finally on Lesbos!

Yes, we're here in our island paradise. Final exams are over, they were both a cinch... but now we're just relaxing! The ferry ride over here was amazing and silly. We were all so tired from the days leading up to the exam, and from walking all around Piraeus pier in Athens trying to find our ship, and everyone was in such a good mood for Lesbos we just stayed up and played cards and watched weird soap operas on the Greek TV that was on the ferry late into the night. The moon rose orangely; I'll post pictures later.
We got to Lesbos at about 7 a.m. on Saturday, and Iannis the hotel owner came to meet us. He loaded us into cars and we arrived at this fabulous place in time for breakfast. The hotel is like a compound, there's lots of buildings. It's right on the beach, and the view of Turkey across the water is amazing, especially at night when you see the the coast all lit-up. The day time too is amazing, though; the sun and the palm trees and grass... it's amazing here. Again, I'll post pictures later. I just kept having these waves of emotion, about how great our group is and how awesome this trip has been so far. And coming in and seeing breakfast all laid out for us... I nearly welled up in tears, it's so amazing here.
We "hosted" a humongous dinner last night and lots of people from the community came, including the mayor of Thermi! Afterwards, we were sitting around finishing our wine when the boys asked one of the guys that works here where a good club in Mytilene is. Oh man, I'm out of battery, I'll write more about that later, I swear. It's so great here. Eek!

Small World

I'd just like to say a few things about time differences. During a usual day here in Athens, I often pause and think about what time it is at certain places in America - New York, Minnesota, Portland, etc. And often it's the middle of the night. Usually when I'm at school in Portland, I work really well at times when everybody's asleep, like late at night or very early in the morning. So now, when I'm in Greece, I should be doing like the best work I've ever done, because 90% of everybody I know is asleep all the time when I'm awake. Right?

In other news, here is a picture of our little "Tiropita":

awwwwwwwww...

Ain't he cute? He's like the best aspect of our apartment. Not the air conditioning, not the porch, although those are very nice... no, the kitty's my favorite. Yesterday I sat down on the stoop of our building steps to pet him, and he did like this flying leap from the top step straight into my lap. I swear, he's lap-crazy.

That's all for now.

Midterm's over, so I SHOULD be working on a paper...

Ahhhhh, the "Byzantine History" midterm is in the bag. I won't find out how I did for another few days, maybe not until Monday, so I won't to jinx it by writing all about it. Suffice it to say, though, that I wrote two essays - one on emperor Julian and one on Constantine. And now it's over. So I SHOULD be working on my paper for "Art and Archaeology" (on wall paintings of Thera/Santorini, which is actually pretty interesting to me) but I only have an hour before a lecture... so I'll blog instead!

So, I said I'd write about our apartments: well here goes. I live in an apartment with 5 girls, there are two other apartments with 6 girls in each, and two MORE apartments with 3 boys in each. There's 3 bedrooms in my apartment, and I share a room with my friend from last year, Clariece. We have a small living room with a porch off it, and a small kitchen. You have to flip a switch in the hallway before you can use the stove, and you also have to flip another switch to turn on the hot water in the apartment 20 minutes before you can take even a warm shower. (Since I'm usually the first person up I've switched my morning routine to eating breakfast first, while the water heats, to save time.) Speaking of fun cultural differences in the bathroom, you can't flush toilet paper down in Greece, so you throw it in a wastebasket. (That's why all Grecian wastebaskets have lids.) It was hard to remember at first, but you get into the routine after a week or so!

The food situation at our place is pretty good. We all buy our own groceries, and everyone eats everyone else's food. (Unless you put your name on something, then it's off limits to others, and that's usually just ice cream.) We pretty much know what we have and what we need, and all the girls are pretty good about keeping up a regular influx of the necessities; milk, cereal, rice, pasta, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, chicken, veal, cheese and pita bread. We buy fruit from the fruit stand, and most other things we get at Athena's, the store around the corner. Maddie, Amanda and myself are the main chefs, but everyone takes turns doing the dishes and chopping things.

Our apartment is pretty quiet; we're kind of out of the way from the other students' apartments, so that's both good and bad. (Good after 10 pm for sure.) The other two girls apartments are in the same building and on the same floor, so between 12 girls and usually some of the boys (who live WAY up the hill,) there's always something going on over there. I should explain about the hill; you may recall last weekend I hiked up to a monastery? Well, the monastery's on TOP of the hill we all live at the base of. The boys live uphill from us, and the girls live slightly downhill. (Getting to our place with all our bags on day 1 was not terribly enjoyable; do you recall the myth of Sisyphus?) The best thing about our apartment, though, is that we have a garden in front and there are CATS living in it! Most of the cats in Greece are wild so we don't pet them, but the landlord takes care of these ones. There's 2 full-grown cats and one tiny little grey fuzzball, probably a month or so old, who we named "Tiropita" (a kind of fluffy feta cheese pastry; in English, Tiropita translates as "Cheese Pie.")

