A virtual visit to the Bourtzi of Methoni.
In my last post I gave you a photographic tour of the main castle at Methoni, finishing at the gateway to the Bourtzi, a small outpost castle that guarded the sea, which I shall now focus on.
Here are the origins of the word Bourtzi:
There were a few final photograophs as we headed back to the car preparatory to moving on to Nestor’s palace.
A photographic of the main part of Methoni Castle, setting the scene for the Bourtzi of Methoni, the subject of the my next post in this series.
Followijng on from my last post which described the journey to Methoni this post covers the main castle, while my next post will deal with the Bourtzi of Methoni.
Methoni castle was first built by the Venetians in the 13th century, and then massively expanded when the retook possession of it from the Turks in the late 17th century. Here is some official information:
Here is the approach to the Castle:
Here are some pictures from inside the castle…
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Setting the scene for the accounts of Methoni and Nestor’s palace.
On the Tuesday of my Greek holiday (Tuesday 15th May) we visited first the Venetian castle at Methoni and then Nestor’s palace at Pylos. This post sets the scene for the rest of that day by describing things up to the point at which we were poised to visit the castle.
We had intended to get underway by nine o’clock and we did. Although being in the back of a hatchback with small rear windows is somewhat limiting of what one can photograph I got a few shots as we approached our main destination.
I took full advantage of our brief stop…
We passed a scene that featured both good and bad…
The wind turbines on the hill are a positive sign, but the derelict shell of a building at the bottom is unfortunate to say the least. After parking in Methoni we passed the Venetial Well en route to a cafe…
At the cafe we were served water and decided to sample their chocolate crepes, which proved to be ill-advised. These were served in absurd quantities, and the principal covering was nutella. I realised after eating one of the three crepes I was served that I needed to scrape away the nutella before continuing with the others. Half way through the second I gave up, realising that trouble was in store if I continued eating the stuff. This decision came too late to entirely save me from adverse consequences, but at least meant that I only became a little nauseous rather than ever actually feeling or being sick.
Once we were all finished it was time to visit the castle, which will form the subject of my next post.
The beginning of full coverage of my holiday, starting atv the beginning with the journey to Tseria and the rest of that day.
Yes folks, after yesterday’s little offering I am now able to start the story of my Greek holiday in earnest, and my usual logical fashion I am beginning at the beginning.
The flight to Kalamata (nearest airport to my parent’s house in Tseria) takes off at 5:40AM (the return flight leaves Kalamata at 12:00 Greek time, enabling the same crew to do both flights), which means that for a public transport user who lives in Norfolk the only way to get to the airport is to travel down the night before. I did this, arriving at Gatwick as planned just after 1AM, and making my way via the automatic monorail to the North terminal, where I waited landside until the EasyJet check in desks opened just after 3AM. An uneventful passage through security and I was safely airside and had about 90 minutes to wait for gate information to appear on the screen. I had had a beer landside, and now airside I had a bagel and a coffee while waiting.
There were equally few dramas boarding the plane. I had an aisle seat, which meant no chance of seeing anything through the windows (they are too small to be of use unless you are in a window seat) and also that I had to get up more often than would have been the case had I been in a window seat.
I had had the forethought to equip myself with plenty of reading matter. We landed at Kalamata fractionally ahead of schedule, a gain that was more than lost to slow baggage handling at that end. My parents collected me in their hire car, a nice sensible Skoda Citigo, very economical on the fuel, and suitably robust for handling rural Greek roads (which are much better than they were when I visited Greece in the early 1980s, but still a fair way from being describable as ‘good’).
Inspite of a sleepless night I managed to get through the day without napping and went to bed at a sensible time, following a meal at the new taverna that has opened in the village. It was good of its kind and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Why not join in with Rachel’s Sunday Social….
Sunday Social is a place to mingle, collaborate, and share our blogs. Sunday Social is one more place where you can share a post that maybe didn’t get as much feedback as you were hoping for. Sunday Social is a place to meet new bloggers.
This weekly post is a “wild card” of sorts. There aren’t many rules but I do ask that you follow a few guidelines.
How do you participate?
It’s very easy.
Voila! That’s it.
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Introducing what will be a series about my holiday in Greece.
I am just back from a week in Greece, mainly in places without internet connections. I have huge numbers of photos to edit, so to keep things going for the moment I am presenting a selection from across the week, plus the return flight, on which I had a window seat.
Notice of my imminent departure for a week’s holiday and solutions to Wednesday’s puzzles.
A couple of days ago I set some puzzles for you, and in this post I will be answering them. Also, I am off to Greece for a week’s holiday later tonight (I fly out of Gatwick at 5:40AM, so am envisaging taking the 21:36 train out of Lynn, connecting to a Thameslink service at St Pancras and arriving the airport just after 1AM – the second latest set of connections available to me, and I know British public transport too well and trust it too little to rely on the last possible connections) and although I will take any opportunities that arise to go online I will still have comparatively little access to the internet, so you will hear little from me between now and a week tomorrow evening when I shall be back home.
