Our Airbnb was just around the corner from the Greek National Museum of Archaeology, whose Wikipedia entry calls it “one of the world’s finest museums.” Ok, sold!

Bought tickets online, walked over there just in time to be drenched by a — perhaps the only — passing shower (as promised in the forecast).

Finest in the world? Maybe. But they definitely have a lot of really cool stuff.

The top images are all orange-y because I let the iPhone tart them up with the magic wand. I think they look neat like that. But the actual color / lighting of the museum was more like the image here of the nymph coyly swatting at Pan with her sandal. “Oooh, let me bend over and take off my shoes so I can fend off your advances!” Not fooling anybody, honey.

It turns out that even in those days the chariot companies lost your luggage from time to time! Apparently the little carved marble nametags would break, and the slaves couldn’t read anyway, so passenger bundles would get unloaded at the wrong city-state.

Maybe that’s not quite true. But reading the explanatory placards here and in the other Greek museums of antiquity was a constant reminder that … indoor plumbing and television aside … a lot of things were kinda the same then as they are now.

There were multiple halls filled with ceramics (plethorae of amphorae?) (a vaahst array of vaahses?) (a Potemkin of pottery?).

Quite a lot of my (admittedly modest… I’m no trillionaire!) career success has come from mastering arcane details nobody else cares about. But I gotta say the people who study these vases and glue them back together and classify them and translate them and interpret the iconography and all the rest are in a nerd league all their own.

Toward the end of our visit, we found this directive on the floor. We obeyed for a minute or so.

The previous day’s airport fiasco and lost luggage, plus that passing shower, had put us both in a slightly sour mood. So on our way out we took un-virtuous pleasure seeing all the people lined up to get in. Slackers! The early visitors get the statues!