I have now gone without washing my pants for one week and 2 days. Gross I know. We are driving from Corinth to Athens right now, tonight we will board an overnight ferry and set off for the island of Crete. We are there for a couple weeks, then we get a little break from school, some families are coming, and we will go island hopping! Schoolwork has become extremely lax, but it is still stressful because our two professors are both tough graders! This week we climbed to 3 different castles…yes castles…I didn’t even know they had castles in Greece! The first day, Monday, we went to a place where they discovered caves in the mountain, right on the water, so that the caves are filled halfway with water, like a river. They do guided tours in little boats through the caves, which are 10 km long, but the tour is only about 1 km. Our guide spoke zero English, but the tour was awesome anyway, we didn’t need words, the limestone made icicle-like formations all over the ceiling and walls. At the end we were able to get out a walk through the rest, it was actually kind of creepy, there were floating lights throughout the cave that reminded me of a scary movie. We got to touch the limestone and take pictures…all that stuff. When we got out, we walked down to the beach, which was full of small, rounded white rocks, no sand, we played around for a while waiting for our other professor. He was the lone member left without a boat and we didn’t know if he even went through or not, but he was no where to be found. I was creeped out. He finally showed up on the beach and told us he was in a boat with another tourist who spoke English and knew a lot about the caves. He pointed out some features, like shapes identifiable in the limestone, faces and even Jesus in the manger! I didn’t see anything like that but he got pictures so I guess we will find out!
After that we went to a small town, I don’t even remember the name, to hike to a castle ruin. It was on the end of a peninsula, but we got lost trying to find it from where the bus let us off. The entire group, professors and all, wandered down a road, which turned into a dirt road, into a dirt path, into a tiny foot path, and eventually disappeared, leading us near a cliff full of rocks, bushes, and thissles. We had no idea where the castle was from here, but fought our way to the edge to see if we could find it. While doing this, one member of the group rolled and sprained her ankle on some rocks. She happened to be my roommate for the 2 night stay in Areopoli, Christina. I felt so bad for her, the guys had to carry her back to the bus, which was far away now, while the rest of the group besides Roy and his wife Peggy, ventured down the peninsula to the edge of the water. She had to just sit by a little playground in a dead town for two hours while we hiked around. The hike was awesome though, we packed our lunches, so when we finally got to the castle, which was just a very boring old ruin, the reward was an amazing view over the Aegean Sea and lunch. I had some sweet rolls with gouda cheese and tzatziki…my favorite Greek condiment. It is a spread of cucumber, yogurt, and garlic, it sounds kind of gross but it is amazing…and you can put it on nearly anything!
We were all exhausted after that day of hiking and just sat around the hotel, some minor wandering through the little town. Christina had to switch with someone on first floor because we were on the second, so got a new roommate, Nina! Our room was huge…absolutely gigantic compared to American and European hotel rooms. European hotel rooms in general are very small, all of them are set up for 2 people, we had noticed that the 3 person rooms we normally have while traveling are actually for 2, with a temporary cot-like bed set up temporarily for us. Which is fine, it just makes our giant suitcases feel even bigger and always in the way. Our hotel in Areopoli reminded me of a castle, except not nearly as cool. It was just cold and all the rooms were interesting and different. Ours had an outdoor entrance, which was sweet, but made it very creepy at night. For breakfast they had the same old normal things, bread and jam, hard boiled eggs, bland cereal, cold cuts and cheese, but they also had some sweet bread and what they called fried pancakes! They were just fried dough, but very good dipped in jam, which is natural and amazing here! One day we had strawberry jam that actually tasted like mashed up strawberries, my favorite so far! The view from this hotel was great, the first night we sat on a cement wall by the empty pool and watched the sunset into the water, it was amazing.
From here we drove to Tolo, by way of Sparta on Tuesday. We stopped in Sparta to climb to another castle, inside there were all sorts of ruins that we could actually climb on, we found a spiral tower to climb into and pretend we were princesses! The cats were really straggly here and followed us around, but we also met one of the prettiest big dogs…he was SOO super friendly! In Tolo we had the most amazing location yet, right on the beach looking out to some islands, one of which lit up at night. The water was super cold, so we didn’t jump in, but we got to walk on the beach a little. Dinner was buffet style here, which was good and bad. Good because we got to pick what we wanted and didn’t waste anything but bad for obvious reasons because everything was delicious!
