Patience...

Okay, here's the deal. Life's been busy and I haven't blogged, obviously. But I'm going to begin to fill in the gaps as I am here in the airport in Athens ready to fly home and on the plane!

All Over Athens and Beyond!

After a long week of classes and the Delphi trip and the Marathon, Monday was a bit long, but a pretty good day! We found out that cooking classes had been indefinitely cancelled due to some personal stuff going on with our instructor, which is sad!

Tuesday began with an on-site visit to the South Slope of the Acropolis and the Theater of Dionysus there. That was a pretty interesting class and I had no idea so much stuff was down there! It was interesting to see more of what was found along the edges of the Acropolis, especially since everyone’s attention upon visiting Athens is the Acropolis! Before entering the site, we first visited the Lysikrates Monument, where I also happened to step in dog poop for the first time here! Ugh! Anyway, the Lysikrates Monument is a choragic monument that was set up by the choregos. The choregos was the sort of director of an ancient theater production and the one that won the competition in during the Festival of Dionysus got to set up a monument. The Lysikrates Monument is the best preserved one we can see today. It is well preserved today because for a time, it was incorporated into a nunnery. After checking that out for a few minutes, and cleaning my shoe, we went to the site. We saw the Odeon of Pericles, which is said to be shaped like the tent of Xerxes with a pyramidal roof. We saw the remains of the Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleftherios, or Dionysus Freedom-giver. Next, we came to the Theater of Dionysus, where the plays were performed during the Festival. We also saw the Stoa of Eumenes and Sanctuary of Asclepius in Athens. We also talked about and saw the Odeon of Herodeus Atticus before we left the area. I felt like we saw so much in a mere hour and a half!

I rushed from the site to the metro station to get to Syntagma for my tour of Parliament. This was pretty cool too! We got to go inside of the Parliament building that I have taken so many photos of! We got to be in and have a talk about the history of the heart of the Greek government as it is today. It was crazy to hear about the modern government of Greece, seeing as though I have learned over and over about the ancient history! After that, I went back to school to get ready for my Modern Greek test. We had our test early and then as a class went out to a café to practice our Greek and relax some! That was great to get away from school and visit with people I don’t get to hang out with much.

Wednesday was busy too! I had classes all day and after my last one I ran to Syntagma to meet some friends from the dig last year. We were going to visit another digger who had a baby! So we hopped on a bus for a while and ended up in some random place and walked to her house! It was so fun to see her and spend time with non-students! Her baby was so precious and her husband was very sweet! It was a really nice visit and a nice change of pace!

Thursday we met for class to walk up Philopappos Hill at 8 am. Sooo early! But it was a nice morning and the hike was okay! We talked about the monument on top of the hill, which is actually for a guy that wasn’t that important but was really rich! Our teacher also made us brownies (the best I’ve had in so long) to reward us for being awake and on such a crazy hill that early in the morning! After that, we walked down to the Pnyx, which is where the Assembly of Athens met! It was pretty cool to be on the area where the real source of government in ancient Athens was based. The area is actually kind of confusing as far as dating and getting all of the phases straight, but it is very interesting! That evening my roommate and I hung out with some of the girls upstairs in our apartment (fellow students).

Friday was lazy and great! I slept in and laid around until noon almost! It was incredible! I met up with some friends for lunch and ended up going to Athens’ First Cemetery with my friend Melissa. It was beautiful as far as the sculpture and adornment of the graves. The weather was also beautiful, and something about knowing I had no actual obligations to fulfill made it all the more lovely! Walking around the cemetery was great, giving me and my friend time to catch up and chat. The rest of the day was good relaxing and talking to friends from home online! I turned in early for the night because I had an early meeting with some people to go Olive Picking!!!

Saturday was AMAZING! It was one of the best days I had in Greece for sure. I went olive picking with four other girls from school at the grove (is that what you call a field of olives?!) of a family! It was so fun. We hopped on a bus with random people at 8 am and were hoping for the best! Their land was about an hour and a half away, close to the island Euboea! We arrived and they instantly made us coffee and gave us treats and breakfast and wine! They were so sweet and generous! The grandmother was so fun and sweet, always working and always joking around! We also met one of the younger girls in the family and she had a really cute two month old puppy that we absolutely loved, Sonia! After sitting around and enjoying yummy homemade wine and treats, we checked out the yard, saw chickens, and headed down the way to the olives! We got there and met a bunch of people and got to work. They laid out some nets to catch the olives and put little rakes in our hands and set us to work! It was so fun!!!! I’m sure it would get grueling after a while, but we had so much fun! We would work for a while, and then everyone would take a break and drink or eat treats. We ate some tiganites, which were fried yummies. After that, we went back to work and took a water break shortly after. After that, we worked a little while longer and stopped for lunch! Working was really fun though. It was also cool to experience a bit of Greek culture that you usually don’t see. We actually helped pick olives! It’s so cool! We stopped at a huge maple tree and ate tangerines for a while before lunch. Finally moseying back to the house we had the biggest lunch I’ve had in Greece!!! The table was set with all kinds of meat and potatoes and olives and cheese and bread and tzatziki and wine! Everyone sat around eating and laughing and relaxing after working a while. It was so relaxing. Even though I could barely understand what was being said (sometimes), I was laughing and having a great time. I love the idea of just relaxing at meals and enjoying company with family and friends. I hate how meals are always so rushed at home and something to get done, not an event in themselves, except for big holidays! Anyway, after a long and fun lunch and many hugs of goodbye, we hopped back in our bus and went to the place where they make the olive oil! I love olive oil, so I was pretty psyched! We drove up and it instantly smelled so olive-y! We looked at how the olives enter and are cleaned and smashed and are miraculously transformed into olive oil! Stepping in the building we were overwhelmed with the smell of olives! There was so much intense machinery in there! As we were looking around, our friend began filling up big bottles full of the oil for each of us! It was so sweet! He said that it was very good quality and extra virgin olive oil! Mmmmmm! I can’t wait to try it! After that, there were more hugs and goodbyes and we hopped on the bus to go back to Athens. It was an amazing day and so great to be with a family and experience a nice Greek day!

Sunday, I joined another class’ little field trip on a Wall Walk around Athens. We walked all over the city for three hours!!! It was pretty cool. We began in Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery of Athens, and made a circuit around the city of where the ancient walls would have been. We saw parts of the wall in random areas, like under parking garages and in hotels! It was pretty cool to hear about the evolution of the walls and even to hear about how the modern city came about in ways corresponding to where the walls were. It was a lot of walking, but it was a great time. The worst thing was that me and one other girl from the group had just been to two of the sites on Thursday for class and were dreading climbing Philopappos Hill again! We survived! After the wall walk, Chanel and I wandered around Syntagma area and did some window shopping and headed back to school to do homework!

Crazy Weekend!!!

Well, as you know, Mom left on Wednesday, and we had classes even on Friday this week to make them up, so that was a long week already! Saturday morning we started off with a 7:30 am bus ride to Delphi! Everyone had been saying that it was going to be a horrible time since the weather was supposed to be bad and a lot of the site was closed! To our surprise, it was a gorgeous day and the whole site was open! I had been there last summer, but did not know as much about the site, nor did I have a guide! It was really cool to hear more about the site and to see where the famous Oracle of Delphi would have sat and all of that fun stuff! The museum was also very cool, although we only had about 25 minutes to check it out. The day was great and I even got a lot of work done on the bus ride there and back!!

As if that was not enough to wear me out, we met up early in the morning Sunday to volunteer at the Marathon! It was such a crazy day! We were told to meet up at the stadium at 7 am and to find the bus for volunteers. We were stationed at 22.5 kilometers, just about the halfway mark of the Marathon. Did I mention that this is the real Marathon?! It goes from Marathon to Athens! I figured since I can't run it I could volunteer to help out for it! That morning, we, after looking and asking many people, found out which bus we were supposed to hop on and began our crazy day! We got to our post and we didn't see the bag with our id's and t-shirts! We began asking around and were told that we would not be able to help without id's. I called the man that set up our volunteering but I couldn't get ahold of him. So we were very confused, bummed, and began walking to the closest bus stop hoping that a bus would grab us before the roads all closed for the Marathon! Just at the moment of despair, he called me back and told me that he wanted to talk to the guy at our post. They talked and we looked more for our shirts. Then, someone came out of a car asking if a bag with shirts was ours!!! They were kind of the wrong sizes, but we did not even care at that point!!! Finally, we became official and our slightly angry station manager became our buddy! He was just trying to keep the place safe and follow rules. We were the Green Team and were in charge of recycling the plastic bottles! So fun! It was raining, we were chasing bottles, dodging runners, and watching for our friends from school running. Five students we knew ran the marathon and I saw four of them! I excitedly yelled encouragement for them, knowing that at the halfway point they were probably starting to feel the burn! It was a great experience and really cool to be involved in. People from all over the world were running. It was incredible to see these people running 26 miles, or 42 kilometers! My knee was killing me and my arms were tired from grabbing bottles for hours! I felt like I was sore enough to have run the marathon! Pathetic! But of course, after a long day's work, we missed the bus back since we were on the street picking up bottles!!! So, we ended up riding in one of the sponsor cars up to the bus with all of the runners that could not finish the marathon. That ride took forever, but was okay and took us home! It was quite an experience and our friend from the station wants to drive us to Marathon and show us around the site! It was so encouraging to see so many people doing such an intense event, especially some of the older people running! I didn't get to see anyone cross the finishline, but from hearing the reports of others, it sounds like it was a really uplifting and great time watching people enjoy the sense of accomplishment of having run the real Marathon! Crazy!! I slept well that night!

It was quite a long and great weekend! :)

Mip and Bip's Grand Adventures, Part 2: Athens!

Friday, we got back from the ferry super early in the morning and came back and slept!!! It was great to get some quality rest after the ferry! Mom and I figured that since the weather was iffy and we were still feeling a bit tired from our trip, we would go to the National Archaeological Museum here in Athens for the afternoon. So, I took her around my neighborhood a bit and showed her the fruit market. I love the markets, they are so fun! We got some yummy fruit to last our day! Thus, we began our adventure. Of course we took the trolley that passes the Museum the wrong direction and ended up on that thing for well over an hour! I felt so bad that Mom just had to sit on a bus! I am a pretty bad tour guide apparently! I've only been there with my class this year and I forgot how to get there! Anyway, so we FINALLY end up there and we relax across the street and have some lunch and juice. We then marched across the street to conquer the huge museum! I was trying to tell Mom that it was huge, but she didn't quite understand HOW big this place was!!! We were there for hours looking and standing and griping about our knees hurting, like two old geezers! But even though I've been there a few times, it was still beautiful and so big! They had a special exhibit on Magic in the Ancient World, as well as a larger temporary exhibit on Women in Ancient Greece. You can check out my photos but it was a great day to check out a museum. I had fun with Mom and showing her around. I tried to give some history and context to some of the pieces I was familiar with, and pointed out the super famous ones she should definitely take photos of! :) I also loved the Santorini Exhibit!!! I got to see my Spring Fresco that I love! Mom also took a sneaky photo of me smiling in front of it! Crazy, but I love it tons! After exhausting ourselves looking around there, we hopped back on the trolley and you guessed it, went the wrong way! So, once again we sat on a trolley and got to see much of the city for over an hour. Of course we were just in time for the supermarket to close by one minute, and sadly we walked back to my apartment and made dinner.

