Delphi.

We left Kalambaka early the next morning and continued across the plain to Delphi, a small city clinging obstinately to the side of Mount Parnassus overlooking an amazing valley of olive trees.

We arrived in Delphi around mid-day and went directly to the museum, where we viewed some amazing sculptures and where Vicky painted a rich mental picture for us all of the decorations of the area so that later when we visited the site we would be able to imagine what it must have been like.

In the museum, we not only got to see restoration being done on the museum floor (which was amazing), but we also got to see a fantastic bronze statue of a chariot racer. This fellow here.

He is intriguing for several reasons, one of which is that he was originally part of a much larger bronze statue including an assistant slave and four huge and majestically posed horses.

These four horses were later taken from Delphi and moved to the Hippodrome in Constantinople, and later still (in 1204 AD) the horses and chariot were taken from the Hippodrome and moved to Venice, where the horses wound up being mounted atop San Marco's Basilica.

Ironically, I didn't know anything about those four horses when I was in Venice, but I had unintentionally taken a picture of them in the background of a picture I took of the Venezian flag, and was able to show my fellow bus travelers the four horses of the temple of Apollo on my digital camera's tiny screen while standing on the other side of the Adriatic Sea in Greece.

After a fascinating tour of the museum, we went on to a nice lunch in downtown Delphi (I had moussaka, a cross between shepard's pie and lasagna) and then went on to the site of the temple as well. There we explored the ruins (pictures up later this week, I hope) and the surrounding area, which was lovely.

That night we crashed in Delphi. Well, most of us did, a handful of us set a horrible precedent by staying up until 1:30 in the morning, when we had to be up at 7:30 as usual, and we would find out the next day that three of the girls hadn't actually fallen asleep until just after 4:00.

Whoops.