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Greetings from Athens! I promised to keep this blog a bit shorter than the last, so hopefully this won’t be too long. As many of you know, I’ve been in Greece for the last 12 days or so, doing a one-course study abroad program that lasts a month. So far we’ve already been to Crete, Santorini, Naxos, the Peloponnese, and Athens. It’s been exhausting moving from hotel to hotel every few days, but the sights have been amazing. The food here is really good, even though I have to say I’m getting a little tired of bread with olive oil, Greek salad, and yogurt. And after Germany it’s definitely nice travelling with other Americans. We switch roommates every time we change hotels, which has done a surprisingly good job at preventing cliques from forming. Our tour guide, Costas, is basically the coolest person on Earth and has really made this trip. He is really funny, really hot (even though he’s 49), has a ton of energy and enthusiasm, and seems to know everything about Greece. He also really takes care of us and has no problem yelling at people in Greek in anyone tries to hassle us. So anyway, I’m going
to write a bit about each place we’ve gone and mention the really interesting historical background (cause most of these places are only cool if you know the history).
Crete
We started the program on Crete in the city of Heraklion. It was a much more modern city than I was expecting (ie, Coach and Prada stores, Starbucks, etc) but it still had a very unique feel to it. Our hotel was located right in the city center, so it was easy for us to go bar-hopping at night and shopping during the day. Our most exciting excursion on Crete was to the ruins of Knossos. Knossos was one of the two major city-centers of the Minoan civilization (the earliest civilization in the western tradition, 3000-1500 BC). The other Minoan population center was on the island of Santorini. Around 1500 BC the inhabitants of Santorini felt their island began to rumble and evacuated to Crete, but the giant tsunami created by the eruption of Santorini (10 times larger than Krakatoa) wiped out everyone in the entire region, including the Minoans living on Crete. Anyway, it was amazing to see the remains of the Minoan capital, which included the
world’s oldest known amphitheater.
Santorini
After Crete we took a ferry to Santorini, which is probably the most photographed archipelago of Greece. If you have any pictures in your mind of what you expect Greece to look like, you are probably picturing Santorini. The geography of Santorini makes it very unique because the islands are all very narrow but extremely tall and steep (picture cliffs rather than beaches). This fits with the culture of the area though because the beautiful white and blue houses cling to the steep slopes overlooking the ocean and make for a great view. In addition to shopping and sightseeing, we went to wine-tasting at one of the local vineyards/wineries, went to the topmost village to watch the sunset, and took an awesome ship that looked like a pirate ship to the caldera and hiked up the volcano then swam in the volcanically-heated hot springs. We actually had to jump off of the pirate ship and into the water, which was pretty scary but really fun. Plus, I really wanted to be able to say that I’d gone swimming in a volcano.
Naxos
Our next stop was Naxos, another of the Greek
islands. Naxos was nice because it was far less touristy than the other places (it doesn’t have a public airport) and had some great ruins. In particular, we could see the giant portara, which is all that is left from the Sanctuary of Apollo. Naxos was also interesting because everyone hit on me, which was fun at first but annoying by the end (six guys in one day!). My friend and I ended up going out for drinks with these Albanian guys that we had met, but we couldn’t really talk to them (they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Albanian or Greek) so we left after only a few minutes. We also went up to the castle of Naxos to meet the self-proclaimed “Duke of Naxos” and listen to an outdoor concert of Greek music and dancing. It was amazing sitting outside, watching the sun set over the ocean, and listening to Greek music. And it certainly didn’t hurt any that they kept insisting on us taking free shots ouzo and glasses of local wine.
Tolos/The Peloponnese
The next day we took the ferry to the Greek mainland and had the pleasure of taking our mid-term
exam en route. Once we got into our tour-bus we were able to see many sights along the way, including giant city wall fortified on the crests of hills and several castles. And meanwhile we had the movie “My Big Far Greek Wedding” playing on our bus, which was hilarious and exciting. We were actually able to understand a lot of the Greek spoken in that movie, which we all got pretty excited about as well.
We spent most of our time in the Peloponnese going to archeological sites and museums. We saw some cool graves at Mycenae and saw an amazing Greek amphitheater holding 12,000 that was preserved unbelievably well. One of the girls on our trip sings opera, so she stood at the base of the amphitheater and gave a performance to show how amazing the sound carries even up to the top of the amphitheater. We also saw the stadium for one of the 5 original Olympic Games, which was really cool. On our way north we stopped to visit ancient Corinth. For those of you that don’t know Greek geography/history, Corinth was an extremely important Greek city-state because it is located on the very narrow
isthmus between Athens and Sparta. This allowed Corinth to control the trade of the region as well as the power to precipitate conflict between Athens and Sparta (which led to the Peloponnesian War. If you’ve seen the movie 300 this is where it takes place).
Athens
We got to Athens this afternoon and will be here for the next couple of days, after which we’re heading to Delphi, Thessaloniki, Litochoro, and Mt. Olympus. I’m having a great time but I’ll be excited to get back to the states and see you all again!
Lyss 😊
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