First you lustrate, then you libate (2)

Phaistos is on a hill above the largest stretch of flat land in all of Crete, and appears to have been the seat of government and religion for this especially large and productive area.  You can get a glimpse of the that plain, which lay quite dramatically below us as we crossed the mountains from Heraklion, in the background of the first picture below, which shows class in session in one corner of the palace.  Phaistos was our opportunity to look for all of those characteristically Minoan structures that we'd learned about in Knossos--how many can you spot in the second picture?

I'm not really going to show you all thirty of my pictures of pier-and-door partitions (unless of course you really want to see them, and ask me very nicely).  It was fun looking for those few features we had learned to recognize, and asking profoundly ignorant questions about the ones we didn't.  One of Michael's main attributes as a teacher is his modesty--he refuses to say he knows what something was for when he doesn't, and he has funny stories about archaeologists who write whole books built on the rankest speculations.  His reserve also allowed us room for our own occasionally rank speculations, as when someone suggested that the feature in the third picture above was a Bronze Age cat door.  His response was, "Could be, I don't know what it was for, and we know they had cats."  He never showed a trace of condescension no matter how far afield we ranged.

I have included just those three pictures of Phaistos, despite the fact that it was a large and beautiful site and I took a whole bunch of pictures, because we've got a lot more to cover today and we need to get moving.  Remember, Phaistos was already our second stop of the morning.  The third, Agia Triada, only three kilometers away, was likely an administrative center connected with the palace at Phaistos.  Much of the Minoan structure was hidden under the ruins of later buildings, but we could make out some of our pet features.  And once again there was a Byzantine church on the site.  As the Christians sought to drive out pagan beliefs in any way they could think of, they naturally thought of putting a church on every possible pagan sacred site, such that, we were told, anywhere you see a church up at the top of a hill or mountain in Crete, there is likely a Minoan "peak sanctuary" underneath it.  At this point Alex and I were guiltily enjoying the Byzantine stuff we were seeing, perhaps almost as much (gasp!) as the Bronze Age stuff.  Don't tell Michael which pictures I chose to post from Agia Triada, okay?

I took a lot of versions of that first shot, even though it was starting to rain and the light was jumping all over.  I was very much taken with the juxtaposition of the Bronze Age ruins, the delapidated church (from the 9th century, Michael suggested), and the large olive tree, which was in season and dropping ripe olives all over the ground.  A few people tasted them; thankfully I did not, as heard, just in time, a chorus of "yucks."  Raw olives are extremely bitter, and the nasty aftertaste stayed with the unlucky ones for some time, all the way to lunch at the beautiful beach-cove town of Matala.  But for much of the subsequent bus ride I was thinking about this very Greek juxtaposition of olive, church, and palace, of ruin and basilica and tree, of what grows and what endures and what decays.

That was it for ruins for the day--well, except for the Roman burial caves, more recently inhabited by the likes of Joanie Mitchell, built into the cliff along the cove-side in Matala.  I already told you that the driver agreed to give us an extra hour, which some used by climbing all over the cliffs, others by shopping, and most of us by swimming in the amazing blue water, floating, jumping off the rocks, lying on the beach, indulging ourselves in the ancient art of being tourists.  Here's a view of the cliff of caves, then one of a cave interior, and one of the view out of a cave entrance toward the beach.

The paintings on the cave wall are not as ancient as they may appear, dating back only to the 1960s or 70s, when Matala was a major stop on the international hippie circuit.  It's not hard to see why.  Matala is an unbelievably perfect little beach town, with tavernas lining the cliffs on the opposite side of the cove, looking down and across at the beach and the caves.  Unfortunately, we rather rushed through our delicious lunch, knowing that our time in Matala was limited, even with the grace of the bus driver's additional hour.  Annabel, Alex, and I did shower off and change in time to climb the cave cliff, Annabel and I all the way to the fence at the top.  It made for ideal scrambling, and if there's one thing Annabel has inherited from her father, it's a love of scrambling up things.

