Postcard 7 to Francis and Family Dear Francis (and everyone in the Alipranti Family), After Delphi, Olympia and Kardamyli, we drove along the curviest roads I�ve ever seen, along the sides of cliffs with steep drops and no guardrails or reflectors on the road.  Greek drivers are crazy too.  All along the roads are little crosses where a crazy driver had an accident.  Here�s an example of the roads:     We finally arrived at Monemvasia, which is a big rocky island with an old fortress on top and a medieval town below and is also hard to pronounce.  It�s one of the neatest places we went to.  We climbed up to the top of the rocky fortress (on the left side of the photo).     From there, you can see the beach below and the sea in all directions.     After Monemvasia, we went to more towns with more fortresses and ruins.  If Uncle Jeff sees any more fortresses or ruins, he will pull out what little hair he has left.  Here is the fortress at Napflio, the next town we visited.  Can you find Uncle Jeff in the photo?     We also visited the Theater of Epidavros, which is 1,700 years old and is still used for performances � mainly Greek tragedies, like Oedipus.  I did not include a photo, because it looks like all the other theaters we saw.   After these places, we stayed on the island of Hydra, which has no cars or motorcycles, only mules to carry things, mainly from the ships to other places:     Hydra has everything else you could need � warm places to swim and a cave to swim into, old castles in the hills, nice restaurants, museums, shops, even a small outdoor movie theater.   Boats take people to different parts of the island when they don�t want to ride a mule.     After a couple of days on Hydra, we arrived back in Athens to get ready for some sailing again.   Athens is the capital of Greece.  Over 4 million people live there � just under half of all the people in Greece live there.  Although people have lived in Athens for thousands of years, it blossomed in the 5th century BC when many of its classical structures were built (such as the Acropolis shown below), many great philosophers and historians wrote their works, and great dramas and literature were produced.  At that time, Athens was also one of the first democracies in the world and even had trials by juries.  Many of the buildings in Washington DC, our own capital, are designed to look like the classical buildings of Athens, because many of our democratic ideas come from this classical era.     There is so much to say about Athens, that I will say more about Athens in my next postcard to be addressed to Joseph.   The red arrows show the places we went to for this postcard:   Love, Uncle Jeff