*Yawn* It's about 7 in the morning and I've been up since 3, having gone to sleep at 9 p.m. yesterday evening. Please excuse my grammar and spelling on this entry, OK? Thanks.

I guess I have a lot of ground to cover, I haven't posted in a while. This has been a week of fun, really, starting Tuesday. It was a girl in our group (Helana)'s birthday, and we decided to throw her a Greek-themed party, where we made togas out of our bedsheets and dressed as different mythological characters. Yours truly was Dionysus, complete with grape headdress and wine bottle. Our professor, Kugler, claimed rights to be Zeus from the beginning, and showed up in a white bathrobe and armed with a metal pole like a lightning bolt. Everyone did something different with props, from an apple (Paris) to a fake eyeball and scissors (the 3 Fates) to a basketball with a face drawn on it (Perseus with the head of Medusa.) It was great fun, the other guests at the hotel thought we were paid entertainment and kept asking us to pose for photos with them. Helana challenged me to a wrestling match at one point, and we had many onlookers for our ultimate showdown. Pictures later, I promise... I didn't have my camera with me, but I'll get some from someone else.

The next day everyone switched what archaeological sites we were working on; we who were working in Thermi now have to take the bus to Mytilini for our site. My group went to a ceramics workshop, where they cleaned and put together pieces of pottery found on the island. It was OK, I mean, it's fun to know how these things are done, and also to be able to handle a four thousand year old pot shard. But after about an hour, it gets OLD. So to speak. At least we're doing something productive, I suppose, and not just left to our own devices to wander around Greece spending money and lounging at the hotel.

The hotel, however, has provided us with loads of entertainment. It's hard to explain how cool it is without one being here. There's a whole library of books that guests have left here over the years, so you can read something on the beach. (I'm working on "The Constant Gardener" right now.) There's a field where you can play frisbee, and when you're not playing frisbee you can have an "action photo" contest with a friend, where you both sit with your cameras and try to take the perfect picture of people in the middle of flying leaps and tricky catches. (The same game can be played with slide-jumping and soccer, by the way.) We had a sweet game of "football" with some of our group against these guys from Turkey who were really good and totally pummelled us (look how big this guy on the right is!) but everyone had a great time. It's a pretty sweet lifestyle, with all these games we have to choose from around here.

The fun was broken up two nights ago, though, when Kugler held a group meeting. We found out that if we go to Turkey for a day trip and come back in, when we go to Turkey for our longer stay we won't be able to come back into Greece; it's a once going, one coming sort of thing. So not only did we get the wrong visas, but we also have to come back into Greece from Turkey as a group. The problem with this is that our week of free travel is right after our Turkey stay, and not everyone wants to stay in Turkey for the same amount of time. So we had to sit and deliberate on when to leave, which wasn't pleasant. I feel like in the organization of this trip we're given so many options on things which, if someone just dictated to us from the beginning what we can and can't do, nobody would be upset about not getting their way. For instance, we always have to decide as a group what excursions we want to go on with our Modern Greek Culture professor; I mean, she's the professor for heaven's sake, shouldn't she profess to us what we need to know, rather than waste time trying to do it democratically? None of us actually knows what we'll like or not, just what we like the sound of, and that's not really enough to plan a whole trip on, I think. Oh well, you just have to do it, I guess. Here's our classroom by the way, shown on the right. It's this weird little old one-room schoolhouse off a dirt road.

Our excursions are really fun though. For instance, we went to see the library of this guy Teriade who was an artist on Lesbos, who was friends with Picasso and Matisse and Chagall in Paris in his time. He collected works by these guys, and put them in his library, and now it's a museum. Very cool that so many works of art by famous guys should be sitting in this tiny museum in the middle of the woods on a tiny little island in the northern Aegean. On a lighter note, I went to Goody's yesterday - today? no, yesterday - which is the largest Greek fast food chain. It was okay, I ordered a bacon double cheeseburger just to see how it's done in a foreign country, and instead of being two meat patties with bacon on it in a bun, it was one patty surrounded by bacon on both sides, on a bun. (So really it should be called a double bacon cheeseburger, not a bacon double cheeseburger.) Just one of those things...

If you're wondering why I'm up so early, here it is: I wanted to go to this dance club in Mytilini that I'd heard about, called My Club, that opened at 3 a.m. For some reason nobody wanted to come with me, so I went alone. First I slept from 9 to 2, then got a cab to town. The club was really cool, I haven't seen a lot of dancing at the places I've been to in Athens and Mytilini but at this place everybody was standing around in little groups. The groups made it awkward, though, for a single person, so I left after about an hour, but I definitely plan on going back with friends, maybe tonight if I can get some sleep today. Anyway, after I left My Club, I went to a somewhat seedy internet cafe where computer nerds were sitting around playing video games (by this time it's like 4:30 a.m.) and checked my e-mail and listened to some music. Then I left and bought a pastry and waited for the 6 a.m. bus back to Thermi. Oh man, there were these dogs fighting with each other at the bus stop and I could tell they wanted my pastry and it was really scary, but I yelled at them and swung my legs as if to kick them, and they ran away with their tails between their legs. I felt pretty triumphant, a girl alone in the city fighting off a pair of dogs. Anyway, I got on the bus and came back here to the hotel, and now I think I'll have a nap on the beach. Later!