Ιστορία της Αθήνας

I'm not dead!

So... yeah. The daily blog thing sort of crashed after my three day excursion to Nafplio. I have drafts written for most of the days in between then and now, but I just haven't had time or motivation to work on them. I will post them, eventually, as I get caught up, but that may not be for a while yet. In the morning, I am leaving for Meteora, a neat site in Thessaly full of awesome geological features, and a bunch of monasteries, which I am very much looking forward to. I will take lots of pictures, and write up the experience Monday night, when I get back. Then I'm in town for all of a day, before heading off to Olympia and Delphi on the next class trip. Also very exciting, but once again, I'm going to be without Internet, which means I won't blog, which means I'll have another three days of stuff to get caught up on. On top of the two weeks I've neglected thus far. So.... I'll get to that all eventually, but it could take a while.

Anyway, in the meantime, I can summarize what has happened in the past week. The way my program is divided up, there is the equivalent of a three quarter class crammed into one quarter, which means that each "quarter" lasts about 3 weeks. Thus, at the start of this week, we started the second quarter, and got a new professor. She's quite nice, and I like her, but the teaching style is much more self-directed and discussion-based. She doesn't explain sites to us, or tell us what is happening at the time period we're learning about; instead, we explore the site, do the readings, ask questions, and discover for ourselves. I will get used to it soon, but it's a big change from the way our last professor taught.

As for sites this week, we didn't do anything really groundbreaking. Tuesday we went on top of the Acropolis, finally visiting the Parthenon. Wednesday was an excursion to Boiotia and Thebes, which would have been really cool, except that it rained the entire bloody time. Thursday was a free morning, and Friday (today) was a visit to the ancient agora. All the sites were cool, but nothing so spectacular that I want to elaborate right now.

Anyway, I promise a more detailed update when I return, but for now it is midnight, and I am off to bed so I can wake up to finish packing and get on a train. So, καλή νύχτα!

During the day off (April 2nd), I went to the Benaki Museum, which Professor Hall had pointed out on the Lakivatos morning trip. It's a nice little museum, encompassing Greek history from the Classical and Roman periods, to the Byzantine period, and through to today. On the third floor, there was a temporary exhibit, titled "Expulsion and Exchange of Populations (Turkey -Greece 1922-1924)". In it were a series of photographs, from the end of the first World War through to the end of the population exchange, along with snippets of text walking visitors through the events of those two years.

The images alone were powerful, but even more so when combined with the objects I'd seen in the rest of the museum. In Turkey and the Near East, Greek Orthodox families had been powerful, and rich. However, during and after the Greco-Turkish war, these families were uprooted, broken apart, and forced from a stable, comfortable life. "Greek" men in Turkey were gathered up and sent to labor camps, from which few returned. Others, along with women and children, were sent on death marches. Refugees from Smyrna and other Turkish towns flooded Thessaloniki, Athens, and other Greece cities, even before the war ended and the population exchange was initiated. The estimate presented in the exhibit was that over 1,000,000 refugees tried to find new homes at this point. Then, at the end of the war, another 200,000 or so Greek Orthodox Christians were ejected from Turkey, while a similar number of Muslims were moved from Greek to Turkey. On both sides, the new immigrants were treated with suspicion and contempt, and were kept as outsiders.

My favorite photograph out of the set was of a young refugee girl sitting on the lap of an evzone, the Greek ceremonial guard. The girl was laughing at the camera, a little shyly, while the soldier laughed slightly along with her. In other photos, too, in the awful conditions of the refugee camps, the some of the children were still smiling, and life went on. It made me wonder if there could ever be a tragedy so great that even the kids would be unable to smile and enjoy life. If so, I hope no one ever has to experience them. Things would have to be awful indeed for even the children to lose hope entirely.

The other striking thing about the photographs was just how similar they were to images of much more recent disasters. In China, Japan, Haiti, New Orleans, Iraq, and Sumatra, in just the past decade, we've seen memorable photos of people living in the exact same sort of conditions. The faces and landscapes and disaster stories change, but the degree of human suffering, and human spirit... those are the same. The expressions of hopelessness, pain, and grief visible in pictures from this 1922-24 set are just as clear in the photos taken today. But present, too, are the expressions of defiance, of hope, and of the human will to survive. At the end of the exhibit, along with the photo of the little girl and the soldier, were several family portraits of refugees, who created a new middle class in Greece. Seeing that gives me hope that people will recover from today's disasters as well, and make the world a better place in spite of the hardship they have faced.

