Greetings from Athens

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My advice: get to the Parthenon early, before the hordes of tourists arrive. I got there just after the opening and only had to share the place with a few dozen others. By the time I left the entrance area looked like a staging zone for D-Day.

The New Acropolis Museum (discussed in an earlier post) is beautiful, but they have a strict no-photographs policy.

The pictures below are from the National Archeological Museum. The weird gizmo is the famous Antikythera mechanism, which I almost missed -- it's in the Bronze Collection, which is overshadowed by all the statuary. The shiny modern thing is the Price model, built to illustrate the device's operation as an analog computer of astronomical motions. Yes, an analog computer built in 150 BC or so that calculates the positions of the sun, moon and planets -- it's unbelievable how advanced the ancient Greeks were!