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As I write this, I am sitting in the Athens airport with my mom (who is desperately trying to figure out how to send a text to Carter on her new international cell phone she got for this trip). It has been one hectic weekend full of lots of taverna dining, awesome chocolate goodies and other delicious Greek desserts as well as much walking all over the city. We hiked Lycavettos Hill, went up to the Acropolis and visited various neighborhoods around the area. My mom got to meet pretty much all of my best friends here, saw my old and decrepit apartment and even went inside the infamous and rather snazzy Eftichidou 16 (and got to see the awesome balcony view!).
In half an hour we board our teeny tiny Aegean Airlines plane for Rhodes. I have high hopes for this trip… I want my mom to experience the Greek island atmosphere plus I really want to check out all the monuments and sites I have been learning about in my Byzantine history class. I am trying not to think about how close I will be to Turkey and instead will have to continue dreaming about Istanbul. Another trip, perhaps.
I have discovered over the past couple of weeks just how interested I am in the Middle East. When I think of the places in the world I want to visit – well, of course I want to see Western Europe. I want to see France and Italy and England and such, but I really want to visit more Eastern countries first. Turkey, Egypt, Israel… those are my priorities right now, which seems a little strange to me. I guess I’ve always been interested in the kinds of political and social issues (and especially the history!) of the more Eastern parts of Europe, but it hasn’t really hit me until now when I think about some friends here at Arcadia who can boast of visiting both Egypt and Turkey by the time they leave.
First, though, I need to come back to Greece. Thessaloniki and the whole Northwest part of the country (Slavic towns and communities, Lake Ionnina). I need to visit more islands… Naxos, Mykanos, Santorini, and I’d love to go back to Syros (one day wasn’t enough). I need to see Mount Olympus. I need to go back to Crete and hike the Samarian Gorge. I want to see Corfu!
After returning from Rhodes I will have two weekends left. One of those weekends will be Hydra. I feel like the last weekend needs to be spent in Athens, but maybe I’ll go somewhere else… maybe…
Happy Thanksgiving!
Yes, the title of this post is a reference to the song “Riotproof” by Tori Amos, but both the song title and lyrics seem to fit this week perfectly. Monday, November 17th, was the 35 year anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Revolt, an event in which students staged a sit-in at the Polytechnic University to protest the military junta presence in Greece. Tanks were brought in, students were killed, and the United States has since been greatly blamed for the catastrophe. As we were informed by our Arcadia staff members, November 17th becomes a rather anti-American day. A parade of protests moves throughout the streets of Athens, ending at the American Embassy, which is guarded by riot police and other military vehicles to prevent anything from happening. Violence usually occurs, teargas and Molotov cocktails are common fare. The day before and the day of, I actually received warnings from the American Embassy warning Americans to stay in their apartments from 4 p.m. of that day until 6 a.m. the following morning just in case.
Seemed like a perfect time to go venture out and see what all the fuss was about.
Our group left at 5:00 p.m. since the parade would be moving by our area around that time. Multiple Arcadia staff members came with us for protection and they told us all to bring scarfs and water bottles, the idea being that if teargas was thrown, we would soak our scarfs with water and wrap them around our head. We weren’t anywhere near the American Embassy or the Polytechnic University, but some of our staff got calls from friends that crazy, violent stuff was going down at both locations. It started pouring with mad crazy thunder and lightning, which only added to the atmosphere of the event. “I feel like I’m in some kind of post-apocolyptic war/adventure movie,” I told my friends around me. It truly felt like the end of the world was coming.
As it turns out, yes November 17th is a time for Athenians to exorcise their hatred towards America (there has and still is a kind of resentment about how much power and influence the States maintains over Greece) but it has now become a stage for all-out protests. We saw people protesting the economic crisis as well as students protesting against the prison hunger strikes (prison conditions are so bad that people are hunger striking both in jail and out to try and raise awareness about it). And we saw a heck of a lot of communists protesting against capitalism and other such western democratic ideals (the Communist party is still huge and alive and thriving in Greece, have I mentioned that before?). Young communist students all wore black hooded sweatshirts and riot police were actually marching alongside them with gas masks on and teargas dispensers already in hand. “I hope they’re not trigger happy,” said one of my peers while we watched them soldier by. “I think anyone here right now with some kind of weapon in their hand would be trigger-happy,” replied another.
