Post-postdated: New Year's in Prague

So I've been postponing writing this one because I really wanted to write it while it was still fresh and I'm lazy and pffbt. So, okay. New Year's in Prague!

Have I told you yet how gorgeous Prague is? Because, oh my goodness, it's lovely, and I want to learn Czech now because it seems like a really fun language, and I've been derping out over it. I got back on the third (so it's been almost a week since I got back and don't judge me), and I finally got my pictures onto my computer on the fourth, which means that they're now on Flickr.

New Year's Eve/Silvester (depending on your religious leanings and what country you're in; for me, I celebrated Silvestr; no 'e') was gorgeous. I was invited by a friend to a party hosted by one of her friends, and took American-style fried chicken (at request) which, apparently, everyone loved, which is a relief, since I don't really eat meat, and I was incredibly worried it wouldn't be cooked enough. We all had a very good time and played a game something like a mix between Pictionary and charades, where instructions were written on cards (in English, thankfully), and you had to do things like, "Act out a city" or "draw a specific kind of flower" and your teammate had to guess it. Our team names came in multiple languages across the board, and we ended up playing and chilling and chatting until the final countdown started.

Oh man. The countdown wasn't much to look at, but once the fireworks started going?

We were far enough out that you could see the whole city centrum from the terrace, and we looked down and it was like the city exploded with fireworks. They were everywhere.

Those were just the views from the flat where the party was happening. All day, 31 December, the fireworks had been popping in the streets and people had been drinking and celebrating, and suddenly, everything was exploding. It's possibly the most beautiful New Year's fireworks I've ever seen, and I was distant enough from them to appreciate the beauty without the sound.

Around 12:30, I was asked if I wanted to go out with everyone, and I said, "sure," because, to be honest, I wasn't quite sure what they meant by going out. Apparently, as I discovered, they meant go out and climb this (largely-vandalized) medieval (probably; I've only seen it at night) tower to see if we could see any more fireworks. It was lovely. My friend and I spent the time comparing the names of the constellations in our languages. Big Dipper as opposed to the Great Wagon (I looked it up, after we tried to figure it out); Orion's belt being the same, &c.

We all finally went to bed around 5, having cleaned up some (not all) of our mess, and my friend and I caught the bus back around 11.

On New Year's Day, there were more fireworks near the National Theater, and some friends and I stood on the banks of the Vltava and watched those fireworks, which were just as lovely, but were much more coordinated than the fireworks of the night before:

And you can click on any of those pictures to be taken to the page on Flickr and see it at a larger size.

I think I forgot to post here about my hiking to Kutná Hora and trip to Kostnice, so I'll probably make another post tomorrow to do a quick sum-up of that, too. 

In die Tschechien

I wish you could see this.

The night sky in der Tschechien is so full of light and life. Prague is beautiful so close to Christmas and Silvester, when everyone is visiting their families or being visited, in these months halfway out of the dark of winter, and yet, there is still so much life in them. Everyone walks stiff and fast, in a hurry to not be where they are more than to get somewhere, but it is interesting how small their steps are.

They walk with reserve and self-containment. I wonder indeed about the nightlife. How far down do they let their hair? Are they scared, even, of joy? The smiles here are brief, and earned; it is not like Americans, who give smiles like they give glances. None of the bold, nonspecific curiosity here. Look ahead, make no eye contact, walk quickly. There is a hurry to them.

I wonder if I could learn Czech, to be honest. What is another language but a new puzzle to solve?

I see myself in a city like this, living well, using my minimal knowledge of the language to isolate myself into my work; to encourage me to write. The last two years of my life have emphasized the importance of well-earned solitude and its untold benefits. The focus of a bare room and plenty of unused conversation for thinking alone can develop one's language and philosophic skills well.

Ah, but what am I saying? I'm obviously talking to you.

Still, this rainy winter that's followed me from Alabama through Europe suits me well enough. It reminds me of home. I miss my cat and my bed, but at least I have my soggy weather.

I have learned a few words of Czech, though. My dad had made it sound like it would be so difficult, but it's a language, like any other, with pieces to assemble. We'll see if I can construct a sentence by the end of the week, huh?

At least, I can say some things. A is "and"; az is "when"; libi is "I like" and libî is "you like." Well, I think so, anyway. I guess I need to pay closer attention to the single words so I can learn them like the other languages.

