Churches, churches, and more churches

After an early flight from Athens, we landed in Rome at the Fiumicino Airport. Upon our arrival, we purchased train tickets to Roma Termini. Our train arrived at the station as we were receiving our tickets, so we had to run to the train. We were lucky that everyone was able to squeeze onto the train because it was going to leave without us.

After a filling buffet, the guys and I met the class in the hotel lobby for a short church walk. I do not remember the names of all of the churches because I visited around 30 churches during my time in Rome. The churches that we visited on our first day in Rome were filled with intricate details worthy of exhibits in museums. When I was taking the course, I believed that the Sistine Chapel was going to have the most impressive artwork, but the proximity I achieved in these churches made them feel more detailed.

Missing the Birthplace of Democracy

Athens was largely an adventure filled with historic sites and buildings of incredible size and engineering. Our first tour was with a guide named Barbara. She knew how to provide us with an abundance of information as well as keep the sites interesting. We visited sites such as the Temple of Zeus and the Panathenaic Stadium. The seating in the stadium was incredibly strange; the people, on average, were shorter than us, but their stairs are much steeper than what is common now. The chairs for royalty and the wealthy were not as comfortable as the seating for the less fortunate. The Temple of Zeus was my first experience with the incredibly large buildings from the past. I expected them to be impressive, but I could not have prepared for the staggering height of the columns. They are astoundingly heavy, but they are also absurdly powerful because they held up a once great roof as well.

Our second tour guide in Athens was a woman named Nani. She was a nice woman, but she was not the most interesting tour guide. The information she provided was fascinating, but she had a habit of speaking for extensive periods of time. Her heart was in the right place, but she had us stop on the busiest set of stairs to the Acropolis. When asked if we could not stop here, she retorted with something along the lines of, “I guess you don’t want to see the birthplace of democracy,” and we kept moving. We felt bad because we knew she was passionate about her country, but she chose a poor place to attempt to educate us.

First Day in Athens, Greece

The first day was spent in Athens, Greece, and I was trying to get acclimated to being in a different country. I arrived with around two hours to explore the city. The streets that I explored were covered in graffiti. In a way it was beautiful; it is not typical to see so much public graffiti in the United States. We met in the lobby for a short discussion of our plans for the night, and we left to find a place to eat. After many restaurants offering us menus and coupons, we found a restaurant with a rooftop view of the Acropolis. In the first hour of the class trip, we were introduced to the incredibly aggressive sales techniques of the Greeks; shop keepers would yell to us from across the street, restaurant employees would complement us in an attempt to persuade us, and people would walk alongside us to try to sell us their wares.

We had a diverse meal that started with bread and vegetables and finished with fish, veal, or calamari depending on what we ordered. A few of us were brave and ordered different juices; Jackson found out the hard way that the Greek interpretation of apple juice is more like apple sauce than juice, and Audrey discovered that lemonade was nothing more than the tart juice from freshly squeezed lemons.

By the time the day was over, I was excited because I had not slept for a period of over 30 hours. I was asleep before I could made contact with the bed.