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

First days in Athens

Cam and I are getting our tan (or actually sunburn) on in Athens. It's about 60-70 degrees F here, fairly humid, and the streets are lined with orange trees that are all covered either in fruit or flowers. For some reason, this does not translate to either fresh oranges at breakfast or actual orange juice: everybody drinks Tang, which is pretty horrible. There are really good (apparently local) strawberries for 2 euros per kilo, and Greek food in general is pretty amazing, if kind of greasy. We enjoyed the 2-euro gyros at Monastiraki on our first day, as well as walking around the Acropolis and along part of the ancient wall circuit. In the afternoon, we went up Lykavittos, a big point hill kind of by our hotel. It has a great view of Attica, so we stayed up there to talk about the local geography and some modern history of Greece.

 Brett Losen looking out at the Piraeus on top of Lykavittos.

 A distant view of the Acropolis. The big temple is the Parthenon.

On the next day (Easter Sunday for non-Orthodox people), we went up to the Acropolis and walked around the Parthenon. Pretty sick.

Like many Greek temples, the Parthenon is designed to be approached from the back and walked around to  get to the front. 

The front of the Parthenon. It got blown up by the Venetians in 1687.

It hasn't been all fun and games: we've had a few quizzes since we've been here and we were supposed to have an assignment yesterday, but the museum decided to close early. But it's a pretty sweet environment and it's really nice to be learning outside for a change. 

Aντίο!

Laurel