My German is likely improving, though I still make the excuse of hardly knowing any. It's just best if I don't oversell my modest abilities. Still, my memorization skills have proven amusing. Already, I've memorized a few passwords and landmarks and faces. it's always the names that present the most trouble. I must find some way to counter that.

Safe travels, dear reader!

Final post: How to acquire a Greek grandmother and her Greek pie dough ('pita') recipe

I'm back in the States, and have been for over thirty-six hours now. Aside from suffering exhaustion, jetlag, and a weird adjustment to corn syrup and MSG (both of which I got completely unaccustomed to while in Greece), the trip was fantastic. We spent our final few days in Pefkohori, after leaving Litochoro. I can't even count the number of awesome places, restaurants, people, and foods I've seen, having been here. It'd be too large a list.

Being back in the States (staying for a few days at Adam's parents' house) has been strange. I had gotten so used to largely broken English and saying things in Greek (not much; just the little I did learn), that it's surreal to be back where everyone can understand me. The last few days in Pefkohori, we were too busy for me to take any pictures, since that's where our final assignment was due, but trust me: it's gorgeous. Where we stayed, we were right on the beach at Adrianna Suites and Apartments, which are also rather nice. The apartment itself came with a hotplate, dishes, silverware, and a fridge, so my roommates and I had a racket going with a kick-in of five Euros a meal. It certainly cut off most of the price of food, and we still had leftovers.

But as far as Pefkohori goes, Adrianna, the woman who owns the Apartments and Suites we were occupying, was fantastic. Even after some of my classmates decided that loudly running around like drunken five-year-olds at three in the morning our first night there, she gave us tyropita and saw us off at three in the morning the day we left.

Aside from giving our group tyropita, she gave my roommates and I a box-worth of tyropita to take with us on our flights, and a recipe for the -pita part of tyropita (cheese pie; tyros is cheese, roughly transliterated) which involves no standard measurements. It was a beautiful eleven-o'-clock PM moment, before my groggy-eyed teacher came to the suites to make sure none of my classmates had decided to relive the first night in Pefkohori. Once she got there, we were instructed to take ourselves to bed, as this was, apparently, not the appropriate time for making pita. I intend to email her for the rest of the recipe, since she knows English, and I am fairly certain she'd be willing to give me the recipe in the end.

In any case, once I got through customs and to Birmingham Int'l, I had traveled 20 hours from Greece to the US. All in all, though, I feel the best night of the trip was learning Greek and a recipe from a woman who barely understood English on our last night in the country. Really, it was a fitting end. Thera, Oia, Athens, Sounion, Corinth, Nafplio, Mycenae, Epidauros, Olympia, Naupactus, Delphi, Thermopylae, Meteora, Litochoro, Dion, Vergina, Pefkohori, and then, finally, home, to my cat, and my job, and my normal life.

It's been a good month.

Surprise Cherries! Oh boy!

Climbing Metéora:

I am in a video game.

I’m riding a bus through one of those places so majestic and fantastic, it must be fake. Rocks the size of colossi or dragons spring from the middle of tree-covered mountains. I have never been so afraid of stalling out in my life. It would be a quick-time event to try and throw myself out of the fire escape hatch into the tumbling scrub brush and forest below, then I’d spend the rest of the game limping through some lost civilization, an offshoot of the Mayans, before waking up in a hospital, being told it was all a dream.

In the sequel, I would go back, and find out that the doctors had lied. I would be forced to find the civilization, which, between this game and the previous one, had been destroyed. I would seek my revenge against the logging companies or something, like a twisted Ferngully gone ape-shit.

* * * * *

An hour later, Metéora behind us, the Greek countryside rolls past as large, rocky hills (or small mountains?); foothills of the Parnassus, I think. We’re arriving in Litochoro in an hour, or something like that. We climbed up the rocks at Metéora to see a beautiful view; it would be a spiritual experience for almost anyone. Fairy-tale woods where Snow White’s heart was cut out, and emerging from them onto a dragon spine in the middle of the sun’s heat versus a cool breeze chilling the sweat on your forehead and the back of your neck, which prickles in response to the cold. A one-foot-wide ledge and some beauty in terror later; I kept thinking something like a rock-slide would happen. But just beauty, I could see why someone would come out here for monastic solitude; there is a peace in these rocks and their caves and footholds.

