Study and Travel in Greece

Dublin days

2007-12-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

I'm back online, after that brief stint of fight-for-your-e-mail time in Amsterdam :)

After getting up at 3:30 a.m., Maddie insisted on taking a cab to the airport instead of taking the bus as we'd planned. I'm not sure what went wrong in her mental construction, but for some strange reason she's just not wired for public transportation. It makes her all nervous and shifty. Anyway we took a cab, only to find that Amsterdam's is probably the worst-designed airport in the history of aviation. The desks are all laid out like islands in the middle of a large room, with "lines" snaking all around the place (more like funnels really, with everybody pushing and shoving around the room, eventually lining up as barriers force the masses of people to form the shape of lines.)

Eventually though, we arrived in Dublin. Our bags, however, did not. They probably ended up in Copenhagen, where we changed planes. Hopefully, though, they'll send them to our hostel soon; my hat and gloves are in there and it's quite cold. Our hostel is pretty hostile, there's not a lot going on here, so I hope they don't like take our bags hostage or something. But hey, we're in IRELAND, so things can't be that bad! I walked around downtown Dublin tonight after a nap, things are pretty cool. I can't wait to see more of it tomorrow. More later ~ cheers!

Safe in Amsterdam

2007-12-19T00:40:00.000-08:00

I haven't written in 4 days and for this I apoligize. Internet time is pretty scarce here, I'm in Amsterdam and the waiting line to use the two working computers at this hostel is pretty fierce.

Anyway, we just arrived here the night before last. The ride up from Paris took a long time because we had to stand in a ridiculously long line at Gare du Nord in Paris and by the time we'd got our train tickets to Brussells, the earlier train had already left and we had to wait another hour and a half before the next one. We hopped over to McDonalds for a cup of coffee and a warm place to stand. I've decided to never again travel in the winter time; summer only. Ýou can't do anything outside for more than an hour before you stop feeling your legs and have to go inside, and going inside involves buying stuff, so you end up drinking a LOT of espressos (usually the cheapest thing on the menu) and hanging out in metro stations. I take that all back, it's not that bad. It's just kind of funny.

Anyway, Paris was great. On our last day we were going to go to Rouen and Caen, but the trains didn't work out and Maddie felt sick. So I got to spend the day exploring Paris alone; I went to the islands in the river (Sunday in the Park?) and saw Sunday mass in Notre Dame. Then I walked up past Town Hall (where there was an ice rink and people were skating to American Idiot by Green Day, which made me laugh. Then I also saw the Montmartre area, where Picasso's studio and the Moulin Rouge are. Later I saw the Opera Garnier and tried to walk back to Place 'dÍtalie, where our hostel was, but that was too far so I gave up.

Ack, I gotta get off the computer. Suffice it to say, we're in Amsterdam and it's a lot of fun. Our hostel is full of cool people, and there's a lot to see in this place. I think today we'll go to the Van Gogh museum. Cheers!

Milan was lousy, but Nice was NICE. And j'aime Paris!

2007-12-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

I'm alive and well and living in Paris! ...Never thought I'd say that, but it's true! We've been here for a day and a half, and things are excellent. Sorry I haven't written until now, but the internet has been scarce. Before I tell you about Paris, let me go back a couple of days. I've been keeping a journal of the things that have happened recently, so it starts on the 13th and progresses from there:

Dec. 13th

Today I woke up in Verona, walked outside and past many blocks lined with shrub-decorated balconies, to the Casa di Giulietta – Juliet’s house! (It's not the real Juliet's house, of course; Shakespeare may or may not ever have even seen Verona in his life. But with all the balconies all over the place there, I would totally set a play featuring a balcony scene there, just to be safe! Anyway, I saw Juliet’s house, and walked to the main piazza. I saw a fountain (!) where the Montagues and Capulets might have fought. Maybe. Then I walked back, we checked out of our B&B and walked to train station with baggage (ugh.) Then we took the train to Milan.

In Milan we had a two-hour layover, and Maddie wanted to sit and read, so I left her at the train station with the baggage, and went to go see some sights. The city is huge, and I wanted to go to this piazza to see the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world, so went to the Metro station. The Metro was crazy though… it took me like 15 or 20 minutes just to figure out which train to get on, then which direction to go in. Switching trains is a big hassle too, lots of escalators and hallways involved, and there’s tons of people around all the time so I was wary of my bag and purse. ...But not wary enough, apparently; as I was buying my ticket, this girl grabbed my purse and covered her hand up with a newspaper that she looked like she was trying to sell me. I didn’t know what was going on, but I pulled my purse back and said “no thank you.” Then she backed off, and I got on my train into the center of the city. It wasn’t until later, at a sandwich shop, that I realized she’d stolen 100 Euro out of my purse! Wha...? I've never been mugged or stolen from before, so it was a real shock and I was a little bit afraid. The poverty in Milan is crazy… I assume the wealth is very polarized there, due to the supreme richness of the upper classes? Maybe? Anyway I took a moment to be glad that I'm fortunate enough that 100 Euro doesn't mean life or death for me, and that I'm able to get on with my travels safely and without too much worry. It will affect how much dessert and beer I buy though, which may or may not be a bad thing. It's kind of funny, actually; of all the ways to get rid of 100 Euro in Milan, the land of designer bags, belts, and fashion accessories of all kinds... I lost mine in the subway.

Well, that was that, and there was nothing I could do. Deflated and wary of Europe, I went back to the train station, got Maddie, and got on the train to Nice. Nice was SO NICE. In Nice it was warm, and it was only a 10 minute walk to our Hostel, where we were lucky enough to get just a two-person private room, and we met a girl there named Corrinne (sp?) who arrived too late to check in and so ended up crashing on our floor. She made us tea, which was nice.

Dec. 14^th

Today I woke up in Nice, at around 8 o’clock. I’ve found, recently, that I don’t need coffee to get my day started; I have plenty of energy just from knowing that as soon as I get up, I’m going to see tons of new and cool places. It’s pretty sweet. The hostel that we stayed at ended up giving us a two-person room, so we had our own shower. So naturally I took a good long time getting cleaned up and dressed! Then I walked out of our apartment after speaking in French (!) with a guy on the stairs for a minute or two. I turned right and walked towards an enormous palm tree, and came to la plage… the Mediterranean Sea again! After a month on the island of Lesbos, it was like running into an old friend in a different city. And the beachfront was gorgeous; lots of pink hotels, palm trees, and women in fur coats (just like in my Broadway-musical vision of the place that I had in my head!) Ah, the French Riviera… too bad it was still pretty chilly, and I was wearing my knit hat and gloves! Nevertheless I stared at the sea for a while, and then went back to the hostel to wake Maddie up.

After she got up, we searched online for a cheap hostel in Paris (NOT an easy feat, let me tell you! We were this close to not going there at ALL, and just staying in Strasbourg or something. Then we found a place with a double-bed for 24.50 Euro per night, and although 20 is usually our top end, we decided to go for it. Phew…)After that, we ended up going to the train station with all of our baggage and finding out that the train to Paris didn’t leave for another 5 hours! We checked our bags into lockers at the station, and walked back to the beach. On the way, we got bagguettes, ham, grapes, and wine, so that we could have a picnic along the Riviera. It was pretty cool, just sitting on a bench on the boardwalk, staring at the lapis lazuli sea and eating the BEST bread I’ve ever tasted in my life, drinking wine and just chatting with Maddie. Then we left the boardwalk and went to a café for tea and coffee, and sat for ANOTHER few hours just drinking and talking. (I’m beginning to see a pattern here, in Riviera life, and it suits me well. I was sad to leave, actually.)

When we returned to the train station, we sat and read our books until the train arrived, and then it was about a 6-hour journey up to Paris, during which I finished Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which I’ve been working on for a few days and have found very moving and interesting. Aside from painting a compelling portrait of the Greek people in modern history, it made me very nostalgic for Lesbos, since most of the book takes place on Cephallonia, another Greek island. All that talk about olive trees, goats, tavernas, kafeneions… it was like, total flashback time, even though the story takes place in World War II. Anyway, it’s really great, I recommend the book to everybody!

Now I’m sitting in our room in Paris. The whole thing, including the bathroom, is about 2/3 the size of my bed room back in Minneapolis, which most of you readers have seen. There’s just the one double bed for Maddie and I – we’ll see how that works out. At least there’s a shower though, which will be a very good thing. We took a cab half way, until we were sure we knew where we were, and then walked the rest of the way, about 8 longish blocks, which was challenging because there weren’t any street signs, we had to rely on our map and a map we found on the street near the Metro station to guide us. It’s very cold in Paris at Christmastime, for those of you who’ve never been here in December! Bring gloves, hat, and scarf! I don’t know what we’ll do tomorrow, probably just the main stuff; the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre. More later ~ Ciao!

Dec. 15th

J'aime Paris! Today I woke up, got dressed, and Maddie and I took a 10-minute Metro ride to the Louvre. We're both on super-tight budgets now, so the 9 Euro entrance fee was a bit steep, but it ended up being totally worth it. When we got to the Louvre, we could actually SEE the Eiffel tower from the Pyramids! "WHAT?? Are we actually IN PARIS??" I thought to myself. After wanting to come here for ALL of my senior year of high school and much of the year before, not to mention Sophomore year when we did "Sunday in the Park with George," it didn't seem possible that now I had actually achieved what before had seemed only imagineable.

Inside the Louvre, we saw tons of Roman statuary, and the Mesopotamia wing with all its ancient Babylonian and Levantine art from way back in Old Testament times, which I enjoyed but which Maddie got bored with pretty quick. (We totally saw part of the castle of Darius I. Nice...) So we hopped up to the Apollo Wing to see the coronation crown of Louis XV (SO pretty) and then over to the Mona Lisa. It was a bit anticlimactic, because by the time we walked down the Grand Hall to the room where the Mona Lisa was, we had gotten separated, and my first glimpse of the Mona Lisa was a bit clouded with thoughts of "Where's Maddie? Oh god, she's lost, she's been kidnapped, I'm going to have to go look for her, this sucks, why can't I just enjoy the Mona Lisa..." but I eventually found her and everything was cool. So we went and saw the "Raft of the Medusa," which we'd studied in Middle School, and then just walked around for a while. The place is ENORMOUS. I couldn't get over the size of it, it was pretty overwhelming. It just never ends! We also saw the "Venus de Milo" and tons of other cool famous things. What a day!

So we left, and I thought it would just be a quick jaunt up to the Arc de Triomphe, so we headed that way. As it turns out I'm an idiot, and can't read maps; it took us about two hours, and we were super tired when we got there. I'd invested in a "flute" (or baguette, as we Americans call them) and munched on that as we contemplated the world's largest traffic roundabout, that encircled the mighty archway.

We then took the Metro to the Eiffel Tower. By that time it was about 4, and the sun was going down and it was COLD. We were freezing our butts off (quite literally, because neither of us thought to bring long underwear) and after contemplating the massive size of the Tower and its beauty in the crisp winter air amongst the leafless trees, we hustled over to the street and into a cafe. We lingered over way-too-expensive tea, hot chocolate, and French fries (ha ha, pommes frites, rather) and watched the sun set, because we wanted to see the Tower all lit up in its night light. When we left the cafe it had gotten even colder, and we only had enough energy to walk to the tower and "make a photo" before going to the Metro station. We saw the Tower go all crazy-like with the lights, as if fifty thousand tiny people with camera flashbulbs were going off all up and dow the place, which was awesome. We had a crazy adventure in the trains which ended up with us back where we started... but our general attitude was, of course, "at least we're warm!" It's true; better warm and inside a train going nowhere, than outside in this cold. One good thing came of our roundabout journey though; we ran into the Kuglers! They had decided on a whim to come to Paris for a day before going to Germany, and had been at the Louvre today as well, and were just on their way to the Eiffel Tower when they saw us! How crazy is that? Like a one-in-a-zillion chance, that's how crazy! I was so happy to see them and Mitzi was yelling so energizingly, that I hugged all of them.

After Maddie and I sorted ourselves out with the trains, we came back to Place d'Italie, near our hostel. We had seen KFC advertisements all over Paris, so we decided to check it out. DON'T JUDGE US! We like Kentucky-fried chicken! And it's part of the culture, to taste the fast food. Anyway, it was an interesting experience. I didn't know what to make of the fact that we were the only white people there. The food was good, and we had ice cream treats called "Avalanches" which I hope they have at KFC's in the States because they were REALLY good.

Now we're back at our hostel. Tomorrow we plan on seeing Notre Dame, then going to Caen and Rouen. Tomorrow's our last night in Paris, then it's off to Amsterdam! We've booked our hostels for Amsterdam and Dublin, so that's all set. It's shaping up to be an awesome journey. More later, I promise. All my love goes out to everybody back home, I'm getting very excited to see everybody very soon :) Cheers!

Ah, Venice...

