Greece was unbelievably amazing! I wish I could write extensively on the experiences, but since I am limited on time (you probably are too), I’ll keep the days short and cover the highlights.
Day 1
5am wake up call. Drive away in charter buses from campus at 6:30am and set off for a 7+ hour drive to Bari. Enjoy the charming countryside of Italy, take a few pit stops along the way, and make a visit to St. Nicholas’ relics (yes, THE Santa) located in a lovely church in Bari. Let’s stop to smell the flowers for a moment, literally! Phenomenon goes that if you go up to where St. Nicholas’ relics are kept and take a sniff, you’ll smell roses. No one knows exactly why. Sure enough, that’s exactly what we smelled. Pretty miraculous! Moving on to port around 4 or 5pm-ish…we boarded the Superfast I, a really neat (and obviously fast) ferry from Italy to Greece. We left maybe two hours later, set our watches forward one hour for Greek time, and sailed on through the night. I thought I’d never got to bed after watching that spectacular full moon shining over the water and listening to the sound of the waves with a wind that was strong enough to actually make my hair blow like it does in the movies (light or even moderate breezes can’t do that to the amount of hair I have).
Day 2
Wake up super early to more darkness on the water, but arriving to port. Amazing first breakfast in Greece. More bus rides (WOOHOO! ROAD TRIP!!!) I was a little more positive about riding in the bus than most of the students were. Road trips are exciting…particularly in Greece because of all the amazing mountain views. Literally everywhere you go on the roads, you can see mountains. More than half the time, we drove on them or in the valleys with mountains towering on either side of us. I could have taken thousands of photos. We visited a Dodona, an archaeological site with a theater and several temples (or at least their remaining foundations). We stopped for lunch in Metsovo before moving on to Meteora, where visited an orthodox monastery. This monastery, along with at least for or five others, are nestled safely atop some unbelievable cliffs. You’ve never, and I mean NEVER, seen cliffs like these. It was so peaceful there and the sound of the wind in the cliffs was unlike any wind I’d ever heard. I think most of us left that place thinking, “I want to be a monk/nun.” From Meteora we traveled to Trikala and stayed at a hotel (we even arranged to have Sunday vigil Mass celebrated in the restaurant dining room in the hotel). Trikala was a really charming town. I will end this day by saying though that both lunch and dinner were very delicious. This food pattern remains consistent in Greece. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the food, even when I thought I wouldn’t like it (I can be pretty picky sometimes).
Day 3
Sunday = bus rides…all day. Well, at least for the first half of the day. We left Trikala and headed toward Delphi. We made a stop along the way at the site of the battle of Thermopylae, where Leonidas and the 300 Spartans died fighting. There isn’t really much to see there except for a large memorial with a few statues, but we made sure to take pictures. From there the road to Delphi was bittersweet. The mountain views were spectacular, but that was the problem: we were driving through the extremely curvy roads of the mountains for about 2 hours straight. That’s right, 2 hours of 180s and 360s and stuff. It didn’t matter what any of us did, we couldn’t avoid the car sickness. Oh, and lesson learned: when you’ve been driving on roads like that and everyone’s nauseous, DON’T back up the bus, because that’s going to really make everyone feel worse. We stopped for lunch a few miles away from the center of Delphi, but all of us thought it crazy to try to eat when we all felt sick. We got over it pretty quickly though. The rest of the day was spent in Delphi, after checking in at the hotel, exploring the historical sites, even climbing up part of Mount Parnassus up to the place where the Pythia herself would sit, inhale the vapors coming out of the ground (those weren’t there anymore), and give the oracle of the god Apollo. It was pretty amazing. The mountains were soooo picturesque. I even managed to go out far enough into the darkness to see them at night by the light of the full moon, which was quite enchanting. Delphi had that small-town feel at the edge of a mountain. It’s a place I’ll never forget.
Day 4
Missed the early-morning hike to the top of Mount Parnassus to watch the sunrise on the mountain range, and I’m really regretting it right now. People who sent said it was probably their best experience on the Greece trip. *grrrr now I’m really jealous* Well, I saw it by moonlight and very few people did, so that’s got to count for something, right? *nice try* Anyway, we visited the museum in Delphi where we saw lots of archaic and some classical sculpture and artwork. We left Delphi and moved on to Athens, but not before stopping at Hosios Loukas, an Eastern Orthodox Monastery. If there was one lesson we learned about the difference between the Eastern and Western parts of the Catholic Church on that trip, it was in 3 words by Fr. Thomas: East. West. Schism!! Haha! Anyway, it was a very peaceful place to be. Once we arrived in Athens some hours later, we visited the Pnyx and the Areopagus, where I was able to participate in a student reenactment of a section of Aeschylus’ greek Tragedy, Eumenides (lines 674-807 if you’re interested). I played the part of Orestes. You’ll have to go read that part of the play to see what I said. I think it went pretty well, considering it was my first time acting…outside of vacation bible school so many years ago, but that doesn’t even count. Anyway, we enjoyed a nice evening in Athens, which, as I just forgot to say, was actually a super hot spot for pick-pocketing, like Rome times 10. I escaped all theft though. Let’s keep it that way.