Wednesday we went to two places. First we went to a theater for Eschlipius, the healing god. We performed more pieces we memorized, I had a monologue this time, and I did ok, I didn’t forget my lines! I was first, on purpose to get it over with. We were actually asked to leave because we weren’t actually supposed to be using the stage and there were tons of high school groups coming through (Spanish and Greek) with guided tours and they each had to show off the acoustics of the theater by dropping a coin in the middle of the stage. We had to leave and come back to finish because of all the groups. Most of the rest of the site is just ruins, it is a huge ancient healing center, much like a hospital. A majority of the site is roped off because it is under reconstruction, they are building up the ancient buildings like they were when first constructed. After this we drove to Mycenae, an ancient site of a very old civilization and the location of the palace of Agamemnon, which was the name of the play we all chose scenes from and performed earlier that day. It was a bunch of ruins again, but it was cool to imagine the scenes taking place here, I played a watchman so we took a picture pretending to be on the lookout for the fire from Troy, like in my scene. The coolest thing we saw was a tomb in the shape of a giant bee hive. The entrance was just a rectangular opening with a cut-out triangle on top, but inside was an enormous circular dome, with hundreds of bricks forming the walls. This thing was at least 50 feet high inside, and it was just a burial tomb! They had two of these on the site, one of which was from the family of Agamemnon, Kind of Argos, main characters of our play. I didn’t even know the play was real…I still don’t know. They had a fake copy of the mask of Agamemnon we saw in the Archeological museum on display at this museum too. Some Greek students were very forward and blew us kisses through the window of our bus when we were leaving.
After this we went to lunch, it was already nearly 2:30 and we were all starving! We headed to the town of Naphlion, a port city, and I got some souvlaki, my first since Athens. We then wandered about and stumble upon a gelato shop…the piles of gelato were like mountains and there were at least 15 flavors! I got some good chocolate kinds, I don’t know what they were exactly, and it was gone in 5 minutes. The weather was perfect for ice cream, upper 60’s and sunny. We climbed up to a castle with over 1000 steps, to find out it was closed. But it was still fun and an amazing view of the city, of which Tolo is a suburb. We climbed around the outside even though we were exhausted, my calves still ache when I used any stairs. When we got back to the hotel some people went swimming on the beach. I did not because I am too much of a pansy, but I did help build a sand castle, we made our professors proud by using what we learned about castles in the last few days to fortify it against invaders. The water eventually rose enough to take down our outer wall and I’m sure it is long gone by now. The rest of the night was pretty mellow, because this morning we left at 8:00 am in order to get some sites in on the way to Pireus.
We first went to the ancient site of Corinth were the fountain and main water aquaduct is. We also saw the place where Paul spoke to the Corinthians in both the letter to the Corinthians found in the bible. It was just a chunk of rubble, I didn’t even take a picture. We then climbed around the acrocorinth, Corinth’s own acropolis, the highest place in the city. Corinth is located on an important isthmus in Greece, and we were able to see both sides of it from the top of one of the sides of the acrocorinth. We got to climb all over the ruins and they were much more interesting than most. There were holes that lead to buried chambers from inside the castle, some watchman towers, you could still see a lot of the notches on the top of the walls. One buried room had a small hole in the ceiling and people were walking around on top, there was a pile of large bricks built up so people would look through the hole, and I was able to climb through it…totally the highlight of my day! We had frame by frame pictures of this… It was a really foggy day up here, and the smog from the city was really visible from up there, it is really sad. Despite this Greece has a lot of good things going on by way of conserving energy. They have lots of windmills, although they don’t have that much wind. They also have many solar powered water heaters on top of their homes and public buildings. Also, every hotel, and I am told this is the same for most of Europe, has a set up where the electricity is shut off inside the rooms when the guests are not there. The key doubles as the key for electricity; it just slides in a little slot by the door and turns the power on. This sucks for trying to charge stuff but probably save the hotel a bundle of money in electricity. One thing that is upsetting is that they don’t seem to have any littering laws. They just dump garbage in random places most of the time, lots of valleys that would otherwise be gorgeous have been turned into dumping grounds for large pieces of garbage such as mattresses and old furniture. It is really sad, they have such beautiful landscape but they don’t always take care of it.
I have not been able to add any entries because this last hotel did not have wireless internet anywhere and it costs 2 euros for every half hour of internet from their computer. So although I am writing this now it won’t be added for at least another 24 hours when we arrive in Heraklion, Crete!