2007-12-12T09:54:00.000-08:00

Today was a freezing cold, foggy gray day in Venice. After getting up, putting on my usual t-shirt and the zip-up brown sweater that has become like my second skin, bundling into my red fleece jacket and warm winter hat, and blue Athens scarf and the mittens that I got in Rome, we set out for the train station. Although we got a little bit lost, we found the "stazione" and hopped aboard the proper train. Slowly but surely we're figuring out which trains we can ride for free with our Eurail Pass, and which ones we have to pay extra for (i.e. the trains we DON'T want to take.)

When we arrived in Venice there was a thick fog, and everything looked really sleepy. Probably everybody was inside because it was so freaking cold out! But seriously, the city was much less crowded than I remember it being when I was here last, when I was 12 years old and visiting my relatives Jane, John and Mark, who were living in Bologna at the time. I recognized the interior of the train station from my memory, though, as well as St. Mark's square. (Side note: funnily enough, as my dad likes to joke, every time I go to Europe he moves into a new house - when I was here eight years ago, he moved to our house on Ford Road, and now he just moved to St. Paul! It seems that every time he moves, I scamper off to Europe to avoid the hassle.) Anyway, today the place seemed almost empty except for us. There was zero wait to get into St. Mark's basilica, which we didn't go into last time I was here and which I daresay I have much more of an appreciation for, now that I'm older. One thing I definitely appreciated about the place was, as my guidebook told me, that the interior of the basilica was designed not in the traditional Catholic style but in a more traditionally Greek Orthodox shape. Also that the Venetian sailors who took Saint Mark's remains from Alexandria had to pack them in pork meat, to avoid being caught by Arab officials. Also, I had never seen so many gold mosaics in one place before! They were on the ceilings, in the domes, on the insides of archways, on the sides of the archways... the whole of the basilica seemed to be made out of gold mosaics and beautiful green, red, and grey marble columns. Not to mention the awesome tile mosaics on the floor! It's a very visually stimulating place!

Both Maddie and I enjoyed reminiscing about the "Classical Kids" tapes we used to listen to as children, because the Vivaldi one had of course been set in Venice. We laughed at the lines we remembered ("The whole WORLD could meet here!" referring to Piazza di San Marco) and went on an unfortunately failed quest to find the school that Vivaldi taught at. We succeeded in finding the BLOCK that the school was on, however, and we managed to get a picture. We also saw the Bridge of Sighs, and ate at a Chinese restaurant because we wanted to see what Italian Chinese food was like. (It was pretty good, although a little bit expensive. Really good dumplings.) Today was an awesome food day; later, because it was FREEZING, we went and had a cioccolata calda (hot chocolate) Italian-style: thick, rich, muddy chocolate that has to be churned in a mixer to keep it from solidifying, topped with real fresh whipped cream and cocoa powder. I swear, if you held some of it in your mouth, it seriously took a bit of effort to move your tongue around. Mmmmmm... warms the body with its heat, warms the soul with its flavour, AND adds fat to one's body, for extra layering-protection against the cold! Nice.

Speaking of Nice, that's where we're going tomorrow! (The city in southern France, that is.) I look forward to seeing what the south of France looks like at 30 degrees Fahrenheit. The next day we'll go to Paris. I've been e-mailing with some friends of ours, Max and Mel, who are in Nancy and Strasbourg, respectively, to see if they want to hang out with us when we're there. Hopefully that will happen, although they're both still in school. I'm bummed that I didn't get to hang out with my cousin Mark, who's working in Bologna, but unfortunately time didn't allow it. I should go e-mail him right now, actually. Cheers everyone, only two weeks until I'm back in America; see you soon!

In fair Verona...

2007-12-11T12:55:00.000-08:00

For everybody worrying about my safety out there, it's been two days, and now I'm writing another blog entry, as promised! Everything is great.

Yesterday Maddie and I got up early to wait in line for the Vatican Museum. It wasn't too bad, we had dressed warmly and we read all we could read in the guidebook about what we were going to see in the Vatican, and only ended up waiting for about 45 minutes. I had brought my passport and everything, but all we had to do was go through a metal detector and put our bags on a conveyor belt, like at an airport, before going into the museum. I guess there would have been more if we were actually going INSIDE the Vatican. The museum's kind of on the edge, like it's part of the wall. Anyway it was cool, we saw a lot of sculptures from the first few centuries A.D. and some cool Egyptian and Levantine art from about the 12th century B.C., also a papyrus fragment from the freking 10th century B.C. (awesome??? yeah... like, oldest papyrus EVER...) And it was also fun to go around looking at the Greek and Roman statues that the Popes had gone and put fig leaves on, for decency. We were so glad we'd bought the little audio guide thingy you type the numbers on and listen to like a cell phone. Where it came in handy the most, I think, was in the Sistine Chapel. Maddie got fidgety and wanted to leave after about 45 minutes in there, but I was glued to that room. I just stood in the middle and stared at the ceiling and at the back wall where the Last Judgment was, listening to that audio guide tell me about the composition of the thing and point out things like the similarity of the skin in the hands of one of the saints, and how the face of the skin resembles the face of Michelangelo himself. Weird things like that. I was also amazed at the size and shape of the place; it's much smaller than I imagined it would be, and also a lot more crowded, both in terms of how many people were there and how much there is to see on the walls and ceilings. I mean it's just an extremely busy room! Very visually stimulating, after 45 minutes I was actually exhausted trying to take it all in, and we left. We then went for St. Peter's Basilica. Oh man. That place is enormous; not as big as the Haghia Sofia in Istanbul - I'll admit I didn't get the same rush as I got in the Haghia Sofia - but it was still a beautiful place. And at one point, all the lights went out, and the guards made everybody leave. That was weird, I thought there might have been some kind of weird security breach or something and it was a little bit scary. Especially because, for some reason, there were thousands of Italian military guys there, probably for mass. Like literally thousands; we had to wait a long time for them to file out, before we could even enter the Basilica. But nothing happened after they hustled us out, which was good. Overall the Vatican was really impressive. I guess I was expecting to meet a lot of groovy pilgrims there, but most of the others that were there appeared to be just regular tourists like ourselves. Same as with the Haghia Sofia, I suppose.

Next we went and had lunch, then went to the Torre di Argentina, the site where supposedly Brutus stabbed Caesar. It was very fresh-looking, like it had only recently been excavated. Right near that site there was a sort of cat sanctuary, which I think Maddie found more interesting than the site itself (oh well.) We weren't there long, since you couldn't go and walk around the site. Wow, looking back on it we did a LOT of walking that day. We saw a LOT of Rome. It's so interesting to see all the Classical influences on more relatively recent art. After spending so much time in Greece wandering from museum to museum and seeing countless marble and stone statues, you get to Rome and it's like, same song, different art period; now we're in the Renaissance, and instead of gods they're saints...? But they still look the same as the gods did over a thousand years ago...? It's really cool. We then wound our way up the narrow sidesteets of Rome, from indistinguishable piazza to indistinguishable piazza, by the Pantheon and nearby obelisk, and walked up to the Mausoleum of Augustus. It's definitely something you have to see; you know it sounds really cool, right? Like, something EVERY tourist would flock to, just to get a photo? Well, it's basically just a cylindrical building of bricks that's overgrown with weeds and vines, with mud caked over the only inscription that's there to read, and beer cans and plastic wrappers all over the place. We weren't sure what to make of it, so we left quickly and went to the Spanish Steps. I'd never even heard of that place, but apparently it's really famous because there were tons of tourists there, and it was really scenic so we took lots of pictures. Sorry I've given up posting pictures on this blog right away, but it's just too dang slow. I've taken over 2,000 all together since arriving in Greece, though, so there will be PLENTY to be seen when I get back to the States!

Anyway, after walking around all day we were exhausted and went back to our hostel, where we met a new guy in our dorm room, Roger from Australia. He was really chatty and we sat around talking to him for a while about where we'd all been and where we were planning to go, and he turned out to be a really nice guy. We went out for a stroll around Rome with him later, planning on going to a bar, although we actually just walked all the way to the Collosseum and nearly all the way back to our hostel before stopping in at a pub for a pint of Guinness. Rome at night is really pretty, but I found it eerily quiet. I mean there was almost nobody out. Anyway, Roger thought we were just these crazy geniuses who knew all about art and architecture and Greek and Roman history, he just grilled us with questions and we totally played it up. I mean, I don't think you have to be a crazy genius to be able to recognize a certain kind of column or be reminded of a certain temple by seeing a similar-looking column formation; three months in Greece will do that to anybody! But we had fun answering his questions, and we were out until about 2 a.m. just wandering the streets of Rome and chatting. All in all a really cool evening.

The next day... that's today I guess... geez, long days!... we left Rome and caught the train for Florence. It took us a lot longer than we expected to get there, so we didn't have enough time to do all the things we wanted to do. But we did manage to see Michelangelo's David (and yes, we saw the Digital David thing at the exhibit, it was SUPER cool to be able to see his face close up and adjust the light to be able to see it from every angle with every sort of shadow!) and we did manage to see the Duomo, the big domed building in the middle of the city, with the Baptissery nearby. We also managed to sample the local gelato (Florence being the place where the stuff was originally invented, supposedly. Maddie the gelato connoissure was pleased.) I'm a little bit embarrassed to say that today's nutritional contents have been mostly consisting of fatty foods; in our rush, we didn't have time to eat other than at the McDonalds by the Florence train station! Gross, I know. But hey, you gotta try the foreign Mickey D's, right? Part of the cultural experience... maybe? I don't know, we were hungry and in a hurry, and living on a budget of 30 Euro a day after lodging doesn't always allow for restaurant meals. The supermarket's always the best bet, but like it says in Kassandrama - "time... marches? Time... tiptoes?"

Anyway, we got back on the train and headed up to Verona, where we are now. The place we're staying at is super sweet, it's this little apartment-turned-Bed&Breakfast. Maddie and I have our own room, there's only a few other people here sharing a bathroom, there's Christmas lights all over the place, and the landlady's name is Flavia. Tomorrow we're going to take a day trip sort of thing, over to Venice, for the day, then come back here for the night. After that it's up to France! We have internet here, so I'll try to post again tomorrow. Ciao!

God, I've had "Waiting" by the Rentals stuck in my head all day. Maybe I'll listen to it on YouTube.

Winter Break... now I am in Rome

2007-12-09T05:26:00.000-08:00

Whats today, the 9th? (Sorry in advance for all the typos, I have to get used to this Italian keyboard.) I'm safely in Rome, on the second day of my European Odyssey with Maddie.

It has been an incredible week. Its Saturday, and today I went to the original site of ancient Rome. How cool is that? Maddie and I saw the houses of Augustus and Livia, and the alleged home of Romulus. We went to the Colusseum, and the ancient Forum. (No, nothing funny happened on the way there...) And do you know how we know that the site is officially cool? Because it rained when we were there... just like it rained at Delphi, Pergamum, Ephesus, Mycenae, etc. Rome, too, is worthy of rain. Anyway, this is how we got here: we left Athens, took the train to Patra, took the boat to Bari (on which I slept because I used my sleeping bag, which I hadnt used yet on this trip but which earned its keep that night by keeping me warm JUST THAT ONCE; totally worth it), then in Bari we went to the Tomb of St. Nicolas (as in, jolly old) and then took the train from Bari to here. And now we are in Rome. Wheee... Tomorrow we go to Vatican City, then for a day trip to Florence. We both ended up bringing enormous suitcases, which we intended to ship home but which we found out would be too expensive, so we just put our small ones inside the big ones. When you live on the fourth floor of the building that your hostel is in, you want to stay there as long as possible. So we did three nights in Rome instead of two, and we will see Florence in an afternoon, I guess. But we're actually HERE. Astounding.