Day 5
Another whole day in Athens! What a city! We spent the morning as a class exploring the Agora, Agora Museum, Acropolis including the oh-so-famous Parthenon, and the theater of Dionysus. I have to say it was pretty epic standing so close to such an amazing building, even if a lot of it was restored. The rest of the day was free time. I stuck with a small group. First we headed off to the Acropolis Museum where we saw tons of incredible ancient sculpture and fragments from ancient architecture. Lots of it was archaic, but there was some early and high classical material as well. I really enjoyed that trip to the museum, and that ticket was reimbursed by UD. Lunch was on our own, but I was on a quest to not spend a single penny on this trip, and I managed. I already had a couple of meager snacks in my bag to tie me over and I took only what was going to be thrown out from the lunch plates of the friends I was with. It sufficed until dinner. Between lunch and dinner, we explored the local area of Athens. Athens has a population of around 5 million and the city is unbelievably huge (we could see so much of it atop the Acropolis), but we only saw a tiny portion of it, but that was fine with me. We window shopped for most of the time, getting in touch with the culture and learning a few phrases from some of the kindly shopkeepers. Particularly in Greece at that point, we had to keep a low profile because of all the riots going on and the bad name Americans had amongst the Muslims. We didn’t run into any trouble, thank God, and I’m so glad we met so many nice people. I really have a new appreciation for foreign languages after seeing how happy it made the locals to hear foreigners speak their language. I mean, I know that locals like that in any country, but to actually see their faces light up when you say even a couple of words to them in their own tongue was just priceless. Now I want to learn as many languages as I can. At least at this point, I could actually read a decent amount of Greek. I studied the Greek alphabet enough to familiarize myself with the symbols and sounds, but not necessarily all of the sound combinations. I’ll be working on that for the rest of the trip, that’s for sure. Dinner with UD again and bed. Athens has been fantastic!
Day 6
Greece trip is half over and I’m already sad about leaving. Enjoy it while you can! We visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, which featured some of the most incredible Greek artwork you’ve ever seen. I even saw some of the old sculptures/frescoes we’d studied back in Art & Arch I in Irving as well as the Art & Arch of Rome class we’re doing right now. I swept through the entire museum in about 2 hours time, which is simply not enough time to see everything. It was so sad whizzing through so many amazing rooms, but I did stop every once in awhile to see my favorite pieces. This stuff never ceases to amaze me. After that trip, we moved on to Mycenae and visited the Lion’s Gate and Tomb of Clytemnestra. That, next to Delphi, was probably one of my most favorite archaeological sites of the visit. The view from the top of the site was, once again, jaw dropping. From Mycenae we moved on to the seaside town of Nafplion where we stayed at a hotel for two nights. Did I mention, all of these hotels we stayed at were 3 or 4 star hotels and each meal is 4 courses, every time. I mean, UD Rome is spoiling us big time! We did take a late afternoon/even walk along the sea cliffs and visited the pebbly beach with clear-green water. It was breathtaking! I’ll be coming back tomorrow!
Day 7
This is a particularly good day. For the morning, we visited the archeological site of Epidaurus a half hour drive away, the site of the Sanctuary of Asclepius the god of healing in the ancient Greek world and home to the extremely famous theater of Epidaurus. In this huge theater which seats…oh, I think it was something like 50,000 people, there is a disc in the center of the gravely stage on the ground and if you stand on that disc, tilt your head up and speak, the result is phenomenal. Your voice carries perfectly through the entire theater so that every seat can hear you and you can even hear your own voice bounce back at you, not like a super delayed echo, but like a slight microphone echo, but cooler! Why? Because you don’t need a microphone to sound cool in Epidaurus! I didn’t know what to say, so since it was still morning time I stuck with the morning greeting in Greek: “Kalimera!” That was about the coolest thing ever, hearing my voice jump right back to me. My reaction was pretty priceless too. I quickly and shyly walked away from the disc with my hand over my mouth and my eyes wide open, “Whoa! That was incredible,” was all I could say.
