Crete

Well, I'm back from my jaunt to Crete. Here is where I attempt to reconstruct a record of my travels aided only by my memory, an outdated itinerary, ten pages of incoherent mirror-writing, and two hundred digital photos. Here it goes...

Day One (Tuesday September 23):
-The entire school boards buses on the plaza in front of the Kallimarmaro that take us to the port of Piraeus where we are going to catch our ferry to Crete. The bus groups that we board at this time are the same ones that we are going to be traveling with all week. My bus is comprised of the two sections of Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archeology, so that means that we are going to be seeing a lot of archeological sites. Other buses have different itineraries and different emphases. The ferry leaves Piraeus at 9 o'clock PM.
-When we got aboard the ferry, it did not align with what my preconceived notions of what the word "ferry" meant. I was expecting something like the Steel-Electric ships that the Washington State Ferries use in the Sound. I did not expect something that looked like an ocean liner. We walked into the ship, and I thought that I had walked into the lobby of a luxury hotel. It was all over mirrors and fancy decorations and everything. And the ship was so big I couldn't tell I was in one, which was disappointing, because I think that the best reason for traveling on a ferry (besides the fact that they run to places you couldn't get to otherwise) is to be out on the water. But after a few hours of wandering around the ship (and the ship was big enough so that I could wander around it for a few hours), I finally found the open deck and went as far forward as possible, and it finally felt like I was on the water instead of in a building, with the unmistakable wind of a ship underweigh in my face and playing with my hair. It was incredible, because I've missed that feeling so much because it's been so long since I've been on a ferry.

Day Two (Wednesday, September 24):
-Breakfast aboard the ferry, then disembark at the port town of Heraklion. Our bus then departs for the archeological site of Mallia, where there is the remains of a Minoan palace. If anyone asks you any questions about what a particular architectural element in a Minoan palace is, say storage. That's probably what it is. Minoan palaces have more storage magazines than anything else. If it's not storage, the other answer is a lustral basin, though those are kind of obvious because they're sunk down into the ground. It was really cool seeing the remains of that palace, though. I had seen plans of Minoan palaces at many times in the past, but it was different walking around the actual remains. It was also neat because unlike the palace of Knossos (which we visited the next day), the palace at Mallia hasn't been massively reconstructed, so we saw it much as it was originally excavated.
-Next we visited the site of Gournia, which was a Minoan town built on a hill. Gournia was a maze of stone walls (though the walls were preserved only about two or three courses high in most places, so I wasn't in any danger of getting lost, and I didn't see any bull-like creatures anyplace in the site). Cool things about Gournia: (1) It was the first Minoan site excavated by a female American archeologist, whose name was Harriet Boyd-Hawes. (2) The modern name comes from the stone vessels called "gournes" which are found in front of all of the houses there. (3) In one quarter of town, every house had a potter's wheel, so pottery was probably Gournia's main export. (4) There is a flat stone on top of the hill with three depressions and a drain bored into it, from which archeologists have reconstructed an entire ritual of blood sacrifice.
-Next stop was the American Archeological Research Centre for East Crete. Most of the other people on the bus thought that this was a really boring stop, but I found it interesting. I guess I'm just weird like that. The center is an archeological laboratory, so we got to see everything that happens to stuff after it's dug out of the ground. The person that was giving us a tour told us about all of the different tests that they do to things (one that I should probably mention is a non-destructive method that boils potsherds in an organic solvent [it sounded familiar, but I didn't write it down and I don't remember the name] and then running it through a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, and using the results to figure out what was cooked or stored in the vessel [I hope that I'm remembering the technical details correctly enough to give a proper impression of what they were doing]), and reconstructing vessels out of fragments that they find, and conserving artifacts so that they don't degrade further, and all of the different kinds of drawings that have to be done of sites and artifacts, and the massive amounts of digital data that they have to store and archive. I thought that seeing all of the different expertises that go into producing archeological findings was really cool, but apparently that was just me.
-After this fun-filled, action-packed morning, it was finally time for lunch in Pachia Ammos, which is this little town by the Archeological Research Center. My friends on Bus B and I ate at this snack shop that was right on the water. It was absolutely beautiful. The water was deep blue and the sky was so bright and sunny. It was just gorgeous. This is a general note for any scenery I refer to in Crete. I may say it, I may not, for each particular stop, but in general, it was absolutely beautiful.
-Evening was free in Agios Nikolaos, so the person I was rooming with and I wandered around the town in search of dinner, which ended up being gyros, and then sitting in a cafe in the town square, me with a frappe and her with a glass of wine, and talking for a while.

