Food Which Looks Like Food

Tags

Food, Greece, travel

Okay, so y’all know the view here is pretty fab, since I’ve uploaded a few pictures of the island and of Athens. What you may not know is that the food is pretty fab, too. I’ve eaten more food here in one meal than Michael Phelps eats in a day (anyone else remember that ridiculous special they did on his calorie intake). I’ve also been watching the Olympics, obviously, and let me tell you–the reason the Greeks aren’t winning anything is because they’re eating too well. Here’s some things you should seriously try next time you’re at a Greek restaurant, if it seems at all legit. Be warned: this food all looks like what it is, since it hasn’t been processed and sent through a grinder.Tzatziki–yogurt and cucumber and garlic and olive oil. As a sauce, it pretty much can go on anything. Especially gyros and souvlaki

Souvlaki–roasted meat on a spit. Typically pork or goat.

Gyros–the basic thing most people know, they’re souvlaki wrapped inside pita bread with tzatziki, cucumber, lettuce, tomato, and french fries on top. Well, not always french fries. But the good ones have them.

Marithes–tiny fried fish, served with lemon. If you ignore the eyes staring at you accusingly, they’re freakin delicious.

Octopus ksidato–ksidato translates roughly to vinegar. This octopus is served raw, having been marinated in vinegar and olive oil for a long time.

Greek salad–does not involve lettuce. Fun fact for people in the States. It’s just cucumber, tomato, feta, and a couple of olives tossed in olive oil. The end.

Fresh fish of any kind–the Greeks will do it well. There’s so much coast to the country, so they should.

And since now I’ve made myself hungry talking about all this, I’m gonna be leaving for dinner. Talk to y’all soon!

What Not to Do On a Small Greek Island

Tags

Bioarchaeology, Greek islands, school, travel

I’ve definitely made some mistakes here, and so have the other people in my field school. As a quasi-entertaining (I hope) way to tell you about them, I’ve made a list of what not to do when on a small Greek island.

1. Forget sunscreen. I wear thirty every day, and I’m still about twenty shades darker. One girl didn’t get her back covered, and now she has a bright pink, blobby circle between her shoulders. The Mediterranean sun does not play around.
2. Go running at noon. You’d think this was obvious, but I still did it. Poor decision-making skills. Apparently, 8:45 is not much better though, since my roommate Lauren went running then and was sick for the rest of the day.
3. Trust anyone on a moto. Every person from the age of 8 up in Astypalaia knows how to ride a motorcycle, and the teenagers especially love to zoom as fast as possible around the tight corners and steep hills. Did I mention the giant potholes in the road, and the fact that I’ve yet to see a helmet? These people also ride double, triple, or quadruple sometimes. A couple are covered in scratches from falling. Getting on one is like signing your own death sentence, if you’re a tourist.
4. Expect food that doesn’t look like the animal it came from. This has actually been a problem. There are people here who were disgusted when their fish looked like fish, and had, God forbid, BONES. All of the food here is pretty fresh, and I’m appreciative of that. If it means I have to fillet my own fish, at least I know exactly what it is and where it came from. Delish.
5. Believe that you’re hydrated. If you don’t feel thirsty, drink at least two more glasses. Our supervisors made us take a lemon shot with sugar and salt as a scurvy-preventative/rehydration effort.
6. Give yourself less than half an hour to go anywhere. Because your walk is either A. up a really steep, circuitous route, or B. going to be interrupted by at least three people you know.
7. Feed the cats. In the wise words of my roommate Anne, “Don’t pay attention to the animals. Or the boys. They will follow you home.”
8. Go to the beach nude. It may be permissible in some parts of Europe, but not here. Unless you want everyone to be talking about you the next day. And on that note…
9. Hope to keep anything a secret. Because everyone on the island knows Professor Hillson, and it will get back to him. Probably in less than 24 hours.
10. Put toilet paper in the toilet. It worries me still that the toilets and plumbing system can’t handle toilet paper, but can handle everything else? Trying not to think about it.
11. Hang your laundry with one pen per item. Another thing I learned by trial and error. The wind can be really strong here, and I returned from the beach to find my laundry scattered all over the lawn once.
12. Use the internet for more than an hour. First off, you have to go to a café to get internet at all. Then, if there’s more than two people on it, the server will slow down drastically. Add in a fourth or fifth person, and the server crashes. Sometimes, you can get back on, if you’re lucky.
13. Read a menu at a restaurant. There are several reasons this is a bad idea. One, typically the menu is only in Greek. If you chance upon one in English, odds are, the restaurant will be out of half the menu items. It’s a small island, and if shipment hasn’t come in, there’s not much they can do about it. And it’s possible that you’ll find somewhere where they don’t even have a menu. Someone will come out and list off ten or so items, and then when you stare at them blankly, they’ll just bring you whatever they feel like making. It’s usually pretty good, so I don’t even bother with menus anymore. Bring on the tzatsiki.
14. Assume everyone will speak English. Raising your voice doesn’t make them understand you either, just fyi, other tourists.
15. Anticipate your mail will come on time. Or ever. The boat that visits Astypalaia makes it a priority to unload food first, and if the mail will fit in the truck, so be it. Otherwise, it might travel back and forth on the ferry for several weeks.
16. Finally, and most importantly…don’t mention the Turks. The Greeks and the Turks are locked in an age-old battle, dating back at least to the Persian Wars. Saying their name or anything to do with them is sort of like mentioning General Sherman in Atlanta, but times ten. Therefore, Turkish coffee? Greek coffee. Turkish delights? Greek delights.