I cried SO HARD when I left my Athens apartment for the last time. Greece has been my home for three wonderful months, and who knows when I'll be back, if ever? So it was like, I was almost mourning for my trip gone by like it was this dead thing that will only live on in my memory. I didn't cry when I said goodbye to my friends, because I can never cry around them, they make me so happy. I am going to miss everybody so much, especially Wendy and Alex, they've become my two closest friends on this trip. Oh my gosh, Im going to miss being silly with Wendy, her saying Syndagma so funny, dancing, and just walking around with her talking about everything. Oh man, all the dancing we did, her me and Alex, in Mytilini and a little bit in Athens. I'll miss Alex so much too; us trying to sing and play guitar to songs we both knew, smoking hookah in Istanbul, and just sitting around talking about music, movies, books, and people. The night before I left, we and a few other people went to Mikes Irish Bar to do karaoke (after a failed attempt to get into this Schmaltzy party that Haileys topnotch political connections almost got us into), and even though there wasnt karaoke they were playing awesome music so we just hung out, drank beer that was too expensive, and danced. After that we hung around outside Mikes, and I had a really good (though extremely painful) goodbye with Wendy. Wendy left, and Alex, David, Sam, Chris Scheffler and I went down to Psirri. There we had an awesome conversation about the trip and how we would make it better, the changes we would make, like how we were always given the option to postpone the due dates for our papers and that screwing us up and making this last month so work intensive. (I still have to write my capstone, it's due January 22nd because I got an extension so I wouldnt have to work as hard. I think I finished my other classes with all A's though. Score.) Anyway, back to Psirri. We left around 3 I think, and I said goodbye to Alex, which was really hard. I know that he, Wendy and I will still be friends when we get back to America, but while we were on the trip we were always in such close proximity, always in the same classes and never more than a few blocks apart and always on the same schedule, that we saw each other all the time and had so much in common that we got really, really close. When we go back to school it wont be like that, with them living off campus and us all taking different classes, which makes me kind of sad. At least we got to say really good goodbyes, though. I never feel, at the end of the semester, that I can say the kind of goodbyes that I want to say, because everything is so rushed and everyone is so busy. With Wendy, though, I got to spend a good ten or fifteen minutes on it, and with Alex it was kind of rushed because I had to get into a taxi, but I felt like we had such a good conversation in Psirri, and right as I was getting into the cab as we waved each other bye it just felt really right. I mean, I never get to say goodbyes like that at the end of school. I dont know. It was just really cool, we got to have really good closure, the kind I dont usually get. I guess we just had such an amazing trip, it had to end really well like that.

I hope I recorded all my emotions properly on this trip. Ill probably write more as this European Odyssey continues, because I want to remember how I felt, years from now when I read this journal again. Other trip journals Ive kept for trips in the past have been so bland, I can hardly tell what happened on them, apart from just events. So Ill probably write some supplementary entries, if I get the chance. Just for posterity's sake, you know?

It's going to be hard, getting used to not being in Greece anymore. I mean it was just. So. Amazing. I've tried my best to describe it, but I think that so much of how I thought and felt about it will be best recorded in the relationships I made with the rest of the people with me. And we will have to stay in touch to help each other remember it; we will have to be each others journals, I think. We have this weird little language with each other, of quotes and sayings that make us laugh and remember certain people and things... you know what I should do, I should make a list of all those sayings and put them in this journal so I can remember them. That's exactly what I'll do. It will take a while, but I'll post it eventually. Oh my gosh, I can feel I'm already about to cry just thinking about how much I'll miss being in Greece with everybody, I gotta stop for now. Ciao :)

Classes Are Over, Still Have Papers, Still Procrastinating...

2007-12-03T05:38:00.000-08:00

The title of this entry pretty much says it all right now. Our last day of class was last Thursday, when we put on our performance of "Kassandrama." (And time's foot... tiptoes?) The show went pretty well, considering there wasn't much pressure on us to succeed. We didn't expect anybody to come, and indeed there weren't very many people there. Iannis and his daughter Lena came, and Kugler and his family, and a couple of faculty exactly 4 students from CYA. Woo hoo. We just had fun with it, and ran through it very casually. It was nice having it finished, though. Afterwards a few of us went outside in front of the Olympic Statium and played frisbee, which was extremely fun. Being out in the semi-cold, playing barefoot on cold smooth marble with the guys and most of us still being in costume was a really good end for the day!

Earlier last week I finished my Karavas paper (on the defenses against iconoclasm, of John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite) and turned it in. Actually, I should say I wrote until I reached the word limit, and having nothing further to say, I concluded it and called it done. It's a weird paper, because it's only half-way complete; after I get back to Portland I'm going to double the length of it, and turn the final product in to Kugler so I can get 300-level credit for the class in the Religious Studies department. This essay that I just turned in to Karavas is, like, the preliminary debut for it--just the "history" stuff--so I didn't really care about the quality of it, and neither did Karavas really, so that's okay. After I fill it in with the theological questions and the implications for Greek Orthodoxy, it'll be super sweet, and since Kugler's the one who will grade the final thing, the end result should be an "A" for my final grade in the class. (Speaking of A's, I just found out I got an "A" on my Attic Tragedy midterm exam, so that class is in the bag. Sweet.)

Now that classes are officially over it's tough to work on my papers. I still have two that are due Wednesday for Attic Tragedy (one essay and one "written reflections" on our show.) So I'll do those tonight and tomorrow. I also have my capstone paper to write, which I'll turn in on the first day of school in January. It's like, we just keep pushing back the dates for our assignments so I never really feel any pressure to do anything!

I've actually been slacking off all weekend... starting right after the play on Thursday, when we played frisbee in front of the stadium. Oh man, it's been an amazingly fun weekend. I'm surprised my brain didn't explode from lack of sleep, smoke, music, etc. After frisbee we went down to Psirri (me, Wendy, Alex, David and Collin) and went to the Beer Academy. That's this groovy little restaurant that serves all these different kinds of beer, some on tap, and it's just a fun place to hang around. I went home and went to bed around 3 or 4. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were spent at the following places in a repetitive cycle; my apartment, David's apartment, Alex's apartment, Psirri, and Lena's apartment. Friday I hung out with Maddie and did some reading for my paper. Then that night we sat around eating junk food and listening to music, and then went over to David's apartment. David's become, like, my surprise friend; last semester he was the one I knew the least, and this September he got a bad reputation as a mooch when he would always go over to the girls' apartment and sit around and eat all their food. But he's quit doing that, and he's actually a pretty nice guy, and responsible too, in his own way. Plus he's always up for going out, and never says no. Anyway, we all sat around while he rolled his own blend of cigarettes, until it was time to go to the concert we'd been planning to go to for days; Let'z Zep, the band that BBC news says is "the greatest Led Zeppelin cover band of all time." That was a very cool concert; I like Led Zeppelin but I don't know their music very well so I'm not a connaissure, but I thought they put on a great show and of course the music was great. After that, we got some coffee and David, Alex, Lena and I went back to Lena's place and hung around and watched "Lost in Translation." David and Lena went to sleep, and Alex and I stayed up for a long time talking after that. We finally crashed on these mattresses in Iannis' office around 5 or 6, and slept until 4 the following afternoon.

Lena woke us up when she got back from taking a big English exam. We had cereal and sat around, and finished "Lost in Translation." Then David, Alex and I left to go home but ended up calling Lena when we saw a billiards hall and wanted to play, so we called Lena and she came out and we went and played billiards. After that Lena went home and David, Alex and I went back to Kolonaki. After arguing for way too long about whose speakers we would use and whose iPod we would listen to and and whose apartment we should go to, we decided to go to David's apartment and order pizza. I stopped in at my place to change my shirt, and the evening proceeded to be almost a repeat of the previous one; we sat around David's kitchen while he rolled some cigarettes and we listened to music, and then went down to Psirri and went to the Beer Academy. We tried to go dancing but decided to just go back to Lena's instead. We sat around at her apartment eating desserts for a while, and went up to her upstairs balcony and sat wrapped in blankets. David smoked, and we watched Triplettes of Belleville and fell asleep around 4.

Sunday afternoon, yesterday, we got up around 2 ("wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!") but ended up just sitting around at Lena's apartment for a few hours watching TV. We regretted this later, when the sun started going down and we realized that it had been a beautiful day outside, so we rushed out and went to the park for the last few minutes of sunshine. After playing on a giant rock pyramid, we took the train back to Syntagma and walked up to Kolonaki. Alex, ever the coffee-obsessed guy that he is, made us all frappes. (I just realized I've never really explained about Nescafe in this blog; Greeks love instant coffee, and the average day revolves around a schedule of coffee breaks in which Nescafe blended with milk, sugar and ice - aka "frappe" - is a staple.) Anyway, after that I went home to SHOWER for the first time in days, which was really, really nice. Then I made us all, plus Maddie and Wendy, a penne with meat sauce dinner. Afterwards Lena went home, and we hung around our apartment until we went to CYA to get Elder Chris and Collin and go to the Beer Academy. (Having a pasta dinner before going to the Beer Academy is a good idea because then you can try lots of different beers without completely losing your mind.) Going there last night was the most fun I've had since coming back to Athens; we had a great group (Collin, Wendy, Elder Chris, myself, David and Alex) and we had an awesome conversation about music and what artists we thought people would still be listening to 30 years from now. (Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Strokes, and Beck were the only ones we were even remotely unanimous about.) We left there around 1 and went to a hookah bar where we had more awesome conversation (at one point we played this sort of game where we kept going around in a circle and we had to say one nice thing and one mean thing about everybody, which was hilarious.) Then we got some sausage sandwiches and walked up to McDonalds where we got even more food (??) and then took cabs back to David's apartment. He smoked some cigarettes and we sat around eating ice cream (why we ate so much that night I have no idea...) and talking, until gradually everyone went home and it was just me and Alex sitting around, and then he fell asleep on the couch so I left.

By the way, I hope you'll excuse the somewhat juvenile/diary format of these past few entries. They're my final attempt to capture some of the "little things" that happen here in Athens, before we all go back to the States. I'm going to miss this group a lot, and for some reason I feel like I have to record the things we do so I can at least TRY to remember them later.

Anyway yeah, today I'm going to go sell some books at the used book store, and hopefully get close to finishing one of my papers tonight. I'll probably post again before I depart on my Eurail journey with Maddie... did I mention we bought our train passes? We have 8 days of travel (not necessarily consecutive) within Italy, France, and Belgium/Luxembourg/Netherlands. It's going to be pretty intense, and I'm REALLY looking forward to it! Anyway, more later. Cheers!

Thanksgiving, and some stuff before and after

2007-11-26T03:24:00.000-08:00

Well it's Monday again, and it seems like I just wrote my last entry a few days ago, when really it was a full WEEK ago. The trip is almost over and the time is FLYING by, probably because I don't notice it passing, because I spend most of my days staring at a computer. I was talking to Alex yesterday about how our memory of the events of the trip so far are already starting to get blurry. I realized then that I'm so glad I've at least kept track of most things on this journal, so I can look back and at least get the chronology of events right! But in a way it's true that the little details will never be as fresh in my mind again as they are now; the feelings I get when I walk past a certain building (like every morning when I walk to CYA and I get to Spyridonos, the block where I could turn left and get a pastry and/or coffee at Angelina's, the little bakery near school) or at a certain time of day when I do certain little routine things. Like getting out of bed and walking down the hall to the electrical box cabinet thingy, to see if the hot water switch is on so I can take a shower. Or little things to small to even recognize, they're more like subconscious things. Like the comfort of stepping onto a Metro train and glancing up at the map, with its reassuring little green and blue and red lines with pictures on it that let you know you're going in the right direction. Maybe I'll go and take a picture of that map later.

I turned in my final Art & Archaeology paper for Nicola this morning, so that's some work that's out of the way. And I'm 1,750 words into my Byzantine History paper for Karavas, which he hasn't set a page minimum for yet, but which he's said shouldn't be LONGER than 3,000 words. (Because he's kind of lazy like that. There's even some speculation among our group, half-jokingly, as to whether he'll actually read our essays at all...) So I'm getting to the point where that's almost done, which is good because it's due on Wednesday. Then after that it's just the Attic Tragedy paper and written response to the performance we're doing, which is this Thursday. (I'll be premiering the role of Hecuba 2 in our weird avante-garde version of Kassandrama, a "theatromontage" put together by our very own theatre professor Anthony Stevens. I'll keep my mouth shut about how very self-serving this play is, how little we're learning from the experience, etc.)

On a lighter note, we had an awesome Thanksgiving dinner last week! On Wednesday night, Sam and I started making a gigantic batch of eggnog in the biggest pot we could find. (The recipe is from Southern Living.com I think, and I highly recommend it. Oh my gosh, it's mostly milkfat, eggs, and sugar. Also some vanilla, cinnamon, nugmeg, brandy and rum.) We had a lot of fun making it, and even more fun serving it! Thursday was a crisp, gorgeous day. Part of it involved dragging chairs up to the boys' house, and part of it involved sitting around with Renee and Ashley and Emma, stirring whipping cream and mixing it into the eggnog mix from the night before. It's fun having good, quality "girl time" with them sometimes, they're really funny. That night there were about 17 of us who gathered at the boys' house, where they had put all of their desks together in a long row to look like a banquet table. The girls who cooked the turkey, stuffing and sweet potatoes in the boys' kitchen had spent part of the day decorating, so there were turkey napkins and wreaths of orange boughs from the trees in our neighborhood, and little tea candles all over the room so the light had a very warm and festive glow. I had come prepared with my iPod, ready to play "Merry Christmas Charlie Brown" (which I'd already listened to twice that day) but eventually people wanted to put on '80's dance music, which was fine with me. Everyone showed up looking fabulous, feeling well-rested from having the day off, and happy for the excuse to sit around and eat a feast! Speaking of which... the feast itself was HUGE. There were 2 turkeys(!), an enormous pot of stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, 2 kinds of green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, broccoli with cheese, and lots of gravy and cranberry sauce for everything. And that was just dinner. Most of us had volunteered to bring something, but that translated into about a dozen people walking in the door with desserts and festive drinks. So there were about a bazillion pies, puddings, and stuffed dates, plus there was ample wine throughout the meal, in addition to my eggnog, Charles' spiced cider, Clariece's hot buttered rum, and David Stephens' Irish car bombs. Despite having one and a half plates of food at dinner, I think I drank most of the calories I took in that night!

