OTOH,
it would be an exaggeration to say that there IS golf in Greece, if you see what I mean . . .
or maybe you will after I finish . . .
Glyfada (suburb of Athens) was designed by Don Harradine, a Swiss Golf Architect, which I would have never have believed was an occupation, but there you go . . .par 72, 6261m.
SO: I said to myself on the first tee . . . a little ragged but a promising start . . . elevated tee, some trees bordering the fairway . . . but that was a little misleading . . . fairly wide fairways, pinched in places with trees, but the lay of the land is very flat . . . some mounding off to the side in places, but the fairways rarely canted any direction. . . see the #14 tee -- skipping ahead, making a long story short -- the trees sort of intrude into play from both sides, but . . .
then the approach is oppressively, depressively, unimpressively mundane . . . I had trouble keeping my attention focused in the face of such muni design aesthetics . . . I mean, I didn't really expect broken monuments with Ozymandian implications, but I did expect more than this.
#15 has the same sort of t-shot, and fairway obstacles: trees, but then for the approach on this par 5, some sudden dynamics . . . it's mostly a mind game since the giant swale separates a green and fairway that are basically level . . . but there I was on the wrong side of the fairway, trying to hook into the green . . . overcooked it and wound up in the swale left of the green, which proved too much for my rusticular skills to get up-and-down, or, even up-up-and-down . . . 8^) . . .
#16 is a formidable hole . . . I finally guessed 7 iron, accounting for distance, wind, and downslope, which was the right club, but my wind-blown shot curled right into a deep bunker, pin-high. tough.
#17 looked like a breather hole to me, a short par 4, so I tried to cut the corner, over the trap . . . I didn't think it was even close, but I kinda skied my shot and it came up a foot short.
I think the bunkers here were cleverly designed . . . scalloped out very gracefully, not particularly well maintained, but freshly raked . . . I always claim I'm not one of those golfers that demand or even desire golf courses manicured like a Hong Kong park, but good turf is not negotiable.
#18 curls once again around dense woods to a semi-blind landing area, then runs graduallyl to a green deceptively uphill. The greens were better than the rest of the course, and they rolled quick but not true.
So I would say that the last 4 holes had interesting features, even if they were not totally interesting holes, if you see how I mean. And I would say the course had interesting features, likewise, tho' itself is not interesting . . . one can see that there used to be a golf course here, but it's in danger of disappearing.