As we drove back to Heraklion, retracing our steps across the mountains, with the white houses of Agia Varvara strung like vertebrae up the spine of the crossing, I listened to Jackson Browne sing "I am a child in these hills" and stared out the window at the slopes of alternating grapes and olives, olives and grapes, and the peaks with tiny white churches built over temples to earlier gods, and marveled at the fact that people had been growing olives and grapes on these hills for thousands of years, and here we were, in our little Mercedes bus, flying like Hermes himself across the width of Crete, so many rich children, still salty from our sea-baths, given the powers of a god, but only for a semester.  I don't know how to cue Jackson Browne on the soundtrack at this point, but here's another picture taken from the caves, looking across the cove to our lunch taverna and down to the water where Mackenzie and Annabel and Meredith are lolling on their floaties like three nereids who aren't at all worried about catching a bus.

Alex and Annabel and I had dinner that night at a seafood place near the water in the old Venetian district, where there was an octopus strung up on wires like some sort of pelagic scarecrow and Annabel enjoyed feeding the cats leftover bits of our sardines.  I really should go on to talk about some of the next day rather than break it here, because we've still got a lot of Crete to cover, but it's late and I have Minoan dreams to dream, in hippie techno-color.

First you lustrate, then you libate

Welcome to Crete, or at least to our particular four-day whirlwind tour of Crete, with an emphasis on the Bronze Age and a secondary emphasis on beaches.  Or was it shopping?  You be the judge.

I need a little help from Annabel and my students for the pictures this time, as I didn't have a camera at the ready at all moments.  Hard to believe, since I returned from the trip with 322 pictures, but there were actually many moments when I was not taking a picture, and some of them, like the Roman burial caves inhabited by hippies in the Sixties, and the octopus that Captain Nick brought up and let everyone handle, made for darn good visuals.  Luckily someone had a camera handy at such moments.  At least I managed to get a picture of every single set of pier-and-door partitions that we found among the proto-palatial and neo-palatial ruins we visited, all 30-odd of them at the seven sites.  Would you like to see them all?  No?  You'd rather see the Roman/hippie caves and the octopus?  Well, okay, but I'm going to have to sneak some archaeology into this post.  You'll thank me later, when you finish this extraordinarily long post.  If you finish.  Hey, wait, I could employ my impressive knowledge of cutting edge technology and break this into two posts, or even three, so that it wouldn't take so long to load!  And then I could include a few extra picture of ruins!  Okay, now that that's settled, let's catch our bus to Piraeus and find our ferry.

We made the 10-hour trip to Crete at night, both ways, sleeping in cabins on very big ferries.  The one going down was easily the biggest ship I've ever been on, the size of a small cruise ship, complete with shopping mall and a small swimming pool (closed, unfortunately for Annabel).  In the first shot Kate is very excited at the prospect of climbing up onto what looks like a building in the background, but is actually our boat.  As you can tell by how empty the pier looks in the second shot, we were just about the last people off in the morning, having slept in as long as we were allowed to.  We took a bus to the hotel, left our bags, had breakfast, and re-boarded our bus for the Knossos site.

The thing about this site is not just how important it was historically and archaeologically, but the fact that chunks of it have been reconstructed.  Most of Knossos and almost all of all the other sites we visited looks something like this.

But Knossos, excavated under the aegis of the godfather of Minoan archeaology, Arthur Evans, was selectively "enhanced" by reconstructions based on best evidence of the time.  So parts of it look like what Evans thought it used to look like.  Even in that first shot of the site, above, some reconstruction snuck in.  I don't know if I have any completely unreconstructed pictures from Knossos.  But here are a few more of what it looks like. 

 

How, you may ask, could Evans get away Disney-fying a landmark archaeological site like this?  Simple:  he owned it.  Those were the days when if you wanted to excavate a site, you simply had to buy it.  Nowadays if you want a building permit and there is some reason to believe you have valuable materials on your site, the government might buy it from you, but it might take forever, and you might not get what you think it's worth, and for those and other reasons some builders simply bulldoze their sites and never mention the cool stuff at all.  Because, come to think of it, the odds are pretty good that anywhere you want to put a building in Crete, somebody else put one there first, sometime in the previous five thousand years or so.

