Rewinding six weeks.....rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...


Greece! I decided to go to Greece to join Kelly on the first part of her trip one week beforehand. I was lucky because our course ended a week earlier than expected so I had an extra week added to my 10 day break between courses. I flew into Athens the day after my course ended and managed to find a girl I didn't know, Kelly's friend, at the airport, and then we found our way together to the youth hostel in Athens where Kelly and two other girls I also didn't know were waiting for us. We found that our knowledge of Greek letters from math class, once deemed rather useless, actually helped us navigate street signs etc. that were written only in Greek. Who ever said math wasn't useful. After emerging from the metro in the center of Athens at night, I was immediately awestruck by the glowing godly looking Acropolis towering over the city.

We spent the next day and a half touring the sites of Athens. Now, Athens is not the most pleasant city. It's quite dirty and crowded and there are a lot of stray dogs running around, old ladies who try to put a flower on your shirt with one hand while helping themselves to your bag with the other hand and so on, and astronomical prices (at least in the touristy areas where we stayed due to limited time)....BUT it was lovely for two days. We took a tourist train around the center, gazed at the guards with funny pompom shoes and a ridiculous kick-step (I wouldn't feel safe guarded by people who look so dumb...I think thats why they have real policemen guarding the presidential palace also), we walked through the tourist infested Parthenon...it was not disappointing (especially since European students get free entry and I am one!! woohoo!) through gardens and marketplaces and one disgusting enormous but intriguing meat market...and no matter where we went there were columns and other various ruins popping out (even in the metro stations!). I wish I could say that everything I learned in Greek Mythology class came gushing back into my mind, but I guess that knowledge is filed pretty deeply (or got taken out with the recycling), but regardless, it still felt like I was on a school field trip.


Actually the most shocking part of my Greek trip was being around so many Americans! Our hostel was filled with them, and it seemed like everywhere we went there they were. And to add to it, I was traveling with four other Americans...overload!!! I hate to say it, but seeing all of them really made me realize that the average American is quite a bit chubbier than the average European.

But even so, it wasn't so bad being around my own people for a bit, though I find many of them annoying, especially when I am outside the country. Actually, the first night I was hanging out in the hostel with all these Americans while Kelly and company were overcoming their jetlag. Some guy in a cowboy hat was reading the news on the laptop and he said in his Southern twang..."wow...there's bin' a shootin' in Birmingham New York, fourteen people killed" and my ears perked up immediately, first because I couldn't believe that another imbecile was allowed to get his hands on a gun, and that there was another tragic shooting so close in time to the nursing home shooting, and finally because I was pretty sure Birmingham New York doesnt exist.... It took me longer than it should have to realize it was actually Binghamton, at which point I practically went into shock. And even worse, it was at a civic center where a lot of my friends' families go, in fact I once volunteered to stuff envelopes there with my friend Hanh...so I was really worried it was someone I knew that was killed! I know they always quote people saying this in papers...but I always hear about these things happening, and they seem so far away, I never thought it could happen so close to home! And more importantly, how can we have such relaxed gun laws?!!! It's bloody insane!!!

It's well known around the world how terrible our gun control is in the US. I was talking the other day with my friend from Colombia and we were discussing her country and how it has a bad reputation for violence, corruption and drug lords, and at one point she said to me 'but you must know what its like, you come from a place that is not so safe also.' And at the time I said it wasn't true, that I almost always feel safe...but in the back of my head was the shooting in Binghamton, all the murders in the T-station by Northeastern's Campus over the years, the girl some of my friends knew who was shot in a burglary three blocks from my apartment, the two shootings across the street from me and so on and so on... and our Costa Rican friend who was in the same conversation, who comes from a place where they constitutionally abolished the army and gained their independence without any bloodshed and has hardly had any violence in its history just thinks both of our countries are crazy. I agree.

And another day I was telling my friend from Vanuatu about the time we were playing frisbee and Sarah got her nose broken and we had to walk to the hospital through the streets of Boston while she was dripping blood and alarming passersby because she looked like she was shot...and my friend said...'well I guess that could be more believable in the US' SO my point is...we certainly don't have a good reputation...and for good reason...and why oh why can people have such easy access to machines that are meant to kill people? Do we ever hear any stories about peoples lives being saved because somebody happened to have a gun? Is nobody thinking clearly?

And that actually was only the first bit of shocking news that happened during that trip...there was the disastrous earthquake in L'Aquila near Rome! And it was torture because all the news was in Greek and I couldn't get any information about what happened! The only thing I was able to decipher was the magnitude, which is a moment magnitude of 6.3, not huge, but most of Italy was built before modern day Earthquake retrofitting techniques, as I found out after returning to Italy, almost 300 people were killed and more than 65,000 people are homeless and living in tents or hotels, mostly those in towns quite close to the fault where ground accelerations were quite high. A lot of my friends here at the Rose School have been there to survey the damage and figure out what buildings people can safely go back to, some are there now because obviously the work is still going on...the pictures they've shown are not pretty. And actually Andy P lived there when he stayed in Italy, and the dome of the church he used to catch a bus in front of collapsed. The earthquake was a reminder to me that our work here is not just an academic circus as it sometimes seems to be.

Anyway, back to Greece. We took an early morning ferry to the Island of Mykonos, which is the most picturesque place I have ever visited...though it wasn't so great for pictures since it rained for most of our visit. Everything is pure white and quaint with accents of blue and red.