Kolonaki, our neighborhood, is really safe. It's kind of a trendy, chic district of Athens, so we don't eat in the tavernas around our apartments very much. We found a not-too-expensive one last weekend, but even there the bill for a moderate-sized dinner for 3 came to around 23 Euro (about 30 dollars), as opposed to HALF that much in Pangrati, the neighborhood our college is in, only a 20-minute walk away. So guess where WE go for dinner when we don't want to cook...

Wow, this is a LOT longer than I thought it would be. I'm gonna go. Peace out!

MANY POSTS / Tech Support

Just a few notices to blog-readers:

1. Just now I posted 2 NEW entries (in addition to this one, so this makes 3 for today, oof) which I wrote several days ago but haven't had a chance to add to the blog until today. Sorry for the confusion (I've been really busy studying for our Byzantine History midterm. Which I just rocked.)

2. Sorry the pictures are so few and far between. I'll try to add more from now on; I've developed a more efficient system of doing so.

3. If you want to see a LARGER version of any picture on the blog, just click directly on the picture itself, and an outrageously huge version of it should come up on your screen in a moment. (Yay for using all 8 megapixels...)

Yeiasou!

Trip to the island of Aegina

Amanda and Clariece and myself just got back from an island getaway! We spent Friday and Saturday on the island of Aegina, just 18 km southwest of Athens. The island is basically set up for Athens resisdents looking to get away from the city for a while, so the port town of Aegina is all little shops and tavernas and bakeries. It was way budget-friendly, just 14 Euro each for round-trip ferry tickets, and we split a 35 Euro room in this hostel-type place. The ferry ride was liesurely and relaxing, and I got a bit of a sunburn. It was funny, a man came up to us while we were walking onto the dock and asked, “Looking for a place to stay?” which we thought was REALLY sketchy, but we tentatively said yes and he told us about the room and pointed to a travel agency on the corner and said that was his place. We figured, how could we say no to a 35 Euro room, so we followed his assistant to the hostel. It was only a few blocks from the port and market, and had clean sheets and air conditioning (a necessity), so we said yes. We paid and got the key, and then left to go exploring.

The shops along the main street all had jewelry and bags, and since we’re only human we spent quite a bit of time browsing among them. Along with tourism, Aegina’s main economic spiel was pistachios. There were pistachio carts everywhere. (I was gonna get you some, Dad, but I didn’t know how I would get them to you! Sorry! Maybe in November I’ll go again…) There were also fresh, slimy octopi hanging from every other window, there were so many seafood restaurants and tavernas there. We ate lunch at a taverna (spaghetti, moussaka, bread and cucumber-tomato salad, and apples with cinnamon, mmm) and went swimming at the beach. The water of the Mediterranean Sea was a little bit cool, but just right for the hot cloudless day. There wasn’t a lot of seaweed, and the sand was really soft. On the beach we made friends with an old man named Lukas [sp?], who chatted us up in mixed Greek/English and told us if we wanted seats (you have to pay for chairs on Greek beaches) he could get us a special discount.

After we had showered and changed we walked south along the coast, and sat on a bench and watched the gorgeous sunset to the west, behind the mountains of the Peloponnese. At one point a woman walked up behind us and exclaimed, “Magiko! Po po!” (that’s “Magical! Wow!” in English.”) We ate dinner at a seaside taverna (grilled octopus, tomato/cucumber salad, swordfish souvlaki, and my new favorite Greek word: tzatziki, which is a sort of yogurt-based dill dip.) Our waiter was funny; he always had a cigarette in his hand while he was serving or chatting us up, something I’ve never seen in an American restaurant! Afterwards we went out for pistachio ice cream, and opened a bottle of wine I had gotten in Athens and drank it on the beach. We crashed in our hostel and slept in the next morning. We ate breakfast, explored Aegina town a little bit more, and left in the early afternoon.

It’s so nice, it only takes about an hour and a half to get to the island from the port of Athens. Plus you can take the metro from the hospital stop a few blocks away from our apartment, switch trains just once, and get to the port in about 15 minutes, so the trip back was really short. Amanda and I walked around in Plaka for a while (the inexpensive shopping area right below the Acropolis) and got groceries, and now I’m WAY tired. Maddie’s cooking dinner tonight, so I might go and rest for a while. It’s been a great weekend, and now I’m ready to study all day tomorrow for my Byzantine History midterm on Monday. Cheers!

