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.
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.
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.
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
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