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.