Add to the things that I really miss about home: the Metro or SEPTA (depending which home I happen to be at at the given moment) trip planners. I freely admit that Athens has a great public transportation system, which is really easy to use within the city core. However, planning a trip outside of the city core requires a perfect mental map of the city, as the bus routes are listed by stops, the names of which bear no relationship to the streets they are on, and the public transit maps include everything you could ever want to know about the routes except what the names of the streets are. All of this makes it nearly impossible to make your way to a place that you don't know exactly where it is before you set out.
Why this came up: my mother had to send me some documents that needed my signature, and my absentee ballot while she was at it. She did this by FedExing the packet to me with a prepaid return waybill. The idea was that I would fill out the documents, put them into a new mailer, and drop it off at the nearest FedEx location. Sounds fine in theory, until you realize that there are exactly two FedEx locations in the whole of Greece: one in Thessaloniki, and the other in the Koropi suburb of Athens. This meant that this morning, I had to figure out a way to get to Koropi, , which just happens to be one of the furthest-out suburbs, almost at the airport. It took me about an hour and a half last night, when I really should have been writing my Art and Archeology midterm, to figure out a possible way to get to the address I needed to get to. There is a Metro station at Koropi, but the FedEx office is about 8 km away from it. This led to plan 1.0: take Metro to Koropi (last stop on the blue line before the airport), and walk to FedEx office. Granted, when I tried to get walking directions off of Google it warned me that it was likely to take me 1.75 hours to do this each way, but I was perfectly (un)willing to do that, because I'm kind of crazy like that. I mean, 8 km is about 5 miles, which is about two and a third times around the Nature Trail, so doable, right? Especially given my track record of hiking to Villanova or the Haverford Township library when I needed something from them?
On my walk home last night, while waiting for the light to change so that I could cross Vas. Sophia, and watching all of the cars and taxis going by, it struck me -- taxis in Athens are actually priced within the reach of mere mortals. It hadn't even occured to me that taking a taxi was an option, since they're so ridiculously expensive in the States. This led to plan version 1.1, which was to take the Metro to Koropi, and then take a taxi to the FedEx office. It would cost more than walking, but it would also be much faster and less fatiguing. This remained my plan until I actually set out on this adventure.
This morning, after I ran some other errands in the morning, I set out on the Metro blue line towards the airport, in accordance with my plan. However, I soon discovered that even though there is supposedly a Metro stop at Koropi that's on the Metro, you can't actually get to it. Apparently, it's too close to the airport, and you need a special ticket to be allowed to ride that far, so I was forced off of the Metro at Doukissis Plakendias. This necessitated a rapid reformulation of plans, because Doukissis Plakendias is nowhere near being near enough to walk to Koropi, and buying a special Metro ticket or transferring to the Suburban Railway would cost 6 euro each way, on top of whatever taxi fare I would end up paying from Koropi to the FedEx office, plus I wasn't sure of the schedule for either of these trains. All of this led to the formulation of plan 2.0, which was to take a taxi from Doukissis Plakendias to the FedEx office. I did get there, and post my package, and get back, and I even did it all in time to go to Ancient Greek (though not in enough time to actually prepare for Ancient Greek, so I was at sight today, which is always so much fun...), but it was a lot of time and aggravation, and I'm sure that there has got to be a better way to get there from here.
Two metro tickets: 0.80 euro each
Taxi fare: 21.00 euro
Postage on packet: 31.27 euro
Estimated time spent planning expedition: 1.5 hours
Estimated time spent actually on expedition: 2.5 hours
Participating in the democratic process: priceless
In slightly less aggravated news, I'm off to Istanbul for fall break starting tomorrow and coming back on Sunday next. I'm taking the train through Thessaloniki there, which is going to be a really long ride, but at least I get to see where I'm going through, as opposed to going on an airplane, where it's like, "we will put you on magic teleportation tube, subject you to varying amounts of acceleration and forces for a few hours while we play a movie outside of the portholes, let you off, and hey presto! you're someplace else." Hey, any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke. Seriously, though, it should be fun and exciting, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Far From the Home I Love
Lest you form the impression that my life here is all marble and baklava, things that I really miss about home:
one: doing laundry in machine washers and dryers. Putting clothes into a machine and having them be clean and dry about an hour and a half later, with a minimum of intervention by you and being able to do something else for that time and not worry about it. Not having to manually wring out all of your clothes. The feel of fabric fresh out of the dryer, a very different hand than stiff sun dried fabric.
two: ice cream that doesn't cost a ridiculous amount. I've had gelato here that was 2.50 euro for the smallest size.
three: spicy foods. Greek food is tasty, don't get me wrong, but they're not really into heat. If I thought that my spice tolerance was diminishing at Haverford, I have a feeling that my tastebuds are going to be in for a real surprise when I get back to the States.
four: being able to understand overheard conversations on the street and elsewhere.
five: peanut butter. They have it here, but, like ice cream, it's ridiculously expensive.
six: lawns and other green places. Similarly, my cedars and cherry trees.
seven: large libraries with collections not limited to items of classical and Greek interest, including a decent amount of fiction.
eight: club meetings and other extracurricular activities.
nine: bodies of water, even those as small as the duckpond, and the smell of fresh water. Granted, I could remedy this by taking the Metro to Piraeus, but that's not really the same.
ten: family and friends (is there a difference?) Goes without saying, but this is what I miss more than anything else.
one: doing laundry in machine washers and dryers. Putting clothes into a machine and having them be clean and dry about an hour and a half later, with a minimum of intervention by you and being able to do something else for that time and not worry about it. Not having to manually wring out all of your clothes. The feel of fabric fresh out of the dryer, a very different hand than stiff sun dried fabric.
two: ice cream that doesn't cost a ridiculous amount. I've had gelato here that was 2.50 euro for the smallest size.
three: spicy foods. Greek food is tasty, don't get me wrong, but they're not really into heat. If I thought that my spice tolerance was diminishing at Haverford, I have a feeling that my tastebuds are going to be in for a real surprise when I get back to the States.
four: being able to understand overheard conversations on the street and elsewhere.
five: peanut butter. They have it here, but, like ice cream, it's ridiculously expensive.
six: lawns and other green places. Similarly, my cedars and cherry trees.
seven: large libraries with collections not limited to items of classical and Greek interest, including a decent amount of fiction.
eight: club meetings and other extracurricular activities.
nine: bodies of water, even those as small as the duckpond, and the smell of fresh water. Granted, I could remedy this by taking the Metro to Piraeus, but that's not really the same.
ten: family and friends (is there a difference?) Goes without saying, but this is what I miss more than anything else.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Brauron and Sounion
Today's adventure was a day trip to three archeological sites. However, unlike my past travel adventures, I really don't have that much to say about them. This is in part a result of the reshuffling of buses and professor assignments, so that the professor that was taking my group around lacked the gift for making the sites come to life that the two professors that I had been traveling with possessed. And in part it's because I'm really tired.
The first site was Brauron, which is the site of a temple to Artemis. In classical times, young girls were taken there to serve Artemis as "little bears" (there was a Greek word for that, but I can't remember it at the moment). The temple was pretty. There was a spring with a stream running through it, so the landscape was actually green for once, and I could smell the water. I'd forgotten how much I missed the smell of fresh water until I was standing by that stream.
The next stop was an ancient silver mine and theater. We didn't stay for that long, because there really wasn't a lot to see there.
