Delphi is such a beautiful place! It is right at the base of a mountain range facing a little nook of the Aegean sea. From every café and hotel, which were many, we could see the coast along with the little town located there, at night there were lights from about 5 villages on the water visible. Yesterday we had class at the site of the ruins of Delphi, where the famous oracle of Delphi did her prophesying for many years. This is really interesting stuff and I totally recommend looking on google for information on it. The ancient Delphians also held athletic games much like the Olympic games but smaller scale. We ate at a cute little café called Agora looking over the sea for lunch, and I got some banana juice! It was delicious, basically a blended banana with milk added to make it liquid. The sun was amazing all day and I got my first color change of the trip! It is barely noticeable but its there! In the afternoon we went for a hike on a long trail up on of the mountains. It was one of the hardest things I have done in my life, it took about an hour and we actually hiked to the very top of the mountain where a little lookout shack was built. The group ended up dispersing and I was left with 3 friends, and we got a little lost on the way up! But we found our way and the view was absolutely amazing, its what kept me going when I felt like stopping, I knew the view was going to be amazing. From our hotel and everywhere in town we were only able to see a little piece of the sea, but from the top of the mountain, we could see so much more, including pieces of sea in between lower mountain peaks between ours and the sea. The sky was overcast but it wasn’t a bad thing, the rays from the sun where shining through in pockets onto the valley and water, so beautiful! We hung out here for a while, but eventually we were too cold…which is crazy because on the way up we were overheating! I discovered I don’t like descending much at all. It isn’t easy, you have to keep your balance and watch the momentum building…and then I just got sick of it. Good thing it went WAY faster than the way up! A few of us (me included J ) wiped out on the way down…it was really sandy rock in some spots, no one got hurt though! I called it Karma when I slid because two minutes before that my friend did the same thing and I laughed so hard! Erik came up with the 6 steps of mountain hiking. The first thing that happens is you lose your ability to formulate good grammar, the next is the feeling in your fingers becomes weak, the third is the color in your face changes. Kelly and I had really red faces for most the hike. The fourth is spitting…no explanation necessary. The fifth is when the loopiness starts to set in…I was really giggly on the way down… The sixth is of course, slipping and falling, and the last, which we failed to reach, is death. Thank God for that J We called ourselves team MERK, for the first initial of our names, Molly, Erik, Rachel, and Kelly. It was the funnest hike of my life and I can’t wait to do more on the islands! A few of us girls started a club called “buns of stone,” a spin of “buns of steel” because we figure by the end of all this step-climbing and mountain hiking we will have amazingly shaped bottoms not unlike our stone sculpted friends in the museum. So far so good, I am surprised I am not sore today!
After the hike Lissie and I decided we needed some chocolate as a reward, so we got some European candy bars and took some needed relaxing time in the hotel. We had dinner at a restaurant down the road here because there was not enough room for us at this hotel. The meals were great, there seems to be a theme though. At each hotel they have given us an appetizer of either cheese pie or spinach pie, classic Greek snack foods. It’s a good thing I love them both! Then they feed us chicken or pork and some sort of rice, potatoes, and vegetables. I’m not sure as to whether they are trying to accommodate us and our American diet or if this is just a normal meal for them. I think it is a combination of the two.
Yesterday was the beginning of spring break for Concordia and one of the girls in the group is a twin, so her twin sister came to join us for a week here and arrived last night. They are so much alike, they laugh the same! We have a very good, tight group, no drama yet!
This morning I woke up at 7:00 am and looked out on the balcony to see the moon still on its decent past the mountains, and a little color in the sky from the sunrise, it was fabulous. We headed out at 8:00 am…it keeps getting earlier! We headed towards the coast and it was the most gorgeous drive of my life…including through the rocky mountains. It beats them out because not only were we driving along the mountains, but the road also winded around the coast. So on one side we had a mountain range and the other the Aegean sea, the sun was still in the east, right over the water. I could not have dreamed of a more beautiful piece of scenery, I just sat and stared out the window with my ipod for the first 2 hours J We are heading toward Olympia now, with about 1 hour to go, I can’t wait to see what else Greece has to show me!
