Meteora

I currently sit in the empty cya computer lab on a monday night, feet up on the table, the room quiet but for the rattling hum of the ventilation system. My only class tomorrow is modern greek, and i do believe one ms. greenberg has been dying for some athenian news (i love you liss!;), so I think I'll take this time to write about Meteora.



Meteora is a small town in North/Central Greece that is famous for its monasteries that sit atop these amazing stone towers. The monks built these structures to protect themselves from the periodic invasions of the Turks, and to isolate themselves from the secular world in general.



I asked my environmental studies teacher today about how the towers were formed, geologically speaking, and he gave me an explanation that I only partially understood. The process seems to involve a river depositing sediments a very very long time ago, different types of rock forming, and then differential erosion. We arrived in the middle of the night, after a six hour bus ride from Athens, and when we stepped outside in the morning it was just spectacular.



I set off a little slower than my cya companions, taking pictures and enjoying the quiet, and soon fell in with Julian, an Aussie I'd met at our hotel the night before. He had never been to Greece before but had explored much of Europe (he was coming from Albania and was en route to Istanbul), and proved to be a really wonderful travelling companion. We went into three of the six monasteries, and I had to put on a skirt over my pants to enter each one. The little byzantine chapels were exsquisite, and they were all really well built into the locations, with lots of levels and stairs and balconies.



After the monasteries we walked back down through the woods and came upon this incredible tree that looked like it was out of lord of the rings (cheesy reference, but entirely accurate). At this point in the day i was supposed to be hustling back to town to catch a 5 pm bus back to Athens with the rest of my cya friends, but I caught sight of this natural archway nearby, a sort of hollow underneath one of the stone towers. I realized that I really wanted to see it, and I didn't really care about catching the bus - there was no need to be back in the city for all of Sunday. So we bushwacked off the trail and up to the rocks.



We climbed up into the arch as far as we could, scrambling over some significant boulders. On the walls overhead, we could see pegs where rockclimbers had laid down routes. It all felt much more adventurous than being back up on the road with the mopeds and Polish tour buses, and it was probably my favorite part of the trip.



And so I spent one more night at Koka Roka, drinking homemade wine and making the above guestbook entry with Julian - I maintain that great entries are possible only with illustrations, and that lack of artistic ability should be no barrier to such attempts;)



Life back in the city rolls merrily along. I am still very busy, but in the best sort of way. The above picture was taken last week, on a Tuesday night at a karaoke bar near the embassy. I am proud to say that those two girls are representing stassinou, home of champions...we have some significant, borderline comical communal pride. We have a four day weekend coming up and are thinking of heading to patras, which is known as the epicenter of carnival festivities, we'll see how that pans out. Until next time, my friends, adeiu.

the sound of settling

hello, one and all -



Welcome to yet another sleepy Saturday, here in Athens. Shannon, Katherine, and I caught a 7 am bus back from a short stay in Nafplio, a beach town in the Peloponnese. The fact that my classes end for the week at 1:20 on Thursday afternoons is proving to be a major convenience. The trip was a damp but thoroughly enjoyable experience, I'll try to get some pics up of it soon - but I am now bone tired.

I am still trying to spend a couple hours of every day walking, and am beginning to see the results in that I am beginning to know the streets, in a limited and provincial sense of the word. I am having to wander farther and farther from home before feeling lost, and resort to street-corner map-clutching less and less often. It seems that the metro system will be the new frontier, but for now I am content to walk. Today I went to the central market, which is every bit as much of a circus as people say it is. Let it suffice to say that I never want to see that many skinned sheep heads again, but know I'll return anyways - it was just fascinating, and I really want to take pictures and try to buy some fish.



The shot above was taken from the Acropolis and shows my neighborhood pretty well - we live a few blocks to the left of the olympic stadium, which appears as a white blob in the picture.



