The sacred mountains

After our class tour of Athens, complete with presentations, long walks uphill and a few failed dinner plans, Chandra and I headed to Delphi.

Once we finally found the bus station, we boarded the sketchiest bus ever. On the way to the bus station I practiced saying Delphi in Greek. It’s pronounced “thel-fon,” like saying “cell phone” with a lisp. Luckily, I never had to embarrass myself because it only takes one bus to get to Delphi and it’s all quite straight forward (we began to appreciate this more once we tried to get to Corinth and Olympia… more on this later!)

We arrived in Delphi as the sun was beginning to set. Over the mountains. It was, from the first moment, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

We checked into our hotel, then spent the next hour or so chasing the sunset. I wanted to get the perfect picture, and we were willing to risk asp-filled fields to get it! How many times will you get a chance to take a photo of Delphi at sunset?

I was waiting for the sun to disappear behind the mountain… Finally, it did.

As I stood, awed and amazed, I realized that I had never really been to place with mountains like these. They made the most beautiful shades of blues I have ever seen.

We ate dinner at a restaurant overlooking the sunset. It was perfect. We stayed in the best hotel of the trip. And the next morning we found out that it’s just as beautiful during the day.

We went to the archaeological site for the day. Delphi was the most important Panhellenic (which means that Greeks from all city states could worship there) sanctuary in Classical Greece. It was a sacred oracle dedicated to Apollo. If you had an question about your future, you could ask the Pythia, beautiful young priestesses who would tell you the word of Apollo. Of course, like most oracles, it’s all about interpretation.

It’s not hard to understand why the Greeks would find this site sacred.

Because of Delphi’s status - both as an important sanctuary and as neutral ground for all Greeks - it eventually became a very important place to control. The Athenians used it as their main treasury when they formed the Delian League (a united Greece under the rule of Athens), and many city states built treasuries or dedications on the site to show their wealth or power.

Delphi really was one of the most stunning places I’ve ever visited, historically and geographically - though I’d argue that, like much of the ancient world, Delphi’s importance is undeniably linked to its geography.

Geek break!

We now take a break from our scheduled programming to bring you a special segment on Geekery.

I got a blog award! And not just any blog award, but a Geeky one. And not just any Geeky award, but a girly one, too. So great!

Eleni, my awesome geeky friend over at RPG Called Life, awarded me this the other day:

Which makes me so happy, because 1) Eleni is an awesome geeky girl whose blog I love and 2) I am a geek and proud of it!

The rules:
List ten geeky facts about yourself and…
Pass this award onto your favorite female geeks!

1. I met four of my best friends online, through various RPG clubs based on the Tamora Pierce books that I read when I was a pre-teen. I was obsessed with these books and spent a lot of my time writing and talking about them with Fae, Ali, Kitty and Lea. I wanted them to be real. Hell, I still want them to be real. And Fae and I still write using characters that trace back to those books original.

2. I speak a bit of Quenya (a Tolkien Elvish language) with Fae. We used to know more, because we wrote characters who spoke it. Now we just speak it to each other - our conversations, emails and letters nearly always end with “Namaarie melamin vanima” (”Farewell my love, beautiful [Fae]“) or “Amin mela lle”(”I love you”).

3. I can recite the entire Rent soundtrack from beginning to end. I’m obsessed with musicals - particularly Rent, Wicked, Spring Awakening and Aida.

4. I am a huge Diablo II freak. I love that game and have spent many, many nights playing multiplayer with my friend Kaitlyn. I also loved Neverwinter Nights, but my computer wasn’t good enough to run it. I recently became obsessed with Fable II. I love fantasy rpgs.

5. I correct people’s grammar and spelling constantly. In person and on Facebook. Also, one time I was bored an took a red pen and corrected all the sentence structure errors in our local newspaper. It was appalling. There are few things in life that make me as happy as a red pen and someone else’s hard work.

6. I watched all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 and all five of Stargate Atlantis between September and December of last year.

7. I’m a huge history Greek. I’ve studied Greek and Latin (albeit poorly). I’ve read most of the Greek and Latin authors (Homer, Ovid, Seneca, Aeschylus, Plautus, Herodotus, etc.) I can go on for ages about mythology.

8. I was a huge Pokemon fan as a kid. Enough said.

9. I once had a conversation with Chandra about the Julio-Claudian dynasty as we were getting ready for the day, before 9am. I know this is similar to #7, but it’s too good of an example.

10. My favourite part of working in a museum was dressing up in the period costumes. I firmly believe that I was born in the wrong time period. I also love Renn Faires and anything else that involves dressing up and pretending.

And now I want to award this to:

My friend Kitty, who I mentioned in #1, who is a fellow fantasy geek and classicist.

The Chris from Always Standing, who plays WOW, among other geeky things.

My Faerie, fellow Elvish speaker who loves all the geeky things I do, plus comics and more video games.

Also, if you haven’t read it yet, read why I think Geeky girls are so awesome: Top Ten Reasons to Love a Geeky Girl.

The labyrinth city

One of the main reasons I chose Newcastle for my MA was the two study trips with Greek and Roman Archaeology. In January, we went to Rome for four days. The planned trip to Greece was only Athens for two days, but since I have dreamed of visiting Greece since I was a six year old reading mythology picture books, I had to see more than just Athens.

