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Hello from sunny Greece! I figured I'd put up this weekly update to a) taunt you all for not being in Greece, and b) see if you want the updates to continue. This is a direct quotation of my email to people, so bear with it. I hope it's entertaining

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<insert Greek characters here>!

That is Greek for "Good Afternoon/Evening to you all" (hope it worked on all your computers). To say it, you say "kal-ee-SPARE-ah sahs," or something very like that. If I'm ever up at another time, I might just teach you some more Greek. Someday.

This has been quite the eventful week. We had a lot of class, which was up and down as usual, but the fun part started on Friday: We left for our first overnight field trip. We woke up early, boarded the bus, and went to the Argolid, a peninsula southwest of Corinth. Our first stop was at Mycenae. Damn near everyone reading this knows Mycenae in some manner - there's the famous Lion's Gate that's in nearly every ancient civilization book (the one with the triangular thing on top which has two lions in a heraldic pose - don't know it? Look it up, I guarantee you do). We also saw the "Treasury" of Atreus - the great big dome tomb thing. You all know this as well. If you can't picture it off-hand, look it up. You know these things. Our trip to Mycenae was a bit more exciting than just looking at this stuff - it was raining, so climbing around on the rocks was a bit more dangerous than usual. We also went into the cistern at Mycenae, which was crazy. A cistern, FYI, is a big underground water collection place. To get to the cistern, we had to go across big rocks, down some more rocks, down a wet staircase, and then down a pitch-black staircase. We had candles, but the wax kept spilling either onto our hands or the ground, which only made the slipperiness (that is SO not a word, but just let me run with it) worse. Ancient sites in the rain = fun. Except when you realize that your only jacket-type sweater thing is wet. And you have to wear it for the rest of the night. Oh well.

That was Friday. Friday night we walked around <insert Greek characters here> (Nafplio if you can't read Greek, which I think none of you can...). This is almost the Greek equivalent of Door County, except infinitely cooler. It's very much the Greek tourist destination to get away from the big cities, but there are ancient things around! It's all very cool. So, we slept Friday night off (after some really ridiculously good grilled chicken for dinner), and prepared for Saturday. Saturday was decent - it was really windy wherever we went, so that made some people cold, but I was fine. We had a picnic lunch consisting of oranges, bread, cheese, and eggs. It was quite tasty, really. After lunch, we went to an old archealogical (also spelled wrong, but this is me not caring ) site and played on rocks again. No one got hurt, but there was the definite possibility. The best part of the day came on our walk back - a few of us girls found a random dock and decided to sunbathe and stick our feet in the water. The water was a bit chilly, but it was an excellent end to the month of January. Later that night we were back in Nafplio and Dan, Ryan, and I took a walk to the beach and then around the cliff on the walkway. It was a beautiful night - moon, stars, water... <insert sighs here> Oh, before the walk the group went to a wine tasting. It was incredible - Greek wine is very very good. Ouzo, however, is pretty bad.

The wine tasting set up an, um, interesting circumstance. Amongst those of us who went were the PSU professor and his wife (hereafter DJ [for Dale Jacquette] and Tina). I was talking with Tina for a while, and we were admiring the sparkling wine (incidentally, champagne is illegal in Greece, at least the French stuff). We decided that since Sunday mornings were made for mimosas, we would drink some the next morning, being a Sunday. DJ came over, approved of the idea, and then Dan and Ryan also joined in. Thus was born the Mimosa Club - we woke up early on Sunday, cracked open the sparkling wine, squeezed some oranges, and had mimosas. It was a truly surreal experience. The rest of Sunday almost paled in comparison. We saw the House of the tiles at Lerna, were duly impressed and moved on. We saw Tiryns, made comparisons to Edoras (seriously, this is a city on a rock-mountain in the middle of a plain JUST LIKE Edoras - made us LotR freaks quite excited), decided to ge
t swords and take the city, and moved on. Then we went up to the Palomidi fortress above Nafplia. This place was incredible. Not only were there acres of site to explore and clamber over, not only were there fantastic views of seas and mountains and cool-looking buildings, not only were there swarms of death bees and extra-secret cisterns and fun little hiding spots, but there were also 999 stairs down the mountain. The bus brought us up the mountain, but we walked down. And I captured much of it on video, though the videos kind of suck. Someday I might have to sent them along or let you see them, if I feel like making an ass of myself It was really really cool. Then we came back to Athens and ended our fun fun weekend.

So yeah, that was our weekend. I'm kind of liking these trips. There's really not that much going on that's not related to a trip. We drink, we go out, we do a lot of reading, and we generally get to know each other. Everyone on the trip is still cool, there's still a bit of drama though it's calmed down (and actually, I count myself among the guilty, but I'm getting over it!), and we're getting to be very close friends. Which is awesome.

I hope everything back in the States is going well. I was glad to hear of the 11 nominations for Return of the King, as well as a Best Actor nod for Johnny Depp (ah, if only he could win). I was also ecstatic to hear the Patriots won - yay for Tom Brady. Um, I'm not really sure what, if anything, else is that important, so I'll leave it here.

Until next week!

Carrie

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