I wish I could say that I've been really productive and done all sorta of awesome things this weekend. It would make a much better excuse fit not blogging yesterday. But, in all honestly, I haven't done much this weekend. I've been a bit sick, and so ended up sleeping, reading, or watching TV shows for much of the past 48 hours, because I simply didn't feel up to doing anything else.
That being said, though, I did go on a couple short adventures, while most of the rest of the group was out partying and island hopping. The first of these, yesterday, me and one roommate went to the Areopagus again, and then tried to figure out if you could walk all the way around the base of the Acropolis (you can't). It was a nice walk, but nothing terribly groundbreaking.
Today, however, we went to a little museum near the National Gardens. They had a temporary exhibit there on the Greek-Turkish population exchange, which took place in 1923. Between war and the exchange, over 1,200,000 "Greeks" (actually just people who followed the Greek Orthodox religion) in Turkey were deported to Greece, and thousands of Muslims were deported from Greece to Turkey. The photos of these refugees, and the conditions they lived in, were extremely powerful. I think my favorite photo, however, was of a little refugee girl, sitting in the lap of a member of the Greek ceremonial guard, just laughing and playing shy with the camera. If there is ever a tragedy so great that not even kids can laugh, I don't think anyone will have hope for the future.
That being said, though, I did go on a couple short adventures, while most of the rest of the group was out partying and island hopping. The first of these, yesterday, me and one roommate went to the Areopagus again, and then tried to figure out if you could walk all the way around the base of the Acropolis (you can't). It was a nice walk, but nothing terribly groundbreaking.
Today, however, we went to a little museum near the National Gardens. They had a temporary exhibit there on the Greek-Turkish population exchange, which took place in 1923. Between war and the exchange, over 1,200,000 "Greeks" (actually just people who followed the Greek Orthodox religion) in Turkey were deported to Greece, and thousands of Muslims were deported from Greece to Turkey. The photos of these refugees, and the conditions they lived in, were extremely powerful. I think my favorite photo, however, was of a little refugee girl, sitting in the lap of a member of the Greek ceremonial guard, just laughing and playing shy with the camera. If there is ever a tragedy so great that not even kids can laugh, I don't think anyone will have hope for the future.