Saturday we set off on a big walking tour of Monastiraki and the city! We walked down the road a little way went to a few sites. I didn’t want to go to too many places Saturday because all of the sites are free to get into on Sundays during the off-season! So we checked out the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which is just so huge and cool, even though much of it is no longer standing. We kept walking down and saw Hadrian’s Arch, which Mom had heard about before and wanted to see when she got here! It is pretty beautiful as well. We then went to the Acropolis Museum and I showed Mom around a bit since I had been there a bunch of times for class. We also enjoyed lunch and hot chocolate in the café of the museum, which is sweet and pretty well priced. It was a nice break before going to the final upstairs exhibit of the Parthenon collection. We watched the little video and all telling about it! After finishing up at the museum, we kept walking, in the misty rain, around Plaka and down random streets. We ran into the Lysikrates Monument, which I explain later in my blog, and enjoy wandering the cute back streets of Plaka. We popped in a few shops to escape rain and to look around, and saw tons of hilarious and ridiculous graffiti. After more wandering, I took us down a street that I recognized, Hadrian Street. This is the street that the Agora is on! We checked out Hadrian’s Library and the Roman Agora and did some window shopping along the crazy and fun streets of Monastiraki! It was a day full of seeing beautiful things and wandering with Mom! I enjoyed it for sure.

Sunday, was the big day. We began our day by sleeping in a little, then heading out, praying for good weather, to the changing of the guards ceremony at Parliament. I hadn't seen it since last year, and it's pretty cool to experience. I had the most obnoxious tourists on the planet standing behind me, but I resisted urges to hit them and carried on with my spectating. From Syntagma, we walked down Ermou and checked out the new Christmas store that had come into the street! I'm getting so excited for Christmas! Anyway, after that, we visited the Poet Sandalmaker and I let Mom check out the shop. I may end up buying some, but I wanted Mip to see the place and check out all the cool stuff they do there! I then took her down past Monastiraki to the Agora! Before we went in the Agora, we had gyros and I showed her a fun shop I like that we bought scarves at! Then off to the Agora! It was so cool to be able to show her where I worked last summer. I never thought I would have the chance to do that!!! I showed her all of our dig sites and gave her a quick tour of the site. I also brought her in the museum, which is small but good and we ran into a student and his Mom! We chatted with them for a few minutes and got along our way in our Sunday Adventure. We took the back way out of the Agora to sneak up to the Acropolis and ta da, we saw the way to get onto the Areopagus! I knew Mom wanted to go but I was not quite sure how to get up there! She almost killed me for taking her up the crazy steps carved into the rock and not the tourist stairs put in! It was so cool to be up there with Mom and we read the passage in Acts where Paul addressed the Areopagus! It was just great to be experiencing all of these things with my Mom. I also love the view of the city and Agora from the Areopagus. All was well until Mom looked over at the Acropolis and said, "Let's go! We've got to get up there!" She was excited; it was so cute. I'm kind of over it seeing as though I've been a ton of times and have foolishly begun to take these things for granted. So we enjoyed wandering the Areopagus a few more minutes and descended to make our way to the Acropolis! We hiked on up and accompanied by cute dogs, checked out the Acropolis. We went at a great time and I even got to snap some photos of the Parthenon with NO tourists!!! Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable! We had a fun time checking out the buildings on the Acropolis and snacking on pita chips. I also showed her from the awesome view of the Acropolis where all the stuff we had visited and where my apartment was! She was amazed we had walked so far that day and seen so much already! She was not excited about getting back home though! Alas, we made our way back through Monastiraki and to a shop I wanted to bring her to to pick up some little gifts for people at home. We stopped for another gyro and some gelato for the walk back! Mmmm. We took the trolley back to my apartment from Syntagma. Long, good day.

Monday, I had class and tons of homework to do, so I went to school pretty early in the morning to get the work that I had long neglected finished up! I had class all day pretty much until after 5, so I showed Mom where some of my favorite museums are, the Byzantine and Christian Art Museum and the Benaki, and set her loose in the city! I don't quite rememember everything she did, but I do know that she visited the Cycladic Art Museum, which I still have not been to, and she got to see tons of the little Cycladic guys she loves. She then moved to the Byzantine Museum and it was closed... I can't believe I forgot. Then she blew off the Benaki to head back to meet me at my apartment. We went out to dinner with a few of my friends that evening at another taverna in our neighborhood! :)

Tuesday, I had class early at the Agora, or so I thought. My roommate and I were walking down, only to meet people who thought class was on the Acropolis. We were all very confused due to many schedule changes recently and the issue was finally resolved by a mass text from our professor! Acropolis it was! I felt bad having to ditch Mom again for class, but she spent the morning journaling and sleeping, and I met back up with her for a while before my last class of the day. Before I went to class, I walked Mom to the Byzantine and Christian Art Museum and headed back to class. After class, I met up with her at the museum and we walked over to the Benaki to check it out together. Of course, the Benaki was closed on Tuesdays! So, we abandoned that and decided to go to a café or something, especially since it had started raining. We weren’t quite ready to just go back to my apartment for the night, so we went to Syntagma to have coffee. It started POURING for the longest time! It was ridiculous! We sat drinking our coffee in astonishment, people-watching for a while and talking. It was great to just lay low and relax a while chatting. We stayed there for a long time and had a nice walk back after the rain had slowed down. We concluded the evening with a nice Mommy breakfast for dinner with bacon and fried eggs. I think we had it Tuesday, I don't even remember! Ahhhh how I forget things so easily.

Wednesday, Mom left at 11 in the morning, so we got up early and walked to Syntagma to catch the bus to the airport. We ended up missing the bus we wanted and caught the next one 15 minutes later. Yep, we watched the bus pull away without us… Anyway, we got to the airport and found the right area for Mom to check her bags and such. I waited just a while until I realized that I was totally going to be late for my class! So I hugged Mom tons of times and sadly left her in a hurry, calling my professor to let him know I’d be there late. I ended up again missing the bus by a minute or so and had to wait for the next one. It wasn’t a big deal that I was late and class was alright, except I was sooo tired already at noon by the time class ended from carrying luggage and practically running back!

Thursday and Friday were pretty typical, except that we had class on Friday! Lame! Thursday our class met in the Acropolis Museum to look at the Parthenon collection, or recreations of it, and discuss the Elgin Marbles, the frieze, etc. Friday, our class met on the Acropolis Friday for our last visit there. We spoke mostly about the Parthenon and the Acropolis during the Classical Period. It was weird no longer having Mip around to hang out with! I relaxed a lot and tried to rest up for the long weekend ahead!

Mip and Bip's Grand Adventures! Part 1: Islands...

Break was oh so lovely and interesting for sure!!! It was so long, and so short. On Sunday morning, soon after our return from the Peloponnese, Mom arrived! At 8 in the morning! We hopped on a bus to head from the airport to Syntagma, and then were going to walk the way to my apartment... a lovely plan until it started raining! We ended up hailing a taxi to get us the rest of the way to my apartment, which was nice, and a really sweet taxi driver gave us a great price. I guess we’re cute! Anyway, after being tired from a week on the go for me and a 10 hour flight for Mom, we were exhausted and took naps before going out to brunch at a neighborhood taverna that I like. We had fun people-watching and enjoying a yummy meal! We took it easy most of the day and visited my academic center and such. It was nice to catch up with Mom and relax before our island adventures!!!

So we got to Pireaus and found our ferry. We found where we needed to go to find our ferry with no big problems, except Jess, a friend who was coming with Mom and me to the islands, had forgotten her suitcase in the fast food place we went to. Throwing her purse and computer onto Mom and me, she started running back to the place to grab her bag! Thankfully a worker had pulled it behind the counter for her! So she met us back again and we went onto our ferry without a hitch. We got nice little seats in the front of our section in the corner. It looked like airplane seats, but with more room. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing on earth, but at least we had seats and such! After a night of pretty bad sleep and a sore neck, we arrived at Santorini at 6 am. The excitement was flowing until on our bus taking us from the port to our hotel Jess realized her wallet was gone… Our lovely island getaway was quickly becoming a stressful experience. Did I mention that it was raining too?! So Jess was very upset, understandably, unsure whether or not it was stolen on the ferry while she slept or if she had misplaced it. She called her mother and we decided to call the ferry and the food place when we got to the internet and could look up numbers. So tension was high after an evening of poor sleep, gross weather, and a missing wallet.

We get to our hotel and the guy tells us that we’ve got to get back on the bus because they don’t have room for us! He took us to another one of the hotels that the same family owns, which was actually more expensive but we didn’t have to pay more (since they messed it up). So it was kind of cool that we got to go to another hotel since it was nicer, but it was a little stressful considering the circumstances, and considering the woman at reception was mad about being woken up so early. We got out of the bus and this crazy precious little jumpy dog was crazily hopping all over me and nibbling my arm and going nuts! He was so excited and was getting his lil teeth caught on my sweater and everything! Not quite what I wanted at the moment, but he was cute! So, we get into a room and it is on the ground floor with absolutely no view! I was told we would have a view! So just as we were about to go ask her for a different room (we’re in Santorini on the edge of the cliff!! We had to have a view!) she walks in and tells us to get out and that she is moving us! We were a bit confused but happy, and we ended up in a nice little room with a good view of the caldera! We had the internet, and it was CRAZY early in the morning, so we started looking up information for Jess to get her wallet back and such. To no avail and many useless phone calls later, the situation did not get better (it never ended up found) and I was getting a bit nervous on how good this trip was going to turn out. I went to talk to our hotel manager to make sure our reservation was set for two evenings (she was confused) and ended up talking to a British woman about the weather and the island. She was intense and very adamant that we were going to have a bad time and that the weather would only get worse and worse. She was going to take the next ferry from the island to another ‘better’ island. It was intense. I was legit praying for the weather to get better for this trip but it was not looking very hopeful…

We relaxed a bit, took little naps, and got ourselves ready for the exploring of the island! We decided to just go out and check our area out instead of waiting for the weather to improve! We ran into a fun shop to get out of the rain and because it looked cute and we loved it. The guy was so sweet and had a PRECIOUS dog!!! I miss Cleo, my pup! But yeah, he was so very nice and had cute stuff in his shop. After getting the courage to venture in the rain again, we walked to the main town, Fira (we were staying right outside of town in Firostefani). We pretty much just wanted food. We ate at the first place we found! It was a gyro place with inside seating and coffees. That gyro was incredible! We ended up relaxing there a while and watching Michael Jackson videos on TV. The guy was nice that ran the restaurant and we chatted with him a while again. I ended up wandering back up the path we had just come down to find a travel agency we had passed to get some more information on what was even open or available to do on the island. I ended up getting a sweet little book and map about the island. Score! After walking back in a little less rain, I met up with Mom and Jess and watched a couple of Michael Jackson videos before we all headed back out into the elements!