The third and last stop was the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, which is a very pretty temple. It's at the southernmost point of Attica, and supposedly it used to be possible to see the Athenian Acropolis from this site (I was unable to do so, but in Classical times there was probably less air pollution). It looks out over the sea, and it's relatively well preserved. According to myth, this is also the spot where King Aegeus threw himself into the sea after having spotted the black sails of Theseus' ship returning safely from Crete. There is also a famous piece of grafitti there, from Lord Byron, but I wasn't allowed to get close enough to the pillar where it was to see the graffito in person.
I am now looking forward to having some kind of break. I have had class or class field trips every day since the 6th without any break, and it's getting exhausting. I mean, even tomorrow and Sunday won't be real breaks, since I will be frantically writing my midterms and making preparations for my fall break adventures, but at least I'm not going to be expected to report somewhere at 8 in the morning and have my entire day planned for me.
The first site was Brauron, which is the site of a temple to Artemis. In classical times, young girls were taken there to serve Artemis as "little bears" (there was a Greek word for that, but I can't remember it at the moment). The temple was pretty. There was a spring with a stream running through it, so the landscape was actually green for once, and I could smell the water. I'd forgotten how much I missed the smell of fresh water until I was standing by that stream.
The next stop was an ancient silver mine and theater. We didn't stay for that long, because there really wasn't a lot to see there.
The third and last stop was the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, which is a very pretty temple. It's at the southernmost point of Attica, and supposedly it used to be possible to see the Athenian Acropolis from this site (I was unable to do so, but in Classical times there was probably less air pollution). It looks out over the sea, and it's relatively well preserved. According to myth, this is also the spot where King Aegeus threw himself into the sea after having spotted the black sails of Theseus' ship returning safely from Crete. There is also a famous piece of grafitti there, from Lord Byron, but I wasn't allowed to get close enough to the pillar where it was to see the graffito in person.
I am now looking forward to having some kind of break. I have had class or class field trips every day since the 6th without any break, and it's getting exhausting. I mean, even tomorrow and Sunday won't be real breaks, since I will be frantically writing my midterms and making preparations for my fall break adventures, but at least I'm not going to be expected to report somewhere at 8 in the morning and have my entire day planned for me.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Δεν εχω φυματίωση
You will all be happy to know that I do not have tuberculosis.
This is official, not just an educated guess based on the facts that my TB test came up negative this summer and I haven't had any risk factors since then. But the Greek government requires official proof of this fact, and hence this week I had to go to the hospital to get a skin test and chest x-ray to prove something that I already could have told you.
It wasn't a big deal, just something of an irritation. Actually, I found it amusing more than anything else, mostly in relation to the difference between how I was reacting to the procedures involved in this and how other people were reacting or apparently expecting me to react. For example, when I went in to get my skin test, the first thing the doctor told me was "Don't be nervous." He seemed to be surprised when I just rolled up my sleeve and got the shot with total nonchalance. But I mean, I saw him get out a new needle, so I wasn't worried about that, and the TB skin test is just a shot on your forearm, nothing to get excited about.
Then, for the chest x-ray, many of the girls in the program have been complaining about this part of the procedure, because you have to take off your shirt and bra (if wearing one), and they don't give you a gown or anything, and the radiologist at this hospital happens to be male. So they have been complaining about this, saying that it made them really uncomfortable and they were seriously considering making a fuss until they found a female to do the exam and so forth. Me? Just take off my shirt and bra, get the x-ray, put my clothing back on, walk out, didn't feel uncomfortable at all at any part of the procedure. Yay for not having modesty hang-ups.
All this happened on Tuesday morning, and it took most of the morning, just waiting in lines for the hospital to deal with all fifteen of us from CYA having tests that morning plus their normal patient load. Today I had to go back and get my skin test read, which wasn't too bad once I figured out where exactly I had to go to have someone read the test and sign the forms saying that I don't have TB.
So yeah, if I die anytime soon, it will probably not be of the galloping consumption. Ruby Gillis I am not (points to anyone who gets that reference. Extra points if you didn't have to look it up).
This is official, not just an educated guess based on the facts that my TB test came up negative this summer and I haven't had any risk factors since then. But the Greek government requires official proof of this fact, and hence this week I had to go to the hospital to get a skin test and chest x-ray to prove something that I already could have told you.
It wasn't a big deal, just something of an irritation. Actually, I found it amusing more than anything else, mostly in relation to the difference between how I was reacting to the procedures involved in this and how other people were reacting or apparently expecting me to react. For example, when I went in to get my skin test, the first thing the doctor told me was "Don't be nervous." He seemed to be surprised when I just rolled up my sleeve and got the shot with total nonchalance. But I mean, I saw him get out a new needle, so I wasn't worried about that, and the TB skin test is just a shot on your forearm, nothing to get excited about.
Then, for the chest x-ray, many of the girls in the program have been complaining about this part of the procedure, because you have to take off your shirt and bra (if wearing one), and they don't give you a gown or anything, and the radiologist at this hospital happens to be male. So they have been complaining about this, saying that it made them really uncomfortable and they were seriously considering making a fuss until they found a female to do the exam and so forth. Me? Just take off my shirt and bra, get the x-ray, put my clothing back on, walk out, didn't feel uncomfortable at all at any part of the procedure. Yay for not having modesty hang-ups.
All this happened on Tuesday morning, and it took most of the morning, just waiting in lines for the hospital to deal with all fifteen of us from CYA having tests that morning plus their normal patient load. Today I had to go back and get my skin test read, which wasn't too bad once I figured out where exactly I had to go to have someone read the test and sign the forms saying that I don't have TB.
So yeah, if I die anytime soon, it will probably not be of the galloping consumption. Ruby Gillis I am not (points to anyone who gets that reference. Extra points if you didn't have to look it up).
Monday, October 13, 2008
The Argolid
I just chased a bus all the way from the Argolid, and boy am I exhausted.
No, wait, that's not how that joke goes. But anyway, I am back from our school trip to the Argolid (if the school decamps to the Argolid, does it recamp to Athens? I'm not sure what the proper terminology is for that, if indeed there is one) in one piece, but definitely tired. So...
Day one (Saturday, 11 October):
-Bus B leaves the Kallimarmaro at 8 in the morning. Again, this bus is full of people from the two sections of Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archeology classes, so archaeological sites are primary on our itinerary. On my bus, my friends sitting behind me are conducting a read-aloud of the Agamemnon in Ancient Greek. I'm paying somewhat attention to this as I'm knitting my scarf, which I finish relatively early on in the day today, leaving me without something to do on the bus for the rest of the trip.
-First stop of the day was at Eleusis. This was where the Eleusinian Mysteries, dedicated to Demeter, were celebrated, and as this cult was one of the most popular in the ancient world, the site was pretty big to accommodate all of the initiates. It was also continually used from Classical times to about the 3rd century AD, when all pagan cults were abolished with the establishment of Christianity as the state religion, so there were remains of stuff down to Roman times, including a very nice (huge) sculpture of Marcus Aurelius from a triumphal arch that the Romans erected. This also meant that there were some inscriptions in Latin, and it was very nice being able to read the inscriptions for a change, because my Greek isn't good enough for epigraphy yet. There were also sanctuaries for deities other than Demeter at this site, including a very nice Pluterion (makes sense that there would be a sanctuary to Hades here, doesn't it) with a really deep well that would make a great entrance to the underworld if you used your imagination a bit.
-Next, we climbed back on the bus and continued our journey towards the Peloponnese. When we got to Corinth, we all got off of the bus so that we could gaze in wonder at the canal there. It connects the Corinthian and the Saronic Gulfs, which are only about 8 km apart at the narrowest point (well within seeing distance of each other), but several hundred kilometers of treacherous sea apart if you have to sail around the Peloponnesian peninsula. It was pretty cool to look at. Our professor told us that it was 8 m deep underwater, 63 m from the top of the cliffs to water level at the deepest part, and 10 m wide. There were also signs around advertising how you could sail through the canal, or, for the more adventurous among us, bungee jump from one of the bridges. Needless to say, I passed on both options.
