Weekend (cont.)

So last post I left of with the events of Friday evening. I spent all of Saturdy in the CYA computer lab (which is only open from 1pm to 8pm on Saturdays and 3pm to 11pm on Sundays). I worked until about 7 when Maddie, Gussi, Amanda, Carolyn, Chris and I met up to go out to dinner with Maddie's mum and her friend Alex who were in town visiting. Dinner was really fun and tasty at a taverna down the street from our school.

A whole group of us intended to go out again on Saturday night, but by the time we got home we were all so exhausted that we just ended up hanging out in Maddie and Gussi's room wrapped in blankets (because Maddie keeps her air-conditioning on something like 18 degrees C) and all crashed really early. Maddie also decided that jumping on my bed would be a good idea and broke it.

On Sunday I managed to write half of my essay in my head when I was half asleep in the morning and come up with some sort of coherent thesis, which is good. At 3 I went to CYA and managed to write my entire essay by 8pm so I could go out to dinner again with Maddie, Carolyn, Maddie's mum and her friend. This time we went to a place near the Acropolis where we sat outside and had another good dinner. The old Greek man who was our waiter (and probably the owner) made Maddie and I get up and dance with him a pretty basic traditional folk dance to the live music they had. It was fun, albeit somewhat embarassing.

This morning we all met, most of us exhausted and sleep deprived from late night essay writing, at the Theater of Dionysus at the base of the acropolis. This is the same theater where every ancient Greek play you've ever heard about debuted. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, you name it. Mercifully we didn't have a lecture class, but instead read outloud the play Lysistrata, a comedy by Aristophanes about the women of Greece forcing the men to make peace by denying them sex. Pretty funny stuff, and it was just amazing to be able to do that in the place where it was first performed. The English major in me gets all tingly when I think about it.

This afternoon we were supposed to go to a Byzantine monastary for our history class, but apparently the monastary (like most things in Greece) is open when the people feel like opening it and closed when they don't. Today was one of the days they didn't feel like it. So we had a good lecture about the rise of Islam and its effect on the Byzantine empire instead. As interesting as our lectures are, it did take me a good three or four cups of coffee to get through it without yawning.

This week is our last week of our History and Archeology classes, so we get to start studying for finals now that we're done with our essay (yay) which are both on Friday. Then Friday afternoon we all get on a ferry for Lesvos where we'll be living on a beach front hotel, doing an honest-to-god archeological dig and taking our general culture course. Granted, we're all excited about the change of scenery and routine.

After three weeks of that, we have a week of free travel. Right now Maddie, Chris and I are solidifying plans to visit Istanbul for 4 days, then we'll move south in Turkey to the port town of (I forgot the name), then to Crete to see Knossos and chill for a few days. My friend Melanie who's studying abroad in France has the same week off and is planning on meeting us in Istanbul, so we're all really excited. It should be super fun.

We don't really know right now how things stand with our access to the internet while we're on Lesvos, so I might not be updating a lot (or possibly at all), but I promise to take tons of pictures and post as thorougly as I can when we get back in Athens in November. And I'll try to get pictures of this last week up sometime before we leave. If you're starved for some visual aids, Carolyn has a really cute photo up on her blog (there's a link on the right side of this page) of one of the three cats that lives in our apartment's little courtyard, a kitten that we've taken to calling tiropita (cheese pie).

And for now, back to studying :)