Day Three (Thursday September 25):
-The entire morning was filled with our visit to Knossos. Knossos is an interesting site to visit for two reasons. The first is that it's a World Heritage Site, so it is brimful of tourists and tour groups from all over the world. Someone told me that Knossos gets over two million visitors every year. This makes the site really crowded, with long queues to see all of the "main attractions." I also heard more languages at Knossos than I think I have heard for the entire rest of the trip. There were tours being conducted in English, Greek, Spanish, French, and German, and those were just the languages that I heard enough of to recognize. The second reason that Knossos is so interesting to visit is that Sir Arthur Evans reconstructed the whole site in the 1920's when he was excavating it, and so at times it is difficult to figure out what was original to the Minoan palace of Knossos and what Sir Arthur Evans reconstructed. It's also interesting in a sad way to eavesdrop on all of the people who aren't aware that most of what you see when you visit Knossos, including all of the frescoes, is reconstructions and copies, and make comments on how well-preserved everything is after all these thousands of years. The other highlight of our visit to Knossos was that we found a litter of puppies near the theatral area, and everyone, including our professor, kind of dropped the assignment we were working on to exclaim over how cute they were.
-In the afternoon, we went to Heraklion, which is the main port of Crete and the town that we originally arrived at. We went on a walking tour of the city, mostly along the walls that protected the city when it was a Venetian colony some-odd hundred years ago. Then we were turned to our own devices for the rest of the evening. Heraklion is a beautiful city, where you can really see the influences of all of the years under Venetian rule. The main square is St. Mark's Square, which has this fountain with lions in it. It's right nearby this beautiful church (not St. Mark's, I don't know what the name of it is), which at various times has been a Greek Orthodox Church, a mosque, and now a Greek Orthodox Church again. Unfortunately, I couldn't take any pictures inside because it was forbidden, even without a flash, but it was just as beautiful on the inside as it was on the outside, with icons and carvings everywhere. I spent the evening walking around Heraklion with a girl on my bus and getting gyros from this place our Latin professor recommended to us, and we sat in the gyro place and talked for a while. Then we were walking around St. Mark's Square, and we saw another boy from our bus sitting in a cafe, and we joined him and talked for a while. Then we accompanied him while he got a gyro, and we talked for a while. Lastly, we joined up with another one of our friends, went back to St. Mark's Square, got a bougatsa (a Cretan pastry with phyllo dough, clotted cream, cinnamon, and honey) and Greek coffees, and sat around there and talked. If you haven't noticed, this is a common theme from the evenings on this trip.

Day Four (Friday September 26):
-First thing that we did was walk to the Archeological Museum of Heraklion. The main museum is closed for renovations, but they have a small interim museum open that houses most of the highlights of their collection. It was still really cool, because I got to see, live and in person, most of the examples of Minoan art I've studied in AP Art History and in this Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archeology class. This includes such wonderful things as the bull-leaping fresco, double-headed axes, marine-style pottery, and the snake-goddess figurine. I was especially excited because my favorite marine-style pot ever, the octopus vase, was on display, and I got to actually see it. It was just as cute in person as in Gardner's Art Through the Ages.
-Then we were off to Rethymnon. When we got there, we hiked up to the Fortezza and the Archeological Museum. We visited the Archeological Museum first so that we could all get in for free on our professors' lecturer passes. It was a small place, with some interesting things like clay sarcophagi. Unfortunately, I couldn't take pictures of any of it because most of the artifacts there were unpublished, and for some reason it is forbidden to take pictures of unpublished artifacts (I'm not sure why. I mean, are they afraid that someone is going to jump them on publication on the basis of a couple of snapshots? That doesn't seem reasonable, but one doesn't argue with museum guards).
-After that, my friend and I spent the next two hours wandering around the Fortezza, which is a Venetian fortress built in the late 16th century to protect Crete from the Turks. I know that I'm in good company when my friend and I see a series of openings in the curtain wall which are larger on the inside than on the outside, exclaim "arrow slits? Awesome!", and then proceed to reconstruct the Fortezza's defenses based on the architecture of the walls and surrounding area. Of course, the holes weren't arrow slits, they were for guns, but they were still really cool. The view from the Fortezza was also amazing. It was at the top of a big hill, obviously, and it looked down onto the harbor and the surrounding area. It was so beautiful.
-We bought crepes for lunch (sweet crepes for my fortifications friend and me, since we already had something to eat for lunch, and a savory crepe for my other friend), and ate them on the beach at Rethymnon. I probably don't need to repeat saying this, but it was absolutely gorgeous.
-After lunch, we got back on our bus and headed to Chania. Again, we were left to our own devices for the evening, so the girl I was rooming with and I took a siesta, because at this point on the trip everyone was exhausted, and then we headed out to find dinner. We wandered around the Old City for a while without finding a taverna, which was the longest that I have ever walked in Greece without seeing one, and finally had to ask directions from a guy working in a periptero. He didn't speak English, and so I got to do the asking because my Greek is better than the girl I was with. That made me feel at least somewhat accomplished. We found the taverna and had dinner. I had kalamaria, and she had tzatziki and dakos, which is hard bread soaked in a bit of water and served with chopped tomatoes and Cretan cheese on top. It was good. Then we wandered more and found another taverna on the waterfront, where we had dessert. I had Cretan pie, which I found out was nothing more than a flatbread spread with honey, and she had yogurt with honey.