-After this short stop in Corinth, we had officially left Attica and entered the Peloponnese. The major stop for today was Mycenae. Before lunch, we visited the Treasury of Atreus, which is this huge tholos tomb. If you have ever seen a picture of a tholos tomb before, this is probably the one that you saw. It was awesome, even though there was this annoying guide from another group that kept telling us to be quiet and that only guides were allowed to talk there. We also got to climb up on top of the tholos, and the view from up there was amazing.
-After that, we crossed the road and had a picnic lunch on the hillside, also with an amazing view. It was really windy, and all of our stuff kept trying to blow away, so we had to keep a close watch on all of our stuff.
-Then we visited the main citadel of Mycenae. My half of the group visited the museum first, which was a small museum that held some of the finds from the site. We got to look at the museum in terms not only of what was in the collection, but also from a museum studies point of view, looking at how the museum was designed to be accessible to different audiences and present its collection and how the collection was arranged and stuff like that, which was neat because we don't normally look at the museum as an artifact in itself. After we got out of the museum, we had a bit of time before we were supposed to meet up with the other group to switch, so our professor took us over to look at a small tholos tomb right next to the museum. This tholos tomb didn't have its roof still on it, so you could look down the inside. We were heading back to the museum when these two men came along talking in English in the thickest Southern accents I have ever heard. The exchange between the two of them: "There's a few hundred square feet in there" "Pretty big cistern. That's what it is, right?" "I think". My friends and I waited until they were out of earshot to collapse on each other laughing. I really hope that they figured out that the tholos tomb wasn't a cistern when they saw the gaping hole in the downhill side of it.
-We met up with the other half of the group and switched leaders to visit the actual Mycenaean citadel. Key term for Mycenaean architecture: Cyclopean masonry, which refers to walls made out of really big stones. I'm talking about stones that are probably twice the size that I am. The entire outer fortifications of Mycenae are constructed in such a fashion. And, of course, approaching the main citadel, we got to walk through the famous Lion Gate, which was just terrific. From the citadel, there is an amazing view of the Argive plain, and at the end of our tour of the citadel, we got to walk down a set of stairs to the water cistern. It was completely dark, except for our flashlights (those of us that had flashlights. I had one of sorts, but it was really pathetic. I want a Maglight for Christmas...) and the flashes of people's camera's as they took pictures to try to illuminate their way. The tunnel was made of corbelled vaulting, and there were two turns in it as it descended. It originally led to a really deep cistern that could supply Mycenae with water for about six weeks, I think, in case of a siege, but it's been filled in to prevent tourists like us from falling in and hurting ourselves. It was a really neat experience, and I can't imagine having to go down that passage with the aid of only an oil lamp (although lamps do throw out a surprising amount of light, especially when it's the only source of illumination around instead of being presented in contrast with electric lighting).
-After this adventure, the group of people who had been conducting the read-aloud of the Agamemnon on the bus had to try to finish their reading at Mycenae itself, because that's what kind of nerds they are. They got to do the part where Cassandra and Agamemnon die before we had to leave. It was amazing amounts of fun to watch and take pictures of, and I wish that I'd been able to be involved in a more active way, but I don't know how to read Greek in scansion and I didn't know about this adventure until it was already well underway.
-[An aside: Mycenae as a whole was terrific, and the whole time I was there I was thinking to myself, this can't possibly be happening, I can't possibly really be here. The first time that I heard about this site, I was a junior in high school in AP Art History, and I never would have dreamed that I would be seeing the Treasury of Atreus and the Lion Gate in real life in person. So actually seeing Mycenae in real life was just so cool, I can't even explain it.]
-After we left Mycenae, we went on to Nauplion, which is the city where we were going to be staying for the next two days. After a siesta, we went out to a taverna to have dinner, then went and got gelato at this place one of the professors swears has the best gelato outside of Italy. After tasting it, I have to agree that it was really good.
Day two (Sunday 12 October):
-The first thing on the agenda for today was a walking tour of Nauplion, which was Greece's first capital during and after the Greek war for independence. Said walking tour consisted mainly of following our professor around to the various statues of heroes erected around the historic district and listening while she told us about who they were and what they did. It was still pretty neat though, and Nauplion is a nice city to walk around and look at.
-Then we made a brief stop at the Folklore Museum, which houses a collection of traditional costumes from various parts of Greece. I thought that it was really cool to look at, but others of my acquaintance were not so convinced. Then again, I dragged my friends to see the First Ladies' inauguration dresses when we visited the Smithsonian in eighth grade, so this isn't exactly a new phenomenon.
-Our first real stop of the day was in Agia Moni, which is a small monastery (well, convent, I guess, because it houses nuns, but monastery is what our professors called it. Maybe in Greek Orthodoxy, they're monasteries regardless of whether they have nuns or monks in them), located on a spot where an ancient tradition has it there was a spring that Hera visited on an annual basis to renew her virginity before she returned to Zeus. It was really beautiful and quiet and calm and peaceful.
-Next we were on to Epidaurus, the ancient sanctuary to Asclepius. It's also the site of one of the best preserved ancient theaters, which has also been heavily reconstructed so that it can actually be used for performances now. It has incredible acoustics, and to prove this, our professor had most of the class spread out all over the theater, and then three volunteers singing on the stage at the bottom at three different loudnesses to see when the people in the seats could hear them or not. Of course, I volunteered to be one of the singers, and so I and my two friends made fools of ourselves on an international stage by singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" at the Theater at Epidaurus. I suppose that we could have done something a bit more classy like "Mary Had A Little Lamb," or "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," but it was the first thing that we thought of that we all knew. It was terrific. And then, as we were leaving the theater, we passed by a group of German students. One of them was giving a presentation, and my friend who knows German tells us that the presenter was saying, "This theater has excellent acoustics, as you can tell from those Americans who were singing." It was great.
-After that, we went back to Nauplion and explored the Palamidi, another Venetian fortress on the highest point in the city. It was extremely windy up there, so strong that we were given specific warnings not to be climbing on top of ledges or along the edges of the cliffs for fear that we would be blown away. But of course the view from that high up was amazing, and I love exploring old fortifications. After about an hour up there, we were given the option to either take the bus back down to the hotel or to stay up there for longer and walk down ourselves. My friend who explores fortifications and I elected to explore more and walk down. We saw the prison that Theodoros Kolokotronis, who was one of the heroes of the Greek Revolution, was kept in. It was a really small room in one of the bastions with no windows and that you had to enter by means of this small tunnel you had to crouch over double to go through. It would have been pretty bad to have had to live there. I know that that's kind of the point of prisons, but still. Then to get down, we had to walk down all these steps on the outside of the fortress, which was cool because we got to see parts of the fortress you couldn't see or get into from the inside, including one set of rooms that I'm pretty sure we weren't actually supposed to go into, but since the gate blocking it off was not only unlocked but almost halfway open, I figured that it was fair game.
Day three (Monday 13 October 2008)
-First stop for the day was at the Argive Heraion. This is the temple associated with the story of the two young men pulling their mother's chariot to the temple so that she could perform the rites of Hera and them dying after performing this feat. (I've only had to be told that that story is associated with this temple about four or five times this year. Maybe now that I've been there it will finally start to stick). Anyway, as always, the temple was in a beautiful location with a terrific view. We could see across to another Venetian fortification about 13 km away and all the way to the Argolic Gulf, that's how clear it was.