Thankfully nothing terrible happened to any of us. We kind of got chased away at the end by some loud-speaking Greek mob, but our Greek-speaking staff liasoned with anyone who would have caused us harm. It was certainly an eye-opening experience. I can honestly say I have never seen something like this and have actually had the capacity to understand what it was I was observing. “This poor country,” I sighed while standing next to Jan, our resident director. “What do you mean?” she asked. “That there are still so many social and political problems in Greece,” I replied. “I never would have guessed before this semester just how much inner turmoil existed here.”
On a happier note, Tuesday night was my friend Ryan’s birthday, so we threw a huge dinner party for him (long live Tuesday night Eftichidou 16 dinners!). I brought the chocolate cake that changes lives for everyone to try and we all dined on delicious homemade Italian food. Wednesday was my personal mental health day… I woke up in a funk for starters, which kind of colored the day with a kind of depression. I left my house at 10:15 that morning and didn’t get back until 5:45 in the afternoon. I must have walked 8 – 10 miles (not sure how the kilometers conversion works out still) all over Athens, seeing things, hanging out and whatnot.
Today seems like it’s going to be a much better day, however. I have some classes, lots of homework, but tonight, Ryan and my roommates Tara, Eva and Elissa and I are all going to see Medea, a modern dance show that is supposed to be the most phenomenal production ever (I have heard this from many).
My mom leaves on an airplane for Greece around 1:00 a.m. my time tonight (3:00 p.m. on California time). I pick her up at the airport at 6:05 p.m. tomorrow evening. I am hoping somehow a taxi service plan to the airport will work out because there is apparently a gnarly metro strike all today and tomorrow. These Greeks and their strikes. It must just be what they do.
The long-awaited trip to Meteora went down this weekend. We left on a train (my first time riding a passenger train!) on Friday morning at 8:20 in the morning. Because we waited so long to buy tickets, the only tickets available were first class, so we rode our 4.5 train ride up into the mountains in style! The ride didn’t seem that long, probably because we all dozed off a little bit. We arrived in the town of Kalambaka/Kalampaka, which was nestled right next to the Meteoran rocks. There was another town down the road, Kastraki, which was even closer to the site of Meteora, but it was more expensive, so we made our way to our little hostel/hotel, Alsos Rooms, which truly was a hop, skip and a jump away from a footpath leading up into the mountains.
To provide a little background information, Meteora is full of these huge rock formations and no one knows the geological history of them. No one knows how they got that way, basically. Years and years and years ago, the monks who lived in Mount Athos (famous monastery area in Greece where women are STILL not allowed into today due to their “unclean” nature) migrated over to Meteora and established a number of monasteries high up on the rocks. So not only were we traveling here to see the awesome landscape, we were also here to view these monasteries that defied gravity and teetered on the tips of the cliffs.
We were a larger group of eight, which seemed like it was going to be a problem, but we eventually split up, which made each group more manageable. The first day we hung out in Kalampaka, since we were told by our friendly hotel owner that trying to get up into the monasteries anytime after 3:00-3:30 in the afternoon would be a tough feat. We grabbed some lunch at a cute little tavern and wandered throughout the Old Town. That night, my friends Ryan, Tina and I hiked up the dark road to the town of Kastraki looking for more adventure while the five of them stayed behind in Kalampaka. We didn’t find any nightlife, but we did find the most awesome ceramic shop ever. It was run solely by this one female artist, who was there, taking pieces out of her giant kiln as we looked through all her pieces. I spent a good chunk of cash there, and we headed back to Kalampaka. We stumbled upon our friends eating pizza at a pizzeria, but the three of us decided to go to a more traditional taverna where we indulged in stuffed tomatoes and peppers, briam (a kind of vegetables, eggplant, and potatoes in red sauce dish), lamb and chicken. Bed was a welcome relief that night, although I ended up having to share a tiny double with my best pal Jessica (Jay-Z), and we’re pretty sure we were spooning the entire night. I guess that’s the sign of a close friendship?
Breakfast came included with our 20 euro student fee at the Alsos House, which turned out to mean we had access to the place’s kitchen and any of the food there. The owner bought two loaves of bread and two cartons of milk for us that morning. Determined to make sure that everyone would start off the day right (I was way too overly concerned with everyone’s well-being for the first half of the trip), I proceeded to brew coffee, boil hot water for tea, and toast up some cheese toast using the bread, butter, and a bag of shredded cheese found in the refrigerator. I burned the bread a little bit, but I think everyone appreciated my efforts.