 

Small Greek Islands and Baby Bones

Tags

Archaeology, Burial, Greece, Osteology, school

Sorry, y’all, I know I have fallen behind again. But in the last week, I’ve learned all of the bones of the infant human body. ALL OF THEM. So it’s been a little crazy here.

To start you from the beginning, the island is ridiculously beautiful. There are definitely days that I look around and am surprised that I live here. The first full day here, two Sundays ago, we went to the beach, and I could still see my toes perfectly at eight feet deep. The water is that clear, and the color is like nothing I have ever seen. It is a bit cold, but I can appreciate that, since it gets up to 45 degrees Celsius every once and a while. The Mediterranean sun is up when I am at 5:55 every morning, and does not stop shining until about an hour before I go to bed at 9:45 every night. Did I mention that I have turned into an old woman?

The main town of the island is called Chora (Hor-ah, with a bit of that phlegmy sound on the h). It’s about twenty-five minutes’ walk from where we live, in Lebadi (Lev-ath-ee). We’re at the base of the hill, about the middle of the island, and the town has a medieval castle at its apex, which we can see even from the beach way below. Our lab is actually right next to the castle, so we got to go explore it on our first day of class. There’s also eight windmills in the town square, one for each main wind direction.

Class itself has been great—we work from 7 to 3 every day, with half an hour break for breakfast at 9 and lunch at 12. I actually have to be called away from the burial I am working on for each meal, because I otherwise totally lose track of time. It’s a bit like calling children off the playground after recess—we lab students would all swear we’ve only been playing for ten minutes. Unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of the work, I can’t post any photos of the lab itself or anything inside it up here. Warning here, though: skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to read about children’s remains. For those of you who are left, you should know that we aren’t ransacking graves. The excavation is actually a rescue: the people who own the two plots of land that the cemetery, Kylindra (Kuh-lin-drah), both want to build on the land and can’t until we’ve pulled everything out. One plot, Phoibos (Fee-vus), has been pretty much finished, while the other, Staurianou (Stav-ree-on-new), is still being worked on. So the 22^nd Ephorate (Eff-ore-ate) of Greece has workers removing the pot burials whole from the graves and placing them in boxes, then Professor Hillson and the University College London field school excavate the pot burials in lab every summer. We either have a soil ball burial, where the soil has broken into the pot at some point over the past 2.5 thousand years and hardened with carbonate, or a sieve burial, in which the pot broke during removal and is fairly loose dirt mixed with stone and bone. If it’s a soil ball, we photograph everything and start digging down gently with dental picks, scalpels, and wooden skewers with cotton rolled and dipped in acetone on the ends. Of course, we have to flip the ball first, because typically the child is at the bottom. Once we’ve found bone, we clear around it and photograph it again, then plan it on graphing paper. This information is later synced up on some computer programs and put into the database. Finally, we remove all the bones, conserving them as necessary, and identify and label them into bags. The loose dirt is then sieved to make sure we didn’t miss anything—this last step is the only one we do with a sieve job. So you can see that my days are pretty busy with all the bones and dirt and broken pottery.