They even paint white squares on the sidewalks. Then the next day we took off to Santorini...my favorite...the only inhabited active Caldera in the world! The giant crater in the center is flooded with water, and serves as the enormous harbor for the island. Pulling into that crater on the Ferry was fabulous...I could see all the different volcanic layers and then creeping over the edges of the crater were all the cliffside villages, again all painted bright white. These houses are stacked like stairs going down the cliffsides, one house's roof is the patio of the house above it.


We didn't stay on the cliff edge, but rather stayed in a more affordable Villa/Hostel run by a guy we called dad because he drove us around and made us breakfast and told us to be safe. The two days there were fabulous...I went off on my own and rented a 4-wheel motorcycle...I wanted a scooter but they didnt want me to drive it :( but I still spent a day and a half of non-stop riding around the island...it was magnificent! Wind whipping my face and my hair, curvy roads wrapping around volcanic hillsides, the sea always in sight. I felt like I could reach out and touch it. Even though I was on a dorky 4-wheeler...I now understand how people get so crazy about motorcycling...I think I'll get a scooter when I move to Seattle...don't tell Dad. So I zoomed around to all of the sites, the Red Beach, the Black Beach, the cute village of Oia, Ancient Thira...Ancient Thira is the reamins of an ancient Greek town on top of the tallest mountain on the island...it is all that is left after the volcano last erupted less than 4000 years ago...it was one of the biggest eruptions on earth during human history and is thought to have caused the downfall of the Minoan civilization and also is thought to be the origin of the tale of Atlantis since the enormous crater filled with water was formed after the eruption. There is actually a sort of Pompeii on the island called Akrotiri...but I missed it because Greeks are even lazier than Italians and they close everything at 3.



We also went to some nice restaurants and experienced a bit of the famous nightlife. One night Kelly and I found ourselves at a dance club filled entirely with Greek high school students along with their chaperones which played only Greek music. They were all dancing on the bars and throwing things in the air and doing some sort of modernized traditional Greek dances that Kelly and I failed at imitating. Then afterwards we were escorted all the way home (a few kilometers!) by one of the random dogs that run around everywhere in Greece as if they were cats. The weird thing is that they all have collars and they are all more pleasant than most dogs I have met. I still haven't figured out why they are there, but I think the Olympics have something to do with why the ones in Athens at least all have collars.



Then right after I got home from Greece, I had Andrea and Kelly here for a week of Northern Italy! We went to Venice, which was packed like a mall on Black Thursday since it was the day after Easter and all of Italy goes out for an excursion, but we had a nice time getting lost and unlost, pushing through crowds and enjoying the beautiful sights. We also went to Verona, which looks like a cliche of Italy...castles on hilltops, tall narrow Romanesque trees, a Colosseum, lots of cathedrals and so forth. We even saw the supposed houses of Romeo and Juliet...though last time I checked they weren't real, anyway they were the homes of families with names similar to Capulet and Montague. We also had a day in Genova and Milan.


But the real highlight of our week was hiking between the five small seaside/cliffside towns of Cinque Terre. These towns used to be isolated from the rest of Italy, keeping themselves up by farming terraces on the steep cliffs, but since a train was built through (with a LOT of tunnels) the towns have become more accessible and since they are so quaint and colorful, obviously they have become rather touristy, and there are hiking trails that connect the five little towns and we did the whole thing and it was lovely. Most of the trails were along these terraces, sometimes the trail was only a foot wide with a ten foot dropoff into grapevines on the terrace below.


There were hundreds of lemon trees heavy with fruit and we strolled through many olive groves as well. There weren't really olives that time of year, but some hikers were searching for some anyway, and as we were sitting under some olive trees along the trail, taking a break and eating some jelly beans Mrs. Natoli sent me for Easter, we had the most brilliant idea! Instead of throwing those yucky black jelly beans away, we stuck them all over an olive tree right next to the path...muah hahahaaaa! I still laugh today as I think about those hikers taking a bite of an olive only for it to be a nasty black licorice jelly bean!!!


Okay...phew...I am almost caught up to the present in my journal entries...except for the month and a half since those trips - I had another class for most of it taught by an old American guy who is really famous but actually came to class a little tipsy a few times. My theory is that since the weather was so cold in the beginning and they turn the heat off on a certain day instead of when it stops being cold, he was so freezing in his room that he warmed himself up in the morning with a bit (or more than a bit) of duty free alcohol he got on the way over....haha...but anyway, he was still a better teacher drunk than many of my other teachers in Grenoble were sober, so it was quite a good class. And since then it's been graduation week for the students from last year (yes, things really are that slow in Italy) so we've had party after ceremony after party. My school bought an old monastary which they now use as a residence for students and faculty, but the church part they turned into an auditorium, but it really just looks like a nice fancy old church with a powerpoint screen installed...so we had some presentations in there and then a few nights ago we had a big party with dinner, dancing and drinking in this beautiful little marble cathedral...it was a bit weird to be doing the YMCA next to confessional booths and holy water fonts, but like I said, life in Italy is always interesting.



So now that all the celebrating is over, I'm back to a short weeklong class about Tsunamis tomorrow, and then next Sunday I go back to France for June to (hopefully) finish my project so I can be free when I leave Italy at the end of July.

Sorry for the long entry, but you've all been whining so long that I never update, so hopefully this will keep you quiet for a little while :D

I will leave you with a picture from our little day-trip to Lake Como yesterday. Ciao ciao.


p.s. keep your eyes open for new pictures soon-ish on www.picasaweb.com/allstadt.k