Over the past two weeks, I've visited a lot of archaeological sites: the Acropolis, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Temple of Poseidon at Isthmia, the Temple of Zeus at Nemea, the palaces at Mycenae and Tiryns, and more. Nearly everywhere there are ruins of different ancient memorials, sanctuaries, and buildings. Most of them look something like this:

I am not a huge fan of modern or abstract art, in the States. Most of it just makes no sense to me, or seems like a waste of space and material. Now, that's not to say that I hate all of it: I can find individual pieces that I like in any style or genre, be it in visual art, music, theatre, literature, what have you. However, a few pieces here and there are far from the whole, and American contemporary art does nothing for me.

On the tour of Greek galleries tonight, however, I found that that attitude applies much more strongly to American modern art than to Greek modern art. We took a tour of 5 different galleries in the Kolonaki area, each with very different pieces on display. The first we went to featured the art of Manolis Charos, made within the last four years. These pieces were primarily surrealist-like paintings, with one found object sculpture. I really liked most of them, particularly these couple:



The next gallery was also really interesting, this time featuring a paper sculpture artist, Tsakirakakis. His works combine color, dimensionality, and language to create some really powerful images. Some of his works are simply beautiful, like his piece "Smell", which is a paper construction depicting flowers with the word smell entwined in the leaves. Others were more political, such as one showing a ton of cars tangled up in traffic, emitting CO₂, or one with the word "Democracy worked into it. My favorite one, simply because it's a bit funny, is the Politics one:


The last few galleries did not impress me quite as much as the first two, but they were still interesting in their own right. The third featured the work of Aikaterini Gegisian, in an exhibit titled "Who Doesn't Like a Good Old Story?" She is an Armenian artist, and so her photography focuses on Armenian subjects. There was a lot of contrast between the old and the new, and nature versus the man-made in her work, which was quite interesting. The fourth included the works of Alexis Korbis, in "Third Heaven". These painting were very realistic, with dark backgrounds and human figures, presented as they look in life. These figures all seemed to be contemplating themselves, and usually a reflection or faded image of the subject was included in each work. Finally, the last gallery displayed the work of Maria Blanth, who does abstract clay sculpture. This was probably the least favorite of the shows we visited, simply because it is this kind of "find your own meaning" abstraction that is overwhelming in American modern art, that I tend to find somewhat useless. Still, it was interesting listening to the artist talk about her work, so that improved it somewhat.

For the past two weeks, I've seen a lot of art and architecture, but most of the focus has been on pre-Classical works. While that is something that interests me more than modern art, in general, in general, here in Athens, those pieces are remnants of a long-gone era. Visiting these galleries, and seeing and hearing how Greeks today view their world and interpret it through visual media, has given me much more of a sense of what this country, today, is going through. Despite outward appearances at the moment, it isn't a settled, peaceful, "first-world" sort of place... it is a people and a culture going through a time of unsettlement, of change, of coming to a new identity. That theme ran through all the art I saw tonight, and has given me a new perspective on this place I call home for the next few months.

As much as this first week has been fun, there's only so much of the same 24 other people I can tolerate, and after some incidents last night, I needed to escape from everyone and just get away. Fortunately, unlike in Chicago, that's very easy to do here in Athens. Exactly a week ago, when Katja took us on the walking tour of Central Athens, she'd suggested that we climb the Hill of the Muses, which is one of her favorite places in the whole of Athens. It's also right near the Acropolis, which I've been to around four times now, and it's always busy there, since it's a major tourist trap, so I packed a lunch and hiked off by myself to climb the hill.

It's a really nice hike there. Once I got to the fork in the path, where one way leads up the Hill of the Muses and the other leads around the base of the Acropolis, there were almost no other people around, and the hike was at a nice shallow incline, forested most of the way up, before opening up into an amazing view of Athens and the Acropolis.


I hung out up there for a while, eating my lunch and just thinking about my week, and my life in general. I don't know yet, how much different I will be after this trip than I was before it. I feel like I am becoming more confident on my own, but then, I've only been here for a short period of time, and I'm around strangers, who I'm always more confident around. I certainly will be healthier: despite all the second-hand smoke, the air is much cleaner here, and the weather and elevation changes are much more to my liking. The food is also better: I can cook for myself, or go to a taverna or restaurant and get large portions of tasty food on the cheap. As to what else will change, physically or mentally, I don't yet know. We'll have to wait and see. I think after this, though, I will be more prepared to take on the future ahead of me. Preparing for graduate school and making decisions about my life is something that scared me immensely. It's exciting, but also a major life change, and especially being as young as I am, it's rather terrifying. I like having a rhythm, a place I know with people I like, a plan. Moving to grad school will break me out of that, make me have to start all over again. Yet, this program is like that as well, with the added challenge of being surrounded by people who don't speak the same language as I do. Being here makes me feel much more prepared for the next year, and the adventures that will come afterwards.

