In fair Verona...

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

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...

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

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!

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...

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

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!