By the time we were walking and out again, the weather had cleared up some and it was not raining anymore! It was incredible! We decided to walk down the steps/path to the Old Port and then ride the donkeys back up the path. Good plan, eh? NOPE! We didn’t get to ride any donkeys. Although there was fresh poop everywhere, the people we talked to said that there were no donkeys and we could not ride. It was the saddest moment. The path was beautiful and the views were spectacular, but I did not get to ride a donkey in Santorini. So we took the funicular back up to the town, which was cool, but quick! It took forever to get down those stairs and like a minute to fly up it! We then wandered the town and enjoyed the afternoon. I saw and was intrigued by this place I kept seeing signs for, the Nomikos Center which held reproductions of almost all of the Thera frescoes. We ended up wandering the town a bit more and passing a beautiful Catholic Church of John and a nunnery. We visited many charming little stores. And I found the Nomikos Center! I was so determined! I love the frescoes from Santorini and wanted to be able to see them, even though these were all fake! So I kept trudging up the hill to get to this place and it almost felt like a wild goose chase until we got there! I was the only one to go in because it cost money and Mom and Jess weren’t too into it. I wandered it for about 15 or 20 minutes and took tons of photos. It was cool because all of the frescoes found are not on display, so it was cool to see all of them as reproductions at least. My absolute favorite was there, the Spring Fresco. I took tons of photos and enjoyed that little center and then met back up with Jess. After searching a moment for Mom, who had wandered off to take more photos, we headed to the bus to head to Oia for sunset. The view from the Nomikos Center of Fira and the cliff area was incredible though!

We got on the bus at 5:20 and to our dismay, sunset was at like 5:30! So we missed the beginning of sunset but we caught quite a beautiful section of it! It is incredible how such a horrible day turned so beautiful! We checked out the sweet area and asked a shop owner for a good restaurant that was less touristy and cheaper! He sent us off into random alleyways and we ended up finding this cute little place! We ended up eating lots, drinking wine, and having a lovely time. It was great to just relax and be away from people and just enjoy a meal. We wandered back to our bus and went back to our town. Everything was good until we realized we were lost. We could not really find our hotel in the nighttime, especially after arriving in the early, early morning! We asked a few people (I had an entire conversation in Greek!!!) and ended up finding it after an hour, only to realize that we were originally only 5 minutes from our hotel when we got off the bus! All part of the experience I guess!

We woke up and I, after journaling, went downstairs with Mom to get coffee. We got ourselves together and had breakfast at our hotel, yummy, and started making a game plan for the day. The weather was gorgeous! How incredible!!! Everyone was so negative! We went to the bus station in Fira and checked out the schedules and made a nice little plan for the day. A plan, funny. We ended up on a bus going to Akrotiri. We were going to check out some of Ancient Thira and the Red Beach! We got off the bus, and unfortunately we were unclear about the bus schedule. But we met a few guys from Albania that were there working, so we followed them to the path to the beach. We ended up loving the Red Beach and spent the whole afternoon there! The weather was incredible and I jumped in the water with my clothes on! We swam in the beautiful water, with only like 5 other people on the beach, and loved every second of it! We played a crazy paddle ball game with our Albanian friends and just relaxed. It was so nice to have a break from running around and exploring. I don’t know, sometimes it seems like my focus gets so intent on seeing as many things as possible as fast as possible and I don’t take time to appreciate the moment. I felt so happy and free just swimming with my clothes on. I loved it! It was pretty incredible to just take it all in. We ended up leaving for the bus that was leaving wayyyy later than we meant to, and waited forever. We actually missed the sunset sitting at the bus stop (depressing) but enjoyed hanging out with our new friends and seeing the town on the bus. On the way back to our hotel, we jumped into our gyro place with the guy we had met the day before to drink some coffee. We were soooo fading after a long day! We ended up going back to our hotel and showering and getting ready to go out to dinner. We met up with the Albanians for dinner and enjoyed the company of new people and good food! Good Santorini wine and tiramisu, does life get better?! We slept good that night after a long day!

Day three of our break has us wake up too early and hop in a van to come to the port to go to Milos from our hotel! The ferry was long, but nice regardless! We made many stops and got to see many islands from the boat! When we got to Milos, it was a bit hectic, but oh how that changed!!! We first were met by an old woman telling us that the tourist office was closed because it is a holiday. The 28th is called Oxi Day, which translates as No Day, when the Greeks said no to the Italians (look it up on google!). Anyway, we talked to that old woman for a while about a room. We decided to go look at the rooms, which were okay, but ridiculous. First, we walked up a long hill to get to her hotel even after she said it was only ‘2 minutes’ away. Ugh. Then, the rooms were very simple and we could not even find a triple room. I was practicing tons of my Greek bartering with this old woman, and translating to Jess (who was understanding most of it) and Mom (who was understanding none). So she was asking too much for these kind of bad rooms, and the bathroom was outside! It was too expensive for what it was. So, we tried to say no and this little woman was soooo persistent! We tried to walk away and she chased us, so we talked more. Then, we were walking down the road, because we wanted to eat and look around some, and she ran after us down the hill to tell us not to go to another nearby hotel! She was crazy!!! So we escaped the old woman and a bit frazzled, we wandered to the port area again in order to find a hotel and map.

We ran into a French couple and ended up getting a great recommendation for our hotel! It is amazing here! It is a good price and mostly, amazing people!!! The Greeks here are being sweet and welcoming, unlike many encounters with Athenians (not all, but often). Anyway, so we checked out the room and decided to stay, then ran off to eat our first meal of the day. Pastitio and fried potatoes and lots of bread. Yum. The restaurant owner brought us some Raki, a traditional Cretan alcohol which tastes like paint thinner and burns like crazy, but I only took a tiny tiny sip to be polite, ew! He was from Crete, so he offered it to us. It is homemade, so it usually comes in a plastic water bottle with the label ripped off! Sketchy! Anyway, after dinner, we wandered some, seeing the town come a little more alive, and got back to the hotel to grab out computers and head back out. We went to an internet café, had frappes, and relaxed awhile before wandering the street along the port. By the way, our hotel overlooks the water! But we looked in some shops and met some nice people, once again, before heading back to our hotel to develop our next game plan.

We ended up chatting with our hotel manager for a while before going to our room and Jess and I came back downstairs to chat with her. Her husband, the owner of the hotel and other nearby shops, brought us ouzo and lemonade. It was so sweet, although ouzo is also a strong alcohol that tastes like licorice. So we sat with them for a little while, sipping ouzo, watching television, and speaking pathetic Greek! After a while, Mom came down to chat as well and the French couple also came! The seven of us ended up talking for an hour or two about life and politics and Greece! It was an amazing experience, really. I sort of interpreted Greek for Mom and Jess some, and the French woman who spoke some English was able to help us with the rest! It was great to feel confident in my abilities to understand Greek and speak it. Thankfully, they are all very patient to listen and help me speak. After that, Mom, Jess, and I hopped in the owner and his wife’s car and drove the town! He said, “Pame!” or Let’s go! and we went! We saw an amazing fortification area where the Greeks fought the Turks. I am not sure when, since my translation was lacking there, but it was beautiful. He also brought us to a shop he owns, very cute, and we checked out his items there. I loved many of the old engravings of photos and things from the late 1800s. So fun! After our little drive and tour of the island, we headed back to our hotels to relax. What an amazing day! We had so much fun and truly enjoyed the relational aspect of it all. It’s not about seeing enough things and taking the best photos, travelling should also be about meeting people and interacting. We were sipping ouzo and talking to French and Bulgarian people (hotel owner/manager) in Greek! Learning from each other and sharing experiences. That’s more what it is all about. I just love this trip! Meeting so many new people and learning so many new things!

We woke up after a nice night’s sleep and Jess and I went to coffee. Mom was so precious sleeping we couldn’t wake her, especially after she was probably the most tired of the three of us since the plane! So we went and mooched more internet and had some cute Greek coffee and brought Mom back some. We all went out to breakfast and got crepes. I got yoghurt and honey also, which was super yummy!! After our breakfast, we went to Tripiti in search of catacombs and an ancient Roman theater we had heard about. We were determined to find these things! We were on the craziest bus I have been on since being in Greece! There were a bunch of old people and yelling and craziness. We asked an old woman (in Greek) where the catacombs were and she said they were closed. We were devastated, but determined, like I said earlier! So we just hopped off at the sign that pointed to the catacombs. The old woman invited us to leave our things at her house so we didn’t have to carry them, but we insisted on keeping them and continuing our journey. The weather was beautiful and we were up for an adventure. So, we started walking in the middle of nowhere. I saw an old man and ended up asking him for directions in Greek, and he starts to answer, then asks me where I’m from. I tell him I’m from America and he starts speaking English to me and starts walking us down the street.
We start down the street with this old man and he tells us that they are right down the street we were on and shows us the sign and says that they are close and that Venus de Milos was found there under a tree and all of these random things. He said that he was so glad he met us, which was precious, and then we wanted to take a picture with us and he just wanted to take one with Mom!! He kept saying she was beautiful and touching her face!!! Hilarious! Anyway, we took photos and moved on our way. We find the road to the catacombs and excitedly as we approached the ticket area we learned that it was free and open! Victory! It was an absolutely beautiful area overlooking the water! So incredible. We had a tour around it by the security girl where she gave us a pamphlet and told us a few interesting things. It was pretty cool. Afterwards, we started walking back and I saw a random path that looked like it lead to the same area as the road to the theater, so I decided to explore while Mom and Jess held back. I kept walking about 5 minutes or so and found the theater! I felt so adventurous! I yelled across this hillside to tell them to follow, and soon we were united at the theater! It was cool, but tiny! We went on our way from there to the street again and began our walk to find where Venus was found! We succeeded in that too! There was a sign leading to an area with the plaque under the random tree where she was found. How incredible!

After that, we walked and walked and decided to call a taxi to get to our next destination since the busses were very infrequent in the off-season. We had heard about a pretty area called Pollonia and decided to go there. It took a bit to get there and our taxi driver was nice. He pulled over at one place to show us and it was beautiful! I wish we would have swam there since it was so beautiful, but the weather was getting a bit windy and cold… Anyway, we took photos and kept driving and he stopped another place that was sweet! He said that people swam there too but not recently because of the weather and wind! We snuck into an area that was roped off to get a better view and it was so cool to see! I was so glad he showed us them! Check out my photos to get an idea of what I’m talking about!

We got to Pollonia, which was sort of boring and strange. We couldn’t swim and it was pretty windy. It was so quiet and kind of a weird part of the day. It was so weird to be in the quiet and simple area. I had not been used to such a peaceful place, especially after 2 months of living in Athens! We ended up finding a beautiful church called the Church of Agia Paraskevi (I think) and wandering around in it. It was so beautiful and highly ornamented. We relaxed in the church for a while just taking in the beauty and serenity of the place. The Greek Orthodox tradition is so different from what I am used to! It is so interesting to experience even looking around the building.

