March 15

This morning I woke up my usual time and had toast with banana for breakfast. My roommates appreciate my morning routine – I pack up everything I’ll need for the day and set out my outfits the night before so that I make as little noise as possible in the mornings. This was our last morning at the Athens Style, however, and I am sad to leave the kitchen and all its little luxuries. Today marks the “turn the page day.” One of the many handouts we received at the beginning of this trip was a double sided syllabus. Today is the first day on the backside of the page. It was a big deal for everyone to flip their page (well, for those of us who still have their syllabus).
With bags all packed, we left the hostel at 9:00 and had a wonderful reunion with Spiros and the glorious double-decker bus. Allie literally shrieked for joy when we rounded the corner and spotted the bus. I now have my old row of seats back and so much more leg room. There is a new addition to the bus, however. Spiros installed a video camera for the second floor and there is now a monitor screen downstairs, right where Krentz sits. I wonder how that will affect the upstairs’ routine…
We drove to Eleusis, which was actually pretty boring. Dr. Toumazu tagged along and it is funny to see him and Dr. Krentz interact, they act (and dress) very similarly, and it’s cute to see how well they work together. I’m sure Krentz is enjoying his companionship. At Eleusis, there is little left standing. There are plenty of foundations left, so we know the size and location of the original structures, but after a few hundred years, this city fails to impress like it used to. It has an interesting history as the site of the mysterious cult of Demeter, arguably the most popular cult of the ancient world, and functioned as a popular religious site for well over 1000 years, right until paganism was outlawed in the 500s.
I ate my packed lunch – left over pasta and read while everyone split up to find restaurants. I had just enough left for a lunch serving and I didn’t want to waste it. It was also a fabulous sauce, if I do say so myself, and probably tasted just as good, if not better, than anything else I would have bought for lunch.
We stopped on the way to the next site at the canal that cuts through the isthmus between the Peloponnese and the rest of Greece. Apparently, there have been many failed attempts to cut through the rock, including those by Alexander the great and Nero, but the success finally came at the end of the 19th century. We walked across the brige over the isthmus and it is easy to see why shovels just wouldn’t get the job done. They had to blast this canal with dynamite to cut all the way down for water to flow though.
Our next site was the location of the Isthmian games – one of the Panhelenic games from ancient Greece, but the museum and site were closed for renovations. We did peep over the fence, but there is even less to see here than at Eleusis, so I was not particularly upset to skip over this one. The next site we will visit, which will be on Tuesday, is Corinth and we even have an archaeologist to meet us there. I am pumped about that. Not feeling it so much at this place.
The hotel where we are staying for the next 5 nights is in a cute little seaside town called Nafplio. The hotel is nice and the rooms a little above average. I am in a double (yeah) with Allie (yeah!). We haven’t roomed together in a double since Crete, when she got so sick, so we are excited for this week’s arrangement. The only bad thing about our room is the lack of a shower curtain. I don’t understand why hotels in Greece don’t think this little piece of plastic is always necessary. It’s annoying when you are showering and you have to focus less on cleanliness and more on making sure the toilet paper stays dry.
Night came pretty quickly yesterday, and I called it quits after eating the last of my leftovers from my cooking in Athens. Tomorrow is a free day, so I will sleep in tomorrow morning!