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: