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:

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.