Watching the sunset over the Adriatic.
Meteora, Greece. Rocks and religion.
Clearest water I've ever seen, Greece.
Parthenon, Athens. It's always under construction.
Temple of Hephestus, Athens. Best preserved ancient Greek temple.It took me 50 hours to get from Sicily to Greece, but the journey was great. I got dropped off from the farm at the local bus stop around 4pm last Wednesday, took a bus into Catania where I caught a train to Messina where they put the train on a ferry at brought us across to Calabria. In my train car there was a Sicilian, two Americans (me and another WWOOFer who left the same day as me), one Colombian and one Mauritanian. That was quite a fun and interesting train ride. I played them some songs on the ukulele. Next I took an overnight train from Villa San Giovanni at the tip of Calabria to Taranto in Puglia where I changed trains to Brindisi, arriving at 8:30am on Thursday. With the help of a British girl who was doing more or less the same thing I was, I found the ferry and booked a ticket to Patra for that evening. I got on the ferry around 4pm and we pulled out of the harbor at 6:30pm, ETA 10am in Patra, Greece. It was really a beautiful ride, I got to watch the sun set and rise over the Adriatic (actually, it probably isn't the Adriatic the whole time. It's hard to tell where certain seas start and end). I rolled out my sleeping bag and slept on a life jacket bin, which was surprisingly soft (or I was surprisingly tired). We arrived in Patra at 10:30am on Friday, but it was actually 11:30 am because there is a time change. I asked around and found out that there was a train strike for one day, but that the train isn't very good anyway, so I went to the bus station and caught the next bus to Athens, leaving 12:45pm and arriving at 3:30pm. Greece is great, the people are really friendly and everyone speaks English. It's a totally different experience to be in a place where I can't read the signs or even attempt a conversation in the native language, though. I feel a lot more like a tourist here. So, I arrived in Athens, took a city bus to the main square, then a subway to the end of the line to Kifissia where my friend Alexandra lives. I walked to her house using the map I had sketched in my journal off Googlemaps, and arrived at 5pm on Friday.
I took a shower and we went straight back into Athens where we met Jagu (my physics professor from Amherst), Daniel Hall (Amherst creative writing prof., ), and Bill Miglore (Amherst '06). We all went to the new Acropolis museum, then to a nice dinner at some fancy club where Alex's uncle has some special position. It was very fun to have a little Amherst reunion, and completely out of the blue.
Now I just got back from a 3-day road trip around the northern half of Greece with Alex and Bill from Amherst, and Alex's sister Katy. This country is really incredible and much less settled than Italy. We left Athens heading north, passing by a number of cities familiar from ancient myths and stories: Thebes, Thermopylae, Delphi, Corinth. We stopped a number of times on the side of the road to swim in the Aegean, and later the Ionian seas. The water here is unbelievable, incredibly warm, clear and salty. If I didn't rinse off after a swim I'd be coated in salt when I dried off. We stayed in Trikala and Ioannina, two cute cities filled with Greek (but very few foreign) tourists. They have much nicer and larger parks than I got used to in Italy, probably because there is so much more space to expand. The highlight of the trip for me was seeing the Meteora, a group of monasteries built on top of some remarkable cliffs. It really looked like something out of a story book, the classic impossible-to-reach holy place. Even without the monasteries, the landscape is one of the most spectacular I've seen, and those just made it that much better. We've also explored Athens a bit, which has been fun, and may go to an island in the next few days.
I've put all my pictures up until leaving for the road trip onto this computer, so I'll put some on the blog now. If possible I'll add them to the appropriate entries, so go back and see if there are new things!
