Wheels on the Bus Go Round

Just to set the record straight....



I did indeed cut off my hair. I didn't realize what a nuisance it had become until it was gone! I'm very pleased to be without it. Anyways, over the weekend CYA hit the road, going to Corinth, Nafplion, Mycenae, Tiryns, Francthi, and Epidauros in the space of three packed days. The trip was challenged by overcast and chill weather, and by the frenetic pace with which we charged through the various ruins, but overall it was great. I wish I'd taken pics at Mycenae, which was amazing, but i forgot my camera that day - i'll try to talk about the shots I have.



Epidauros was an important healing sanctuary in the ancient world, dedicated to the cult of Asclepius. People would make pilgrimages to the site and make sacrifices or leave votives, hoping to cure various ailments. Often the votives were in the shape of what was bothering them - there are a lot of disembodied eyes, ears, and torsos, which is rather funny.



Epidauros in also the home of the best preserved ancient theater - there's still a festival there every summer where they do the tragedies in mondern greek. The acoustics are really pretty stunning - you can hear the person standing on that circle in the center from pretty much anywhere in the theater.



Surprise, surprise, my favorite site was the woodsy one, Franchti Cave. It has been inhabited for something like thirty thousand years, and therefore is really famous and important among archaeologists - I found it just fun to poke around in.



We were lead here, and elsewhere, by my history professor Steve Diamant. This is, while hilarious, a very unfair photo of him - he is in fact well spoken, nattily attired, and a veritable fountain of knowledge on the Ancient Greeks. It turns out that he worked on the excavations at Francthi during the early 70s, when the site was first discovered, and thus gave us an amazing lecture.



He then led us up over part of the cave that had collapsed, and we followed like so many mountain goats. A good time was had.



The time is going by at an entirely bewildering pace. This weekend I am headed to Crete with some of my darling flatmates, and after that it's basically a rush towards spring break. It's hard to navigate being a student, a resident of a foreign city, and a traveller all at once, and it often feels like I can't keep it all going at once. Nonetheless, it's wonderful. I guess I shall go prepare for class tomorrow morning - we're meeting at the agora, and there is reading to be done. kalispera.

Over the River and Through the Woods

Hello everyone-

It's a busy Wednesday, I just got back from an Environmental Studies field trip to the National Gardens. We saw an escaped african grey parrot, european robins, magpies, the requisite stray dogs, and some hilariously enthusiastic speed walkers wearing hilariously tiny shorts. My flatmate Mitzi's parents are in town and they're making us dinner in a while, I'm very much looking forward to fresh Mexican food. While feta cheese is perhaps one of the greater culinary inventions of the western world, I'm about ready for a change of pace.

This past Monday was Clean Monday, a national holiday in Greece. People abstain from eating meat, fly kites, and eat this special bread with sesame seeds that's made only once a year. I went on a hike with a Greek outing club on the island of Salamis, which is very close to Athens. The Athenians on the trip were rather absurdly well equipped for a day hike - most walked with serious trekking poles, wearing sturdy boots and frame packs. But they were incredibly welcoming and shared a lot of bread with us.



Near a monastery before the serious hiking began I met a man and his horse down by the water, and he offered to let me hop on for minute or two, which was lovely.



We then took the bus to the head of the trail, and hiked up over the mountains to the beach on the other side.



There the terrain opened up somewhat, and there were lots of great flowers in the fields that I should've taken pictures of, especially the poppies.



We sort of hopped over ridges along the shore until we reached the bus, tired and hungry. Along the way I saw a lot of kites, and a lot of men hitting octopi (is that the plural of octopus?;) against the rocks by the water. They tied them to ropes and then swung the ropes, from behind their shoulders and down to the ground - the tentacles flailed wildly as they flew through the air. Octopus is a very popular Greek food, particularly during Lent, but it is rather tough and chewy in it's natural state, and the beating tenderizes it. All in all, a good long day was had.

This weekend we're going on a schoolwide trip to the Argolid, which includes Nafplio, Mycenae, and Franchti, among other places. I'm thrilled to be travelling with my archaeology professor, and to be able to learn on site...reports to come.

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.