The five who split off the following day were going to try to head back to Athens on a bus in the early afternoon. I personally thought that trekking all the way up to Meteora to leave at 2 or 3 in the afternoon wasn’t worth the money, so I planned to leave either on the 5:30pm train that evening or the 6:30am train the following morning depending on what time I got back from the monasteries. Ryan and Tina agreed with me, so while the other five rented a taxi or two to take them up to the top of the rocks, my two companions and I hiked up the footpath near our hotel into the canyon. We must have seemed an odd trio (Tina is actually 42 years old, is a mother with a husband and is currently finishing her B.A. But despite this, she never once tried to be a “mother,” nor did she try to be “young and hip” like us while we were hiking. I respect her immensely and hope that one day I will be able to find the kind of peace with myself that she has found within herself).
We stopped by monasteries and climbed rocks. I mean… really climbed rocks. There are some cliffs and ledges I ventured out to that I’m sure would make my friends and family cringe seeing me out there (at one point Tina even yelled up at me “I’m so sorry Bri, the mothering instinct is coming out in me. GET DOWN FROM THERE!”) We were planning on trekking the 9 kilometers from one end of the canyon to the other, but about halfway there, it started raining and we got picked up by a nice Greek couple who let us hitchhike with them to the main monastery, the Great Meteoran. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed inside or else I would have some spectacular monastery pictures to show for it. I guess I will have to be content with the memories and the fact that my friends and family will never be able to see what I saw. Let me just say, however, that the church in the Great Meteoran was spectacular. The inside walls were plastered with these immensely detailed fresco paintings of biblical stories. It looked like a comic book, almost… that’s the best way I can describe it.
Coming down from the mountains was another story. We walked… and walked… and walked. We found a footpath off the road that looked like it was washing away, and being the crazy ones that we were, we went off onto it. The entire day we had a running joke of how we were in Middle Earth (as in Lord of the Rings), and I could have sworn on this path we were somewhere in the outskirts of the Shire on our way to the town of Bree. Like me, Tina was a huge Tolkien fan, and we spoke in Lord of the Rings quotes all the way down to Kistraki. We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and by 3:00 in the afternoon now, I was absolutely famished and was complaining profusely about walking up hills. Before I knew it, Ryan had picked me up and carried me the last quarter of a mile to a tavern, which had the best tasting food I have ever gorged myself on (hunger always makes food taste better, doesn’t it?). Oh yes! I also saw a persimmon tree in someone’s yard! Yes, I’m a dork, but I was super excited about it!
Luckily we made it back to the train station by 5:00 p.m. so we could get our late train home. As we were walking along the platform, we saw our five friends sitting in the train already waving at us. We went inside and found out that due to miscommunication, they missed their 2:00 in the afternoon bus and miraculously got their money reimbursed. So here they were. We began and ended our adventure together. We got into Athens around 10:30 that night, which meant getting back to my apartment by 11:15, which meant after telling my roommates about my adventure, I was eating dinner at midnight. Such is life in Greece, it seems. I got to sneak in a call to Brendan that night, too, which allowed me to go to bed feeling all warm and fuzzy inside!
Sunday, I took it easy. Cleaned my room, did some laundry, wandered around Plaka trying to buy more gifts for people. I cooked potato leek soup Sunday night from scratch… without a recipe… using fresh ingredients purchased from the weekly Laiki (it’s getting cold now! It’s soup season!). I also had a leftover cheese fondue package from weeks ago, so I melted that down, boiled some broccoli, cut some green peppers, chunked two loaves of bread and lay that out for fondue dipping. Finally I made a green salad with balsamic dressing, cracked upon a chilled bottle of white wine and invited some friends over for dinner. We had halvas, dried figs, and chocolate-covered baklava for dessert. It was a perfect end to a perfect weekend.
Life is, as always, good here in the Mediterranean.
This weekend was a weekend of day trips. Friday I hopped on a class trip to Epidauros, Saturday I rounded up some friends and bused ourselves up to Delphi, and Sunday I took a leisurely stroll down to the Temple of Zeus in between writing a 5-page paper I had not begun because of all my traveling. Good weekend!
