kiwi unexpectedly goes greek.

So I guess I owe anyone still reading this some sort of finale. Anything that happened after my last blogs was uneventful. The plane ride home was the most arduous trek of the trip (yes, yes: I’ll climb mountains and castles without so much as a grumble, but leave me in the air for 11 hours and I will cry.) I had incredible ear pressure pain when we landed in Newark, which made the whole journey home terrible. The only consolation that I received upon landing were the Greek tourists in our plane: they looked out the windows expecting their magical first glimpses of America, and were immediately met with a panoramic view of factories and congested highways. Welcome to New Jersey!

Saying goodbye to everyone on the trip was incredibly difficult. We were all heading to the airport at different times and heading to different destinations across the US, so we were hectic and scattered, but sad. It’s always the most difficult thing for me to spend every waking minute with a group of people for such a long time and then suddenly leave them all indefinitely.

So the plane ride was terrible. They messed up my food again, but I didn’t even care. They eventually fixed it and I got double portions. Which, depending on your interpretations of airplane food, could be a blessing or a curse. I spent a lot of time coloring. The in-flight movie feature was Pocahontas. AGAIN. Really?

Going home was weird. I was anxious and crabby for days, because I always get weird when I get home from places. I mean, my culture shock is always worse coming home than it is going, but I just like being left alone when I’m exhausted from a trip (or even a day out), and it’s the least conducive thing when friends and family are all fired up to hear every single detail of such a long journey. But being home now is okay. I’m trying to focus on getting ready to get back to regular school classes so that I’ll be back on a rigorous routine again.

Thank you to everyone who has followed this blog, from anywhere you are in the world. I’ll keep you updated on my future travels- because there certainly will be many more to come!

Details later.

The last few days have been pretty relaxing. We’ve taken our free days to explore the more modern side of Athens. Heidi organized two optional field trips that a few of us jumped on: touring the National War Museum (thousands of years of battle? Awesome.) and the Painting Gallery (all Greek artists, throughout the years.) At the War Museum, the guards gave us tons of free merch, which made all of us insanely happy. Last night was Pasta Night. We have basically been talking about making a group pasta dinner for weeks now, but the other day I bought pounds of Dora the Explorer and Spongebob shaped macaroni, and we decided to cook everything up all at once. We went to the supermarket in the morning and goofed off there for awhile. We bought all kinds of crappy products (that we definitely didn’t need) to enhance our dinner: nachos, nacho cheese, banana and strawberry jellos. After the supermarket trip, we went back to fix up our jello. One would think that making jello is the simplest of all food preparations, but we could not figure out how to do it. The instructions were like, pages in Greek. And the measurements were all bizarre. (Oh, metric.) We also didn’t have any standard sized bowls. We Googled jello preparations, and found an extremely pretentious jello recipe site that claimed all kinds of problems that could (and certainly would) arise if the jello was not constructed with exact precision. This made us incredibly nervous. Eventually we decided that it was worth the gamble to just eyeball all the measurements and hope for the best. Skip ahead about six hours: the jello was amazing. I have never had jello so rewarding. Eventually we cooked up about six pounds of pasta, which is about as superfluous and ridiculous as it sounds. It was absolutely insane. Anyway, we basically all hung out all day, which is only going to add to our inevitable separation anxiety tomorrow, when we leave.

Today are our exams: most of the crew is taking only the history portion, and a few of us are going through with taking the Modern Greek exam in hopes of gaining some credit for that too. Apparently doing well on the Greek exam takes us one step closer to getting credit for the class, but doing poorly won’t affect anything. I wish every class was like that. After the exams we’re going to the market to pick up last minute things for home. Tonight, we have a group dinner similar to our orientation dinner on the first night. (AKA, Rutgers is footing the bill, and we’re all going to jump on that.) Somewhere in the middle, we’ll be packing and wishing we weren’t leaving. We’re all obviously a little excited to go home, but we’ll miss the dynamic of being here. In case I don’t get a chance to write anything more before I’m home: Greece, you have treated us well. Consider yourself taken.

Today was one of the most adventurous and exciting days that I’ve had so far in this trip. A group of us decided to use our day off to go back to Corinth, and climb a massive mountain (Acro Corinth) to get to the castle on top. We left early this morning, because we needed to take tons of transportation to get there: we walked to the metro, took the metro to the train station, took the train to Corinth, and a taxi to Acro Corinth. As soon as we got in to Corinth, we saw how overwhelmingly cool the mountain was. We started up it, and we stopped at all kinds of cool alcoves and ancient monuments as they came along. We goofed off and took pictures and played around in the rocks. Basically, all of the fun stuff that we generally don’t have the opportunity to do when we’re on a tight school schedule at these sites. We trekked through the paths as well as some of the wild terrain. After descending, we caught a cab to the modern city of Corinth. We walked around for a bit, grabbed lunch, and toured the place at our own pace. Then we had to get a cab back to the train, and the train back to Athens, and a subway back to near us. It was a crazy day, public transportation-wise. But the mountain was awesome and we all agreed that it was a trip well worth taking. It was seriously a great experience. I will try to get pictures up right now!