But as Michael, our fearless leader, explained, there is some advantage to starting with Knossos, because we would be better able to picture the significance of what we were seeing later.  Scroll back up to that last picture.  Those are reconstructed pier-and-door partitions, minus the wooden doors, which were kind of an ancient folding or louver door that allowed for the control of light as well as access, and were associated with ritual locations.  Maybe I'll show you a few dozen more pictures of them--if you ask nicely--but those will only be the stone (or concrete-enhanced) bases of the piers; this is what the stone portion of the whole thing looked like.  Very helpful to students like us, though real archaeologists swear under their breath against this desecration.

We caught Michael here taking one of his rare pictures (rare because he's seen these sites so many times), and of a reconstruction at that, in this case a lustral basin.  Remember that term:  lustral basin.  Or L.B., as we came to call it.  Evans gave them that name, and even though it's pretty clear that he was way wrong about them being sites for ritual cleansing, the name has stuck.  If he had been right, the Minoans would have been the ritual-bathingest people in history (or pre-history), because no palace worthy of the name could have less than a few of these.  Mostly connected to fancy walls, paved floors, pier-and-door partitions, and other cool stuff that we soon learned to recognize.

Michael did his dissertation work and other excavations on Bronze Age stuff, and however much we may learn from him about those Athenian and Spartan Johnny-come-latelies in the 6th century, it's clear that Michael's heart belongs to the Minoans, perhaps with a soft spot for the Mycenaeans.  As much fun as he had trotting us all about the Acropolis, he'd really rather be somewhere in the second millenium.  (All dates are B.C.E. in this class,which makes it particularly difficult to ask questions about Byzantine and Renaissance Venetian sites.)

The archaeological museum in Heraklion is undergoing renovation, so we toured a relatively small area which contained all the best artifacts from the museum, kind of a concentrated essence-of-museum, the cream of the crop, just the really, really good stuff.  How perfect is that?  The quarters were a bit close, but we were a small group and it was not crowded, so Michael was able to pause at each display and talk about it.  Here are a couple of the more famous pieces.  You can find much better pictures of them with the help of Google, but these will help me remember what Michael told us about the snake goddesses and the bull jumpers.  He's clearly put a lot of time into imagining what bull jumping involved, and impressed me at least with the challenge of something that makes modern matadors look like wimps.

That last image, the first you see as you enter the museum, has become an icon of Crete--you might be able to see it in the logo of our ferry company on the side of the ship, and it is one of Arthur Evans' reconstructions.  It actually consists of four separate pieces, as you might be able to see even in my poor picture:  crown, chest and right arm, thigh, and hand gripping a rein.  Unfortunately, these pieces were not found anywhere near each other, and we now know for sure that they don't belong together, can't even reasonably go together.  The thigh points one way, the chest the other; the lily crown was only worn by women.  But when a howler becomes an icon, iconography wins, and even the experts in the museum cave in and lead off their display with the famous mistake.

We saw a number of libation vessels in Crete, but this was my favorite.  They have a hole near the bottom which the libation bearer plugs with a finger until it's time to make that liquid offering to the gods.  Being a language person, I particularly enjoyed learning new verbs like "libate."  One can never have too many verbs at one's disposal.

We had a bit of adventure with the afternoon, which was free.  A few of us took a city bus trip to the beach, were battered about joyfully by enormous waves, and ending up hitching a ride most of the way home in the back of a pickup truck.  Annabel loved every bit of it, of course.

The next morning we loaded up in our bus again and headed south across the island.  This might be the time to mention that we were a little spoiled by the Athens Centre, bus-wise.  Being such a small group we fit nicely (i.e., everyone got his or her own row) in a small and nimble bus, a Mercedes no less.  Moreover, we had a very nice driver, who readily agreed to stay an extra hour in Matala so we could have more beach time.  But why say any more when there's a picture handy?--here's a shot of the Kriti-bus and our fabulous driver.  We felt very smug parked next to all those giant tour buses.

