Last Afternoon in Bulgaria

7/27

This afternoon I did a SAS-organized cooking class. It was amazing. Bulgarian food is delicious, it’s actually a lot like Greek food with a little Turkish influence and their own flair.

Originally, this trip was supposed to take place in a restaurant in a small village. But, a few months before we arrived, the entire restaurant burned down. The person who told me this probably wasn’t supposed to (he was a new tour guide) and didn’t really tell me anything else about it. So, our cooking class did not happen in the restaurant of a small village, but in the banquet hall of a super nice hotel in Golden Sands (one of Bulgaria’s major beach tourist destinations about half an hour north from Varna along the coast) called Riviera.

We walked into the banquet hall, and it was huge and beautiful and very well air conditioned, which felt amazing. Bulgaria wasn’t as warm as Italy, Croatia and Greece, but it was still toasty enough to make me very thankful for the AC. All the tables were set up with long white tablecloths, red runners, white plates, full sets of silverware and folded white cloth napkins. The ceilings were very high, at least two stories, and the room had sleek, modern architecture with decoration to match and lots of potted plants around the edges of the room.
There were four different stations: one with breads, one with cold dishes, one with main dishes, and one with soups. First, we were at the breads station. We began by making banitza, a mixture of yogurt and eggs layered in filo dough and baked into a kind of custard that is eaten for breakfast. We also made two other types of breads, which both had yogurt as a main ingredient. Last, we made Bulgarian doughnuts, which were meant to be eaten for breakfast and tasted somewhere between doughnuts and beignets. Next was the main dish station (our group rotated a little out of order).  We made moussaka, which was similar to the Greek but slightly lighter and with different seasoning, and pickled cabbage leaves stuffed with a mixture of veal and pork. At the cold dishes station, we made the Bulgarian version of the Greek salad: Shopska salad, kyopoolou (a dip with eggplant, roasted red peppers, tomatoes and spices), roasted pepper salad, and roasted red peppers stuffed with a cheese and herb mixture, dipped in flour, then egg, then breadcrumbs and then fried (yum). The next and final station was the soups. We made a very traditional cold yogurt soup: pretty much just Bulgarian yogurt, water, herbs and cut up cucumbers. We also made a delicious bean soup and a soup with mini meatballs.

After we saw all the cooking demonstrations (because they were more demonstrations that actual classes, we each did a little part of the cooking, but it was main the chef there doing so), we got to eat everything we made. Everything was delicious, and yogurt was served as a general condiment to be eaten on anything.

They also gave us packets of four different spices frequently used in Bulgarian cooking: spearmint, “table savory seasoning,” “flavor salty spice mix” (which had paprika and a number of other spices in it and was delicious…I’m planning on eating it on toast with a little butter), and  “summer savory”, a much-used herb somewhere between oregano and thyme. And, each of us received a little cookbook full of Bulgarian food, including all the foods we made that day.

Our tour guide told us one the way back to the ship that several Bulgarian students in Varna had called her asking to meet the American students who came on the ship. It felt like all of Varna knew what our ship was: everyone I talked to that spoke even a little bit of English asked if I was from the student ship once they found out that I was an American. But once I heard this, I really wished SAS had organized some kind of meet and greet with the Bulgarian students; it would have been so interesting to hear what life in Bulgaria was like from someone in my situation. Two students from Varna actually came along on the trip with us. One, Yuri, sat with us at our table for lunch and told us about the studying he was doing. As a history major, he told us a little about how the communist period actually shaped the food they ate: many of the more involved and “unnecessary” dishes of older traditional Bulgarian cooking fell out of use. So, some of the “traditional” Bulgarian food now had actually not been around that long, but has become very popular and just as Bulgarian fairly recently.

Love from Bulgaria,
Ginny

Varna, Bulgaria

Varna, Bulgaria

7/24

I just cleared immigration in Varna, Bulgaria! This is the only port so far where everyone on the ship had to clear immigration individually in the port rather than having country immigration officials coming aboard and clearing the whole ship together. Hopefully I’ll have a Bulgarian stamp on my passport after this.

Today I went on the SAS-organized trip of the highlights of Varna. I picked this trip because I had absolutely no idea what there was to do or see in Varna, so it seemed like a good place to start. It was: we went to the ruins of Roman baths, the Ethnographic Museum, the Archaeological Museum, and the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin.

On the way to the Roman baths, which were just a five to ten minute bus ride from the ship, I tried to get a feel for the city. This may sound silly, but the most prominent feature for me were all the trees. I have never been in a city where the trees stood out more than they did in Varna. This may have been due in part to the loud scratched and bangs the branches and leaves of certain trees made on the roof of the bus as we drove along the street. Many streets were “tree tunnels,” and not just because the streets were tiny; the trees were giant and beautiful, especially with the sunlight filtering through their leaves. I imagine they were al deciduous, so Varna must look much more bare in the winter. Hopefully they wrap some of the trees with lights then. The buildings were mainly around six stores, more or less in other places. The architecture was simple and functional but not unattractive (for the most part, although I did see a few bare cinderblock buildings with the corners crumbling away). Also, tourism is very developed in Varna, and there are several universities in the city, so the town had lots of students and lots of tourists, and the population almost doubles in summertime.

The baths were sunk below the level of the city, and excavations lasted from 1859 to 1944. They were located in the Greek district, the oldest part of Varna. They are definitely ruins, and a very different experience of visiting baths than the one I had in Pompeii, where the baths were almost perfectly preserved, right down to the wall paintings in several of the rooms. Here, the baths were stripped of all their marble adornment to show the brick, which was crumbling away at the corners. The roofs were gone in all the rooms except the furnace. Still, most walls outlining the 70m by 100m baths were still present, along with a number of brick arches. An exercise area was in the middle of the baths, and there were a total of six pools: three for men and three for women, one cool, one warm and one hot. The Greek district was originally established by the Greeks in the 6th century under the name Odessos (town on water). Also, there was a family of stray cats including three little baby kittens that were so cute…I wanted to pet them and carry them around with me through the baths, but I decided that having rabies would be a bad way to spend the rest of my trip.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the Ethnographic museum, but I really enjoyed it. It showed the daily life of Bulgarian people in the late 19th through the mid 20th centuries. It was mainly an agricultural society, and there were ploughs and other farming tools all set up how they would have been used. No olive trees are grown in Bulgaria, but they do have lots of vineyards, and several old winery apparatuses were on display. There were cases and cases of traditional clothing: dresses, aprons and head scarves for the women (white for single, red for married, and black for mourning) and tunics and pleated Turkish style pants for the men (the more pleats, the wealthier he was). There was a clear Turkish influence in the clothing in general. Weddings only took place in the winter because the other seasons were too busy, which means no cute strappy white heels under the dress. The bride wore a red veil and large rubber clogs to accommodate several pairs of warm woolen socks. Also, a special tradition in the area around Varna was the Camel Dance. Not exactly sure how this went (the model camel didn’t dance for us), but it was performed on New Year’s Eve to drive away bad spirits. One of my favorite exhibits was Survakne: a Christmas tradition where children decorate sticks (can’t remember why exactly…), but she said that it was a favorite tradition of many of the children in Bulgaria today. On the third level, the museum was decorated to show what a typical wealthy Bulgarian’s house would have looked like in the early 20th century. There were clear Turkish influences: low sofas in the living room and the style of decorative furnace in the center of the room. The ceiling was all ornately carved wood, and our tour guide described this as a very traditional Bulgarian thing. As you may be able to tell, this place set all my anthropologist senses tingling, and I really enjoyed it. It was a nice change of pace to the many other museums, churches and archaeological sites I have been to.

Next, we went to the Archaeological Museum. I knew from the preport that we would see Thracian (a horse-riding, warrior civilization with no written language but beautiful artwork, especially gold burial goods), Greek and Roman artifacts. I most definitely did not expect to see the oldest human-wrought gold treasure found in the world (according to our tour guide). But they were there: beautiful bracelets and other gold jewelry found in Bulgaria belonging to a civilization 1,000 years older than the ancient Egyptians. This collection has been shown all over the world, and was on the cover of National Geographic in the 90s. Still, it’s relatively unknown because nobody expects Bulgaria to be a treasure trove on ancient civilization, but location-wise, it makes sense. The first religious notions appeared in the stone/copper age, but some of those burial goods are submerged underwater due to a rise in the level of the Black Sea. Upon hearing this, I immediately thought of starting a career as an underwater archaeologist, moving to Varna (or Nessebar…read tomorrow’s blog) and spending my days scuba diving along the Black Sea coast.
We unfortunately could not take pictures inside the museum, but there were some pretty spectacular pieces, especially 12th century BC Thracian gold jewelry as finely wrought as modern jewelry and including a necklace that looked like it belonged in an H. Stern collection. My friend and I agreed we would totally wear it today.

The Greeks took over Varna around the 6th century BC, at at that time the town was a bustling trading center as a major port on the Black Sea. So, the museum was also full of ancient Greek red and black type pottery, which was still impressive even though I had just been to Greece. There were also many giant anchors in covering most of the floor in one of the rooms, evidence that Varna’s hstory as a port goes back over two thousand years.

In another gallery were Orthodox Christian icons. There are paintings of Jesus, Mary or other saints and always done in a specifically prescribed manner. The purpose of these icons was not to be beautiful. Orthodox Christians believe that it is impossible to represent the divine beauty of those figures, so the icons do not even try. Rather, they are a way to focus your religious energy when sending a prayer. The figures were two-dimensional and had long noses, small mouths and large eyes, all supposedly signs of religious fervor. Also, they were made in a series of layering colors, tracing the outline and then filling in the clothing colors paint-by-numbers sytle, in some places scratching off paint to reveal the color below. Then the background gold (a feature common to almost every Orthodox icon I have seen so far, which is a lot) was applied, and finally the details such as lettering or facial features (which were minimal because the artists were not trying to make them realistic) were added. They vary in size from 2-3cm to 2m in height, and the oldest Bulgarian icon in the museum dates back to the 10th century BC. We had a great tour guide today, and throughout the day I could feel a surprisingly strong send of Bulgarian pride and identity.

