Clariece In Greece

The Calm Before the Storm

2008-01-06T13:58:00.000+02:00

So after saying goodbye to Melanie in Vienna (she took a plane back to Strasbourg and should be flying back home in a few days) I stayed by myself in Vienna for one more night. Went to check out a really nifty exibit at the museum of technology and industry called "Kings of Chrome" which was a showcase of rare classic cars. A few Alfas, some Mercades, some Bugattis. It was pretty impressive. Then I had one more night in the hostel and woke up at 5am the next morning to check out and catch a bus to Munich which I almost missed because it took longer to get to the bus station on the metro than I expected it to. But all turned out well. After a long bus ride, I arrived in Munich, hopped a metro (U-bahn) to the Studentenstadt station where I was surprised to be met by my friends from home, Mary, Dakota and Alice. They are all studying abroad here for the year. So for the next few days, I'm staying with Mary and having a great time relaxing with friends before I head to Spain. Last night I went out with Dakota, Alice and some friends and had a great time. Today Mary's going to show me around the city, and tomorrow I'm tagging along to some classes. It's a nice respite from the chaos of travel and it's great to see my friends. Before I know it, this segment of my life will be over and I'll be in Madrid living with a host family. At this point I'm definately both really excited and a bit terrified. But for now, all is calm.

Spanglish Lessons

2008-01-03T19:16:00.000+02:00

The new blog is called "Spanglish Lessons" and the address is:

http://www.spanglish-lessons.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

Happy New Years from Europe!

2008-01-03T18:20:00.000+02:00

Where we left off in our story, I was in Amsterdam with Melanie and Chris enjoying some Christmas cheer. Since then a lot has changed and a lot has happened. We said goodbye to Chris in Amsterdam when he flew home on the 29th. Now he's back in California snowboarding with friends. Mel and I hopped a 15 hour overnight bus to Prague. In all, it wasn't too bad, especially since Mel convinced me to join her in taking a sleeping pill and I managed to sleep through about 12 hours of the trip. We arrived in Prague exhausted and got lost in the distant suburbs of the city trying to find our hotel in the freezing cold. Fortunately for us, as it turns out, people from Prague are the nicest people on earth. Some woman came up to us and asked us if we needed help and basically walked us to our hotel. Due to some strange twist of fate, the cheapest lodging that Mel could find for us in the city was actually this amazing hotel with a big fluffy white bed, minifridge, tv, and the best shower ever. That first night we were so exhausted that we stayed in and watched bad old American movies dubbed in Czech.

On day two it was time to go explore the city. Now I've heard before from people how amazing Prague is but I never really got it until we went. The city was completely undamaged by the Germans in the second world war, so buildings from as far back as the middle ages are completely intact. The whole city centers around the river, which is wide and shallow, and hills in the west, one of which is crested by the palace district and the beautiful St. Vitus' Church. Of everywhere that I've been in Europe so far, Prague has the most amazing architecture. If you just walk around the city, you find something beautiful around every corner: opera houses, gothic churches, ancient synagogues, modern architecture. This city has it all.

On the first day, Mel and I wandered around the city and ran into a cross country ski competition in the middle of a huge square in the palace district. Of all the absurd things to come across in the middle of a city, a ski race? There had to have been thousands of people there. Well... at least we figured out why hotels were so expensive that week. We also went to a concert in the Mirror Chapel (a really nifty chapel) of a saxophone quartet playing classical music. It was pretty amazing.

That evening Mel's friend from her program in France, Mike, met up with us. So he flew in from Amsterdam and told us that he should be at the hotel between 11 pm and 1 am. So we stayed up waiting for him, watching movies dubbed in Czech, and as it got closer and closer to 1 am we were getting worried that he'd gotten lost in Prague or something. About 10 to 1, he showed up and it turned out that he'd been sitting in the room next door for the last hour or so. Apparently the hotel clerk gave him the keys to the wrong room and the people staying in that room were out, so he sat around and watched tv for an hour until he realized that the luggage in the room didn't look like ours and the couple who were staying there actually came back. They weren't too happy about it.

So the three of us wandered around the city more the next day and prepared for New Years Eve. That night we found ourselves a spot on Charles' Bridge, the famous medieval pedestrian bridge that runs through the heart of the city, to watch the fireworks from. While we were waiting, we ran into a group of crazy French guys and some Russian and German girls and we all hung out on the bridge for a long time. We were expecting to be able to see the fireworks over the big main square in town, which we had a great view of, set against the background of a gothic tower on the East end of the bridge. What we didn't expect was a fireworks display set off from a barge on the river right in front of us. It was pretty amazing. There was much alcohol, merriment and a few sparklers that the Russian woman gave us. Then when all of the fireworks across the city had finally died down, we walked back to our hotel exhausted from the chaos of the night.

The next day we checked out the palace and saw more of the city, which I think all three of us fell in love with.