After that, we taxied over to Plaka, where we heard we must see a sunset! We hopped off the taxi into another still town and saw a sign leading to Kastro, or a castle. Of course Jess and I were all for it, dragging Mom up the many stairs and chasing the sunset! The walk up was gorgeous and we watched a sunset on top of a castle! Only a few couples and us were there. It was beautiful for sure. After taking in the beauty and joy of that moment, which was so nice to share with Mom, we went back to our town by the port to get ready for our ferry back to Athens. We relaxed at our café for the evening until 10:40! Mom brought our hotel owner over to say goodbye to us and we chatted a bit! He was so sweet! We met some great people on this trip! We got to visit with our friends who owned the café and met more Albanians! One seemed sweet on me since he kept winking at me and blew me kisses when he left! Awkward!!! Anyway, we had thoroughly enjoyed our very long day and walked to our ferry. As we went to say farewell to our sweet hotel owner, my eye was caught by something on the stairwell to my right. You guessed it! The sketch old woman was there to take in her next victim!!! She was still as a deer in the headlights on that stairwell as I looked at her in disbelief! Scariest moment!!! After each of us saw her, we got onto our ferry and surprisingly slept relatively well that night.

We got to Athens at 6 am and hopped onto the metro back to our area and took naps! Mission Island Adventure… Accomplished. That’s how I’ll leave the story for now, but I’ve got plenty to update you on! Sorry it has taken so long!

Ah, lovely countryside...

Here I am, on another mode of transportation writing my blog! I’m on a ferry this time! Visiting with Mom and a friend Jess this week! I am so excited! (We are officially on Fall Break with school and we have classes again next Monday.) You’ll hear all about it next week. But, this past week has been FULL of good times. We were gone all week on a school trip to the Peloponnese. For those of you not up on your Greek geography, the Peloponnese is the part of Greece that looks like a hand! Anyway, we spent the week there with school from Tuesday early morning until Saturday evening. It was amazing and now I miss Virginia even more! Seeing all of those trees and the beautiful mountains! I love it!!! It was a great week, full of travelling, so I’ll fill you in on the details!

Let me preface this by saying that I did not even know about, or knew little about a few of the sites we visited this week! So if I mention a place that sounds unfamiliar, maybe Google it and check it out. Everywhere we went was awesome! Tuesday morning, I got on a bus with 40 or so students and we all began our five day long tour of the Peloponnese! Our first little stop was at the Corinth Canal! We all had potty breaks and opportunities to accumulate snacks for our journey ahead!

We got to Mycenae after some driving, which was met by much excitement by dorky archaeological students excited to see the Lions Gate there. It is an incredible site, but since I had been there last summer, it was a bit less cool! Anyway, it was great to be guided around and learn more facts and theories about the site more relevant to my Archaeology course. In addition to the crazy big Mycenaean Palace remains, there are tholos tombs that are great. A tholos tomb is a tomb that was usually used for royal families that looks like a big bee hive/cone structure. The largest tomb, the Treasury of Atreus, is absolutely huge and impressive! After a visit to the little museum there, wandering, and lunch, we hopped back on the road to drive to Olympia. The drive was a few hours, so when we got to Olympia, we checked into our hotel and had free time for the evening. Some friends and I visited the Museum of the History of the Olympic Games (I think is the name) and the Archaeological Excavations at Olympia Museum. I had also been to both of these museums last summer, but it was great to see them again and know a little more background knowledge to the pieces I was seeing, etc. Afterwards, the evening consisted of some jogging around the modern town of Olympia (woohoo) and a light dinner.

Wednesday, we jumped right into the site of Olympia! I had also been there last summer, but still enjoyed my visit and again enjoyed having a guide leading us around highlighting relevant facts. The site is huge and pretty incredible. After organized wandering, as well as a jog in the old stadium, some friends and I wandered the site more and checked out the big Olympia Museum before lunch. After lunch, our class met up to go to the museum. This place is so cool, even if you think archaeology is lame! The craziest big sculptures were found from the Temple of Zeus in Olympia and they truly are beautiful works of art. Also in the museum was the Nike of Paionius and the Hermes and Dionysus statue. I joined up with the other class from our bus’ tour after mine, and after a bit we all got back on the road again! We drove to Pylos, which was kind of cool and kind of lame. The town is unimpressive today, but in my Ancient Greek language course right now, I am reading from an author Thucydides. We are translating his account of the Peloponnesian War and specifically, the battle at Pylos. So, it was great to be there and see the place we were reading about, but there was not much to do in the little town but eat, so a group of us went out to dinner!

Thursday, we went to Methone, a crazy awesome Venetian palace. It was so fun and they just set us free for an hour. I felt like a kid running around a backyard fortress! It is very well preserved and really beautiful! We also visited the Palace of Nestor, which is an incredibly preserved palace structure right outside of Pylos. It has a very well preserved megaron, a sort of sanctuary area. You can even see the flame paintings on the edges! After exploring these areas, we went to Sparta for the evening and checked into our hotel. We had a walk around ancient Sparta and a lecture by one of our professors, which was interesting. The remains of Sparta are few, since the Spartans were not big fans of showy architecture and such like Athens. Also, the modern town was built over the ancient town. Anyway, a friend and I also jogged in Sparta before going out to dinner with a bunch of other students in a nearby town our professor recommended. The food and wine were both great and we had so much fun. Plus, we got free baklavas and chocolate turtles. That was a fun night for sure.

Friday, our group went to Mistras! This was probably my favorite site by far!!! It is a very well preserved Byzantine town with tons of old churches and a monastery and fortifications. It was a very important site in the Byzantine Empire and especially since I have heard about in class, it was great to see it! It was such a beautiful place. We had lunch in Sparta and got back on the road to go to Nauplion! This may have been my favorite town! It was so cute. One of our professors took us on a walk around the town and the old town, which was beautiful and fun! Also, Nauplion is said to have the best gelato in Greece, so we got tons! We got some before and after dinner! Our professor recommended a great little place for dinner! It was so good!!! It was so fun to visit with friends more and chat over a lovely dinner. I wish things were a bit more like that at home. I guess meals seem to be so much more rushed and lame at home. I love how Greeks put more emphasis on meals and spending time with each other. Anyway, that was a fun evening wandering around Nauplion.

Saturday, our group went to Epidauros. I forgot what was even there! There is a healing sanctuary of Asclepious there, as well as a really well-preserved Greek theater! It was so interesting to be at such a site. It was in the beautiful countryside, which is in itself therapeutic. It was pretty cool to imagine how so many people came to this healing sanctuary in antiquity. After exploring that crazy site for a while, including this circular structure with a sort of maze beneath, we checked out the theater. This theater was amazing and the best preserved Greek theater! It started raining there and everyone's umbrella came out! After wandering up and down the slippery wet stairs of the theater, we headed back to Nauplion for lunch. More gelato! We then began our journey back to Athens. Part of the way there, we stopped off in Tiryns. The walls of Tiryns, an ancient Mycenaean fortress, are huge and very well preserved. They were crazy to look at and going through the fortress we all wondered why they needed such a wall! After checking that out a while, we finished our drive back to Athens!

By the end of it all, I was/am tired, a bit sick of being on the road, excited, a bit sick of being with American students in hoards, and loving being on break from classes! It really was an amazing week and to be led around looking at ALL of those sites was incredible. Good times for sure. You’ll hear from me soon about this coming week of break. Being off of school is awesome, too bad classes are coming back in merely a week! The semester is already halfway over, can you believe it?!

Love!

Only the beginning...

This has been a busy week and is only the beginning of tons and tons of traveling I've got ahead of me the next couple of weeks!

Last weekend, I did a lot of studying getting ready for midterms. On Saturday, my friend and I went on a search for cheap wrist watches and did some shopping and wandering around Monastiraki and talked. We had fresh squeezed orange juice at a nice cafe that looked up at the Acropolis and did homework. It was a great morning. The rest of the weekend was pretty chill with tons of work.

The week was full of midterms and boring studying, but it was great to get them over with. We had some fun throughout the week! It was my friend's birthday, so we all went out to Yum Yum and had yummy Chinese food and took a study break. A few of us also went jogging most nights, which is so fun and gorgeous. It is so nice to jog, even late at night, to see the city and get a workout! How incredible to be jogging on the Olympic Stadium, past Hadrian's Arch, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and the Acropolis! We also had a lecture on Wednesday night about the Thessaloniki Film Festival, which was really interesting!

Thursday morning was great, despite the rain! I was supposed to have class at Kerameikos (Ancient Cemetary), but as I was on my way there with some other students, but class got cancelled due to the intense rain that made the site pretty muddy. I kept walking to the site with a friend that didn't know where it was exactly, then decided to just camp out at a cafe for a frappe and wait for the travel agency to open. I wanted to book my Fall Break ferries to Santorini and Milos with Mom! I ended up at a nice little cafe and drank an amazing frappe for over an hour, watching the shop owners and Athenians interact in Monastiraki. It was really interesting. I got a different glimpse into daily life for Athenians that I usually don't see at 8:30 in the morning. I had a really pleasant time just being solo, journaling and praying, and figuring out some things that have been on my mind. On the walk back, I went into a few Byzantine churches in Athens and checked them out. After a while, I went to the travel agent and booked my ferry tickets before meeting up with girls to buy train tickets to Litochoro!

Friday night was so crazy! We saw a bunch of stuff, something like stage, being set up in the area beside school right at the plaza area of the Marble Stadium. We had heard from someone at CYA that it was some sort of Street Theater show and was going to start at 9. So, around 8 we left school, grabbed food, and ran back to see. It was absolutely insane!!! It lasted about 45 minutes and was all in Greek! Most of the actors were running around on stilt things doing crazy flips and carrying fire around, while the ones without stilts did crazy acrobatics on the stage/scaffolding area. At one point some of the guys had fire shooting from their feet! They also did the awesome acrobatic thing where you climb up a piece of fabric and spin around and such (wow I wish I knew the word...). The simplicity and yet complexity of the show was beautifully done and really a work of art. It was a very powerful and moving performance, even though we did not know what they were saying. We took a few pictures with some of the actors after! :)

This weekend, two friends and I ran away from the crazy big city of Athens to seek after the solace and beauty of Mount Olympus. Yep! Right now, as I type, I am in Litochoro, a small town at the foot of Mount Olympus, in the restaurant of our hotel, eating amazing fried potatoes and drinking a frappe. Let me explain how we got here!

Upon an earlier whim this week, we decided to come visit Mount Olympus, so we started looking up trains and such. I kind of hopped on the boat with their plans, and I'm so glad I did! Nice and early (5:45 am) on Saturday, we hopped on a bus and metro to get on a train to end up in Litochoro! We arrived at 11 am and upon calling our hotel, we got a ride to our hotel! But on the train, there was lots of studying, eating, and snoozing. At one point, Kelsey was trying to put my backpack in the overhead storage and it cascaded down into the floor, as the guy across the aisle offered to help us. Pretty funny.