The “Ancient Greek Sanctuaries” class took a day trip to Epidauros, a place with (surprise, surprise!) lots of ancient ruins. There is an amphitheater at Epidauros, though, which was the main reason for my wanting to go. Legend has it that the acoustics are so perfect in this theater that no matter where you are sitting in the audience, people talking in the dead center of the stage sound like they’re talking right next to you – no matter where you are! I was skeptical. The professor, Jen, asked for six volunteers to read and act out some ancient drama impromptu on the stage to prove the point. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity (hey I’ve raced at the Olympic Stadium in Olympia… I should totally act out ancient drama at the theater of Epidauros!), and I have to say, that theater really does have good acoustics. It was kind of mind-boggling, actually, how perfect everyone sounded even from way up high.
That night, I was lucky enough to play hostess to Lauren and her friend Patricia who were on their way back from the island of Paros, on their way to Milan and eventually back to Sienna. I got to take them to a Greek taverna and introduce them to a friend or two of mine. At the end of our meal, we were brought some kind of honey wine (that’s what Lauren and I are drinking in the second picture). I asked what it was because Jessica and I had had it before and wanted to buy some. “Moschato,” replied the waiter. “It’s good, no? You want more?” “No, no, no!” I replied hastily. “It’s free!” He replied. “I bring you more!” “Yes, please!” shouted Lauren in his wake, and he brought us out another round of the stuff. Later that evening, Lauren, Patricia and I chatted deep into the night and the next day I had them on a trolley down to Syntagma and the airport at 7:30am. It was a short-lived visit, but it was certainly better than nothing!
And then came Delphi. My roommates, Eva and Elissa, and Ryan and I all decided to catch the 10:30 bus up to Delphi. It took an hour to get to the bus station by public transit and then three hours on the bus, but it was well worth it. We got off the bus, looked out at the view of the Corinthian canal and nearly died. Then we promptly went searching for coffee. “I love traveling with you!” Eva exclaimed when I enthusastically agreed that caffeine was necessary. “If I were with anyone else and suggested coffee, they’d tell me to forget it and suck it up!” “You’re forgetting who I am!” I told her. “I mean, honestly…’
The archeological site at Delphi was just… unreal. I mean, I could say amazing or incredible and still be perfectly right about it, but it truly was just unreal. It seemed almost fake. It was beautiful, it was impressive. I felt like it didn’t exist. Pictures can’t do it justice, really. I joked with my friends that I was having a spiritual awakening. Maybe I was. Who knows.
Below the main archeological site with the Temple of Apollo (that’s what the big columns are) was the Tholos, a circular temple built in honor of Athena. We visited that, too, along with an ancient gymnasium where athletes would train for the Pythian Games, Olympic-like events held here every four years to celebrate Apollo’s victory over Python.
We contemplated staying a night but returned to Athens on a late bus. I was happy to be home and have a full Sunday to get work done, but still feeling as if I needed to do something, headed down to the Temple of Zeus down by the National Gardens. It’s a site that’s so dang close, it’s a miracle I haven’t visited it yet. It has an interesting story behind it too, one that would take far too many words to type out here, but one that can be read about here!
Also, the Athens Marathon was this Sunday, so I got to see lots of runners coming into the finish line at our local Olympic Stadium (“at our local Olympic Stadium” is a phrase I will never again be able to use once this semester is finished).
My mom is coming in roughly a week and a half. I booked tickets to Rhodes Monday morning, so that’s for sure happening too! I’m excited, but I realize that once she leaves, it will be December 1st, leaving me onlyl TWO WEEKS LEFT here. Where is the time going, huh? Where is it all going so quickly…?
I think the Greeks are more excited than we Americans are to have Obama as our next president. That may be a lie… we were pretty psyched at Arcadia at 6:00am on Wednesday when Tuesday’s election results came in. Jessica and I had figured out about an hour before that Obama had probably run because with the 55 electoral votes from California and the 11 in Washington (both my and Jessica’s states respectively), he would have the necessary electorals to nab the presidency. It was a pretty emotional scene, probably because we were all sleep-deprived, having gotten up at 3am to watch the results come in real-time and partly because it was just such an emotional event. I admit, I even started getting teary when Obama started speaking and you could see everyone in Chicago crowded around to see him. I was Skyping with my mom at the time, too, which was kind of neat. I felt bad for not being at CMC, but it was still a memorable experience. It’ll be one of those things in which people will say, “Where were you the night Obama got elected president?” and everyone will remember exactly where they were and what they were doing. Well, I was in Athens Greece, celebrating with fruit salad and victory pancakes made for us by one of the girls on the program.
