The play's the thing

Hey, everyone- I appear to have fallen asleep waiting for this post to publish.  I think it would have been up eight or nine hours ago, but alas, we were exhausted, and the Internet around here is not optimal.

So, here it is, written last night:

This morning, we left Delphi and got on a bus to Nafplio. Our particular tour probably works out better when it's not the dead center of summer, though, because we arrived just in the worst part of the day's heat. We keep doing that. It would be so much better if we could come early and get in a walk around the place we've arrived before noon.

As it happens, we keep having a quick walk around in the middle of the day. Today's quick walk took us to a gelato place. Cas and I each got a sorbet that was half lemon and half strawberry. 

We took a pit stop at Isthmos Canal in Corinth today. It was a real marvel of engineering in digging it out and making a passage for ships. 

It was that stop that put our arrival time at around 1:15. 

We had a half hour to shake off the drowsiness from the bus and get ready for a walk.  Charlie took us through the city, showing us some of the things we may wish to explore on our own. Her walks are brisk, and often punctuated with pauses for shopping recommendations or tourism suggestions. I would love that a lot more if those suggestions were being made in the high 80s, not the high 90s. 

I paid just a little bit of attention.  Not much.  After our brief orientation, Cas and I elected to stay behind as the rest of the group went back to the hotel.  We stayed at a restaurant and had what turned out to be a really big lunch.  

We wandered around a little bit after that, ending up at a bar for a small piece of time until our wine tasting event.  Our local expert had us try two white wines, three red ones, a small amount of Ouzo and Ciporo.  I thought the first white was too bitter, the second one was okay, and I liked all three reds.  The Ouzo was fantastic, and the Ciporo (nobody told me it was the same thing as Grappa) tasted like what I imagine fingernail polish remover would have tasted like.  

In the end, we decided to purchase a bottle of red for our ferry ride, and leave the Grappa for someone who needed to remove furniture varnish.  

The final event of the day was a Greek play in the Epidarus festival.  It was a production called The Bacchae written by Uripides in 400 BC.  I have to be honest, I kept falling asleep.  The heat combined with the exhaustion of the day and the fact that the play was hard to follow was about to lull me to sleep right there in my stone seat.  The play was in Greek with English subtitles.  They did this by projecting the English words on these small horizontal screens to the left and right of the stage.  Looking back and forth was dizzying.  It made things a little more taxing than my already worn out attention span could do.  Still, it was great to see a play with a chorus in a real Greek amphitheater.  they used no audio equipment, and we heard every footfall.  Those old Greeks knew what they were doing.  

It's time for bed, for sure.  I am only staying up long enough to post this last photo from our seats, then it's lights out!