Photo Post!

Okso. Mom's going to kill me. But I love this picture. And I thought I'd offer it as proof as to how windy it was at Sunion.

Πω πω! Άργησα!

So, I've been MIA for a while now... the past couple of weeks have been totally crazy. Between my mother and my aunt coming to visit and midterms and a four-day school field trip I feel like I haven't been going under 100 miles an hour since last Friday. It was very frustrating to have the only serious work I've had to do all semester to coincide with a family visit. But as of the time of posting, my midterms are all done, and grades are out! And my family is gone… But so much has happened since the last time I posted. And things happened before the last time I posted that I haven't written about!  I'm going to have to try to write today and tomorrow, but I have another class trip starting very bright and early Thursday morning, and an entire presentation to prepare beforehand, so we'll see how that plan goes.

So, my mother and my aunt were here for 10 days. Highlights:

1. Not having to pay for dinner!
2. The temple of Poseidon at Sunion
3. Weekend trip to Crete.

The first one I should think is pretty self-explanatory.  Though because my mom is as in to food tourism as I am we had some particularly good meals.  In particular, I learned that octopus isn't necessarily tough and chewy.  We had some amazing seafood in general actually, which was fantastic because most of my friends here will only touch seafood in the form of fried calamari.

The temple of Poseidon was majestic.  Our tour left just before the sun set over the ocean, so we missed what's supposed to be the most beautiful time there.  But the soft light right before the sunset was perfect for taking pictures of the monument.  And there was some serious wind.  Not omg-my-hair-is-getting-out-of-place wind, but my-course-veers-off-to-the-left-when-I-walk wind. It is a perfect for a temple dedicated to the god of the sea.

This doesn't quite capture it since you can't see the sea in the backround, but you get the idea.

Crete was a little disappointing, a large proportion of museums etc. were closed because it was the off season.  This main consequence of this is that we were very Greek and had very many coffee breaks.  But, I did get to see the palace at Knossos, an archaeological exploration that I was unexpectedly involved in.  I was in the middle of writing a paper on the similarities between wall paintings found at Knossos and those found at Santorini.  Seeing reproductions in situ made my work seem more relevant, and conversely, the research I'd done helped me better appreciate the site itself.  I taught (my mom) and re-taught (my aunt) τάβλι (backgammon) in a bar, while locals played it around us.  We had a gorgeous bus ride to the next city over from our hotel, during which I got to have some very needed mother-daughter time. I received further evidence that I should never drink frappe, because it invariably makes me skittish and nervous and vaguely paranoid later in the day.  And I hung out in a playground by myself for a bit and met Denisa and Laura, two adorable Cretan girls with whom I could barely communicate, but they were so happy to have me, they almost made me miss my plane.

Having my family here made me realize, among other things, that I'm not exploring Athens to its fullest.  I've had a pretty negative view of the city.  I've mentioned here that I feel awkward, and sometimes unsafe, here as a single woman.  I was disappointed by the nightlife, I always thought time abroad in Europe would be oft punctuated by awesome techno dance club experiences, but noone in Greece dances...  I'm going to most of the monuments and museums here with class for free, so I haven't gone to any of them on my own.  And it has rained every weekend I've been here.  That's not a short list of grievances, but its certainly not enough to write off the city entirely, so I'm making an effort not to.  On Sunday, after our field trip I went to the temple of Olympion Zeus with one of my roommates and her boyfriend, and went out for crepes for lunch.  In the evening I went out to a small movie theater with some kids I'd gotten to know better on the trip.  They're not from Pomona, which is shocking if you see how I've been spending my time here, but they're from Chicago, so they're still people that I could meet up with after the program is over, which is sweet.  We saw The Visitor, which was fantastic.  And even though it was an American film, it still felt like a distinctly Greek experience.  They had the typical concession fares, popcorn, soda, and candy, but it wasn't nearly as much of a ripoff as in the states.  And juxtaposed next to carbonated soft drinks were Bacardi Breezers, wine, and beer.  So as I slouched down in the front row of the theater I got to share some popcorn with a friend and sip on a Stella.  It was positively cozy. Until... halfway through, at a very tense moment, the film reel stopped!  I panicked for a brief moment before I realized it was for intermission, which is just a euphemism for cigarette break.  Oh nicotine addicted Greeks...  I am starting to love you so.

