Food post!

Today was my trip to the weekly farmers market! It's on Friday mornings, the past couple of weeks I've either forgotten about it, or been on trips to other parts of Greece. But today I finally got my butt out of bed and went produce shopping. Its still too cold here for me to say it was a totally awesome experience, (Pretty much everything I do right now is marred by the fact that I didn't bring warm enough clothing) but its a really awesome resource to have around. There were so many delicious looking vegetables. So I bought a bunch, because I decided that I'm going to make ratatouille. I've never made it before, so I had no idea how much to buy of anything. As a result, I definitely overbought. And bought poorly in one case. A couple of the vendors had zucchinis with flowers attached. Looking at them conjured up mouthwatering images of fried zucchini flowers. When I got home I looked up how exactly one makes them and was sorely disappointed. I'd never seen flowers un-fried before, so I didn't really know what their supposed to look like. Mine are definitely too wilted. And I bought the female kind (the kind that's attached to what we think of as a zucchini), and apparently the male flowers are much tastier. And my flowers are attached to mature plants. Usually you buy flowers on their own (or attached to baby zucchinis) to fry. All of these are things I did not know. But now I do. I can't decide if I'm going to try to fry them anyways, as you can tell from the picture, they're pretty darn sad (and this guy, or gal actually, isn't even the worst of the bunch) But I'm so looking forward to veggie goodness in some form.

Unfortunately, I don't know when I'll really end up making it, because this weekend is the apex of καρνaβάλι, which is the Greek Orthodox version of Mardi Gras, which is way awesomer becuase it lasts for two weeks. Last night was Tsiknopempti, which literally means the Thursday of the smell of roasting meat. Everyone eats absurd amounts of meat to prepare for lenten fasting (which doesn't actually start for over a week, but I like that they're getting a head start). It doesn't feel quite proper to make a vegetarian dinner today, but I won't be around for the market again for quite some time.

Other food adventures. I attempted to make shakshouka earlier this week. This was a mishap-filled experience. I bought half as much crushed tomato as I was supposed to (they should warn me that 28 oz is super-huge can sized!) which wouldn't normally be a problem since we have a grocery store downstairs. But I didn't realize the error of my ways until well into the cooking process when the sauce had reduced. I also forgot to preheat the oven. And then I proved to myself that I am a fail at cooking eggs. I've never made eggs in a way that required me to know if the yolks have set. I'm all about the hard-boiled, scrambled, and omelet egg varieties. The way that shakshouka works is you make a tomato-based sauce, put it in a baking dish, break eggs in to it, and bake them in the oven until just set. It looked to me as if the eggs weren't setting, so I turned up the heat, came back in two minutes, to what looked like eggs covered in plastic.

After warning my roommates that I may have ruined dinner, we dug in. It was not a total disaster. There was enough food for three people, rather than four, which was fine since our other roommate ended up working late in the library. The eggs weren't horrible, they were basically just hard-boiled, but in the shape of an egg-over easy, and the sauce was, to my mind, very tasty. Then I redeemed myself with an awesome new find from the bakery for the dessert, and all was well.

Well, I'm off to the wine festival (its another part of carnaval). But, did you know that this is what a cashew fruit looks like? I did not. Now we both do.

What am I doing with archaeology?

So, I'm going through a little bit of science withdrawal. I thought that once I finished my grant proposals I'd be thrilled to be able to take a break from thinking about nerve cells and chemical reactions. But I'm not! I miss it! Well, maybe not the chemical reactions, I was never very good at mechanisms... But yeah, my archaeology class, the most relevant class to be taking here in Greece is not thrilling me. Reading about ancient Mycenaean tombs sooo does not appeal. I enjoy our on-site lectures a lot. The professor gives the artifacts in the museums the context, and therefore relevance, that I can never manage to muster up myself when I'm there on my own reading the little information cards. I get that much closer to imagining the people of these ancient times as they lived. But to what end? Just to fulfill intellectual curiosity? Or is there a wider social implication of this work that I'm missing? I'm hesitant to to makes thoughts like this public, I know I look like a huge science elitist. I've definitely come off as one before (please let's not have the "is psychology a science" debate). That's part of why I came here I think. Pomona is a liberal arts college. As such, it should be exposing me to different methods of inquiry all the time. It has in the sense that I've taken at least one non-science class every semester. But I usually end up viewing them as little more than a diversion from what I'm legitimately studying. I chose my two English classes (one on science fiction and one on food studies!) so that I could read books that I thought looked interesting without feeling guilty, and I only threw together literary analysis when forced. I haven't taken non-scientific methods of inquiry very seriously (well, I tried with philosophy, but that definitely failed).