This land is so varied; like people, it wears many faces. Mountains, valleys, vast farms, unworkable moors, harbors and waterlogged rivers, and places so dry, you shrivel like a snail in salt. Graffiti is thrown onto every unpainted or neglected surface, most of it poorly made, some of it really beautiful. Greece needs more graffiti artists with quality – there aren’t enough.

Delphi was… well, it was tiny. And expensive. And full of tourists (don’t get me wrong: tourism’s alright... But do we all have to hit the same towns at the same time?) Half of the stores here in Greece are labeled “eco-friendly” and half of them don’t even try. Because they just are. A/C? Open windows. Heat? Firewood. Most of the homes even have one or two solar panels outside. And then we come here and dirty their beaches, feed their strays, and buy their gimmicky t-shirts and souvenirs in every city.

* * * * *

So I got my days wrong. But I did hike [part-]way up Mt. Olympus. Katie and I wandered along every little trail that made us curious, including a trail that we found out (about ten feet down) was not a trail… Mount Olympus was gorgeous… After arriving in Lotochoro last night around 7 PM local time (11 AM central standard), we went to dinner and relaxed and turned in our homework.

But dinner… we went to a place that insisted on giving us three different desserts (ice cream pop, cherries, and cake, made by the sister of the owner), all of which were a surprise, but very good. I didn’t catch the name of the place, but they wear pink polos as a uniform. Anyway, good food, great people, very nice. The condos we’re staying in are gorgeous, and I have a room overlooking the rose garden. Everyone was confused why we were so happy to have a room on the same floor as the garden… I’m not really sure why. I’ve washed all my clothes, so they should last me the next (and final) five days of the trip. It’s weird to think how quickly it’s gone by. In a week, I’ll be back in the States, adjusting to my old time.

Anyway, Litochoro. Tonight, dinner was at a place called Papy’s, which was good. They don’t have any vegetarian dishes… I got souvlaki and a beer for 4 euros total, and that was good enough for me. It may have been less than that, but we’re not sure. Climbing up Olympus was fun, though. From where we were, we kept hearing/seeing (alternately) the river running between the mountains, and horseflies, butterflies, columbine-like flowers clinging to the rocks and slope, lichens…

We had to get there. So we kept climbing (we started at 9:30 AM) until around noon, when we ate at a bench on the path, and then turned around, found a path (or… well, what we thought was a path) down, and started slipping and controlled-sliding down the side of the mountain. We weren’t even really that sure that we’d get to a place where we could jump in, but we figured we had to try, because the water was so clear and looked so cool, compared to the hot sun beating down on us.

I was so close to the edge in some of the places. This was a rock we climbed to (and yeah, that's an almost sheer drop; note the river winding through):

So ten minutes after first starting down, we see what looks like a clear path to some rocks in the shade on the edge of the water. We get there, realize we want to jump in, and don’t want to fully saturate our jeans and t-shirts. So we went without. Which… well, probably was a mistake. The water was freezing. I mean, melted snow from the top of the mountain, freezing. It was so cold. And, surprisingly, there were water striders, and tadpoles the size of dimes with tails (as well as one fully-grown frog that was chilling on a rock and we hadn’t noticed), a few fish, and some teenage Greek boys who decided to come over and hit on us...

Hormones are the same in every country.

The oldest of them was sixteen, and probably knew English the best out of the group (or was the leader, or babysitting the younger ones), though his English was as broken as all the Greek I know. He ended up showing us a quicker way out (and in, really) of the area where we were, which led straight back to the way we’d come before going on the upper trail.

It was all a little surreal.

It was all really fun, though.

Also, spider nest:

Those Greeks really knew what to do in a zombie apocalypse.

This is why I'm LOVING the Mediterranean and surrounding waters.

Today was the last day in Nafplio.

It feels as though it’s been months since I have seen the states, but really, I wouldn’t mind living here, learning the language, and making my way through Greece. Or, really, all Europe, for that matter. It’s not that I think a gypsy lifestyle would be idyllic; more that I think I could make it here, if I worked a lot of dead end waitressing jobs and lived in low-income housing until I wrote or painted or created a masterpiece.