After the feast, we all went to the Ethniki Theatro (National Theatre) to see a production of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. I stayed awake for about 20 minutes, and then gave in to the triptophane (i.e. Turkey sleep chemical.) Then I was nudged awake just in time to applaud for the curtain call. When I asked Elder Chris how long the play was, he told me "a little over an hour." What a nap! At least the parts of the play that I managed to see were cool. Prometheus was strapped to a gigantic mill-like wheel in the center of the stage, which made for an interesting visual effect on the whole. Also very impressive was the chorus; they were spot on in their synchronization. But when the play's in a different language it's kind of hard to maintain interest, even though I'd already read the play in English. It's such a poetry-intensive, language-driven play though! All of Aeschylus' plays are like that, I think. If you can't hear and comprehend the words, there's almost no point in watching it, after seeing the initial staging and visual set-up.

The weekend after that awesome Thanksgiving was fun, although I spent a lot of it in the library. Friday night a few of us went to see some live Rembetiki music (the traditional music of Greece that you hear everywhere here, dating back to the Revolution in 1821.) That was fun for a while, but it was kind of weird just standing at the back of this over-crowded bar where I felt extremely out of place. So I went to go and get a coffee with Alex, and that was cool, it was like being back on Lesbos again, hanging out in Musiko Kafeneion. We joined up with the group again after a while, and walked around looking for a club to dance in. That idea sort of failed, although we walked all the way up to Syndagma before giving up and heading back to Kolonaki. Then I called Avery on the phone, which was extremely nice, and went to bed around 3 a.m. Saturday night was great too. (Isn't it funny that I have to refer to the events in my life in terms of what NIGHT they were on, because my days are so dang boring because all I do is sit in the library?) Anyway, Saturday NIGHT a bunch of us gathered in the boys' apartment to watch the movie "Knocked Up." It's a hilarious movie which everyone should see, and it's especially fun when you've spent the last 7 hours working on a paper. We walked to a bar in Kolonaki for a while, but I called it an early night around 1 and went home.

Sunday was fun, I went to the Poet Sandalmaker with Alex, who wanted to buy a leather satchel but needed a second opinion to make sure it wasn't too much of a purse to be a guy's bag. Elder Chris came too, to get some sandals for his mom, and I ended up being his foot model. We took a long time getting back to CYA; although we had the best intentions of being there when it opened at 3, we actually hung around near Syndagma drinking coffee for a while, then went to the park talking about movies until like 4:30, and then went to get pizza at Domino's for dinner, so didn't get to studying until about 5:30. It's really, really, really hard to get started working on your paper when you're in another country and there's tons of fun stuff you could be doing, and it's not due until Wednesday and you're already halfway done! In fact, I ended up making ZERO progress whatsoever on my paper on Sunday. I went onto WebAdvisor (the website where we search and register for classes at Lewis & Clark) and shopped for classes for like an hour, and figured out what classes I still have to take and how much room I'll have left over for electives my senior year. I think it'll be a good year.

Today I've been pretty good about getting work done; I added about 200 words to my essay, and turned in my paper for Nicola. And it's only 2:30! The question is, will I stay here after class, or go home to make dinner? It's so tempting to just leave at 7 after rehearsal, but I should probably stay and make some more headway on this thing. It'll get done eventually...

Stress, and one FUN weekend!

2007-11-19T09:37:00.000-08:00

Yarrrrrrrrrgh!

Sorry, just had to let that out. I'm a bit stressed. I finished one paper (yessss!! "The Extent To Which the Remains and Objects Found in the Athenian Agora Match the Practices Described in Aristotle's Constitution of the Athens" is complete!" Art & Archaeology - done.) ...but it seems like the fun NEVER ENDS around here when it comes to papers. Now I've got "Icons and the Monastic Tradition" to deal with, and that's going to be a challenge. Also I've got to wrap things up around here in terms of packing, shipping things home, and getting my travel plans for after the trip organized. You all know I'm flying back to the States from Dublin, Ireland, right? Yeah. Well, that ticket's all bought and taken care of... it's GETTING THERE I haven't quite dealt with yet. Travel across the LENGTH AND WIDTH of Europe in 16 days? ...Can't be THAT hard, right? All the same, it's about time I bought my Eurail pass, I think... and figure out what Maddie's plans are. We haven't been getting along very well these past few days, mostly because she's stressing out WAY too much over Thanksgiving dinner. She wants to cook a big dinner, but not TOO big, so there's drama about who's eating where, who's cooking for whom, etc. and it seems like all she does is yell at people and whine about everybody's lack of organization about the whole thing. Yuck. I've stood up to her a few times and told her not to be so unpleasant about what ought to be a fun holiday of togetherness, but that just makes her angrier. I'll be glad when that's over! Other than that life's peachy. I had an adventure with the Registrar's Office this week, trying to sign up for all the classes I need for next semester. After several tries, a couple of REALLY early mornings (around 2 or 3 a.m.) and one long game of e-mail tag with a Communication professor, here's what I got:

Religious Studies 274 Islam in the Modern World (since ca. 1300. With Paul Powers, highly recommended).

Religious Studies 455 Themes in History of Religions (mystery subject to study in-depth in cross-cultural religious history, TBA first day of class! With Alan Cole, mystery professor.)

History 323 Modern European Intellectual History (focused on ethics and philosophy. With Chana Cox, infamously tough professor.)

Communication 303 Relational Communication Theory (in-depth relationship/communication theory and research methods. With Daena Goldsmith, mystery professor.)

...Basically, I'm going to explode my brain. I'm so excited. Chana Cox is going to be hard, and I'm going to work my bum off for the Islam class. On the other hand, "Themes" is only one night per week, and it eliminates Poekoelan from my schedule. (I can still take classes on Wednesday nights if I want, but Mondays and teaching beginners' classes are out.) So, it's going to be a challenging semester. My roommate talked to the Housing office though, and it looks like we're probably going to get a SWEET apartment on campus. Score!

Anyway, back to GREECE! Our group went down to the Peloponnese this week, to see Mycenae (as in, Agamemnon's place), Nafplia (the first capital of the country of Greece after the Ottomans were deposed), and Olympia (where the first Olympic games were held.) It was a good trip, except that it rained every time we went to a historical site. Modern Nafplia was dry but cold, and Saturday and Sunday were both very very wet and cold. Especially because most of us just brought a single change of clothes... or less. I had only brought a change of shirt and pyjamas; so on the bus I was all about the PJs. (Climbing onto the bus with everybody stripping off their wet clothing soon became natural to us. The first few times it was a bit shocking to climb aboard and see my classmates sitting in their seats in their underwear; but nobody wants to sit around in wet jeans for hours at a time!)

The sites themselves (getting back on topic, ahem) were brilliant. On the way to Nafplia we stopped in Epidaurus, which used to be the spot of an ancient Askepion and healing cult sanctuary. FUN. Also, Epidaurus is home to the theatre that has the most perfectly-designed acoustics in the WORLD. Like, you can hear a pin drop from the way way back nosebleed section, and people's diction is actually IMPROVED when they speak there. That was very exciting. The Epidaurus theatre is also an interesting architectural specimen because the "skene" building, as you can see in the picture, is placed completely behind - tangental to - the "orkestra" (main round part of the stage.) Usually they overlap somewhat, but not in this one; this leads scholars to deduce that in Epidaurus more emphasis was placed on choral movement, music and dance than on drama as we think of it. Hmmmmm.

Friday night and Saturday morning, when we explored Nafplia, featured trips to some awesome structures as the hilltop citadel overlooking the harbor (from where you could see some mountains, beyond which was the harbor out of which the Greek navy sailed under the direction of Agamemnon! Very cool...) and an extremely old mosque (15th century?) that had been converted into a cinema. Also an excellent gyro place. Also our hotel room which was enormous and in which we watched part of "The Rescuers Down Under" in Greek.

On Saturday, Mycenae was the first stop. It POURED. We saw all the buildings we'd been studying in Archaeology class; the Tholos tomb ,the cave where they'd found the "mask of Agamemnon," the grave shafts, and one deep dark stairway/tunnel thingy where we all slipped and slid down a long marble stairway in pitch darkness just to come to a dead end, but which felt really ancient and mysterious.
(Don't be fooled by this picture, it's all because of the flash! PITCH DARKNESS!) The thunder and lightning was intense that day too, which added to the overall spookiness of that particular excursion.

Saturday night we arrived at Olympia, and we were all completely soaked, so we ordered a bunch of pizzas at our hotel. A few of us played poker (I need to start winning one of these days, dang! Good thing we only play for a couple of Euros) and afterwards we went out to explore modern Olympia. Which involved going to a bar and watching a soccer match between Greece and Malta, and having an awesome conversation with Sam, David, Wendy and Alex, and also a Greek fellow named Bill who later took us to his favorite dance club. There were people dancing traditional Greek dances to the house/techno music there, which was very cool to see.

The site of ancient Olympia was EXPANSIVE. I feel like the sites where ancient sporting events were held, such as Delphi etc., are the biggest and best-preserved, and I'm always surprised when I see them. Anyway, we saw the hotels where visitors stayed for the games, and we saw the gymnasium where athletes trained. (Fun fact: when the athletes were washed in the "spa" by professional bathers with olive oil and skin-scraping techniques, the "residue" from these full-body exfoliations was then bottled and SOLD to pious Olympics fans who believed that these leftovers had healing properties! Yummy...) We also saw the hilltop where women who tried to participate in the games and who were discovered were thrown off of, in punishment. In the arena, we reenacted an Olympic race, one for the boys and one for the girls. The participants had to be barefoot, so naturally I opted to take pictures instead. Oh man, also at the site we saw these amazingly enormous columns that zealous early Christians had somehow managed to topple over in anti-pagan fury. Check out how massive they were! This one's a reconstruction, but it's to exact size measurements. Dang!

The drive back was fun; it involved a long time sitting around in my PJ's, listening to music with Alex and playing 20 Questions with him and Wendy. Somehow, even though I'm super stressed about all these papers and things I have to do before I leave, I always manage to have a lot of fun, most days. Like last night; I accidentally took a 3-hour dinner break with Wendy, Alex, Clariece and Chris, just sitting around on the couches in the student center and talking and eating sandwiches. And last week, when I went down to Psirri a few nights in a row to go dancing. (Why nobody told us about Psirri back in September when we had TONS of time and were always looking for the young people of Athens and never managed to find them, I'll never know.) But hanging out over there with Alex and David is extremely fun, and sitting around at hookah bars and listening to Greek techno music is a great way to wind down after a long day of staring at a computer screen trying to make sense of it all.

No excuses...

2007-11-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

Wow. It has been FAR too long since my last entry, and for this I have no excuses. I've just been very, very busy getting back into the whole "school" thing; a month spent mostly just experiencing the culture of a Greek island beach paradise can really mix up your expectations for what school is supposed to be like! I'm sitting here in the library on a SUNDAY and it's like, um, okay, how am I supposed to play soccer and go swimming and go out dancing when I have to spend all my time reading and writing papers! This isn't school!

But seriously. I DO have quite a bit of work to do now; I have 2 papers due two weeks from now (on Nov. 26th), one's a 10 page double-spaced essay for Nicola, my Art and Archaeology professor, and one's an 8 page paper for John Karavas, my Byzantine History professor. We didn't have enough time to do these papers while we were in Athens in September, so now that we're back we have to finish those classes up with these final papers. In addition to those, however, we also have our big capstone paper which we've theoretically been working on this whole semester, but for which both Kugler and Sofia (our Modern Greek Culture professor on Lesbos) have given us so many different descriptions of what they're expecting in this paper and what we should be focusing on that nobody's started writing yet and we're all really stressed out about it. At the beginning of the term, Kugler told us we would be writing a paper on a certain aspect of Greek culture and how it's evolved from the ancient world to the modern one. Then, on Lesbos, Sofia told us that it would be more socio-anthropolgy based, with lots of interviews and fieldwork; very modern-centered. So now we're supposed to be writing a paper on some aspect of Greek culture and how it's evolved from the ancient world to the modern world, somehow integrating 10 subject interviews (I have no idea who to interview, by the way, and neither does anybody else, this is so awkward, only a handful of us have ever taken a sociology class) ... And it's due about a week after the other two are due. Oh, and we've also got Attic Tragedy class, for which we have to write a 9-page term paper, take a midterm exam, produce and perform a 30-minute play and submit a lengthy journal detailing our experiences working on the production. In addition to daily readings of class material, usually a couple of articles and/or a play or two.