At the train station, we had a sort of rough time trying to communicate with the person from our hotel on the phone! We ended up having two people help translate what we were trying to figure out (a ride to our hotel) to the person on the hotel. It was interesting, and we shortly after hopped in a car with a really nice guy to head to our hotel! He enthusiastically welcomed us to Greece and Litochoro! I awkwardly slammed my seat forward trying to give the girls in the backseat more room! The driver and I had a great time chatting in the front seat as I tried to practice some Greek and communicate. We got to our hotel and had a lot of fun meeting the people at our hotel. They are so sweet!!! They treated us to frappes and we chatted with the lady, Zoey, for a little while using our little bit of Greek, which was really fun and good practice for sure! She also gave us this strange alcoholic drink, which her mother (yiayia) made, and it was super fruity and yummy.

Afterwards, she set us up with a taxi and we spoke some Greek/English to him as we drove up to Mount Olympus. We had a deal that he would take us up to an area to take lovely photos, then bring us to a monastery, drop us off at the center of Litochoro, then would pick us back up at 10 pm to bring us back to the hotel! It was great! We headed up this crazy mountain road up to a restaurant area and field and practically drooled over how beautiful the mountains were. It was a sort of overcast day, rainy at times, but ended up being gorgeous. The Autumn leaves and trees were absolutely amazing, although it did make me miss the Fall in Virginia! Athens does not have so many trees! As I tried to tell our taxi driver how beautiful the trees were, he corrected my grammar! It was cute, since I did not quite know what I was saying! I could not stop smiling looking at the trees and at the mountains. I can see why the Ancients would have seen this site as so beautiful and sacred. It is ridiculous how nature can be so stunning. We had some fun taking photos and hanging out looking at the mountains as a man walked up from Athens. He spoke pretty good English and we chatted a while. He had been to Mount Olympus many times and was here with many friends. He said that they were having coffee and he wanted to check out the mountains, not just sit inside and drink coffee, since he can do that in Athens! He told us about mythology of the area and we talked to him about our experiences studying in Athens. He took some pictures for us (so we didn't have to figure out our self timer for EVERY pic, and after his friends called, he headed back inside. We then took more fun photos and played with a precious dog following us around, until a crazy bee started buzzing around my head relentlessly. Seriously, this thing was crazy. I actually started to freak out and was sort of crying trying to remain composed! I ended up just running!!! I was so sick of that thing. It was totally like in my ear and buzzing away. I wanted it to either sting me or get away!!! We ended up coming back into the restaurant to meet our taxi driver (we had an hour there!) and we hopped back in our taxi. Feeling slightly carsick, we began our next mini adventure...

We ended up at a Monastery to St. Dionysus and checked out that amazing place! So beautiful! I'm going to post tons of photos of all of this, but it was very beautiful. We walked around and took it all in. The church was absolutely gorgeous and highly decorated. We looked all around the monastery and little pavilions and the like. After a little while in there, probably a half hour or so, we headed back to meet our taxi driver friend!

Our next stop was the center of Litochoro, where we made plans to meet up with our driver friend at 10 pm. It was about 2:30 or so by the time we got there, and it was so cute! We stopped for some amazing food for lunch. The restaurant, "Gastrodromio in Olympus" was actually Fodor's choice for dining inLitochoro in 2008. It was incredible! I had some stellar veal bolognese and spaghetti. The bread was absolutely amazing. We took tons of photos of our food and spent over two hours there just trying to finish ALL of our food and taking in the crisp air of Autumn! We had great conversation and felt ready for our next adventures of exploration. We had heard about a beautiful river area in Litochoro from our buddy we met taking photos earlier, so we were ready to find it. We asked the man at our restaurant and he said that there were two areas to see it, one with a small waterfall. This was our challenge!

We set out after eating to explore Litochoro and find this river. We walked up some beautiful path and saw the little river/stream, and ended up moseying up some crazy sketch path, only to turn around after getting the heeby jeebies! Our next effort was up and around past the main area following the sound of water and our gut instincts! We ended up walking and walking up to the top of town and around some crazy curvy roads. We wondered at one point if we should turn around, but kept going. Good thing!!! We ended up just wandering until we found the Mount Olympus National Park! We started up a random path, after joyously jumping up and down. We were crazy excited as we kept hearing water and continued on this absolutely amazing path. It was absolutely incredible. I do not have enough adjectives to describe how cool this place was. We ended up and were walking in the bottom area of the path through the Enippeas River Gorge! My jaw dropped as we were looking at the mountains and this gorge. We took SO many photos! We stumbled across this fun little water area that said the water was "dringable," so us being thirsty, filled up my water bottle and drank it! It was so clear and so tasty and clean! I haven't died yet, so I think it was okay!!! As we kept walking, it kept getting more and more beautiful, until we found the little waterfall!!! We were so excited! We found someone to take photos for us (we ran into only a handful of other people on the path). I slipped under the little fence and got a photo a bit closer up with the waterfall, then as we hopped back on the path we decided to check out the European E4 trail we went past. It was more natural (as opposed to a man-made path with a fence) and is actually the path that people hike that includes the Pyrenees and Alps!!! So we checked that out for a while and took more crazy photos. It gave us a much better view and we felt obviously cooler since we were on such a sweet path! :) When the sun started to go down a bit, we figured it was time to head in for some hot chocolate and to find our way back to the town before dark. It was a quick descent and although we passed some punk kids spraypainting some grafitti, we made it back safe and sound to the city center.

In the city center, we ran into a wedding! The main church in the middle of town was packed with people and a beautiful bride!!! Everyone was outside and taking photos and it was so beautiful! This is the third wedding I have run into since I have been here in Greece!!! We found a sweet restaurant to camp out at and do homework with hot chocolate and Fanta to wait for our driver. After a few hours there, we were heading back to our meeting place when our driver stopped by us and called us in! He was so nice. Right when we got in, he handed us each a sweet little pink rose!!! He asked us how Litochoro was and kept asking if it was beautiful, which it was. We were still kind of in shock that 1. we found such an awesome place and 2. it was so incredible! After our ride back, we headed to our room to do a bit of work and sleep!!! What a day!!

Today, we have been relaxing ALL DAY at our hotel restaurant. After a much needed full night of rest, we woke up and got ready for our day. We went down to breakfast and were so very excited, but we had no idea what to expect... It was SOOO GOOD!!! I'm going to post a photo, but we had cereal, yoghurt, fried eggs, ham, cheese, granola, peaches, orange juice, coffee, and bread with jam/nutella/irish butter. We ate like pigs, and sat there for over two hours!!! Afterwards, we wanted to go to the Dion Archaeological Museum, but found out it was closed on Sundays off-season. We were considering taking a walk, but it is rainy! So, we have been camped out here all day, loving being away from Athens and in such a sweet little town with such great people. We've been chatting, getting work done, and blogging (obviously)! A great weekend! Our train back leaves at midnight back to Athens, and we'll be arriving at 5:45 am. I've got a presentation for my Byzantine History class at 10:40 am, and tons of homework to do, so I'm looking forward to a busy day! But this weekend has been sooo worth it!

I've got tons of traveling this next few weeks, so I'll keep you updated!
Tons of love!!!

Ps, we made it back safe and sound! I have to tell you about dinner!!! It was incredible!!! Surprise surprise... haha. We had a great time chilling in our room listening to old boy bands and random music for a bit, then headed downstairs to dinner. I ordered an amazing pork steak with scrumptious fried potatoes (i call them medallions of happiness). Chanel had Zoey pick what she wanted to eat for her and she chose this amazing pork thing with meat so tender it fell off of the bone. Reminded me of barbecue from home! But dinner was just crazy and so filling and cheap! So great. After dinner, we hugged our new friend Zoey and said farewell to everyone else as we hopped into the car with her husband to go to the train. They were so amazing to let us check out 12 hours late free and to drive us back to the train so late!! :) They told us we have to try to visit every summer and hike Mount Olympus! We'll see how that goes, but I would love to go back there!!!!

O Athens...

A lovely Friday afternoon here in Athens! It has been a great week, but has, once again, flown by. Sleepy, I had classes Monday and had to work on a big paper, and as I was locking myself in the library, my roomie called telling me I was missing Cooking Class!!! Quickly I ran over to the kitchen! :) We made some crazy bean soup I loved, some weird eggplant dip i didn't like tooooo much, stellar roasted potatoes, and lemon chicken! Randomly, we had the same dish (not as good) for lunch the next day in our dining hall! Funny. But that was fun and afterwards I went back and kind of worked on my paper, and kind of chatted... the usual!

Tuesday was fun, beginning with a visit to the Agora for class. Embarrassingly enough, my roommate and I got lost-ish. We popped out of the National Gardens at a weird place and got turned around, so we took a 'short cut.' Anyway, I should know the Agora like whoa, seeing as though I dug there last summer, but anyway, we wandered through the maze of Plaka, which was super beautiful and fun, and were only a few minutes late to class.... After classes that day, I went back close to the Agora to the Acropolis Museum to meet up with a few people I met digging last summer! We wandered the first floor of the museum a minute and then went to the cafe, splitting some yummy dishes. We had some cheese w/ honey on it and some little melon balls, then some custard pie thing, Galactoboureko. So good!!! I got a piece from my local bakery too for my apartment when I'm craving sweets! Anyway, it was great to see them again and catch up some. I think later in the semester I'm going to go with them and visit another friend from the dig! Tuesday night was full of working on that paper! I finished the writing part, and was going to add photos in the morning. I hung out with my friend after we left the library a bit, complete with Fanta Blue and oregano potato chips. Yep, good night.

Wednesday, I got up and finished my paper. Our Byzantine class met at the Benaki Museum Photographic Archive! So cool!!!!! We saw photos from like 1870 and super old from Athens! It was so cool to see what some of the monuments and buildings looked like even 50 or 100 years ago. The city was so different!!!! We've been talking in our class lately about how Byzantine and Medieval monuments of the city were disregarded and often destroyed in the frenzy to get back to the Classical/Ancient Athens. It's kind of crazy! But the archive was really great to see. There were even pics from Meteora! That night, we also had a lecture about Crete. It was talking about some recent/ongoing excavations on East Crete. It was about the newer types of investigation and research methods on site, analyzing different types of food and purposes for rooms. It was cooler than I can explain!

Thursday rolled around and it was a pretty typical day school-wise. We met in the classroom for my Archaeology class, which was different, and we had a history lesson to begin our next section of classes. Thursday night a few of my friends and I ate Mac and Cheese (thanks to Stephanie for giving it to me!!), pigs in a blanket, pizza, and tangerine juice! So fun! They also surprised me with a super yummy piece of cake for a belated birthday gift! It was so cute and sweet! :) They're great! We also had a little ice cream cone frozen and dipped in white chocolate! yum.