I’ll write more on that if I have any interesting things that I can talk about, but we can move on for now. I’m going out to dinner tonight with two of my roommates, both of whom have become friends of mine here. Maybe I’ll do a food post later this week? The supervisors give us a lot of advice on where the best food is, so I’ll have to scope it out and take some super-obnoxious touristy pictures to share with y’all. For now, kali spera, as they say here (good day).

Your English is Very Good

Tags

Archaeology, Athens, Greece, school

Well, it has only been six days since my last blog post, so I feel I’ve stayed accountable to all of you. Although, if I’m being honest, this last week has felt like a lifetime. For starters, I don’t think I live on earth. The way a photo looks when you’ve saturated it all the way? That’s sort of my life right now. I also evidently don’t appear American—a man stopped me at the National Archaeological Museum to tell me that my English was very good. Fresh juice is served everywhere, and cow is an unusual meat to find at a restaurant. Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

So I got into town Wednesday evening, the 27^th. I got to my room and took a shower immediately, then met my roommate for the hotel. We went out to dinner with a few other people staying at the same hotel in our program, then I promptly fell asleep—you can see where my priorities lie. Thursday was very busy, as we visited the Parthenon and the rest of the Acropolis (Ah-crah-pah-lis, with loads of temples), the Ancient Agora (the marketplace and government), and the Acropolis Museum (the most amazeballs museum I’ve ever been in). I felt a little sick on the Acropolis, but after drinking some fresh squeezed juice, I felt loads better and powered on. The Acropolis Museum has a lot of the building preserved there, rather than on site, in order to prevent further degradation of the marble. The pieces are set up at heights and distances relative to one another, so they at least still make sense. We then freshened up and went out to dinner near our hotel, which was in the busy Plaka district, near the intersection of Athinas and Ermou streets.

Friday myself and three other girls took a bus tour out to Delphi and saw the Temple of Apollo, practice fields, theater, and Roman-era racetrack. There was also a small museum, and our tour guide only got a few things wrong. I laughed a bit when she described kouroi, an ancient Greek type of statue, but I’m also a little bitter, because she called the classics major out-dated and out of fashion. At least lunch was good—we had four different starters, a main dish, and dessert.

That lasted most of the day, so I didn’t get to see much else—and Saturday was the day we took the ferry to Astypalaia (Ah-stee-pall-YAH). But I did have all morning and part of the afternoon, so I got up bright and early, met another girl, and visited the Kerameikos cemetery, the main cemetery of ancient Athens. I then walked to the Museum of Cycladic Art (Sih-clad-ick), which was also excellent. The Cyclades are a group of islands to the east of the Peloponnese, the peninsular land mass of lower Greece. They’re also just to the west of the island I’m studying on, Astypalaia. The art ranged from 3000 BC to 400 AD, and focused on that area, but they also showed trade routes on an interactive map, depicting the diffusion of art and ideas to different regions. Finally, to museum myself out, I went to the National Archaeological Museum. The statues were chronologically arranged, which I thought was really cool because you could see the progression of artistic styles. They also had a temporary exhibit on a shipwreck excavation, and we nerded out very hard over that. The half-destroyed statues, eaten away by sea life, were fascinating.

Saturday night we spent ten hours on a ferry, and arrived in the wee hours Sunday. I plan on making a separate blog post about the first week here though, because I don’t think y’all could handle it all at once (and neither can the poor wireless at the internet café, what with all the pictures I’ve taken). Talk to you this weekend, perhaps?

Miss Me?

Did you miss me? I know it’s been a while—that whole continuing the blog while I was at school thing didn’t really work, did it? But now that I’m off abroad on another adventure, I figured I should start it back up.

Right now, I’m en route to Athens, via Amsterdam. I am sitting in the Schiphol International Airport, but more importantly, I’m sitting inside a teacup. A giant freakin’ teacup. Drinking a Campari spritz (here’s to you, Italy).

This was not my original plan. Not that anyone’s original plan includes getting sauced inside a giant teacup. The original plan was to have a long enough layover in Amsterdam to get out and see the city, for at least a little bit. But due to some rainy weather, we landed a little late, and I decided it wasn’t worth getting soaked to leave the airport for less than an hour.

