Howdy, everybody!

We're at sea all day today. Tomorrow we will arrive at Alexandria, Egypt, for two days. We have been to Greece and Turkey the last two days. We are finding the people in each country very nice. We had a limo in Greece--a short limo with three seats. Very comfortable and we went to the Acropolis. They had scaffolding on several parts of it--trying to restore it with modern technology. I think they are ruining it myself--with all the white cement they have stuck into the broken cracks. I had no idea that they made those huge columns by stacking round stones on top of each other like a stack of donuts. When we were at the Acropolis, you could look 360 degrees and see white apartment houses thick as thieves all over the hills.

We also went to the Temple of Jupiter which had massively tall columns. How they got the stones up that high is a good question.

I wasn't very excited for Turkey--since I don't know anything about it, but it turned out to be a really interesting place. We hired a taxi cab--which was definitely scrunched after the limo, and took off for the mother of Jesus--Mary's house near Ephesus (as in where the Apostle Paul visited and wrote to the Ephesians). We drove for an hour and a half and were surprised to find lots of green hills and mountains. We traveled up this mountain with our ears popping like crazy and found pine trees. It was like going to the mountains in Idaho. Mary's house was in a beautiful setting. They claim that the apostle John, her son, took her there to live after the crucifixion. The Catholics have made it a shrine and it's a little rock house with a dome on top. It seems a little unlikely that she would travel from Jerusalem clear to Turkey and up a high mountain--in those days, but they say that John is buried in Ephesus which is nearby.

Ephesus was a really cool city of ruins that was once an ancient wonder of the world. It had lots of columns and parts of buildings and 2 ampitheaters. One was huge and held 24,000 people.
It also had a library, a brothal, and lots of other buildings.

It rained really hard for 10 minutes and we got soaked to the bone, but then the sun came out and dried us quickly.

On the way home we stopped and took a picture of one of the hundreds of Mosques around the country side. They were easy to spot--and as thick as Mormon churches in Provo, Utah!

Having a great time--but spending far more than we thought we would. Oh, well, it's only our son's inheritance!

Lovely,

Ruby