-Next up was visiting the site of Tiryns. We were really lucky for this stop. One of our group leader's colleagues is the assistant to the site director for Tiryns, so he gave us the tour of the place. This was terrific for two reasons. One, since he works there, he knows absolutely everything known about the site, and so he was able to give us a really interesting and informative tour. Two, because he's really high up in the administration of the site, he was able to take us to parts of the site that aren't generally open to the public. There are portions of the site that are roped off with signs saying No Entrance, and he pulled barrier down temporarily and waved us through. So we got to go down the West Stairway and into other parts that we wouldn't have been allowed into if he weren't leading the tour. So that was pretty cool. There was a lot more Cyclopean masonry at this site, with even larger blocks than were found at Mycenae.
-One last stop at Nauplion for lunch (gyros for me. Gyros in Nauplion are tiny compared to the ones in Crete, or even the ones in Athens, and so I ended up eating two before I felt full. They were good, just "unfortunately minuscule," as one of the people I was with put it). Then we were back on the bus and on the way back to Athens. I spent the entire bus ride back to Athens sleeping on my friend's shoulder. It's been a long, but fun, past few days. Now I get to catch up on all of the work left undone over this trip, plus prepare for midterms, which are nearly upon me.
No, wait, that's not how that joke goes. But anyway, I am back from our school trip to the Argolid (if the school decamps to the Argolid, does it recamp to Athens? I'm not sure what the proper terminology is for that, if indeed there is one) in one piece, but definitely tired. So...
Day one (Saturday, 11 October):
-Bus B leaves the Kallimarmaro at 8 in the morning. Again, this bus is full of people from the two sections of Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archeology classes, so archaeological sites are primary on our itinerary. On my bus, my friends sitting behind me are conducting a read-aloud of the Agamemnon in Ancient Greek. I'm paying somewhat attention to this as I'm knitting my scarf, which I finish relatively early on in the day today, leaving me without something to do on the bus for the rest of the trip.
-First stop of the day was at Eleusis. This was where the Eleusinian Mysteries, dedicated to Demeter, were celebrated, and as this cult was one of the most popular in the ancient world, the site was pretty big to accommodate all of the initiates. It was also continually used from Classical times to about the 3rd century AD, when all pagan cults were abolished with the establishment of Christianity as the state religion, so there were remains of stuff down to Roman times, including a very nice (huge) sculpture of Marcus Aurelius from a triumphal arch that the Romans erected. This also meant that there were some inscriptions in Latin, and it was very nice being able to read the inscriptions for a change, because my Greek isn't good enough for epigraphy yet. There were also sanctuaries for deities other than Demeter at this site, including a very nice Pluterion (makes sense that there would be a sanctuary to Hades here, doesn't it) with a really deep well that would make a great entrance to the underworld if you used your imagination a bit.
-Next, we climbed back on the bus and continued our journey towards the Peloponnese. When we got to Corinth, we all got off of the bus so that we could gaze in wonder at the canal there. It connects the Corinthian and the Saronic Gulfs, which are only about 8 km apart at the narrowest point (well within seeing distance of each other), but several hundred kilometers of treacherous sea apart if you have to sail around the Peloponnesian peninsula. It was pretty cool to look at. Our professor told us that it was 8 m deep underwater, 63 m from the top of the cliffs to water level at the deepest part, and 10 m wide. There were also signs around advertising how you could sail through the canal, or, for the more adventurous among us, bungee jump from one of the bridges. Needless to say, I passed on both options.
-After this short stop in Corinth, we had officially left Attica and entered the Peloponnese. The major stop for today was Mycenae. Before lunch, we visited the Treasury of Atreus, which is this huge tholos tomb. If you have ever seen a picture of a tholos tomb before, this is probably the one that you saw. It was awesome, even though there was this annoying guide from another group that kept telling us to be quiet and that only guides were allowed to talk there. We also got to climb up on top of the tholos, and the view from up there was amazing.
-After that, we crossed the road and had a picnic lunch on the hillside, also with an amazing view. It was really windy, and all of our stuff kept trying to blow away, so we had to keep a close watch on all of our stuff.
-Then we visited the main citadel of Mycenae. My half of the group visited the museum first, which was a small museum that held some of the finds from the site. We got to look at the museum in terms not only of what was in the collection, but also from a museum studies point of view, looking at how the museum was designed to be accessible to different audiences and present its collection and how the collection was arranged and stuff like that, which was neat because we don't normally look at the museum as an artifact in itself. After we got out of the museum, we had a bit of time before we were supposed to meet up with the other group to switch, so our professor took us over to look at a small tholos tomb right next to the museum. This tholos tomb didn't have its roof still on it, so you could look down the inside. We were heading back to the museum when these two men came along talking in English in the thickest Southern accents I have ever heard. The exchange between the two of them: "There's a few hundred square feet in there" "Pretty big cistern. That's what it is, right?" "I think". My friends and I waited until they were out of earshot to collapse on each other laughing. I really hope that they figured out that the tholos tomb wasn't a cistern when they saw the gaping hole in the downhill side of it.
-We met up with the other half of the group and switched leaders to visit the actual Mycenaean citadel. Key term for Mycenaean architecture: Cyclopean masonry, which refers to walls made out of really big stones. I'm talking about stones that are probably twice the size that I am. The entire outer fortifications of Mycenae are constructed in such a fashion. And, of course, approaching the main citadel, we got to walk through the famous Lion Gate, which was just terrific. From the citadel, there is an amazing view of the Argive plain, and at the end of our tour of the citadel, we got to walk down a set of stairs to the water cistern. It was completely dark, except for our flashlights (those of us that had flashlights. I had one of sorts, but it was really pathetic. I want a Maglight for Christmas...) and the flashes of people's camera's as they took pictures to try to illuminate their way. The tunnel was made of corbelled vaulting, and there were two turns in it as it descended. It originally led to a really deep cistern that could supply Mycenae with water for about six weeks, I think, in case of a siege, but it's been filled in to prevent tourists like us from falling in and hurting ourselves. It was a really neat experience, and I can't imagine having to go down that passage with the aid of only an oil lamp (although lamps do throw out a surprising amount of light, especially when it's the only source of illumination around instead of being presented in contrast with electric lighting).
-After this adventure, the group of people who had been conducting the read-aloud of the Agamemnon on the bus had to try to finish their reading at Mycenae itself, because that's what kind of nerds they are. They got to do the part where Cassandra and Agamemnon die before we had to leave. It was amazing amounts of fun to watch and take pictures of, and I wish that I'd been able to be involved in a more active way, but I don't know how to read Greek in scansion and I didn't know about this adventure until it was already well underway.
-[An aside: Mycenae as a whole was terrific, and the whole time I was there I was thinking to myself, this can't possibly be happening, I can't possibly really be here. The first time that I heard about this site, I was a junior in high school in AP Art History, and I never would have dreamed that I would be seeing the Treasury of Atreus and the Lion Gate in real life in person. So actually seeing Mycenae in real life was just so cool, I can't even explain it.]
-After we left Mycenae, we went on to Nauplion, which is the city where we were going to be staying for the next two days. After a siesta, we went out to a taverna to have dinner, then went and got gelato at this place one of the professors swears has the best gelato outside of Italy. After tasting it, I have to agree that it was really good.
Day two (Sunday 12 October):
-The first thing on the agenda for today was a walking tour of Nauplion, which was Greece's first capital during and after the Greek war for independence. Said walking tour consisted mainly of following our professor around to the various statues of heroes erected around the historic district and listening while she told us about who they were and what they did. It was still pretty neat though, and Nauplion is a nice city to walk around and look at.