This morning (Friday), we got up and went to extend our visas, since they expire before we leave Athens! So lame, but it was an interesting experience. The area was similar to the DMV. The building was insane and hectic, but we got pushed to a certain person to help us that knew our school, etc. and we got it taken care of. I had a scare when the lady was not going to take my forms since I had been to Serbia since the photocopy of my passport had been taken. But thankfully, I just had to run down the street and make a photocopy! :) After that, we explored around Syntagma and found a computer store for my friends to try to fix their computers. It had a sweet school supply store in it! It was so fun! I loved it! After that, we metro'd to Maroussi to go to the Dell store, only to find that we couldn't get help there, so we hopped over to a little pastry shop and got cookies and ice cream! We then bussed back for lunch and such.

As far as random thoughts go, I've had the urge to start playing guitar again... we'll see how my wrist holds up when I get home, but I think I'm going to play again. And I think I may want to start drawing again... just for fun. I'm no good, but I kind of enjoy it. Maybe!

Off to organize things for my midterms next week!!!
Love

Serbia?!

I made it to Serbia, obviously!

Thursday afternoon I walked to Syntagma and hopped on the bus and headed to the airport. I got there with a perfect amount of time to get my boarding pass and get through security and wait at my gate. It worked out well since we left on time and got in to Belgrade early! Praise God! On the plane, it was not crowded and I had my 2 seat area to myself, which was stellar. And, we got a little dinner and dessert! The flight was quick and we got there in no time. Walking around in the airport, I didn’t think my friend Neal would be there yet, but he was and my dad was too! It was great to see both of them for sure! We drove back about 3 hours to their town, picking up McDonald’s on the way! It was great to have that time to chat and catch up. We got to town and we visited the rest of the family, but then headed over to Mirela’s to get ready for bed. She’s so sweet to be letting me stay there and she gave me everything I need. I even got to use the internet, which I didn’t expect, so that was great. We chatted for a while, but then headed to bed.

Friday was my birthday! 21! So I woke up and Mirela made me French toast! Yum yum! She said I may not think it is good since it is not sweet and like our French toast. But it was great. We had tons of things to put on top of it, chocolate, jam, cheese, meat, everything! And I had this yummy yogurt! It is yogurt, but it is pourable. So good! I don’t think we have it in Greece, but I’m going to look for sure! Then we walked to the police station to register me as a visitor and where I was staying. Then we walked through town and went to the house of the family I know here! It was great to see them! We saw the men (Dad, Neal, Dennis, and a few of their friend) chopping wood and helping out a neighbor. Then, we relaxed upstairs, visited with friends, and had a nice time with lunch and a cake! So good! We did a lot more relaxing and visiting as the day went on and after having friends over for some time together, we went over to where I was staying with Mirela and had another cake and more visiting! A very fun day, full of relaxing and cake and friends. I do have to say that it is so weird to hear another language than Greek now! I’m getting used to being around a foreign language and now it’s different again! So weird! Anyway, I got online and talked a bit and headed to bed.

Saturday, I woke up and had breakfast with Mirela again! She makes such good food. She made hotdogs cut up with eggs and cheese. Don’t judge, it’s super good! We also had some more yogurt and bread! Later on, I took a taxi to the family’s house and visited with them a bit, then we walked about an hour or so to visit with my new Serbian grandmother! She is the sweetest thing! It’s cool because she knows my dad, and knows my sister, and now she knows me! She fed us tons and tons of food! So sweet and yummy! So we spent time talking to her, even though she speaks no English. My friend Stephanie translated for us, which was great, and we just enjoyed some down time eating lovely food! (Seeing a trend for my trip here?...) Afterwards, we relaxed and while the men chopped more wood, finishing up what the rain had interrupted, and I relaxed at my Stephanie’s house and enjoyed some time to relax and chat, once again! Later, we had dinner at their neighbor’s house! We had great pizza with mushrooms and ham! Sooo good! That lasted late into the night as we chatted and ate! Pizza after pizza came out, and we kept eating! We also watched American Football!!! Exciting, I know! I was insanely excited about it and was super into it! We watched the Michigan State/Michigan game! It was a great game! I kept getting all worked up over it and gasped and everything! Our host was so surprised that I liked it, which was hilarious, and I told her that I recently had started to enjoy it! I guess that’s Nick’s fault! Anyway, afterwards we all went back to bed and got ready for some of our last day!

Sunday I was getting used to waking up and having Mirela make me coffee and breakfast! I’m spoiled! We had French toast again, by my choice, and it was just as yummy as the first time! We got a lot of time to talk and get to know each other better, just before my ride came to get me and bring me to their place for time together! Friends of Neal and Stephanie had friends and family to visit, so all of us got together and chatted for a while in the morning and had coffee. I could get used to this European thing of lots of chatting/coffee!!!! What a shock I’ll have when I come home! Anyway, after many of us parted ways, we hopped in the van to get some yummy Serbian burgers and head to Belgrade! We were doing some sightseeing and having some quality time together before I was set to fly out in the evening and Dad and Dennis were going to fly in the morning! So, after quite a drive, full of fun singing and goofing around, as well as laughing at the ‘old men’ falling asleep every five minutes, we made it to the city! We may or may not have gotten lost, and I may or may not have found where we were heading, but regardless, I got to see the city and enjoy even more time together with friends and family! Can’t have too much of that! …? We walked up a nice street and visited lots of little street vendors, finishing up with some wandering around what I think was called Kalemegdan. It was pretty cool and had an absolutely gorgeous view overlooking a couple of rivers. We had to rush a bit to get me to the airport in time, only for me to realize that our flight was delayed a half hour or so. Woohoo airports. It was really hard to leave my friends and family after seeing them these mere three days. I cried a little! It was so great seeing friends from home and Dad, and I’m really glad I got to visit them, and make great new friends!!! I can’t wait to see all of them again!

Getting back into Athens around midnight, I hopped on the bus to head to Syntagma, but the bus stopped at Evangelismos! I guess Syntagma was crazy for Elections!!! Anyway, I taxi'd home and slept!

Life post-Crete

After Crete, this week has been soooo hard to get back into the groove of classes. It is crazy that I was gone all last week and am travelling again this weekend from Thursday night to Sunday night! Anyway, the weekend after Crete was great! I got some, not enough, homework done, and met new friends! I met up with a guy my friends in Serbia met on a visit to Greece for coffee in Syntagma on Saturday afternoon. It was great! He brought a friend who had recently come into town as well. It was great to talk to new people for sure! Other than that, I did a lot of relaxing and talking on Skype! Sunday, I went to church with my new friends, which was great! Great to be in a church again, although it was in all Greek! I wore headphones transmitting an English translation, which was somewhat strange, but great! But, I did sing the hymns in Greek as I read along in the hymnal. I was pretty proud of myself! I even understood a few words! It was great to be around almost all Greeks and experience a bit of what some church looks like in Greece, although the church I visited was not Greek Orthodox, which is what the vast majority of Christians in the city practice. The message was definitely encouraging and I enjoyed it a lot. The message was good, but I was a bit confused since the translation was choppy at times. It was from Galatians 6:7-10. Overall, it was about how goodness and morality must be based in God and nothing else. In addition, he spoke on how we reap what we sow, whether that is good or bad! He was encouraging the listeners to show mercy and love to all and sow seeds of goodness since God is good and exists. He also made a point which I found it good to hear, saying that we are all fruits of another’s seed sown. I guess I don’t think of that so often! Like, I’m where I am and believe what I believe today because someone sowed goodness and the message of God’s love in me. A good thing to remember, and quite an encouragement as well! I’ll probably go back there when I am actually in Athens for a weekend! The rest of the day was relaxing and uneventful. On the way back from church, which was almost a half hour away, I stopped off at the Temple of Olympian Zeus and journaled a bit. It was just such a beautiful day and that temple is so incredible! Afterwards, I started working on a paper and did some homework! The usual these days.

Monday, I had classes and such, and had a heck of a time getting used to being back in school! Ugh! This is the first week I’ve really felt like a student here! It’s strange! I thought I was on vacation!!! The sad thing is, I’m only kind of joking…. My Byzantine class was sort of funny because my professor just went over our research papers and what he actually wanted from them. The issue most of us are finding is that we either don’t know enough about Byzantine history to write a 10 page research paper, or that all of our sources are in a different language than we understand! I’m sure we’ll figure it out. My paper is on Meteora, that beautiful monastery community I visited a few weeks ago. I also had a Modern Greek test and a pretty rough day of Ancient Greek! Such is life when you take two language classes simultaneously! Anyway, that night I did some grocery shopping and ate some dinner and did some homework.

Tuesday, I had class at the Acropolis! I still think it’s crazy that that is absolutely normal in my mind right now! We studied the remains of and evidence of the Archaic Acropolis. We discussed the various temples that would have been standing at that time and some of the archaeological difficulties trying to precisely locate such temples based on written/literature evidence but not much physical. It’s interesting because the Greeks would take down temples and buildings and re-use their building materials for the next structure. They would even re-use foundations. So we don’t even know what is underneath the now Parthenon, since we can’t take it apart and look underneath it! Only theories I guess. After that, I had lunch and met up with the man in charge of the Hellenic Foundation here in Athens. Some students and I are going to be volunteering there! I'll fill you in on details later on about what we'll be doing.

Wednesday, was pretty typical with classes and everything, except we had a pretty cool lecture at night! The lecture was by John Psaropoulos and was called, 'Can Greece Elect a Better Government Than it Deserves?' This was really interesting, especially since the elections here in Greece will be happening this weekend! He spoke about the current situation of Greece and gave us an idea of the country's place in the EU and Europe.

Thursday morning and day I tried to work out all my crazy flight plans about Serbia and go to classes. My archaeology class met at the Acropolis museum! I finally got my flight information figured out when a super helpful staff worker at school called the airline for me since I kept being put on hold! She said my flight as still on and I should go! So after lunch, enjoying a pastry with my coffee, and Modern Greek, I headed back to get ready for my flight.

I’ll write later about the Serbia trip as a whole! Love!

Adventures in Crete!

Once again, I am sorry it has been so long since my last entry! The past two weeks have FLOWN by!!! Last Monday evening, our whole group from school went to the island Crete until early Saturday morning, and since then this week has been crazy. Right now, I am on an airplane flying to Serbia listening to music and drinking a lovely cup of coffee! I’ll fill you in on what life has been like in the past couple of weeks. I’m already starting to forget details…pathetic really! If you ever wonder why I write SO much on this blog, it’s because my memory lasts as long as a goldfish’s!

A few weekends ago, wherever I left off the last blog, we had classes on Friday, and then for the weekend I relaxed in Athens. I don’t remember exactly what I did honestly, but I took it easy knowing that our Crete trip was going to be quite an ordeal! I did a lot of relaxing and hanging out with friends. It’s been great to meet new people and build friendships! It has been a really great time. Fun cafes, late nights, and lots of laughing… sounds good to me!