Rosh Hashana (sp?) - Not bringing your camera must be good luck

I know I said that my next post would be of more general concern; about how our apartments are, etc. But I HAVE to write about what happened last night first, because it was so wonderful and because I’ll probably forget the important details as more and more time goes by. Last night, Helena and I went to Rosh Hashana services at a synagogue near the Keramikos area of Athens. We almost didn’t go, because we had arranged to meet at “the big stairs” near our metro stop, but apparently there were a lot of those, so we took a much later train than we had expected, and Helena was worried that she’d miss Rosh Hashana. To make matters worse, we got off one stop too early and couldn’t connect to our other train, so we had to wait for the same train we were just on to come through again.
When we got to the Keramikos, Helena only had vague directions for how to get to the synagogue itself, so we asked a couple that was holding a map, in the hope that they were tourists. They spoke in Greek accents and the man apparently passed by the synagogue all the time, for he gave us detailed directions. When we arrived at the synagogue, we headed straight inside but were stopped by a man in a neon green polo shirt who asked to see our I.D. We had expected this, because we knew that this was one of the oldest and most famous synagogues in Athens, and we presented our passports. He asked us if we were from America, and then asked if we were Jewish. I was worried they wouldn’t let me in, but Helena quickly answered “Yes!”, adding a note of shock to her voice as if to say, “duh, why would you ask that” and fortunately he didn’t ask me too. I didn’t want to have to explain that I wasn’t Jewish but was just trying to learn about a new kind of ritual and was there also to support my friend, although I doubt it would’ve been that big of a problem. He also asked us what we were there for, and Helena said, “to celebrate Rosh Hashana?” like that, with inflection, and he just laughed and waved us insisde. Someone pointed out the way around the side of the synagogue to where the women’s entrance was. It was an orthodox synagogue, so we sat on the upper balcony and weren’t sure if the seats were assigned, but there was an American girl there who said we could sit just anywhere. There were also a bunch of CYA girls who we saw walk in a little while later. The service, when it started, was entirely in Hebrew (and maybe Greek, I couldn’t tell) but I meditated throughout most of it. Helena had on a yarmulke and her prayer shawl, so the other CYA girls were looking at us quite a lot. When the service was over we walked downstairs and out of the building, and were told that the Rabbi had invited us all back to his house for dinner. He said it was right around the block, so we went. I was skeptical; how could everyone in the synagogue fit into his house? I was nervous too; everyone there was either orthodox or reformed jewish, and only a few people there spoke English, that I could tell. After walking for about 20 minutes (what happened to right around the block?), we arrived at a hotel-like building. We went into its large dining room, and Helena, myself and the American girl from the synagogue were seated at the Rabbi’s table. We chatted with the others at our table, and then the food was served. There was a prayer to go with every food; pomegranates, lox, apples with honey, leek pie, chicken, vegetables… everything had symbolism for the Jewish new year, and eating’s always fun when there’s symbolism behind the food! So the meal was great, and the company was fun. I had a really great conversation about religious toleration with an Israeli guy named Rehavi, and there was an American grad student sitting by Helena who told us a funny story about how she had met the Greek Prime Minister at a football game. There were two Israeli guys across from us, who didn’t speak Greek or English, and one of them started flirting with Helena for a while. We got a ride home, at about 11:30, from a French man named Dani. Being in a car on the road in Athens was the single most terrifying experience of my semester so far, we’ll just leave it at that. Greek drivers are SCARY. But we got home okay, and I crashed into bed like a rock.

Day in Delphi, again

Sorry about that abbreviated post before. Internet time is limited, since I can't steal WiFi in my apartment, and I only use it when I'm at the other girls' apartments. (I'll explain the whole living situation later, after I've covered all the main events! We're so busy, I don't know if that'll ever happen. Still...)

Anyway, we saw Delphi, and concluded it by visiting the Temple of Athena, which is special to me because there's a picture of it on one of the textbooks we used in "Ancient Greek Religion" class with Kugler last semester. So, that made me happy. Overall it was an awesome day. The next day was Saturday, and it was SOOO nice to sleep in for once! I went out for coffee and pastry, and did my laundry by hand in a basin in the kitchen. There are laundry machines for us to use in CYA, but they've ruined people's laundry and the dryers don't work, so I just do it by hand. Saturday evening Clariece, Chris, Helena and I decided to hike up the hill to the north of our apartments, to see the monastery at the top at sunset. It wasn't a very long hike, but the stairs at the beginning were very steep. It was totally worth it, though, when we got to the top. The view was awesome, the sunset was amazing, and there was a wedding going on which we got to see. The church itself is quite small, so most of the guests were mingling on the terrace during the ceremony. The bride and groom came out right disappeared, and everyone threw rice and cheered. (Isn't Athens enormous?? I couldn't believe it!)