Day Five (Saturday, September 27):
-The long promised hike down the Agia Irini Gorge. This hike was billed as generally easy and flat, with a couple of rocky sections. Apparently, everyone except for me agreed with this description. The trail was filled all throughout with loose rocks on which I was afraid that I was going to turn an ankle, interspersed with sections where I was literally climbing over the rocks. It wouldn't have been too bad if I had had a walking stick to help me keep my footing (a third leg would have been helpful too, but that's a bit less practical), but I didn't have one with me and I was afraid to go off of the trail to try to find one, because I'm not sure what the Greek regulations are about collecting and moving things within national parks. The hike took me forever to do, it seemed like, and I know that I was one of the last 10 people out of the gorge, which includes the two professors and the guide who were acting as rearguard. Part of the reason I took so long was because I was taking pictures, and so everyone just got ahead of me, but it was still not the greatest feeling to finish behind everyone else, even if it wasn't a race.
-Then we got on the bus (the last one left) to go to Sougia (about 5 km away), for the promised lunch and seabathing. After I got off the bus, Nadia, the program director, asked me why I was limping and whether I was okay. I hadn't even noticed that I was limping, so I blamed my knee and said that I just needed to rest it. She let me alone for that, but that was all I needed after that hike down the gorge, to be informed that my joints were acting up in a noticeable manner. After lunch, I went swimming for a while, and then got out and laid on the rocks of the beach (it was another one with rocks and no sand) for the next two hours until the buses left. It was nice, but it was also about an hour too long.
-Then we got on the buses for the two hour long ride back to the port at Chania. I think that the bus ride was actually the most enjoyable part of the day, which is rather depressing if you think about it. But we spent the entire bus ride telling stories, jokes, and riddles, and playing six degrees of separation with only the movie knowledge that we could come up with off the top of our heads, so it really was a lot of fun.
-At last we got on the ferry that would take us from Chania back to Piraeus. This time it actually was a ferry, not an ocean liner, so that made me very happy. The ferry left at 9 o'clock PM. I spent the first few hours of the voyage on the top deck (which was a lot easier to find on this vessel than on the last) talking with some of my friends. Then I went to bed relatively early, because we had an early call this morning.

Day Six (Sunday, September 28):
-At six o'clock in the morning, we got off of the ferry and got aboard buses for the last time. They took us back to Kallimarmaro, from where we walked back to our apartments, which for me is nearly two kilometers. It was dark when we got off of the ferry, and it was that early dawn light by the time I got back to my apartment. I turned back on the water heater so that I could take a shower later, laid down on my bed, and proceeded to go back to sleep for two and a half hours.
-Then I got up, took my shower, made myself breakfast, and wrote all of this up. Now I get to do all of my homework and reading for tomorrow.

What a trip. And this is a really long post. Congratulations if you made it all the way through.

More adventures

Adventures from Latin today:
-So, today's assignment was Pliny's letter 25, which is to Tacitus about his uncle, Pliny the Elder's, death during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. For some reason, even though Pliny as a whole is pretty easy Latin, my mind totally died while trying to prepare this letter. It took me about two hours to figure out that in the line "Quamvis enim pulcherrimarum clade terrarum", the pulcherrimarum terrarum was a partative genitive with quamvis. Said realization came during lunch as I was sitting with two other people at the table who were having a conversation quite unrelated to Pliny, and of course, as I am wont to do while translating Latin, I exclaimed this in a rather loud voice, which confused one of the people at the table who thought that I was talking to him and couldn't understand what I was saying. Also, the edition that I'm working from hypenates "eruditissimo" in "eruditissimo viro" after the first s, which I missed, and I spent about twenty minutes trying to work out how a snub-nosed man fit into the sentence before I gave up. Sorry for the Latin geeking, I just had to get it out of my system.
-As I have already said, the entire school leaves for Crete tomorrow, and so our professor was talking about various people from Crete that either he or someone he knows know. He says that his grandfather is friends with this Cretan who is somewhat of a terrorist (puts bombs into buildings and cars, beats people up, available for assassinations, that kind of thing), but is otherwise "a very nice man." Class is laughing in disbelief at this statement. The professor also gave us advice on the best places to get souvlaki in Crete and told us that we ought to try the raki while we're there.

Other adventures:
-We covered the theogeny today in Myth and Religion, so we managed to make it from the mist that preceeded Khaos to the Great Deluge in an hour and a half. It was amazing. There was just so much information and so many stories, and we were going so fast, that my head was spinning a bit. It was so much fun.
-I'm going to Santorini with my roommates the weekend after we get back from Crete, so next weekend. I'm excited...
-I have had two other girls from the program ask me for directions to the local yarn shop after they saw me knitting. It's nice to know I'm not the only one with this vice. Also, I think that I'm going to have to knit something more complicated so it takes longer, because otherwise I'm going to end up spending way too much money on yarn, especially as the yarn stores sell nicer yarn than the cheap acrylic that I'm used to, and I'm not sure I'll be able to resist that...

Also, does anyone have any ideas of how learning Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Korean, Punjabi, Turkish, or Urdu (especially Arabic or Turkish) would benefit me in my later studies/career/life? If you do, please let me know. I want to apply for a Critical Language Scholarship for this summer, where the State Department would pay for me to live abroad for seven to ten weeks to intensively study one of the languages listed above, which the United States Government has designated as ones that more Americans desperately need to know, and that's one of the questions that they ask on the application.

