Day 7

Today we traveled by bus from Athens to Delphi, Greece. Once again the views are wonderful and we are lucky enough to see this majestic view from the balcony of our hotel room. Much like the rest of Greece, it is very mountainous. The focal point of the city is the large gorge in between mountains. We walked to the Delphi Archaeological Museum and archaeological site. It was unbelievable how vast the site was! There were ruins of an entire community that we were able to walk through. The site included a treasury, theatre, stadium, water system, houses, church, temples, and much more. The most popular set of ruins was the Temple of Apollo. The most well preserved was the treasury. An interesting fact that we learned today was that they only make an effort to reconstruct the site if at least 70% of the pieces of the structure are found. We also walked to another site that had a temple for Athena. On the way we heard some sounds, looked up, and saw an endless line of goats walking along the mountain side! Oddly enough, one of the coolest math things we learned about today came from a souvenir shop! The man showed us a ceramic tablet with a series of tables etched on it as well as Pythagoras' face. At the top it read, "Intelligence of Pythagoras". It was a number guessing game/magic trick (though of course there is a mathematical algorithm behind it that makes it work). The shop owner asked us to pick a number, but not tell him what it was, and tell which of the 6 tables that the number appeared in. He then figured out our numbers by adding the first number in each table we said it was in. Besides this man, we also met a shopkeeper in Samos who is a math teacher as well as a driver in Athens who is a physicist. Unfortunately, jobs in these fields are hard to come by in Greece. It was great to be able to learn new things from everyday people.