-Then we made a brief stop at the Folklore Museum, which houses a collection of traditional costumes from various parts of Greece. I thought that it was really cool to look at, but others of my acquaintance were not so convinced. Then again, I dragged my friends to see the First Ladies' inauguration dresses when we visited the Smithsonian in eighth grade, so this isn't exactly a new phenomenon.
-Our first real stop of the day was in Agia Moni, which is a small monastery (well, convent, I guess, because it houses nuns, but monastery is what our professors called it. Maybe in Greek Orthodoxy, they're monasteries regardless of whether they have nuns or monks in them), located on a spot where an ancient tradition has it there was a spring that Hera visited on an annual basis to renew her virginity before she returned to Zeus. It was really beautiful and quiet and calm and peaceful.
-Next we were on to Epidaurus, the ancient sanctuary to Asclepius. It's also the site of one of the best preserved ancient theaters, which has also been heavily reconstructed so that it can actually be used for performances now. It has incredible acoustics, and to prove this, our professor had most of the class spread out all over the theater, and then three volunteers singing on the stage at the bottom at three different loudnesses to see when the people in the seats could hear them or not. Of course, I volunteered to be one of the singers, and so I and my two friends made fools of ourselves on an international stage by singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" at the Theater at Epidaurus. I suppose that we could have done something a bit more classy like "Mary Had A Little Lamb," or "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," but it was the first thing that we thought of that we all knew. It was terrific. And then, as we were leaving the theater, we passed by a group of German students. One of them was giving a presentation, and my friend who knows German tells us that the presenter was saying, "This theater has excellent acoustics, as you can tell from those Americans who were singing." It was great.
-After that, we went back to Nauplion and explored the Palamidi, another Venetian fortress on the highest point in the city. It was extremely windy up there, so strong that we were given specific warnings not to be climbing on top of ledges or along the edges of the cliffs for fear that we would be blown away. But of course the view from that high up was amazing, and I love exploring old fortifications. After about an hour up there, we were given the option to either take the bus back down to the hotel or to stay up there for longer and walk down ourselves. My friend who explores fortifications and I elected to explore more and walk down. We saw the prison that Theodoros Kolokotronis, who was one of the heroes of the Greek Revolution, was kept in. It was a really small room in one of the bastions with no windows and that you had to enter by means of this small tunnel you had to crouch over double to go through. It would have been pretty bad to have had to live there. I know that that's kind of the point of prisons, but still. Then to get down, we had to walk down all these steps on the outside of the fortress, which was cool because we got to see parts of the fortress you couldn't see or get into from the inside, including one set of rooms that I'm pretty sure we weren't actually supposed to go into, but since the gate blocking it off was not only unlocked but almost halfway open, I figured that it was fair game.
Day three (Monday 13 October 2008)
-First stop for the day was at the Argive Heraion. This is the temple associated with the story of the two young men pulling their mother's chariot to the temple so that she could perform the rites of Hera and them dying after performing this feat. (I've only had to be told that that story is associated with this temple about four or five times this year. Maybe now that I've been there it will finally start to stick). Anyway, as always, the temple was in a beautiful location with a terrific view. We could see across to another Venetian fortification about 13 km away and all the way to the Argolic Gulf, that's how clear it was.
-Next up was visiting the site of Tiryns. We were really lucky for this stop. One of our group leader's colleagues is the assistant to the site director for Tiryns, so he gave us the tour of the place. This was terrific for two reasons. One, since he works there, he knows absolutely everything known about the site, and so he was able to give us a really interesting and informative tour. Two, because he's really high up in the administration of the site, he was able to take us to parts of the site that aren't generally open to the public. There are portions of the site that are roped off with signs saying No Entrance, and he pulled barrier down temporarily and waved us through. So we got to go down the West Stairway and into other parts that we wouldn't have been allowed into if he weren't leading the tour. So that was pretty cool. There was a lot more Cyclopean masonry at this site, with even larger blocks than were found at Mycenae.
-One last stop at Nauplion for lunch (gyros for me. Gyros in Nauplion are tiny compared to the ones in Crete, or even the ones in Athens, and so I ended up eating two before I felt full. They were good, just "unfortunately minuscule," as one of the people I was with put it). Then we were back on the bus and on the way back to Athens. I spent the entire bus ride back to Athens sleeping on my friend's shoulder. It's been a long, but fun, past few days. Now I get to catch up on all of the work left undone over this trip, plus prepare for midterms, which are nearly upon me.
Friday, October 10, 2008
"I have seen the face of Agamemnon"
This morning, my Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology class took a trip to the National Archeological Museum again. This time, we were looking at the Mycenaean collection, specifically the stuff that was found in Grave Circles A and B. Let me just tell you, it was a lot of gold. They found something like 14 kilos of sheet gold between the two grave circles, and about a quarter of it is on display at the moment. It was to the point where my instructor was going, "and in this case we have more gold. Isn't that nice? Now moving on to the next case..." It was pretty though. I got to see the most famous of the pieces found in the Grave Circles, the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, which my instructor told us that they couldn't be sure if what it looks like now is what it originally looked like, as Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Mycenae, had been known to have a jeweler "improve" on what he found, and the face depicted in the Mask of Agamemnon allegedly bears an uncanny resemblance to Schliemann himself. Two of my friends also did a presentation on Linear B, in front of the case of Linear B texts. I'll spare you the details of Linear B, unless anyone expresses an interest in knowing, but basically Linear B is a syllabary used to keep temporary Mycenaean inventories and records, and is the earliest known text used to write Greek. I also learned how to write my name in Linear B, which is useful as we have been informed that that will be the first question on the final exam. Unfortunately, Linear B doesn't have a way to write /l/, which makes spelling my name a little awkward. It ends up sounding a lot like Japanese, actually, because what I came up with was "ra-ra po-ra-ka". It looks something like this: 
Pretty cool, eh?
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Peripatetic
Today, I am very glad that I walk everywhere I need to get to, instead of relying on the Metro or bus systems. There is a general strike today in Athens, which means that the public transportation system is non-operational. Consequently, a lot of classes have been canceled today, including my 8:30 AM Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archeology class which was supposed to meet at the National Archaeological Museum this morning. The strike might also go on tomorrow, but tomorrow's classes aren't going to be canceled because the professors have had enough time to tell their students to be prepared to walk to the sites. My Latin class today also got canceled, but because our professor is sick, not because of the strike. This means that on a day when I normally have three classes, I now only have one. This also means that I have time to eat my dinner before dark today, which I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to do, since my last class goes until 6:50 and sunset is at 6:59 today.
May you be sealed in the Book of Life, everyone, by the way.
Also, this weekend the school decamps to the Argolid, which will be fun and exciting. I know that we're going to visit Mycenae, of course, but they haven't posted itineraries for the buses yet, so I don't know what else we're going to see. But I still am really looking forward to this trip.
May you be sealed in the Book of Life, everyone, by the way.
Also, this weekend the school decamps to the Argolid, which will be fun and exciting. I know that we're going to visit Mycenae, of course, but they haven't posted itineraries for the buses yet, so I don't know what else we're going to see. But I still am really looking forward to this trip.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Weekend adventures
Day one (Friday, 3 October)
-Get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to be out of the apartment by 5:30 to catch the metro to Piraeus for a 7:00 ferry. I am accompanied on this adventure by two of my roommates and two of their friends, for a grand total of five people.
