Finis

Hi guys,

Unless I get inspired to put up more pictures or do some sort of later retrospective post, this is probably the last entry of Cam and Laurel Take On the Greece. I’m writing this in JFK airport and on the plane back to SLC, where I’ll be doing research with a physics professor at the University of Utah for the summer.

The Lion Gate at Mycenae. It's pretty big. 

We spent the last week of the trip, after an off-day in Athens, primarily looking at Mycenaean sites (the mainland Bronze Age culture; named after the palace of Mycenae, the home of Agamemnon in the Iliad and Greek mythology in general). Mycenaean palaces are probably most impressive because of their "Cyclopean" masonry walls, which are made of huge blocks of stone (so big that only a Cyclops, or a big group of really well-organized people, could lift them). They also have really interesting tombs, with the beehive-shaped tholos tombs being the most distinctive. We traveled in the northern Peloponnese, Boetia, and Thessaly to explore Mycenaean and Neolithic sites (including a fun stop on a walk from Mycenae to nearby Berbati to go "sherding" in a local farmer's field, and another stop below a Neolithic cave settlement site to find chipped stone tools...but you didn't hear that from me).

Entrance to the "Treasury of Atreus"  (actually the biggest of the tholos tombs, but whatever) at Mycenae. For reference, those blocks in the foreground come up to my upper thigh.

Our last few days were spent in Athens, with a day trip to Marathon, Thorikos (a Mycenaean site, later part of Classical Athens), Laurion (home of the silver mines that made 5th century Athens rich, allowing its transformation into the foremost naval power in Greece), and Sounion (the southernmost tip of the Attic peninsula), and then an off day. I spent my off day on a nice OD run up Mt. Hymettus (on the east side of Athens), sat on the Areopagus (a hill where an important governmental council met in ancient Athens) for a while, visited the Acropolis one last time, and had a huge group dinner at a Brazilian restaurant. 

Prof. Rutter at our last site, the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. 

View of Athens from the top of Mt. Hymettus. 

One last look at the Parthenon.

I don't feel like rehashing all of my closing statement, which will be found on the official blog shortly, so I'll just say it's been amazing and exhausting to go on this trip, but mostly awesome and wonderful. Every person on the FSP is fascinating and unique, and it was great to get to know all of them a little (or a lot) better. Here's hoping we stay in touch and that some of us, at least, can go back to Greece later in life.

Poda para poda, epite, apite, and safe travels,

Laurel

Crete

Hey all,

We’re just got back to our hotel in Athens (as of time of writing) about half an hour ago (7:45 am on May 25th), and everyone is sitting around waiting for our rooms to be ready so we can nap/read/shower and enjoy our day off. More interesting, however, is that we just got back from Crete!

I’ll spare you the details of what we were doing, because you can read them in exhaustive detail on the official blog, and because you probably don’t care that much about the intricacies of Minoan palace architecture. Incidentally, if you do follow the official blog, you may have noticed a change toward a more formal and educational tone in most of the entries. That’s because the blog entries are now about a third of our grade with the new professor (Rutter), whereas PCC basically counted them for participation only. Anyway…

Crete was one of my favorite places on the trip, even just looking at the landscape. It’s extremely mountainous, and there was even some snow on the mountaintops in places. Unfortunately, most of the really high mountains were in western Crete, and we spent approximately zero time out there because there aren’t any fancy Minoan palaces in that region. The academic focus of the trip has shifted from Archaic and Classical Period material to the Bronze Age cultures of the Minoans (on Crete) and the Mycenaeans (on the mainland). We spent most of our working time looking at Minoan palaces and cemeteries, with a few villas and later sites mixed in.

We've also had a lot more non-working time, partly because Prof. Rutter is a bit more relaxed than PCC and partly because it was in the high 90s almost every day on Crete, so we took some time off in the middle of the day in order to not die of heat prostration. We also did a lot less hiking than I was expecting us to do, but Cam and I still got some good runs in.

Text is boring. Here are some photos:

The view from Mt. Iuktas, the peak sanctuary (a type of Minoan religious site) associated with Knossos, which is straight ahead on the plain far below. 

The Archaic to Hellenistic polis of Lato, of which we all have a billion pictures because we had a paper assignment about comparing it to Gournia, a Minoan settlement. 