How I know...

one: that the Communist Party in Greece is not dead: they are taking out ads on Facebook. I'm not kidding -- yesterday my roommate was in the Academic Center checking her Facebook, and the ad on the side was from the KKE/KNE, which is the Greek Communist Party and the Greek Communist Youth Party, respectively. I don't know what the rest of the ad said, because it was all in Greek, but seriously, the Communist Party? On Facebook? Really?

two: that the Aegean is very salty: I went swimming in it. Yesterday, my roommates and I went to a beach, since everyone else had gone to a beach over the past couple of weeks, I hadn't yet, and the season was rapidly drawing to an end. We got off of the tram at this random beach, since we were getting tired of riding along the line. Said beach turned out to be really rocky, with no sand at all. The day was also much on the cooler side from the ideal beach weather that had prevailed over the last couple of weeks. Still, we went into the water, which was still warm, and very salty. It burned your throat if you accidentally got any into your mouth, and I was very careful not to get any in my eyes for the same reason. It was fun. Then we got out of the water and lay down on our towels over the rocks (well, more like pebbles) that made up the beach until we dried off. The sun was somewhat warm on us, but it was windy and the air was getting cooler, so we left after only about two hours there in total. My roommates inform me that this was somewhat of a failure as a beachgoing expedition, but I still had fun.

three: that I take too many pictures upon occasion: my camera's batteries are dead. Well, dying, because my camera will turn on for intervals of up to approximately 15 seconds and then switch itself off again. I just changed the batteries in my camera a week and a half ago, and before that just before I left for Athens. This is unacceptable. Would anyone happen to know the Greek for "rechargable battery"?

Meeting

The entire school is leaving for Crete on Tuesday, so tonight they held a Crete informational session cum town hall meeting for the entire student body. At the town hall portion of the meeting, we all got treated to a rant from various members of the staff about how the washing machines and dryers at the school work perfectly, they're just different from western-style dryers because they're a condensing model instead of a venting model, how no one in Greece has washing machines, how they could say that they had laundry facilities if they gave us a bucket and some soap, and how we all signed up for a cultural experience and the cultural experience of doing laundry in Greece was to handwash your laundry in the bathtub and hang it up to dry on a line. It was kind of amusing. I mean, I tried doing my laundry in the school washers once, decided that it was too much trouble, and have been handwashing my laundry since. It's not a big deal. But I guess that some of my CYA classmates are less willing to make adaptations than I am.

Then for the Crete information part of the meeting, Mr. Phyl, the president of CYA, got up to speak in front of everyone wearing Cretan traditional costume, which included a white tunic, a black hat, a dagger, and boots. Then he showed us this Powerpoint presentation highlighting things that we're going to do and see in Crete, including this three hour hike down a beautiful gorge followed by sea-bathing and lunch.

I'm excited...

Food and yarn

Yesterday evening was my first Greek cooking class. So at 7:00 PM the 15 other people in my section and I gathered in the tiny kitchen in the Student Union to learn how to make various items of Greek cuisine. Yesterday's menu was tzatziki, horiatiki, a kind of mincemeat roll in tomato sauce that I didn't catch the name of, and rice. Stavros, our teacher, was having us eyeball all of the ingredients and spices, which was a lot of fun for all of us because we had no idea of what we were doing and therefore no idea of how much of any spice we needed. But everything turned out really well, and there was a lot of food. I think I had more at dinner last night than I normally eat in an entire day here. But everyone was hungry enough to eat a lot, because when you start cooking an entire dinner from scratch at 7:00 PM, you get to eat at about 9:00 PM, by which time everyone was starving. In two side notes, (1) I am amazed at how the staff can manage to produce enough food to feed 160 people in that kitchen, because it's maybe fifteen feet on a side, and we couldn't even fit the entire class in there at one time and have room to turn around in, and (2) cooking for 18 people is much different both from cooking for four people and for cooking for 400 people.

Also, way to amaze roommates number 2(ish): knit, especially stranded knitting. I cast on a scarf from the yarn I obtained the other day last night (a variation on Binary from the Winter 2006 Knitty), and absolutely amazed my roommates (1) that I was knitting, (2) that I was knitting with more than one color of yarn, and (3) that I've been knitting since I was elementary school, and (4) with my description of other things I've knitted recently. The discussion branched off into tangents concerning the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Unicode, the Cthulhu mythos, and stereotypes of Catholic schoolgirls. I also ended up promising to teach my roommates how to knit if they obtained needles and yarn, which could be exciting because I'm not a very good teacher, but I couldn't really say no. It was fun, but at the same time I just don't get why knitting is so amazing to everyone. All I'm doing is following directions!

Φωτογραφιες

So I put up the pictures I've been alluding to on Facebook, under the assumption that anyone who's reading this probably has access to my profile. They're in chronological order according to when they were taken. I'll also probably go back and put captions to them, so that people other than myself know what they were from.

Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to pull out the photos that actually turned out, so I put them all up. So I guess that if you're interested in seeing what I've been seeing, you'll just have to wade through them all. Warning: there are a lot of them.

Or I guess you could view it as a way to observe my photographic methodology, as all the pictures are up, even the ones I took to bracket exposures and so forth.

Have fun!

The Road goes ever on and on

I need to stop walking without a clear destination I want to get to. Do you know how much ground you can cover if you just walk for three hours without stopping? This time I ended up via a most circuitous route in Gazi, which is clear on the other side of the map of Central Athens we were all issued. Mind you, the scale on that map is 1:10,000 (centimeters, I presume, so a more useful way of phrasing that ratio would be 1 cm: 100 m), but it was still quite a walk.

I'm not sure whether I wish I had a pedometer so I knew exactly how far I was walking, or whether I'm glad that I don't know.

I did find the local yarn stores, though! I am now the proud possessor of two skeins of acrylic yarn, one green and one black, size 4.5 straight needles, and size 6 circular needles. And one of the yarn stores has a knitting group/open class from 1100 to 1300 every Saturday, so I might drop in on that Saturdays when I'm in town.