Our first stop after crossing the spine of the mountains was Gortyna, distinguished by the most complete surviving inscribed Greek law code.  Granted, this was not Bronze Age stuff, but we can't read Linear A anyway, so what the heck?  Michael explained that huge chunks of Greek law concerned inheritance when there was no male heir.  Only male heads of household supplied soldiers, so city-states that let women inherit easily soon ran out of soldiers.  And thus the fall of Sparta, we learned, which was by far the most liberal in allowing women to inherit and own property.  And here I thought it was because they threw too many babies off the rocks.  That'll teach me to get my Greek history from movies.  Here's a couple shots of that code, written Boustrophon, "as the ox plows," right to left and then back left to write, with the letters changing direction as well as the words themselves.  It fills that whole wall in the second picture.

The other big attraction at Gortyna was a ruined Byzantine church, constructed partly of materials from the earlier pagan buildings.  But perhaps "ruined" is the wrong term, given that somebody maintains this shrine.  Annabel lit a candle to the memory of her less pagan forebears.

That's Katja in the middle, by the way.  She was our official Athens Centre representative, Travel Coordinator, Entertainment Director, and Other Fearless Leader.  She kept Michael on his toes, and set a very high bar for those in the group who considered themselves skilled shoppers.

After Gortyna we had just a short hop to Phaistos, another fabulous Bronze Age site, just jam-packed with L.B.s and other now-recognizable features.  But perhaps it's time to end this post and pick things up with a fresh download.

Clearing the Air

This is not going to be the most entertaining post on this blog.  For one thing, there won't be any pictures.  Trust me, you wouldn't want any pictures.  Because this post is about the stuff we haven't mentioned so far, the less glamorous aspects of our first couple of weeks in Greece.  It's mostly about caca.

Which apparently means the same thing in Greek as it does in English and who knows how many other languages.  Let's start with the thing that ensures that certain of my relatives, never mind precisely which ones, will never visit us in Athens:  we aren't allowed to put toilet paper in the toilet.  At all.  It has to go in the trash.  This applies to home and elsewhere. 

I have already proven myself to be a poo weenie.  On our four-day canoe trip with Chase and Phyllis and Sasha this summer, two day's paddle up the Tangle Lakes in beautiful tundra, not having seen another person besides the six of us on the entire trip, I ventured into tactless territory and asked Phyllis why she carried a lighter with her when she went off to do her doody.  (She'd announced her reason for  heading off over the hill and then that she'd forgotten the lighter and returned for it, so I wasn't being as nosy as you thought.)  "Don't you burn your t.p.?" she asked in genuine surprise.  I felt ashamed of my poor wilderness ethic, as did Alex, but we were not persuaded to borrow a lighter.  I guess I feel that if burying my business was good enough for my father and his father, it's good enough for me.  Wait, I don't think either of them ever did any such thing.  I know for a fact my father, who loved to hike, would go to great lengths to avoid having to poop in the wild.  Well, anyway, burying is what I was taught in my formative camping years of those innocent Sixties and Seventies, and this old dog is not going to learn that particular new trick.  Mea poopa, mea maxima poopa.

But here in Athens I wasn't given the option of wimping out.  We were instructed that we were never, ever to put t.p. in the toilet.  No precise consequences were delineated, although there were a few apologetic allusions to the poor plumbing in Greece, and especially in Athens.  But I don't need specific threats--I have no trouble imagining all on my own the horrors that could ensue if I and my family disobey the rules.  Never mind the possibility of our toilet backing up all over our apartment.  I don't want to be standing in front of our building, with all the other inhabitants likewise evacuated (you should excuse the pun) and staring at us (more likely shouting at us in Greek), while sirens and revolving lights announce to the entire neighborhood the emergency presence of city sewage officers backed up by the toilet branch of the local police, as the entire neighborhood comes under martial law for the duration of the plumbing emergency.  I don't care how small are the odds of such a thing actually happening, I'm not going to risk it. 