Some of you may be wondering how I’ve remembered all these details. When go on tours or just whenever some detail comes up I’m worried I might forget but want to include in my blog, I write it as a note in my phone. So, as we could not take pictures (another way I remember what I did that day so I can write my blog) in the museum, I had my phone out to take notes much of the time. This wasn’t much of a problem until we entered the icon room, where there were very strict about not taking pictures. A woman who was supervising/guarding the icon gallery saw me holding my phone and came over and started yelling at me in Bulgarian. I tried to explain to her that I was taking notes, not taking pictures, but she continued to yell at me in Bulgarian, louder and in increasing anger, until I put my phone away. So if you ever want to take notes on your phone in the icon section of the Archaeological Museum in Varna, don’t.

On a side note, the museum was in the building that used to be the girl’s high school and was a very attractive building with a large courtyard shaded with vines and set up for some kind of function to occur. Also, the entire museum was studded with potted plants. Bulgarians must really like their greenery.

Our next stop was the Christian Orthodox Cathedral of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, conveniently located right in the center of Varna and near the train station, not that I plan on taking a train anywhere. It was fairly large and well-preserved, with the same brick patterning and domed exterior. Inside we were not allowed to take pictures (or more precisely we had to pay to take pictures, and it wasn’t that fantastic). The entire interior was painted with icons, and floor was slabs of recycled stone and marble, and the doors, altar, and chairs along the wall (only for special guests as you stand in Christian Orthodox serves) were made of ornately carved dark wood. Our tour guide told us that in Varna, there was one Catholic church, one mosque, and three protestant churches in addition to the (I think) eleven Orthodox churches/cathedrals, and that the largest minorities in Bulgaria were the Turks and the gypsies.

After our official tour was over, we had about an hour of free time to walk around the main square of Varna. The tourist information center was there, so we stopped in to see what was going on. The Summer Music Festival is happening every day we are here, with most performances happening in the Roman Theater, so that explained why there was a stage full of percussion instruments in the middle of the Roman baths we saw earlier in the tour. Also, there is a Folklore Festival starting one of the last days we are here, so hopefully we can make those.

We then walked through a number of shops with Bulgaria trinkets. Someone asked where I was from and when I told him California, he looked so surprised that I felt we must have been the first American tourists here…ever. I doubt that it true, but I haven’t seen any other Americans here other than the SASers, which is actually kind of nice and makes me feel much farther from home than I did in any of the other countries I visited. Also, it’s harder to find people who speak more than basic English here, and many people I’ve talked to don’t speak English at all. I only had euros with me, so I stopped by a money exchange station in the center to change them for leva, the Bulgarian currency. You get about two leva for every euro, and in general prices here are cheaper than in Greece. I don’t remember if I mentioned this is my blog, but the currency in Croatia was kuna, and you get about 5 kuna for every US dollar and about 7 kuna for every euro.

I was pretty thirsty, so I stopped by a stand and bought a peach juice box with my new leva. The juice was delicious, but I thought something must be wrong with the straw because the liquid was coming out unevenly. When I looked at it, I saw that nothing was wrong: the straw was designed differently. Instead of being an open tube, the tube was sealed at the end and there were four little holes on the sides for juice to go through. I don’t know if this is a Bulgarian thing or if just the company of the juice I bought does it, but I got pretty excited about it. Also, McDonald’s is advertized all over the place in Varna, including a giant billboard in the center advertizing a “shrimp lemon burger.” Don’t think those would go over too well in the US.

Also, today one of my friends went on an SAS trip to a small Bulgarian village. She said it was incredible: everyone in the village came out to see them and basically threw a festival for them. They had tons of homemade traditional Bulgarian food, saw traditional Bulgarian folk dancing, and most of all she was struck by how kind, welcoming and giving the people in the village were. Apparently this group was the first tourist group to ever visit their village, and they kept giving them food and telling them to come back to their village. She also got to stop and take pictures in one of the many sunflower fields in Bulgaria. I was pretty jealous upon hearing all this, but I did enjoy my highlights of Varna tour so it was ok.

Tonight we heard a little of the music festival, which tonight featured the Youth Percussion Pool performing a percussion extravaganza. Then, we hung out on a beach (which is a convenient fifteen minute walk from our ship) with about fifty other SASers and then invaded one of the many clubs along the beach called Extravaganza. It was pretty cool: large rounded ceilings that reminded me a little of being inside a train station, and good music to dance to. It was a Sunday, though and not very busy, so we made it an early night.


7/25

Today I went on the SAS-organized trip to Nessebar, a town about two hours south of Varna along the coast. On the trip so far, this town was the most surprising for me. It is definitely one of the cutest and prettiest towns I have ever been to, and I was not expecting that from Bulgaria.

On the way there, we passed field after field of sunflowers, field of wheat and barely, cows, sheep, goats, horses, and storks, which are a good omen to Bulgarians: it is very good luck to have one build a nest on your house. We also passed hills of grape vines, and our tour guide told us that mainly red wine is made in Bulgaria, and that Bulgarians normally drink red wine. She also told us that there were about 400 Bulgarian folk songs about red wine and only one about white wine, the lyrics of which go something like “white one, white one, why aren’t you red?” Yet another reason for me to like Bulgaria. We passed over the river Canchia, which was quite muddy and supported tons of trees to either side. In general, the Bulgarian countryside we drove through was hilly and either covered in trees or farmed. We drove through the foothills of the Balkan mountains, which come right down to the coast, on the way to Nessebar, and despite the narrow sharply winding road I enjoyed the drive because it was so pretty. We stopped for a short break about half way there, and I had a baguette sandwich and a peach yogurt drink, which was quite tasty.

Our guide told us that before Nessebar and the surrounding area of Sunny Beach became the tourist destination (mainly for Europeans) it was now, it was famous for the acacia honey (which was the favorite of British Queen Victoria) and their rose oil, the pure form of which is expensive because it takes three tons of rose petals to make one kilogram of rose oil. Back in the Greek/Roman times, this area was much fought over because of the many salt lakes nearby and the value of salt at the time.

Out of the winding road and back down by the coast, just about twenty minutes from Nessebar, we arrived in Sunny Beach. It was completely full of huge hotel after huge hotel, casinos and nightclubs with the occasional supermarket, restaurant, café or souvenir shop thrown in. It is extremely popular with vacationers from Russia, Poland, and Germany as well as wealthy Bulgarians, and our guide described it as a very fun but noisy spot which would not be good for a quiet, restful beach vacation. Our guide told us there were 400,000 beds in Sunny Beach…and with the number of hotels we passed by, I believe it.

The line between Sunny Beach and new Nessebar was not very clear, but when we crossed our guide announced the change and I noticed a slight decline in huge hotels. Right at the border, there was a little stadium where she said performers such as Sting and 50 Cent had performed at in the past. I couldn’t help but wonder what 50 Cent was doing in Bulgaria…but he was there.

Old Nessebar, the original part of the city, was built on a frying pan shaped little peninsula and surrounded on three sides by water with only one little road connecting it to the mainland. It was so picturesque: most of the buildings there were built in the 19th or 20th century in the classic style with a stone first floor and wooden second floor, and the building codes today require that any new construction be carried out in the same fashion. First we went to the archaeological museum (another one!) which had more beautiful gold jewelry and other artifacts from the Thracians, vases and statues from the Greeks and Romans, and Christian Orthodox icons, notably one made of little tiles of mother-of-pearl (and possibly the only one I’ve seen that I actually liked). After the museum, we toured the main cathedral, the Cathedral of St. Steven, and then toured I think five other churches in Nessebar, which were much the same, except for one on a cliff overlooking the ocean that was abandoned during construction due to a bad omen. Now it looks something like a ruin and houses stray dogs. While we were here, we saw a red ribbon pinned to a tree. Our guide pointed it out and said that, although the timing was off, it was part of a tradition in Bulgaria to give presents of red and white ribbons at the end of winter, which are worn as bracelets until you see the first flowering tree of the beginning of spring and you tie or pin it to the tree.

After the guided tour, we had a few hours of free time to roam around the city. It was all cobblestone streets and adorable little shops and street vendors selling a wide array of Bulgarian and not Bulgarian gifts and souvenirs. Clothes, pottery, jewelry, spices, honey, and so much more lined the streets, so we had a fun time walking along in the shade of the many leafy trees looking at all the stuff. We had lunch at a delicious restaurant on a cliff overlooking and beach and ocean below. I had a giant plate of mussels in a white wine butter sauce with thyme and lemon, which I demolished and thoroughly enjoyed. With a bit of cajoling, I even got the girl next to me, who had eaten her first piece of seafood (a shrimp) in Barcelona to try one of the mussels.  We walked down to the beach to dip our feet into the Black Sea and enjoy the picturesque little houses and boats near the water. Luckily, it is much cooler here than it was in Greece, so spending the day outside was very pleasant. I will have pictures of Nessebar up on facebook as soon as I get the chance, and make sure to check them out.

We left around 4pm and got back to the ship about 6, giving me enough time to blog a bit, shower and change before meeting up with everyone to swap stories about our second day in Bulgaria.