So then I found my way to a map, and discovered I’d wandered straight into a fairytale. Y’all, there’s a jungle. I saw the words “Children’s Jungle,” went to check it out, and saw a veritable forest of gym pieces shaped like trees and monkeys and such. And then there’s the free vodka distillery for a Netherlands company right next door (excellent planning there). And a place to get foot/back massages, and a meditation room with free beds. And a free library. Oh, and then there’s the museum, which contains a few select work of the Dutch Masters. What. This is not an airport. This is heaven.

After seeing all these amazing things at once, I was a bit overwhelmed, at which point my survival instincts kicked in and I stumbled to the nearest sign for a bar. I sat down without really seeing anything, and then looked around to see myself in an oversized teacup. Apparently something else Amsterdam is famous for.

I really started pinching myself when an entire soccer team, decked out in blazers, descended upon the (non-teacup) table next to me. I’m gonna go ahead and blame my blatant staring on the fact that it was four am Atlanta time and I was basically brain-dead.

God, I’ve missed Europe.

On a slightly different note, I intend to update this thing about once a week for the duration of my trip, since I’ll only be gone seven weeks. You know me, though, so if that doesn’t happen, no one will be overly surprised. I doubt I’ll update while in Athens for the next three days, but once I get to the island, I hope to hog the bandwidth at the one internet café I know of there for at least long enough to update occasionally. I’m gonna head to my terminal now, though, so I’ll see you soon!

The Joys of Forralt Bor and the Christmas Season

Tags

Budapest, Christmas, finals, forralt bor, Hungarian State Opera House

Hey guys. Sorry I disappeared under a rock for a while there. After my weekend in Budapest (more details below), I had drafts of papers and exams and then all of a sudden it was finals week. Funny how those things creep up on you, right? I had the written portion of my ancient history/archaeology class on Monday, as well as a Greek commentary due as my final that evening. Then there was the field portion of the ancient history/archaeology course on Wednesday (in which, you guessed it, WE GOT ON A BUS. And were driven to an unknown destination, at which point they threw us into the drizzle, handed us blank pieces of paper, and told us to draw the entire town we saw there, labeling the different important bits of a Roman town and listing off the reasons we thought each structure was what it was). And then my Latin exam on Caesar’s De Bello Civili was that afternoon. Our final papers for the class are due on Friday, but I went ahead and turned mine in a bit early, so I am actually done with class in Rome entirely. Mine was on the importance of synthesizing bioarchaeological evidence with our other forms of knowledge about the ancient world (primary sources, art, archaeology of goods and buildings, etc.), especially in regards to funerary rites. There’s some really interesting potential in the discipline, though classicists have been loath to pick it up (yeah, I’m talking to you, philologists).

If you’re really interested, let me know and I’ll do a blog post on the subject later. I think I might continue the blog at school, though I won’t be in the Ancient City anymore. Comment below and let me know if you think I should!

Moving past my (mild) obsession with funerary rites, though, I think I promised you more details of my trip to Budapest. I went for Thanksgiving weekend, because I had free time, and several of my friends here were going to have family in town and be busy anyway. My friend Dan was kind enough to meet me at the airport, and then his kindness came back and bit him in the butt, because I then roped him into showing me the entire city. Which. Was. Fantastic. If I wasn’t required to think Rome was the coolest city ever, it might have some competition in Budapest. Although it’s sort of like comparing apples to oranges: there was about a twenty or thirty degree temperature difference, and the buildings were a bit more modern. But Budapest is still a city with a history.

On the first day, we visited Memorial Park. As a former Soviet nation, Budapest had a lot of Communist art, as well as a history of rebellion against that government. They chose to move some of the sculpture to a park out of the main city–it took us about forty five minutes to get there by public transit. Since Hungary did not become independent until 1989, there’s also a lot of propaganda still around, which they sold in the tiny giftshop…things like postcards and matchboxes and flasks (and the occasional blank passport).

After that history lesson, we sort of just ran all over the city seeing all of the monuments, from the Grand Market to the Citadel and ancient royal castle, which led to some breathtaking pictures. Budapest is known for its bridges, as the Danube cuts the city into two towns (Buda and Pest), and the bridges are all lit up at night, which makes for a striking image when set next to the white marble facade of Parliament, for example. The fact that I had a cup of forralt bor keeping me warm in this cold weather made me appreciate the view all the more. Forralt bor, or gluhwein in German, is red wine heated up with sugar, water, various fruits, cloves, and cinnamon. It might actually be the most delicious drink I’ve ever tasted, and I’m planning on making it at home this holiday season.