-Eight hour ferry ride to Santorini. The ferry stops at Paros and Naxos before it gets to Santorini. On the Piraeus-Paros leg of the ride, there is a professional magician from Spain doing card tricks. He calls himself Ben-hur after the Charles Heston film, but his real name is Manuel. He doesn't know very much Greek, and the Greeks didn't know very much Spanish, so he was doing his patter in English as a lingua franca, but it was cool being able to understand some to a lot of all three languages being used in the performance. After the ferry makes port in Paros, Ben-hur and wife disembark (to the tune of Coventry Carol, weirdly enough. The ferry was playing it as its Muzak while people were getting off the ferry, I have no idea why), and I sit down near where I was standing to watch his performance and pull out my knitting. The Greeks nearby ask me about it, but as my Greek is barely good enough to say "I am a student from the United States. Yes, I am knitting," they ignored me after a bit and were chatting in Greek, of which I understood only a little.
-Finally, we make land in Santorini. Coming into Santorini: you are in a volcanic caldera, created when the volcanic island of Thera exploded in about 1550 BCE, and you see sheer rock cliffs going down to the water. There are three main islands in the Santorini group, but the island of Thera itself is the one that people actually live on. Our hostel has sent down a van to convey all of the people from the ferry to the hostel (about 10 people). The van winds up switchbacks up the face of the cliff and drives us to our hostel. The hostel is extremely nice, more like a hotel than a hostel.
-After we put down our stuff and freshen up a bit, we take the KTEL to the village of Oia to watch the sunset. Oia is a very picturesque little village, all over white walls and blue highlights and arches, on the edge of the cliffs (as I think all villages in Santorini are, so that they can have access to the water). It's the village that all of the postcard pictures of Santorini were taken in. And the sunset from there is pretty. We have dinner at a taverna along with another one of my roommates' friends who happened to be there and the friend's friend who was visiting from spending the semester abroad in Cairo. I had meatballs in tomato sauce, which was disturbingly like chicken tikka masala (except with meatballs, not chicken), considering that it was labeled a "Greek dish" and we are really far away from India).
-Then back to the hostel.
Day two (Saturday, 4 October):
-Up at 8ish to go into town. We walked into Fira and visited the Museum of Prehistoric Thera, which has a collection of Theran pottery and frescoes, including the one from the House of the Ladies and the one with monkeys gathering saffron. I really enjoyed getting to look at everything.
-Then we wandered around Fira for a bit before we caught a bus that took us to the port. We signed up to take a "Santorini in one day" kind of tour, which normally I don't approve of, but we did only have one real day on Santorini and it seemed to get us to all of the places where you're supposed to visit when you're there, and we didn't have to worry about working out the transportation links by ourselves, so it was probably justified.
-The tour: at the port, we got onto a boat which could have been a sailing ship (it had the masts and everything), except that they didn't have the sails up and we were moving the entire time under the diesel engine. The boat took us to the volcano, which we got to hike up. It was a much better hike than the one down the Agia Irini gorge. For one thing, this one was actually on a pretty decent trail, with fractured volcanic fill underneath rather than barely there trail with large rounded water-eroded stones, so it was much easier to walk on. At the top of the volcano, the tour guide told us all about how we had to let go of our idealized notion of how volcanoes formed nice peaks at the top and about how volcanoes that have explosive eruptions tended to have calderas at the top and how the way that they could tell that this was a still active volcano was the heat from the geothermal vents and the volcanic gasses that still came out, which I already knew and didn't really need to be told, but I guess that most of the people who come to Santorini don't come from volcanic regions.
-Next, we all climbed back aboard the boat which took us to a hotspring. So we all jumped out the side of the boat and swam over to the hotspring, which was pleasantly warm. There were some guys in the hotspring who were playing chicken, which was mildly amusing to watch, although they were really blurry, because of course I wasn't wearing my glasses for this. Then after about 20 minutes, we swam back to the boat and climbed back on board. Swimming in open water is much different than swimming in a pool, and I'm out of practice even for that, so it was not the easiest thing I've done in the past couple of weeks, especially as my strongest stroke normally is backstroke, which you can't really do in open water.
-The next stop on this tour was a small island "where there's a simple village, where they've only had electricity for twenty-five years" (not quite verbatim from the tour operator), where we were supposed to have lunch at one of the six or so tavernas that this supposedly small, simple island not used to tourism had right at the cliff base on the few meters of land that separated the cliff and the water. I walked a bit further down the strand, as far as they had buildings (probably about 300 meters, maybe). There was a little church, Agios Nicolaos, which was barely accessible from land and had a small dock attached to it, which was interesting.
-After this stop, we got back aboard the ship and they took us back to the port, with a couple of stops at small ports along the way so that tourists could get off and do touristy stuff in the respective villages that the ports belonged to.
-The tour being over, we went back to our hostel to freshen up and then went into Fira for dinner. We ate at a taverna again, and since three of the four other people I was with were vegetarian, they ordered off of the appetizer menu, while I ordered souvlaki kopotokolou off of the main menu. This resulted in them all getting their food and finishing it before I even got my food. It was really awkward.
-Then we wandered around Fira for a while shopping, mostly because everyone else wanted to shop than because I was particularly inclined. Then it was back to our hostel to go to bed so that we could be up to catch our ferry the next morning.
Day three (Sunday 5 October):
-Up early so that we could catch a ride down to the port from our hostel.
-Then a 7:00 am ferry from Santorini to Pireaus, via Naxos and Poros. I sleep for the first two or so hours, including apparently through our port of call at Naxos and all of the resultant commotion. The ferry is pretty rough, and it made a lot of people sea-sick. I wasn't too bad, but even I was feeling somewhat sea-sick, which is weird because I never get sick on ferries. And the water wasn't really all that bad. It was kind of rough, but not terribly so. And I kind of feel that if you've seen water every day of your life before you go away to college, then you really shouldn't get sea-sick. The fact that everyone else was also getting sick, and I was a lot better than the rest of them, makes me feels somewhat better, but it was still kind of ridiculous. I spent most of the ferry ride sleeping/dozing, which made the ride go faster, I guess.
-Then we finally got into Piraeus, at about 3:30 PM, and took the Metro back to our apartment. Even after we got off of the ferry, it still felt like we were on the boat for the rest of the night.
Overall impression of Santorini/the weekend:
-Honestly, Santorini left me extremely underwhelmed. It is incessantly promoted as being the most beautiful, the most romantic, the most picturesque, the most et cetera of the Greek islands. And sure, it is pretty, it is picturesque, it probably is romantic (someone else will have to double-check me on that last one), but it didn't seem superlative to me in any way. I think that the reason for this may be two-fold. For one, there is no depth to Santorini the way there is to other places. 90 percent of Santorini's economy is tourism-related, so that's basically all that there is there. And everything exists for the sake of tourism, which makes all of the prettiness and picturesqueness extremely self-aware, except that they won't admit that it's self-aware, the which combination irritates me no end. There is also no real history or anything to Santorini. What they don't tell you in all of the tourist literature is that pretty much everything on Santorini was leveled in an earthquake in the 1950's, and consequently everything that you see is modern, built in the same style as what had gone before, but also deliberately constructed to make Santorini a tourist base. So all of the stuff they try to sell you about how Santorini is a pastoral place where life has gone on in much the same way for ages is not quite accurate. The history to Santorini is more of the Neolithic variety, but the archaeological site of Akrotiri has been closed for the past few years, ever since the protective roof over the site collapsed and killed some people. The second reason why I think that Santorini was underwhelming to me is that I'm too used to that kind of a landscape, terrible as it is to say. Listening to my travel companions, I got the impression that the reason why Santorini was so beautiful was that you were on an island, you could look across the water, and see other islands, the which may have been amazing to my roommates from the waterless Midwest, but until I went away to college I could look across water and see land every day of my life (although to be fair the land I could see didn't meet the water in a sheer cliff and was considerably greener). Volcanoes, water, cliffs, this is what I'm used to. Sunsets over the water, sure, the view from Oia is pretty, but I was pretty old before I ever saw water to my east.