For dinner, a met up with a group of friends and ate at a restaurant in a pirate ship replica right on the beach. We were outside and with a gorgeous view of the crashing waves of the Black Sea. We were all pretty hungry, so we got a lot of food. We had appetizers: mozzarella and garlic bread, “morrows” which were basically rolled slices of sautéed zucchini with a mint sauce and served with a feta and tomatoes, and French fries with cheese on top (I have named these Bulgarian nachos because they are also offered pretty much everywhere you go). For dinner, I had what probably should have been called the carnivore platter, but what said “cannibal platter” in English under the Bulgarian title.  It was three different meat dishes: a pork lion, a kabob with chicken and beef, a kabob with lamb, and a “meatball” which was more like a patty of beef, pork and lamb with a little cheese and spices. I also had a side of spinach cooked with ricotta cheese, and everything with delicious. For dessert, I had pana cotta ice cream with brownies. I’m not exactly sure what pana cotta ice cream meant, but it was super rich and custardy so I’m assuming it was something like French vanilla with a berry puree layered throughout and two dark chocolate brownies with chunks of walnuts. We all waddled back to our ship, which was only about a ten minute walk away, and I collapsed into a happy food coma for the night. 


7/26 

Today I went to a sunflower field about half an hour taxi ride outside Varna. I wasn’t really planning on doing thing, but at lunch one of my friends mentioned that she had found a sunflower field a short walk outside Varna. She remembered when we had walked about to the freeway entrance in Varna that it was actually a short taxi ride outside the city, and there were six of us so we hailed two taxis. The first taxi driver spoke some English but didn’t know what sunflower meant, but the second taxi driver did and told us him where to go. They had to stop on the road several times on the way there to talk about which turn to take, but we got there eventually and they were helpful despite our limited communication ability.

So we got to our field of sunflowers, and the pictures we got were totally worth the saga of getting there even though my feet and lower legs were covered with little scratches from thorny plants growing everywhere between the sunflowers.

We were originally planning on renting a small sailboat off the beach about a half an hour down from the ship, but by the time we finished with the sunflower fields, it was a little late to do that. Luckily, we ran into a group of SASers at the bus stop who were headed to Aquapolis, the ancient Greek themed water park. Every time I say that name I laugh. It ended up being really fun, pretty similar to Wild Rivers, a water park in Irvine that I went to a lot when I was younger. Except that the lazy river and another pool in Aquapolis had a pool bar and all the other snack areas served alcohol and were much cheaper than water parks in the US.

When we got back to the ship, I was pretty tired so I took a nap before going out for my last night in Bulgaria. Tomorrow I have my cooking class, and I am so excited for it. I will post a mini blog on that probably once I get to Turkey since it ends right when we need to be back on the ship, so I won’t have time to go back to the internet café I’m at now.

Also, just as a side note, people in Varna keep coming to the port and staring at our ship and taking pictures like they’ve never seen anything like it before, so I’m guessing they don’t get a lot of cruise ship traffic.

As always, you can email me at vescholtes@semesteratsea.net

Love from Varna,
Ginny

Greece to Bulgaria

7/22 to 7/23

7/22

This afternoon we passed through the Dardanelles with Europe on one side and Asia on the other. A pilot boat came and helped our captain guide the MV Explorer through the straits. At one point, you could see Troy on one side of the strait and Gallipoli, the site of a major WWI battle, on the other. A little eerie.

We then entered the Sea of Marmara, the lake-like portion of ocean sandwiched between Bulgaria and Turkey and linking the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and passed through for several hours. 

Then, around 9pm tonight, we entered the Bosporus. At around 8:45, I grabbed my books, mug and hot chocolate mix and went up to the top decks, intending to make myself a hot chocolate (my first since Italy…Croatia and Greece were just too hot to drink hot chocolate) and study a little for my quiz tomorrow. No studying happened whatsoever. At first, the sun was just finishing setting and the sky above the western part of the city was lit up in pinks and purples. The Bosporus is about twenty miles of twisting and turning waterway, with the city of Istanbul hugging the water almost the entire way. Near the beginning, when some of the colors of the sunset were still visible, we passed by the Hagia Sophia. It’s not right on the water, but near the top of a hill close enough to have a great view. First of all, it’s huge and dwarfs all the surrounding buildings (except the great Blue Mosque, just a mile or so to the left). It was completely lit up so it almost glowed in a city which was already a mass of different colored lights twinkling against the fading twilight. I tried to get pictures, but most of mine are pretty blurry because the ship was always moving so the camera could never quite focus on the land. Hopefully some of my friends got better pictures than I did, and I took a video of both sides of the Bosporus.

What felt like (and what I hope was…nobody should have missed this) the entire ship was packed onto all the decks outdoors, and my friend and I made out way to the eighth deck at the bow, definitely the best vantage point, in time to cross under the first bridge. It was strung with huge blue lights in a diagonal zigzag pattern, and as we got closer everyone started going crazy. I took a short video here and everyone is cheering and taking pictures (even though almost everyone’s pictures were turning out at different colored blurs or bright city lights). Once we were on the other side of the bridge, fireworks began shooting off from the water where we had just passed, causing waves of new cheering and a mass relocation of people looking toward the fireworks. Just after the fireworks, the zigzag lights on the bridge began a lightshow. The changed colors and danced around just like you would expect at a hotel in Vegas. I have no idea if it was a holiday or if this is just what happens in Istanbul on a Friday night, but I intend to find out.

Buildings came down to the very edge of the sea almost everywhere along the Bosporus, and most of these buildings at the water’s edge were lit up spectacularly…I really hope some of my (or some of my friends’) pictures came out well. We then approached a second bridge, also lit up but in a more classic outline of the bridge and in a deep blue that did not change colors or dance, but was beautiful nonetheless. At this point, people started clearing off the eighth deck, so I could get a good spot at one of the handrails and not have to fight to see the city. Also it was completely dark, so the sky and ocean were almost the same color with the land between only a slightly deeper black covered with the glittering lights of Istanbul. At the risk of sounding sappy and overly romantic, it was as if all the stars in the light pollution-free sky had descended to the surface of the ocean and formed into the shape of land all around the ship to separate the sea from the sky. That is exactly what I was thinking when I was up watching this about an hour and a half ago…probably because I was so overwhelmed by Istanbul at night that I couldn’t help thinking like a Romantic. About twenty minutes after we passed the second bridge, there were only five other people on the eighth deck with me, and I was so happy to just lean on the rail and stare out at the city. I guess those feelings must have shown, because one of my friends came by to say hi, and then left after a few minutes because she said she could tell I was having a moment. I was expecting to enjoy passing through Istanbul at night, I was not expecting to be so overwhelmed that I now must do a Bosporus tour by night when I’m back there in a week, and really hope I can come back later in life. I haven’t even set foot in the actual city, and I know that in a week I will be there for five days, but I already know that won’t be enough.

Love from the Bosporus,
Ginny


7/23

Today we actually arrived in Varna around noon. But, our berth in the port does not open until tomorrow morning, so right now we are just chilling out in the harbor, salivating at the beaches on shore. I first noticed this during my marine biology class, and had a quiz in my history class afterwards, so this new knowledge made studying more difficult.

Every evening at 8pm before we debark to a new port, we have a “preport” where we learn about the country and city we will be exploring the next day. Several people (usually professors) give brief presentations on the history, culture, economy, modern politics, and whatever else seems important about the country. One of these presentations is always by the interport student, a student from the country to which we are headed, in this case, Bulgaria, who came onto the ship in our last port (in this case Greece) and will debark once we get back to his/her home country (in this case Bulgaria). They are great resources for us on the ship, or they would be if they were easier to find…I have only managed to track down the Croatian interport student to ask questions about Croatia so far.

I have a little bit of the preport on Bulgaria here just because I figure that, like me, you might want a little background.

History wise, Bulgaria was originally home to a fairly advanced, military, horse riding civilization contemporary with the ancient Greeks (and therefore influenced by the ancient Greeks) called the Thracians, who did not have a written language but who left beautiful artwork, especially in tomb paintings and gold sculpture. Then Bulgaria was wiped into the Roman Empire, meaning that there are Roman ruins scattered throughout Bulgaria today. Bulgaria was always as a crossroads of the world, a place where different cultures met (and meet). The Slavs swamped this corner of the Byzantine Empire (the east half of the Roman Empire) in the 5th and 6th centuries and set up the village and agrarian culture still visible today. The first Bulgarian Empire comprised a ruling class, the Bulgar Turks (who assimilated with the local Slavs linguistically), over Slav and Thracian peasants. The Bulgarian Empire was converted to Orthodox Christianity in the 9th century by the Byzantine Empire’s clever plan to send Saints Cyril and Methodius to create a written language for the Bulgarian language in which the Bible could be written. It is from this Saint Cyril that the Cyrillic alphabet was born. Bulgarians are still very proud to have their home be the birthplace of this alphabet, in modern Bulgaria, May 24th is the day of the alphabet.

The Ottomans invaded in 1393, and Bulgarians still have bitter memories of the occupation, but during this time Orthodox Christianity became an even more pronounced part of Bulgarian identity. In 1876-8 and sparked by the Greek independence movement, Bulgaria fought for its independence from Turkey and succeeded with help from Russia. A Bulgarian professor on board told us the joke “no empire or alliance survives Bulgarian membership.” They were part of Alexander the Great’s empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire. They sided with Germany in WWI and WWII, were part of the Communist Bloc, and he jokingly wondered if the EU would make it much longer after Bulgaria joining them in 2007.  I guess that just comes with the territory of being a cultural crossroads.

Today, Bulgaria has about 7 million people, about the population of Virginia with similar land size as the state of Virginia. It is part of the EU, but is not in the euro zone and is supposed to begin using the euro in 2013 or 2014. Bulgaria has both a president, who deals with the foreign relations, and a prime minister (Boyko Borisov, who supposedly has a kind of “Batman” persona and is the coach of the national Bulgarian hockey team), who runs most of the internal government. There is a presidential election in the fall, so we may be hearing about that while in Varna. Also, recently the EU has been expressing a lot of concern about the drug trade and strength of organized crime in Bulgaria, which is one of the main reasons Bulgaria is not yet a part of the no-visa travel zone within the EU. Our interport student advised us to avoid nightclubs with lots of fancy cars parked out front because this is where organized crime lords will be. Right now the opposing party is trying to pass a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister Borisov, possibly because he has not followed through on his promises to clean up the government.

