Catching up...

I can't believe I've been here for over a week. It feels like months with all of the places we have traveled to and seen.
To recap:

The overnight ferry ride to Crete was eventful to say the least. :) It was a very large boat and I enjoyed exploring the different compartments of the ship with my roommate. There was one lounge where everyone was smoking and I had to hold my breath every time I walked through because there was no clean air. All of the smoking is one of the things I just can't seem to get used to in Greece. While on the boat, we even discovered a Disco Lounge, but I didn’t stay up long enough to find out if that’s where all the cool people hang out. ;) We had a small cabin with four bunk beds and I slept alright through part of the night until the boat started rocking heavily back and forth. Being on the top bunk, I woke up with every roll of the boat because I thought I was falling off the bed. I managed to get some sleep, though, and in the morning (6AM to be exact) we disembarked and headed to the Suda Bay Cemetery (one of the few things open at that time of day). This place commemorated and housed the soldiers who died during WWII at the Battle of Crete in 1941. There is certainly something sobering about waking up early in the morning and encountering the reality of death. What was so increasingly overwhelming for me was not the sheer number of graves (over 1500) or the people who had died there, but rather the gravestones particularly of those they could not identify. Inscribed at the bottom of the marker were the words “KNOWN UNTO GOD” and I couldn’t help but weep at the beauty of these words. It may have been my surroundings, the context, or the situation, but there was something about those words that just rang true in my spirit. Whoever this person was, his life experiences, his actions, his thoughts were so remote from myself and this place in time, and yet it was comforting to realize that he was known by God. I’m not sure if I can even convey what I experienced, but I had a moment in that cemetery that shifted my perspective. That had to be the highlight of my day even though we spent the rest of the day traveling and exploring more neat sites and museums.

Sunday our group went to the famous palace of Knossos. For those of you who don’t know, this place was an important city center during the Minoan civilization and is a hotspot of much controversy because one of the earlier archaeologists (Sir Arthur Evans) restored a large portion of the site. So instead of seeing nostalgic ruins and rocks, you get restorations of his guesses about what the site might have looked like. Being a visual person I could appreciate the impression he was trying to convey about the grandeur and sophistication of the peoples who lived there, but I think he may have done more harm than good. It was neat to walk around the place, though… it was more like an archaeological theme park. ;)

Now that we've been traveling to the west side of Crete, it has been nonstop hiking! I think my professor doesn't feel we've had a successful day until we've done five sites by noon. Not true, but it has been exhausting! :) I mostly sleep on the bus every chance I got. One of the first sites we went to was up a mountainside. The bus dropped us off at the bottom of the mountain and then we piled into the back of a caravan of trucks to take us up the rest of the mountain. From there we hiked to the archaeological site. On this occasion, I stumbled upon an interesting piece of pottery. We're not allowed to pick anything up (or take anything) from the sites, so if we see something, we have to just point and and ask our guide or professor. When I mentioned that I found something that might be of interest, the archaeologist who ran the site picked up the piece and started laughing hysterically. I got extremely embarrassed all of a sudden and thought that I had mistaken something modern for ancient and so he was laughing at me. Turns out it was a broken piece of pottery that is part of an ancient "colander" or strainer of some sort. No one knows really what it's used for but they find them in rooms that are used as kitchens. So, I happened upon something that was common, but interesting (I'll post the picture once I get it from my classmate!). What made us more intense archaeologists was that we had to take a boat to the (now) island of Mochlos and we got a tour of the dig that was currently going on. We walked around the different trenches and the archaeologists were showing us the interesting things they were uncovering. It was super neat! :)

Everywhere we go, I keep marveling at how beautiful everything is. There is beautiful water in almost every direction. And yesterday, we finally got a chance to enjoy it. My classmates and I went for a swim at the beach near our hotel. It was AMAZING! I bought a cheap-o frisbee at a store nearby and we tossed it around some. All in all, a fabulous way to end the day.

Today we also did a ton of hiking and exploring different sites, but my favorite part of the day was just relaxing at the beach and enjoying dinner with friends. I'm enjoying it here, but I miss you all. I hope you all are doing well. I would love to hear from you!

I'll try to be better at keeping up with the blog. Until next time!