I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I thought that Santorini was too famous for being famous, when it really didn't seem all that special to me. It was pretty, to be sure, but it wasn't spectacular like Crete was. And I guess I'm a little disappointed that it was supposed to be superlative, and it wasn't.
Am I glad I went? Yes.
Would I go again, or recommend that other people take the ten-hour ferry from Athens to get there? Probably not, unless they ever reopen the site of Akrotiri. That would be really cool to visit, and there would actually be something there.
And I guess that if I'm complaining about Santorini, I must be doing pretty well.
-Get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to be out of the apartment by 5:30 to catch the metro to Piraeus for a 7:00 ferry. I am accompanied on this adventure by two of my roommates and two of their friends, for a grand total of five people.
-Eight hour ferry ride to Santorini. The ferry stops at Paros and Naxos before it gets to Santorini. On the Piraeus-Paros leg of the ride, there is a professional magician from Spain doing card tricks. He calls himself Ben-hur after the Charles Heston film, but his real name is Manuel. He doesn't know very much Greek, and the Greeks didn't know very much Spanish, so he was doing his patter in English as a lingua franca, but it was cool being able to understand some to a lot of all three languages being used in the performance. After the ferry makes port in Paros, Ben-hur and wife disembark (to the tune of Coventry Carol, weirdly enough. The ferry was playing it as its Muzak while people were getting off the ferry, I have no idea why), and I sit down near where I was standing to watch his performance and pull out my knitting. The Greeks nearby ask me about it, but as my Greek is barely good enough to say "I am a student from the United States. Yes, I am knitting," they ignored me after a bit and were chatting in Greek, of which I understood only a little.
-Finally, we make land in Santorini. Coming into Santorini: you are in a volcanic caldera, created when the volcanic island of Thera exploded in about 1550 BCE, and you see sheer rock cliffs going down to the water. There are three main islands in the Santorini group, but the island of Thera itself is the one that people actually live on. Our hostel has sent down a van to convey all of the people from the ferry to the hostel (about 10 people). The van winds up switchbacks up the face of the cliff and drives us to our hostel. The hostel is extremely nice, more like a hotel than a hostel.
-After we put down our stuff and freshen up a bit, we take the KTEL to the village of Oia to watch the sunset. Oia is a very picturesque little village, all over white walls and blue highlights and arches, on the edge of the cliffs (as I think all villages in Santorini are, so that they can have access to the water). It's the village that all of the postcard pictures of Santorini were taken in. And the sunset from there is pretty. We have dinner at a taverna along with another one of my roommates' friends who happened to be there and the friend's friend who was visiting from spending the semester abroad in Cairo. I had meatballs in tomato sauce, which was disturbingly like chicken tikka masala (except with meatballs, not chicken), considering that it was labeled a "Greek dish" and we are really far away from India).
-Then back to the hostel.
Day two (Saturday, 4 October):
-Up at 8ish to go into town. We walked into Fira and visited the Museum of Prehistoric Thera, which has a collection of Theran pottery and frescoes, including the one from the House of the Ladies and the one with monkeys gathering saffron. I really enjoyed getting to look at everything.
-Then we wandered around Fira for a bit before we caught a bus that took us to the port. We signed up to take a "Santorini in one day" kind of tour, which normally I don't approve of, but we did only have one real day on Santorini and it seemed to get us to all of the places where you're supposed to visit when you're there, and we didn't have to worry about working out the transportation links by ourselves, so it was probably justified.
-The tour: at the port, we got onto a boat which could have been a sailing ship (it had the masts and everything), except that they didn't have the sails up and we were moving the entire time under the diesel engine. The boat took us to the volcano, which we got to hike up. It was a much better hike than the one down the Agia Irini gorge. For one thing, this one was actually on a pretty decent trail, with fractured volcanic fill underneath rather than barely there trail with large rounded water-eroded stones, so it was much easier to walk on. At the top of the volcano, the tour guide told us all about how we had to let go of our idealized notion of how volcanoes formed nice peaks at the top and about how volcanoes that have explosive eruptions tended to have calderas at the top and how the way that they could tell that this was a still active volcano was the heat from the geothermal vents and the volcanic gasses that still came out, which I already knew and didn't really need to be told, but I guess that most of the people who come to Santorini don't come from volcanic regions.
-Next, we all climbed back aboard the boat which took us to a hotspring. So we all jumped out the side of the boat and swam over to the hotspring, which was pleasantly warm. There were some guys in the hotspring who were playing chicken, which was mildly amusing to watch, although they were really blurry, because of course I wasn't wearing my glasses for this. Then after about 20 minutes, we swam back to the boat and climbed back on board. Swimming in open water is much different than swimming in a pool, and I'm out of practice even for that, so it was not the easiest thing I've done in the past couple of weeks, especially as my strongest stroke normally is backstroke, which you can't really do in open water.
-The next stop on this tour was a small island "where there's a simple village, where they've only had electricity for twenty-five years" (not quite verbatim from the tour operator), where we were supposed to have lunch at one of the six or so tavernas that this supposedly small, simple island not used to tourism had right at the cliff base on the few meters of land that separated the cliff and the water. I walked a bit further down the strand, as far as they had buildings (probably about 300 meters, maybe). There was a little church, Agios Nicolaos, which was barely accessible from land and had a small dock attached to it, which was interesting.
-After this stop, we got back aboard the ship and they took us back to the port, with a couple of stops at small ports along the way so that tourists could get off and do touristy stuff in the respective villages that the ports belonged to.
-The tour being over, we went back to our hostel to freshen up and then went into Fira for dinner. We ate at a taverna again, and since three of the four other people I was with were vegetarian, they ordered off of the appetizer menu, while I ordered souvlaki kopotokolou off of the main menu. This resulted in them all getting their food and finishing it before I even got my food. It was really awkward.
-Then we wandered around Fira for a while shopping, mostly because everyone else wanted to shop than because I was particularly inclined. Then it was back to our hostel to go to bed so that we could be up to catch our ferry the next morning.
Day three (Sunday 5 October):
-Up early so that we could catch a ride down to the port from our hostel.
-Then a 7:00 am ferry from Santorini to Pireaus, via Naxos and Poros. I sleep for the first two or so hours, including apparently through our port of call at Naxos and all of the resultant commotion. The ferry is pretty rough, and it made a lot of people sea-sick. I wasn't too bad, but even I was feeling somewhat sea-sick, which is weird because I never get sick on ferries. And the water wasn't really all that bad. It was kind of rough, but not terribly so. And I kind of feel that if you've seen water every day of your life before you go away to college, then you really shouldn't get sea-sick. The fact that everyone else was also getting sick, and I was a lot better than the rest of them, makes me feels somewhat better, but it was still kind of ridiculous. I spent most of the ferry ride sleeping/dozing, which made the ride go faster, I guess.
-Then we finally got into Piraeus, at about 3:30 PM, and took the Metro back to our apartment. Even after we got off of the ferry, it still felt like we were on the boat for the rest of the night.