Bulgaria borders the Black Sea, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Macedonia, and the major cities in Bulgaria are Sophia, the capital, Plovdiv, and Varna (where we are now). It is marked by the Balkan mountain range running through a portion of the country, and had beautiful sandy beaches (win).

Whew! So I hope that helped…I’m much more familiar with Bulgarian history now anyway. I can’t wait to see it tomorrow!

Love from the Black Sea,
Ginny

Athens, Greece

7/17

This morning we arrived in Piraeus, Greece! Piraeus, in Greek pronounced either pee-ray-oos or pie-ree-oos, I’ve heard both, is the port of Athens. It’s about a 45 minute metro to the center of Athens, but today the metro is on strike so that won’t be happening. Luckily, the busses aren’t on strike today so SASers can still travel independently and cheaply into Athens.

Piraeus itself is much larger and more metropolitan than I expected. I was thinking it would be more like Civitavecchia, the port of Rome: a smallish town revolving around the port. Piraeus still revolves around its ports, but it is definitely a city, with at least seven stories throughout and more in the more densely populated centers. Piraeus, unlike Civitavecchia where there was a chunk of countryside between that city and Rome, sprawls into Athens. When I was on my way to Athens on the SAS tour bus today, our guide just announced that we were in Athens even though there wasn’t much of a break in the buildings. Our tour guide told us that Piraeus is the largest port in the Mediterranean, which was a surprise.

The tour took us around Athens and then up to the Acropolis. First, we stopped at the Olympic stadium in Athens, which was large and quite impressive looking all made of white marble. The floor all around the stadium was also made of white marble, and the sun was so bright that when I stepped out of the bus, I had to squint my eyes almost shut to keep the reflection of light off the marble from blinding me, even though I was wearing sunglasses. We passed by the capital building, which is constructed, as many important buildings in Greece are, in neoclassical style with modern ionic columns lining the front of the building. I was struck by how wide the main road in Athens was, and by how much graffiti there was, much of it having to do with the economic situation. We passed the main city square, which was full of protesters, banners and tents reminiscent of los indignados in Barcelona. No actual protests took place while I was there, but ones in the past had elevated to violence. We also passed the tomb of the unknown Greek soldier, with the two guards outside wearing traditional garb: a red fez-like hat, a white tunic-y shirt with a vest over, a white skirt that poofs out almost like a long tutu, off-white leggings, high white socks with a black stripe at the top, and large dark red shoes with a black puff ball on the toes. I think they must have been trying to out-do the Swiss Guard at the Vatican. 

While driving, our guide told us that Athens had been built to house ½ million people, but today 4 ½ million people live there. As such, they have a problem with pollution, so on odd numbered days, only cars with odd-numbered license plates can be driven, and even on even, which means that people in Athens can only drive their cars every other day. But the public transportation in Athens is excellent (when it’s not on strike): metro and busses that go all over the city and connect all over the country and are very cheap (most tickets under 1.5 euro) and frequent and usually on time. But, if you buy the wrong ticket, don’t validate your ticket or get caught without a ticket, you get fined 60 times the price of the ticket. A group of friends accidentally bought student bus tickets (which are .7 euro instead of 1.4 euro) which were apparently only for Greek students, and the police fined them 72 euro. Also, Athens was completely empty today, except for tourists. Our guide said this was because it was Sunday and very hot (37 degrees C), but I couldn’t shake a weird ghost town feeling. There were lots of trees lining the streets, which was pretty and almost every story of the buildings in both Athens and Piraeus had a balcony covered with an awning to protect against the sun.

It’s always funny for me to see American influences in foreign countries, but today in Greece I saw on the best. In the window of a store were several floor to ceiling cartoon images of Chuck Norris saying something in Greek to advertize their store. Chuck Norris in Athens.

Once we had seen most of the city, we headed over to the Acropolis. Acropolis means the highest point of a city, and the Acropolis in Athens is just that. It really was cool to look up and see the Parthenon above the modern buildings of the city. When our bus was fairly close, we were stopped by a police car. Turns out that no cars could drive past a certain point around the Acropolis because Hillary Clinton was at the Acropolis Museum today. I didn’t get to see her, but several of my friends did and two even got a picture with her inside the museum. So, we made the trek the rest of the way up to the Acropolis on foot. It was very hot, but most of the way up the Acropolis was covered in olive trees, so there was at least shade. Once we got to the archaeological site on the top of the hill however, there were very few trees to provide shade and the sun was merciless. The stones on which we were walking were very smooth and slippery, and several people almost fell if they were not watching their footing. I loved imaging the 2,500 years of feet that had polished these stones to their current slick state.

Around 2000BC, the Acropolis was the civic, social, economic and religious center of ancient Athens, but by 1200BC most other buildings had moved down off the Acropolis (such as the agora, the marketplace) so it was just the religious center of the city. The Parthenon is the temple of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. According to Greek legend, two god wanted to be patrons of the city: Poseidon and Athena. To decide who would be the patron, both gods gave the people of the city a gift. Poseidon gave a salt water source and two horses. Athena gave an olive tree, and the city inhabitants preferred her gift and names the city Athens.
In the 4th century BC, the Persians sacked Athens and burnt the Acropolis and the entire city. The Athenian fleet defeated the Persians around same time, and the Athenians came back and restored the burned city. 449 BC was the highest point of Greek civilization (democracy was born, Golden Age of Athens), and the ruler Pericles wanted to show that Athens was the most important city-state. He invited the best architects, sculptors and painters to rebuild the city. In this time, all the currently white marble buildings and statues of the Acropolis would have been painted with bright colors.

But later, at the end of 5th century and after a war between Athens and Sparta, not enough money to rebuild until Romans moved in and respected the Acropolis enough to maintain the temples on top. The 5th century AD also begins the Christian Byzantine period, when the Parthenon is converted into a Christian church. In the 11th century, crusaders transform the Parthenon to a Catholic church. The Venetians storm through Athens, then the Ottoman Turks come and transform it to a mosque. The Ottomans eventually use it to store gunpowder, and as it became a militarily strategic point, the Parthenon was bombed to destroy gunpowder by the Venetians.

In the 19th century, an Englishman made an agreement with the Turks to take a bunch of marbles and statues to decorate his castle. He eventually game them to British Museum, where they remain to this day despite multiple requests by Greece for their return. Our guide mentioned this point several times during the tour, and I would tell it was a sore spot.

Pollution damaged the buildings of the Acropolis, so today they are taking more stringent measures to protect the white marble buildings. You can’t smoke up on the Acropolis or bring drinks other than water, and it is protected by UNESCO.

The marbles on the two triangular facades of the Parthenon used to feature the birth of Athena straight from her father’s, Zeus’s, head on one side and the story of the competition between Poseidon and Athena to be patrons of the city on the other. Now, both of those marble stories are in the British Museum.

If you look down from the Acropolis, you can see an incredible view of Athens. You can also see the best preserved ancient Greek temple in Greece: one to Hephaestus, the god of iron and the forge. There is also the Theater of Dionysus, which has been revamped to hold modern plays.

On the top of the Acropolis, you can see three main groups of ruins: the wingless victory temple (which once held a statue of wingless victory), the Parthenon with its Doric columns which once had a 12m high gold and ivory statue of Athena at the end (it had since now disappeared), and the Erectheon. The Erectheon was the most important temple to ancient Greeks on the Acropolis. On the inside, there was a saltwater source and an olive tree because this was place where the quarrel between Athena and Poseidon occurred. The columns are in the ionic style, the most elegant, and the temple itself was divided into two parts: one to Athena and one to Poseidon. It is very well-known today because of the statues of six women in place of the columns on one side: the maidens porch. Now, all these are replicas. Five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum, and the last and best preserved maiden is in the British Museum. Our guide told us a story, which supposedly occurred after the first maiden was taken by the British but while the other originals were still in the temple. It sounds like an urban legend to me, but it still makes a nice story, and further underscores the resentment the Greeks feel for having so many of their monuments stolen. Of course, it is nice for the rest of the world to be able to see Parthenon marbles in the British Museum. Anyway, supposedly women were sleeping in the Erectheon temple (don’t remember why exactly…it was hot up there and I couldn’t pay attention the whole time) and heard the other statues crying because they missed their sister.

The whole Acropolis has been under restoration, and you can tell where the restorations have occurred by where the bright white marble, which comes from a nearby mountain, puzzle-pieces its way into columns.

When we came back to the ship after our day in Athens, I was itching to find a theater nearby that played Harry Potter in English. So, I talked with other HP enthusiasts on the ship (which were very easy to find…almost everyone I talked to was at least willing to go see HP tonight and many were dying to go). We found a theater in a mall in Piraeus, the Village Shopping center, that was playing HP in English every half hour. So, we hopped a bus to the theater (easier said than done…but we found the right one eventually) and made it in time for the 10pm show. The movie theater we went to looked a lot like one I would see in Southern California. Similar size, similar decoration (except a large, circular chandelier that looked something like a faux-crystal disco ball in the center of the entry area of the theater), even similar snacks being sold (yes, they had pizza, popcorn, hot dogs, sodas and ice cream instead of gyros and feta cheese…but they did have beer so there’s at least one step up). Also, the movie theaters had assigned seating, and for our whole group to sit together (all 17 of us) we had to buy our tickets all together…a logistical nightmare I avoided by passing off my seven euro (even about the same price for the movie!) and slipping to the side of the line. There were several posters for HP around the theater, so I had to take a picture of me with one…unfortunately that one was Malfoy, but the movie was starting soon and it was nearby.

I loved the movie, but am (like so many others) a little sad that no more new HP books or movies will be coming out. But, I will definitely to see it again when I get home.