SO. That's where my head is right now; somewhere between Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians (my Nicola paper) and the character of Hecuba 2 in Kassandrama, the avant-garde "theatromontage" my Attic Tragedy professor put together for us to put on. Don't get me wrong though, it hasn't been all work and no play since getting back from Lesbos; we've had a massive, all-school screening of 300 in the auditorium, which was immensely enjoyable, followed by a Q&A on Sparta with a history professor. (Gigantic nerd-fest.) We also had dinner at Ianni's house, with Sofia - it was funny seeing how much Ianni's apartment looks like Hotel Votsa! And we just got back from an overnight trip to Meteora, about 6 hours away, which is this beautiful world of cliffs and hermits' dwelling-caves with all these monasteries overlooking the scenery, it was extremely cool. Two of the monasteries held relics of the bodies of saints, which some of our group found kind of disgusting but others of us found quite intriguing. We also found it interesting that girls had to wear skirts inside the monasteries. So anyway, we're having fun amidst the chaos and stress. Last night some of us went out clubbing in Psirri, a part of Athens that's full of bars and music clubs and all these young people (finally!) and didn't get back until 6 a.m. Now it's 4 p.m. and somehow I have to have written 4 pages by the end of today. That's the goal, at least. More on my oh-so-interesting library life later, I promise! Peace 'n' love...

Safely back in Greece

2007-11-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the cozy reception office at Hotel Votsala, after a day of re-acclimating to Lesbos and relaxing in Music Cafe playing Scrabble in Greek with Amanda and Alex. The rest of Turkey was amazing, but it's good to be back; I was getting tired of being hustled into all the stores and restaurants wherever I went, and being followed and spoken to by ALL the guys there, "Excuse me! Excuse me. Hello. Where you from? You English? Excuse me. Where are you staying?" It's like, EVERY guy there just wants to start up a conversation with you and hopefully take you back to his house. Every girl gets this, even an elderly woman with a limp who I talked to! It's partly because, in Turkish culture, women never go out alone except if they want to look available to men - like, if they're really promiscuous. So everyone thinks you WANT to talk to them, even if you don't show it, so we get hassled by all the guys. Anyway, I'm kind of glad that's over. But Istanbul was AMAZING. Instead of giving you a list of all my day to day activities, I'll just put up a list of things I saw in Istanbul:

- The Kadesh Treaty, the oldest existing peace treaty we know of; it's from the 13th century B.C., and it's a treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites, vowing to protect each other from enemies!
- The only surviving religious mosaic from before the Byzantine period of iconoclasm!
- An entire room full of pottery shards! (Gives some perspective to modern archaeology, and just how pointless every shard we found actually is...)
- Some talent/shekel measures from Babylon, 8th century B.C.!
- An endless field of beanbag chairs, stretched out before endless blocks and blocks of cafes and hookah bars!
- Some lion and goat mosaics from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, from like the Nebuchadnezzar II period (7th-6th cent.'s B.C.!)
- Some Byzantine emperors' tombs!
- The oldest tower in the world that's still open for tourists to go inside! (Galata Tower, 14th cent. A.D.!)
- An entire city block that was only guitar stores! (Glad Alex wasn't with me at the time...)
- A march to the Independence Monument in Istanbul, 2 days before Turkish Independence Day!
- Independence Monument ON Turkish Independence Day with Alex... and then we went to a Turkish karaoke bar where people were singing "I Will Survive," then to this tiny upstairs bar where there was a Turkish rock band playing a really cool show!
- Topkapi Palace, where the Sultans used to live and do everything (including harems, treasuries, pool-sized bathtubs, imperial kitchens, gardens, etc.)
- NOT Nicea, because the bus schedule wasn't in my favor to go there. But I DID see the Istanbul bus station, with zillions of individual bus companies occupying a gargantuan strip-mall type of building surrounding an enormous ring of crowded cars, vans and taxis. ANARCHY.
- St. Irene, one of the only churches from Byzantine times that hasn't been converted into a mosque, where they held the 2nd Eccuminical Council!
- The Grand Bazaar, which is in this 15th century building with approximately a zillion little shops inside and everyone's heckling you to buy things and coming on to you!
- The Hippodrome, where 30,000 people were slaughtered at the Nike Revolt in the time of emperor Justinian (about 532 A.D.) and where they put all these obelisks from all over the empire. The street that runs around the park is right about where the old horse track used to be!
- Enormous, enormous, gigantic, huge, really really big Haghia Sofia (St. Sofia) re-built by the emperor Justinian after it burned down in the Nike Revolt. So big. So beautiful. Immensely sacred place, built on the site of 3 previous temples, now a mosque.
- Asia!
- AND MUCH MORE!

I'm not putting up pictures, because I took SOOOOO many while I was there. I'll show you all when I get back. Oh but it was SO fabulous. And every night we would go to a different bar or cafe or hookah place, and just relax and talk about where we'd been, what we'd bought and how much we'd bought it for (I've got most of my Christmas shopping done by the way) and music and whatever. There were also TONS of international students there, so lots of fun people to meet. Travelling by myself was nice, it was cool not having to wait for anybody at museums and sites and things, but sometimes I got a little bit jealous of the people in groups for whom it was much easier to get acquainted with other groups at the hostel. Like Amanda and Helana who made friends with these British guys who had biked there from London over like 2 months. They were fun. At the same time they were always getting drunk (I ate breakfast with them once, they were having omlettes... and beer!) so I realized that that would've been kind of hard to deal with. Yeah being by myself was pretty great. Plus I was able to hang out with other people from my program; everyone who came to Istanbul was staying at hostels on this one block behind Haghia Sofia that was all hostels and hookah cafes, so we were all pretty much together. Mel came down from France and was living with Maddie, Clariece and Chris in the same hostel as me (though I had my own separate room) so them and I hung out some times, and Amanda and Helana were in that hostel too. Basically, if you hung out in the hostels or at those nearby hookah cafes and just waited a few minutes, people you knew were bound to stroll in through the door at any time! Lots of fun.

So now I'm back on Lesbos, and we're getting on the overnight ferry back to Athens tomorrow. Sigh. Back to the whole "school" thing in a few days... 4 huge papers... Attic Tragedy class... apartment life... no more sunny beachside hotel... sigh. It's a good life I lead. Cheers!

Istanbul, not Constantınople... 2!

2007-10-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

NOTE - My aol e-maıl address ıs NOT workıng for some reason. Please send all e-maıls to carolynb@lclark.edu, I wıll get them there. Also, Just to be clear, thıs entry ıs a FOLLOW-UP to one I started wrıtıng earlıer; you need to scroll down to the entry below thıs one ıf you want to read the story of my trıp to Turkey thusfar! I'm sorry I have put off wrıtıng for so long and now have to catch up on everythıng all at once, but thıs journal ıs as much for me as ıt ıs for you all, so I want to wrıte down a lot of events to help me keep track of them.

Dınner tonıght was fantastıc by the way. I met up wıth Maddıe, Amanda, Helana, Chrıs, Clarıece and Danıel (the guy from the hotel on Lesbos) back at our youth hostel, and we went to the groovy bar upstaırs for a whıle before headıng ın our dıfferent dırectıons. Amanda, Helana and I went off ın search of a restaurant, and on the way we ran ınto an older woman that the other gırls had met ın a souvenır shop earlıer ın the day. She told us she was on her way back to thıs amazıng lıttle restaurant, and we ended up just followıng her there and havıng dınner wıth her. She was an Englısh teacher from New Zealand who lıved ın Chına, very ınterestıng. We talked a lot about dıfferent cultures around the world, what ıt's lıke to be a world traveller when one ıs 63, and other thıngs. The food was terrıffıc (I had lamb wıth mushrooms and a potato dumplıng, oof now I'm really full) and we all had a nıce tıme. Here's a pıcture of all of us.

Anyway, back to my Turkısh adventures of the past few days. After leavıng wet raıny Pergamum, we contınued by bus to Ephesus. It was another few hours, but I slept most of the way because we stopped for lunch at a , a sort of all you can eat buffet type of thıng desıgned for large bus tour groups; huge tables, not too expensıve beer, and lots of greasy food. I slept lıke a baby after that, and when I woke up we were drıvıng ınto Selcuk (sell-CHUCK) a town near Ephesus where our hotel was. A few people from our group went out to explore Selcuk; some went out to hookah bars, but I wanted to get some rest before goıng to Ephesus the followıng day.

Professor Kugler descrıbes Ephesus as the Dısneyland of Archaeology, and he's exactly rıght. The sıte ıs enormous and remarkably well preserved. It's also ıncredıbly ornate, and the hılly surroundıngs and steep pathways around the sıte make for a very stımulatıng trıp. Even though ıt was raınıng lıghtly when we got there, the place was crawlıng wıth tourısts, many decked out ın brıght colored ponchos. At the tıcket booth there was a sıgn sayıng Is Your Tourguıde Lıscensed? Because ıt ıs agaınst Turkısh law for anyone other than lıscensed tour guıdes to speak to groups wıthın sıtes lıke Ephesus and Pergamum. So we had to ınvest ın a guıde to tell us about the ındıvıdual buıldıngs around the sıte - such as Domıtıan's temple and the ancıent lıbrary - and I stuck wıth Kugler so he could tell me about other cool thıngs. We talked a lot about chapter 19 of the Book of Acts, where Paul gets ın trouble wıth the people of Ephesus and they form an angry mob agaınst hım ın the great theatre there. I'm feelıng much cooler ın my relatıonshıp wıth hım than I was earlıer thıs month, when I was a bıt dısappoınted ın the whole archaeology set-up. I had felt that he was judgıng me as a whıny tourıst, somethıng I absolutely couldn't bear. But sınce then we've gotten back on track wıth our rapport. We were all assıgned to gıve presentatıons on one topıc or another on the bus throughout Turkey, and mıne was cemeterıes. Sınce none of us have computers, let alone ınternet access, research for these presentatıons was lımıted (ı.e. nonexıstent.) Needless to say my presentatıon on cemeterıes at a sarcophagus fıeld ın Assos was lackluster, but I remembered a few thıngs from a paper I had wrıtten for Kugler last semester and ended up havıng a pretty good conversatıon\debate wıth hım afterwards about how much one can actually dıscern about ancıent burıal practıces from the evıdence we have. He seemed pleased at how much I had remembered, and I was mutually pleased to get some of my questıons answered by hım. Maybe thıs contrıbuted to my posıtıve take on the sıte of Assos and the wındy clıffs there?

Dıd I mentıon about our last day ın Mytılını yet, by the way? It was pretty ıntense. On our second to last day we went to the bıggest hıgh school on the ısland and sat ın on a Physıcs class there. It was ınterestıng how much the students spoke over the teacher. I dıdn't catch much of the lesson except that they seemed to be talkıng about a traın and a plane both goıng from Athens to Thessalonıkı, and at some poınt the teacher saıd somethıng about the Pythagorean Theorem, whıch I thought was SUPER cool, to be learnıng about that IN GREECE where ıt was INVENTED. Whew! After that we went to ıntervıew some students ın the lıbrary (whıch contaıned many classıc authors such as Nathnıl Hothorn and Tzeın Osten) and ınvıted them out to tea wıth us later. So we came back ınto town around 9 that nıght and met them for tea, whıch was fun; one boy, John, was really enthusıastıc about gossıp. He kept askıng me, Do you lıke gossıp?? Do you watch Oprah?? What ıs the gossıp ın youg group? When we left the tea house we went to a restaurant that also served hookah, whıch was ınterestıng. Later we would wınd up at another hookah bar, and ıt turned out to be a nıght full of hookah and dancıng, and I dıdn't get home untıl about 5:30 a.m. So the next day when I got up at 9 to arrange gıfts for our hosts at the hotel I was less than chıpper, especıally because ıt was raınıng and I had to walk to the Kuglers' house to fetch Hıllary who had the photo we were havıng framed for Iannıs and Sofıa. She ıs such a lucky kıd, theır famıly was lıvıng ın thıs sweet vılla ın Thermı and she had her own separate buıldıng that housed her room, whıch used to be a 18th century battlement tower. Yeah. Anyway, she and I went ınto Mytılını to get gıfts and ıt was wet and cold and pretty lousy ın general. We got some warm pastry whıch helped, but goıng back to the hotel and sleepıng ın dry PJs was pretty much the best thıng ever. That nıght we had a bıg thank you dınner for Iannıs and Sofıa and the staff at Hotel Votsala, where we presented them wıth gıfts and showed a photo slıdeshow set to musıc on Maddıe's computer hooked up to a projector. It was a lot of fun, and everyone from the dıg sıtes showed up too. It felt a lot lıke beıng at camp; we have had SO much fun at Votsala, and we had lıved there for so long and played soccer and sang to the guıtar and eaten ın that dınıng room so many tımes ıt was really sad to be leavıng. But the goodbye dınner was a really great way to end that leg of our journey.