The day after that, Mike left early on a bus back to Strasbourg and at noon, Mel and I caught one to Vienna. The bus ride was beautiful, mostly through snowy wilderness, and they played My Big Fat Greek Wedding which is funnier now that I've lived in Greece. After some initial confusion about where exactly our hostel was, we made it here yesterday evening. We're staying in a dorm with eight people, which is always a bit awkward but not bad. The hostel is amazing, with cheap internet access and laundry facilities. We found an inexpensive Turkish restaurant down the street for dinner and reminisced about our adventures in Istanbul over cups of apple tea.

Today we went out and saw what we could of the city. It is certainly beautiful, but also bitterly cold which makes one more inclined to take refuge in cafes than look at pretty buildings. We did manage to see our share of large important looking buildings and churches (and they have some seriously impressive baroque style churches here), had some delicious and filling Austrian food for lunch and tea later at the Opera House cafe. Tomorrow Mel is flying back to Strasbourg and then home, and then it's Clariece alone in Europe.

The good news is that I have everything worked out at last. I can't arrive in Madrid until the 8th because my host family is on vacation or something, so I'm spending one more night in Vienna (I intend to go to a rare car museum tomorrow after Mel leaves) and then catching a bus to Munich at some ungodly hour of the morning on the 5th. Then I'll be meeting up with my friends Mary, Dakota and Alice who are all spending a year studying abroad in Munich. Mary is kind enough to let me sleep on her floor for a few nights and then I have airplane tickets from Munich to Madrid on the 8th and a whole new kind of adventure begins. So right now I'm super excited to 1. see my friends in Munich, 2. have somewhere to sleep for free, and 3. go to Spain!

At first when people started leaving Greece to go home and then when Chris left the other day, I was getting really homesick, but the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that I made the right decision to stay in Europe for another semester. Everyone I've met in the past few days who's been to Spain has told me that it's amazing, which can only be a good omen. I think I'm finally ready to start a new overseas adventure.

For next semester, I think I'm going to start another blog, so as to keep things simple (at least for me). As soon as I have it up, I'll post the link here.

Wishing everyone back home a Happy New Year from Europe!

Spain Update and Christmas in Europe

2007-12-27T15:23:00.000+02:00

For those of you bitting your nails about whether, a week from now, I'll be flying home, trying to make it in Europe on my own, or moving in with a host family in Spain, I figured it was time for an update. I got an email back today from the woman who is going to be my host mother (who I've been trying to get a hold of for two or three weeks now) saying that they're looking forward to having me join their family this January. They are a family of five who live in the suburbs of Madrid. The father works for some big international company, the mother works at home and they have three children, a 10 year old daughter, who I will probably be working with the most, and two teenage sons. At this point, I am corresponding with the mother over email about when they would like me to arrive. So all is going well, and my plans are back on track.

In other news, we had a lovely Christmas. In Paris we met up with Mel's roommate, Amelia, who has an apartment in Paris for over winter break. As it turned out, her apartment was literally across the street from our hotel. So we spent a lot of time with Amelia and her friend Rachel. They had us over for Christmas Eve dinner. We had pasta carbonara and hung around. Mel called it her idea of a quaint European Christmas.

On Christmas day we actually woke up at 6am to catch our train to Amsterdam. The train ride was fine and we arrived in Amsterdam hungry and disoriented and had a mellow Christmas evening. Since then we've been seeing the sights of Amsterdam, which is a mercifully small city and easy to get around by foot. So far, it has to be one of my favorite cities that we've visited. The canals are beautiful, the people are friendly (a nice change after Paris) and we don't really have many plans except to relax and enjoy the city. This afternoon, we're going to go check out some museums and Mel's really excited for the after Christmas sales.

Tomorrow Chris flies back home. We'll see him off at the airport. Then Mel and I catch a 15 hour overnight bus to Prague where we'll be for New Years.

Hope that everyone back home had a lovely Christmas and will have a happy New Years.

Ahhh, The French

2007-12-21T12:28:00.000+02:00

Writing today from an internet cafe in Strasbourg, France. A few days ago we left Zurich for Basel, a town in northern Switzerland, and spent that afternoon in Bern, the capital. Both were really nifty, smaller and a bit more welcoming than Zurich was. Then yesterday, we hopped a train to Strasbourg where we met up with our friend Melanie who has been studying here and will be with me for the rest of my travels. Strasbourg is another big European city full of beautiful and imposing architecture. The cathedral here is gigantic and quite well known, I think. They have France's oldest Christmas market which draws a lot of tourists at this time of year and gives everything a very festive atmosphere. Today we'll be bumming around the city with Mel as she prepares to leave and then heading to Paris by train tomorrow. I was hoping that it would be warmer here than in Switzerland, but no such luck. It was actually snowing a bit earlier this morning. With the Christmas lights and the cold weather, it definately feels like Christmas is quickly approaching and Europe has certainly decked herself out for the occasion.

Goodbye, Italy

2007-12-16T18:08:00.000+02:00

So to update you on our travels, we spent the last two nights in Venice, which was lovely, but expensive, then this morning took a train from Venice to Zurich, where we'll be for the next few nights. The train ride through the mountains was amazing. All is well, although very cold. Out of time at the internet cafe.