Before I get to that, though, I need to complete my adventures here. So, after thinking and eating, I moved on, exploring the area, including finding a children's festival in progress, and the little observatory I'd noticed from the Acropolis hill. Then it was time to return home, before people started worrying about me, since I'd been away for 4 hours at this point. But having time to relax and reflect has helped me to deal with socializing again, and prepared me more mentally for the second week here in Athens.

Γειά σου!

For the second day in a row, I really haven't got much to say. Today was a free morning, and there was a transit strike here in Athens, so instead of going out to do anything, I just slept till 9, did homework, cleaned stuff, went grocery shopping, and generally did all the sorts of things I do at home. Not every day in Greece is going to be an exciting adventure to exotic and historical places. In some ways, life in Greece is exactly the same as life in the U.S. Chores still need doing, class is still class, and life, while a bit different, is still basically life.

In other news, I cooked dinner today! I made lemon pepper chicken and potatoes. It was not the most flavorful or ground-breaking food I've ever eaten, but considering I've never really cooked chicken before, it was a quite successful adventure. The chicken was moist, but fully cooked, and the potatoes had absorbed a lot of the lemon juice, and so were a tasty compliment. I was fairly pleased with myself. But, that's pretty much the most exciting thing that's happened. It's nice, in some respects, to have a slow, normal day. I feel much more functional now than I did at the end of yesterday, when I was exhausted. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to tomorrow, despite the early call time, because we will be going on our first excursion out of Athens! I will have pictures and much, much more to talk about them.

Until then, καλή νύχτα!

One of the nice things about this program is that we get a rental phone, with a Greek phone number. I had gotten a global phone in the US over Christmas, because at the time I didn't know I would have a phone to use. However, the rates to call from a US phone in a different country are absurd, so there was no complaint when I found out. Still, my family activated my personal cell phone for use here in Greece, just in case.

Of course, technology being what it is, I turned on my phone when I landed in Athens... no signal. To this point, I still haven't gotten it to work. Apparently, despite following all the instructions, Verizon failed at activating my SIM card, meaning I have a very expensive calculator and alarm clock. But, hey, I've still at least got a phone for calling within Greece, right?

For the first day, yes. Turned on the phone, used it, programmed in all the phone numbers, everything was fine. The battery got low, so I charged it. Turned it on the next morning, and entered the PIN for my SIM card. "SIM Card Locked. SOS Only". Now, I'd only entered the password once. It was supposed to give me three attempts before it locked the card. So, I shut it down and tried again. "SIM Card Locked. SOS Only." So, knowing what I do about mobile phones, I shut it down, took out the battery and the SIM card, blew on the contact points, put it back together, and tried a third time. "SIM Card Locked. SOS only."

By this point, I decided that phones hate me. So, I went to talk to my TA, to let him know that my phone was out of commission, and see if he knew who I should talk to. He referred me to Isabel, of the Athens Centre staff. She played with it for a bit, and came to the same conclusion: she had no idea what its issue was. The PIN number I was using was correct. All I'd done was charge the phone. There was no good reason why it was acting up. It was time to ask an expert. She send me down to Germanos, the cell phone dealership nearest to the Athens Centre, and I met a nice employee there who a) spoke decent English and b) had the resources to experiment and figure out what the problem was. It turned out that my SIM card was perfectly fine: put it in a phone, and it worked, no issue at all. When you put any SIM card into my phone, however, it came up with the same dialogue: "SIM Card Locked. SOS only." After determining this, the man in the store gave it back, saying that the phone body was a piece of junk. There was a software issue, and they couldn't fix it. I thanked him, and said I'd talk to my program about buying a new phone. I reported back to Rosemary and Isabel, and they agreed that they would have to buy a new phone body; after all, I'd already been walking around for 2 days with no means of communication. If I were to get lost on an excursion or get hurt or something, I couldn't get a hold of anyone, and they couldn't get a hold of me.

Finally, on the afternoon of Wednesday of the first week, after having two useless phones since Saturday, I got a new phone body, one of the same style but much nicer than my initial one. I've got it all charged up and re-entered the phone numbers of my professors, TA, and classmates. Now I just need to add some more money to my SIM card, and the technical difficulties will be over. For now.