Woops! It seems that I am pretty much a month behind in this thing. Which is deplorable, and I apologize.

We’ve just been doing a lot of stuff, learning to knit, reading novels, visiting three world capitals in less than two weeks. That kinda stuff. BUT I am majorly behind so I’ll have to start with Santorini.

Oh! Also we went to see a soccer game, which was interesting in an insane sort of way. The Greeks get REALLY into soccer, to the point of giant cultlike chants and small explosives.
Also, my wallet was stolen on the supercrowded Metro. Awesome! Another girl in our group had her bag slashed open with a knife and didn’t even realize. Authentic Athens pickpocketers, everyone.

But anywho…

AWESOME TRIPS Part 1: Santorini!

We headed off to Santorini on a ferry roughly the size of a giant freaking hotel, where we sat in the lobby-type room and slept on couches because it was a nine-hour trip. It was an overnight ferry, so we arrived in the morning after leaving at midnight. It was pretty cool.

When we got there my roommate argued with some sketchy travel agents until we got a hotel room with a view out over the Cliffside for really cheap. I’d like to think this was because of expert bargaining skills, but it was also partially because we got there in the middle of winter when there were about twelve other tourists on the island. The room, though…was SO nice. And the view was incredible, right out over the sea with a view of the volcanic islands and the famous sunsets (though we missed that since it was so cloudy).

The first thing we did, naturally, was get in the Jacuzzi at 10 am because we were so excited that there was a Jacuzzi.

Then we went off in search of food and shops, and did a lot of touristy browsing and scoping out restaurants and also freezing our butts off. The islands are colder than the mainland, and MUCH windier (which becomes a lot more significant later).

We were wandering happily around, talking about how sad it was that we were missing Halloween, when we passed a doorway that was completely decked out in orange and black and went WAIT A MINUTE. Turns out it was a pretend Irish pub, which was celebrating Halloween by having a party, so we headed back there and won free shirts with witches on them and got free pointy hats from the bartenders who were all in costume. It reminded us all of home.
We ended the night in the Jacuzzi again with little glasses of wine, watching the sun go down over the water.

For day two my roommates, who are probably insane, had planned to jump off of some cliffs. But the wind had reached instant-pneumonia levels so instead we looked at art galleries and the place where Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was filmed.

We shopped and ate some more, and headed back to the rooms to pack, and THEN we learned that our hotel-sized ferry back was, in fact, in Crete indefinitely because of the high winds.
The hotel people had allowed us to keep our bags in one of the three rooms after checkout, so we headed back there to camp out for…a while. The ferry that was supposed to leave at 10pm ended up leaving at noon the next day.

This means that seven of us spent the night in a two-person hotel room. There was some pretty creative use of furniture as sleeping surfaces and a lot of spine problems in the morning (at least they gave us breakfast).

Coming soon…Berlin!

Happy Halloween, America!
We don’t get to have Halloween here. Apparently there’s some day in February where Greeks all wear funny costumes for no reason though, so perhaps we’ve been a good influence.

It would seem that I haven’t blogged in a while. This is definitely not because I forgot my Blogger password. That would be dumb.

Classes are chugging along in a way that is truly unremarkable, unless you count the way City U. is really terrible at, say, telling us whether our classes are cancelled or not. Organization is not one of the famous Greek traits (as far as I can tell the famous Greek traits are aggressive driving and high-heeled boots and tardiness).

I’m learning some very useful phrases in Greek class (“Good morning! My name is Erin! I want coffee! Where does your mother live?”). Usually I can practically utilize about two of these words before it degenerates into gesturing and the clerk using English anyway, I guess because it is painful to watch.

Apparently I missed Vince Vaughn as well as Kevin Costner last week, a trend I am not pleased with. C’mon, famous people!

We visited the Temple of Poseidon, which was beautiful if you don’t mind being trapped on a peninsula until your bus comes back. There was a Greek national holiday called Oxi Day on Wednesday so we got to sleep through classes (SO not as good as Halloween though).

