on Greek mythology. She was also a fan of telling us what English words were derived from Greek. "And this god's name was Kronos. From this Greek word you get chronology, chronicle, chronic...that's from the Greek word Kronos." (For anyone who recognizes the funny in this from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", I'm sorry to say I didn't have the chance to ask her opinion on Windex.)

Statue of Zeus. In his hand he holds Nike, the goddess of victory.
"From this Greek word you get the word Nicholas," said the tour guide.
"From this Greek word I get the word Nicole," thinks Nicole.

Olympia was the site of the original Olympics, of course, and was pretty much leveled by an earthquake a long time ago so it's mostly ruins and a few things rebuilt or semi-rebuilt. The various temples were interesting, including the temple of Zeus (built in the 5th century BC). This was the location of the statue of Zeus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which was located in the temple from the time it was built until the 5th century AD. We also saw the temple of Hera, which still serves as the place where the Olympic torch is lit every four years. Apparently when the games were held in Athens, one of the field events was actually held at the field in Olympia. It was a very interesting tour, and of course really cool to visit the very first Olympic village!


After the tour and the bus ride back to the ship, there wasn't any extra time to see Katakolon before departure so we headed right to the GIANT line of people waiting to board. Wyatt started crying that he had to go potty, and a really, really awesome Costa employee offered us priority boarding and jetted us to the front of the line. Thanks for whining, little man!

We opted for lunch in the main dining room because we were feeling too lazy to walk through the buffet. We were seating with a guy who looked just like Phil Collins. He was from Spain. Wyatt was (of course) being dreadful, so he and I had a brief conversation about horrible children. Apparently he had one too. My Spanish is not bad, considering I haven't used it for ten years, but it wasn't great-- I had to do a fair amount of clueless nodding and smiling while he told me stuff about his kid. Still, it was really nice to actually be able to understand something being said to me.



After lunch, Tom took Wyatt back to the cabin for a nap and I headed out again to suntan and read. I found a really great spot on the back of the boat, with a good breeze and beautiful view. I took a really great nap out there! It was near one of the hot tubs, and I saw that there were a lot of people who would sit in the hot tub and drink coffee. It was a little cooler that day, but it was still probably 90 degrees. Those crazy Europeans!

Dinner the third night was the first of two "formal" nights. It wasn't enforced or anything, but I did notice that a lot of people dressed up nicely. At least more sparkly, anyway. On this night I discovered that I do not like duck as food and felt like a horrible person for eating it. I do love cheese, though, and had a lovely assortment on the nightly cheese platter. Our waiter, Clive, was very nice and took a liking to Wyatt. He brought him a little toy car and told him he could keep it as long as he didn't fall asleep that night. Because it was "fancy" night, our table had a taper candle. Wyatt really wanted to blow it out, but we thought we'd ask first. Each night, anyone having a birthday on board would get a lovely (not really) serenade from the waitstaff. For some reason, that night there were about eight people with birthdays. It also happened to be Wyatt's birthday! He was not a paid passenger, so sadly (not really) he did not get serenaded. However, when we asked if Wyatt could blow out the candle Clive actually brought him a piece of birthday cake with a candle in it-- and so Wyatt got to blow out a candle and eat cake on his third birthday. Big thanks to Clive the awesome waiter from the Philippines, who did that for the little man without even knowing it was his birthday!

The End of Day 3

Olympia Pictures*:

https://picasaweb.google.com/100630377008480284814/Olympia?authuser=0&feat=directlink

*In these pictures and some from the other days, I notice that I look a little pregnant around the tummy area. I assure you, that is not the case. It is merely a combination of an ill-fitting strapless brassiere and serious vacation overeating. The "food baby" has  mostly disappeared already.