Power Tourism

2007-12-12T10:37:00.000+02:00

Hello, all. Just wanted to put up a short post to let everyone know what is going on right now. Chris and I left Athens for Rome 5 days ago. We spent a few lovely days in Rome which is a beautiful city, and then hopped a train to Florence yesterday, stopping over in Pisa to check out that leaning tower thing, which is pretty awesome. Today we're off to explore Florence. I'll try as best as I can to keep you updated on my whereabouts.

In other news, InterExchange, the company that is organizing my host family to live with and teach English to in Spain has just contacted me with a prospective host family that lives in Madrid. I'm now in the process of figuring out how to finalize my plans for next semester, but things are looking good. I'll keep you up to date.

Off to explore Italy!

A Taste of Ancient Greece

2007-12-05T15:04:00.000+02:00

Last week in Athens!

Classes ended last Thursday and were capped off by our performance of "Kassandrama" a play based on fragments of two of Euripides plays about the Trojan war. Anthony Stevens introduced it to us on the first day as "an avant-garde, experimental, theatromontage." Trust me, it was an interesting experiance to perform it.

A few days ago we had a goodbye pizza party at the Kugler's apartment, which will probably be the last time that all of us are together. People are leaving this week as early as tomorrow. I'm in town until Saturday, time I'll need to finish off my last essay and take my Ancient Greek final.

Last night a group of us went out to this restaurant that serves "ancient Greek food" based on references in surviving texts from the time. Honestly, I feel like it was more of an excuse to make really tasty food and make the patrons eat with their hands in a fancy restaurant situation. With such a big group, it ended up being fairly reasonably priced, especially considering that we had multiple courses of really tasty food. How genuinely ancient it was is questionable, but after a sip of the sweet honeyed wine and a taste of the pork stuffed with dates, no one cared anymore.

This morning, I ran some errands and bought a guidebook to Western Europe for our impending travel spree. We have plane tickets to Rome, Eurail passes, and hostels booked.

I think I'm going to miss the group and the sense of community that we have here in Athens, but I'm ready to see a bit more of Europe at this point. I think I'll have to wait a few months to get all nostalgic and begin to wax poetic about how amazing this experiance has been; enough time to forget all of the hours spent in classes and the computer lab and have my memories distilled down to all of the wonderful times and experiances I've had here. For now, I'm still in the computer lab, dreaming of Italy.

A Much Needed Break

2007-11-27T15:36:00.000+02:00

Over the past three weeks, I've been spending nearly twelve hours a day at CYA, in class and in the computer lab working on my essays for Art & Archeology and Byzantine History, both of which were due yesterday. I can't say how glad I was to get those both finished last week and have a relaxing Thanksgiving and weekend away.

For Thanksgiving we managed to get most of the group together in one of the guy's apartments, where Maddie and Helana spent all day cooking and set up a long table out of the guy's desks. Everyone who came brought a dish (I brought some Hot Buttered Rum for desert)and everything was delicious. Many thanks to Maddie for all of her hard work, trying to make dinner for so many people. All went splendidly and everyone was in good cheer.

After dinner, we all hopped the metro to a theater in Athens where we went to see a performance of Aescylus' Prometheus Bound with our theater professor. To be honest, I slept through most of the play (that's how exhausted I've been) but from what I did see, it was a pretty nifty production.

The next day Chris and I headed to the airport to catch our plane to the island of Santorini. It's that island that you always see photos of with the white and blue houses hanging off of the cliffside. It truly is a beautiful and picturesqe place. We stayed in a hostel that turned out to be as nice as a hotel in a suburb of Fira, the largest town on the island. In the summertime, the place is swamped with tourists, but in late November, hardly anyone was there. The first day we spent relaxing and reading in our hotel room and exploring the town of Fira. On Sunday we went on a boat tour that went to the active volcano in the center of the islands (Santorini is actually a group of four islands created by the explosion of the volcano in prehistoric times) which is still puffing a bit of sulfur smelling smoke and to a hot springs off of one of the other islands.

When I say hot springs, what I really mean is "luke-warm springs". What happened is that the boat pulls up to this cove and they put a ladder over the side. The way it works is that you jump into the (freezing cold) sea and swim about 100 feet over to the smaller cove with the hot springs. Half of the people on the boat didn't even bother to go in, but Chris and I did. When we got to the "hot springs" we realized that they weren't all that hot at all, and then we had to swim back through the cold sea water to the boat. I thought the whole thing was quite funny and had a great time, regardless.

That evening we took a boat up to Oia (pronounced Ia) to watch their famous sunset. It was beautiful, but I think I've seen sunsets out in Eastern Oregon over the desert that could easily rival it. We realized after it had gotten dark that there weren't anymore buses running that evening and our chance of finding a cab in an abandoned town was pretty unlikely. Fortunately we did happen to grab the only cab in Oia which we shared with a few med students from the east coast and made it back to our hostel in the end.