Obviously, I had forralt bor the next day too, from a Christmas market in front of the basilica of St Stephen’s, which is named after the first king of Hungary (his mummified fist is preserved as a relic in the church). Then we headed to Hero Square (a monumental area commemorating the military dead), and to the Turkish baths nearby for a few hours. The huge complex, which is fed by mineral springs, has what felt like an endless stream of pools and saunas of varying temperatures, including a plunge pool of 16 degrees Celsius. Dan and I both did that, after spending some time in the outdoor pools (though it was only 30something degrees Fahrenheit outdoors, the pools were kept pretty balmy). The sulfur smell took a little getting used to at first, but it was definitely worthwhile. And after that day of pampering, we went to the Hungarian State Opera house and saw a ballet production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. The building itself was worth paying to see, and the tickets were very reasonable (I think we paid something like 4000 forints, or a little less than 20 bucks, for some pretty great seats). Essentially, the whole weekend made me wish it was Christmas already, because it was cold, and I did a lot of gift shopping, and the markets were playing Christmas music, and I got to eat some super great food. Oh, did I not mention the food? Oh man. I had roasted, stuffed goose leg with baked apples and veggies with a glass of the new harvest wine for dinner the first night. It’s apparently a St. Martin’s Day tradition in Budapest to have goose and new wine, and bad luck will come to you if you don’t, but they cut the tourists a little slack and say as long as you eat that meal at some point in the month of November, you’ll be fine. The Hungarians also have a strange obsession with paprika, and so I had paprika sausage at one Christmas market, while Dan had paprika chicken another time. Then there was goulash in a bread bowl, and these chimney cakes that were baked around a poker and then dipped in cinnamon or cocoa or vanilla. Yum. The weekend was basically heaven.

And now I’m realizing that this post was supposed to be about leaving Rome, and I’ve been babbling on about Budapest. I think I might have to write my post about leaving  Rome once I’ve gotten home…especially because I’m going to see the Pope tonight, and I want to be able to include that. He holds a service for university students only every once and a while, and our program got tickets for anyone who wanted them tonight at 5:30. After that, I have dinner at the American Academy of Rome at 8pm (I interned with them this semester, and I’ve heard the food for the scholars is generally pretty good). Then tomorrow morning my flight leaves for Philadelphia at 11:50am. So I guess next time you hear from me, I’ll be State-side. Weird. Ciao until then!

A Week on the Bus…Round Two, Campania

Tags

Campania, Herculaneum, Naples, Pompeii

Dear readers, as you may recall, in October I, along with my 36 classmates, spent a week on a bus traveling around Sicily. The past week was essentially a repeat of that experience, except we went to Campania. Quick geography lesson for those of you who aren’t versed in the precise location of every area of Italy: Campania is immediately to the south of Rome, whereas Sicily is that silly island that it looks like the boot of Italy is about to punt over towards Spain across the Mediterranean. So we actually spent a loss less time on the bus this trip (less driving because less distance). You would think that this meant we spent more time at sites or woke up a little later: yet daylight savings strikes again. The sun went down around 4:30 every day, so we had to rush a little bit. This was fine with me, because it meant we got a little more time to relax (read: catch up on homework and sleep) in the afternoon. But you don’t really want to hear about my homework, do you? No? Ok, I’ll get to the good part: the places we saw.

Campania is the region in which Mt. Vesuvius is located. Yup, the same Vesuvius that blew up on August 24, 79 AD, at 1 pm, covering the cities around, like Pompeii and Herculaneum, with layers of volcanic ash. Or, that’s the traditional date anyways. Our professors like to point out that it could have been in September and we’re not really sure. But for the sake of tradition, let’s say the date I gave you is right. So of course we saw those two cities, with the asphyxiated people and animals. But the really neat thing about the cities is how much they feel like ghost-towns, as if people had just picked up and left a few months before, instead of a few thousand years before. The walls are still mostly complete, and at Herculaneum, organic materials are even preserved, albeit a bit charred. The polychromy (colors) on the wall exist basically in their original states, so we can study wall paintings there.