And so, Chandra and I planned a ten day trip designed to see as much of Greece as possible - and still spend a bit of time in the sun.

The first place we went was Crete. We flew from Manchester to Heraklion, the modern city from which you can visit ancient Knossos.

Instead of staying in the city, we stayed outside at a nice little hotel with a pool and a short walk to the beach. After all, us Canadians (pale as we might be) are used to a warm summer that we’re fairly certain not to get in the Northeast of England this year, so we had to get some much needed Vitamin D while we could.

Our first discovery from Greece was the wonderful food:

And a beer named Mythos, which is like, perfect!

The next day we headed into Heraklion to find our way to Knossos, the ruins of the legendary Minoan city that dates back to about 1700 BCE. It’s the famous city of King Minos and the Minotaur, of the Labyrinth built by Daedalus. It was excavated by the infamous Sir Arthur Evans, starting in about 1900 CE.

And why is Evans infamous?

It has to do with both archaeological theory and the ethics of restoration. Evans restored and reconstructed a number of buildings on the site, something that no archaeologist would dare to do nowadays. It wasn’t long before his British colleagues were pronouncing the reconstructions as wrong. To this day, Evans is used as a bad example in archaeology textbooks.

But the people of Crete see Evans in a different light. Unlike many of the antiquarian archaeologists of the early 20th century, Evans didn’t expropriate the artefacts from Knossos to a fancy cabinet of curiosities in England. He left the site and all its finds to the people of Crete. So they kind of love him.

Part of me disagrees with Evans’ reconstructions, but the other part of me recognizes that it makes the site a hell of a lot more interesting to visit. And to take photos of. Like our tour guide said, it’s easy to imagine yourself back in ancient Knossos.

After an educational morning, we retired to spend our next day and a half on the beach and swimming in the Sea of Crete.

Greece is officially my favourite holiday spot because you get archaeology and history and sun and sand.

You’re so vain

This post is about me.

Okay, ALL posts are about me, in some way. It’s my blog, after all.

But this is a different sort of vain self-indulgence.

Yesterday, my friend Chandra and I went to get our hair done. As part of the package they also did our makeup and took some “glamour shots,” of sorts.

We weren’t too sure about it. We’re both sort of awkward in front of cameras unless it’s what we call a “stuck at the head” shot, where one of us is holding the camera at arm’s length and taking our picture where we look like siamese twins attached at the head.

But I think they turned out quite well.

And my beautiful friend Chandra:

And, of course, after being serious for like an hour, we revert to our natural state:

Number 94 on my list of 100 things is “Pose nude.” Who knows when that will happen, but at least now I have some beautiful pictures while clothed!

War stories

I’ve been a bit lax on posting about the book I’ve been reading for my 50 books in a year, but I read two books back to back a couple of weeks ago that formed a post in my head from the beginning.

I started off by reading The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I know, you’re surprised I never read it before, right? It wasn’t required for school and the Second World War isn’t generally my thing. But it’s like, a classic, so you have to read it eventually, right?

Also, Chandra bought it because she’d never read it. Then she handed it to me in class and said she’d finished reading it quickly so that I could read it after her, like we’d talked about. So I started reading it.

The next book I read, immediately afterward, was The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I bought it a while ago, on recommendation from Fae. I didn’t really realize, as I sat down on an EasyJet flight to Paris, that I was about to start reading the second book about the Second World War in as many weeks.

“They’re strange, those wars. Full of blood and violence - but also full of stories that are equally difficult to fathom.” - The Book Thief

I think these are the only books I’ve ever read about the Second World War. Truly, my love of history stops at about 500 CE and starts up again during the Cold War. Nothing had ever brought the World Wars to life for me, really. It was all a blur of battles and mud and air strikes and assasinations. There were no faces to the stories, no names to the tragedies.

I think that’s probably why a lot of people are forced to read Anne Frank in school.

I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoyed The Diary of a Young Girl, per se. It dragged on in lots of parts, and I wasn’t terribly interested in how much a 13 year old girl hates her mother. But it was undeniably real. It was the real voice of a real girl and the horrible things she had to go through. And even the parts that were annoying were real. It was her life. And sometimes it was horrible and terrifying and other times it was so shockingly normal.

I only picked out one quote from The Diary of a Young Girl.

“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”

It’s pretty powerful to think of a quote like that coming from a girl who spent more than a year in hiding above a warehouse, hoping for the end of a war.

The Book Thief, on the other hand, was entirely fictitious, but also very poignant. And much better written, no offense to Anne. I adored The Book Thief. It was a truly unique book. It’s told from the perspective of Death, watching over a girl called Liesel, who encounters him a number of times. It’s full of really interesting foreshadowing, intertextuality and interesting devices like pictures and short lists. The style is very interesting, and being narrated by Death means that it has a lot of really great one liners, my favourite.

“It’s the leftover humans. The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions, I still fail.”

“When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when the books and the words started not just to mean something, but everything.”

“It’s hard not to like a man who not only notices the colours, but speaks them.”

“Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day. That was the business of hiding a Jew.”

“It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.”

“The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words?”

I’ve had enough war stories for a while. It was pretty intense, reading these two books next to each other.