The rest of the day, however, though I was on a an Obama-high, I anxiously checked over and over again for results on Proposition 8 in California, the proposition that would ban gay marriage for good. I was distraught when it passed… I started crying. Really. I literally sat down and put my head between my hands and cried. I feel kind of ridiculous, actually. I mean, yes I was deeply invested in it not passing, but compared to others out there, it’s not like it directly affects me and my life. Maybe I was tired? Maybe I was thinking of friends and others who would be directly affected? In any case, my sadness soon turned into anger and all day long Jessica and I were ranting and raving about it (Jay-Z goes to school in California, so she’s politically aware of happenings in both her home state of Washington and California). I say Supreme Court or bust, Prop 8!
In other news, my transition to vegetarianism is on the upswing. Seriously, I just don’t really eat meat that much anymore. I stopped eating turkey sandwiches long ago (turkey deli meat here is truly sub-par… it’s the one food in Greece that really can’t stand up to America’s version) and have started noshing on Greek salads and sesame-seed bread rings (which I discovered the other day are known as “koulouria”) for lunch. Dinner is often meatless, too. Lots of vegetables, salads, cheese, rice, bread… meat, not so much. I did have some fish at the beginning of the week and Tuesday night I had a little bit of chicken (I didn’t prepare Tuesday’s dinner, though, seeing as it was an Eftichidou 16 dinner party), but mainly I’ve been living off cheese. And I can’t tell whether I feel better or worse because of the radical cut in protein.
I think my favorite Greek dishes so far would have to be χωριάτικη σαλάτα (Greek salad, prounounced ‘whore-ee-ah-tee-kee sal-ah-ta’), κουκκιά (mashed fava lentils with olive oil, lemon and onions), dolmades (rice-stuffed grape vine leaves), and really, nothing beats a good skewer of chicken souvlaki. I’m not a fan of gyros, but I really enjoy the meat in kebab form. I’m not such a big fan of Greek desserts, though I have enjoyed baklava whenever I eat it (which is rare), but we have discovered this bakery above our grocery store that makes “the chocolate cake that changes lives” as we Arcadia folk have come to call it. I have been told about said chocolate cake since my birthday and finally had my first taste of it at the beginning of the week. It changed my life. As one of my roommates said, “How can you exist knowing that something like this is out there?”
I am becoming more reflective, more nostalgic for home, and becoming pre-maturely nostalgic for the end of Greece. I know I still have a month and a week or two left, but it feels so short. And with my mom’s 10-day visit breaking up the time, it seems really short. I’m going to miss it here… I’m going to miss the people, the food, the 3-hour coffee sessions. I can’t wait to come home and be back at CMC with my friends and taking classes with professors I know and love, but still… this is kind of a hard life to give up.
And I don’t know how you can possible explain to someone something like this. I really don’t know how you can put it into words. Pictures hardly do it justice… sure I have these awesome photographs of temples and ruins and my friends and I acting like dorks at Arcadia, but no one will ever truly be able to “get it” (if that makes sense?). I can show my mom around Athens and share parts of my daily life with her, but it’s not like she will have been here the entire time living and feeling everything with me. I just don’t know how I’m supposed to remember this – and on top of that, try and convey it to friends and family. You just can’t. You really can’t.
I think I have Greece in my skin, now. I don’t think I will ever be able to get rid of it. Already I’m trying to plan and see when another trip back here would be feasible. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those places that continually calls to you throughout your entire life, haunting you. In a good way, though!
Things are all happening so fast, I can’t keep my blog posts coming fast enough! I just posted about Crete, and that happened a week ago. Already there are a zillion more exciting tales to relate!
Basically Halloween weekend began Thursday night for us (huzzah for three-day weekends!). The Arcadia staff put on a Halloween party at the Center for us on the night of the 30th. They brought in chicken and pork souvlaki, massive boxes of oregano-seasoned french fries, and the biggest Greek salad I have ever seen. One of the professors made sesame seed brittle for dessert which was fabulous, though as he told me, “You must eat and not think of how many calories are there!” I laughed and then proceeded to eat three huge chunks. Not that this is a topic I want to get deeply involved in talking about here in my happy little blog, but I think my time here in Greece is basically eradicating most of the big “hurdles” I still faced concerning what was left of my high school eating disorder. I guess, though, part of my goal in coming to Greece was to get over my last few hangups, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise!