Overall impression of Santorini/the weekend:
-Honestly, Santorini left me extremely underwhelmed. It is incessantly promoted as being the most beautiful, the most romantic, the most picturesque, the most et cetera of the Greek islands. And sure, it is pretty, it is picturesque, it probably is romantic (someone else will have to double-check me on that last one), but it didn't seem superlative to me in any way. I think that the reason for this may be two-fold. For one, there is no depth to Santorini the way there is to other places. 90 percent of Santorini's economy is tourism-related, so that's basically all that there is there. And everything exists for the sake of tourism, which makes all of the prettiness and picturesqueness extremely self-aware, except that they won't admit that it's self-aware, the which combination irritates me no end. There is also no real history or anything to Santorini. What they don't tell you in all of the tourist literature is that pretty much everything on Santorini was leveled in an earthquake in the 1950's, and consequently everything that you see is modern, built in the same style as what had gone before, but also deliberately constructed to make Santorini a tourist base. So all of the stuff they try to sell you about how Santorini is a pastoral place where life has gone on in much the same way for ages is not quite accurate. The history to Santorini is more of the Neolithic variety, but the archaeological site of Akrotiri has been closed for the past few years, ever since the protective roof over the site collapsed and killed some people. The second reason why I think that Santorini was underwhelming to me is that I'm too used to that kind of a landscape, terrible as it is to say. Listening to my travel companions, I got the impression that the reason why Santorini was so beautiful was that you were on an island, you could look across the water, and see other islands, the which may have been amazing to my roommates from the waterless Midwest, but until I went away to college I could look across water and see land every day of my life (although to be fair the land I could see didn't meet the water in a sheer cliff and was considerably greener). Volcanoes, water, cliffs, this is what I'm used to. Sunsets over the water, sure, the view from Oia is pretty, but I was pretty old before I ever saw water to my east.
I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I thought that Santorini was too famous for being famous, when it really didn't seem all that special to me. It was pretty, to be sure, but it wasn't spectacular like Crete was. And I guess I'm a little disappointed that it was supposed to be superlative, and it wasn't.
Am I glad I went? Yes.
Would I go again, or recommend that other people take the ten-hour ferry from Athens to get there? Probably not, unless they ever reopen the site of Akrotiri. That would be really cool to visit, and there would actually be something there.
And I guess that if I'm complaining about Santorini, I must be doing pretty well.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Tony, Tony, look around
There are several very unladylike things I could say at the moment, but I don't think that I'll commit them to paper (well, virtual paper. Pixels, more like).
I seem to have lost my wallet.
The last time I saw it was about 11 am yesterday when I was paying for groceries at the Marinopolos on Kanari Street. I didn't realize that it wasn't where it ought to be until about 11 pm, when I was transferring everything that I needed for this morning's field trip to the National Archeological Museum from my backpack to my purse, which was too late to go looking for it, although my roommates and I did tear the apartment apart trying to find it, looking everywhere in the apartment it might possibly be, up to and including the freezer. So this morning, after I got back from the field trip, I asked at the front desk of the Academic Center whether anyone had turned in a lost wallet. No such luck. I retraced my steps through the National Gardens. No wallet. I enquired at the desk of the Marinopolos. No one had turned in a wallet. I don't know where else it could be.
What was in my wallet: about 30 euro, my Washington State learner's permit, my credit card, my debit card, a bunch of Starbucks gift cards, my bone marrow registry card, about 20 bus tickets, possibly my library cards and my HNA student ID, and a bunch of pictures of friends from high school.
On the bright side, my keys, my ISTIC, my DIKEMES student ID, my cell phone and my passport were not with my wallet, so I still have those. And I bought groceries before I lost my wallet, so I'm not going to starve this week. And it has American identification in it, so there's a good chance that it might be turned in to the American Embassy and it'll get back to me.
I called my mother, and she's going to call the banks and cancel my credit and debit cards, so I don't so much need to worry about that. And I got a loan from the accounting office at school until I get a replacement debit card.
What I'm really mad about is losing the pictures. Everything else in there was either replaceable or only money. Those pictures weren't. I had about 10 wallet sized pictures from HNA dances and senior pictures, including some from senior prom. There was also my only picture of me and Pat at junior prom, which is the only picture that I have in physical form of him taken after eighth grade (I think that there's a five by seven of that picture too, but that belongs to my mother). Those were the only copies I had of those pictures. I can't replace them. And now they're gone and I'm probably not going to get them back.
And what's nearly as maddening is that I have no idea where my wallet could have gone. You may not be able to tell it from looking at my room, but I'm really a very organized person. Everything has its place that it goes back in, or else I won't be able to find it. And there's only two places where my wallet goes: in the second compartment of my backpack if I have my backpack with me, or in the main compartment of my purse if I don't have my backpack. It only ever comes out if I am actively completing a transaction, and it goes right back into its place once the transaction is completed. So when people are asking, "well, where else could you have put it?" there is no other place where it could be. Which leaves the possibility that someone took it, but I think that that's really unlikely, because to do that the hypothetical pickpocket would have to unzip my backpack, while I'm wearing it, rummage around in the bottom of my backpack, while I'm wearing it, and rezip my backpack, while I'm wearing it, all without me noticing. So I have no idea where or how I could have lost it.
If anyone is so inclined, would you offer up a prayer to St. Anthony for me?
And there have got to be much better ways to find out that the Greek word for wallet is πορτοφολι.
I seem to have lost my wallet.
The last time I saw it was about 11 am yesterday when I was paying for groceries at the Marinopolos on Kanari Street. I didn't realize that it wasn't where it ought to be until about 11 pm, when I was transferring everything that I needed for this morning's field trip to the National Archeological Museum from my backpack to my purse, which was too late to go looking for it, although my roommates and I did tear the apartment apart trying to find it, looking everywhere in the apartment it might possibly be, up to and including the freezer. So this morning, after I got back from the field trip, I asked at the front desk of the Academic Center whether anyone had turned in a lost wallet. No such luck. I retraced my steps through the National Gardens. No wallet. I enquired at the desk of the Marinopolos. No one had turned in a wallet. I don't know where else it could be.
What was in my wallet: about 30 euro, my Washington State learner's permit, my credit card, my debit card, a bunch of Starbucks gift cards, my bone marrow registry card, about 20 bus tickets, possibly my library cards and my HNA student ID, and a bunch of pictures of friends from high school.
On the bright side, my keys, my ISTIC, my DIKEMES student ID, my cell phone and my passport were not with my wallet, so I still have those. And I bought groceries before I lost my wallet, so I'm not going to starve this week. And it has American identification in it, so there's a good chance that it might be turned in to the American Embassy and it'll get back to me.
I called my mother, and she's going to call the banks and cancel my credit and debit cards, so I don't so much need to worry about that. And I got a loan from the accounting office at school until I get a replacement debit card.
What I'm really mad about is losing the pictures. Everything else in there was either replaceable or only money. Those pictures weren't. I had about 10 wallet sized pictures from HNA dances and senior pictures, including some from senior prom. There was also my only picture of me and Pat at junior prom, which is the only picture that I have in physical form of him taken after eighth grade (I think that there's a five by seven of that picture too, but that belongs to my mother). Those were the only copies I had of those pictures. I can't replace them. And now they're gone and I'm probably not going to get them back.
And what's nearly as maddening is that I have no idea where my wallet could have gone. You may not be able to tell it from looking at my room, but I'm really a very organized person. Everything has its place that it goes back in, or else I won't be able to find it. And there's only two places where my wallet goes: in the second compartment of my backpack if I have my backpack with me, or in the main compartment of my purse if I don't have my backpack. It only ever comes out if I am actively completing a transaction, and it goes right back into its place once the transaction is completed. So when people are asking, "well, where else could you have put it?" there is no other place where it could be. Which leaves the possibility that someone took it, but I think that that's really unlikely, because to do that the hypothetical pickpocket would have to unzip my backpack, while I'm wearing it, rummage around in the bottom of my backpack, while I'm wearing it, and rezip my backpack, while I'm wearing it, all without me noticing. So I have no idea where or how I could have lost it.
If anyone is so inclined, would you offer up a prayer to St. Anthony for me?
And there have got to be much better ways to find out that the Greek word for wallet is πορτοφολι.
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