7/18

Our bus driver on the SAS-organized trip to Delphi today was named Kostas…as if I needed anything else to make me feel like I was in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Two of my friends left for Santorini early this morning…so they probably have that feeling times a million right now. Once we got onto the highway, we passed an Ikea (they really are everywhere) and Autogrill, a European pit stop full of delicious snacks that I originally discovered during a two-week road trip around Italy with my family for Spring break a few years ago.

On the way to Delphi, our tour guide explained to us that marble is relatively easy to find in Greece, which is one of the reasons why the monuments in Greece are mainly marble. Also they have to clean those monuments regularly to prevent the pollution from accumulating on the marble, allowing a chemical reaction that degrades the marble to occur. She said that wood was the expensive building material in Greece, and that wealthy people would have wood floors, not marble ones. We also passed a small Christian Orthodox cemetery. The graves here were topped with marble monuments that reminded me of ones you see in certain cemeteries in New Orleans or other places where the soil is unstable, but here the body is still buried six feet underground, they just have very ornate tombstones.

We stopped at a small market and gas station to allow our bus to refuel. For some reason I was always hungry in Greece (seriously…I ate about every two hours, and not the dainty carrot stick kind of snacks), so despite my sturdy breakfast of oatmeal that morning, I went into the market looking for a snack. I got lucky and found the last sandwich in the market, which was a basic but tasty ham and cheese, and something that looked like a Greek granola bar. It was most almonds with some kind of honey mixture holding it together, and it was very tasty. I also had a few paprika chips that one of my friends bought. This is without a doubt my new favorite flavor of chips. They are everywhere in Greece, and Lay’s makes them! I really hope they become popular in the US, because if not I might have to get some shipped to me to quench paprika chip cravings that I know will happen once I’m home.

Our tour guide used some of the time on the three-hour bus ride up to Delphi to explain the differences between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. I was quite confused of this choice of topic considering that we were on our way to Delphi, the location of the oracle of Apollo and one of the holiest sites of the ancient Greek world, until she said that we would be stopping by one of the most beautiful Orthodox Christian monasteries in Greece on the way to Delphi. Pretty much everyone on the bus had the same reaction to this statement. We looked up from our iPods or from dozing out the window and gave each other a “This is the Delphi trip, right?” look. Apparently this visit to the monastery had been in the itinerary all along, but most of us had bought this tour before we even came on Semester at Sea, ad the full contents of this trip’s description was long-buried under an overload of memories from Spain, Italy and Croatia. So we continued on, up winding roads through steep hillsides in scenic, middle-of-nowhere Greece to the Hosios Loukas Monastery.

While my start with the monastery was unexpected and a little rocky, after having seen it, I am so glad that I went. The monastery itself was established in the tenth century by an Eastern Orthodox monk, Loukas. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but Loukas at some point began miraculously healing sick people, the news of which attracted more and more follower monks to his monastery. After his death, the followers wanted to make Loukas a saint, but the head of the church wasn’t quite feeling it, so they made his “Hosios Loukas”, a hosios being one step down from sainthood. A church was then built near the monastery and names Hosios Loukas Church.

Now, I had just come from three of the most historically Roman Catholic countries in the world and had seen my fair share of beautiful churches. But this church was strikingly beautiful, and surprisingly different than the Catholic churches I had seen so many of in Spain, Italy and Croatia.  The outside, like most Orthodox churches, was fairly humble. It was made of brick and stone, most of the decoration on the façade being an interplay between these two building materials. A round dome crowned the church, also like most other Orthodox churches. Above the door was a mosaic of Jesus with a background of gold. All the mosaics in the church had a similar gold background, which our guide said was typical of Orthodox church decoration. The purpose of art in the church was not to be beautiful or realistic, but to educate the worshiper and represent the idea behind the painting. The church was meant to symbolize the universe, with mosaics of Jesus near the top and in the dome symbolizing heaven and then the Virgin Mary and other lesser saints coming further down the walls, and then geometric patterns and mosaics of flowers detailing the insides of small arches or lower down on the walls. I feel like I’m doing a poor job of describing what the inside of this church looked like…but I have (or will soon have) pictures on facebook so you can see what I mean. In general the church looked more like a mosque than a Catholic church or cathedral, with similar rows of round arches throughout. Also, the building overall did not have that same grand quality with towering ceilings that makes everyone who enters feel tiny, and our guide said that this was quite intentional: worshipers in an Orthodox church were not meant to feel dwarfed by the power of the religion. Also, there were no pews in the building; just a few ornate wooden chairs built into the wall around the edges for important visitors like the bishop. People stood when attending mass.

I should have mentioned this earlier, but before we entered the church, all girls wearing bottoms that did not cover our knees had to wear one of the skirts that hung lined up on hooks in a small room before entering the monastery. It was very convenient that they let us borrow these skirts instead of having to buy something like I did at a cathedral in Barcelona, but I’m sure this monastery gets a tiny fraction of the traffic that one did. We were the only visitors the entire time we were there, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we were the only visitors that day. It was beautiful, it was just quite a drive from any major city, or even small town for that matter.

We got back on the road after an hour and a half or so touring the monastery and church, with plenty of time for pictures of the beautiful view of the valley below. We passed through a tiny mountain town called Arrahova about half an hour later. We just drove through, but I wished the entire time that we could have gotten out and walked around. It was full of cute little shops that  probably could have wandered around in all day, but I had to be content staring out the window for the five minutes or so we drove (slowly) through the town. Arrahova means “the sound of the wind in the trees,” and they are famous for a special type of goat cheese that is served either grilled or fried (fried cheese was one of the most common foods I saw in Greece…it was on many more menus and in much more variety than gyros even, and I very rarely see it in the US), and for their woven goods. I was also the most shocked I have ever been at how close two busses can come without actually touching. We were part way through the town, and the street was tiny enough for me to think we wee doing well fitting one bus. But lo and behold, another bus trundled along the road on the way back (I assume) from Delphi. Both busses stopped for a bit, and then the other started backing up and I figured they would just have to go all the way out of the town; it was just physically impossible that both busses could be on this street at the same time. The other bus did not go back, but backed up enough to drive one set of tires up on the sidewalk. Our bus did the same, and then they began to drive toward each other. Everyone in the bus (except the tour guide, who stopped talking only reluctantly when she realized everyone’s attention was too absorbed what for her must have been a regular occurrence) held their breath as we watched the other bus pass by…literally less than an inch of space between the side of our bus and the rear view mirror sticking out of the side of the other bus.

In another half an hour or so, my Greece stomach was telling me it was time to eat again. Perfect timing, because we then stopped for lunch. It was an adorable restaurant, tile floors with high, beamed wooden ceilings and a beautiful view of the valley out the back wall, which was floor to ceiling windows. Our lunch was served family style, and dishes or traditional Greek food just kept coming out. We started with bread and tzatziki, which was delicious and so refreshing after the heat outside, and a Greek salad of fresh tomatoes, onions, olives and a huge chunk of delicious feta. Then feta cheese wrapped in filo dough and fried, spanakopita, which was much lighter and more spinach-y than what I had eaten before in the US, cabbage stuffed with rice and veal and topped with a creamy sauce (this tasted a bit like stuffed grape leaves, so it must have been similar), some kind of delicious herbed meat patty with cheese in the center (none of us were expecting this…so when we got to the cheese our entire table almost died of happiness, or at least I did), French fries (which were served almost everywhere I went in Greece), and rice with veggies. For dessert, we could choose between fruit, baklava, and a cake that looked a little like tiramisu with nuts at the bottom. I had the baklava, and it was delicious and fairly light.  Fully stuffed and good to go without eating for at least five hours (a long time for me in Greece), we boarded the bus for Delphi.

Delphi was the oracle of Apollo, and back in the day (around the 5th century BC) the whole area was full of travelers from all over the Greek world bringing questions to the oracle. The oracle would answer questions the seventh day of seven out of ten (ancient Greek) months of the year, so people would literally camp at the base of the hill where the temple was located for weeks, sometimes months, waiting to be able to ask. Of course, not everyone actually went to the oracle; if they had a less dire question, there were a number of lesser “prophets” on the read leading up to the oracle that could answer their question much more quickly and cheaply. But for the others, there was quite a ceremony to approach the oracle. First, the would begin at the base of the mountain, where there were a number of small temples to different gods and goddesses (people were living here, so the base of the hill was much like a mini city). They would then ascend the hill and pass treasuries set up by the different city-states. Technically, these treasuries were meant to be gifts from the city-states to the oracle to venerate Apollo, but they were also means of showing off to all the people who came to Delphi, which was a lot. Our tour guide was from Athens, and she sad the Athenian treasuries (yes, they had two…a small one toward the beginning and a really fantastic huge one later on, they were pretty smart) were the best, of course. Once past the treasuries, they would approach two priests, who would sprinkle the goat the brought with cold water. If the goat shivered, they would slaughter it as an offering to Apollo (and for free lunch), hear the question and take it down to the oracle. The oracle was a virgin woman at least fifty years old, who was technically called the pithia. She would drink water from the spring coming up from the cave over which the temple was built, and that in combination with whatever other noxious fumes were coming up from the cave would make her babble. The two priests would then interpret her babble, which was supposed to be the god Apollo speaking through her, into a riddle-form answer to the question, which had to pose two possible choices. The priests would then come back, tell the owner of the recently deceased goat the “answer” and he would walk back down the hill, probably extremely confused. And, when the circumstance in his question arose, and he found out which choice the oracle had really meant was correct (because the oracle was always right, so if he picked the wrong choice it was because he misinterpreted the oracle’s riddle-answer), he would come back to Delphi brining gifts of thanks.

Interestingly, the priests didn’t simply rely on their ability to interpret the pithia’s babble and hope the answer would apply to the question. Instead, they had dozens of spies who would talk to the people in the city below to gather information on the questions they were asking as well as the news from the Greek world. Then, they would have time to formulate an answer. If they really didn’t like a question, they might sprinkle warm water on the goat, so it wouldn’t shiver, which meant the oracle could not hear their question today. Or, they would just give an answer so convoluted that neither choice could be seen as right or wrong.