In more recent events, I spent most of yesterday (Sunday) studying and preparing my presentation on the reforms of Solon (6th cent. B.C.) which I'm doing with Frances. Today our "Byzantine History" class went to the Byzantine Museum (duh) and when we got to this enormous room with dozens of paintings of Jesus and Mary, he told us, "anyone who finds a fundamental difference between any of these paintings I'll buy them a beer, because I can't find any." We could name some differences, but despite the fact that the creations of the paintings spanned thousands of miles and hundreds of years, they were apparently all the same in most ways. Interesting how homogenous Byzantine iconography was, throughout the empire's history. Well now I have no excuse to stop writing except that I'm tired and want to go home, and that this is a good stopping point. Next time I'll tell you about the living situation we have here. I'll leave you by telling you that tonight I had dinner at a souvlaki (meat-on-a-stick) place called "ντερλισιους" ("der-licious," we don't know why they put an extra r in there) which was two souvlaki, fries, and a lemonade, and it was 5 and a half euro. It was awesome.

A day in Delphi

Today is Sunday, and the weekend has been fantastic. We have Fridays off from classes, but this week we went on a day trip to Delphi. It's a few hours' drive from Athens, so we had to leave CYA at 8:30 a.m. We stopped to eat lunch around noon, at St. Lucas' Monastery. Apparently it was an extremely important location during the Byzantine era, but our professor wouldn't tell us why; he wanted to wait until next week. Oh well, I took lots of pictures; the architecture was beautiful, the scenery was fantastic, and there were a lot of paintings and mosaics to see. It was apparent why the location made such an excellent hermitage, being on a hilltop above fields of farmland. I also saw the "remains" of St. Lucas himself, which was chilling. No one could wear shorts inside the monastery, so there were bins of elastic waistband pants and skirts available for those among us who had dressed for hot weather. Anyway, we ate lunch at St. Lucas' and proceeded to drive to Delphi. Just some background on Delphi itself: the oracle wasn't the only reason to go there in ancient times. The place is HUGE: there is a sports arena, a theater, a bank, and multiple temples there as well. Huge festivals were held there, and because of its central location on the mainland of Greece, Delphi was a gathering place for people from many city-states. Every city-state that participated in the events there had its own treasury area for storage of their wealth (so there would have been an incentive for GRAND parades of treasure-transport upon arrival at Delphi!) There were also "trophy" areas where markers were placed to show athletic victories for each city-state. (Now, when we got to Delphi it was raining, and since it had been sunny when we left, none of us had brought raincoats. Some of us managed to obtain garbage bags from the gift shop, but most of us weren't so lucky. However, the rain and mist around the mountainside made for a very "mystical" backdrop for the day!) Anyway, we went to the museum first to avoid getting rained on, and saw many artifacts that had been moved from the site for preservation, including parts of friezes, like this one depicting Dionysos holding a musical instrument. Given the dichodomy that most scholars acknowledge existed between Apollo and Dionysos, it is interesting that this sculpture would be placed on the temple wall opposite one of the god Apollo, to whom the temple itself is dedicated. We walked around most of the site, and thankfully it stopped raining. Let me reiterate: the place is HUGE. And you don't go there to "get your fortune told," or whatever. In ancient times there was sometimes a woman seated on a tripod platform who, in a drugged-out trance, would give you an ambiguous answer to whatever question you asked her, but it would be insulting to dress someone up in a toga or as a gypsy and just plop her down in the middle of Delphi to read tourists' palms. Oops, this post has to end here, because I'm in someone else's apartment mooching off their neighbors' wireless internet and it's getting kind of crowded around here. I'll write more later, I promise! Cheers~

My classes and my professors

I just got out of "Byzantine History." Karavas, the professor, has a great sense of humor, but it's a very dry sense of humor; he rarely smiles, but you can tell he's laughing on the inside. He's Greek, but speaks very good English. He's an archaeologist and Roman historian, and sometimes he refers to something he's found on one of his digs. For example, the other day, we were discussing economics. He was telling us about inflation in the Roman empire, and to prove his point he pulled from his pocket a third-century A.D. silver coin that he'd found on a dig in northern Italy. It weighed about half as much as a dime, which illustrated his point: that currency was pretty much worthless at the time of the accession of emperor Diocletian, which is partly why he instigated a huge economic reform in the late third century. We've been talking about the emperor Constantine for 2 days, and it's almost Kugler-ish how Karavas leads the class around in circles, asking us questions and making us talk about the material.

