The Mediterranean Life (Week Two)

I find myself again sitting in the CYA computer lab after a full week of life in Athens. Every day here is so packed with things that I figure the best way to describe it all it to just give you a blow-by-blow of my week, so here it goes.

Monday

On Monday afternoon our Byzantine history class met at the Byzantine museum. I didn't take any photos there but the art is amazing.

Tuesday

Our morning class, archeology, met at the National Archeological Museum for a second time, this time to see the exibit of Mycenean artifacts. Most of them were dug up my the archeologist Heinrick Schleiman back in the late 1800's. He thought that he'd found the Mycene of the Homeric poems, home of King Agammemnon of the Greeks. It was refered to by Homer as "Mycene rich in gold" and there is certainly a lot of gold in this exibit.

This is the famous "Deathmask of Agammemnon" which you might have seen before.

This is one of my favorite of the decorative daggers found in the Mycenean burial sites. Nifty design.

The great thing about the way that our Archeology class is set up is that part of it is to teach us how to make our way around Athens. We have to find our own way to and from the museums and archeological sites that we visit. On this day a me and my friends Maddie and Chris decided to walk back to the school instead of taking the bus. We had an amazing walk back through a nice shopping district of Athens called Plaka at the base of the acropolis.

This is one of my favorite photos from that walk. It shows well the juxtoposition in Athens between the old and new with the little Byzantine church in the middle of the street in a busy shopping area.

Wednesday

Our Archeology class met at the Keramakis, a graveyard with burials from the Archaic age through the Hellenistic. The museum there is primarily pottery, but there were also a few marble statues.

This is a picture of our whole group sitting outside the Keramakis museum with our professor.

This is one of the statues from the Keramakis museum, an archaic era koros.

Again a group of us decided to walk back to school, myself and my friends Chris and Hailey. We wandered a lot longer in a different area of the Plaka neigborhood. The architecture in this area of the city is a lot older and it had a lot of small tavernas and cafes.

Here is the view down one of the twisting streets in Plaka. The hill in the background is the entrance to the Acropolis.

Unfortunately, this trip didn't go as well as the last one. We ended up going the wrong way around the acropolis, which works well as a landmark, but only if you know which side of it you're on. So we ended up having to ask directions from some locals and barely made it back to the school in time for our next class.

On Wednesday night, my friend Ruth, who I've known since middle school got a hold of me. She was in town on vacation with a friend from college, staying at a hostel near the acropolis. I took the train out there and met her at her hostel, which has an amazing view of the parthenon at night from the rooftop bar. None of my pictures of it turned out at all, but it was awesome. Then she came back to my apartment to hang out for a while and we ended up climbing up to the top of the hill behind our neighborhood in the middle of the night. The view is just as amazing at night as it is during the day.

The city lights go on for every directions for miles and miles.

After we walked back down the hill, we said goodbye so that she could catch her flight to Berlin the next morning.

Thursday

In the morning our archeology class met at the ancient Agora (or marketplace), which is mostly just ruins.

This is what is left of the temple of the twelve gods in the Athenian agora. That wall through it marks of the train line on the other side. So basically when they built the trains in Athens at the beginning of the 20th century, they built

them through the ruins of the agora. Genius.

This is the Hephaistion, or temple of Hephaistos, the best preserved temple on mainland Greece. Pretty nifty.

After the agora we went up to the Pnyx hill where the assembly of ancient Athens met to vote. This is the view from there. The hill in the foreground is the acropolis, complete with parthenon, etc. The hill in the background is the one that our neigborhood is next to with the monastary on top of it.

After classes on Thursday, my friend Rianna and I (the only two people on the trip who are overloading and taking Ancient Greek) met with our professor for dinner and class. I didn't get home until 8pm when I crashed and slept until the next morning.

Friday

Carolyn and Amanda, a few of my flatmates, decided to get out of Athens and take a trip to the Island of Aegina, which is only an hour's ferry ride from Piraeus, the port of Athens. So we hopped a train to Piraeus and a ferry to Aegina and spent Friday afternoon and night in Aegina.

It's a decent sized island. There are fishing villages along the coasts and on the other side of the island there is supposed to be an amazing ruin, but you have to get there by bus, so we didn't manage to get out of the town of Aegina, which is the port city on the island. It's sort of the steriotypical Greek island town, with tavernas along the waterfront, little winding cobble stone streets, houses with white stucko walls and brightly colored windows and doors. A bit touristy, but it was nice to get out of Athens for a night. We had lunch and dinner at different tavernas, went swimming in the Aegean which is warm and really really salty, laid around on a beach for the afternoon, and went for a walk down the coast after dinner. We stayed the night at a little hotel we found in a room that had three beds was really cheap, definately a good find.

I'm just happy that I had a chance to get out of town for a bit and see more of Greece than Athens. Also from the ferry, I had my first journey over the famous "wine dark sea" of Homer. This is the same sea that merchants have been traveling across since the neolithic times, the same sea that the heros of the epics would have sailed across to go fight at Troy, or to wend their way slowly homeward. Amazing.

This is a photo of the port of Aegina from the ferry as we arrived. Our hotel was right behind the church with the big spires in the background.

On Saturday we headed back home to relax for a bit. In the evening I went out to a bar with a few friends and ended up staying up really late talking with my flatmate Maddie on our balcony. This morning was cool and gray for once, and I went out to Plaka with my flatmates Carolyn and our friend Wendy. Bought a changepurse for the massive collection of change that I've been developing since I've been here.

Now I'm at CYA again. I must be off to study for our Byzantine history midterm tomorrow and translate some ancient Greek.

In conclusion, I would say that two weeks both seems like no time at all and all the time in the world. I find myself slowly falling in love once again with a city far away from home. It is a great comfort to me to be reminded again that I can be happy no matter where I am, and just how many options I have for what I do with my life. Live everywhere, see everything that I can. That's the plan for now. This should be the first of many logs of my journeys overseas.