You probably think I'm going to talk about the toilets themselves next, don't you?  But I'm not.  I'll leave that topic for some female blogger, who would likely have a lot more than I to say about, for instance, the whole topic of toilet seats and the lack thereof.  In fact, one of my creative writing students wrote her first poem of the semester on the subject of toilets, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty.  I mean, the poem was actually very good, but the subject was filthy.  Maybe she'll post the poem on her own blog, and then I can put in my very first link and you can read all about it.  But, like I said, I'm not going to talk about toilets here.  Except for their inevitable appearance above in connection with the discussion of toilet paper, from which they could hardly be entirely excluded.  But no actual focus on or attention to toilets themselves in this post, no sir.

That's probably actually enough on the entire topic of human caca--how about we talk about cat doodoo?  It's everywhere on the sidewalks, adding to the fun of negotiating the "parked" cars and motorcycles, low tree branches, irregular paving, and other pedestrian challenges.  Some of my students claim to be bothered by the smell of cat pee everywhere, but I myself hardly notice it for all the smell of cat poo.  You smell to-mah-to, I smell to-may-to, it still stinks. 

Instead I'll talk about the weather.  It's pretty danged hot here for a trio of Alaskans.  We have been mighty grimy on occasion, and not all of those occasions involved returning from the beach, when one expects a certain level of grime.  We ran the air conditioner in our bedroom for a couple of hours to cool it down, and when we went in there for a break from the heat of preparing a meal for my students, it felt blissfully cool.  But the thermometer on my travel alarm revealed that the room was at 77 degrees Fahrenheit.  And now we're headed south to Crete, where it will presumably be even warmer than Athens, and we're being told to bring coats and raingear, to prepare for the possibility of cooler weather.  I haven't yet worn long pants in Greece, and only regretted my shorts once, at a reception at the Athens Centre where I felt under-dressed (but not remotely cool).  I've only worn closed-toe shoes twice, once to run and the other time on the Acropolis when I wished I was wearing sandals.  So do you think I'm packing any long-sleeved shirts to take to Crete, despite the well-meaning advice of my colleagues?  We have a tiny umbrella under which we all three will crouch if it rains, but I'm not taking a raincoat.  I actually look forward to the possibility of being a little chilly.  Bring on that nighttime sea air. 

I just realized that I mentioned returning from the beach in the paragraph above, and I'm afraid that at that point I might have lost some readers, those of you who were pained at having to read a litany of complaints from someone who has been swimming in the Aegean several times in the last couple of weeks and now has to take time out from writing this blog to go lie on the beach in Crete.  I guess I'll stop there.  There must be other bad things about living in Greece, and I'm sure I could come up with them if I had time.  But the Minotaur calls.  I think I can just make out a few Greek words I recognize,  despite the bullish voice and Crete accent.  One of those words might have been "caca."

The Money Shot

This is it, folks.  The moment you've been waiting for.  One of the most iconic sites in all the world, and certainly the most visited and culturally important place in Greece.  The Acropolis, our first tour, led by our excellent professor of Monuments of Ancient Greece, Michael Wedde.  I'm not giving you all the pictures, of course--who has time to wait for that upload, and besides, there are plenty of better pictures by professional photographers available on the web.  These are just a few of my favorite moments.

Starting with waiting outside in the heat while Michael stood in an endless ticket line with our ID cards.  After a while I went to stand with him, to ask questions and keep him company, but first I took a few pictures.  Apparently it is not only American humans who were somewhat enervated in the heat.  I don't want to poach on Annabel's territory--she's compiling a two-part photo-essay called Cats of Athens and Dogumentary--so don't expect a lot more pictures of cats and dogs from me.  Suffice it to say that there are lots of strays, both feline and canine, and the dogs at least are collared and tagged to indicate that they are officially sanctioned strays.

Even once we had the tickets, there was quite a press of people approaching the gate.  Michael told us that the huge formal entrance would have been even more impressive to ancient worshipers than the Parthenon or other temples on top.  While we waited I took this shot of the Nike temple that perches on the corner of the Acropolis like a shy younger sister.

Shy and beautiful.  It turned out that this was the only view we would get of this temple--it's not receiving visitors, despite being only one of four ancient structures remaining on the Acropolis.  We did, however get to approach the building in the background of the next shot--perhaps you will recognize it?  This is my entire student body, all seven of them, plus the Fitts-Heyne contingent.  Being such a small group helps us squeeze through crowds, a skill we had some practice at today, and it also makes it a lot easier to get everyone in the picture.