On Monday morning, the owner of the hostel drove us to the airport to catch our flight back to Athens. We made it into town a few hours before out Attic Tragedy class and had to take the metro into Athens and then stop by at our apartments to grab our school stuff. We made it back to class in just the nick of time.

Overall, it was a really nice and relaxing weekend. Unfortunately, the second we arrived back in Athens we were plunged back into the chaos of essays and play performances. But we only have two more weeks until the end of the semester and then it's off on an adventure in Europe.

So I think I have a solid plan at this point for travel after the program ends. Chris and I will be traveling together. We're leaving Athens on the 8th of December and flying to Rome. Then we're taking the train through Pisa to Florence, then to Sienna and Venice. After that we're going north to Switzerland where we'll be in Zurich for a few days and then Basel, a smaller town in northern Switzerland. After that we're taking the train up to Strausbourg in France where we'll meet my friend Melanie (who we traveled with in Istanbul and Crete). From Strausbourg we'll take the train to Paris and on Christmas day we'll travel from Paris to Amsterdam. We'll be in Amsterdam for a few days, then Chris leaves for the states and Mel and I and a few of her friends from France are going to Prague for New Years. After that, Mel and I will probably be going to Vienna for a few days. Then she heads back home and I'll be off to Spain for the next four months (hopefully).

I'm sending in the final application for Spain tomorrow, so hopefully I'll find out soon if they have a placement for me. I'll keep you posted about it.

I'm really excited for my mini tour of Europe. It should be amazing. But for now, It's back to essay writing.

The Last Five Weeks

2007-11-19T14:34:00.000+02:00

So, where we left off in the adventure, I was on the Isle of Lesvos with all of my comrades puttering around the island, swimming in the sea, working at some archeological sites, and taking our Greek culture class with Prof Sophia. Since then, quite a bit has happened.

Our time on Lesvos ended with an 8am ferry ride to Ayvalik, the town in Turkey directly across the water from Lesvos. We spent the next four days with the whole group traveling around western Turkey on the world's smallest tour bus. The first two nights, we were in Assos, a tiny town with all of one taverna and maybe two hotels on the coast, where there is a sweet archeological site up on top of the hill where we climbed all over the ruins of an ancient temple and fortifications. We made our way up to Troy, where we all took lots of photos of the group in their giant 'replica' of the Trojan horse. Then down south to Pergamon, where it was raining buckets, so we spent more time hiding under trees and in catacombs than looking at the actual site. The second two nights we stayed in the town of Selchuk nearby the site of Ephesus, where we discovered the joys of hooka bars and Ephes, the ONLY beer in Turkey. The next day we went to Ephesus, which has the ruins of a Roman era library, some Roman villas with sweet mosaics and a really nice ancient theater that was gigantic.

The next morning our week of free travel began. The world's smallest tour bus dropped us off at the airport in Izmir where I traveled with Maddie and Chris to Istanbul where we met up with my friend Melanie who is studying in France. Our hostel was in the area called Sultanamet, which was mostly hostels, hotels and restaurants nearby the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. From the rooftop we had an amazing view of the spires of both of them over the city.

We spent our time in Istanbul relaxing and doing touristy things. Visited the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia (where I took a lot of photos, but realized that it is impossible to capture the monumental scale of the building), the Basilica Cistern (a Roman cistern used to store water for times of siege, which was underground and looks a bit like the great hall of Moria from Lord of the Rings) where we had some of their amazing apple tea by candle light, the Grand Bazaar and slightly more difficult to find Spice Bazaar, which were both incredibly overwhelming, Topkapi Palace where the sultan and his harem lived back in the time of the Ottoman Empire, and Chris and I also managed to make it to the Archeological Museum there, which had some nifty things, most interesting of all being what they claim to be the world's oldest love poem carved into a slab of rock.

We spent our evenings in our room talking, in the hostel's bar meeting travelers from around the world, or exploring the nightlife of the city. We found this amazing place on the other side of the river from our hostel that was a full block of outdoor hooka bars. Just red and orange bean bag chairs and small tables as far as the eye could see, and no one tourists in sight. We sat and relaxed and smoked some hooka, and waiters came around with trays of tasty apple tea and fruits and desserts.

Basically, I loved everything about Istanbul, and certainly intend to go back at some point. It's made my list of places to live in the future.

After our 6 nights in Istanbul, the four of us took a ferry to another town farther south and then a long bus ride back to Ayvalik where we met up with the rest of our group and took the ferry back to Lesvos. We spent two nights on Lesvos in Hotel Votsala, which was lovely, because we got a chance to show Mel around the place where we had been living for the last month. Then we hopped a plane to Heraklion on Crete.

This airplane just happens to be the smallest passenger airplane I've ever been on in my life. I love flying, so I had a great trip, but Mel and Maddie who aren't too great with flying to begin with, didn't have so much fun.

When we arrived in Crete, we managed to find a hostel to stay in for the two nights we were there, which was alright except for the midnight curfew and the lack of electricity in our room. While we were there, we visited the archeological site of Knossos, which is really well known, and the Crete aquarium. Then we puttered around town for a day, said goodbye to Melanie and headed back to Athens.