After food, traditional Greek music was blasted through the room’s speakers, and our Greek professors commenced dancing, teaching us some dances and steps along the way (the sesame brittle professor, Takis, apparently was an awesome dancer, so he mostly led the way (he’s the guy in the hat below!). It was most fun watching them, though, because they knew all the steps. It was not a late night, but it was enjoyable nonetheless!
I was a little distraught over the fact that my Halloween was going to be pumpkinless (the costumes and candy I could forsake, but the pumpkins were a tough one to give up), so I decided that I was going to do something fabulous on Halloween to make up for it. Which was how I got the crazy idea to go to a Greek island for the day. I grabbed my friends Jessica (whom I call Jay-Z) and Joe and down to the port of Piraeus we went to catch an 11:00am Flying Dolphin (a really fast little speedboat) to the island of Aegina. The ride only took 40 minutes, and soon enough, we found ourselves out in the middle of the ocean!
My real reason for wanting to see Aegina was not for the town, though I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was a town with some history. Apparently from 1830 – 1833, it was the capitol of Greece (the capitol then moved to Nafplio and finally to Athens). It’s a town considered a suburb of Athens it’s that close to the mainland and a lot of Athenians use it as a summer getaway. In any case, I went because I wanted to see the Temple of Aphaea, which was just spectacular.
According to European folklore, this is the final temple in the “Holy Trinity of Temples.” According to legend, if a straight line could be drawn between the Temple of Poseidon (seen that), the Parthenon (seen that… twice!) and the Temple of Aphaea, it would make a perfect equilateral triangle. Who knows whether it’s true or not, but it’s mystical enough to please me.
We wandered down to the nearby town and had lunch at a taverna overlooking the sea. It truly was a great experience… Greek salads, calamari, dolmades (those stuffed grape leaves), saganaki (fried cheese), kittens playing at our feet while we ate… paradise! We hung around on the beach a little bit and then took a cab back to Aegina. The place is famous for its pistachios, and I was determined to buy some bags when I got back to the main town, but when our cab pulled into port, we realized we only had about five minutes to catch the next Flying Dolphin out of there. Each of us threw down 20 euro. Jay-Z paid for our tickets, Joe ran to the boat to keep it from leaving without us, and I sprinted off to a kiosk to buy some nuts. It was like watching a movie in slow motion… Jessica running with our tickets to the boat, she and Joe hopping in while I frantically paid for my pistachios. I heard them screaming for me, so I ran as fast as I could across the plateia, ripping my jeans and gashing up my leg against a bench (a bench! Who cuts themselves on a bench?!) along the way. I literally jumped from the dock to the boat as it was departing into the arms of the craft’s Greek workers who promptly asked me for my ticket, thinking that I had lept on last minute for a free ride. Jay-Z came to my rescue, and the three of us moved to the back of the boat, where we sat and watched the waves.
Saturday I had to go to the Acropolis for a school assignment, so I spent yet another day wandering around the Plaka/Acropolis area, but since I hadn’t done that in a while, it was actually rather nice. Nothing else particularly exciting happened that day except for the fact that I found a taverna that night that serves tabbouleh (for sure going back there!) and… oh yeah, LAUREN WAS IN ATHENS! Even if for only just an hour, I demanded we get a picture to prove that it happened. She and her Scripps friend were on their way to the Greek islands for Fall Break. Next Friday they’re coming back and crashing at my place for the night on their way back to Italy.
Sunday was spent doing homework, but that night, Arcadia had organized a group outing to a football (AKA soccer) game. It was absolutely WILD! The Greeks had all their cheers synchronized and everything, though we couldn’t really understand what they were saying (it was all in Greek, but I could pick out some words…). There were sparklers and gunshots and screaming and fights. It was absolutely insane. We ended up standing in the back the entire game, but that worked out because I managed to make some Greek friends. When they found out I was from America (“California?! Where in California?! Southern California?!”) they gave me a bunch of Greek stickers to “put up around your town.” Honce, the one guy who introduced himself to me, then asked whether I would be interested in a “hairy Greek boyfriend” to which I replied, “Ohi, efharisto!” (“No thanks!”). He told me I had pretty eyes in Greek (actually understood that one!) and then tried to tell me in English that I was pretty, but he seemed to have forgotten the word for “pretty” and instead it came out as, “You are good! You are very good!” He paused and then burst out with “Pretty!” In my opinion, “Good” and “Pretty” are not interchngeable terms. Especially in contexts like that. Finally, as he was teaching me one of the cheers, the term “s’aghapo” came up, which means “I love you,” which led him to scream “I love you, baby!” at the top of his lungs at me. Then his friends offered me a puff of their big fatty pot joint, but it had been around into one too many hairy Greek men’s mouths for my taste. Petros, our librarian and personal paparazzi, documented our interactions from afar with his camera.
