High above the ruins and the modern city of Corinth, I sit in the precinct of Aphrotite's temple, looking out over the world so far below. There, the wind whipps by, running over two thousand years of ruins and blowing through my hair and tearing at my clothes.

I imagined coming here to seek the favours of this temple, of Aphrodite's famed sacred prostutites, and know that for this instutution to have sustained itself on this rock, so high and so inaccessible, it must truly have lived up to its legend, and even surpassed it.

The walk to the precinct was tewnty minutes, up 45° inclines, warn marble steps, and past hundreds of not-so-benign plants, all without a map or guide. I made most of it at a run.

On my way to the shrine, I was about 20 meters down the slope when I encountered a line of nubile young American girls processing down the path as I moved up it. As they paraded by, moving down the path I was struggling so hard to climb, I found myself already aware that Aphrodite still held court here. How else could I explain the exquisite line of twenty-somethings winding down the hill?



But to be here now, to see this view and sit among the stones, my imagination runs wild.

• there, the priestesses meet their customers
• there, they entertain them
• there, they take their money
• here, the pleasures of the flesh are combined with the sacred

And now, here, in this silence of the roaring wind, I can hear their sounds of pleasure.

Pics zylch asked for
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View to the Northwest | View to the North | View of the Ithsmus   
To the north, directly across the water, is Perachora

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 View to the East | View to the South

1. saw the nautes pillar
2. did a monkey dance
3. saw a Roman archeological dig
4. saw Notre Dame and decided it wasn't worth it to go in
5. kissed a girl in Paris
6. caught a shooting star with someone who had never seen one
7. found a new favourite air carrier (four words: "green skirts, golden apples")
8. was closely watched by the Illuminati
9. had impure thoughts in a church
10. realized I needed more work on my Latin
11. realized I recalled more French than my 7th grade teacher would believe in a million years
12. realized German, no matter how often I heard it, is simply impossible for me
13. had really good chocolate (the jury is still out on whether I believe in really good chocolate)
14. kissed a girl in the Vienna Christmas market
15. saw more famous dead people (Falco!) than I had any right to
16. lost three people in Vienna, and found two of them
17. lost a bottle of tequila to pressure in the cargo hold, and soaked some poor sot's bag with it, I'm sure
18. slept with three women and one other man . . . in one bed
19. spent an hour and a half with a shower buddy struggling to remove gold body paint
20. finally got between Mazi's legs
21. lost all chance I had with a girl to a three year old
22. had french fries that could only be described as "exquisite"
23. saw signs for "Men with hats cross here", "Men with hats go down stairs here", and "Men with hats steal children here"
24. had a crisis of conscience that would have been terribly funny from my persepective, but not so much from yours
25. discovered that the sun does not shine in France, and especially does not shine at Charles De Gaulle (CDG) airport
26. Became stranded at CDG on the way home and discovered the previous assertation is untrue, though we also discovered that CDG is designed after Charles De Gaulle's nose: large, unsightly, and ugly
27. learned that a hat, properly worn, can move you to the front of any line
28. proposed to a girl in Vienna
29. found Europe to be exactly like the US, just with a few new languages and monopoly money
30. discovered the French are much nicer when you're in a wheelchair, and customs are much simpler
31. went fishing in shark-infested trashcans
32. had a one hour layover turn into a 23 hour layover
33. encountered the Great Mystery of the Missing Cheese Stick
34. am now the proud owner of an Air France t-shirt
35. managed to get my bags checked all the way through to Columbus, but not my travel partner's
36. will never fly Air France, into CDG, or go to Paris ever again.