My personal favorite was the Villa of Poppea, so named for the wife of Nero, whose family home scholars believe this to be. The home had paintings from multiple different artistic styles, and it was also in a rural area, so it had a whole set of gardens associated with it, which one researcher has recreated based off of root morphology. How, you ask? Well, in the same way that archaeologists poured plaster casts of the bodies at Pompeii, the roots also left spaces between the volcanic debris, and based on casts made of those spaces, this woman managed to recreate the possible plants in each location. A little bit of pollen analysis was involved too. Super cool stuff. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera at that stop, so you’ll have to make do with pictures of the actual cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum instead. Which is okay, I guess.

Who am I kidding? It rocked. Especially the part where we got to go in this back area that is currently being excavated in Pompeii…as soon as the Turkish minister was done looking at it. Absurdly cool. This area was known as the Insula of the Chaste Lovers, and contained primarily a bakery with a few other shops. The oven and grist mills are preserved, as are the bodies of five mules who would have turned the mill. Pompeii also has several theaters and amphitheaters and a forum that have been excavated.

The other town we visited was known as Herculaneum (they believed Hercules had founded their city on his way back from Spain, having stolen the cattle of the monster Geryon).  It’s not as trafficked by tourists as Pompeii, but personally, if I had to choose between the two, I’d probably pick Herculaneum. The houses tended to be a bit smaller, but they had more marble inlays and one really cool wall mosaic going for them. Less square footage, but higher aesthetic appeal.

In between the regions struck by Vesuvius, we also visited Naples, Baia, and Sperlonga, along with Monte Cassino and a few more towns (it was a busy week). The art history professor took us for a day through Naples, so I got to see a Caravaggio firsthand. He also tried to convince us that Naples was a nice city and didn’t deserve its reputation. Jury’s still out on that one for me. On the one hand, I ate some excellent one euro pizza and saw some beautiful things. On the other hand, I had to wade through a lot of trash to do so, and I’ve heard we only visited one of the nicer regions of the city. It might take another visit there to convince me one way or the other (hear that, mom and dad?).

Baia, or Baiae as the ancients knew it, was the site of the baths of the Romans. It was sort of a scandalous place that any self-respecting politician wouldn’t be caught dead enjoying, and so of course, every self-respecting politician had property there. Later, in the empire, Nero had a fantastic complex there, complete with a theater with a pool attached. Speaking of sweet Imperial digs, Sperlonga was the site of one of Tiberius’ getaways. His grotto for dining originally included ponds for eels and fish, as well as massive sculptural groups depicting scenes from the Trojan Cycle.

Finally, we ended our week with a stop at Monte Cassino on our way home. The home of the Benedictine order since it was first founded, it has been pretty close to continuously occupied. The monks are occasionally disrupted by wars–as in World War II, for example–but ultimately always come back to their main base. The monastery is perched on top of a mountain overlooking the entire surrounding area, giving it a beautiful view. It was a great way to end the trip.

And with that, I think I’ll sign off. I’m going to Budapest this weekend, so maybe I’ll have some exciting stories for you by next Monday! Ciao!

Better Late than Never: Oh, and Another Police Station

Tags

Eurail, French Riviera, Paris, travel

I’m going to stop pretending that I’m going to update more frequently. That way, it will be a pleasant surprise when I do, instead of a disappointment when I don’t.

So where was I again? Right. On a train to Milan. ll I have to say about that town is that it felt like stepping into New York. Sure, there were some nice stores, but it was grey and industrial, with too many McDonalds, and too few rays of sunshine. Everyone was bustling about. The next day, we left for Nice and ended up at the Nice police station. Nothing major, don’t worry. (Since the last police station fingerprinted me, I couldn’t pull a Foxy Knoxy…too soon? Oh well.) Katherine had her bag of clothes stolen, but because she’s a smart cookie, she had her passport and Kindle and such in a smaller bag with her, which wasn’t taken. We were helped out by this kindly youngish French man, and reported the theft. Never can say that random strangers aren’t nice ever again. Plus, I’ve now officially been in more foreign police stations than U.S. ones.

Otherwise, the French Riviera was nice (pun totally intended); our dinner was fantastic. But I don’t recommend drinking the free wine several restaurants use as bait to get you to sit down. Ours was a rosé, and it tasted and smelled like Smarties instead. Yuck.

