This place is starting to grow on me, notwithstanding my failure to leave it. Today I toured the ruins again, this time with my new Australian friend Liz. Actually, the site starts to have more meaning this time round and starts to resonate with me.
Not passing through it but passing with it.
We saw the guest house, the echo hall (where winners of the trumpet contest had the honour of presenting prizes – there were 7 echoes in the hall when it was standing). We saw the Temple of Zeus, large grooved stone wheels and crumbling, tumbling pillars. Prizes were awarded in the hall here.
We saw the pedestal where the statue of Nike stood, the goddess of victory. We saw the original statue in the museum – standing on a blue pillar, giving the illusion she had just descended from Mount Olympus ( more than 500 km away – see yesterday’s post!) to bring news of victory.
There is a strange entry in my travelogue recalling an image of Nike carved in slate back home. Until now, in real time, I believed that was a gift I gave my parents from my trip here. Maybe it was a gift from a Welsh slate quarry? How fickle can be our memories. Maybe my next blogging project should be My Big Welsh Trips? Oh, I have a ready supply of sequels for my various travels! Each one as unreliable and uninformative as this one.
I have found my niche – observations of flora and fauna for people who can’t tell a buttercup from a butterfly, historical facts for people who say “ I don’t know that, it was before I was born” ( I know about 1066 and I certainly wasn’t around then), and architectural knowledge that can’t distinguish between a Doric column and a column in the Daily Mail. No offence to readers of The Doric.
Good news – tomorrow I break away from Olympia and will be found in a mountain town in the centre of the Peloponnese, site of the famous Temple of Apollo. See me there live tomorrow – haha!
Psychologist on the Move 