Our "Art and Archaeology" professor Nikola, on the other hand, is almost the complete opposite. She uses PowerPoint in her lectures, but whenever we stop her to ask her questions, it's almost like we're getting in the way of her lecture. She always has to answer them and then go back to the PowerPoint, and by then we've lost the thread of the presentation. I think she's used to giving lectures to rooms of 500 people, and not used to all the weird questions my classmates and I have. On the other hand, what she has to teach us is quite interesting, and she takes us to lots of museums to see what she shows us in the PowerPoints, first-hand. Today, for example, she showed us lots of images of frescoes from Thera (aka Santorini) where a volcano exploded around 1650 BC, some of them famous images I've seen in school before. And then we took the tram over to the National Museum of Archeology and saw the ACTUAL frescoes themselves, UP CLOSE. (Like this one on the left, called "Boxing Children.") We saw many frescoes, along with dozens of vases and jars which she's shown us already too, so we can see if they're big or small, cracked, smooth, etc. It's very, very cool. The only thing I'm struggling with about Nikola is that she sees religion as a very black-and-white thing; either an artifact was used "religiously," or it was not. She's a very open-minded archaeologist and so she doesn't claim to always know the answers to everything, but to her, "religious" just means something where people are worshipping or communing with a deity, with little or no practical function in the user's daily life. Personally I think it's more complex, that a religious act can serve a practical function as well, and that many everyday activities have a religious function. So I struggle when she insists that any given item was probably not used "religiously." It's a little too vague for me, and for many of my classmates, and we wish she would elaborate more than she does when we question her. Archeology, we are finding, is pretty controversial stuff. Nikola always refers us back to the old joke: How many archeologists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: 100. One to screw in a lightbulb, and 99 to tell him he did it wrong.

First Impressions

Today is my fifth day in Athens. Like many of my classmates, my top project has been adjusting to how HOT it is here. I’m from Minnesota, so “heat” to me has always meant three or four days at a time of 80, 90 degree sunshine. Here, however, “heat” is not just an excuse to go to the beach; it’s a way of life. It lasts all day and all night, goes on for most of the year, and it’s intense, especially in the middle of the day. From 2 to 6 p.m., the city of Athens has declared “siesta” hours when excessive noise is not permitted, so that most people can sleep the hottest time of day away. We students are in class most days at that time so it’s not a problem. (Or we’re sitting in our air conditioned apartments. Nice!) The day I arrived, though, I found out how protective Athenians can be about their quiet hours, when one of my neighbors stomped upstairs to shush my roommate and I, who were standing in the hallway chatting.

Mostly, though, our encounters with neighbors have been pleasant. I managed to have a nearly 90% Greek conversation with an elderly woman who was coming inside at the same time as me, and she was very friendly and was apparently used to “American college students” living in her building. I also met Athena, the checkout woman at the small grocery store around the corner from our apartment. She too was friendly (and probably glad to see me, as we introduced ourselves to one another upon my THIRD trip to her store in the same day! Setting up a solid grocery foundation for a 5-person apartment is hard; in one day I went back for olive oil, extra pasta, and other articles.)

The vendors in Athens seem eager to gain American college student customers, or else they’re just very generous with their stock; yesterday two of my classmates received free apples from a vendor at a fruit stand, and this morning when I asked for coffee, the man who made my drink and handed me my change also handed me a free croissant, smiling and saying, “to go with your coffee!” Cold coffee, by the way, is an excellent way to beat the heat around here, so when one orders a hot beverage, it’s not unusual to receive odd glances or a disbelieving confirmation from the person taking your order.)

Coffee is also a necessary part of MY morning at least, because classes start at 8:30 a.m., and since it’s a 20-minute walk to school from our apartments we’ve been at the campus until 5 p.m. or later while orientation is going on. While we’re not being given tours of the library or meeting the president of the college, we’re in one of two 3-hour courses we have Mondays through Thursdays. From 8:30-12:00 is “Art and Archaeology” and from 2:00-5:00 is “Byzantine History.” The Archaeology course is taught by the daughter of a pair of archaeologists, who grew up on-site at many digs, so she adds an interesting perspective to the artifacts she shows us. Our Byzantine History professor, too, is something of an archaeologist; yesterday he brought in a third century Roman coin he found in northern Italy.

Well, right now I have to leave for the second half of Archaeology class; we're going in groups to the Museum of Cycladic Art (Cycladic refers to the Cyclades islands, just southeast of the mainland) which is conveniently located just a few blocks away from our campus. So I'll say "Yeia sou" for now, and thanks to everyone who made this trip possible!