Oh yeah, we (and by ‘we’ I mean the Athens team) won!
Great game.
First: Thursday night cooking and dancing. Second: Crete.
Thursday night a big group of us gathered at the Arcadia Center where Joanna, our housing director, was going to teach us how to make dolmades (stuffed grape vine leaves) and spanikopita (spinach and feta cheese-filled pie). The whole escapade took much longer than expected and we didn’t end up eating until about 10:30 at night, but it was certainly a memorable experience. Petros was snapping pictures the entire time (and jokingly told me that he considered naming the Facebook photo album “Bri’s Portfolio” I ended up weaseling my way into so many of the shots…) and though the food didn’t come out quite as expected, it was delicious! Most everyone left following cleanup, but a few of us stayed behind to listen to Karynna play the piano… and that led into another hour/hour-and-a-half event of piano karaoke and “pretending” to Greek dance. It was such a fabulous beginning to Fall Break!
My roommates departed for Crete via airplane early Friday morning, so I had the entire apartment to myself that day. I basically spent the time cleaning, packing, eating and watching many episodes of “Class of the Titans.” I met with my traveling companions around 6:30 that evening, and by 8:30pm, we were on a ferry on our way to Crete!
The boat was huge! It has a pool, even, though of course in the off season it was drained and not functioning. Our cozy little cabin had two bunk bed sets and its own bathroom, and we claimed our beds, sat down to plan our weekend, and promptly fell asleep somewhere around 10:00pm. We awoke the next morning at 5:00 in the morning and by 6:00, found ourselves standing on the dark, cold, windy streets of Heraklion with all of our bags, not entirely sure where we were going. At this moment I tried to stave off a slight panic attack… we were three 20-something American students in a foreign city unsure of where we were going. But I just walked on with my friends, hoping that we would run into our hostel/rent room hotel soon. We did, and thank goodness they were open. We checked into our four-person room, toasted our adventure with some cups of Greek coffee from the place’s roof garden restaurant, and watched the sunrise over the Heraklion skyline.
We put away our things and trekked back down to the bus station where we hopped on a charter bus headed towards the city of Rethymnos, which was about 1.5 to 2 hours away from Heraklion. We wandered by the seaside and stumbled upon a huge open-air Laiki. A little groggy still from waking up at 5:00am that morning on a ferry boat, we stumbled up a hill to the fortress of Fortessa, a Venetian structure that claims to be the largest stronghold in Europe. I’m not so sure I believe such a claim, but it was still amazing to see nonetheless!
From there, we meandered down to the Old Town where little shops abounded and small cobblestone pedestrian walkways were the norm. We sought out the old Muslim mosque, which is obviously not functioning (Muslim = Turkish in the Greek imagination, and Turks are associated with the dark period of the Ottoman Occupation…. not that modern Turks and Ottomans are the same folk, of course, but nations of people will bend history and twist ideas to conform to their beliefs, it seems…) and managed to find an old arch that was once part of the old city. I consulted my guidebook for a lunch spot and found a cute little taverna called Lemonokipos where we dined under spacious lemon trees. I had a (surprise, surprise!) Greek salad, and I got to try saganaki for the first time, which was basically fried cheese. Yes, I ate fried cheese. It was some kind of local Gruyere cheese, too. It was delicious. We had a bit of trouble finding our bus back home, but we managed to get on the right vehicle and soon were whisked across the Cretan countryside back to Heraklion. We had dinner, drank some tea and shared some conversation on our hostel’s roof garden and promptly crashed around 9:30pm. It had been a long day.