Today was the last day in Nafplio, and the first in which we visited the beach. It was a stone beach (unlike the black sand on Santorini), and the water was so clear that you could see where the shelf dropped off into sea. Adriatic, I think. I’m not certain. I could smell the salty water, and there were few enough people that we could lounge without even having to try and find the best place to enjoy the beauty of it (and it was probably not even the length of a football field).

The stones looked like they were made of marble (which wouldn’t surprise me) and we had to do a little bit of adventuring the figure out the right way to go, anyway. We ended up sidling along a wall on the way back (on the way there, we took a longer way), like in the video games, and found a snail graveyard full of gorgeous shells (none of which I grabbed because I was more afraid of them breaking.)

After which we passed Antica Gelateria di Roma (a fantastic gelateria in Nafplio; I highly recommend it if you ever go) and grabbed what may be my last gelato of the trip (though, considering, I did have it three days in a row); and around 10:30 we left for Olympia.

Which is… well, it’s like every other place in Greece, except with more seclusion. It’s beautiful, with flowers everywhere and flower petals dying in the streets, motorcyclists and tourists and camera shops and tall, slim evergreens. Tile roofs and stucco walls, restaurants that sell Traditional Greek Food! and No Service Charge (which is a lie, because the bread they bring to your table isn’t free). It’s beautiful, and it’s fun, and, today, at least, it’s empty. I walked through streets and could feel the silence in the stores. One of the shop owners followed us into his own store as we perused the different restaurants (eventually stopping in Zeus, which was the cheapest, and had Serbia-Ghana on the TV); that’s how empty it is.

Serbia lost. 1-0, Ghana.

I really want to watch Up again…

Alright.
So.
My last post was a little sparse, prior to the photographs, and even then, the photographs were just a dump of pictures from the past few days. So here I sit in Nafplio, having just reached our hotel, not yet gone to dinner, but having already gone and put my stuff in my room. Probably too many participles in that sentence... Anyway, it's gorgeous here, our hotel is on the coast; I'll get pictures on here later. (Here is a link about it: http://www.allgreecetravel.com/peloponnese/agamemnon_hotel_nafplion.asp)

Today, on the ride from Athens to Nafplio, we stopped in Corinth, and visited the old Greek/Roman agora/forum, then visited Acrocorinth (where there is a medieval castle built around the old acropolis), which was entertaining. You can see the whole isthmus from some of the heights around there, and I did get pictures to make into a panorama, so I'll put that up later as well.

We went to Sounion from Athens last night, and watched a gorgeous sunset from the place where Aegeus is said to have jumped into the sea, giving the Aegean its name. Look it up; it has to do with Theseus betraying his father (I.M.O.) and dumping the woman who saved his ass on Naxos. Just saying.

Anyway, Sounion was gorgeous:

Yeah. Seriously. So pretty. I need to check my saturation on one of those images, because I can barely see anything on my computer screen right now if it isn't black and white, but I'll be working on that tonight, and then remedying the situation.

The breeze here off the sea is great, and it smells of salt water.

Oh!

Details on Santorini that I never gave:

Okay, so I ended up involved in a donkey race, because I rode a donkey up the caldera from the harbor (Santorini is made up of a few islands, because of a 17th century B.C. volcano) and another of the girls on the trip was on a donkey that we're pretty sure was my donkey's brother, which led to a nine-donkey race up the mountain, which I won; it was highly entertaining, because all the donkeys really knew the way already, and, as Dr. Summers said, "They have to find ways of entertaining themselves!"

As far as the hot springs, I don't have any pictures because we had to swim probably a few hundred feet from the boat to reach them, but I was the first off the boat, leaping into the Mediterranean feet-first. As I pushed my head above water, someone asked me how it was; about the temperature of a nice pool in summer, really; "Salty!" I replied before swimming to the muddy waters of the springs, which were about the temperature of a warm bath. The mud was so nice; I want some for my garden. You can tell it was full of all sorts of healthy nutrients for plants and people alike. Actually, while we were there, there were some goats on the cliffs above the springs, looking down at us, and one which we were encouraging to dive headfirst into the spring. I'd have applauded the little guy.

The volcano was... well, it was a volcano. It was inactive at the moment, so it was mostly just fertile rocks with some flowers nudged in between. Otherwise, it was pretty dull. But cool.

Now it's time for dinner.

I'll get back with you later.

Picture dump:

Oia

Oia

You can see old Athens from here!

I want one of these owls...

lolwut?