We returned to Nafplion for another afternoon of free time. I was immediately off to the marina, the sea cliffs and the beach from the day before. I went alone this time, and it worked out perfectly well. The walkway along the sea cliffs is decently quiet, but well traveled by many. And would you believe it? There were stone steps that led from the walkway down to the bottom parts of the sea cliffs right next to the water. I must have visited at least half of those stairs (there were so many of them) and just sat for a time on the rocks next to the water, enjoying the sun over Nafplion and watching the storm pouring on the mountains on the other side of the gulf (I guess a few miles across) the water. Pretty epic sight! And the sound of the waves against the sea cliffs was unlike any sound I’d ever heard live. I’m talking about that sound you only hear in the Planet Earth series or National Geographic, where the water has eroded away so much of the rock next to the water that its become a deep cavity, creating a kind of ledge with some space over the water (in this case, just 2 or 3 feet). But that sound caused by the waves in that cavity is so deep and thunderous, you hear and feel those vibrations at the back of your head. And I was sitting right next to it!! After exploring the sea cliffs for what must have been a good 4 hours, I finally walked down to the beach next to the cliffs, the same pebbly beach from yesterday. Lots of the UD students were there again as were the professors. Even Dr. Hatlie himself went swimming with the students, much to their delight. That man is really something else! I didn’t exactly go swimming, but I did wade in the water up to my thighs. I spent more of my time browsing through the many gorgeous rocks and shells on the beach. There wasn’t very much sea glass, but the rocks and shells made up for it. I collected about a handful’s worth of pebbles/shells/sea glass for Greek souvenirs. In all sincerity, those natural pieces of Greece mean a great deal to me. So I basically enjoyed Greece at the most basic, natural level, but it was in that simplicity that I found the most valuable things that everyone else overlooked when they went shopping and stuff. I really enjoyed collecting the natural wonders that God himself made. It made my connection with Greece that much more intimate.
As evening came and the waves picked up, I went back to the sea cliffs where the waves were crashing up against the rocks and shooting magnificent sprays anywhere between 15 to 30 feet high into the air. If the waves had been bigger, I can only imagine how much more epic that would have been. But there I sat, an arm’s length away from where the water shot up like geysers. I like to think of these as the ocean’s fireworks. A couple of these fireworks managed to hit me, making for quite an exhilarating experience. Before it became much darker, I went back to the hotel for dinner. UD provided nearly all the meals, but two were on our own. This was the second one. I pulled out what I had stockpiled from breakfast/lunch: an apple, a few thick slices of slightly dried bread, and a packet or two of Nutella along with some stockpiled water. It was actually probably one of my most favorite meals in the way that I was able to enjoy the nighttime view of the city from my hotel balcony while listening to nice music and enjoying the Greece in a simplistic way.
Day 8
Must we leave?? Okay fine. We left Nafplion, but not before stopping to visit Alexander the Great’s Palamede Fortress overlooking the sea and Nafplion. Great place for pictures and lots of cool steps and tunnels. From there we left for Olympia and stayed at a hotel there. Olympia is really small (population about 1,000), but still has its charm even though there’s not very much to do there. We did visit the Archaeological museum there for awhile and it was really great. I’m really going to miss seeing all this amazing artwork in real life. That evening after Mass and dinner, there was a Greek Folk Dance Presentation by the hotel pool. The Greek dances wore some really neat outfits for the first half of the presentation, then left for a wardrobe change, and came back for round two. After some dancing, they invited the UDers onto the stage to dance. They were very patient in trying to show 50+ students how do dance on such a small stage at the same time in a circle. It was great fun and an excellent way to end the last night in Greece.
Day 9
We visited the archaeological site of Olympia, including some of the temples (to Zeus and Hera) and the very first Olympic race track. Yes, we had our Olympic games on the track, including an all men’s and an all women’s footrace and a relay race. I am proud to say that I participated in the UD Olympic games on the same track where the very first Olympic races were held so many years ago. Really awesome feeling! After that we left Olympia for Patras, where we visited the more contemporary orthodox church of St. Andrew the apostle. The relics of his skull were there too, so that was pretty neat to see. After that short visit, we boarded the Superfast VI, a much larger ferry than the first one, complete with disco and a pool (which was drained though). I was actually there on the starboard side of the boat the moment we left port. And that was the last I saw of Greece.
Day 10
It was all studying for midterms on the boat from the time we boarded, but it was nice to do it with the ocean in the background. We even had Mass right there on the boat in the upper level of the disco, with a huge “bay window” view of the ocean as our backdrop. That’s probably the most creative place we’ve ever had Mass, or so said Fr. Thomas. I’d tend to agree. We arrived in Ancona later that afternoon and then it was a good 4-5 hour bus ride home to campus. It’s been a great experience! And I won my challenge of not spending a penny in Greece. I think that through this self-imposed challenge, I increased my appreciation for the values of simplicity and poverty.
I’ll never forget this amazing 10 day adventure.
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