We tried to get out to the Samarian Gorge the next day (a rather dangerous 11-mile long gorge, the longest in Europe. According to pictures, it looks a lot to me like Zion National Park in Utah) but received conflicting information from travel agents that the place was closed (the Gorge closes every Winter and Spring due to dangerous conditions. Many have died in the Samarian Gorge…), so instead we decided to have an adventure. One of the other girls on the trip, Kaitlynn, had read about – and I’m ashamed to admit that I had not heard of it yet – the Diktean Cave. According to Greek mythology, Kronos, Titan and king of the Gods, was eating all the children that his wife Rhea was giving birth to because a prophecy had fortold that one of his children would overthrow him. Rhea gave birth to a son she named Zeus and she kept him hidden in the Diktean Cave where he grew up until he was strong enough to overthrow his father, free his brothers and sisters, and instill the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses. Seeing this cave sounded like a splendid idea to me, being the Greek mythology buff that I am, and so we began asking around the bus station for instructions on how we might reach this remote location without the use of a personal car.
As it turned out, the cave was located on the Laisithi Plateau, a land formation up in the middle of the mountains that was used for a lot of Crete’s agriculture. It is a difficult location to get to, and there was only one charter bus heading up that way at 8:30 in the morning on Sunday and one charter bus leaving there for Heraklion at 2:00pm. We figured to go for it… and just swore that we would be back at that bus station by 2:00pm… or else we would basically be stranded in the middle of nowhere.
We boarded the bus, which took nearly two hours to get us to our destination due to the steep and windy mountain roads (I’m still not sure how these massive charter buses get up to these places… seriously, our bus bullied its entire way up, forcing other cars to move and back up to accommodate its massive size… those roads were teeny tiny, after all!). The bus driver was super nice and obviously noticed we were foriegners, so he deliberately told us which bus stop we wanted to get off for the Diktean Cave. Once we disembarked, we discovered we had a whole other mountain we had to hike up to get to the cave entrance. As we began our ascent, I suddenly realized that I had left my iPod (A.K.A. my life force) on the bus. My friends at first tried to cheer me up, but when I told them I felt so sick I wanted to die, they backed off and let me vent out my frustrations and anger at myself in my own way. As Kaitlynn later confessed, they were all keeping a good distance away from me while we were hiking up because they were afraid if they tried talking to me, I would push them over the side of the cliff. I told her that she was a prudent decision-maker and that they had all probably done the right thing.
The cave was pretty neat. Pretty deep and creepy looking at first. But it was worth the trek. After that, we had time to kill before our 2:00 bus headed back to Heraklion, so we played some cards while sipping coffee and hot chocolate in a cliffside cafe. We found some ceramic stores on the side of the road, had lunch at a family-owned taverna (the most authentic taverna experience yet, I’d say!) and camped out at the makeshift bus station on the side of the road. The bus was late by 15 – 20 minutes, causing us much anxiety since we were afriad perhaps we had missed our only ticket out of there. But the bus came, and as we climbed aboard, I realized it was the same bus driver we had coming up. He winked at me and held out his hand. Sitting on his palm my was iPod, the headphones perfectly coiled around it. I gasped (very loudly according to Kaitlynn) and repeated my many thanks to him. I collapsed in a bus seat and literally started sobbing I was so happy. My friends thought I was insane, but they were amused enough that they pulled out their cameras to catch my tears of joy and happiness. “I thought you were going to hug or kiss the bus driver right there on the spot,” Kaitlynn told me with a chuckle.
The next day we hit the ancient Minoan palace of Knossos, which was pretty dang incredible if I do say so myself. The second half of the day was spent in Chania. Well, half of that half of the day was spent on buses getting to and from Chania, actually. Nevertheless, I’m glad we got out there… it was a pretty little port, though watching the sunset over the ocean reminded me terribly of Laguna Beach. I blame that day for the subsequent homesickness that I have been feeling this past week.
Our last full day, Tuesday, we decided to head down to the town of Aghios Nikolaos where we took a touristy boat trip out to the island of Spinalonga, one of the last well-preserved former leper colonies in the world. Our tour guide, Viktor Zorbas (strange little old Greek man who kept telling us to be ferrymen and ferrywomen who would eradicate hate and prejudice among peoples. He also cracked a pretty good joke at the end: “Name one time when a politician has told the truth! Give up? When they look at another politician and call them a liar!” Yeah, I didn’t think it was ravingly funny, either). The island was really neat, though. Like really neat.
Our ferry left that night at 8:30 and we took another overnight trip back to Athens. We got in around 6:00am and zombie-like rode the metro home. I got in around 7:00am to find my roommates asleep. I put on water for coffee and started the day like any other day in Athens.
There were some things I missed on the trip, of course, but that just gives me all the more reason to return. I will return, make no doubt about that.