I will take more pictures of and from the Acropolis, no doubt, when we go up there with visiting family, and I anticipate better light.  The blinding September sun was almost too much for my camera, or at least for my skills with this camera.  But sometimes when I pointed it at the ground, for instance straight down the walls of the Acropolis, I could moderate the light somewhat.  And perhaps even catch a pair of amorous tortoises moving easily as fast as I've ever seen a tortoise move.  At least, one of them was amorous--apparently the other was not in the mood, hence the hare-like pace.  That is the remains of a sanctuary to Aesclepios, Greek god of healing, in the background, at the base of the Big Rock.

 

We spent the afternoon at the museum, but cameras are not allowed in there, hence all these pictures are from the morning, which actually extends somewhat past noon to the lunch hour, not quite as late as in Spain but certainly after 1:00.   I took pictures of the other building, the most important historically, but apparently it was not the most important bloggorically.  It was merely the older and more important temple site, including the place where Poseidon's trident came down to strike water (unfortunately salty), with holes left in the roof and floor to mark its passage, and an olive tree growing where Athena's original gift grew, beating out Poseidon's salty water in the competition to be boss god of the Athens polis.  Instead of pictures of that temple, I offer a piece of wall that was hurriedly reconstructed out of whatever materials happened to be available (old statuary, leftover pieces from temple construction) while Athens' war chief was stalling in Sparta to allow time for the re-fortification.  Not the sawed-off column chunks sticking out at the bottom, like incorporating log-ends from house construction in Alaska into the fence around the property. 

As we rejoined the stream of humanity exiting the massive gate, I could not resist a picture of one off-kilter column, and another of one of the guards whose job is not to protect us, but to protect the Acropolis from us.  They have whistles they blow at offenders, as they did while we were entering at someone who crawled a little too far up one of the walls.  I think they look good in their non-uniform street clothes, artsy and unofficial, as guards at an international cultural landmark should look.

The ominous black shape in the bottom-left of the upper picture is Patrick's shoulder.  We were a little crowded exiting, as you can see in the bottom photo, and there was no way for me to get the crooked column in without including a body part.  I kind of like it, though, as there's precious little blackness in these sun-drenched shots.

And finally, the part that Annabel had been waiting for:  the Theater of Dionysus, where she could sit in the place where Antigone was performed more than 2000 years ago.  Of course, she'd have preferred to be on the stage, but it was cordoned off, and she had to settle for a seat in the house with the rest of us spectators.  I felt Michael deserved another acknowledgment at this point, as he had been providing us with a fascinating commentary throughout, and in case you couldn't guess, he was holding the camera for the group shot with Parthenon.  I figured he'd been in a few shots of the Parthenon during his career, and wouldn't mind wielding all of the cameras for this shot.  But he was always there leading us, staying true to his method of "see first, talk after," and giving me a much richer experience than I'd have had on my own.  Efcharisto, Michael.

First weekend and we're off to the island of Aegina

After orientation on Thursday and Friday, we had the weekend off until classes started on Monday, and almost everyone wanted to go somewhere.  Folks at the Athens Centre recommended Aegina, one of the nearest islands, for a day trip, and we thought, why not the weekend?  (Clearly we have a very gung-ho group that makes up in enthusiasm for its small size.)  On Saturday morning we rendezvoused at the Athens Centre and headed to the Metro.  After a false start and some quick backtracking due to one of the stations being out of service, we made it to the port of Piraeus, got ferry tickets right at the Metro station, walked to our ferry, and boarded immediately.  It was a huge ferry, and there were plenty of others the same size coming in and heading out.  I was fascinated during the early part of the crossing by all the freighters moored in the gulf.  I'd always heard that Athens/Piraeus was a major port, and I know Greece is a major shipping power, but nevertheless the armada of huge freighters and tankers spread across the gulf was impressive.