I’m getting a little homesick now that it’s well into fall in the States. Fall’s always been my favorite season so it kind of sucks just missing it entirely. It’s getting chilly here but everything’s still green and no one celebrates Halloween or Thanksgiving. Aphroditi is going to make Thanksgiving dinner for all the American kids, including specially imported Butterball turkeys because Greek turkeys, she says, are too boney. It’s super super nice of her.

Tonight, we depart on an overnight ferry to Santorini. It’s supposed to be the prettiest of the Greek islands, though it’ll be cool and windy when we get there so I am not looking forward to a dip in the water like I usually would be. We’re coming back Sunday night to Monday morning. A week later we head on a ten-day excursion to Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris, which is majorly exciting provided the travel agency stops being so frustrating.

And cause I've been behind, here's some pictures from Meteora and our Delphi/Corinth/Sparta trip. Enjoy :)

Sup, America

I HAVE SOME MORE PICTURES. Here they are. They are from the Acropolis omg omg omg

The reason I haven’t been blogging is that I’ve been having many glamorous and exciting adventures in the beautiful weather.

Just kidding!

It’s actually been raining all week, and really cold too, I am confronted suddenly with the fact that I pretty much packed nothing with sleeves because I was too much of an optimist. I need to go shopping if I can convince a roommate to come with me. I’ve been on whole-apartment shopping trips but I am so slow that we usually switch stores before I find anything. Or else they are sketchy places with “Dolce and Gabanna” hanging on hangers outdoors for suspiciously low prices.

I went to the market yesterday and did some serious grocery shopping even though it was pouring rain, so I’m proud of myself for that. Last time I was so overwhelmed by the fact that it was an open market that I ended up buying two plums and an apple or something. I made chicken in my apartment for the first time, too! It was exciting.

Annnnd what else. The apartment went out again to a bar I liked and a club I didn’t, I ended up kind of grumpy and with blisters on my feet from my shoes I don’t usually wear. But the night started out as fun times, at least. I really like all the girls I live with, they’re fun.
And we got shadowed all the way home by these two dogs that were flanking us really protectively and barking at every creepy-looking man that got near us. They seemed really eerily smart but it was nice, they made me feel weirdly safer. They came all the way back to the apartment with us, Kathleen gave them names and everything.

I had my first classes, except not Photojournalism because the professor crashed his motorcycle into something on the way there (he’s okay). They were…pretty unremarkable. And I don’t think they’ll be much of a challenge.

Blahhhh today is so blahhh. I’ll hopefully have more exciting things to blog about later.

OH I FORGOT KEVIN COSTNER. He was apparently just wandering around the city and some girls from our school saw him and took pictures with him. WTF. I wanna see someone famous!

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…

OOPS SORRY

Guys Mike pointed out that I posted my phone number incorrectly... it's actually 011 30 690 921 3877. Sorry!

Dell-feeeee

This is how you pronounce Delphi if you are and Authentic Greek Person.

So the Delphi day trip was...kind of a bust. There was a rockslide so we couldn't climb up and see the temple or the theater, which are the two super famous sites there. Instead we saw a lot of big square blocks, which were ancient and all but so not worth a three-hour drive. The museum was pretty awesome, but it was closed when we got there so we had to leave and eat and come back.

Stella was our tour guide, which was awesome because she is surprisingly good at shoving through crowds of tourists, despite being a little grandma-type person. She kept waking me up on the bus ride with her announcements though, which made me grumpy.

There were cats EVERYWHERE. We got more excited about a kitten than the ruins.

Then we took a "walk" up to the highest point in Athens, a little church on a big hill. Halfway up we realized it was actually a grueling hike of steep steep death, but the views at the top were totally worth it (except they are still on my camera, sorry). Also this dog with a tumor (we creatively named him Tumor Dog). Walked with us all the way down the mountain and halfway through Athens, barking like he was clearing the way or something. He even stopped and waited whenever we took a rest. He was a good friend, Tumor Dog.