Here in Athens, it's back to the grindstone academically. We are taking our last class, Attic Tragedy with Prof Anthony Stevens and have three term papers and our capstone project to finish, along with the performance of a play for our Tragedy class. It's a lot to handle, but we all know that we can do it. I've already managed to finish one essay for my Archeology class and need to have the one for my History class done by Thursday.

Both of the last two weekends we've gone out of town as a group. The first weekend, a one night trip to Meteora in central Greece and this past weekend a two night trip to the Peloponnese where we saw Epidaurus, Mycene, Tiryns, Naufplia, and Olympia.

Meteora is a town at the foot of these amazing rock promontories that jut straight up into the air. A long time ago, hermits started living in the crevices of the cliffs and eventually there got to be so many that they established first one monastary, and then others, up on the tops of the cliffs. They're amazing because the buildings seem to just grow out of the rocks almost organically. Until the last century, the only way to get into most of the monastaries was by being pulled up in a net. Next to Istanbul, I think it's my favorite place that I've been on this trip.

This past weekend was also amazing, although tainted a bit by the fact that it was pouring down rain the entire time. The first day we visited Epidaurus, a sanctuary to the god of healing Asklepius, and a very pretty and peaceful place. The theater of Epidaurus is supposedly the most acoustically perfect theater ever. It is massive, but if you drop a coin in the center of the orchestra, it can be heard even in the highest seats. We stayed the first night in Naufplia, a lovely little town with a sweet castle on the hill above it. It was the original capital of Greece after it broke away from the Ottomans. The next morning we visited the castle on the hill, which is huge and in pristine condition because it never fell, rather it was betrayed, supposedly by the French architect who designed it. Up there on the hill we watched the storm move in that would mark the rest of our trip.

That day we visited the sites of Tiryns and Mycene, both from the Mycenaean civilization of the Bronze Age. They have walls made of stone so big that in the Classical Era they called them Cyclopian, because they thought that the giant cyclopses must have built them. In Mycene we all went to look at the underground cistern, which is down a long dark stairway that is pitch black without lights. I felt a bit like Lara Croft or Indiana Jones exploring the unknown. Except of course that archeologists and tourists have known about this for years. Mycene is the home of mythical characters such as Agamemnon, general of the Greek troops that fought at Troy, and is called by Homer "Mycene, rich in Gold".

Then, soaking wet from the rain, we took the bus onwards to Olympia, another little Greek town, where most of the group spent the night inside hiding from the rain, watching MTV (an American television station) for the first time in months. The next morning, we walked to the site of ancient Olympia, where the original Olympic games were held. There is quite a bit of the site left, including the ruins of the massive temple to Zeus, the temple to Hera and the original Olympic stadium where Professor Wardle had the girls and guys run races for the prize of a free lunch (I remained comfortably a spectator). The museum at Olympia had some interesting bronze work found at the site and the famous statue by Praxilities of Hermes and the baby Dionysus.

Once again drenched to the bone, we all boarded back on the bus and returned to Athens, and back to the grindstone again.

This week is a lot of essay writing, a lot of class, a midterm on Wednesday and Thanksgiving on Thursday. Thursday evening we're also going to a play with our Theater class, which should be fun. Then Friday, Chris and I are flying to Santorini for the weekend, where I promise to take lots of photos of the blue and white houses and intend to relax a bit with two of my essays and one midterm done.

To all of you back home, I hope that you have a great Thanksgiving spent with loved ones. I will miss you all, and as my friend Alison reminded me, I'll also be missing our traditional attempt to view the Christmas tree lighting in Pioneer Square.

Much love to you all,
- C

Island Exodus

2007-10-04T14:30:00.000+03:00

Sorry for the length of time between this post and the last. Here in Lesvos we have internet, but I haven't had the time since I've been here to be on the computer at all.

So last Friday we had our final exams for the two classes that we were taking in Athens, Art and Archeology, and Byzantine History, which seem to have gone well enough. That evening the whole group met at a metro station and headed out to Pireus, the port town of Athens, where we caught our ferry to the Isle of Lesvos. The ferry ride was 12 hours long, and generally uneventful, except that they played the movie "Titanic" on the main deck. Seriously, who's idea was it to play a movie about a ship sinking ON A SHIP. Then again, the Aegean certainly isn't the Arctic.

So we arrived at Mytilini (the largets city on Lesvos, with 45,000 inhabitants) and were driven in cars by the staff of Hotel Votsala, where we are staying, to the hotel. That first day we had a bunch of meetings, were introduced to our General Culture professor, Sophia, and had a walking tour of Thermi (the town we are staying in) with Iannis (owner of the Hotel). Thermi is a little fishing village on the Eastern side of Lesvos with about 1,000 residents. Our hotel is on the beach, with a jetty out into the sea with a diving board, a bunch of kyaks, a peddle boat with a slide on top of it, and a lot of lounge chairs out in the sun. On the first day between engagements, Hilary and Chris and I went swimming. We took the paddle boat out to where the water was deep enough and had lots of fun jumping off the slide. The water is perfectly clear and you can see all of the fish and seaweed at the bottom. It is also really warm, at least compared to the water off of the Oregon coast.

