Home sweet home...

I couldn't believe how excited I was to return to Athens and back to my sweet little dorm room in Loring Hall. I did a little dance in front of my door. :) It's funny how quickly you establish a little home and a community of friends around you. I've only been in Greece for a little over ten days now and I feel like I've been here for a lifetime. I've learned so much and have made such good friends here.

Being in Crete for the past week was lovely. It was every bit as beautiful as I remembered it to be. I will admit that all of the intense hiking and standing in the sun was a bit more than I bargained for, but I got to eat some AMAZING food and explore more of the cities than I had before. Apparently, there was also something in the news about a large earthquake near Iraklion, the city we were in, but it was out in the ocean and we didn't even know it happened. So sad. :)

One of my favorite experiences of these past couple of days was visiting the site of Phaistos. It was day six of our time on Crete, so by now we had seen enough (ruins or foundations of) Minoan Palaces to satisfy even the most enthusiastic among us. So, our Professor divided us into groups and we were to explore the site and report back to the group what we observed based on our different topic (construction materials and building, topography, economy, public spaces, etc.). Being a teacher, I LOVED the new teaching method and it was much more fun to explore the site based on our knowledge than to walk around and try very hard to pay attention. :) I had a great time. I'm quickly training to become a little archaeologist (Judy, I know I'm a nerd, you don't have to comment on it after every blog ;).

Now I'm back in Athens for another week and tonight we head to the National Museum. It will be so exciting because it just opened to the public (finally!). The funny thing about the museum is that there are only part of the Parthenon Marbles there because (a long time ago) Lord Elgin took some of the Parthenon Marbles back with him to England and now they are housed in the British Museum. So, at the new National Museum, they blatantly placed up the portion they have and left the area of the "stolen" marbles empty. :) What's even funnier is that I've even seen grafitti on the street that says the marbles should be returned. Oh, Athens...

**Correction: I thought we were going to the New Acropolis Museum which is what I described above. We went to the National Museum today which has galleries and galleries of AMAZING ancient artifacts. It was a long visit, but fantastic. We'll actually go to the museum I described above in a couple of days...