EDIT: some pictures finally?? these are from downtown Athens, shopping and the apartment and the little mountain we walked up. Woop! More to follow but photobucket is absolutely glacial.

I am finally, finally back in my apartment after FAR too much field-tripping. We spent the last three days touring Peloponnesus, a big peninsula thing where a bunch of the famous ancient city-states were. I’ll break it down for ya…

Corinth: There wasn’t much to Corinth, except a big canal that we walked across and went oohh. We stayed there in a hotel Friday night, and went to a little island called Monemvasia (“one entrance”) that is connected to the mainland by a little bridge and consists entirely of a small mountain. Which, of course, we had to climb up on foot. It was okay though, because the views were spectacular. There was a little town at the base and the ruins of a palace and some churches at the top. And amazing, amazing views of the Mediterranean on all sides. Did I mention that the Mediterranean was about twelve feet from the hotel? It almost made up for the crappy little area rugs.

Sparta: SPARTAAA. Not actually that exciting, it’s just a little city now with a lot of cute Spartan children chasing pigeons and such. Over in Ancient Sparta there are some ruins of a fortress and a “dead city” called the Byzantine Necropolis, on top of a mountain. That we had to climb up. It took forever and ever, the ruins were not as cool as the Corinthian ones, and we got lost on the way back down and ended up hiking for a LOT longer than we actually needed to. I thought my legs were actually going to give out. Stella made some joke about us being Spartans now while we all quietly resented her for hanging out on the bus during the whole thing.

Olympia: The high point of Olympia was the massive (big fat?) Greek Orthodox wedding that took over the entire first floor of the hotel. Everyone was up till the middle of the night and in the morning they gave us leftover fancy wedding candy. We got coffees and sipped them outside at a café in the evening, and watched soccer. I felt very European. We spent the night there, and in the morning went to the ancient Olympian museum (which was really cool) and the ruins (which were cool in theory, but in reality kind of flat and not exciting. Some people raced in the stadium area where the first Olympics were held though!)

Then we rode in the bus for a million hours, which I mostly slept through, except when the driver yelled through the window at other drivers or Stella got on the microphone to tell us important things, like how one time her tour group accidentally took pictures of a goat herd while the shepherd was peeing.

Before we left for our little journey, we went to dinner at this place that was loud and crowded and insane and had Greek dancing and stuff. There were men in skirts and pom-pom shoes and a bellydancer who didn’t do much except shake her boob fringe at everyone, but she was still appreciated because dinner came with a lot of bottles of wine. The place was 99% foreign tourists who kept going “oompah!”

Next comes a little back-to-school clothes shopping, which is more needed than anticipated because when I washed my clothes in the bathtub (which takes forever, I wouldn’t recommend it unless your local Laundromat ALSO costs ten euros) I accidentally stretched a couple shirts out really big when I was wringing the water out. These things you only learn from experience…