ANYWAY, back to Ephesus... ıt was amazıng. The theatre there ıs HUGE, and you could totally ımagıne an entıre cıty beıng up ın arms agaınst Paul there. A few gırls from our group read part of Antıgone on stage, and some others sang snatches of Bob Marley songs, but I found that a bıt sılly and tourısty. We went to a part of the sıte that was called the Glass House, mostly because ıt was the sıte of domestıc quarters that the Australıan government had paıd to have a glass roof put over to protect the frescoes on the walls there. That was amazıng, and the frescoes were gorgeous, ıncludıng a floor paıntıng of two fıgures whıch I correctly ıdentıfıed as Dıonysus and Medusa (score two nerd poınts for me!) Ashley, Wendy and I trıed to fınd the prıson where Paul was kept, but we weren't sure whıch buıldıng ıt was. Later we found out that NOBODY really knows what buıldıng ıt ıs, and there ıs a lot of academıc debate on the subject. We ended up takıng pıctures of a lot of buıldıngs that MIGHT have been Paul's prıson, and found out that one of those buıldıngs was actually the church of St. Sophıa, where the Second Ecumınıcal Councıl was held ın 431. (Yay for Byzantıne Hıstory... 2 more nerd poınts, please.) On our way back to the hotel we also stopped at the ruıns of the ancıent Temple of Artemıs, one of the seven ancıent Wonders of the World. It was freakıng enormous. And about half of us wrote papers on ıt last semester, so that was pretty awesome. My mental ımage of Turkey from now on, by the way, wıll only ınvolve raın. All those stereotypıcal ımages of blue skıes and sand? All lıes. Lıes, I say.

After returnıng to our hotel ın Selcuk, I proposed a plan of actıon for the afternoon - fırst a vısıt to the church of St. John (the gospel wrıter who lıved ın Ephesus for a tıme), then on to the Hamam (the Turkısh bath), then to the hookah bar for coffee and pastry. I tell you, I would be an amazıng tour guıde because the afternoon was FANTASTIC. Fırst of all, I knew that St. John's was buılt to honor the man who wrote the fourth gospel, but I dıdn't know that he was actually entombed there. But there ıt was, after we had paıd 2 lıre to get ınto the ruıns of the church, ın the mıddle of the sıte was a marble floor surrounded by columns ın front of whıch was a plaque that read The Tomb of St. John. The group of us that was there - Emma, Ashley, Alex, Davıd, Wendy and I - delıberated for a whıle whether he was actually entombed there or whether hıs remaıns rested somewhere else; why would hıs body remaın ın a mostly Islamıc country? Why ıs the place relatıvely deserted? Why was hıs church allowed to fall ınto ruıns? Etc. We couldn't reach a conclusıon, so we just explored the rest of the ruıns. The sıte was absolutely gorgeous, I would totally want to be entombed there.

We left the sıte and walked to the Hamam, whıch I've been waıtıng and waıtıng to wrıte about; I'm sure ıt wıll be one of my most vıvıd memorıes from the trıp so far! Well. We arrıved there all cold, raıny and muddy from trampıng around Ephesus and St. John's all day, and were ready for a bath. We put our belongıngs ın drawers at the front desk, and went ınto separate changıng rooms to get undressed - we were naked except for the towels that we'd been gıven to wrap around ourselves, and we went to the bathroom and through there ınto the Turkısh bath. I dıdn't know what to expect, other than the domed roof, whıch I'd seen from the outsıde all over Turkey already. Indeed, the room was one bıg domed marble room wıth a round marble platform ın the mıddle, whıch the boys were lyıng on already. The platform was heated from wıthın ıt, so we were basıcally just fısh ın a fryıng pan; you lıe on the warm platform ın the steamy marble room, wearıng nothıng but thın cloth towels, and your pores open up and ıt gets all the junk out, lıke ın a sauna. Every ten or fıfteen mınutes someone would get up and we would douse ourselves wıth cold water from the taps; there was a draın runnıng around the room to get rıd of the rınse-off water. Then at one poınt two large haıry men wearıng only towels around theır waısts started takıng us one by one through the two-step washıng process; fırst you go to the man on the rıght and he scrubs your skın wıth a glove, gettıng rıd of all the dead skın and dırt. Then he rınses you off and you go to the other huge haıry man, who rubs soap all over your body and you get thıs warm soapy massage. It got pretty close to home, but ıt wasn't uncomfortable at all. They were extremely professıonal, and for some reason beıng naked and soapy ın front of a mıxed group of frıends ısn't really that awkward ın the Turkısh bath context. It just felt really natural and extremely relaxıng. After we'd all had our baths they gave us dry towels and told us to rınse off ın the shower stalls along the room, and when we came out of the bath room we sımply stood there and they wrapped us each ın three more towels and guıded us to benches where we sat down, lookıng lıke pırates ın our strıpey yellow matchıng costumes. Then they brought us hot apple tea to drınk as we drıed off, and we all opted to go upstaırs for the optıonal oıl massage. If you ever get the chance to go to a Turkısh bath and have the optıon of gettıng a jasmıne oıl massage, DO IT for sure. It was surreal, amazıng, relaxıng, and ıt's been 24 hours and my skın ıs stıll amazıngly baby-soft. I also reccomend followıng ıt all up wıth a trıp to a low-lıt hookah bar wıth all your frıends who are all smellıng lıke jasmıne and gıgglıng because everybody ıs just glowıng wıth relaxatıon and oıl and hookah and happıness. After the hookah bar we went back to the hotel for an amazıng dınner, then came BACK to the same hookah bar and hung out there for the rest of the evenıng. We danced and lıstened to awesome musıc, everythıng from the Gypsy Kıngs (Turkısh pop) to good old Red Hot Chılı Peppers. We put on all the rıdıculous hats that were lyıng around the place to protect our haır from smellıng lıke smoke, some of whıch had veıls and bangles. Abıt the owner was really cool, a few of us stayed very late and talked wıth hım for a long tıme. Even Iannıs and Jeanette and Dımıtrı came wıth us for a whıle. Back at the hotel I had an awesome talk wıth Wendy too. All ın all ıt was a pretty congenıal day, afternoon, evenıng and nıght, and I went to sleep feelıng warm, good, clean and happy.

Now I'm ın Istanbul lıstenıng to the raın outsıde thıs ınternet cafe, I'm stıll full from that amazıng dınner, I've been here way too long, I'm goıng to go back to my hostel and fall asleep, tomorrow I'm goıng to have even more amazıng adventures, and my lıfe ıs ıncredıble. That's all. Good nıght!

Istanbul, not Constantınople...

2007-10-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

I made ıt to Istanbul! I am sıttıng ın a cafe lookıng out the wındow at the beautıful Blue Mosque ın beautıful Istanbul. Thıs ıs the most computer tıme Ive had ın days because our tıme ın Turkey so far has been FULL of fun thıngs to see and do. We (my class except for Sam whose vısa had complıcatıons, my professor and hıs famıly, our hotel host Iannıs, our teacher Sofıa, the hotel bartender Janette, her frıend Dımıtrı, and an 18-year-old Amerıcan who works ın Iannıs' hotel named Danıel) arrıved ın Turkey at Ayvelık across the coast from Lesbos. Ayvelık ıs called the sleepy Greek vıllage, because so many Greeks have settled there. We walked around there for a whıle, and I was pleased to fınd that many people ın shops and cafes spoke German. It was weırd, feelıng lost and a lıttle scared; thıs ıs my fırst tıme ın the almost-Mıddle-East-Europe-ısh part of the world, but then I realızed that I could carry on pretty well ın conversatıon ın another language that ısnt Turkısh or Englısh. That was cool. Anyway we drove by bus to Assos after that, and settled ınto our hotel before drıvıng up thıs bıg hıll to see the ancıent acropolıs there as well as a 14th century mosque. Watchıng the sunset up there was amazıng. The acropolıs ıs very well preserved, and unlıke ın Greece there were no whıstle-blowıng guards to tell us what to do, so we got to have up close and personal tıme wıth the ruıns!

The next day was really excıtıng; we drove to the sıte of Troy! I was super pumped to see where Homerıc epıcs took place, but I dıdn't prepare myself adequately for how extremely TOURISTY the place would be. Yıkes! I knew Schlıemann had pretty much destroyed the place when he fırst excavated there, but wıth all the ropes and walkways and balconıes ıt was basıcally just a bıg rocky museum. It was cool to be there though, and I took a LOT of pıctures. I wont put any on here because ıts mostly just rocks, but maybe Ill add some later. Much cooler than Troy, I thought, was the ancıent agora of Assos (lıke the allıteratıon?) ıt was really wındy and raıny when we went up there later that day, and you had to be careful not to get blown off a clıff by sudden gusts! Feelıng the wınd from the sea standıng on those clıffs was really amazıng, and ıt was the fırst tıme sınce comıng to Greece that I've really experıenced a connectıon to the ancıent world ın ıts purely natural settıng. So as you can ımagıne I was really happy after that, except that I dıdn't take any pıctures. Hopefully that means I'll just preserve the memory better ın my head...?

After stayıng up late playıng poker (and losıng tragıcally) the next day was to be a day of ıntense DRIVING. Dıd I mentıon we have a lıttle van to get us from place to place? Very handy. Anyway, we drove to the sıte of ancıent Pergamum and ıt raıned cats and dogs (or to the Greeks ıt raıned chaır legs) when we arrıved there. We trıed to waıt for the raın to let up, whıch ıt eventually dıd, but after about 20 mınutes of clearness ıt began to haıl! Pergamum looked wonderful and mystıcal ın the raın, wıth ıts smooth whıte marble ruıns and enormous Aesclepıon rooms and hallways, but I mean, enough ıs enough! (The person lookıng really uncomfortable ın front of a pıle of rocks ıs Mckenzıe, and the pıle of rocks ıs all that's left of the ancıent lıbrary of Pergamum, the second largest lıbrary of the ancıent world after the one ın Alexandrıa.)

Aaaak, I have to go and meet some frıends for dınner. I'll come back later and wrıte another post about Selcuk, Ephesus, and an amazıng trıp to the Turkısh baths! Untıl then, thıs ıs your correspondent ın Istanbul sıgnıng off. Peace!

Safe in Turkey!

2007-10-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

Turkey is AWESOME and I'm gonna tell you ALL about it when I don't have to pay a zillion dollars per minute to use the internet. I'm super safe, I've been here for two days and I can already count to 5 in Turkish and apologize for not speaking more Turkish. We've been to Assos, Pergamum and tomorrow we're going to Ephesus!! VERY exciting. More later I promise,

Much love to you ALL!

Carolyn

Excursions

2007-10-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid I have to excuse myself once again for not posting in such a long time. Every time I sit down at my computer, I barely have time to check my e-mail before I'm up and doing something else. We have been all OVER the place recently. I'm afraid I've lost track of what happened on what day, but I'll try to recap the main events since my last post.

AUTUMN has settled on Greece, something none of us was expecting! I remember when we first got here how we couldn't stand the incessant heat of Athens, and now I find myself wearing my fleece jacket to bed at night. (One day this week I took a nap, wrapped up in 5 thick blankets, which was the warmest I've felt in a while.) I only brought the one jacket to Lesbos, and a few long-sleeved blouses, but that's it for warm clothes. Fortunately I've been able to take this opportunity to do a little long-sleeve-shirt shopping these past couple of days, so don't worry, I'm warm and comfortable. Sunday morning was really really really cold and rainy, but I managed to drag myself out of bed and go to a church here in Thermi to see a Greek Orthodox service, along with Professor Kugler and a few other students. The liturgy was in modern Greek, so we couldn't understand it. (Kugler could've translated if it were in ancient Greek, but unfortunately it's almost a completely different language.) We tried our best to blend in and observe the rituals that the people who lived in the village were doing (lighting candles, kissing icons and bibles, etc.) but we soon realized that this was futile. We left before taking communion, because none of us knew for sure whether the non-Orthodox could take communion or not. The rest of Sunday was spent indoors. I went into Mytilini with Alex, Wendy and Amanda to play Monopoly at our new favorite cafe, Musiko Kafeneion (Music Cafe, in English.) The Monopoly set was in Greek, so for Chance and Community Chest cards we just said we'd have to put whatever amount it said on the card into the middle. All the streets were from Athens so we kind of knew what was what, but we gave up on utilities because none of us could remember the rules for those. It was a grand old time, and we got way hyped-up on coffee and pastry and laughed at each other trying to pronounce street names in Greek, while the rain fell outside. Alex won with hotels on the equivalents of Broadway and Park Place, but we all went out for ice cream afterwards (I had Keimaki, the most disgusting gelato you'll ever have... it tasted kind of like pine sap.)

