Kelly Frazier '09

Yesterday a very exciting event took place... I finally received my passport back from the Greek embassy in NYC. With it came the oh-so-awaited student visa, nicely tucked in the middle of my unused traveling pages. In case you haven't realized it yet, I am still state-side. Yes, for another week and a half I will be home while my friends head back to classes. I'm not complaining, of course. I enjoy my family, especially my kitties, and I have time to hang out with friends from home who I rarely see anyway. But the arrival of my passport and visa shocked me into reality. I am headed to Greece on the 26th and I won't see any of my friends in the states for the next four months.

I arrived in Athens on Sunday around 6 p.m., just in time to see the beautiful red sky of sunset. It was wonderful, but with sunset come darkness and with darkness comes my inability to make sense of my surroundings Being on a bus, I didn't feel so lost because our driver knew where we were going and I wasn't really supposed to. It wasn't until we (my four fellow roommates and I) were dropped off on a corner in the middle of a city that I started to feel a little lost. Now where?

There are three subjects to this blog, but the first two go hand in hand. I have made the observation that Athens is a city of little old ladies and stray dogs. Both of these subjects are absolutely everywhere. It's not just Athens though. I think it may be all of Greece because both were highly prevalent in Nafplio, but we'll get to that in a later post.

The last two weekends we (aka Arcadia students) have gone on trips to some of the more interesting places in Greece. Our first weekend, and the end of our orientation period, was spent in Nafplio which is in the Peloponnese. Our second weekend, which was organized by Arcadia but not sanctioned or chaperoned by faculty, was to Delphi in the mountains.

This is an e-mail the director of our program sent to us on Friday to warn us that there was call for snow this weekend:

This morning, about 12 of us met at the center to go on a Zaharplasteio Walk. Basically we visited some of the best sweet shops in Athens. Kim, our student activities coordinator, described it as a "bar crawl only with sweet shops instead of bars." Each place had a specialty. We visited the best place to get loukoumades (honey donuts), a gelato place, a bakery well known for its milk-based desserts and one of the most famous chocolate shops in Athens.

In case you didn't know, Greece is predominantly Greek Orthodox Christian. Something like 99 percent of the population. On the Orthodox calender, Easter has to come after Passover and this year it falls five weeks later than the Roman Catholic Easter. So, to make a long story short, Carnival was for the past three weeks and clean Monday was today because everyone in the country starts fasting tomorrow.

I don't know about anyone else's programs, but Arcadia in Greece is no walk in the park when it comes to academics. I still have to work my butt off to get good grades in my classes. This past week was my mid-term week. I had two written mid-terms, one paper, and a very odd little project for our Greek seminar class.

Vatican City. We didn't exactly have the best weather for touring through Rome this past weekend. But we were in Rome, so it totally didn't matter.

Pompeii

We woke up early on our second full day in Rome to catch a train to Pompeii. The train ride was two hours to Naples and then we had to take the above ground metro to Pompeii (which took an hour). At first we got on the wrong train, but it wasn't a huge deal because we got off the wrong train while it was still on the same route as the right train. The only downside was that we had to stand in the rain for 40 minutes waiting for the right train to come. We did meet a really nice couple from Iceland while we were waiting though (they had made the same mistake we had).

Our weekend started on Thursday morning at 9 a.m. This weekend was a trip planned and sponsored by Arcadia, so we got out of all of our Thursday classes and had a very strict schedule of events to stick to.

Yes, yes... I know. My last blog said Corinth part one and I'm moving on to Meteora, but alas, life moves too quickly. I mean, I'm actually leaving for this next weekend in an hour. So, time is just whizzing by. Hopefully, I'll get back to Corinth, but no promises.

The Greek Orthodox Easter is very different from the Western Catholic Easter celebrations. There are some similarities, like the selling of chocolate-shaped bunnies and the dying of hard boiled eggs, but when you break it down there are far more differences.