Catch-up...

Hey friends! Sorry is has been a week since my last post... I found myself in a bit of a jam. The day after Delphi we went to Olympia, and ever since then my computer has been broken. It is still not fixed, but I am borrowing someone else's to send a few important emails and update this. So the computer problem... it worked fine in the morning at Olympia. I sent emails and everything was normal. Then I tried to turn it on during the bus ride to do some homework, but instead of booting up, it gave me "the blue screen of death." It said one of the Windows system files was corrupt or missing and could not load. So my dad has sent the original discs to me here in Crete and I am awaiting their arrivial with the hope that I will be able to repair the file without having to reinstall Windows thus lose all of my files.
Keep your fingers crossed for me!!

But that's not why you are reading this blog, so I will instead inform you more about my adventures in the Mediterranean. First stop after Delphi was Olympia where the ancient Olympic games were held. It was really cool for me to see this site because I wrote a speech on the ancient Olympics for school last year. We saw a few cool temple ruins and had a race in the ancient stadium.

The next day we stopped for lunch at a restaurant that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea. After eating, our group walked down to the water and played in it for about an hour. It was a bit cold (but not compared to Lake Superior!!) but fun to play in. We skipped rocks and basked in the sun, and one of the girls in our group found an octopus! It was a small octopus hanging out near the shore. She actually almost stepped on it (but luckily didn't), and so we watched that for a while, too.

That night, we stayed in Areopoli. The hotel here was amazing... it was caled Castle Mani and looked excactly like a castle. Our room was huge and the walls were made of stone and such. It was really cool.

That day, we started out by taking gondola-type boats into caves. I felt like I was Christine in Phantom of the Opera as Erik is taking her to his lair... there were stalagmites and stalactites all over and was really cool. Pictures will come once my computer is fixed and I can get them off my camera.

The plan for the afternoon was to hike to a castle that was built on a thin strip of land that jutted out into the sea and have a picnic lunch. Well we started our hike with a knowledge of the general direction of the castle, but didn't know for sure because we couldn't read the signs (there are over 25 of us by the way). We ended up taking a wrong turn and cutting our own path (do you sense a pattern?) through the bushes and shrubs in the Mani region of the Peleponese. After we reached a cliff and realized that it was not the right way to go, we began to backtrack and find the real path. Once we were on the real path, it took us about 45 minutes to hike to this castle. It was amazing... down a large mountain, across a little land, and back up the sides of this ridge to get to the ruins. There wasn't too much to look at, but it was really neat to think back about how this fortress might have looked when the buildings were all in one piece and people actually lived there. A group of us yelled "Soli Deo Gloria" (the motto of Concordia) from the cliff with the hope that we would get extra credit in Religion... but our professor sadly nixed that idea.

The next day we went to another castle ruin called Mystras. It was built into the side of a mountain (again) and we were given time to walk around and explore. At the top of this mountain inside the fortress was the "keep" (where the royalty would go in case of attack because it is the hardest place for enemy to get to without getting killed), and a group of us decided to hike to the top. There was a great view from the mountaintop and the hike wasn't nearly as rough as the one the day before (and the one from Delphi a few days before that) so it was fun.

The next day we performed our second set of scenes for theater class. They were all from Agamemnon and we performed them in the theater of Epidaurus (in the area of Greece that Agamemnon lived and ruled). That was really fun and cool, but not quite as much of an honor as the first time because the theater was open to anybody and we had to stop between nearly every scene for tour groups to come in and look around and leave. Then we saw Mycene which is an ancient civilization possibly dating back to 3,000 BC. It is where scholars and historians believe Agamemnon lived and was also buried.
That night we built sand castles because our hotel was right on the beach. Our castle was amazing... it resembled the ones that we had seen for the past few days. There were double-gates and keeps and watchtowers and everything. Again, picture to come when my computer gets fixed.

The next day we went to Corinth. This was a cool site because if you have read Acts 18 or the books 1 & 2 Corinthians, you can pick out the places in the ancient part of the city that Paul actually stayed and preached and such. We also hiked up to the acrocorinth (highest point in the city... another castle-type fortress) and walked around and explored for a few hours. I'm telling you... if my legs aren't in shape by the time I get home, there's no hope for me! Haha. But this was a cool site to see and explore.

That brings us to today. Last night we took an overnight ferry from Athens to Crete, but the boat itself was more like a cruise ship. You couldn't feel the swaying or anything, and it was a fine night. The trip was about 9 hours so we loaded at 8:30 last night and landed at 5:30 this morning. Once we got off the boat we had breakfast in the hotel we will be in for a few days and then took a bus to Knossos which is a reconstructed city on the edge of Heraklion. One man, Sir Arthur, worked with this excavation and hired a Scottish friend of his and about 500 slaves to dig the city up and help him reconstruct it. There were some pretty neat things and also a good museum.

I am sorry this entry was so long, but since we have been traveling every day for the past week and a half, we see new exciting things all of the time and they are all worth writing about. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, and I apologize that no pictures are here with the text but I promise that I am more frustrated with it than you are! I hope all of you are doing well back home... it is about 70 degrees here now, so try to stay warm back home!!