Magic Dice & Cloud

Tomorrow Eleni will be traveling to Germany. So today we met again with friends, this time in the cafeteria in the Parko Eleftherias. On the way home we noticed that there were big towering clouds on the horizon, on an otherwise spotless blue sky.

I snapped a few pictures, hoping to catch the spirit of those huge towers, looking along all the street canyons, as there were different clouds in multiple directions. They were based in the hills around Athens.

Likely they are a weather phenomenon due to the shape of the land Athens is built on. The megalopolis is stretched out over a relatively flat and wide bowl (just a few hills in the middle), with a ring of hills around it (and open to the side where the sea is of course). When the exhaust from cars and heating gets stuck in that ring of hills, we get smog. Today it seems that those hills caused different layers of air to intermingle and produce those clouds.

Despite the clouds it's pretty warm, we saw a sign giving 24C at around 19:00 in the afternoon. Warm enough to eat on the balcony and then play some backgammon out there too. In the process of getting my 3rd or so doubled game in, I dropped a dice... from the third floor.

Luck had it, there was no one down there. I saw it bounce off the street a couple of time. I picked up a spare to continue the game (as I'm a crypto-nut, I always have enough dice at home, the particular one I had bought in a shop selling backgammon and chess sets in Monastiraki).

Right after the game I looked down from the balcony again, in reverence to the dice who went down there. And I saw a light spot, on the opposite side of the street, right next to the line of a car's shade. Must be the dice! I jumped up and went down (the stairs!), and indeed it was! The dice is mostly unharmed, with some grey spots on the corners and a hardly noticeable dent on one side. A magic dice indeed!