Being here is all about expanding my horizons, trying to immerse myself in a new culture, a new language, new ways of academic thinking. And its not really happening... I need controlled experimentation! I need biological pathways! Or something. I feel so narrow-minded. But at the same time I feel relieved. I'm not just studying neuroscience because of a potentially dishonest life plan I came up with to get in to college. I really like this stuff! So I've been searching out science on my own, namely through blogs. Research Blogging is totally the love of my life right now. (http://www.researchblogging.org/) It's a compilation of posts by science writers that reference peer-reviewed research articles. I love it. I'm hoping that by paying attention to what I'm most interested in there, and other blogs etc. I might start to realize what it actually is I want to do with neuro. Medicine? Research? Clinical research? Ahhhhh my future is stressful!

I'm sorry, I know that wasn't really an appropriate travel-type post. But hopefully its better than nothing? I'll get something up about my real-world experiences soon too. Wine festival this weekend anyone?

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?

winblog!

This week has been pretty awesome.

I finally succeeded in getting the plane tickets for Istanbul. The trick is apparently using a debit card, rather than credit.

I have almost solid spring break plans.  (To be revealed when they're really solid)

And I turned in my final research proposals!  Those were stressing out my week hardcore.  My advisor decided a little last minute that I should try for a second, slightly more prestigious grant. It was somewhat flattering that he thought I had a chance at it (I'm not really sure I'm eligible, though we'll see).  But at the same time it was frustrating to try to pull it off as quickly as I did.  I'm just glad I don't really have to do homework here, otherwise that could have been really annoying.

I have to be up in a little under 5 hours for our field trip to Mycenae, so that's the extent of my update for now. But I'll be back on Saturday with awesome pictures!

Playing Catch-Up

So, I'm going to try to write about all the random little things that I've been failing to do so far.

First thing--I've started uploading pictures to a Picasaweb Album. Since there's no easy way to do a "Read more" function on Blogger, putting up large quantities of photos just doesn't really make sense. So, this is the address http://picasaweb.google.com/torrig. It's also in my links in the right-hand column.

Right, so the first album I've put up there is from the walk I took around Pangrati (my neighborhood) on Thursday. I'm done with classes at 2:30 on Tues/Thurs which gives me lots of time to explore. I started with the grocery store (I put those pictures up here earlier) and then went away from the main street in a direction I hadn't been before. I found a fig tree, which could be exciting in a couple months, but its nearly barren, and hanging out from someone's personal property. I suppose I probably shouldn't try to steal from it. The picture currently at the top of this blog is from that excursion.

Basically everywhere I walked was residential. My neighborhood isn't touristy at all. In fact it's not in any of our guide books. It made me feel a little bit like I was trespassing, even though I was on the streets. But it was nice to be reminded that I'm in a real place where real people live. CYA is a very contained program, so sometimes I forget that this is somewhere new and interesting that I'm living. Right, so I got to a street that I realized was going to take me deep into residential neighborhoods that I didn't really know how to get out of. So I turned around and saw a like... 60 year-old man standing in the middle of the street staring at me. As I passed him I said hello in Greek and he didn't say anything back. I crossed the street a couple yards in front of him and glanced back and saw that he was following me. And there was noone else around. I got pretty freaked up and pretty well ran down the stairs in front of me (the neighborhood is really hilly, so there are lots of stairs) and didn't look back til I was on a busy street. My excursion came to a fast end.

This is related to my main complaint with this city. I just don't feel comfortable walking around by myself. I'm constantly comparing Athens to Paris, and I'm sure its getting annoying to someone, but when I visited Paris last summer I spent every day wandering the city by myself, and I never ever felt unsafe, or even uncomfortable. Clearly, the lack of language barrier there probably made me way more comfortable. But its not just that I don't know the language here. I feel uncomfortable as a female. I feel weird sitting down in a cafe by myself and just reading or people-watching. There are very few women out in general. Most tables are groups of men, and some are couples. I rarely, if ever, see a solitary woman doing anything than just walking through the street with an obvious purpose. Men (including the national guard) stare and hiss in the street. In the middle of the day I certainly don't feel unsafe (with the exception of that one creepy man), but I don't feel relaxed. Its sad, because one of my favorite things to do in Paris was to sit in a cafe with a glass of wine and relax. I'm going to start walking around the city by myself and see if it makes me feel any better, because I don't want to feel like I have to spend all my time in my apartment and the academic center, but I don't know if its going to work.