Zakros, a small Minoan palace by the sea. 

The Gorge of the Dead (or "Dead's Gorge," as the sign called it), where burials from Zakros are found. 

Cam's killing it with the style choices. 

This was taken in the back of a pickup truck taking us to a site (we didn't have time to hike up and down before sunset, so we settled for just hiking down...lame). Yes, that is Cam's favorite shirt. 

Phaistos, my personal favorite of the Minoan palaces. 

The lighthouse at Chania, where we caught the ferry back to Athens.

We're going to the Peloponnese (actually, we're in the Peloponnese now...I'm finishing this up at the hotel in Nafplio) and then Boeotia to look at Mycenaean sites. One week left! How bittersweet. Hope everything is well for all the readers of this blog.

Laurel

Update in pictures

Well, I officially suck at keeping up with this blog (so does Cam, but we had this alternating post thing going, so I feel it's more my fault than his). I hope you have all been at least periodically looking at the official blog of the trip, which can be found here. Anyway, I thought I'd try to catch up by posting a few pictures and highlights that didn't necessarily make it into the official blog.

Here's a view of Delphi, the famous sanctuary of Apollo where there was an oracle that allegedly told the Greeks to do all sorts of weird stuff. I had to hike out on a cliff to get this picture. It's a beautiful site, and very interesting as well.

This is the area of the Meteora, where there are a bunch of Byzantine monasteries on the tops and sides of these sandstone pillars. The landscape reminded me a lot of Utah. Cam went running for a lot of the day (it was basically a day off with semi-mandatory education). I spent most of the day hiking with PCC (our prof for that part of the trip) and two other students, finding caves and exploring cliff dwellings.

 

 Here's Cam at the highest monastery (Grand Meteora). My group ran into him when we followed a random supply path up the mountain from a cave.

After a while more in Northern Greece, we went to Istanbul, which was pretty freaking amazing. Here are some crazy tiles and stained-glass windows in Topkapi Palace, the residence of the sultans.

This is the dome of the Selimiye Mosque at Edirne, near the Greek border. I was part of small group that took a side trip up there on our day off in Istanbul. It's a really amazing building, considered the masterpiece of the greatest Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan.

Me in Selimiye wearing mosque-appropriate clothes.

After our time in Istanbul, we spent our last days with PCC (aka Prof. Christesen, aka the prof who wears vests all the time...but not in Greece) on the island of Andros. Half of the group, including myself, stayed in a beautiful house far away from the beach with no wifi (where this photo was taken). The other half stayed in a hotel near the beach with wifi. I think we got the better end of the deal...

...especially because PCC brought us groceries twice a day, and there were fresh eggs and a huge fruit and vegetable garden at the house. Awesome.

We're on Crete right now with Prof. (Emeritus) Rutter, one of the foremost experts on Bronze Age archaeology in the Aegean. This is the Grand Staircase at Knossos, the largest of the Minoan palace complexes on Crete. This thing would have been 4-5 stories high, which is pretty cool for being so old.

Well, that's all I can think of for now, plus we're supposed to be meeting to celebrate one of our group's birthday's (shoutout to Rocio Cara Labrador for turning 20!). So long for now,

Laurel

THIS IS SPARTA!

.... home to the world-renowned Museum of the Greek Olive and Olive Oil!

In reality it's pretty much what it looks like here-- a mid-sized city suffering from the nationwide economic downturn. Needless to say, it was quite a letdown after expecting to be met by a fully operational civilian militia or something like it. That said, the area just outside the city is just as scenic as the rest of Greece we've encountered so far:

Sparta with Mt. Taygetos in the background

 

 

Crossing over from Laconia into Messenia

 

Mt. Taygetos produces some of the most biological honey I've ever tasted.

Because we're constantly moving and we have a relatively big group, we travel in a big coach bus. This basically makes us a 60-year-younger version of the leaf-peepers that always come to Dartmouth. Now, I've long said, "The day you see me getting on a bus to ride around New England and look at leaves, please take me out back and shoot me." And I think I still stand by this statement, but I sort of see where they're coming from. Because there are only 16 people in our group and we have a huge bus, I get the whole back row to myself.