The ancient Greeks believed that Delphi was the birthplace and center of the universe, which is part of the reason why it was such a holy site. As such, a common gift to the oracle was a belly button stone, or a more or less 3 foot high cone shapes stone. These can be found all over Delphi, and we saw several both in the archaeological site and the museum.

When we toured the museum, we unfortunately only had 45 minutes before it closed (at 3pm), so our guide did a very quick, but nonetheless complete, tour. It was full of statues, marble faces of buildings decorated in relief and other artifacts found at Delphi. By far my favorite piece was the charioteer of Delphi. This was a life-size bronze statue of the winning charioteer of the Pithian Games, a kind of mini-Olympics that took place every other year at Delphi because sport and religious were intertwined for ancient Greece. It had incredible detail; each eyelash was actually a part of the original mold for the piece, not added on later. Also, the artist put iron-rich clay where the lips were, and they rusted, giving the lips a reddish hue that was still visible.

After the museum, we hiked around ancient Delphi. The site was fantastic, and the views were incredible. The mountains jutting up above us reminded me a lot of Mt. Talac in Tahoe for those of you who have been to SSC. The Athenian treasury had been rebuilt at least in part, and it was impressive. The actual temple of the oracle was enormous. Today there were only a few columns left, but the foundations of the original temple were still there, and it was easy to imagine how grand it must have been when it was functioning. Further up the hill from the temple, there was an amphitheater where plays and music would take place. Further up from that (significantly further…the ancient Greeks really had a thing for building on tops of hills, probably lucky for me considering how much I’m eating here) was a long, narrow stadium that the Romans renovated. I’m glad I make the hike up to the stadium; the view the whole way just kept getting better, and I got some great pictures of Delphi from above. Past a certain point, the stones lining the path were the originals from ancient Greek times. Just like in the Acropolis, I loved imagining the 2,500 years of feet that had walked this same path, wearing the stones to their present perilously smooth state.

I also saw several very cute stray cats in Delphi, one of which I almost picked up until I reminded myself how unhappy I would be to have to go home early due to rabies.

On the way home, our tour guide pointed out the crossing paths at the base of the valley where Oedipus came across his father (without knowing it was his father) on chariot, had a fight and killed him.

When I came back to the ship, I was exhausted from the heat and took a nap. When I woke up I was hungry again, so I found some friends to go get some dinner. Today at 5am, a taxi strike began that will last the duration of our stay here, so my friends and I decided to wander into Piraeus until we found a place to eat. It didn’t take long, and I had a delicious chicken gyro with paprika tzatziki. One of my friends was dying for hummus, and convinced that he would find hummus somewhere in Greece as they sell “Athenos” brand hummus in the US. It wasn’t on the menu of any places we visited through the whole trip, and everyone he asked looked at him like he was crazy when he asked for hummus. I told him he would just have to wait for Turkey.


7/19

Today I had no plans other than to sleep in. I actually told all my friends not to call my room before 11am, and at 11:03am one of my friends called and asked if I wanted to go to Marathon.

I’m sure you all know the story: in the wake of a great Athenian naval victory over the Persians, a messenger was sent to the town of Marathon to deliver the news. He ran all 26 miles there, delivered the good news, and then dropped dead. Every time I hear this story I think of the Eddie Izzard sketch on it and wonder the same thing myself: why run if it was a victory? Just stroll the twenty-six miles, it’s not like you’re warning them of an impending Persian attack. But there were a lot of things the ancient Greeks chose to do that don’t make much sense to me.

So, as many of you probably know, I’m not a big fan of running. But, I had no plans for the day, and the threat of a ferry strike (which never actually happened…good thing, or about ½ of the ship would have been stranded on islands) botched my plans of going to Mykonos. So I, under the condition that I would do absolutely no running, met up with three of my friends to go to Marathon.

Getting there was quite the adventure in public transportation. First we walked to the bus station to take the bus to the metro in Piraeus, which we realized on the way back was completely unnecessary: it takes slightly less time to walk there than to take the bus. Then, we took the metro from Piraeus to a stop in Athens called Victoria. All was going smoothly on the metro until we reached the stop directly before Victoria. The doors closed, and the metro started going back the direction we had come. For about thirty seconds, one of my friends and I just stared at each other, silently hoping that the metro would start going the right way again. But it did not, so we got off at the next station, which happened to be Monastiraki (strong possibility that I just butchered that spelling), the stop nearest to the Acropolis. But today we were going to Marathon, so we went to the other side of the metro tracks to go in the correct direction. This side of the metro was closed, but just for this stop. I’m still not really sure how that works, but we got back on the metro and went one more stop in the wrong direction. We got off, and here the side in the direction we wanted to go was not under construction, so we got on. This time, we got off the metro at the stop right before Victoria, run over to the other side to the metro on the opposite side of the tracks and caught it just in time. As the doors closed, I crossed my fingers, hoping that that train would move in the correct direction. It did. We arrived at Victoria metro station in Athens a few minutes later, hopped off the metro and began asking around to find out where our bus station was. This was a not-so-nice part of Athens, and unfortunately I learned this the hard way while waiting in line at the newspaper stand to buy a bag of my newfound favorite paprika chips.

I didn’t notice at the time, but when I came back to the bus stop about twenty feet away, sat down on the bench and set my purse on my lap, I noticed a slash in the side of my purse. It had clearly been cut with a knife sometime since I had last looked down at it, and I hadn’t even noticed. Luckily, my purse has lots of pockets and nothing fell out or was stolen. I find it odd that this happened in Greece, because other than this one incident, the people in Greece were the friendliest and had the best hospitality of anywhere I went. They also touch a lot when speaking to you. While waiting at the bus stop, I offered an older woman a seat on the bench, and she smiled and said “eferistow” (you’re welcome in Greek…the one Greek word I mastered in my five days there) and touched me warmly on the shoulder and arm with both hands. In restaurants when I asked what was their best dish, on the way to bus stops when we asked directions, on tours when I asked the guide a question, people in Greece would touch me on the arm or shoulder or hand when they were speaking to me.

Our bus finally arrived, and this was a long-distance bus, so we bought the tickets on the bus itself rather than at one of the many newspaper and snack stands along the street where we would buy city bus tickets. About an hour and a half later, the woman we had asked to let us know when we arrived in Marathon told us that we had arrived. We hopped off the bus and onto a simple paved street with unremarkable, 2-3 story buildings around us. There was absolutely nobody on the streets. Most of the stores were closed. Nothing, not even the street signs, was in English. I’m not sure what I was expecting to see when I came to Marathon, but this was not it. It felt so empty, almost abandoned, and I wondered if we had gotten off at the wrong stop. The women we asked had told us that the city (town really) center was a few blocks downhill and to the left, so we headed in that direction. It had been a few hours since I had last eaten, so I was starving and we were dying for an air conditioned café with cold water.  Only a few steps into Marathon, one of my friends said, “no wonder that guy dropped dead, it’s hot as balls out here.” Laura, I will miss you after this trip.

After ten minutes or so of wandering, we found a café that was both open and air conditioned. It smelled delicious. Rotisserie chickens were roasting on a small, rotating spit, some mysterious mixture of meat and veggies was wrapped in foil and sitting on the grill, and some kind of juicy meat was stacked on one of those vertical stakes to be cut off the sides (like in Brazilian barbeque). And giant bottles of water, as well as Fanta and an array of other drinks, were nice and frosty in an open-face refrigerator in the front. Side note, Fanta is much better in Europe than the US, and I had lemon Fanta for the first time here in Greece…so delicious. I asked the woman behind the counter if we could see a menu, and she smiled and pointed at menus further down the counter, which were all in Greek. I tried asking her what was their best dish, but she only spoke Greek (“menu” has spread almost all through Europe to be used in Greece, so she knew that word, but probably not many others). Surprisingly, Greece is the place on the trip so far where I found the fewest people who spoke more than a few words of English. More surprising was that Croatia was the place on the trip so far where the most people (literally everyone I talked to) was almost fluent in or had at least good conversational English. But back to the café in Marathon: luckily a woman eating in the café spoke some English, and she came up and helped us order. She was telling us what different meats they had for the gyro (touching my arm as she spoke and pointing out the different foods being cooked on the other side of the counter), but for many she didn’t know what to say, so she pointed to the layered meat on the vertical spit and said “not chicken.” I ordered a “not chicken” gyro with everything on it. It came out with inions, tomatoes, French fries (several places served them in the gyros under the guise of being “potatoes”), tzatziki and paprika. My first bite was heavenly, and I decided that the “not chicken” tasted a lot like pork carnitas. Also they had somewhere between grilled and fried the pita itself before stuffing it full of goodies, so overall it was a pretty heart-healthy lunch (or snack, since it was about 5:00pm by now).

We continued walking down the street, hoping that we would come upon something interesting. There were lots of stray dogs and cats, just as there were in Piraeus and Athens, and I made the mistake of petting one, which then followed us around for ten minutes or so. We stumbled upon the “Center for the Promotion of the Marathon Race.” It was closed, but there were several large banners out front that proclaimed last year was the 2,500th anniversary of the first marathon, which was ran by that crazy messenger in 490 BC. 2,500 years of running for hours on end…insane. But it’s still impressive to have an event with such history. Further down, we found the stadium of Marathon. A cool mosaic was set in the ground nearby proclaiming that this was the starting place of the Olympic marathon run, and a shiny metal statue reminiscent of the winged shoes of Hermes sat on a white marble base at the white marble entrance to the well-maintained track and field. One of my friends took a lap around the track just for funsies. Also three flags: the Greek flag, the EU flag and a light blue flag with a dark blue banner and some white laurel wreath design in the middle that I think was some kind of Olympic flag, marked the entrance to the stadium.