You actually can go back to Constantinople, from Greece at least.

So. I am a terrible blogger. I have been slowly writing this post for a week now. I got sick, and then my mother and aunt came to visit, and had midterms, so I just haven't updated. But now its done. Though I don't have any pictures right now because I didn't take any digitally. I only brought a disposable camera with because I was worried about travelling with my digital camera. I'll steal some from my travel companions soon though, and share. If you want a quick recap of the weekend, since I've been so slow, here are the main things I learned on my trip:

1. Getting to new cities at night is awesome.
   
2. Hostels are the best way to travel.
3. I am wicked bad at bargaining.
   
4. Being naked can be fun!
5. Excoticizing things really can ruin them.
6. I'm pretty bad at hookah.
   
7. Food tourism is my favorite part of travel.
8. Istanbul is freaking baller!

So yeah, as suggested by item 8, my trip to Istanbul was really really fun. I was there from Thursday night to Sunday night, and it was definitely not enough time. I really really want to go back again in my life.

We got there after dark, it was around 9 once we had gotten through customs. Our hostel had an airport pickup service, but it was expensive, and we had to book it well in advance to get it. So instead we took public transportation at night, which was somewhat difficult. We got a LOT of directions that were just points in a general direction. Then we turned a corner and Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque were just in our faces, lit up, surrounded by birds. It was totally awesome. We eventually made it safely to our hostel, and got heckled by our first restaurant owner on the way there. At essentially every store and restaurant there's someone standing in the doorway trying to entice you to come inside. When they see a group of clearly foreign tourists though, they get a little... creative. We were regularly called beautiful girls, sexy girls, spice girls, Shakira, and many more. This one particular guy at the restaurant on the way to our hostel called out to us from across the street EVERY time we walked by. It got fairly annoying.

Our hostel was rated the best in Istanbul by one service or another for something like 4 years running. Its the first one I've stayed in, so I don't have anything to compare it to really, but I loved it. It definitely helped that we didn't sleep with strangers and had a cheap room entirely to ourselves since we were a group of 6. But the staff were really nice (particularly the night desk guy), we met some really awesome people (read: cute English boys) and had evening activities pre-planned for us in a city where we didn't know the night life.

However, we didn't spend our entire time in the hostel. The first day we went to Topkapi palace, the Egyptian spice bazaar and a tour of the Bosphorous. We also went out to our only real sit-down dinner, saw a belly dancer brought in by the hostel (I wouldn't be surprised if she moonlighted as an exotic dancer, she was not classy) and hung out with the aforementioned cute British boys at the hostel. We decided against going out to a club with a cover charge with these boys, which was a little disappointing but necessary given how much we still had to do in the city.

The next morning we set out early to try to check out the little Aya Sophia. It was the practice, small-scale version of the bigger famous one, which is now a functional mosque, but it looked like it was closed. We saw the Blue Mosque which was fantastic for many reasons not the least of which was that we got to walk around in socks on its warm carpet. The big Aya Sophia was not as impressive as I had been led to believe, but the Basilica Cisterns were way cooler than I thought they would be.

Then we went to the Grand Bazaar. Some guy the day before had told us not to shop at the Grand Bazaar, because it wasn't a good deal. We didn't take his advice, but we totally should have. When we went in to some of the shops the next day I definitely saw multiple things that were much cheaper, but that's ok. I mostly bought presents for other people, but I also bought myself a backgammon board! It was the one thing I wanted for myself. I was a little too dedicated to getting one really, and I bought one fairly hastily and I'm pretty sure I got ripped off, which was a little depressing when I realized it.