Today we had seven hours of the most boring lecture I have ever been trapped in, then learned that most of our classes were unavailable. I am officially taking Photojournalism and Human Development, which are still art and psych even if they're not was I originally wanted, so I'm cool with it. There's also a Modern Greek class with an oral lab that will probably terrify me.

Then we brought groceries! I fried myself some eggplant and was so pleased with the result that I have been telling everyone, even though no one cares, probably. Tonight we're going to a bar where the main attraction is apparently a wall covered in neon bottles, where I will probably hang around being way more sober than everyone else. But there is no dancing, I was promised, which is good because I'm tired and last time we danced creepy Greek men tried to dance with us. I am not a fan.

My legs burn and the internet sucks, as per usual. I'm still working on pictures but it is a pain in the arse. To hold you over, here is a picture from Meteora. And a dog sleeping on the Parthenon. And Stella.

Ta ta!

Real big rocks, etc.

Guys,

Guys,

Meteora was freaking awesome. If you haven’t googled it or something, the Meteora are these gargantuan rock formations that look like giant pillars. Some of them have monasteries built on the top (From the sixteenth century!) and we got to tour four of them, wearing ugly skirts because women aren’t allowed inside without a long skirt on. They were so cool though! They had paintings and stuff from the 1500s that still looked awesome, and really old icons and one had relics from a saint and that kinda thing. I also got distracted by the stray cats that were wandering around everywhere (up on top of giant cliffs, what?) because they were super cute.

The rocks themselves were breathtaking, just massive and beautiful and I must have taken a billion pictures, I’ll have to weed out the non-exciting ones before I upload. It was amazing climbing around on them, a real spiritual, beautiful experience. Plus we got to stay in a fancy hotel with a pool on the roof!

Our tour guide for the Meteora trip was an insane old Greek woman named Stella who referred to herself in the third person and referred to all of us as her “beloved ones.” She also called other tourist groups “the enemy,” as in “My darlings, my poor darlings, the enemy is at the top of the stairs. You will have to stay here with Stella and wait.”

She sounded like a weird cross between Yzma and Mrs. Doubtfire. Only Greeker. She also would interrupt her speech every time she used a big word and explain how it was actually a Greek word. She also grabbed the microphone to point out things like corn and Japanese tourists while we were driving.

Actually the drive was pretty cool, even though it was five hours long. We saw gorgeous mountains and the ocean with islands in the distance, and even a Gypsy settlement with tin sheet lean-tos and laundry lines and such, which I didn’t even know still existed. Plus there was Stella’s commentary. (“You see these? They are how do say it, tomahto fields. You say tomahto or tomato? Tomato? Okay. So there tomahtos- tomatoes! Oh, I am sorry. Anyway, we use these small tomatoes to make tomahto juice.”)

Today, we tried to take a trip to a lake that Afroditi sort of told us about, and after spending a million years on the really sketchy bus someone asked a Greek guy where we were and he told us we had already passed it. We got off, not knowing where we were, and waited for a bus in the opposite direction but it took so long that we gave up and walked to a little restaurant and had pizza. The plus side was that we got “stranded” literally right along this beautiful beach, so we all hung around there instead of at our original planned beach and it was still nice.

Now I’m in the apartment by myself being a lazy bum because everyone else went clubbing with Deo and I didn’t feel like it. But I’m not sleepy because I went to a café with internet for a while and had a super delicious but quite strong cappuccino. I was watching the Emmys belatedly but now it’s some weird Greek soap opera called Karma (Κάρμα!) that features a cruise ship wreck or something.

Tomorrow are the Greek general elections so we’ll probably do nothing, since everything will be closed. Monday we’re visiting the ruins of the famous oracle at Delphi. Hellz yeah.

I miss all of you as much as I miss peanut butter! <3