All of us are in two person hotel rooms here, and my roomate is Rianna, who is the only other ancient Greek student on the trip, so the arrangement works out nicely. Our room is on the second floor and we have a balconey looking out towards the sea (though there are a few more buildings between us and the shore, so the view isn't quite a beachfront one). All around us are other rooms with Lewis and Clark students. We don't have a kitchen here, but they feed us breakfast, a snack, and dinner everyday so we never really have to cook anyway.

On Sunday we were supposed to have a all day long field trip around the island, but Prof Kugler seemed to get the hint that we were all exhausted from finals, the ferry ride and moving and postponed the trip until this weekend, so just about everyone spent the day sleeping. On Monday we had a tour of Mytilini with Iannis, which is only about 45 minutes by bus south of Thermi.

On Tuesday we began work at the different archeological sites around Thermi and Mytilini. For this week I'm in a group of 12 at the site of the Bronze age settlement at Thermi which has been entirely excavated. Now they're just doing reconstruction and preparing the site for the public. I spent all of Tuesday categorizing animal bone fragments with a group of people, which was cool, but I felt really underqualified. Until a few days ago, there was no way I could tell the difference between a pig mandible and a goat scapula. Yesterday I was at the same site, this time digging with a group in an unexcavated area. We haven't found much of anything yet except really small shards of pottery and one brick, but I don't think they expected us to. Other groups are working at three different sites in Mytilini, a Roman era rescue dig (someone wanted to build a hotel and they found ruins when they went to build the foundations), at a metals workshop, and at a ceramics workshop. Next week we rotate and our group breaks up into smaller groups of 4 to go to each of these places. I'm most excited about the pottery workshop where they put together shards of pottery back into pots.

In the evenings we have our general culture course with Prof Sophia who is a Greek-American and a sociology professor at Michigan State University. She has a lot of insight into Greek culture as both a Greek and a sociologist, so the class is fairly interesting, but sociology really isn't my field, or my cup of tea.

In the evenings we have dinner in the cafeteria/lounge at the hotel. Each night has been a different Greek dish, all delicious. They have a bar, and the group I usually sit with at dinner has gotten into the habit of getting a jug of wine to split with dinner at every meal, which is less expensive and more Greek. After dinner, people play board games and cards, sometimes really late into the night. A few nights ago the whole group went out to a bar in Mytilini to celebrate one of the girls in the group's birthday and had a great time. Last night Prof Sophia suggested that we have a screening of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" which is even more funny now that I've been to Greece.

What little free time we have is wonderful. Most people lay around on the lounge chairs or go swimming. Yesterday Chris and I went swimming and then kyaked along the shore to a bunch of submerged ruins off of the beach, which was pretty cool.

As much as the sunny weather and warm sand makes me think that we're not in school anymore, we most definately are. I have a ancient Greek quiz this afternoon that I'd better get around to studying for. I'll post some pictures as soon as I have time.

For now, yasu!

Some Photos from the Past Few Weeks

2007-09-27T16:58:00.000+03:00

Just some photos from last week.

The Parthenon (at last!)

The Erectheon along with some of my classmates

Me in front of the Erectheon

The Theater of Dionysus

Rianna (left) and Maddie (right) at the theater of Dionysus

Me at the Theater of Dionysus

Just a funny statue at the National Archeological Museum on our last trip. Roman era.

Gandalf (Dionysus)

Some hot Roman guy who was sleeping with the emperor.

That's all for now. Off to study for finals tomorrow and pack for Lesvos!

Weekend (cont.)

2007-09-24T16:50:00.000+03:00

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 :)

A Moment to Breathe

2007-09-24T13:40:00.000+03:00

So I have just a moment now between lunch, finishing my Archaeology essay and the beginning of my History class, so I'll try to be about as thorough as I can about last week in the next ten minutes. Will post photos as soon as I get a chance.

Monday
For Archeology we went to the Keramiokos cemetary again. Not much to say. After a while even I get sick of looking at old rocks, which is primarily what is left of the Keramiakos.

In history we had midterms (yay). At least it was an essay exam.

That night I had to work on a presentation with Consuelo (one of two other English majors on the trip and just a nifty person in general). We were at CYA until 8 or 9 pm, but on the way home she showed me this place in our neighborhood that makes gyros to go for 2.50 euro that are super tasty. I've been going there every chance I get since then.

Tuesday
We spent 4 hours at the National Archeological Museum looking at pots. Again, there are only so many pots a person can handle. Consuelo and I gave our presentation on women in vase painting, and our whole group got yelled at by an angry Greek man for sitting on the floor during a presentation about Panathenaic vases.

Our history professor seemed to notice how exhausted we all were, so in his class we ended up just watching a really terrible 80's vintage Greek film about mosaics and the emperor Justinian.