Monday was fun too; we went to an archaeology lab (yes, we're still "helping" at dig sites) where they cleaned up metal artifacts to display in museums. I was given a formless, bent, twisted slab of bronze to scrape dirt off of, and we spent the time just talking and pretending the pieces we were working with were of any value whatsoever. ("Oh look, I can just make out a face... is that Agamemnon? I think it is. And he's performing some sort of ritual? Cool! Hahaha... NOT.") Later that night a bunch of the guys got together to play poker. It was Colin, David, Daniel (a guy who works at the hotel), Alex, Chris Smith and myself, and everyone put in 3 Euro and we played no-limit Texas Hold 'em with chips. At about midnight Spiros, one of the Greek guys who works here at the hotel, kept buying everybody shots, so the game got pretty silly. At the end it was between Colin and I, and we weren't getting anywhere, so we split the pot fifty-fifty. So I came away 5 Euro richer, hoop dee doo.

On Tuesday we went on a hiking excursion to see the remains of the Roman aqueduct here on Lesbos. It's amazing how HUGE they had to build it, in order to channel water efficiently throughout the island. We drove to the aqueduct in the town of Moria, close to Thermi, and then we drove towards the center of the island and hiked into the mountains to see another set of remains. The hike was fun, kind of a "middle of nowhere" thing with lots of olive trees and little creeks. At one point we emerged out of the trees and into a little village street lined with cafes! We stopped for Greek coffee, and realized we were right by the road (which our teacher Sofia had known all along of course.) Then we drove to a little "secret" taverna by the sea for an amazing dinner. We had to make two trips to get everyone there, so I and a few others had to stand around for a long time in the cold, but singing songs and dancing always helps pass the time. The taverna was tiny and cute, warmed by a wood stove in the center. Some of us made merry with the folk instruments that lined the wall around us, and lazily stroked the many cats that were lounging around nearby. Needless to say, I slept like a log that night. This "wait until 10 then eat until you pass out" dinner thing really agrees with me, I think.

On Wednesday we went to the "rescue site," a recently-excavated spot of land from Roman times, where someone was trying to build a hotel. The Greek government requires any and all construction projects to cease immediately if they find something ancient, so there we were, taking apart a Roman wall and putting the ceramic pieces we found into plastic bags. It felt weird to be destroying a two thousand year old wall, I'm not sure how my morals allowed me to continue, but we did it. Later that day we went on a fishing trip around the bay, with the intention of catching a lot of fish and bringing them to a taverna for them to fry up for us. The catch, however, was lackluster; two palm-sized striped fish were all we managed to get, but fortunately a fishing boat passed by and the fishermen were friends with Iannis, our hotel owner! They laughed at our pathetic catch and passed us a basket of fresh iced fish, which a few of us gutted on the boat. The taverna dinner was fantastic, supplemented with kalamari and tzatziki. We also had some gelato when we returned to the harbor. Later we sat around my room and played guitar with Alex.

Then in case we hadn't had enough fun yet, Thursday, yesterday, was purely fun. We spent most of the morning sitting in cafes playing games and drinking hot chocolate, and some of it shopping around Ermou, the main shopping street in Mytilini. (I bought a "United Colors of Benneton" shirt in the hopes that it would help me make hundreds of European friends because now I'll fit in with them... that's the theory at least.) There are these two cafes, Musiko Kafeneon where we played Monopoly and House of Tea, this place with big beanbag chairs and cool decorations made out of graphic logos and lots of fancy teas and really good spicy hot chocolate. House of Tea also has a Jenga set, so we sat around playing Jenga there for a while. Then back at the hotel some of us made burritos for dinner, and baked apples with cinnamon. Later that night we had a party in our hotel room. I swear I'm gonna feel SOOOOO bad when I get my grades for this semester and there's just this massive column of "A"s down the page, which I haven't earned at all but which are just being handed to me on a silver platter. It's bizarre. November is going to be really hard though, probably three months worth of hard work in the form of four extremely difficult papers I haven't started writing yet, so I'll make up for all this slacking off later. For now I'm going to go into Mytilini and interview some high school students for my capstone paper, so that counts as work, right? Right. That's all for now, seeya!

2007-10-12T20:50:00.000-07:00

*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!

Life on Lesbos: 3 Amazing Days

2007-10-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

Whew. It's been a pretty crazy weekend, LOTS going on, so much that I always go straight to bed at the end of the day without writing in this journal! Whatever.

Friday night we had a barbecue here, which it seems like we do every weekend. We invited the excavators from our dig site at prehistoric Thermi. They seemed to enjoy themselves; it's not hard to do, because the hotel has awesome cooks and we can always eat outside, by the sea. We shared a carafe of wine at our table... can I interject and say how nice it is to be able to share a bottle of wine with friends and not have to worry about being "shady" or pretending I'm 21? It's very nice. Especially by the sea.

Georgia and Vicky, two of our friends who were Thermi excavators, took a few of us to their favorite bars after dinner. We went into Mytilini in Georgia's car, and listened to the Cure on the way. One bar was called Musiko Kafeneon (Music Cafe) and it was this very groovy, low-lit place that played the Smiths and other low-energy alternative American rock. It was full of these weird little statues, and at our table there was a lamp shaped like a slice of watermelon. It felt very "French" for some reason. Georgia carried most of the conversation; she's really funny, and we call her "the girl with the hair" because of her purple, short in the back haircut. Vicky is quieter, she's "the bone girl," but she's really nice and smiley. There were probably more silences in the conversation than were comfortable, but you know, it was a pretty full week and we were kind of tired. Anyway, after we left Musiko Kafeneon we went to this place called Hott Spott, which was right next to a bar called Monkey which we'd already been to a few times and which was a bit too expensive for us. Hott Spott was okay though, and much louder than Musiko Kafeneon. We ended up sitting outside, and talking about politics and international relations. (Which is fun when people speak different languages and have had a few beers.) We went home at about 2, and went to sleep.

Saturday was a really full day. We went all over the island on a bus, first to an olive museum in the center of the island, which made me crave olive oil like mad. Then we went to Petra and saw a mansion and a church. I feel like I look at a lot of churches. There's lots of candles and lots of silver. Basically. I'm starting to notice differences between kinds of icons though, and that's kind of good because maybe I'll do my final paper on iconoclasm? I dunno. Lunch was great, we ate in a groovy taverna and had a LOT of food, most of which was fried. Awesome. I was pretty sleepy afterwards, but there was still a lot of places we were to go to. Then we went to (Molyvos?), a town where there was a big castle on a hill above the town. Basically, our bus dropped us off up by the castle, and our professor told us to walk down to the bottom and meet up at the bus there, and people took the opportunity to shop for souvenirs. So it goes, I guess: "Oh, we're not learning? Yay, free time! Let's buy things!" Oh well. After that we went to a church which was famous because apparently a saint told someone there to make an icon out of earth and blood and worship it. So we saw the icon, and there was a wedding going on at the church so we got a lot of people-watching in. Finally, we went to a place where they made ceramics and lots of people did more shopping. I didn't do any shopping, so here's a picture; I'm not buying any breakables for gifts! Anyway, our bus returned to the hotel at 7:45 p.m. and I barely made it to my bed in time to fall asleep, completely zonked.

I got up at about 6 this morning, Sunday morning, and saw the sunrise. I would have written a journal entry, but our power went out and so did the internet. It was going to be another day of excursions, so I just sat and prepared myself. We spent most of the day at a small family farm in the middle of nowhere. It was actually really, really cool; we got a tour of the place and saw where they ground flour using a water mill, and took turns at the wheel of this huge olive press. It's really cool to know how olive oil is made, remind me to tell you when I get home, okay? We also saw some newborn baby goats; they were brand new that day! Awwwww... Then we got to learn how to make Greek food, I worked mostly at the cheese pie station. So now I can make you all some excellent, if fattening, cheese pie. We also did a grand cheese and olive tasting. Mmmmm. Then we went into a village called something like Aghios, and saw the church there. Again, our assignment was to walk to the bus which was parked at the bottom of a hill. I stopped for a Greek coffee, which was an AMAZING wake up call. If you've never had Greek or Turkish coffee, I suggest you get on that. Wow. When we got back to the farm we ate the food that we'd prepared, and had a Greek dancing lesson. I really like Greek dancing, there's a lot of free style involved. After dancing - and this was perfectly planned - we went to the Thermal baths for which the town of Thermi is named. They had segregated baths for men and women, because you were encouraged to go in the nude. It was amazing; a hot tub full of natural hot spring water the size of a swimming pool where you and all of your friends could just go and sit and get clean? Classic. Now I'm back at the hotel, feeling nice and clean. I'm still full from lunch, which is amazing considering it's almost 9 now and lunch was at like 3:30. Sweet. I'm going to bed soon; I'm pretty tired, and tomorrow is my last day at the dig site at Thermi so I want to be wide awake for it. Cheers!

More about Hotel Votsala and Archaeology

2007-10-04T05:12:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone, sorry I haven't posted in such a long time!

We've been QUITE busy with our archaeological digs; we found out just a few months ago that we'd be getting the chance to do some work at some sites here, and we were mostly pretty excited to do it. When we got here, though, what actually happened was very different from what we'd expected.

We've been split into groups and sent to either Thermi (the site near our hotel) or either of two sites in Mytilini, doing work either with metals or ceramicware. Tuesday was the first day we went to the sites, and it was a very bizarre day. We heard from other groups that the museums didn't even know we were coming; as for my group, when we got to Thermi the woman there greeted us and asked us what we were studying. When half our group had announced our majors, she stopped us and asked, "What are you DOING here??" None of us were intending to go into the field of archaeology, and she was clearly disappointed. She turned and spoke with the three younger women who were there to teach us, and they argued amongst themselves in Greek for about 20 minutes while we stood there in bewilderment. Finally they split us into groups to go with each of the students. One group went with Vicky, the "bone girl," a grad student specializing in animal bones, to help her identify the different specimens she'd laid out on a table. The rest of us went with Eva and Georgia, two other grad students, to look around the site. After we'd walked around, they roped off a section of land and had us dig ten centimeters down to the next level of earth and sift through the dirt for ceramicware and quartz. It was pretty exciting for about 20 minutes while she showed us the techniques for digging and sifting. We were finding lots of pottery shards, which was immensely satisfying. After an hour, though, we realized that our progress was very slow and that we weren't actually helping; they had roped off a section of ground that they had no intention of ever excavating, they just wanted to give us something to do to keep out of their way. It got a bit existential after that. We wondered what we were supposed to do at this site for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week - just keep sifting through dirt for millions of thumbnail-sized ceramic shards that all looked exactly the same, and were so sanded down by thousands of years of dirt-rubbing that no one would ever fit them back together into their original vessels? We weren't learning anything, nobody taught us anything after that initial 20 minutes, they just went back to work. And how were we supposed to "experience the culture" of Mytilini if we only had 2 hours of daylight to ourselves every day? A dreary outlook, to be sure.

We returned from our site to find that almost everybody else had had similar experiences of being shunted around, away from any actual progress being made at the sites. The group was pretty unruly at that point. I wasn't sure if I was going to say anything to Professor Kugler, but when he approached me and asked me how my day had been, I just poured out all my feelings, my existential notions about the whole thing. I gleaned that he'd spoken to others about their experiences already, because it became apparent that he had expected me to "whine" about the archaeological dig, and he had already prepared defenses against any complaints I might raise. I wasn't prepared for this, and I was upset that he'd practically written me off in his mind as an ungrateful brat before actually listening to what I had to say. After he'd left me sitting by myself, I took a walk down the beach and threw rocks angrily into the sea, feeling pretty abused and sorry for myself. Unhealthy I know, but I respect Kugler a lot and probably put too much stock into his opinion of me. In any case, the whole day was kind of a downer.

After Sophia's class that night - she teaches our "Modern Greek Culture" class in the evenings, which is basically just an overview of sociological methods and notions in Greek context - we had a group meeting to discuss the dig. Many people presented logical arguments for why we should reduce the time spent at the dig sites - the way the idea was presented to us, whether we had a choice in the matter, whether we'd still have time to work on our projects and papers, etc - but there were also some students who just plain whined about their own personal problems with the way things had gone. Pretty depressing, for a group of 20 year olds. Kugler wrapped the whole thing up by "playing the parent" for us and telling us to give it another try the next day. It always makes me feel better, talking things over with him, so that was pretty good.

He turned out to be right; these past two days have been much better. Now we're only there for 3 hours, and Kugler spoke to our excavators about maybe letting us observe them more in their work so they could teach us how to actually do things, instead of just giving us pickaxes and essentially telling us to go play in a sandbox for a long time. So we've learned more about how to reconstruct a site, mixing mortar and placing stone layers one on top of the other. We've also learned about identifying animal bones - I can tell the difference between sheep, goat, and pig's teeth now, and distinguish between upper, lower, right and left teeth - and about rendering drawings of stone walls, with accurate measurements of angles and things like that. Georgia, a grad student who I've become friends with, also showed us today part of the site where they've found entire clay vessels "frozen in time" in the ground, such that they have to actually dig AROUND them to see where in the room they were and in what condition they were in when they were used last. I actually got to touch one of them, which was amazing; a recently discovered clay jar dating to about 2500 B.C., and I'm one of the first to lay hands on it. Way cool. Here's a picture of me holding a piece of pottery I found in our little roped-off area where we were digging.

