Asbestos and Pet Rocks

Greetings to my faithful followers! This will probably be quite brief because it is midnight and I am rather tired (and we are going on a bike trip in the morning... I need to be awake for that!), but I thought I should catch all of you up on what has been happening in this neck of the world, 8 hours from every single one of you (except for possibly Chris, although I don't know if you read this. If so, Hi Chris!!)

So what has happened since the Parthenon? We saw a few other monuments, and not to drop names, but we went to the Tower of the Winds, the Choragic Monument, the Agora, the Temple of Hesphastos, the Temple of the Holy Apostles, the Petraki Monastery, and a really old church that I don't know the name of. I remember that it was going to be torn down, but some man known as Crazy Ludwig saved it from destruction. This same man, Crazy Ludwig, designed a castle in Germany called Neuschwanstein and is what the Disney castle is designed after.

Anyways, we went to the temple of Hesphastos (which I like to refer to Asbestos because it is easier to remember and sounds exactly the same), and that was really cool because it looks like the Parthenon but is in pretty full condition. We also went to the Petraki Monastery (or as I call it, the Pet Rock E Monastery because it is easier to remember, too), and that was a really interesting experience because our guide admitted that he didn't know much about it, so he asked if there was a monk there who could help explain things. One came out, and he only spoke Greek so he talked through our guide, but explained all about the monastery, monastic life, and answered any of our questions. Then he invited our group inside the monastery and gave us juice and cookies! It was really fun and really nice! Roy Hammerling (professor on the trip) said that out of all the monasteries he had been to, he had never been invited in for juice by a monk :-)

Yesterday we also went to a really neat conference. It was about Greece's issues concerning the freedom of expression and religious freedom. Their church is a part of their state, so there have been a lot of problems recently with people who claim to have free expression but are offending people in the church because of cartoons, artwork, plays, poetry, etc. The conference was minimally in English so we wore headphones and listened to a translator for most of it, but it was still really engaging and only boring a few times. I think I am going to try to write an article about it (I took notes and got a packet of information) for The Concordian and possibly Howie Hanson's blog. We'll see.

Last night and tonight were pretty good group bonding times. I learned quickly that I have not yet acquired the taste for wine (so you don't have to worry about me taking advantage of being over the legal drinking age), but it was fun to spend time just talking to the other people on the trip. I can tell that this is a really good group of people and we are going to have a lot of fun.

That's it for now. I'm tired. Catch up with you all again soon!!