Wednesday
After nearly three weeks in Athens, we finally made it to the Acropolis. It was apocalyptically hot and humid, but nifty nonetheless to be on the acropolis. Except of course that you aren't actually allowed to touch anything and they're reconstructing the Parthenon to what it would have looked like in the Classical era (a decision I'm not exactly sure I agree with, reconstruction is a delicate science).

Thursday
Acropolis, episode 2. We finished discussing the Parthenon, etc, and got to climb up the Areopagus hill where murder trials were held in ancient Greece.

For History class, we went to the museum of Islamic art, which is the best museum of it's kind in all of Europe. It was pretty nifty, but they didn't let us take any pictures at all, which is really too bad because the stuff there is gorgeous.

That night Gussi convinced me to go out with her and we had a good time with a group of LC students and CYA students at a bar in the neighborhood of Pangrati.

Friday
Hardcore essay writing time at CYA all day. That evening Young Chris and Gussi and I went in search of a dance club and discovered the nightlife of the Monastiraki neighborhood which is amazing. We failed at finding a club, and missed the last metro back home so we walked around for like two hours and eventually found our way home. Then Chris and I climbed up to the monastary again for the view, but it was too windy and cold to stay for long. A good night overall.

I suppose I'll cover the weekend in the next post. Now it's time for class.

Essay Gridlock

2007-09-21T14:12:00.000+03:00

I know that I've usually been posting pretty detailed descriptions of my week on Sunday afternoons, which I'd like to keep up as much as possible, but this week's post might be a few days late. We have our first big essay for our Art and Archeology class due this Monday, so every free hour is devoted to research. My topic is how much the burial practices and narrative art of the geometric period reflect the Homeric epics, pretty nifty stuff. And then I have a Greek test on Tuesday, finals for our two classes are both next Friday and then we're leaving for our month on the Isle of Lesvos. So there's a lot of stuff going on right now, and I'll try to keep this as updated as possible, but I'm not sure how often that will be in the coming weeks.

Notable events of last week include going to the Acropolis twice, the Islamic Art Museum and giving presentations on Greek vases. More detail later. For now, it's essay writing time.

The Mediterranean Life (Week Two)

2007-09-16T15:35:00.000+03:00

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.

Week One

2007-09-09T18:02:00.000+03:00

Honestly, this first week in Athens has flown by, probably because they've been keeping us so busy. There were a few days in a row when we left our apartment at 8am and got back at 11pm. Besides our regular schedule of 2 3-hour classes a day, we've been doing all sorts of things, including a Survival Greek class (where they taught us how to order food but not how to ask where the bathroom is), a taverna dinner where we met other CYA students and faculty, a dinner at the house of the President of CYA (which I declined to go to) and a multitude of other orientation activities which had us worn out and exhausted by Friday.

And on Friday, we went to Delphi. For those of you who don't know, there was a huge sanctuary at Delphi, in the mountains north of Athens, dedicated to the god Apollo. It is most famous for the Delphic oracle, the most trusted prophetess in ancient Greece. It also has a theater and a stadium where Panhellenic games were held (similar to the Olympic games held in Olympia on the Peloponnese). During the games, war was temporarily put on hold between the Greek city states.

On the way up to Delphi we stopped at the monastary of St. Lucas, which has a great church from the Byzantine era (around 10th century) and a slightly later church. Here are some photos:

This is a group of people from our trip standing around.

A view of the monastery and the hills surrounding it.

Some mosaics on the inside of the Byzantine church.

After that we drove on towards Delphi, where we arrived in the middle of a pretty serious rainstorm. We hung out in the museum there for a little while and saw some of the most amazing things.

These are archaic period statues of two brothers whose story is told in Herodotus' History. Solon the famous lawgiver of Athens told the story to King Croesus of Lydia of two boys who carried their mother up to the sanctuary of Delphi when their donkey went lame. She was so pleased with them when they arrived that she prayed to the gods that they might have the best possible life and at that very moment they died. Point being that the Greeks valued death in youth at a moment of glory over living into one's questionable old age. Hmm...

The museum at Delphi has a great collection of artifacts from the Mycenean Age through the Hellenistic (after the Classical period), but I'll not bore you with photos.

I seem to have lost all of the photos that I took at the temple of Apollo at Delphi (as if you needed to see more pictures of ruins). The rain gave the mountains a beautiful misty atmospheric feeling, and the view from the sanctuary of the green valley below is amazing. The sun came out on our way back down from the sanctuary and it was bright and sunny when we went to the Temple of Athena on the hill below.

Besides spending hours of time in classes (during which we have gotten a chance to go to the Cycladic art museum and the Archeological Museum of Athens, where just about every ancient Greek thing you've ever seen a picture of resides) I've been spending my free time this weekend relaxing and catching up on homework. Last night a whole group of us walked up the hill just behind our neighborhood at sunset to catch the view of Athens which was spectacular. There is a little church on top of the hill and a restaurant. When we had gotten up there we realized that we had walked into a Greek wedding. The bride and groom entered the little church just after we arrived to have the ceremony performed and emerged again just as the sun set to much celebration from the crowd. Fortunately we weren't the only tourists who were caught up in it, there were a few Germans and Japanese people up there, too.

