Today, March 25, is a double holiday for the Greeks; Greek Independence Day, as well as the feast day of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary are celebrated on this day. Greece began to become independent from the Ottoman Turks in 1829. The exact date of the liberation was not March 25, but since …
Tag Archives: Europe/Greece
Historical Pilgrimages: Delphi and Hosios Loukas
Last weekend we took a trip to upper central Greece to visit Delphi. If you have read The Odyssey (or other classical texts) you know Delphi is the place to consult the oracle. If a person was facing a tough choice, let’s say to attack a city or not, they would make the trek to …
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Peloponnese Field Trip
So much time has elapsed since I last wrote, and for good reason: I spent the last 4 days in the Peloponnese, the large peninsula of southern Greece. It is good for me to review the itinerary, since I learned so much information in just a few days. Overall, the field trip was equally thrilling …
Birthday Weekend & Clean Monday
When you are quite young, it is not unusual to imagine what your milestone birthdays might be like. Will I get a car when I turn 16? (Definitely not.) Will I have newfound freedom when I turn 18? (No.) Will I party til the sun comes up when I turn 21? (Ha! Still no.) When …
Meteora: understanding beauty in the middle of the sky
Hello readers! If you have ever seen a tourism brochure of Greece, the cover was probably a picture of stunning rock formations, like the ones you will see in the photos below. On Thursday evening my roommates and I decided we would like to see this place for ourselves, so we planned our visit to …
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The Week of Heavy Things
If you have been following this blog faithfully (hi mom!) you are probably hoping to see stunning panoramics of the Acropolis by now; I regret to inform you the Acropolis was closed by the time my group got there, so those photos will have to wait for another day. Instead of a panoramic photograph, allow …
A weekend trip to…the dentist?
Yia sas, readers! As the weekend quickly approaches I thought it is necessary to put down a few words about the happenings of last weekend and the first week of classes before they become eclipsed by the upcoming weekend escapades. As the title of this blog already revealed, I spent Friday afternoon in a dentist …
Yia sas from Greece
γεια σας (hello all!) from the Pangrati neighborhood in Athens, Greece. It has been a whirlwind since I landed yesterday afternoon, but I am feeling more settled each moment as my first full day draws to a close. My apartment is a two minute walk from the CYA academic center. The academic center is next door neighbors …
Istanbul
The plane that spirited me away from fair Athens spat me out – sleep-deprived – in the merry city of Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantion/Byzantium. Baklava here is, empirically better than anywhere else in the world, and the sights are unparalleled. It is, after all, a Roman Greek Turkish European Asian Muslim Christian Jewish Byzantine Ottoman smorgasbord about 2600 years old. …
Leaving Greece
I lied. This is the penultimate post. I assure you, Amy, I did not mean to swindle you. It’s just that there’s so much to write, and I didn’t know how to summarize my Greek pilgrimage in so few words and…ah. Well! It felt not so long ago that I was rambling about the newness of …
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