Here is the most elegant of the official solutions, posted by Callum Cassidy-Nolan:
As you can see from the above graphic, almost half of those who attempted solutions on brilliant.org got it wrong. A perusal of the comments section revealed a degree of reluctance on the part of some of the errant solvers to admit to being wrong (never mind arguing with the umpire, some of these folk were metaphorically following that up by arguing with TV replay umpire) so I am to explain the whole process of getting the right answer (though it took me milliseconds to work out and not much longer to enter the correct answer):
One particularly offensive complainant attempted to use the fact that the question had said decimals allowed to claim that an answer of 0.375 should have been permitted. This is wrong – the question specifically asked for a percentage, and the reason for mentioning the a decimal figure was OK was so that people did not think they needed to round to the nearest whole number, which in correct mathematical notation would have been 38 (the figure being rounded away is five or greater so you round up, had it been four or less it would have been correct to round down).
Another complaint people made was being marked wrong for including the percentage symbol – I am less unsympathetic to this than I am to the indefensible claim that 0.375 should have been marked as right, as this latter has missed out turning the answer into a percentage, but including the symbol is still a mistake as the way the question is asked renders it needless to do so.
Please note that I did not create this problem and had nothing to do with deciding what answer should be marked as right – I have treated it at length because I was annoyed on the composers behalf that so many solvers rather than attempting to see by looking at correct solutions, of which plenty of good ones were posted, why their chosen answer was wrong instead opted for the ‘argue with the umpire’ approach, in some cases being very unpleasant about it. Here to end this little post is David Vreken’s published solution:
A couple of easy problems on brilliant.org that have generated considerable controversy, and some butterfly pics of my own.
A couple of this weeks puzzles on brilliant.org have generated considerable controversy, so I am going to share them with you as a prelude to the butterfly pics. Both puzzles are actually very simple, and I will provide solutions and explanations some time on Friday.
Here is a screenshot of the first puzzle:
Here it is:
These are from Saturday and Monday. In addition the ones I have photographs of I have seen one other species, mainly white but with flame coloured wingtips but not yet been able to photograph it.
The second post in my personal series about #autisticspecialinterests.
Welcome to my second ‘special interests’ post for the month of May. The first, which set the scene can be seen here. The first post dealt exclusively with London, where I grew up. This post looks wider, although it still deals with events from before I was diagnosed. NB – undiagnosed means just that, not diagnosed – it DOES NOT mean “not autistic”.
This overlaps with the first post, because I visited St Petersburg in 1991. The two week visit I made to that city in 1991 was significant in many ways – it was there that I learned to eat a more varied diet, because I was just mature enough to appreciate that it was a choice between eating what was served or not eating at all and make the best of things. Also, because the family I was staying with were living very close to one of its stations I gained a considerable acquaintanceship withe the St Petersburg Metro, and also experienced the trolleybuses and trams that were a feature of daily life there.
Other than being horrendously overcrowded the St Petersburg Metro was a significant improvement on the London equivalent – a far more frequent service, and no delays. Also the underground portions were much deeper than in London, with often two colossally long escalators (far longer than any London equivalent) between the platform and the surface. This was my first major experience of public transport anywhere other than London.
My first solo holiday took place in the summer of 1993, when I travelled to Scotland for two weeks. I travelled all around Scotland in those two weeks. As well as some seriously scenic journeys on mainline railways (I experienced both the lines the head towards Skye among others) I also made the acquaintance of the Glasgow undeground system (a single, circular route).
This holiday was a splendid experience overall, but a mere curtain raiser for…
This happened in the following summer., Equipped with a rucksack and a two week rail pass for Norway, Sweden and Finland I started by taking a plane to Gothenburg. From there I travelled north, pausing in Stockholm. From Sundsvall I temporarily abandoned trains to take a boat across to Vaasa in Finland. From Vaasa I headed for Helsinki, and then the longest single journey of the trip, to Narvik, the most northerly railway station in the world. I continued my northerly exploration by bus as far as Tromso, before switching to boat for a journey along the coast to Hammerfest, the northenmost town in Norway. I varied my route back by taking a bus from Hammerfest to Alta (a mistake, this place is the Nordic equivalent of Brandon, only with even less appeal). Back in Narvik I selected a bus to Bodo, Norway’s other northern rail outpost. This decision cost me a night spent on the sgtatiopon platform at Bodo before I could head south to Oslo. From Oslo I headed east to Stockholm, and my last journey of the holiday (other than the flight home) was from Stockholm to Gothenburg.
Not having previously explored any foreign public transort systems in this kind of detail I was highly impressed. Although there are many ways in which Nordic public transport is a vast improvement on British I note a few things in particular:
My next post in this series will look at public transport in various cities that I have experience of. Here to end are some public transport themed pictures…
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