This is the church at the top of the hill.

Here's a photo of the city with the belltower of the church at sunset.

And here's a photo of the city at sunset. From the top of the hill you can see the entire city perfectly, and it's beautiful, though truly sprawling. You can also see the port and the ocean to the southwest and the mountains of the Peloponnese to the west.

It really is marvelous and I am happy to be here. Missing all of you at home and spread out across the planet and hoping that your sunsets are as beautiful.

Athens at last!

2007-09-04T13:25:00.000+03:00

Sorry that it's taken me so long to get around to writing something about my trip. I left home last Thursday and arrived on Saturday, but the computer labs at College Year in Athens (CYA) didn't open until today. So let the story begin.

Left from the Portland airport on Thursday evening with hugs and goodbyes to the family. The flight was long (with an 8 hour layover in New York's JFK airport) but consisted mostly of sitting around in airports waiting to get going. I did learn that children, although generally cute, very quickly cease to be so on airplanes, and that apparently New Yorker's don't know how to make coffee. I arrived in the Athens airport this last Saturday at about 9am, the same time as the group that traveled through the school, and got to wander around the airport for a while looking for the professor who was supposed to be picking us up. In the end, we all managed to find each other and took a bus into the city proper where we found out which apartments we were going to be living in and dispersed.

Our group has 23 people in it, all from Lewis and Clark College. Most of us are studying religous studies or classical studies, though we have a few biology and chem majors. They divided us up into five apartments, three girls apartments and two boys, all within a few blocks of each other in Kolonoki, a trendy district of Athens that's mostly apartments with a few stores on street level, although there is also a hospital a few blocks away from our apartment and a monastary directly across the street (where the bells go off for a few minutes at 7am and 7pm daily, a good wake up call if our alarms fail us).

Our apartment has five girls in it. I share a room with my friend Carolyn, there is another double room and one single. We also have a lovely little living room with a balconey that overlooks the monastary (where we've been eating dinner in evening and breakfast in the mornings), a bathroom with a sink and tub that both don't drain well, and a rather large closet with a Christmas tree in it for some reason.

Surprisingly, I'm already starting to feel at home in this strange city. Having lived in a large city in a distant past life, I find the absolute chaos of the streets, the tall buildings and the gum bespeckled sidewalks rather charming, while it seems most of the group is rather taken aback by all of it. The traffic is truly trecherous and micro cars (Minis, Smart Cars, etc), motorcycles and scooters dominate the streets. Little regard at all is paid to pedestrians, and the sound of screeching tires can be heard from our balconey at all times of day.

After a rocky start with the idea of grocery shopping in a foreign country (apparently everything in the whole city shuts down on Sundays, including grocery stores), we've managed to find a nice little shop around the corner from our apartment run by a nice woman named Athena who corrects our sorry attempts at conversing in Greek. We also get ice cream, cookies and beer from one of the ubiquitous kiosks down the street. A few blocks away is a whole row of coffee and pastry shops where they serve passible coffee that I've managed to figure out how to order in Greek. Here they drink Greek coffee (which is really Turkish coffee), instant coffee (which is truly ghastly), and regular filter coffee known as "philtrou". I stop by to get a cup every morning before class starts, as we lack a coffee pot in our apartment.

Fortunately for us, three of the girls in our apartment like to cook, so we've been saving a lot on food by having them cook in the evenings, and the two of us who don't cook do the dishes afterwards. Honestly, I eat better here than I do at home, or even at school.

Our apartment is about a 20 minute walk from CYA, which is a stately looking and nicely air conditioned building right in front of the Olympic Stadium that was built for the 2004 Olympics. There is also a nice view of the acropolis and the Parthenon from the school. I'll post pictures as soon as I figure out how to upload them on the school's computers.

For this first month, we're taking two full classes, so we have two three hour classes a day, four days a week: Classical Archeology and Byzantine History. Our archeology professor is a delightful English woman, the daughter of two archeologists who grew up on digs around the world. It seems that we'll be spending the majority of the class at important sites and museums around Athens.

Our Byzantine History class starts in just a few minutes so I'd better go, but I'll post more later. Yasas!

One Way Ticket

2007-08-12T04:27:00.000+03:00

In exactly nineteen days, I will be boarding an airplane to Athens with a suitcase and a one way ticket in hand. The flight will take some twenty-one hours, with a seven hour lay over in New York's JFK airport. Twenty-one hours is the difference between this summer and the next year of my life. Theoretically, I'll be in Europe until this time next year, when I'll come back to complete my senior year at Lewis and Clark. For the Fall semester, I'll be in Athens, the Isle of Lesbos, and Turkey traveling with an overseas program of Lewis and Clark students. For the spring semester... well, we'll see. Whatever happens, this blog will be the continuing chronicle of the next year of my life. I hope that it makes for an interesting story.