The woman on the bus had told us that there was a bus to the beach at 6pm, so we found the bus stop, again with more effort than in Athens because people in Marathon were few and far between, but we made it to the stop in time to take the twenty minute ride to the beach. On the way, I saw a few of the classic white houses with blue domes. I had told myself that I couldn’t leave Greece until I saw these, so I was very happy to find them. Marathon on the beach was similar to the city, except without multiple stories in most places. It also had the imprecise feeling of many other beach towns I had been to in central California. We found a place to change into our suits (and a patisserie for me to sample Marathon baklava, which was quite rich and sweet but delicious) and headed toward the beach.

The beach was so nice—not touristy or crowded at all, and only a little rocky (at least compared with many of the other beaches I have visited recently) on the shore and then perfectly smooth sand in the water. The beach sloped out at a shallow grade, so we walked out a good 50 yards before four feet could no longer touch the bottom. The water itself was very flat…so flat in fact that I tasted the water to assure myself that this was the Aegean Sea and not a large lake, because there is a lake near Marathon. It was salty, so I’m going to go with the ocean and not a lake, but I should try to find out where I was on a map to be sure (if any of you would like to take that up as a homework assignment and email me about it, please do so). Being in the cool ocean was fantastic, and we all just waded and swam around contentedly for an hour or so. The sun sets pretty late here, probably around 9:15 that night, so when we got out it was still bright and warm enough to dry off in the sun and change back into clothes. We walked along the beach on the way back to the bus stop. It was lined with adorable outdoor beach bars, cafes and tavernas (which are intermediate between a café and a restaurant in both price and formality and serve traditional Greek food) that reminded me of beach bars in the Caribbean or Mexico. Outside one of these bars, I was shocked to find a cutout of Chuck Norris (with his name on the poster) saying that this place had the best food (or something like that…it was all in Greek except “Chuck Norris”). Before catching the 9pm (which ended up really being the 9:20pm) bus back to Athens, we stopped by a grocery store and bought peach iced tea (I’ve been getting it everywhere while on this trip…it’s just so good), tzatziki, pita, feta, and salami for a picnic dinner on the beach. I also found hot chocolate mix in the grocery store…which I of course bought because I had been going into hot chocolate withdrawal on the ship. It was just too hot in Croatia or Greece to have any, but it’s always cold on the air conditioned ship.


7/20

Today I slept in again, which felt fantastic, especially after going to bed early (for this trip). I met with friends around noon and decided to take the rest of the afternoon to explore Athens. We now knew it was easier to walk to the metro, and we knew because of our adventures with the metro the day before that Monastiraki was stop near the Acropolis and in the middle of the shopping center.

The shopping center was fantastic: there was one main, very wide stone-paved pedestrian (or most pedestrian, anyway) street lined with shops. At first these were large popular shops like Zara, H&M, Berksha and Blanco (kind of like Forever21 but better). At Blanco I found a super cute and comfortable pair of leopard print shoes and bright pink shorts. Eventually these larger stores fizzled into a market with tons of little stores selling all different types of clothes and Greek souvenirs. There were also a few streets branching off the main shopping ones that were lined with bars, cafes and tavernas, which we returned to for dinner before too long.

Between the larger stores and market areas and down a side street was the Sandal Poet of Athens. I have pictures of his shop (and will put them on facebook), but leather unfinished sandals and sandal laces line the shelves of every wall in the shop and hang from every point in the store on which they can be draped. He makes a range of leather gladiator sandals, and when I went in, he adjusted all the straps of the sandals to fit the size of my feet. Then, he hammered nails into the straps to keep them in their proper place, and told me that if I wanted to quicken the darkening of the leather’s color which would occur naturally with age, I could run olive oil into the sandals. Not surprisingly, the whole shop smelled like leather and had a very hippie vibe: hand-painted chairs in abstract, spiraling shapes and bright colors, a shag carpet and natural-colored lamp shades with designs drawn on. The store was cluttered, but in a way that made it feel more alive. The sandal poet himself certainly lived up to his name: he had shoulder length grey hair and a short beard and wore a black, tunic-y button up shirt over his substantial girth, a pair of simple and lived-in olive green pants and a pair of leather sandals. I assume they were a pair he had made, and they were so old they were almost black. The leather had perfectly molded to hit feet, and I knew why, despite literally being surrounded every day by new sandals, he preferred that pair. I asked how long it would take my sandals to turn the same color as his, and he laughed and told me that his sandals were very old. I said they were well-loved, and he agreed.

With my new gladiator sandals on my feet, we walked over and found a taverna for dinner. I asked our waiter what was best, and he was quite pleased and started explaining all the traditional Greek food to us (while touching my shoulder). I ended up ordering moussaka, and my friend Laura had pastitsio, kind of Greek lasagna. We also split a Greek salad, which came out as delicious red quartered tomatoes with refreshing cucumbers, blanched red onion, kalamata olives and a giant chunk of feta covered with olive oil and herbs. My moussaka, layered vegetables and meat with a potato-like sauce and cheese, was delicious. After we paid, we stood up to leave and our waiter came hurrying out and told us to sit, so we did. He brought us out a bowl of Greek yogurt with honey, which was also delicious.

When we got back to the ship, we met a bunch of people going to a Bon Jovi concert in Athens. I have no idea what Bon Jovi was doing in Athens…but there you go.

This was our last night in Greece and hadn’t been out yet, so we decided to go to this karaoke bar right outside the port where a bunch of other SASers were going for the night. It was fun, but a bit of a SAS-fest, so we went to an amazing outdoor club in Athens called Akrotiri Boutique. It was so cool: up on a hill so I could see the lights of Athens at night all around us.


7/21

This morning I went on the SAS-organized trip to the Corinth canal and ancient Corinth.  The canal was incredible: cut into rock and a skyscraper’s worth of stories deep. I had a snack of paprika chips at the market near the canal, and then we got back on the road to ancient Corinth. In ancient Greece, Corinth was one of the largest city-states in ancient Greece. The museum was small, but quite detailed. There were a number of marble statues, many of which were headless because to save money, they would just change the head to the new important figure instead of making a whole new statue. There were also a few sarcophagi and marble sphinxes. Several cases were full of hand-painted vases, plates and other daily objects, some of which were in miniature as burial goods. Well-preserved mosaics of myth scenes, geometric patterns, and grape vines decorated some of the walls.

The actual ruins of ancient Corinth were a little underwhelming compared with Delphi, so I wish I had seen them in reverse. The main temple was originally six by fifteen Doric columns, but today only five by three are left standing on the foundation of the temple. Much of the area is open rubble what used to be the agora. There were also the ruins of several fountains, including the Fountain of Peirene, and buildings which used to be stores and houses.

The economic situation is pretty palpable in Athens right now, lots of protests and public transportation strikes (which really complicated my traveling). Piraeus and Athens also felt strangely empty for being such large cities, and I found myself wondering where all the locals were. But despite the obvious hardship, overall the local people here are the friendliest and have the best hospitality of any country I've visited on this trip so far.


Love from Greece,
Ginny

Dubrovnik Afternoon

7/14 afternoon in Dubrovnik

I’ll admit, when I first walked down the gangway out of the ship to go snorkeling, I was wishing that I could be sleeping or wasting time on the internet at the café. But now that I’ve been on the trip, I’m so glad I went because it ended up being really fun.

From the very beginning of the trip, I knew most people were having similar second thoughts about snorkeling in our last few hours in Dubrovnik. At the bus just outside the ship, I met a group of other *ahem* tired people who had decided to go out to Revelin the night before, including Kallen Abby and Kaitlin, three of the friends I had gone out with the night before. But this meant we all had similar experience and lots of stories to share, so we entertained ourselves for fifteen minutes or so until the trip leader showed up with the other 2/3 of the SASers going on the trip. Turns out we were actually supposed to meet in the Union, not by the bus, and those 2/3 had not gone to Revelin the night before, so they had actually checked the meeting place instead of assuming it was the bus as usual. Oh well, we made the trip.

We boarded the bus, and literally drove to the end of the port, a 5-10 minute walk the entire ship made every day, and got dropped off by two boats that would take us to the snorkeling headquarters across the bay. This lack of foresight and planning is unfortunately common in the SAS-organized trips. Luckily, most of mine have been pretty good, but several have had hours cut off because of bad communication between the professors designing the trips, the field office booking the trips, and the local tourist companies carrying out the trips. But, when going along with these trips the headache of planning and dealing with snafus in those plans is never your own, so that is still one serious advantage. Also, on SAS trips you get to meet new groups of people since the signups occurred either over summer or at the very beginning of the trip before people broke into friend groups.

Once we arrived at the snorkeling/scuba diving/parasailing/waterskiing (yes it was flat enough to water ski)/tubing/banana boating shop on the other side of the bay, we were divided into two groups. We were in the second, so we lounged on the beach (again, by beach I mean pebbles, rocks and concrete areas) and swam for about an hour and a half while the first group went snorkeling. When they returned, we grabbed out fins, masks and snorkels and the ten of us loaded into the boat along with the captain and three Croatian snorkel guides about our age. All three of them looked like the Croatian version of beach/water sport bums, and one was wearing a water polo speedo (with the H2O polo logo in a polo ball) under his trunks. Also their trunks were brands like Quicksilver and Hurley that only reinforced this similarity. We motored over to what looked like several large, craggy rocks jutting out of the ocean and the captain stopped the boat so we could all jump in, which we did gladly since it was quite warm.