The following Monday we had classes as usual, but met up at school at 7 pm to get ready to take a ferry to Crete! It was insane! So we hopped on busses, then ferries to take an overnight ferry to Crete. We were put in sleeping cabins according to alphabetical order, which ended up fun since I met some people I don’t usually see or hang out with. Other than that, I wandered around the ferry some with some friends and ended up going to bed pretty early, as most everyone did. We arrived at about 6 or 7 am on Crete. I slept pretty well, even though it was totally weird sleeping on a boat! I definitely woke up really confused hearing odd announcements and a phone ringing beside my head!
We then got some breakfast, or rather, bread, a piece of cake, and a hardboiled egg! Next, we hopped back on busses and began our Cretan adventures! Our first drive was a bit over an hour, so most people slept on our busses! Lots of bus sleeping took place over the week for sure! We went on Tuesday to sites called Malia and Gournia, both pretty cool! We were studying archaeology of temples in Crete and looking at what a little town might have looked like, We also had lunch and visited an American Archaeological Research Center for East Crete. This place was pretty interesting. After hiking up a hill to get to it through thorns and grass, we entered the Center. This is where they bring finds and where the drawing and architectural people work. It is cool because they have each stage of the archaeological process there, with cleaning, organizing, reconstructing/conservation, scanning, studying, photographing, drawing, you name it! After that, we headed to Agios Nikolaos to check into our hotel. We wandered the cute little town, stared off into the water, and had a nice dinner!

Wednesday, we visited Lato, checking out remains of a little town and wandering Heraklion’s Venetian walls and remains. We had a nice little lunch in Heraklion, including gelato. We also headed to Knossos that afternoon! Pretty awesome place, wandering what the palace could have looked like and thinking about the exciting history of it all! After that, we bussed back to our hotel for the night. The evening was spent relaxing and eating, as usual. But, Wednesday night we did some table hopping. We started with dinner. We then moved to the next restaurant over to try a traditional dessert on Crete (I forget the name) with cheese, pastry, cinnamon… So good! Then, we went to the next restaurant over for some little Greek honey donuts. Then, we headed around the corner for some gelato to finish off the evening! Scrumptious!!!

Thursday, to all of our dismay, upon heading to the Heraklion Museum, at 8 30 am, we could not get in. The electricity was out and they could not open the doors, etc and we had to walk away… Maybe the coolest museum on Crete. Sad, but regardless, we trudged along, sleepy and a bit sad, to Rethymnon. We checked out the little museum for a while and checked out this crazy Venetian fortress, Fortezza. This place was pretty cool, and huge! It overlooked the water, as well as the city, and was just fun to run around in! I feel like as a 10 year old being there with all of my friends, life could not have been better. After Rethymnon, we headed to Chania for our final evening on the ground. Chania was gorgeous and had a great lighthouse and strip of restaurants and shops along the water. I loved my evening there, complete with crepes, wine, and gelato. My favorite part was maybe walking to the lighthouse… It seemed close, but was quite a little hike just walking in a roundabout way. But it was well worth it. We could see the stars and the town by night! So nice.
Friday was different than expected, since our hike of the Samaria Gorge was cancelled. We ended up taking a trip to Phalasarna (I think) and checking out another little archaeological site that had something to do with pirates and such. All of us had the beach on our minds! We then went to a beautiful beautiful beautiful beach on the Western coast of Crete. Beautiful day, beautiful sand, beautiful blue water, could it be better?! We finished up Friday with some nice shopping and wandering of Chania, then transferring to our Ferry. It was pretty similar to the first one, except woke us up at 4 45 am! Our ferry back was so nice, pretty new, and I think the bed was actually better than my bed in Athens!

I’ll spare you all the details, but it was really a great week. Nice to be away from the busy city of Athens and see an island and a new place! It was crazy sleeping in a different hotel every night and being in a new place all of the time.

Anyway, that’s that with my Crete trip. I’ll update photos as soon as I have TIME + INTERNET. It’s tricky to come by these days at the same time. I’ve got a big paper due on Wednesday, so after that I’ll be freer for a while!

I’ll update soon on the rest of the week. I’ll be in Serbia soon!!!!

Crete! Long but great week!

Hey! I just figured I'd quickly update you on what I have been up to! Our school took a field trip to CRETE this week! It was a great time, to say the least! Ferries, busses, hotels, restaurants, museums, sites, shops, beaches, and sunburn! Full week for sure! We saw some awesome things and I took tons of photos, but I do not have the time to update all the details yet! I'll be updating soon this week (hopefully!) but I've got lots of schoolwork to catch up on!
Love you all!

Crazy Week!

Wow! The end of the third week?! Already? I feel like this week has gone by so fast, but last Monday feels like ages ago! It has been a packed and fun week for sure! Thursday ended up being a bust with the concert idea due to rain, so I stayed in and dry!

Friday was much more eventful! It was a pretty regular day of classes with Archaeology class at the Acropolis Museum and a Modern Greek test! The Acropolis Museum is new, just opened this year, and is beautiful! You can’t take any photos throughout the museum, which is a bummer, but I saw so many incredible things there. The kind of things that I read about and studied back at R-MC in my Greek Art and Archaeology class and wondered what they would look like for real. I saw things like the Blue Beard Pediment, Peplos Kore, Moscophoros (calf-bearer), Rampin horseman, Kritios boy, and the Caryatids! Seeing as though you may not know what those are, google them, or just take my word for it that they are super well-known and cool. Our class session there was focused on looking at what kind of things were found at the cave sanctuaries we had looked at a couple of classes prior and the Archaic remains on the Acropolis. We’ll go back there later this semester to look at more stuff, but it was great to check it out. I actually snuck a few pictures, thinking it was okay to take photos on the third floor, and got in trouble…but I kept my photos! After that, I ate some crazy cod stuff for lunch and went to my Greek test. Friday night was really fun!

Friday night I went to a concert sponsored by my absolute favorite juice company here, Amita! It was a free concert in the Olympic complex (from the 2004 Olympics). It was ridiculous. First off, it took us forever to get there since we were waiting at metro stations for a while, but the journey was fun because I went with two girls, Kelsey and Melissa. We were chatting away and enjoyed our super long trip to the concert. Also, there were other CYA students around somewhere, but we didn’t run into anyone else. It was Greek teenage insanity! There were crazy preteens and teenagers everywhere, and the place was packed! We took some fun pictures and people-watched for a while before braving the crowd! Once we braved the crowd, we had other peoples’ sweat all over us and annoying teenagers running into us like crazy! Despite that, it was so fun. It was surprisingly fun to be around people speaking no English! We just got to experience it for what it was, a fun Greek pop concert. The bands that played before the headliner, Akon!, were great and all the crowd knew the words. I even recognized some of the songs! After lots of dancing around and jumping, they played some random American songs, like ‘Beat It’ and a lot of Lady GaGa music. We sang along happily to the words we knew, just enjoying the fact that none of these people would see us again! Finally, Akon came out, which was crazy! Quite an interesting performance! Then it started raining and we headed out a little bit early to TRY to beat some of the crowd, and because we had been standing for hours, but we ended up standing at the metro station for another 45 minutes or so. The trains were not running so often since it was so late. We ended up taking the train the opposite direction, on purpose, so we could hop onto one going the right way and try to get seats. We ended up getting seats and coming back by the stop with everyone waiting from the concert. It was insane!!! People were cheering so loudly when the train came in and were hitting the edges of it and it was ridiculous. One kid even broke the window of the train!!! He actually broke it. I saw it happen! My jaw dropped. Then the train filled up and we had some annoying boy leaning all over us, but we ignored him the best we could and tried to enjoy our sleepy ride home. Eventually, with a pit stop at McDonald’s (haha my first and last time going there!) we headed home, super late! Good thing I had nothing to do on Saturday!

Saturday, I slept in!!! It was nice. I spend a while journaling and reading my book about Mother Teresa and it was a lovely morning. Hungry, I went to get pizzas with two of my roommates. It was sooo good! And was my Sunday food too! After enjoying some pizza and relaxing some more, I headed to the academic center to get some work done and I skyped a while, which was great. I sat out on the balcony at our academic center here with my lovely view! I even watched the sun set behind the Acropolis! Surreal. That night, a few of us went to an Open Air Cinema! Sooo fun! We saw 'Inglorious Basterds,' which was a crazy movie! They show movies here in their original language with Greek subtitles, but the movie is in French and German half of the time! So it was interesting!!! The best part was that we were sitting out on a lovely night watching a movie (which was weird because I have not seen one since I have been here) and the Acropolis was in the background. Ridiculously gorgeous! So that was a great night and a beautiful walk, both there and back!

Sunday morning I went to a Protestant church here, about a 45 minute walk away, with a friend. It was a very interesting experience! I'll probably go back when we are actually in town and not traveling! It was mostly an oriental congregation and things were similar to how they are at most Protestant churches I have been to. The sermon was about judging others and focused on how Jesus speaks about not judging. He distinguished between judgment as unconstructive and harmful as opposed to constructive and lifting up others. He expressed that it is important to judge what right is versus wrong and that we have a role as Christians to help keep fellow Christians on constructive paths. He also spoke about how we often look to other peoples faults and don't recognize our own. One of my favorite things that he said was that it is not about changing other people, but about letting God change us. Also, he said that we would be a lot less judgmental if we took seriously the free grace and love of Jesus since it would remind us that there is nothing better about us that earns God's love. His focus was also on restoration in love as opposed to condemnation. It was strange, but nice to be back at a church, even though it looked a lot different than church from home. After church, I spent the afternoon getting work done and doing laundry, which is quite a task by hand!

Last night, we walked up Lykavittos. So beautiful! First we went up to a friend's apartment which is in the neighborhood below the hill, then we walked up and up and up and up! It was quite a climb and so very beautiful. I will post photos but it was spectacular. Such a great view of the entire city, which is HUGE! There were tons of German tourists and they were all singing! Fun. Anyway, I've got to get and get ready for a field trip, but I love you all and will talk to you soon! :)

It's Already Thursday?!

Wow! It is already Thursday! This week is flying by so quickly. After my weekend in Meteora, I came back to a full week of classes and activities! I'll fill you in a bit on what this week has been like here in Athens for me!

Monday morning, bright and early, I started my day going to the hospital. Don't worry! I am not sick or anything, but we all had to take a TB test and get a chest x-ray in order to extend our visas to last the whole duration of the semester. Quite annoying, really, but an experience for sure! A group of about 25 of us met up at the hospital, got a shot and a huge circle drawn on our arms, and waited anxiously for our x-rays. The x-rays were super awkward and the hospital was a bit sketchy, but we survived! Then, I headed to class, late because of the hospital visit, and carried on a normal Monday of classes. That evening, I had my first cooking class! A chef, Stavros, comes to our school and teaches about 5 cooking classes each semesterfor students interested, so I signed up! It was very fun! We made tzatziki, a fun Greek dip made with greek yogurt, cucumbers, and garlic. We also made a fun lentil soup, which I actually ate, vegetables and all! After that, we made our main course, some rice with fun beef somethings on it. It was very good and fun to hang out with about 10 of my fellow students, including my roommates, and cram in a kitchen playing with knives and food! Then, we all sat down and had a nice group meal and conversation. I'm looking forward to my next classes later on this semester.

