Hello all! So my evening last night was spent places besides the computer, but yesterday was a good day! We went to see Delphi, which is one of my favorite sites ever. Actually, it is my favorite site ever. The site is beautiful, the town more so, and the valley and mountains most of all. If you only ever go one place in Greece, this would be the spot to visit.

The main attraction, of course, of the archaeological site is the temple of Apollo, where the pythia would answer questions 9 months out of the year about anything and everything, supposedly being inspired by Apollo to do so. Some of the most famous events in history have been impacted, or at least commented on, by the oracle at Delphi, and two of the most famous phrases of the ancient world ('Know thyself' and 'Nothing in excess') were carved on this temple. Ta-da: You can perhaps catch of a glimpse of how amazing the scenery is behind the temple foundations here:

The other cool thing is that there is a little tunnel beneath the temple which you can crawl through. This is me, absolutely blocking it. It is a wee bit tight, to say the least, but totally doable!

Alright, so that was Delphi day. We spent the night there and then made three stops today on our way to Kalabaka, where we are spending the night tonight. Our first stop was in Orchomenos in Boeotia. (In Boeotia, because there is, oddly enough, one in Arcadia, too.) This is a pretty cool site, though we couldn't see too much of it. It has a hypothesised Mycenaean palace, unfortunately a church still stands today on the site where it might or might not be. And also a massive tholos tomb, which is almost an exact copy of the tholos tomb of Agamemnon, which is the most famous one. So, it's big:

But the fantastic thing that makes it so unique is that the round tomb also had a side chamber, and the ceiling is intricately carved in relief allll over. This is just a piece of it:

From there we moved on to Chaironeia, which is where the famed battle took place between the Macedonians (supposedly this was Alexander the Great's first battle) and the Sacred Band of Thebes, which was a group of about 300 elite fighting men. Unfortunately, the Sacred Band was defeated for the first time ever here, and died to a man. Two funeral mounds were erected, and atop the one for the Sacred Band, this monumental lion was set up:

Our last stop of the day was at Thermopylai. >> Hopefully you have all at least heard of the 300 and know why that was cool, if not, go watch it right now! In short, the site, in ancient times, was a narrow path between the mountains and the water (which is now much further away because the shore line has silted up). This has caused a number of battles to be held here, but the most famous is when the Spartans and allies faced the Persians in 480 BCE. They did lose, but they fought valiantly and have been remembered for it ever since. This is the monument set up to that battle there today:

With a nice fancy, heroically nude spartan in the middle:

And that was it for the day! We have made it to Kalambaka, which is right near the site we are going to see first tomorrow: Meteora. We can actually see Meteora from our balcony:

That's the view from our balcony, and our next top is right atop those awesome rocks. More about it tomorrow! Love you all, hope all is well!