Adventures of the last twenty-four hours

one: Apparently, my roommates think that I am the last person in the world one would suspect of going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I forget how it came up, but when we were talking last night, somehow the topic of conversation got from handwashing laundry to Rocky Horror, and they were really surprised that I love dressing up and seeing it. Sometimes it's amusing what assumptions people make about me.

two: In what was possibly a bad idea, but not so bad as it sounds, as Athens is a pretty safe city, I went out last night and wandered around for a few hours. Somehow I managed to get to Plaka via Akadimias Street and Syntagma, both of which are about 90 degrees separated of where Plaka is in relationship to my apartment. Then I found my way back to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which I ended up going the long way around, and from there up the Vassileos Konstantinou back to Kolonaki. (I know that the place names mean nothing to anyone who hasn't been to Athens, but you could look it up on Google Earth if you're really interested). It was a really long walk. I set out at about 10:30 PM, and got back to my apartment about 1 AM, by which time my roommates were worried sick about me. It didn't help that when they tried calling me, I didn't hear my cellphone ring because apparently the last person who rented this phone left the ringer on this quietish ringer called "Elves." I kid you not, it sounded like something composed by the strongest proponent of the light and beautiful school of portraying figures from the otherworld. Anyway, things that I saw last night on my journey:
a) The Waiting For Godot cafe/bar. Closed, of course.
b) Many stray dogs and cats.
c) People filming some sort of movie or commercial or something. I saw them near the beginning of my walk, on Akadimias Street in front of this neoclassical building, and then near the end of my walk on the Vassileos Konstantinou in front of the Kallimarmaro. That last one was exciting, because they were filming some scene where people with guns were talking with people in a car, and I saw the guns before I saw the cameras.
d) The outside of the Numismatic Museum, which is housed in this beautiful neoclassical building. One of the arcades on the outside was lit up, and I could see these gorgeous paintings on the ceiling. I want to go back there and actually see the building by daylight from the inside.
e) An archeological site with part of the original fortification wall of Athens.
f) The Athens Hard Rock Cafe.
g) Hadrian's Arch.
h) The outside of the Byzantine Church of Saint Catherine. Another building I want to see the inside of by daylight.
i) People skateboarding in Syntagma Square, listening to hip-hop music on a portable boom box.
j) The outside of the Athens Green Design exhibition in Syntagma Square.
k) The soldiers guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Athens in the dead of night.

three: This morning, I went to the Museum of Cycladic Art with my Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archeology class. It's a small museum, but there's a lot in it. The class spent its time on the first floor, where all of the Cycladic art is. It was really cool to see the Cycladic figurines in real life. You get a sense of scale to them that you don't get from seeing pictures, even if the picture captions tell you how big they are. There were also vessels from the Cyclades, some tools that they used, and a few examples of Cycladic "frying pans," which may have been used for making salt cakes. I got to choose one of the objects that really drew my attention, sketch it, describe it, and think of what I thought its purpose might have been. I chose one of the late figurines. My sketch from the front actually turned out decently, but the one I tried from the side/three-quarters view didn't turn out quite as well, but it got the idea across. I think that the figurine I chose was probably intended for display somewhere, possibly in a shrine, because it looked like it was intended to stand upright, unlike most of the other figures which you couldn't stand up if you tried. After we finished looking at the Cycladic art, I decided to explore the rest of the museum, since I had already paid my admission and I didn't have anything else that I had to do with the morning. The second floor was closed for refurbishment, but it normally holds a collection of Ancient Greek art. The third floor has temporary exhibits, which at the moment was a display of Ancient Cypriot art, ranging from the Chalcolithic to the Roman periods. The fourth floor had another exhibition of Greek artifacts, focusing on how they were used in everyday life. That one was fun. Then I went down to the new wing of the museum, which was randomly hosting a temporary exhibit on Russian avant-garde art of the 1910's-1920's. It was fun to look at, but a big contrast from the exhibits in the rest of the museum.

four: Upcoming: see whether washing clothes by hand and hanging them up to dry in the apartment is less of a time and labor investment than hauling them 1.8 km to wash in an hour and a half cycle, dry in dryer for two hours, and then have to haul them back 1.8 km, still less than dry, to hang in apartment to dry completely.

Observations

one: How I would characterize modern Athenian architecture: loud. I mean that literally. Every kind of acoustically reflecting surface you could think of is present, from marble to hardwood to tile to flat walls. Likewise, most acoustically deadening surfaces like carpets or acoustic tiling or soft furnishings are not to be found. So, sound travels a lot and reflects of everything. For someone who doesn't hear the greatest, like me, this can be frustrating as what I want to hear gets drowned out in the general uproar.

two: Sidewalks here tend not to be paved, but instead to be tiled. Not anything fancy, just little red tiles about two inches a side set into square configurations tessellated to form sidewalks. They're slipperier than concrete even in dry weather, and I have a feeling that it's only going to get worse once Zeus Cloudgatherer finally sends us some rain.

three: I wandered around an Athenian cemetery yesterday. It was quite pretty, and very different from American cemeteries. No one is buried in the ground in Athens, it seems. Instead, families build above the ground tombs that apparently serve whole branches of families. Some of the tombs were quite elaborate, while others were simple monuments. All were made of white marble. It was interesting to observe the throwbacks to classical themes combined with the Greek Orthodox religion of most of the people buried there. I saw some mosaics in the Byzantine style, and some imitation grave steles. Most interesting in this vein, however, were the grave steles that had been updated to include Christian themes, such as the inclusion of an angel, or having a chi-rho on the vase that the maiden was holding.

