That is to say... Argolid!

So, this weekend I had my first class field trip, to Argolid. It was a combination of awful and awesome. First, an itinerary:

Day 1 (Thursday)

Eleusis

Corinth

Epidaurus

Day 2 (Friday)

Tiryns

Palamidi

Day 3 (Saturday)

Treasury of Atreus

Mycenae

And we stayed in the charming town of Nafplion Thursday and Friday night.

So, everyone except for the full year students went on the trip, so we were divided up in to 4 buses with two touring groups each. Generally, we were supposed to be divided up by classes. I was supposed to be with my ancient archaeology class, but my professor has too my students in her classes. Therefore I, along with two other people from the class, had to be with someone else. This was disappointing from the start because she is a really awesome professor, and a specialist in the era of the sites we were going to see. But it was even more disappointing when we got on site for the first time. My tour guide was truly awful. She spoke English, you might even say that she even speaks it fluently, she always came up with the words eventually. But it took some serious effort, with lots of pauses, and lots of repeating things she had already said in different ways. It was miserable. And it was doubly miserable because it kept raining off and on, and was quite cold. Greece isn't supposed to be cold!!

But, the sites themselves, once I managed to figure out what they were, were very cool. Eleusis was the home of the Cult of Demeter. There were tons of cults to random gods, but this one is especially famous because the particular rituals associated with the cult have been kept almost entirely secret. We know that they bathed with pigs, and may have done something with a box of dildos.

Our stop in Corinth was largely a bathroom/pit stop. But we also went to look at the channel there. It was built in the late 19th century by the French to allow for faster passage between the Aegean and Ionian seas. It is CRAZY deep. I tried to take pictures, but there's no way to capture the sense of vertigo you get from looking down in to it.

On the first bus ride we also stopped in Epidarus, which was cool, even given the horrible narration, and the rain, because its the main site of the cult of Asklepius! I got some sweet pictures of ancient medical tools, and the building where they'd go to dream up (literally) their cures. Also, the theater there has amazing acoustics. I had climbed to the top of it at one side, heard someone say my name, thought they were just a couple rows away from me, turned and saw that they were at the top at the opposite end of the theater! And this place seats 15,000 people!

We then ended in Nafplion and dropped off our stuff at the hotel. I was supposed to be rooming with two other girls, but when we got to our room there were only two single beds. And there was no running water. We finally got that all sorted out (one of my friends got to be by herself in the teacher's double with a gorgeous view of the sea) and went out to explore the city, which is totally adorable. We walked around the shoreline and took pictures of the misty mountains in the distance, and wandered around the shops, and went to a taverna dinner and got wicked ripped off. It was our own damn fault and I'm too embarrassed about how it happened to explain, but suffice it to say I won't make the same mistake twice. It was an unfortunate ending to a pretty frustrating day.

View from my hotel room.

Misty mountain shot

Day 2 was a little better. We had to get up early again, but the breakfast at the hotel was surprisingly good. Greek yoghurt with honey can make pretty much anything better. Tiryns was pretty. It was probably the port of Mycenae. Today its basically just some rocks on a pretty hillside. Palamidi was much more interesting. Its a Venitian fortress on a hill above Nafplion. The view was gorgeous, as always. The best part there was actually walking down to Nafplion. I've heard that winding staircase has 999, 857, or 1013 steps. All I know for sure is that when we got to the bottom my legs were shaking so bad I was afraid I'd fall over. But then we sat down at a cafe and had a Greek salad and everything was all better (have I mentioned that I love the food here? because I do). We also went on a walking tour of the city, which was painful. At least half of our original group had defected to the other tour guide, which was pretty rude, but also brilliant on their part. After that though, the day got infinitely better. I met up with a friend from another group for coffee, then went out with my roommates for gyros (cheap AND delicious!). Then I went our for gelato which some describe as better than you get in Italy (I don't know about that, but it was damn good). Then I went out with some other friends, and finally got to go out dancing! We've been trying all semester to find a dance club in Athens, to no avail. Greeks apparently just don't dance... However, since all of CYA was in this small town, we could pack the bars with Americans and dance ourselves. It was awesome.

Olive trees, from Tiryns

Day 3 continued the trend of awesomeness. I ditched my tourguide for our trip to Mycenae, which is one of the most gorgeous places I've ever been, and the weather was beautiful the entire time. We started at the Treasury of Atreus, which is a dome-shaped tomb held together solely by the placement of the stones. Its amazing, if the placement of any had been off by even a couple millimeters the entire thing would have fallen down! Walking around the Mycenae citadel itself was very cool, and made more so by the fact that my friends here are huge archaeology nerds and were SUPER excited about everything. We came back for a quick lunch at Nafplion and my roomies and I ate food that we had brought with us to save money and had a picnic by the water, and then got some more delicious gelato, and slept on the two hour ride back to Athens.

One of the views from Mycenae

And another one.

So yeah, that was my weekend, how was yours?