The next day, we moved onward, to Paris. Alex’s friend Josh met us at the station and taught us how to use the metro system, thank God. Having to pay to use the bathroom (.50 €, thank you, now please go through the turnstile) was bewildering enough–if I’d had to figure out how to get on the train, I would have lost it. Instead, I lost it the next day (briefly). After an excellent dinner of canard aux framboises, or duck with raspberries, and a good night’s sleep in our hostel, we headed to the Louvre. Their current temporary exhibition? Alexander and Macedonia, of course. Two hours in, I was totally overwhelmed by the horde of school children shrieking and old ladies jabbing me with their elbows to get a better look. I understand that  you’re dying and all, but really? RUDE. Our group separated for a while (read: for our sanity), and met up again just in time to see the code of Hammurabi. Pretty exciting stuff.

We hit all the other big sites (Champs d’Elysee, Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, San Chappelle, San Denis, Rue di Rivoli) except for the Musee d’Orsay, which was closed due to a strike. See: Strike at Revamped Musée d’Orsay Blocks Grand Reopening. Anyway, after three days of drooling over 300 € Hermes scarves (which I did not buy) and croque madames (which I did eat), we got back on a night train for Rome, on which I studied and slept for about fifteen hours total. And then that cycle continued for the next week and a half, with the occasional break for a meal.

Which pretty much catches you up on my life. I played a little Tour Guide Barbie for my mom and aunt for the past ten days, and said goodbye to them last night. I’m looking forward to some real fall weather starting up in the next week or so, as it still is in the 70s for the high most days here, and to going to Campania in seven days. Ciao til next time!

Sicily…or How I Spent a Week on a Bus

Greetings from the world of midterms. I recently left a world of beautiful people, escargot, and wine, trading it in for classics nerds, pringles, and red bull. Disclaimer: this post was written a week ago; I don’t have time to write a new one now or to post about fall break (the beautiful people, escargot, and wine will have to wait for later this week), but I did manage to find the old post and copy it down here!)

As I write this, I’m sitting in a carriage of a high-speed train, which is carrying me from an art-filled sunny morning in Florence to a shopping spree evening in Milan. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be able to post until this upcoming Sunday (*from the future: yeah, I was even later than that, sorry*), because I didn’t bring my computer with me on fall break. We’re staying in hostels and don’t really have anywhere to store our stuff, so all I have for the whole week is a backpack. Who was two thumbs and a master’s in packing light? This girl.

Anyway, I figured I’d let you know about some more of my fabulous travels. This past week, as you may remember from my last blog post, my entire program got on a bus and traveled around the island of Sicily. Here’s a quick recap:

Saturday: Got on the bus at an absurdly early hour. Drove several hours to Poseidonia/Paestum/Palestrina (you choose which name you prefer, based off of your favorite time period Greek/Roman/modern). Saw some Doric temples and was really excited. Spent the night there, which was beautiful because the beach was a five minute walk from our hotel and you could watch the sun set over the bay and mountains while swimming, then take a walk after dinner and watch as the lights coming on in all the harbor towns make a gleaming garland to wreath the moonlit ocean. (Is it just me, or is lyric poetry taking over my vocabulary? #nerdproblems)

Sunday: Got on the bus at an absurdly early hour. Stopped an hour into the drive to see a random Latin roadsign and drink a cappuccino. Got back on the bus and drove to Reggia Calabria, which is at the tip of the boot of Italy. Viewed the butts of the Riaci Bronzes, which are currently in a restoration lab facedown (hence the butts). They’re still really cool, because we have very few original Greek bronzes; the Greeks either melted them down for reuse or the bronzes oxidized to the point that little of the original artistry is visible.

Monday: Got on a ferry with the bus at an absurdly early hour to cross over to Sicily.

Then everything becomes one massive blur of being exhausted, eating pasta with eggplant, and viewing Doric temples. Well, viewing whatever remains of Doric temples. A lot of times, that just means a ginormous playground of rocks, which is really not interesting to anyone but classicists. And maybe small, curious children. Which are often the same thing, I’ve come to learn. It was a really fun trip, and we saw some beautiful places, but I’m glad it’s fall break. My friends, Alex and Katherine, and I are excited to be traveling in a small pack, instead of a bustling horde of forty, and to alter our schedules have no specific schedule whatsoever.

For now, I think that’s all I have to share. See you in about a week, when my brain will be full of facts for my midterms and my closet full of clothes from Milan and Paris! (*Blast from the future again: closet and mind both not as full as they should be, but whatever.)