Tuesday, my archaeology class met on the Acropolis! We were investigating the evidence for Mycenaean inhabitation on the Acropolis. We wandered around the Acropolis as well at many cave sanctuaries, which I had never seen/noticed before! Afterwards, I had some classes and a town meeting. Town meetings here are where we meet up with all the other students in the program and discuss how things are going, etc. We also discussed our upcoming trip to Crete and got some information on how that will be laid out! Exciting!

Wednesday started off with another hospital visit! I had to get my TB test checked and pick up my x-ray. Now I have a huge x-ray just sitting in my room, how helpful?! Afterwards, I had classes and some crazy conversation in my ancient Greek class! We actually may travel to Pylos with my ancient Greek class for a weekend in order to see what we are reading about in Thucydides! Yesterday evening, we had a nice garden party at our president's house, which had yummy food! It was fun to visit with people and not be thinking about school, etc.

Today, my day started with my archaeology class and we met in the Agora. It was crazy to be back there just observing and learning after spending so much time there last summer! I had another modern greek test and am relaxing for the rest of the day! Our Greek dancing class got cancelled again (after being postponed due to rain) so I think I will go to a concert tonight and enjoy the town a bit. We actually have class tomorrow to make up for some sessions we will be missing due to trips this semester.

I guess I should get some reading done!

Love you all.

Amazing! Stunning! Incredible!

Where to begin… This weekend was tiring, long, short, spontaneous, unplanned, interesting, stressful, peaceful, gorgeous, and incredible. Before I get into the details, I’ll let you know what I was doing! I, as I mentioned in previous blogs, was traveling to Meteora, and area Northwest of Thessaly in Greece. I had heard of this place last summer, but couldn’t end up going there for whatever reasons, so I knew for sure I wanted to go this trip. I will explain what it is eventually. Patience. But, it was absolutely amazing. But not the whole time! I will begin my story on Friday afternoon and evening.

After having a nice Friday of wandering and visiting the fruit market, exploring Plaka and Monastiraki, and getting absolutely no school work done, my roommate and I decided to go to dinner. After failing to persuade our semi-sick roommate to join us, we ventured out to a little taverna in our neighborhood. We got great food, observed fun Greeks, chatted about random things, laughed a lot, drank lovely wine, and came back, in the pouring rain, much too late to be leaving first thing in the morning to Meteora! Regardless, we came back and got our things packed and ready, me with my backpack and Kara with her purse. Alarms set, we went to bed.

Too soon after closing my eyes to sleep, I awoke to 5:30 am and I was up again and walking outside in the rain to a supposed bus stop in Syntagma (there are tons!) and looking for the stop from which bus 024 departed from. So, using my handy rain cover of my backpack (good choice Mip), I protected my bag and walked around, still dark outside, wet, and hopeful that the weekend would improve. Anyway, our plan (I know, funny) was to walk to Syntagma (15ish minutes), bus to the main bus station in Athens in order to leave at 7:30 am. We ended up taking the bus the wrong direction (ugh!) and ended up on the other side of town, so we waited and were driven back to the actual bus station at about 8 or 8:15. Thus, we decided to take the 9:30 am bus and alter the plan a bit. At the bus station, we ordered our tickets for there and back and relaxed a bit in the station, happy to be out of the rain and with tickets in hand. We got on our bus at 9:30 and set out for our next destination, still not Meteora!

The bus we took from Athens was taking us to a connecting bus in Trikala, which took 4 and a half or 5 hours , even though our tickets included the fare all the way to Kalambaka, the small town below Meteora. We waited about 15 minutes for that bus, hopped on and drove into the rain once again. That was about a 30 or 45 minute bus ride to the town, where we picked somewhere to get off the bus and got some food, wandered, etc. It was about 4 pm or so by this point, and for various reasons (confusion about transportation, not enough time, closing monasteries, etc) we did not go up to Meteora that evening. The plan of the afternoon and evening was to find somewhere to stay, eat, relax, find our bus stop, and figure out how the heck to get to the “city of monastic life on rocks,” as my little tourist books refers to Meteora.

So, we did just that. An old guy on a moped chased us around for a while trying to convince us to stay at his hotel, we got random stares from the townspeople, and we found a nice little gyro place to eat lunch/dinner. We had our meal, ran into some people who spoke English (maybe from Canada?) and asked them for a few tips and recommendations for a hotel. We went to their recommendation to find it was closed…hard to believe, but we went to random places and finally found a simple place. The little old woman in charge was sweet and after giving us a look up and down, listed a pretty good price. So, we looked in a room, decided to stay there. We dropped off some books from our bags and set off to explore and find the bus stop and some sort of plan for the next day. We probably walked those streets a ton of times in that few hour span just checking things out. We saw a sign leading to a Byzantine church for the assumption of Mary and followed it up to the church. It was a good walk and uphill, but gave us a beautiful view of the city and everything. Going into the church was incredible because it was very old and beautifully painted, as are all amazing Byzantine churches. It felt so peaceful and sacred to be in that old church. It was aesthetically beautiful, but also had another sense of beauty that I cannot really describe in words. It got me very excited for the day ahead at the monasteries.

After descending the hill down to the main road in the town, we finally caved and asked someone where the bus stop was as we realized it was in seeing distance! So we got our return ticket filled out with time and a seat number, etc and the lady mentioned a bus that went up to the monasteries! We had heard from everyone else you either had to have a planned tour before coming to the town or had to take a taxi to the monasteries. So we grabbed bus tickets for 8 30 am for 1,40 euro and went back to our hotel to get the books we had dropped off to sit at a nice café and enjoy the night. Well, by this time it had stopped raining, but was chilly! We were drinking hot chocolate and feeling like it was a nice autumn day! So strange for Greece! I journaled a while and read my book with the letters of Mother Teresa in it and had a splendid time. Then, around 8 we headed back to our room, exhausted and just about ready for bed. Once again, we observed a Greek Orthodox wedding! From our balcony, we could see some of the rocks of Meteora, a church, and random other buildings. We saw the bride and did a fair amount of stalking! It was fun. By 10 or so, after reading and journaling and relaxing, we headed to bed in order to wake up early, though not as early as that day, and catch our bus! We knew we only had until about 1 pm to see everything we could because our bus out of Kalambaka to Trikala left at 2:15! We got up to beautiful weather, perfect for all of our walking, and began our day!

Waiting for the bus, we met some other travelers, chatted a while, and discussed the day. Finally, we saw our bus arrive and so began some of the most awestruck and amazing hours of my life. I may seem dramatic, but this place was really incredible. Meteora means something like “suspended in the sky,” which describes the area pretty well! Meteora was deemed “holy ground, unchangeable and unviolated” by the Holy Synod of the Church in Greece in 1995 by civil law. It is also recognized as a “protected Monument for Humanity” by UNESCO and other international organizations and must be maintained “as such for bearing witness to Christian, historical, architectural, agiographic (and generally artistic) and geological evidence.” (By the way, my quotes and snazzy intellectual phrases indicate information taken from my little info book I picked up on site). In addition, the theory most commonly held about the site is that a delta shaped cone made up of river stones and mud poured into the ancient Thessaly basin and that after geological separations the waters found an outlet and the delta shaped mass broke up into huge stones up to 400 meters high. Pretty ridiculous, but cool. So, you can look up more info on the site yourself later if you are interested but I’m going to talk about my experience a bit more! (By the way, my research paper/presentation for my Byzantine History course is going to be on Meteora, so I’ll know more eventually!)

So the bus took us up to the largest and most impressive monastery, the Holy Monastery of Grand Meteoron. From there we were just going to wing it and try to get a taxi back to the town when we were going to leave. That didn’t work quite as well as planned, but I will explain that later! Even riding the bus was a beautiful view and nearly took my breath away. We got off the bus at the first monastery and, as my many photos show, required us to take a lot of stairs! We walked hundreds of stairs in those few hours for sure. Inside the monastery there was an old carpenter’s station, kitchen, ossuary, cellar, etc. There were also a few museums! We could not take photos in the museums, but there were beautiful displays of carvings, paintings, jewelry, silverware, dishes, clothing, documents, books, etc. The artistic detail and precision of the works was amazing and I wished I could take all of it home! I actually bought a print of a copper engraving of the area that a monk had done a long time ago! But after exploring that area and little courtyards, etc we finally went into the church, which words cannot describe. Similar to the church I described earlier, there was such beautiful decoration and paintings coating the interior, but even more than that, the sense sacredness was profound. I could have laid in the floor there and looked up for hours trying to follow all the stories and take in all of the paintings. Alas, we had to leave, but upon leaving, and taking tons of photos, we did not know where to go or how to get there.

So, we saw another monastery in the distance and decided we would try to get to it! So we started walking along the road (probably very dangerous with the way Greeks drive!) and got to the next one, Varlaam, in a little while. It was such a pleasant walk with the view and the weather! Varlaam was smaller than the Grand Meteoron for sure, but it had such a sweet charm and was so nice itself. And after that, we walked to the last one we got to visit, The Holy Monastery of St. Barbara Roussanou. This one was also smaller, with a sweet charm of its own. I do not have as many pictures from these two because they had less in them, and because we weren’t allowed to take photos in the actual churches.

From here, we called a number on a pay phone to a taxi service, wasting money on my phone, since we got disconnected both times and a taxi did not come. We were kind of nervous and almost contemplating asking a random person for a ride… We were almost going to go back UP to the monastery to ask the person at the entrance advice. That would have been quite a hike back up those stairs, and if we did, we could miss our non-existent taxi! So we waited and sat for a little while, contemplating. We saw a random bus drive by that looked like the one we had taken up to Meteora from Kalambaka, tried to wave, but still sat there hoping we were not going to miss our bus! We then saw a bus again in 10 minutes or so and I waved excitedly and they stopped! I don’t think it was actually supposed to, but I guess we looked like we needed it! So back down the mountain we went, saying a sad goodbye to beautiful Meteora.

Getting back into town we had some lunch and ice cream and got our bus back to Trikala. Everything was great…. Nope! My roommate had somehow left her wallet at the bus station in Kalambaka! (As did one of my other roommates, but hers was on a taxi on Saturday, not returned back to her…) She realized it in a minute or so, but the bus could not turn around for it. We had one of the workers on the bus call the station, get her wallet and keep it safely. It turns out they brought it on the next bus to Trikala from Kalambaka and everything was okay. I ended up taking the 3:30 bus as planned back to Athens, as Kara insisted, but she waited for the next one in 2 hours. So after a long and peaceful bus ride brushing up on Ancient Greek Grammar I got to Athens. I waited at the bus stop for ages and ages and finally a bus came to bring me back to Syntagma. I walked back from there to our Academic Center and then to my apartment. All was well. Such a great experience, even with all the traveling to get there!

It was a great weekend and so nice to be away from the busyness of Athens and all the American college-age people! I hope I showed you a glimpse of the beauty of this place. It was incredible! Make sure to check out the pictures on my site. They should go in the same order as the blog and so you should be able to identify most things or follow what they are of!

Lots of love and will update later! Off to catch up on readings!