But then we went to the Turkish bath to relax. Turkish baths are fantastic. I only had the slightest idea of what I was getting into. I almost don't want to say what is was, if there's any possibility that you're going to go to one yourself, I feel like you shouldn't read this. It's more fun to go in a little confused. But, anyways, we had to strip down, which for me included my glasses, which meant I couldn't really see anything, and we had to wear this giant croc sandals. We went in to a huge, hot room. It had a huge hot slab of stone in the middle, with a bunch of half-naked women on it. Emphasis on the half naked. We had thought that we were supposed to totally strip down, I definitely didn't want to look like a weird tourist too embarrassed to disrobe. But we were pretty much the only people there not wearing underpants. Trying to fit in can often backfire. But it was liberating! I mean, I didn't have glasses on, so I couldn't really see anyone else in the room, it helped me not be embarrassed about who could actually see me. And the women there, particularly the workers, were so comfortable with their bodies. And then we were bathed. In this warm warm room, when it was cold and rainy outside. It was lovely to be pampered when I'd been worrying about organizing travel. They scrubbed us down, I could see the dead skin just flying off my body. Then they soaped us up, and the way the did it was the best part. They filled up what looked like giant pillowcases with soapy water and air and then twisted it closed. Out came huge clouds of fluffy white soap. It totally engulfed me, got in my mouth and up my nose. It freshman year foam party all over again! And then basically gave us a massage. And then we laid down on the hot rock and got warm and dry. It was lovely.

One of my friends had been sitting in Starbucks for over 2 hours because she knew she wouldn't enjoy the bath. So eventually we had to go back in to the cold world. After spending some time at the hostel we went to a Whirling Dervish show. We didn't quite understand before we got there that it was really just at a restaurant, so we ended up paying for dinner on top of it. The whole thing just felt very commercial. Someone at the hostel the next day said that when she went to see the whirling dervishes in the states she could feel the energy in the room change when they started dancing. That wasn't the case at all here. It had the air of a performance, rather than anything religious. And honestly, its not even that interesting. They spin. My English/GWS friends had a very extensive conversation about how we had "exoticized" and ruined it. I don't know if that's exactly why, but they were at least partially right. I have never felt so much like a dirty tourist in my entire life.

The rest of the visit was not quite as interesting. We smoked hookah at a awesome local bar by the hostel (and I was wicked bad at it). The next day we walked around the Asian side. The best part of that was probably our 50 cent sandwiches. The food there was awesomely cheap. And awesome. It really became evident that food tourism is my favorite thing. Trying new food always always improves my mood. But yeah, all in all, I loved Turkey.

And it came with a very large nose.

This past weekend was the last un-pre-planned weekends I'm going to have in Athens for a very long time. Next weekend I'm in Istanbul (woooooo!), weekend after that my mommy and my aunt come (more wooo!) and I have to show them around Athens. Weekend after that the three of us are going Island hopping. Weekend after that I have a trip to Olympia/Delphi with the whole school. Weekend after that I have a trip to Northern Greece with my ancient Macedon class. My schedule is pretty crazy...

So I let this weekend be chill. Thursday after class I went out clothes shopping for the first time here. I seriously needed some warmer clothes. CYA was not totally obvious about just how cold it was going to be here, and how long its going to be cold for. I bought a turtleneck, I had to after the CYA handbook told me that they are both warm and stylish! I also bought a pair of awesomely patterned tights, because they're very popular here. But one of our main purpose was to try to find boots. ALL the women here wear calf- to knee-high boots here, and I've seen some really nice pairs. However, they are all also pretty expensive, at least to my taste. I've never personally spent 100 dollars on any individual piece of clothing, and that was pretty much the cheapest I could do for a nice pair of boots here. At the very end I saw one nice pair, that I knew from another store was definitely real leather, marked down to 20 euros! So exciting! I chatted with the salesguy as I was trying them on. We didn't find any that I liked in my size, but I did find out that he has family both in Wisconsin, and in Oak Park!!! (for those who don't know, that's my home town) He also repeatedly told me that I had a beautiful smile, and that I brightened up his day, and I walked out with his phone number. I'm potentially going to meet up with him later this week for drinks. So yeah, I have a new Greek friend, which is pretty exciting.

