Time has flown by quickly here and already it is time to leave our hotel.  From now on we do not stay at the same hotel for more than three nights in a row.  It’ll be rough since it’ll be for three weeks but nevertheless I’m kind of glad to be on the road again.  I’ve accomplished my goal homework wise here.  Only one paper left to write.  I’ve got to get motivated and start on it.

About that tour from so long ago…

On Monday we left Tolo and went to Olympia.  As you can guess it’s the site of the ancient Olympics.  It was cool and rainy when we arrived and stayed that way until we left the next day.  On the day we arrived we visited the museum and the next day before we left we went to the site itself.  It is very large with many structures since a mudslide from long ago protected much of it.  I raced some people on the Olympian track which was not circular like we are used to but simply down and back.  The track was very muddy but luckily the way my clothes look a little mud doesn’t even show up much.  With all the water on the ground the worms really came out.  Kim offered to eat one for ten euros.  She got it to touch her tongue which made a really cool picture, but couldn’t bring herself to chew it or swallow it whole (the idea of a worm wriggling in her stomach was unappealing).

That day we spent a good number of hours on the bus driving up to Ioannina.  Ioannina is a large university city up in Thessaly.  From there we planned on driving through the mountain passes to Kalambaka, but when we woke up there was a fresh layer of slush on the ground and the passes had been closed.  So instead we took a six hour bus ride to Delphi.  It was a really long day.  I listened to at least five hour monologue of one of the students who wasn’t talking to me, but another girl who didn’t have the heart to tell him to stop.  His voice carried really well on the bus.  It was the third day in a row that I was sitting near to him and it was really hard to block the voice out.

We spent two days at Delphi and luckily did not have to get back on the bus till we left.  I think Delphi is so far my favorite place besides Nemea and Athens.  I loved the mountains and the village is very beautiful. There was a lot of wood in the building of the hotel we stayed in and I adore the color and warmth from wood.  The streets were narrow and covered with small shops.  We met a man named George who painted icons.  They were very beautiful and I wish that I had bought the one that I really liked, but instead I conserved money and bought a small one that was not hand painted.  I’ve decided that I enjoy the icon of St. George and the Dragon.

On Friday we had another long bus ride to Kalambaka.  This was perhaps the strangest experience yet.  I usually sleep on the bus and at one point woke up to find myself back in the Midwest.  If it weren’t for the occasional cement house that are ubiquitous in Greece, it could have been the Midwest.  The whole place was flat as a pancake with water towers visible in the distance and fields alongside the road.  When we reached Kalambaka we had another sight to behold, that of the cliffs of Meteora.  They rise out of the ground like pillars.  Their sides are almost straight up and on the top a few monasteries lie.  These cliffs were used in the film For Your Eyes Only with James Bond.  I’m going to have to watch it again when I get home.

We visited three monasteries the next day.  A few of the students had to close their eyes as we drove along with only a simple guardrail separating us from certain doom.  There was a monastery that I would have liked to visit but we didn’t.  It had a rope bridge to it from another one of the pillars.  It was a rope bridge out of an Indiana Jones film.  Doors could be seen in rock walls where there is no visible way to get to them and stairs cut into the stone seem to appear from nowhere.  All there monasteries that we visited were well placed to accommodate visitors.  They were all very beautiful and had interesting museums at them.  My favorite was the monastery where the nuns lived.

Then came Sunday.  We left Kalambaka and drove down to the Temple of Posiden at Sounion then drove back up the coast to Piraeus and caught the ferry to Crete.  Since then I’ve been lounging around on this island working a bit on a tan.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to have internet connection next.  I think we’ll be spending a couple of days in a small village soon helping out in some agricultural activities and learning more about the culture.

p.s.  There's a soccor match going on now.  Greece against Albania, currently Greece is winning by one goal.

