I would cut my foot for some sweet jewelry.

So, I've had no internet in my apartment since I got home from Spring Break, and have been busy entertaining friends who came to visit. First Ashley, Margaret, Kayleigh, and their friend Taylor from UCL came to town after meeting us in Santorini.  Then a day after they left, Gina came and I've been showing her around.  Magically, the internet is back in my apartment! So I can finally mention some things about my spring break, but that's going to have to wait because first I have to talk about the epic adventure I had last night.

I gave up on Athens nightlife long ago.  The greeks never dance, espeically to American music, and I just hadn't had any enjoyable nightlife experiences.  I came to Europe expecting to spend late nights flailing around to sweet house beats, but Athens has a dearth of discos or dance clubs.  But then Gina came to visit, and was of the opinion that it was unacceptable that we haven't been going out.  Thursday night after she got here we went out to a bar and got warm honey wine, which was delicious, and we got comped warm honey raki, which was less delicious. We met some boys, I made out with a guy named Γιαννης which was pretty fantastic.  So I was actually feeling positive about nightlife in Athens.  And then last night happened.

We decided to go to a place with a reputation as a foreigner's club, because people actually dance there (because they're not from Greece).  On the walk over, my shoes broke.  Which was my own damn fault because my mother told me they were going to break, but I thought I could get away with wearing them once.  I was wrong. Always listen to your mother.  Anways, by 12:30, everything was still empty, but we ended up talking to an Athenian guy on the street who told us that the club we we'd been planning to go to would get good in half an hour, so we sat down, ordered a beer, and chatted until the dancing got going.  As we finished our drinks a good song came on, so we got really excited and went out to the dance floor.  Within thirty seconds, someone had dropped a glass.  I moved out of the way because I had taken off my shoes and didn't want to cut myself.  Within another 30 seconds, someone else dropped a glass, which shattered, and then shot across the dance floor and in to my foot.  I hobbled over to a couch, inspected it for glass, and tried to pretend it wasn't that bad of a cut.  Then we realized that there was a pool of blood the size of a dinner plate accumulating under my foot.  We hobbled down to the bathroom to check it for glass and wrap it up in toilet paper then caught a cab to the hospital.  The one the cab took us to was apparently a public hospital, which meant I probably would have had to wait for hours to get treated, so we hopped in to another cab to the private hospital.  At this point, I have to pee like mad.  I spent the entire cab ride complaining about the fact that I have to pee, to the point that I considered making the driver pull over to a gas station or something.  I'm pretty sure I was absurdly irritating to my friends who were with me, but I seriously almost peed in this guys back seat.  We finally made it there, I was put in to an operating room directly after the bathroom.  Then I got to watch them operate on me!  It was only something like... 8 stitches or so, but I have to go back tomorrow to get it checked out.  For now I'm on antibiotics and confined to my apartment because I can't really put weight on my left foot.  Everyone is being super sweet.  My one roommate bought me cookies, another one went to the pharmacy for me to get my antibiotics.  And the VP of CYA, who was on call last night and spent multiple hours in the hospital with us, called me three times today to make sure I was all set.  So yeah, I've now been operated on in a foreign country.  The night was certainly one for the books.

The best thing about Vienna.

I just flushed toilet paper for the first time in months. Yayyy civilized Western Europe!

I call the ace of spades.

Spring has sprung in Athens!  Little green buds are showing up on all the previous dead-looking trees, and the walk from my apartment to the classrooms smells amazingly delicious.  Last week though, I was worried. It didn't seem like spring had sprung, but rather as if summer had settled on the city as a dense dark fog.  It jumped somthing like 30 degrees in 24 hours, which might have been nice except for the opressive humidity, all of which I experienced on my walk up the side of the Acropolis.  Turns out, we'd been the victims of a sand storm up from the Sahara, which brought and trapped the heat and humidity.  From the top of the Acropolis my teacher could point out two distinctly colored layers of air: a red one, which was the Sahara sand, and a yellowish one, which was trapped pollution.  If it had decided to rain that day or the next we would have gotten covered in a film of reddish mud.  Luckily, it didn't (though I thought it would have been pretty cool to see if it had) and the storm passed on in a couple days.  Now Athens is slowly warming up, though I did have another miserable day at the Acropolis, this time with cold rain.  It was so nice this weekend that I went down to the beach in a sundress and even managed to get a little bit of a sun burn!  And I'm wearing another dress today, withouts--very unathenian, but exciting.

Working backwards, I've done some other fun things since the last time I posted.  Last weekend was my last school field trip, this time to Northern Greece as a part of my Ancient Macedon class.  We stayed in Thessaloniki and spent the days visiting the typical ancient tombs and halfway reconstructed houses. Though to be fair, most of the sites that we saw this time were better preserved than the ones I saw on other field trips.  And we went to Thermopylae! (That's the place where "300" happened, for those of you who know as little about Greek history as I did two months ago).  There's still a hot spring, but unless my professor just took us to a random mountainside, you can't actually see anything resembling the narrow pass depicted in the movie.  I was really excited to be able to envision the Spartans fighting off wave after wave of Persian infantry, but it really just looks like a solid mountainside now.  And it smells like sulfur.  Oh well.

The day before we left for our field trip was Greek Independence day.  There was a huge parade through the main squares of the city.  We ended up standing where they started marching, which unfortunately meant that we didn't get to hear any of the bands play (they waited until they were a block away from the starting point to being playing...).  But I bought a Greek flag, and pretended to be patriotic.  The parade has more to do with displaying military prowess than respecting veterans, which is what I'm used to in the states.  The entire parade was more than an hour of wave after wave of different parts of the armed forces, from multi-tonne tanks to scuba-divers!  If anyone wants to attack Greece, Greek Independence day is pretty clearly the day to do it.   Anyways, I have to go get ready for cooking class.  But I'll leave you with a picture of the coolest part of the parade--the evzones.  They're the guards of all the official Greek buildings.  They're kind of like the British guards.  The changing of the guards is a big deal, they wear funny outfits, and they're not allowed to move while they're at their posts.  They also walk in this really bizzare way, I got a video of it, which I'm thinking about putting up on youtube, but I bet there's something up there already if you're interested.  So yeah, the evzones: