After Israel, we hopped a flight out of Tel Aviv, and had a wonderful opportunity to check out Cyprus during a day-long lay-over. It was all blooming with beautiful spring flowers, and made a lovely stop. Cyprus is a Greek speaking sovereign country, although the Northern half is mostly Turkish speaking, and is occupied by Turkish forces. During our time there, we took a nice tour of the town and discovered the church pictured above which was built in commemoration of Lazarus (the man Jesus raised from the dead), who may have finally died here in Cyprus.
After stopping off in Cyprus, we continued on to Athens Greece, where we saw the Greek Parthenon, one of the greatest architectural achievements in the world. The Parthenon was built to look large from afar, a sign of Athenian dominance in the region, but it also looks small and approachable up close, signifying the accessibility of the government to the citizens. The mathematics used to design this amazing structure follow the perfectly devised rules of proportion known as "the golden mean," which is a ratio found throughout nature. The pillars are angled in slightly so that if you follow their lines upwards, they would connect in a pyramid about 6000 feet in the sky (one of the techniques to make it look smaller up close). Unfortunately, the building was destroyed a couple hundred years back. It was being used to store explosives and was hit by a shell from a British warship... crazy!
We also happened to time our visit to Athens to see the very grand changing of the guards on the tomb of the unknown soldier on a Sunday morning.
We were impressed with this enclosed motorcycle... not that it has anything to do with anything but we saw it in Athens and wanted to share it with you!
Athens hosted the 2004 Summer Olympic Games. The olympics originated in Greece so naturally Greeks thought it a great honor to have the games return home. As a result of this collective pride they built an enormous and amazingly expensive olympic park which is now completely neglected with rust and grafitti and overgrown with weeds. At the current rate it will end up looking as ruined as the ruins in a couple years.
3 comments:
I hope you're getting some good food in greece... yum yum! (I spent 5 weeks there in 1997.)
THat car is soooo cool but Cyprus sounds like HIgh school maybe that's no so cool High school's are scary
wow...i went to Greece and Italy last year but didn't see some of these things (it was a school trip so we were on a tour the whole time.) It was great to see some of the things we missed on the tour :)
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