I’m Not Dead…(Yet)

Tags

busybusybusy, Italy, Julius Caesar, Ravenna, Rome

Surprise! I’m alive! I know, you were all worried that I’d slipped into one of the graves I study and not clambered back out. It felt that way a few times in the last twelve days, but no, not yet. I have, however, been to an Italian police station. And on a twelve-hour bus ride (which is basically hell). And there were a few things in between the two.

So, let’s start with the police station. When last we spoke, the weekend was rapidly approaching. I was packing my backpack for a weekend of light hiking through Cinque Terre, one of the most beautiful regions in Italy. And then…THE EMAIL. Late that night, we at the Centro were informed by our residential director that we needed to board a bus early Saturday morning, passports in hand, or else we’d be deported. He said that the police had questions about our permessi di soggiorno. It wasn’t actually a big deal, but we were freaking out a little bit. Especially because they ran my fingerprints through the system not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. I just look like a hardened criminal, you know.

After that, the weekend just progressively became more and more insane: I couldn’t really sleep Saturday night and so was running on three hours of rest on Sunday. Homework was a blast (as I’ve mentioned before, we have loads of it). Fortunately, we got to go on a lot of cool trips out of the city to make up for that fact.

We visited a sanctuary to Diana at Nemi, where we also saw restorations of two huge pleasure barges in a nearby museum. The anchor was three times as tall as I am. We then headed to Praeneste (modern Palestrina), which was important historically as the last refuge of the younger Marius when he was standing up against Sulla (a general and dictator of Rome in the 80s BC). Praeneste was a huge sanctuary as well, and has now been converted into a museum…with over 800 stairs leading up to it. I guess that’s part of why Marius felt safe there…those steps are awfully discouraging for the casual tourist, much less for someone wearing pounds of armor who probably would die fighting at the top anyway. (Sulla won, despite the stairs.)

This past week, we visited the Palatine hill in Rome, looking at what may/may not have been part of Augustus/Octavian’s home in the late Republic/early Principate. Explaining that complex maze would take hours…and a blog post devoted entirely to it. Maybe another time? I’ve been told we’ll be going back there, so when we do, I’ll do a post on it specifically. Promise.

And this weekend? That 12-hour bus ride was to Ravenna, a city in the north of Italy. To be fair, the actual drive is only five and a half or so hours, but we made a lot of stops along the way back and took a rather circuitous route, in an attempt to follow Julius Caesar’s fateful march to Rome. The drive was lovely, full of sudden switchbacks and mountains rising out of nowhere, with little towns perching on the very ridges of hills. Or, it was lovely there. I was carsick most of the way back.

On the upside, Ravenna itself was gorgeous. I (typically) forgot my camera at the Centro, so I have no pictures of it, but hey, that’s what Google is for. Ravenna, apart from being a town Caesar camped in, was also the capital of the empire in the 5^th century CE. As Constantine condoned Christianity in the 4^th century and the town was on the upswing, there were oodles of beautiful churches at which to gaze in awe. Some of the most beautiful mosaics in the world can be found in the baptisteries there. Though the late empire really isn’t my cup of tea, it was a really cool trip. Plus, it was nice to get out of Rome for a day or two.

So there you have it. A condensed, painless version of my last two weeks. (There were also over 400 pages of reading involved, with 300 or so lines of translation in Greek and Latin, but unless you’re one of my classics major friends, that isn’t likely to interest you.)

The next two weeks promise to be interesting as well, though again, I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to update. You see, we leave on Saturday morning for Sicily. We’ll spend a week shuttling between different towns in the area (we have four different hotels in the space of that eight nights, if that tells you anything), and afterwards, we have fall break.

Oh, wait. I haven’t told you about fall break at all, have I? I was planning on going to Greece, but there’s some major riots going on in Athens, so my travel companions and I nixed that plan. Instead, we’ll be going to…*cue clichéd drumroll, please* Florence, Milan, Nice, and Paris. It’s basically going to be the best trip ever. We’re taking the train early Monday morning to Florence, spending all afternoon there, taking the train to Milan, spending the evening and next morning there, heading to Nice for the evening and next day, then heading to Paris for four full days. Then an overnight train back! We don’t have a particular plan for what sites we intend to see, but you can bet that shopping and the Louvre are involved. Will keep you updated. And will try to post. But as you’ve seen already, I’m not the most reliable blogger. My bad.

Ciao for now, and all my best.

E