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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 27th. 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?

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