Cotraveler Tom’s gone: headed home to a summer session at Villanova U., so now there are 2. We went to the Temple of Poseidon, which was the typical set of reconstructed columns and tumbled stones except that it’s on top of a seaside cliff. This was interesting because we got to see a little new area outside of Greece, although the 2 hours each way on the bus was longer than we spent at the actual destination of the ride. I have an affinity for inappropriate footwear, as I hiked a cliff / hill from the temple to the ocean in my Birkenstocks. If my feet didn’t hate me after Mycenae, they definitely do now.
Rest of day’s just random wandering highlighted by gorging ourselves at the Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat buffet, regrettable but filling Americanization.
Maybe better than “Let’s Go” travel guides: a book based on a user-interactive travel website. Travellers could moderate each other’s comments on usefulness / accuracy / category, maybe similar to Slashdot and possibly even based on Slashcode. Advertising = stickers in bathrooms / payphones / internet cafes of targeted airports and their associated cities. User incentive: micropayment iff comment’s directly used in resulting book. Add in consistent, quality editorial voice and you’ve got a travel guide that’d put that project of a Harvard student club known as “Let’s Go” to shame?
Another “Corps” better than Marine and possibly rivalling Ameri- / Peace: Rebuilding Corps. Take motivated young people fresh out of college and not quite uptight enough to sell out to the corporate world of work or sufficiently immaterialistic for the granola-and-tie-dye, profit-free Peace Corps. Thrown them at a country that’s devastated, maybe even by American bombing (Afghanistan / Iraq / who knows who next?), preferably somewhere with a fairly large number of English speakers, mature civil society, and large international airport. With the help of college students doing something much cooler than the typical internship, a few dozen thousand educated rabble-rousers could catapult a country into the 21st century and make a decent buck by establishing businesses more linked to and considerate of local communities that the typical multinational. Maybe a nice project for the World Bank to fund? “Dreamer, always dreaming away…”