four: I have never seen so much marble in my life as I have here. It seems to be everywhere, not just in the cemetery. And that's even discounting the fact that CYA is right next to the Kallimarmaro.

five: I am not normally one for coffee, but I enjoyed the frappe I had in a cafe in the National Gardens. Likewise, I am not normally one for alcohol, but I enjoyed the retsina I shared with one of the girls who live downstairs.

six: Modern Greek is rapidly approaching the frustrating point where I can understand about a quarter to an eighth of what someone is saying to me, and I can think of the words for how to respond to a quarter of that.

seven: Many of the other students in the program lapse into Spanish when they're trying to speak Greek, so it's not just me. I think that the shortcut to non-English language just tends to jump to Spanish since most of us know it better.

eight: Crossing streets in Athens is a continual adventure, since the drivers are crazy and don't yield to pedestrians, and many of the streets I have to cross to get to school and back are so big that they are divided highways, with two crosswalks per street crossing instead of one. There are also a lot of people who ride motorbikes or mopeds (I'm not sure what the technical distinction is, but they're the light two-wheeled motorized conveyance, not the heavy motorcycle), mostly without any kind of helmet. It's mostly men who ride the motorbikes, with womenfolk if any riding behind them, but I have seen a few women riding motorbikes on their own.

nine: I spent about ten minutes this morning observing a turtle that was wandering around the bench in the National Gardens where I had been reading my Ancient Greek portion.

ten: There are times, like when I'm reading Pliny's letter to his friend who is being sent to be the governor of Achaia, when I can't believe that I'm actually where all the things that I'm learning about in classes happened. At the same time, I really miss everyone.

It's all Chinese to me

If you're not in the mood to read about the finer points of Ancient Greek classes, I would advise not reading farther. You have been warned.

So today was the first real meeting of my Attic Prose class, where we actually read stuff that we had prepared, instead of just choosing the text that we're going to do this term. It took me about three-plus hours to prepare about 2o lines for today. Granted, the first hour of that was general panicking about how I seem to have forgotten all of the Ancient Greek vocabulary and grammar that I ever knew, but still, the amount of time I spent and the amount of material I was able to get through was kind of pathetic. For comparison, it generally takes me about an hour and a half to two hours to get through about 40 lines of Latin, so half the time and twice the output. Then I get to class, and find out that this professor actually wants us to produce translationese. As in, he's not really interested in us being able to produce a smooth, clear translation in coherent grammatical English, like we're supposed to do in classes at Haverford, but instead is interested in making sure we know what every word is doing in the Greek in the Greek, even if it produces dubious English. This is slightly worrisome, since my normal method of preparing a text is to use the grammar and syntax to understand the meaning of the text and present the meaning of the text in a way informed by the grammar in class, not to have the grammar and syntax as an end in and of itself. My professor is also very into making sure that we have the stresses right when we are reading the Greek out loud, to the point of breaking in after every word to correct your pronunciation. I realize that pronouncing the words correctly is important, but him breaking in after every word kind of defeats what I thought was the purpose of reading the Greek out loud: to get a sense for how the sentence sounds and what it means. The translation goes around the room, and when it gets to be my turn, the professor corrects my pronunciation after every word, which really throws me off, since I tend to use the reading out loud to refresh my memory of what part of the text this is, because I don't write down a translation to bring into class. Everything I had prepared for this particular sentence flies out of my head, I take a million years to do a translation, which the professor kind of has to walk me through, and I totally screw up all of the grammar. It was a terrific way to start out a new class. I did redeem myself slightly at the end of class by knowing that an imperfect indicative in the protasis and and imperfect indicative plus αν in the apodosis makes a present contrary to fact condition.

Edited to add: Did I mention that we're reading this without a commentary? You know, that wonderful piece of work by people who actually read the language that glosses hard words, explains difficult grammar, and provides additional information that helps you understand just what is going on in a particular text? So all of that stuff that the commentary gives you, I have to do without. In the first Ancient Greek literature class I've ever taken, and I hate even doing Latin without a commentary.

To be rational, I know that everyone else in my class was just as overwhelmed as I was. And I know that this will get easier as I start remembering how Ancient Greek works and I get more familiar with Xenophon's vocabulary and style. And I know that if I prepare for class better, things will go easier. And I know that this class actually is at the right level for me, because it's the intermediate Greek class, and I'm certainly neither a beginner nor an advanced student.

But I still feel a bit like I'm in over my head.

Okay, you can all go back to your non-Classics related lives now.

This weekend's activities so far

Last night: went to the outdoor cinema in Kolonaki. It was really nice. They were showing Manhattan with Greek subtitles (there isn't much in the way of Greek language cinema, so most theatres play English movies with subtitles). I bought my ticket in Greek, so I felt proud of myself. The cinema itself was in a small outdoor garden with a lot of outdoor chairs set up in rows. They played half of the movie, then had an intermission where everyone got up and bought drinks or snacks from the stand in the back and talked. Then they showed the second half of the movie. I could read some of the Greek subtitles, and if I remembered things better, I would now know such words as psychoanalyst, neurotic, and synagogue in Greek.