A soldier undergoing inspection in front of the Parliament building on Syntagma Square. You've really gotta wonder about the logistics of upholding the law in those shoes. From what I've seen, they move about with absolute precision and stare majestically into the distance while timid tourists shuttle back and forth photographing them. When someone gets too close they slam the butt of their rifle on the marble steps, which makes a terrific cracking sound and summons one of the guys in an olive uniform to shoo people away.



We eat out constantly - tzatziki is my life.



We also tend to go out at night a fair bit, although the greek social calendar is a little brutal for me. It seems that at nine or ten at night people are still having dinner, and around eleven or twelve they're thinking about heading out to bars. This is taking some getting used to.

In other news, classes are good. Modern greek is quite the brain bend for me, I've never tried to learn a second language besides latin, so the mechanics of speaking a foreign tongue are well, entirely foreign. The archaeology of athens class meets twice a week and always on site, which is great - last week it was the nat'l archaeological museum, this week it's the acropolis. My history course is giving me some valuable context, and i'm thinking about doing some study of the feral cat population of our neighborhood for my final project in environmental studies.

That's about everything that's fit to print. Please feel free to comment away, it makes me happy to know that people actually look at this/inspires me to maintain it (html layout is so freakin tedious....). kalispera.

a sleepy saturday morning

The photo above is part of a blood orange I ate for breakfast this morning, out on this balcony above Stassinou.



The trees in the picture are in fact orange trees, but are laden with bitter inedible fruit. I bought the blood orange yesterday at the Friday street market in Kolonaki, a neighborhood adjacent to mine where a number of my friends live. To get there, I walk up by the National Gardens and past the president's house, where at all hours of the day and night young gaurds in elaborate traditional uniforms do drills outside the gates, stepping high in shoes with pompoms on the toes. The market was wonderful, bright and busy and full of unknown things. I bought tomatoes, citrus, apples, cucumbers, lettuce, oregano, and some very interesting greens. I thought I knew more than most about greens, but I have no idea what these ones are - peppery and a little tough, but not so much as to need to be cooked like chard or kale. I wish I had a picture for you, dad. Maybe next time.

Life here is great - I'm having an easier time adjusting to the different hours than I had anticipated. Thus far I appreciate how many things are done more slowly, more generously. Meals go on and on for hours, walks around the city through endless new blocks, a general interest in quality of life, in things done well. A case in point: yesterday around four in the afternoon, a couple of friends and I decided that we wanted coffee before class. We headed out and stopped into the first cafe we came to, a place around the corner from our apartment roughly the size of a closet. The proprieter, after listening to our request for coffee, ushered us to seats by the window and proceeded to give us shots of cherry brandy and talk to us about the spirit of Greece. The coffee never came - we just spent the hour nursing our liquor before heading off to class, after promising to come back soon.




In other news, it appears that my apartment is the land of Very Attractive Women. We all get along very well thus far and have been having a lot of fun exploring the area and getting to know one another - it is reassuring to have good company in a strange place. It is interesting and a little unnerving, the sort of attention a group of American females receive around Athens. When I stroll by myself I can feel relatively unnoticed, particularly if I wear black and avoid eye contact. Going out with one of my blonde housemates, however, is an entirely different story. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out as we all get more comfortable here in general - right now i suspect our map-clutching and strictly English-speaking ways mark us as tourists rather than expats. We'll see, we'll see.

I guess that's all for now, I'd rather be off to see the day.

yes!

yes!, originally uploaded by ecpalmer.

Blog testing, 123, abc, etc etc.....

After countless dropped calls and document fumblings, I have a visa at last! I was so happy to finally get it yesterday I could have kissed the sour-looking old official who handed it over, without ceremony, from a locked drawer in a windowless office on Boylston Street. Considering how much energy I invested in acquiring the damn thing, I am considering superglueing it to my torso in case of emergency. For now, I think I'll settle on going to get some airplane provisions (read - crosswords and gum).

I shall report again, with less pedestrian musings, when I am in Hellas.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.