When we got off the boat, all eight of us, without accommodations because the Athens Centre's preferred location was booked with a wedding, we quickly met a young man representing the local booking agency, and he showed us a cheap hotel that the kids quickly accepted, but we declined.  We got the name of a nicer place just a little ways up the road, took a taxi there (although it was close enough to walk and we did so several times), and loved it.  Unfortunately, they had a baptism party scheduled, and the proprietor warned us that it would be noisy.  But since it was a baptism party, it wouldn't go very late, "only one or two."  We checked out a couple of other nearby hotels, but decided on the Hotel Danae and taking our chances on the noise.  The weather would determine whether the party would be outside or in, outside being right outside our window in the pool area. 

Luckily for our sleep later that night, a big storm blew in.  But unluckily for our afternoon plans, we were driven out of the water at the beach we all went to by the lightning.  (We did not mind the rain--it was all warm.)  There was a wild baptism party at the beach bar were we were swimming, and they gave us drinks and invited us to join in, but the whole party was rained out by the force of the storm.  Nevertheless, a couple of the students realized that a baptism party might not be a bad place to hang out, and later that night, after dinner, they returned with us to our hotel, and were up dancing and partying with the locals until somewhat past "one or two."  As I said, we pretty much slept through it.

But wait, back up.  After we were driven by the storm back to our hotel and warm showers, it cleared up again.  And nothing was going to keep Annabel out of the water.  Here is a picture from our hotel room with Annabel in the pool (after swimming in the ocean, being rained out, returning, showering, and then going out to the pool), and another of Annabel swimming in the ocean again right below our hotel, with the ruins of ancient Aegina in the background. 

The main town on the island has the same name as the island, which I'm romanizing (probably incorrectly) as Aegina, pronounced EGG-een-ah.  It's been a town since neolithic times, and the excavation and accompanying museum are absolutely amazing.  For some reason it's referred to in guidebooks and maps as the Temple of Apollo, but it's so much more than that--in fact, I could hardly find the actual temple to Apollo in the layers of time and space.  I'm sorry for not taking a good picture down into the excavations, but here is a picture of Annabel the next morning up by the Byzantine stela, and a view looking back toward our hotel (where Annabel was previously seen in the water).

After most of us toured the site and museum, and the two who had been up late took a healthful morning dip in the ocean at the city beach just outside the gates of the archaeological site, we took two taxis most of the way across the island to the amazing temple of Afea, a pre-Hellenic fertility goddess whose site hosted later temples to various Greek gods.  What you're seeing in the pictures is Greek construction, and forms a line-of-site (on a clear day, before modern levels of air pollution) isosceles triangle with the Parthenon and the temple of Poseidon at the end of the Attic peninsula.  Supposedly the Parthenon was modeled on this temple, and this one is better preserved (not having been caught in the middle of twentieth-century warfare).  After too little time at this amazing hilltop site (being crowded by the infrequent transit schedule), we caught a bus down to the nearby town of Agia Marina, and spent a beautiful afternoon at the beach and in the overlooking taverna.  Here are a few pictures of Afea, and a couple of some students in Agia Marina, where the food was good and the snorkeling was wonderful.

We caught what turned out to be a kind of local ferry from Agia Marina, which made another stop on the island that we weren't expecting, but then steamed across to Piraeus, and after changing once in a packed metro station (at which someone getting off the train before ours was robbed) and making the now-familar fifteen-minute walk from the central square, we were safe at home, exactly three hours after getting on the ferry.

The first two days of class went well, and tomorrow we go to the Acropolis, led by our Monuments of Ancient Greece teacher.  Our wonderful Greek language teacher has given us a fabulous head start on Greek after only two classes, vastly more and more useful information than I got in a whole summer of lessons with Rosetta Stone Greek, and we are busily reading signs and trying out our Greek on waiters everywhere.

Some will say there were too many pictures of ships in this report, and others, too many pictures of water, and still others, too many pictures of Annabel in the water with ships nearby.  But you are all wrong.  And to prove it, I will give you more pictures of ships, and Annabel, and water, and more ruins to boot.  Such was our weekend.  And if you raise your voice in protest, we will say that you are not arguing, you are merely being Greek.