Anyway, that was basically the only problem we've had with the trip so far, and for 5 weeks in a foreign country I think that speaks pretty well for us as a group and for Kugler as an organizer.
Our hotel, for example, is amazing. I told you about how I almost broke down and cried when we first got here, when I first saw how beautiful and friendly everything is here. It's not, you know, 5-star or ritzy or anything, but it's just really NICE being here. Everything is so open and airy, the beach is lined with palm trees, the dining room is cozy and has lots of windows facing the sea and the distant Turkish shore, and Iannis the owner is so warm and welcoming and always willing to talk to us about Greek culture. Plus the food is good; we get breakfast and dinner, and Iannis usually sends us off to our dig sites with bags of hard-boiled eggs and fruit juice as a snack. When we get back from the sites we have lots of time to wander around the town of Thermi, or take the bus down into Mytilini if we want to "experience the culture" more on our own. Otherwise, people sit around on the beach or take the hotel's kayaks for a spin. (Here's a picture of Mackenzie and I trying to kayak chariot style.) Alex and I have been teaming up on guitar and vocals for songs we both know, which is way fun because I love to jam and I miss jamming with Avery. The group will swim and play ping pong and soccer as well, and sometimes the dogs who hang around the hotel try and steal the ball away from us.

Speaking of animals, there was a cat hanging around here last night who we all wanted to bash over the head because of the constant - I kid you not, constant - meow meow meow that kept us up, on and off - I kid you not - from 11 p.m. to 7 in the morning. So I think we'll all keep a glass of water by the door tonight, so in case he comes by again, he'll get a sploosh.

For now I think I'm off to bed. Kali Nixta!

Amazing Adventure to Skala Eressos

2007-10-01T10:26:00.001-07:00

Okay. I have a lot to say, so be sure you have like 20 minutes to sit down and read this slowly, because it’s really cool and totally worth it. This is my first chance to sit down luxuriously at my computer in days. (And by “chance” I mean “time when my body has no energy left and therefore can’t do anything else.”) Lesbos is so beautiful, I feel like I have to see more and more all the time. So, yesterday when we had the day off, I opted to take a bus over to the other side of the island.

But first I have to tell you about Saturday night! Oh wow. It was fun. After the huge dinner that we hosted for the community, a few of us went out dancing. Well, not quite dancing, because the only real “dance club” in Mytilini (the main city not too far from here) doesn’t open until 3 a.m. That’s the thing about this place that I’m finding more and more; you HAVE to do siesta, otherwise it doesn’t work. Siesta is usually from about 2 to about 6, so that gives you an extra 4 hours of energy in the evening that you wouldn’t normally have. The thing is, though, that with our class schedule we don’t usually get to do siesta, or we’re so psyched to do and see everything that we forget to take a rest in the afternoon, and end up crashing at about 11 p.m. and miss out on all the night life. So anyway, Saturday night we got a ride with this guy who works at the hotel, Cosmos, and his friends Danny (who just graduated from Michigan State and who did a study abroad program here years ago and who now lives in Israel but who’s here on vacation for a few days) and Kostas. We went to this bar called “Monkey” and tried to dance, but it wasn’t really a dance place so it was a little bit awkward. Some people wanted to stay until “My Club” (the dance place) opened at 3, but we started falling asleep around 1:30 so we came back to the hotel and had a good night’s sleep, the first we’d had in days.

Anyway, I got up around 9 on Sunday morning and found out that ALL of our activities that we were going to do that day had been cancelled. So I figured, this was my chance to finally go to Skala Eressos, this groovy town with lots of cool beaches on the other side of the island. It’s also famous as the birthplace of the poet Sappho, and lots of women who admire her writing make pilgrimages there in the summer months. The bus, I found out from Nana who works at the reception desk, was to leave at noon, and wouldn’t leave Skala Eressos again until 6 a.m. the next day. After checking with Kugler to make sure it was okay, I set off. Since it was already 11 and I had to get to Mytilini, I ended up going all by myself. The ride across the island was about two and a half hours of gorgeous countryside. I kept waiting for this immense wave of fear - fear of being in a foreign country, fear of being by myself, fear of getting lost/stuck in a weird situation, etc - but it never came. I just made a decision, got on a bus, and did this thing. I may have either achieved a new sort of strength, or I'm getting stupider while I'm here. Either way though, I have better adventures like this, it seems.

When I got to the town it was about 2:30, the middle of siesta hour, and the place was pretty quiet except for the late lunch crowd at the seaside tavernas. I took a walk down the beach and acted really calm and collected when I passed the people sunbathing on the “clothing optional” section, like I was from Europe and saw this sort of thing all the time. Right.

It took me just about an hour to find the “Tenth Muse,” the most famous bar in all Greece, and only because I passed it once and didn’t see it. After paying homage there, I had only to walk about half a block before passing one of the many signs reading “Room for Rent.” I got my room and key from the landlady, Aphrodite, took a moment to admire the view from my very own balcony of my very own single room in Skala Eressos, took it all in, took this picture of myself and this picture of the courtyard of my house, and went out to find some lunch. The tavernas by the beach were beautiful, with loud Greek music playing, and couches for seats around the tables, ideal for big groups. I didn’t want to sit alone, but finally my hunger got the better of me. A waiter seated me outside one of the tavernas, and I ordered stuffed peppers, my favorite. Of course it was excellent.

As soon as I’d finished my food, the waiter offered me a glass of ouzo and a dance. Stupidly I declined because I wanted to get some sleep before night fell and the parties started. But as I was heading out, a group of men and women who looked to be in their ‘60’s and ‘70’s seated at a table nearby offered me a seat, and invited me to have a glass of wine with them. The waiter was looking on, and so was everyone else in the taverna. Under pressure, I said yes, and all at once they all scooched around in their seats to make room for me. Many of them began speaking to me in rapid Greek, and I smiled and excused myself for only understanding “poli ligho Ellenika… very little Greek!” Eventually, though, I found out that all of them spoke French, so with my limited Franglais we were able to work through our language barriers.

So we drank white wine and ate fruit and cheese, and I told them about my studies, and they told me how all eight of them had grown up together on the island. This taverna was their sort of hangout spot, they told me, and sometimes they would sit here for two or three days like we were doing, just eating and drinking. One man claimed they had broken five tables there over the years, from dancing on them and weighing them down with too much food. As we sat, every few minutes someone would lift their glass and exclaim, “yeia mas!… health to us!” and we’d have a toast. Nikos, the waiter who had offered me an ouzo, was very friendly with them, and always kept my wine glass full; it quickly became obvious that they all wanted me to keep drinking, and that all of them wanted to set us up on a date. (From then on I took only small sips when we toasted, or merely pretended to drink.) Since my new friends were such constant patrons, it was they who chose what CD’s were played at the taverna. They knew most of the songs, so there was much singing and dancing. Nikos made me get up and do some traditional Greek dancing, and the group smiled and yelled “opa!” and “bravo!” Pretty embarrassing, as tourists kept walking by and taking our picture and clapping. (Yes, that’s me, part of the rich Greek cultural backdrop…)

When I left it was three and a half hours since I’d sat down for lunch. I wandered back to my room, set my alarm for about midnight, and fell asleep.

I got up as planned, got cleaned up as much as possible (I’d only brought my purse, no toothbrush or anything) and went out into Skala Eressos. The tourist season, I’d found out, is at its last days now, and tourists make up most of the "party" population. So when I went out to the beach and looked down in either direction it was very dark. But I followed some traces of music back to the Tenth Muse, and there were lots of people hanging around dancing. The music was cool, a groovy mix of American music and Greek covers of American songs. I had a Coke for a wake-up, and I made friends with a few girls from Sweden and Canada. We hung around and talked about EVERYTHING. I was at this bar for hours, just talking about whatever, dancing, having an awesome time. There was a lot of language-deciphering going on, but everyone was able to speak through someone else at least. I was impressed by Sabine, a Swede who couldn’t hear but who spoke amazingly good English, and by Amanda, a Brit who had moved to California and works on Lesvos as a bartender in the summer. Amanda had a friend at Lewis & Clark several years ago, so we kind of bonded over that. It was amazing; in just one day I’d been accepted into two very different groups of people who just wanted to have some good conversation and enjoy the beautiful view of the sea. It was the island utopia you think only exists on TV. Really magical. I didn't take pictures at the Tenth Muse, but maybe now my new goal can be to go back and take some, some day. Anyway, when everyone went home from the bar (around 3:30), I went back to my room and just sort of sat around for the last two hours before I had to get on the 6 a.m. bus back to Mytilini.

Catching the bus back this morning was the scariest experience of my trip so far. I went out of my room to the bus station at 5:45 in the morning, and of course it’s pitch-dark and there’s no actual “station,” just a bunch of buses parked in a lot side by side. And it’s cold and I only have my little blouse thingy on, so I’m shivering, and every noise made by a cat searching for garbage is probably a ghost. Nothing happens until 6 precisely, when I see two people come out of another rooming house with suitcases. It turns out they’re British, a mom and her daughter, and they’re taking the bus to Mytilini as well. We had adventures trying to figure out which bus was ours, and then trying to find change for a 50 Euro note so they could pay their landlady for their room. It ended up with me running to the nearby bakery – literally running, in my little flip-flops – so we could all get change, and then running back with change and pastries for breakfast, then the British woman running back to her hotel to pay for their room and running back to get on the bus. So the bus was 20 minutes late leaving, and I spent the entire drive back worrying over whether or not my group would wait for me going on the day’s activities. (And somewhat enjoying the awesome sunset out the window.) As it turns out, I was able to get a cab from Mytilini back to Thermi, and as I pulled up to the hotel, the group was all assembled outside waiting for the bus. So I was able to casually stroll up and join them about 10 seconds before our bus pulled up to take us to our archaeological dig.

More on the archaeology and classes later – I’m off to bed. (Haven't slept in a LONG time.) Let me just close by saying that Lesbos is everything I’d hoped and dreamed it would be, and my new goal is to save enough money to be able to come back either next summer or the summer afterwards and spend more time in Skala Eressos. Seriously, it was so friendly and fun-loving, it was like no place I’d ever seen before. Really a good time.

finally on Lesbos!

2007-09-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-09-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-17T07:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-17T06:46:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-10T09:30:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-06T08:38:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-05T00:24:00.000-07:00

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!

Packing

2007-08-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

My new mantra is "I'm not bringing much to Greece." That's the only way I can stop myself from packing absolutely everything. All my stuff is lying out on my bed right now, and it looks like a lot already. I'm basically done, I just need to pick up a couple of things from Target (like sporty socks for walking around all the ancient ruins, and black t-shirts that won't get too dirty.) I've decided to bring my laptop computer with me to Greece; I'll just lock it up in the Athens apartment when we go to Lesbos. That way I'll be more inclined to stay in contact with people, upload more photos, and spend more time on homework (yay.) I've reached my $ummer earning goals, so that's fabulous. I'm almost done reading the first four chapters of Treadgold, now I just have to read Cameron and maybe learn some more Greek. "THen ksero ellenika poli kala." (I don't know Greek very well.) Kugler sent us a very reassuring e-mail regarding the fires that have been spreading down in the Peloponnese (see map), saying it's kind of spooky and the air gets very dense sometimes, but other than that we should be okay. Germany and other European Union countries are already helping out and sending water-dumping planes. More when we actually get there.

NOTE: I just found this out, it's important for everyone to know: Athens time is EIGHT (8) hours AHEAD of Central Time. So if it's noon in Minneapolis (10 a.m. in Portland, 1 p.m. in New York) then it's 8 p.m. in Athens. Easy enough, right?

Map/First Post

2007-08-11T22:42:00.001-07:00

Ta-daaa! I've created my travel blog and put a map on it. My technological prowess astounds even me. Scroll down to see all the happenin' spots I'm going to visit. (I've circled the places I'm going in red.) First stop: Athens. It's August 12th and I'm SO ready to go. Except that I'm only halfway through "Teach Yourself Greek" and haven't started the reading for my first course, "Byzantine History." I'm gonna depart on the morning of August 30th with my good friend Kozloff, and classes start September 1st. Kozloff and me are going to travel Europe together after classes end; we've got 17 days of travel time before we both fly back to the states out of Dublin, Ireland. Hopefully that'll be enough time to traverse a continent. We'll see. For now, it's "mia pikilia, parakalo" (a plate of appetizers, please) and "yah-soo" (cheers!)