Friday was uneventful and Saturday was not as eventful as I wanted it to be. I went with two of my friends to explore an Athenian university in an attempt to meet Greek students, as suggested by one of my friend's professors. On the way there we passed the sketchiest street I have ever seen. The directions we had said that there was a street with a fair amount of drug use that we could avoid if it made us feel uncomfortable. I've walked through the immigrant neighborhood before, which is where most of the drug use is centered, so I figured that this one little street couldn't be so bad. But it was terrifying. Every roughly... 5 feet there was someone obviously strung out on drugs, most people were smoking... something, I made no attempts to ascertain what exactly that something was. We made a unanimous decision to go to the University by another route. The University itself was desolate. Now, I know that I have a slightly skewed version of what a University should look like, after having spent two in a half years at the holiday resort that is Pomona College, but this place was bleak. There was graffiti everywhere, including inside the buildings. The buildings were huge and dirty and imposing and utilitarian and grey, inside and out. Even the student center was uninviting. It was two big blank rooms with plastic chairs and tables. I would like to thank Pomona right now for its adorable Spanish architecture and obsession with landscaping.

We totally chickened out about talking to students. I blame the totally depressing atmosphere of the whole place. Even my friend Aleedra, who never ever gets nervous about talking to people, couldn't muster up the courage to approach anyone. Eventually we just walked up to the square behind the school to see if we could figure out what cafes the students who weren't working were hanging out at. In the middle of said square were a couple of homeless guys sitting in couches around a fire. Athens is a pretty cool place... Eventually we saw a group of students and followed them in to an adorable cafe that had a bunch of board games. We busted out the Greek scrabble board and proceeded to play the least competitive game of scrabble I have ever taken part in. We were glad whenever someone could manage to make a word. But make words we did! And when I showed it to my Greek professor today we had only spelled one word incorrectly! (I think that they should just do away with omega, and use omicron for everything. Stupid Greek vowels) Later that night I met up with some other friends and we went to a καρναβάλι parade. We went to the early evening one, instead of the one at 2 in the morning, so it was pretty weak, and the fireworks only lasted 5-10 minutes. But after, we went to a creperie and I got the best crepe that I've had here so far.

Sunday was pretty awesome because of our trip to the wine festival. I went on Friday as well, because the entrance fee was for all weekend. But I went on Sunday with someone who had taken the experience pretty seriously when she was with some other people on Friday. She could tell the difference between a Merlot and a Syrah, bandied around words like "spicy" and "peachy" without sounding like a fool, watched how the wine swirled to judge sugar content and asked the wine merchants questions that sounded intelligent. This is in contrast to me "Mmm. I think this is buttery. Yeah? That's a word I can use for wine right? Does this taste like butter to you? What does buttery taste like." And so on. But. As the afternoon wore on (and I sipped on some more liquid courage) her confidence started to rub off on me. I honestly recognized that the syrahs were spicier than the merlots, and that I don't like sweet wines, from personal preference and not just false pretension. I also said that a red tasted of blackberries without doubling over in laughter. And I asserted that something else had "nice legs" (to be honest, though I know what legs are, I don't really know what they have to look like to be qualified as "nice"). Then I went home and made amazing ratatouille from the vegetables I bought at the market on Friday. All in all, it was a very satisfying Sunday.

Holy moly that was a long post. Well, here is proof that I have friends! Blogger kind of fails, so I don't have a way to put captions on these if they're in the body of the text, but here they are now.

Danielle and Aleedra and our Greek Scrabble board!

From left to right: Dena, Hilary, Anouska, and Lynette at the awesome creperie.

Dena, Hilary and Lynette are my flatmates, and Anouska pretends that she lives in our apartment.

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?