And as it turns out, it's a pretty sweet way to see the countryside. If you carefully read the last sentence, you'll see that I didn't say that it would be a pretty sweet way for all of you to see the Greek countryside, because it won't. If you have looked read the last posts, you know that I suck at photography and that my camera holds between 5 and 7 pictures at once due to my lack of a memory card:

... and some of the better ones from moving and non-moving vantage points:

Kalamata

 



Mani Peninsula

If you look closely, you'll notice Lauriel in the foreground at a beach in the Lower Mani.

The dark spot is Lauriel on her balcony in Kalamata.

One aspect of Greek society that has been particularly troubling to me is that despite their long history of intellectual and philosophical innovation, they apparently cannot, even if they combine all of their collective brainpower and resources, design a fucking shower that works properly. At every hotel, we find a brilliant new example of inept shower design. We have seen everything from showers with no curtain or door to ones where the shower head falls off the wall when you turn the water off. Here is the worst version yet:

Water sprays from the shower head in all directions, so you soak the whole bathroom and any dry clothes, towels, etc that might be in it. Apparently you're supposed to ball up in the corner and kind of hold the handle over your head or something.

Another interesting cultural difference I've noticed is something I like to call the "two dudes, one moped" phenomenon. It's just what it sounds like- two grown men riding around on a moped together- and it's hilarious. The most entertaining aspect is the variety of ways to make it look casual. My personal favorites are the "lean-back-and-cross-the-arms" method and the "I'm-just-checking-my-phone" method. Unfortunately, I don't have a great picture yet, but but this gives you an idea:

The Cam and Lauriel Take on The Greece Fan of the Week is Scott. I hear he's been spreading the word down at Thayer, which is great to hear. I would like to give a shoutout to Scott and the rest of the Thayer community down in Couch Lab... So many memories!

Cam Woodworth, Th '13

Vassilis with 300 goats

First of all, sorry for not posting for a while! It's been a crazy 10-ish days since we left Athens. We are now back in Athens, but I've been incredibly sleep deprived, so this will be a short post in any case.

Corinth and Nafplio/Nauplio/Nauplion (depending on how you transliterate it) were pretty awesome. We moved on from there (with a few stops in Arcadia along the way) to Sparta, which was kind of depressing because there wasn't much going on. Apparently they focused all of their energy not into sick buildings, as the Athenians did, but into kicking ass and enslaving a third of the Peloponnese. There was, however, a big Leonidas statue.

 Leonidas in all his bronze glory

The land around Sparta (Laconia or Lacedaemon) is absolutely gorgeous, and we had some fun hikes there and in Arcadia.

 Emmanuel Kim '15 and Cara Labrador '15 at the Acropolis of Ancient Sparta, with Mr. Taygetos in the background (it's pretty).

Eventually we moved back up through Arcadia to the Temple of Apollo at Bassai, which was interesting architecturally and also seems to drive the people working on it insane. Apparently the last person in charge sketched every block of the temple by hand and referred to them as "his 5000 friends." The guy we talked to seemed fine until the end, when he told us the Greeks won the Persian Wars because of their superior metallurgy and democracy makes us better than animals because...something about making babies. None of us really followed it.

Arcadia! 

Another highlight was Olympia, where we ran at the stadium (Cam and I both came in second in our respective genders) and looked at the big Temple of Zeus Olympios.

This is called a triglyph, which has a kind of complicated mathematical relationship with the proportions of Doric temples. In short, big triglyph = BIG temple. This is a really big triglyph. 

We also got to go inside the Parthenon today. Pretty sick.

And now for an explanation of the title: the professor decided to take anyone who volunteered to go for a hike in Arcadia looking for a church that was built out of old parts of ancient buildings. He didn't really know where it was, but asking the locals seemed to produce some sort of consensus. Cam and I being Hard Guys, we decided to go. Skipping forward through several hours of enjoying a brisk uphill walk in the spring afternoon sunshine...we didn't find it. We turned around to get back to the bus, and the rest of the group, but the professor was worried that we wouldn't be able to get back to the bus quickly enough (we turned around after 5 pm), so he decided we were going to hitchhike down the mountain.

Asking people in the town halfway down the mountain yielded no results, but farther down the road, Prof. Christesen was able to flag down a black-tee-shirt-and-camo-pants-clad guy in a dirty white van and persuade him to give us a ride. The van smelled of goats and didn't have any seats in the back, where all the students and the TA (Katie) were riding, and we spent most of the ride slightly nervous, but everything turned out ok. 