Today: one: get groceries other than pasta, tomato sauce, and cereal. This involved walking across to the supermarket on the other side of Kolonaki Square. I love browsing in civilian supermarkets, so it was a real adventure to be browsing in a supermarket in a country where I don't speak or read the language very well. Then I got to walk with all of my groceries back to my apartment, which was a bit less fun, though not too bad because I went early in the day before the sun got too hot.

two: After I got everything put away, I decided to go take a walk (as though I haven't been walking enough already this week). So, I hiked up Lycabettus Hill. And it was a hike. Lycabettus Hill is the highest point in Athens (the top of it is something like 277 meters above sea level) and while I wasn't starting out from sea level, it's still quite an elevation change. I was also doing this around 11 o'clock in the morning, on the side of the hill with no shade, which was possibly not the brightest idea either. But it was a beautiful climb, even though I was right on the side of the hill and the look down made me feel kind of dizzy (I don't have the greatest head for heights). At the top of the hill, there's a little church. The inside of it is all painted with ikons in the Greek Orthodox style. It was beautiful. I tried to take pictures of some of them, but I'm not sure how well they turned out since I wasn't using a flash. I don't think I can properly convey the contrast between the dark inside of the church and the blinding sunlight outside of it. The view from the top of Lycabettus was amazing too. You can see the entire city from up there, all the way down to the Pireaus. It wasn't the most clear view that far (Athens is not the most air pollution free city in the world), but that's at least 9 km away.

three: on the way back, I stopped at a Germanicos store to buy a microphone headset for my computer. I tried to use Greek, but the lady working at the store heard my terrible Greek, concluded that Greek was not even close to my first language, and switched over to English. It was kind of annoying. How am I supposed to learn Greek if people talk English to me? (We will now pause for everyone to tell me that I am not allowed to berate myself for not being fluent in Greek after a week in the country).

four: hike with my laundry up to school to use the washing machines here (1.8 km up the Vassilissis Sofias in the midday heat with all my laundry in a duffel bag, plus my backpack with my school stuff and laptop). Figure out how to use Greek washing machines, put laundry in washing machines, wait 1.5 hours for wash cycle to finish, figure out how to use Greek dryers, put laundry in dryers.

No idea of what activities are planned for tomorrow. I would bet that they involve more walking, though.

Classes

Well, I have now had one meeting of each of the classes I'm taking this term. So far, I think that I'm going to enjoy each of them, though I'm on my beginning-of-the-semester high right now, so take that last pronouncement with a grain of salt.

Class one: Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archeology. We spend most of our class meetings on site actually looking at the Aegean and ancient Greek art and archeology. And the class is taught by an archeologist who has actually worked on some of the sites that we're going to be visiting. She also says that we're going to read the Lysistrata and read some of it out loud at a Greek amphitheater.

Class two: Intermediate Greek: Attic Prose. We spent the first meeting discussing what text we wanted to read this semester. As in, the professor asked us what texts we wanted to read, and then we had a discussion about the relative merits of reading something more obscure versus something that you're going to find on the Harvard Classics list. Then the professor left the room and the class got to decide what we wanted to read without the professor being there. We nearly decided to read Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, but because that was too obscure and there were people who were planning to go on in Classics, we finally settled on Xenophon's Memorabilia.

Class three: Advanced Latin. There were too many people registered for this class, so we split into two sections. Then we decided what text we were going to do this term. Our professor really pushed Pliny the Younger's Epistulae, so that's what we decided to read. We also decided to read Ovid's Amores, and some Horace if we have time. That didn't take the entire class period, so we spent the last half of class discussing what we've done in Athens so far, and our professor told us all about the different types of souvlaki, and never to pay more than 1.50-1.80 euro for one.

Class four: Ancient Greek Mythology and Religion. Let me just give you a reading list of the primary sources for this class: Aischylos The Orestia, Prometheus Bound, Sophokles Antigone, Oidipous Tyrannos, Euripides Bacchai, Iphigeneia in Aulis, Iphigeneia in Tauris, Hippolytos, Medeia, Homer The Iliad (selections), The Odyssey (selections), all in translation. This is going to be fun.

Erratum: the work I was discussing with my roommate was Cicero's Pro Caelio, not Plato's Crito. The editorial staff regrets the error.

Updates

Things I know after orientation that I didn't know before:
-There are protests and/or strikes in Athens almost every day. Protests traditionally start outside of Parliament in Syntagma Square and finish outside of the American Embassy, no matter what the cause.
-Showing your palm to someone with all fingers extended (like you're going to give someone a high five) is a rude hand gesture in Greece, roughly equivalent to flipping someone off. Protesters do this towards Parliament during protests.
-Tipping is not common in Greece. Instead, a gratuity is included in the bill.
-Coffee is expensive because you're paying rent on a table for as long as you like, not just having the cup of coffee.
-The unemployment rate in Greece is around 10 percent.
-The system that we use for pronouncing Ancient Greek was created by Erasmus during the Renaissance.
-There hasn't been a major earthquake in Athens in about 10 years.
-Posing with statues is offensive to the gods. Taking pictures without posing is fine.