There was surprisingly little sea life. It wasn’t entirely a surprise as I had been told to expect this both by people who had already been snorkeling here and in my marine biology class where we learned that this warmer, saltier part of the Mediterranean, while being beautiful and very clear, did not have as much life as the western Mediterranean and had much less life than, for example, the Pacific off the California coast. The substrate was mainly large boulders covered in a thin layer of green, red or brown algae in some places and looking bare in others. When we were closer to the rocks jutting out of the water, I could see several tide pools or other places where tide pools might form under different circumstances. I didn’t see any hermit crabs or other little creatures in the tide pools here, but when I went to a rocky cove a few days ago I saw several crabs, hermit crabs, and even a few little fish in the tide pools. At this cove I could also clearly see zonation occurring the in intertidal community. Far up on the rocks there were completely bare any dry, probably the places where the ocean didn’t reach even at high tide. In places a little lower, where the ocean probably reached just at high tide, there still wasn’t really anything there. I wondered if this was because of physical limitations: that marine organisms just couldn’t stand being as dry as they would be living in that area, or if it was due to some other interaction between the creatures in the community, like the predator-prey interaction we saw in class between the limpets and algae. Just above the water level, there was some dry algae that looked greenish-brown and was very small. At the water level, the rocks were slippery with brown algae and studded with the occasional small invertebrate, probably limpets, stuck to the rock. In the water there was larger algae and some fish, one of which actually bumped into or tried (unsuccessfully) to take a bite of out my leg. Or maybe I just accidentally walked into its home as some small fish can be incredibly territorial (and audacious). I didn’t see any sea urchins in this cove, but I didn’t have goggles or a mask with me at the time so it was more difficult to see what all was living on the bottom after a certain point, although overall the water in Croatia was amazingly clear and kept making me and everyone I swam with think it was much shallower than it really was.

But back to the snorkeling trip. To really see any life, I had to dive down six feet or so to get closer to the rocks at the bottom. This of course made me wish I were scuba diving, but hopefully I will get a chance to do that at a future port. What made me wish even more that I were diving was one of the Croatian snorkel guides telling me that there was a small shipwreck just to the left of where we were snorkeling, but that it was probably too deep for us to be able to see from the surface. But once I dove down closer to the rocks in my snorkel gear, I could see some fish and other life between the rocks. I saw several of the fish I saw in the Medes that looked like a small kelp bass, with the mottled brown and tan coloring. I’m not sure if these were the same species or not, but it seems possible, and they were behaving similarly: just floating stationary near the bottom. Also, I saw fish that were similar to the ones in the Medes with little black spots on their tails, but they looked smaller and narrower here. I also saw small schools of dark grey fish a couple inches long. Whenever I saw schools I would try to swim near them (or through them) because it’s cool to be surrounded by fish, but they always swam away the second I got close. I’m sure that is because they are so well adapted to school together and stay away from big fish (or curious snorkelers).

The first really cool thing I saw was a torpedo left from WWII. It was wedged between two boulders in about ten feet of water, and was covered in a light layer of mossy looking algae. It didn’t seem to me like much life had made the torpedo its home (which was surprising since that is what usually happens to wrecks and anything else that sinks into the sea), but that may have been because I couldn’t stay down there and look at it very long. Also, it was reflective of the amount of sea life in the surrounding area, and more generally in the Adriatic. We continued to snorkel close to the jutting rocks, and I continued to dive down to try and spot something interesting. I saw several smallish black sea urchins, which I avoided. I heard that several people came to the medical center on the ship to get sea urchin spines removed during their time in Croatia, and I’m glad I wasn’t one of them. I also saw a fish about the same size (maybe six inches) and shape as the kelp bass-like fish, but that had black and white vertical and slightly wavy stripes, a little like a treefish (but without the giant red lips). 

By far my favorite creature of the day was an octopus. I’m so lucky that I saw it, I think only me and one or two other people saw it before it disappeared too deep into its crevice between the rocks. I heard one of the guides say octopus, so I booked it over to him. We dove down ten feet or so and he pointed into the crevice. Two fish (the treefish-like ones) were floating in front of the hole looking at the octopus, which I thought was odd. I’m pretty sure they weren’t actually just sitting there looking at it like I was (maybe waiting for it to check out some leftover mollusk parts), but it was nice to not be the only spectator. The octopus was a pale purplish pinkish tanish color that blended in with the rocks nearby. I didn’t see it change color while I was there, and when I swam down the second time it was too deep in the hole to see. It was on the small side, with the body about the size of two fists stacked on top of one another and then the tentacles stretching around it. I couldn’t see the tentacles fully, so I’m not sure how long they were. I could see the octopus filtering water though its body, which looked very cool and a little creepy. I’m not sure what it was doing at the time, maybe looking for tasty mollusks, but it looked like it was just sitting near the edge of its den, looking at the two treefish-like fish outside as they stared back. When we came to the surface, the guide who had spotted the octopus called it a “she”, so I asked if it was a girl octopus, and he said that yes, it was a female. I asked how he knew, and he just laughed and told me it was because she didn’t say anything, so I guess that was a joke and not actually the sex of the octopus.

After this, we went over to the underwater cave. I saw cave, but what it was really more like a small, underwater rock tunnel leading into pool of ocean surrounded by the craggy rocks jutting five to fifteen feet into the sky. The pool itself was open on top, so the “cave” was really the underwater tunnel. The guides told us we had to be able to dive down about two meters and hold our breath for about fifteen seconds, which is fine for ocean people used to diving under waves, but most of the people on the trip were not ocean people and couldn’t make it. I went through the tunnel first with the guide, and it was a little longer than I expected but very manageable. I love underwater caves, so I was really wishing at this point (again) that I were scuba diving. At first that cave was pretty dark, but after a few stroked a bright turquoise circle opened up from where the sunlight was streaming in through the pool within the rocks. The pool inside the rocks was very cool. It was literally as calm as a swimming pool despite the small swell around the rocks in the crashing of waves and surge action on the other side of the rocks. The pool was also quite deep, with the rocks coming almost vertically out of the water and leaving the pool (about the size of a large backyard swimming pool) in the middle. There were a few paths in the rocks where people could climb from the ocean outside into the pool (but my way was definitely cooler). The three guides climbed up to the top of the rocks, and I followed since following them in the past had lead to both seeing the octopus and swimming through the cool underwater tunnel At the top they asked me if I was going to jump off into the pool, and I said of course, so I was the first one to jump in. Many SASers went cliff diving in Croatia, and I did not so this mini-jump of about fifteen feet or so held me over. After I jumped in, all three of the guides had to show me up by swam diving off the rocks into the pool, which was just unfair. After that, some other people also jumped off the rocks, some needing much more encouragement to actually take the plunge than others (again, not all ocean or heights people). When I was waiting to jump a second time, a bunch of scuba divers entered the pool, so we all had to wait another five minutes or so for them to clear out before we could keep jumping. There was another, longer underwater tunnel leading out the other side of the pool that the scuba divers exited through. I asked one of the guides about this, but he said that it was too long to swim through, which was disappointing.

After we had played around enough, the group climbed over the rocks and I and a few other people swam back through the underwater tunnel to get back to the ocean. Once there, the boat we had come in was outside waiting for us and the captain sounded his alarm and began yelling at our guides in Croatian. Apparently they had taken a little too much time letting us have fun in the pool, because we were now late. They didn’t seem to mind though, and I had the feeling that they were used to this happening, but they did shepherd us quickly back to the boat. From there we went back to the shop to pick up our clothes, and then back to the port where we took the three minute bus ride down the port to our ship (totally worth it to get a bus, SAS field office) and got back on the ship just in time for a quick shower before dinner.

At 7pm we had another life boat drill, the second of the trip because regulations require them to be repeated each month, so we’ve now been on the ship a month, which I find very hard to believe. The trip is just zooming by…we already have four ports under our belt with another four to go.






More love from Dubrovnik,
Ginny

Adriatic to the Aegean

7/15

I’m still not used to returning to class after a few days in port. It probably doesn’t help that I pack a week’s worth of activity into those few days, but I was hoping that it wouldn’t be too much of a shock coming back to class this time. It was much easier; I actually remembered where we were in the class, which is good since I have a midterm tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that this is the only time in my life where I’ll have midterms before I get to Barcelona, Greece, and Turkey and finals after leaving Morocco.

We’re leaving the Adriatic and entering the Aegean soon to on our way from Dubrovnik to Piraeus/Athens. Today the internet and server on board are down, which means that I can’t check my email so that’s a little frustrating. Also, tonight we loose another hour. This hasn’t happened in awhile…but I remember it throwing me off a lot when it did so I’m planning on going to bed super early so I’m not exhausted all day tomorrow.

I just happened to stumble into a classroom where a girl on board was teaching a belly dancing class, so that was quite a pleasant surprise. I heard Arabic music and was like could it be? And it was! So I joined her email list to find out when future classes are since it will be fun to keep dancing a little on the trip. There is a talent show on board on the way back from Morocco, so that’s a possibility.


7/16

The internet and server are back now, so I could check my email, which is always nice.  Tomorrow we arrive in Piraeus, the closest port to Athens! I am so excited, but I’m going to go to sleep as early as I can so I can try to get rid of my cough that has been hanging on since before Italy. I think the entire ship is sick now though…and the medical center (which is only open for 2 hours each day) had been keeping very busy.

I am so excited for Greek food, I have literally been having dreams about it.  It's silly but I'm really craving Sal's (our chef in the Tridelt house) Mexican food, banana chocolate chip bread and egg rolls while I’m on the ship. The food on the ship comes nowhere close to as delicious or varied as his...although we do have bread rolls and cheese cubes every day, which I'm sad to say have become the staple of my shipboard diet. Of course, in port I and everyone else just go crazy eating all the delicious food in the new country. Italy was probably the biggest crowd pleaser…but I really loved the seafood in both Barcelona and Dubrovnik. I’m looking forward to some really yummy street gyros in Greece…so I hope I find a good spot.

Love from the Aegean,
Ginny

P.S. Every time I log onto this site in a new country, it comes up in the local language. So right now it's in Greek and last time in was in Croatian.