When we got to Olympia, Prof. Christesen had Katie write a thank-you letter to Vassilis, the guy who gave us a ride, but he didn't know his last name, only that he owned 300 goats. Eventually, she had to: 1) fax the letter to the nearest big city, with instructions to send it to the tiny village where the guy was from; 2) email the letter to the local newspaper, because the guy at the hotel in Olympia thought they would love the story, and 3) actually mail the letter to "Vassilis with 300 goats" in the town.

I hope that was funny, and that we can keep y'all updated slightly more frequently in the future.

Laurel

When In Rome

When in Rome! I’m not sure if this saying applies here, but it seems like an appropriate way to start my post about Greece since I don’t know any sayings about Athens. It’s the hair of the dog, I suppose.

The biggest change I’ve noticed between Greece and London is that the food here doesn’t suck. Instead of paying the equivalent of $12 for a gray piece of meat with a couple pieces of iceberg lettuce called a “super burger,” there are tons of places to get gyros and tons of other delicious and cheap food. Gyros usually consist of pork or chicken that they slice off a giant rotisserie with a sort of hand-held weed whacker or a large sword combined with fries, tzatziki (basically cucumber and Greek yogurt), fresh tomatoes, and fresh onions. They are awesome.

In fact the food is so good that I’ve eaten myself to the point of having the “meat sweats” several times already (For those of you who are not familiar with the phrase, “meat sweats” is the scientific term that refers to when you break a sweat after you’ve eaten a lot of meat- trust me, it’s a real thing). Here Hunter samples the lamb and pita: 

(Photo: Cara)

This brings me to my second major difference, the language. These two differences are related because the most common time for me to flex my linguistic muscles is when I’m ordering food. In my first attempt to use Greek, I apparently looked so hopeless that the guy at Πίτα Παν (pronounced Pita Pan - ha) said, “You need help,” gave me the menu, and let me use my sign language (my second best language behind English but coming in ahead of French, Latin, and Greek) to just point to what I wanted. This was a setback for sure, but fortunately I got another chance. Here I sample the food at Pita Pan (sorry for the picture):

 

 

Upon making it back to Corinthos from a run along the boardwalk, I realized that I forgot where our hotel was. After wandering the streets for 15 minutes or so, I decided it was time to fall back on my Greek. I approached a cabbie washing his car and said, “παρακαλώ! πού είναι hotel Δία?” This roughly translates to, “Please! Where is [hotel] Dia?” Unsurprisingly, he gave me a confused look, but with a combination of Greek and sign language, I apparently got my point across. He informed me that in fact there were four hotels in Corthinos, none of which was named Dia. After thinking for a second, I realized that Dia was the name of my hotel’s wireless network, not the name of the hotel. So what I had really asked him was “Please! Where is the hotel whose wireless network is named Dia?” and that I had no idea what the actual hotel was called. A bit flustered after realizing that I was a complete idiot, I tried to thank him for his help.  Instead I mixed up the approximately four Greek words I know, smiled and said “Please!” and was off on my way. I eventually found my way back through a 15 minute process of elimination .

After the food and language barrier, the biggest change has been the climate. The best way I can describe it is “ideal-rayon-shirt-wearing-weather”-  it’s pretty much been sunny and 70s everyday.

All rayon aside, the scenery in Corinthos is unbelievable. Here’s the view from my hotel room:

(Photo: Me)

But it’s actually pretty sweet here:

(photo: Teddy)

 

Acrocorinth was used as a military fortress for nearly 2,500 years. I was impressed and inspired by the castle.  10 year-old Cam and 21 year-old Cam were equally excited to check it out. Here are the outer walls:

 

(Photo: Teddy)



And the view from the top:

 

(photo: Katie)

We just arrived in Nafplio, and it seems like pretty decent rayon-shirt-wearing-weather here as well

 

 

 
Venetian fortress in the harbor

The Cam and Lauriel Take on the Greece Fan of the Week is James Q. from Staten Island, NY. James is a “long time listener, first time caller” who “really likes” the blog, so hats off to you, James!

Please!,

Cam