On another note, I mentioned that the picture at the top of the layout right now is a picture I took. I've been messing with the layout, but I can't really figure out what I want to do. There's too much blank space at the top of the layout right now for my liking. But, I would really like to have one of my own pictures incorporated into the page. So, bear with me if the layout changes some more. And if you have any suggestions where to look for good layouts, I would greatly appreciate it.

Sto Spiti!

I went on my first day trip today!  My first real traveling experience here!  Sweeeet.

So.  I woke up at 6:30 (after going to bed at 2, which is early for me, I've been consistantly falling asleep at 3) We met to go on the metro but we couldn't transfer to the line we wanted to because it was out of order. So we took a bus out to the part of track that was working, missed the ferry by 10 minutes so chilled for an hour and a half in Boston's Cafe/Restaurant. Then we took a 1.5 hour ferry out to Aegina.  We walked a monastary (for the most recently cannonized saint of the Greek Orthodox church) , and before that walked around the island a little.  It was gorrrrgeous.  And hunger-inducing.  We had totally awesome seafood, including probably the freshest fish I've ever had.  (Given I'm from the midwest, not that hard to accomplish, but still)  All in all, it was an awesome day.

The title of this post means "at home" as in "Yianni einai sto spiti!"  It refers both to a random quote from the day (as will most titles that make no sense) but also the fact that my apartment here has stopped feeling like a place I can sleep to a place I am actually living.  Crossing the sqaure to get to my block really made me feel like I was entering my space today. It was nice.  My mood changes so quickly here, we'll see if the feeling stays.  But for now, its good.

Now on to pictures!

I ended up eating one of these!  Soooo fresh.

 I don't know why, but I really really like the Greek flag.

This is a walk that supposedly has 300 chapels on it.  Each family was allowed its own church back in the day.

Views from the monastary

View from the Orthodox church.

California Squid

My class just got cancelled! Ten minutes before it was supposed to start. Sweet! Good thing I'm glued to my computer here.

My family wants pictures, and pictures they shall get.

I decided to go out exploring in Pangratti yesterday because I have been spending too much time in my room doing nothing interesting. Plus, I needed to take some pictures of my own. I started by hitting up the grocery store that's literally under my apartment. I really really want to figure out something to do with these. Anybody have any thoughts on what to do with a whole frozen octopus? Or... what's the other thing? A squid. Noone else in my apartment really likes fish though, so I don't know if I'll ever really be able to make this dream come true.

However, I did get to make one food-related dream come true yesterday. These are two of the Greek snack foods I've been hankering for. Most of the stuff you see is either American like Lays chips, they have salt and vinegar, and barbeque (though they call it oriental barbeque for whatever reason) and Oreos, or familiar from other parts of Europe like

Hobnobs and digestive biscuits yummm. They put oregano on EVERYTHING here, so oregano

chips seemed pretty "authentic" (oi, food studies class last semester made me hate that word) Greek. And these croissants in a bag are everywhere. I've been obsessed with them since I first saw them in the grocery store. My roommate thinks I'm an idiot for buying them,

since we can get real croissants at the delicious bakery down the street. But I had to have one. And seriously! This one is called Trendy. What really did me in though was the brown pile on the front of the package which was delightfully reminiscent of the dog droppings that are all over the streets here.

So, verdicts.

Oregano chips: tasty. 2 out of 2 roommates polled agreed with me. One added that they were different, but maintained that they were still tasty.

Trendy bagged croissant: pretty awful. 2 out of 2 roommates asked refused to try it. Poor sports I say. It tasted vaguely of cardboard, plastic, and bread. Not even buttery really. And the chocolate filling was your typical overly sweet sticky processed chocolaty-type substance. Better than chocolate fillings you would get in processed stuff in the states. But still highly (and unsurprisingly) inferior to the filling in the pain au chocolat I got from the bakery the other day. Oh well. I'm still kind of in love with these croissants though. There are many other brands. Including ones with spongebob. I will almost certainly try this experiment again.