I am wretchedly tired as I type this.  And perhaps rightly so.  I’ve been pushing myself harder than need be these last few weeks, but I feel confident that I shall be glad of it later on.  I have had the goal, while here, of writing two five page papers a week (for three weeks).  So far I have adhered quite well to it and am facing only one paper left this week.  When done I shall have greatly reduced my homework load and shall be able to spend the last three weeks on the road in peace with only books to read and sunshine to catch.  Besides all the five page papers, there is also one ten page paper that I have not embarked upon yet.  I am determined to have it finished by the time my birthday rolls around and thus be finished will all my homework by then.  It is not that the professors expect this from their students, indeed they grant us till the fifteenth of May to hand in any and all papers.  But it is satisfying to know that when I get home I can recover from jetlag without the nagging shadow of work hanging over my shoulders.

This in short is why the prolonged absence.  I have yet to finish detailing the ten-day trek from so long ago, but I shall finish later.  There is little to report of our stay on Crete as of yet.  The time has been spent mostly in the room typing on the computer, reading a book, or sitting on top of a rock wall basking in the sun like a lizard.  It is not terribly warm yet (we have yet to reach seventy degrees) and so far I have been on the beach in my bathing suit only once.  There was one really warm day last Saturday when it got up to around 68 degrees perhaps, but that is all.  Even so, I am deliciously excited with the weather considering I heard that last week southern Minnesota got twenty one inches of snow.  We are also back to having classes every day.  Soon they will finish and we will have our last myth test finishing up the studies and leaving only travel.  When we travel next I intend to make more of an effort to search out internet cafes and update the journal accordingly.

          Sunday morning we woke up with the Mediterranean smell pervading the atmosphere.  The beach was alluring but the waters cold.  A few brave souls swam while others combed the beach for washed up shells and other treasures of the sea.  A group of us adventured to the rocky hill of Assini and hiked up the old stone steps to look out over the town of Tolo and the islands that dotted the landscape of the Mediterranean.  As we neared the hill and walked past the small white building at the bottom, we were greeted by a black and white cat, or gata as they are called in Greek.  She designated herself as our Greek guide and showed us directly to the steps that led to the top of the hill.  All the way up she climbed, one step ahead of us.  We followed and when we reached the top she was rewarded with a nice petting.  She even allowed us to take pictures with her in them.  The top of the hill was quite exquisite and expansive.  Sharp rocks cropped up everywhere with lush greenery nestled in between.  Heavy rusted metal grates could be found here and there covering large holes in the ground.  Not all the large holes were covered however as I came upon a few of them that could easily be fallen into.  As I explored further off the beaten path I found the edge of the hill looking over the blue waters.  It looked possible to get down the edge near the water but definitely difficult and not something I wanted to try alone since I had parted ways with the others to explore on my own.  We easily spent over two hours on the hill looking around the few ruins left and turning our sight out to the lure of the sea.

     We left Athens for our excursions on the mainland early in the morning.  As we carried our heavy luggage out to the bus we met our bus driver Yannis, a cheerful man who frequently played with worry beads, a ubiquitous item in Greece.  The bus we were traveling in was white and new.  Yannis told me later one night in Delphi as we sat around a table in the taverna digesting our food that the bus cost half a million dollars and he would have to pay it off in seven years.  From other people I found out that the bus can go two thousand kilometers without gassing up and takes half an hour for the tank to fill.  Yannis was an amazing driver.  We were told that bus drivers drive gravel trucks to learn how to maneuver the lumberous vehicles.  We negotiated narrow city roads without trouble and managed to drive through Meteora without falling over the cliff edge, made especially difficult when we passed another full sized bus.  Nevertheless, with Yannis’ wondrous skill at the wheel the bus came through without a scratch.  The way we squeezed through narrow spaces without more than a couple of inches to spare made me think we were on the Night Bus, for those of you who are Harry Potter fans you know what I mean by this.

            We rode this Night Bus for ten days.  It was a good bus to be on for the most part.  I was troubled only a few times by people whose voices carry and never seem to stop talking.  It seemed as if we lived out of that bus since we were off it for evenings and for sites alone.  There was only one day when we managed not to set foot on that bus and that was at Delphi towards the end of the trip.

            On Friday we left Athens and visited three sites: Eleusis, Cornith, and Nemea.  My favorite of course was Nemea, since it was the site on which my report was done.  Everyone on the trip picked a site on which they did a site report.  A ten page paper and a five minute or so speech at the site to everyone.  Mine was less than five minutes.  By the time we reached Nemea the sky had opened up and a light drizzle was soaking everyone.  Since it was the last site to visit we got there a bit late and had only forty minutes to run around.  I was quick in my report then used the time we had to my advantage dashing around from one place to the next taking pictures and enjoying the site.  We were unable to see the stadium which is a part of the site but a little ways away.  I should have liked to see the graffiti that had been carved into the wall by Christians during the first century.  I have a reason to return to this sleepy little town and small site.

            We spent the night at Tolo and stayed there for three days total.  The next day we went to another four sites (actually three since the first two are right next to each other): Mycenae, Treasury of Atreus, Temple to Hera, and Tiryns.  Mycenae is where the lions gate rests, a monumentus erection of stone.  [pic]  Finally, free of Athens and its fierce guards with whistles, we were able to run and jump and play around on the rocks.  Before this site I felt much more as if in a museum rather than in the open air and sky.  The grandest adventure of the day took place at Mycenae.  We passed through the lions gate and meandered through the grounds.  There was a beautiful almond tree at the top of the hill that spouted many pink and white blossoms.  We traveled further down the path of stones past the almond tree and down the other side of the hill passing the broken remains of what were once rooms and fortress walls until we reached a dark foreboding cavern awing open before us.  A small sign in brown with yellow lettering spelled out Cistern and pointed into the gloom.  We took out our flashlights, those that had brought them for we had been forewarned, and entered one behind the other in a single line.  I proceeded them all into the inky blackness.

The steps were wet, slippery, and worn down from thousands of years and thousands of people walking up and down the treacherous way.  The path took a left and then a right.  One hand was pressed close to the damp wall to guide us and hold it as if it were a shield to protect us from falling.  We passed under a support that consisted of a metal rusted rod in the middle of the stairway holding up another rusted bar crosswise the ceiling.  Somebody had placed an old coke can up there and it sat in the darkness watching our progress.  Some people were nervous as the darkness took on a life of its own and swallowed our light.  Butterflies in stomachs raged in a whirlwind as step after step the stairs got smoother under our feet and the perfidious water attempted to sweep us away into an endless gloom.  Soon the theme song for Indian Jones was struck up and as people joined those with anxious nerves were calmed.  We journeyed down the ninety-nine steps into the heart of blackness when suddenly there appeared before us a mighty drop.  We slithered down on our bottoms this last enormous stair that must have been made for giants.  The ground was no longer the slippery smooth rock but a fine powdery light brown dirt.  We slowly moved forward into the unknown only to find that we were surrounded by three walls reaching into the dark netherlands above and one colossal step.  We had all climbed down and together the small space became quickly cramped.  Flashlights were turned off and the blackness enveloped us.  Breathless we stood there experiencing a darkness darker than any winter night in Minnesota.  Without a moon or stars or any ray of hopeful light from up above we huddled together down in the cavern ninety-nine long steps below the living breathing playing world.  A light was turned on and Phil climbed the giant step above to take our picture.  The light went out once again but this time we smiled in the darkness waiting for a flash.  After a few pictures were taken, Phil climbed down once again to join us in our burrow.  The lights were put out once more so that we could experience once more the childish fright of the dark, yet this time not all light was gone from the well.  Far above us a small light was bouncing around to the sound of footsteps coming down.

The second half of our group had found us.  They descended as we had, but they had the comforting forethought that others had gone before and managed to survive the monstrous depths.  We had hoped to surprise or scare them with our presence but no such thing occurred.  We craned our necks up to watch their decent, the cavern ceiling forming the v found in church windows.  The boys scrambled up the big step then helped hoist the girls up.  Before leaving the pitiful hole I knocked on the walls in hopes that something, perhaps a secret doorway, could be found.  The sound emitted was hollow, but no cracks could be seen anywhere along the walls.  Nevertheless I like to image a great underground river beyond those walls, or secret tombs filled with riches from the ancient world waiting to be discovered.  The ascent was relatively easy and quick.  Returning to the known world of sunshine and flowers and wind I was filled with a sense of longing to experience again the descent into the unknown.  An exploration into that which cannot be seen at all, a walk with ones eyes shut not able to see further ahead than the next step wondering where the ceiling will be low, which step will provide no safe foothold, and the fall, bound to happen, where it will end.