In other news:
-I talked to a member of the Modern Greek faculty, and she told me that taking Ancient Greek, Latin, and Modern Greek would be a bad idea, and she advised against it strongly. So no Modern Greek class for me.
-I've been spending the time that I haven't spent in orientation wandering around trying to get to know my neighborhood. I'm also still talking pictures of all the interesting graffiti I see. Knowing me, I will end up with more pictures of graffiti than of all the "picturesque" sites that I'm "supposed" to be photographing. But it's my camera, and I can photograph whatever I want.
-For the only time in my life other than at the Classics teas, there are more Classics people around than anyone else. All four of the other girls I'm living with are Classics majors, and we make up the majority of the people in the program. Last night, one of my roommates and I were talking about reading the Crito as an intermediate class rather than as an advanced class. I love spending time with non-Classics people, but for four months, this is awesome.
-I had an adventure yesterday trying to buy laundry soap in a store with no English labels. All of the boxes, not surprisingly, were labeled in Greek, and I couldn't read any of it. I ended up getting some kind of Italian laundry soap, because at least I could read the label.

Please talk me out of this

Someone talk me out of adding Modern Greek to my schedule. Please.

I don't want to take five classes. I know that taking five classes is a bad plan. Especially when three of them would be language classes.

But my survival Modern Greek class yesterday was really fun. And I love learning new languages. And Modern Greek would be a really practical language for me to learn right now, and taking a class would help me learn faster than trying to pick it up on my own. And I really need to know more Modern Greek than I do, considering that I got flustered today and tried to use Spanish.

But there's no room for it in my schedule, and nothing that I can drop to make room for it. Unless I take five classes, which, as I noted, is a bad plan.

Please, someone, talk me out of this.

Made it!

Well, I made it. I am here at school in Athens, mostly in one piece and with all of my stuff intact. I'm even feeling not that jet-lagged, which is a positive sign considering that I'm ten hours removed from Seattle, and I've only been here since 3 in the morning on Friday.

Living arrangements: I am sharing an apartment with four other girls, none of whom I have met yet. Two of them are here, judging by the luggage which I saw when I moved my stuff into the apartment, but they themselves where not there. The apartment is on the third floor of a little apartment building on Enzonon Street in the Kolonaki neighborhood, for those who care about such things. I arrived at the apartment building at 4 pm, which is right in the middle of siesta. I knew that we were supposed to be quiet during siesta, but I was unaware that "quiet" was defined as "if I can hear that you're alive, you're being too loud." Needless to say, I was making an unacceptable amount of noise as I moved my suitcases from the elevator and tried to figure out which of my keys fit in which of the locks on my door. A man from downstairs came up to tell me so much, unlocked my doors for me, and told me that I had too much luggage, which may or may not be true. I didn't even try to unpack any of my stuff, as I figured that that would also create too much noise and I would like to try to start off on the right foot with my new neighbors.

Athens: I've been here since Friday, as I said, but this is the first that I've been in the neighborhood in which CYA is located. I'm not sure what I was expecting of Athens, other than the Acropolis, which I haven't visited yet (as I'm sure that I will make many excursions there with my Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology class), and as such, I'm not sure whether it has fulfilled expectations or not. The neighborhood in which my hotel was located was composed of many narrow streets, with many hotels and shops. It was loud, and it had many places of eating with outdoor seating. There seemed to be a pharmacy and souvlaki place on every block. There was much graffiti, many of which I photographed. As far as I could make out, a lot of the graffiti was either anarchist or communist, judging from it being signed either with a hammer and sickle or the anarchist sign. There were multiple newsstand kiosks on the streets, selling everything from newspapers and magazines to gum and water to cigarettes to belts and purses. There is a lot of smoking here, but the people who smoke don't do it obnoxiously, and I haven't been anyplace yet where I couldn't breathe for the smoke. The neighborhood where I am now seems to be more middle-upper class than the neighborhood where the hotel is, and I haven't been here long enough to register any meaningful impressions.

Language: I don't read Modern Greek so well as I thought that I did. Modern Greek in its written form isn't supposed to be very much different than Koine, but I forgot that there was an additional two-thousand years of vocabulary that I was going to have to deal with. And while Greek is like German in that in order to create new words, you put two existing words together, that's not enough to ensure that I can recognize all two thousand years of new vocabulary. Additionally, I realized that my reading vocabulary in Koine isn't all that great either. If Plato or Lysias didn't use the word, I probably don't know it, and if they did, you're still taking your chances. Compounding my difficulties is that most of the signage is in all upper-case letters. This may not sound like much of an impediment, but in Ancient Greek, there might be two or three upper-case letters on a page. Consequently, I don't recognize upper-case Greek letters as quickly, and I'm reading them one letter at a time instead of being able to recognize entire words, which is really slow. ImAgInE iF aLl EnGlIsH wErE wRiTtEn LiKe ThIs, AnD iT mIgHt GiVe YoU sOmE iDeA oF wHaT iT's LiKe. For spoken Greek, I don't know very much, but that's still more than my father did. My speaking vocabulary consists of stuff like: "Good morning" "No" "Yes" "Thank you" "Please" "Water". Not really enough to get by with. Luckily, I'm enrolled in the Survival Modern Greek class during orientation, where they attempt to impart enough Greek in four hours to enable us to, well, survive. Most of the people I've run into speak at least some English, but I feel terrible speaking English in a foreign country.

People: I haven't talked with very many people from CYA yet, but those I have encountered have been nice enough. The first person I really started talking to, I discovered, has a younger brother who's starting his freshman year at Haverford and is living on 3/3. What are the odds? We then had a nice session of Classics geeking, which was fun.

I think that that's about all I have to say at the moment, and siesta is over so they won't kill me if I make a reasonable amount of noise moving things around in my apartment, so I think I might go do that now.