Okay! So, I shall try to bring you up to speed right quick. And... yus, pictures. Those will appear sometime eventually/maybe/hopefully. >> So last I left you, we had been to Azorias and Mochlos and were staying in Siteia. The next day we visited the Siteia Archaeological Museum, which while mostly unlabeled was still rather cool. It had this in it:

Which, admittedly, doesn't look like too much. But! It's really very cool. It's about a footish tall, and made of hippopotamous ivory, and amazingly detailed. See!

All the little veins and tendons in the feet and hands are carved in, which is really amazing to see up close. And there was other cool stuff too ^^ From there we went to Palaikastro, which is where this gem came from. It was a cool site, though just a town. They are still searching for a Minoan 'palace' to accompany it, and hopefully will find one this summer. Then we went to Kato Zakro, another Minoan site with a small palace and surrounding town. Nearby is the Gorge of the Dead, where the cemetery was. Most of our group went swimming, but Laura, Chad, and I hiked the gorge for two hours. It was really pretty, and we poked around in some caves and scrambled up the mountainside, which was lots of fun. This was one of the lower caves we went to. That green bushy thing at the bottom is where the trail was.

 And this was the highest point we got to before deciding we weren't properly equipped to keep scaling. Everything was so beautiful up there though!

Let's see. After that we stopped by a little monastery and then went back to Siteia. The next day was Gournia and Malia (two palace sites) and the Iraklion Museum, which is mostly closed for refurbishment, but still has a single room of the 'big hits' for visitors to look at. Those were all really cool, and I got to give my second report at Malia, so those are all done, yay!

That night we stayed in Iraklion and then got up the next day to go to Knossos. Knossos is an awesome site, somewhat contested because of the reconstructions Sir Arthur Evans undertook, but still fabulous. Unfortunately, it was an extremely busy day as the cruise ships were in and it was hard to see everything. It was nice to have an experienced excavator talking about everything, but I think that I saw more the last time I was there. At least there weren't hoards of people about then! After that, we looked at a more modern museum of Crete, from Byzantine times on. Which was cool but... not ancient stuff ^^

The next day we visited Gortyn, which is famed for a giant, preserved law code, and Phaistos, which is probably my favorietest Minoan site ever. It's very pretty and fun to explore and also has the Phaistos Disc. Which is the awesomest mystery ever. We stayed in Rhethymno that night, and the next day visited a couple of smaller museums there and in Chania before we hopped on a ferry back to Athens.

So we've been in Athens the past three days, and in that time did a walking tour of post-antique Athens, which was rather interesting because we learned a bit about how/why the city is laid out as it is and some about the different types of architecture that are dotted about the city. That night we went and saw a performance called 'Socrates Now' which was really really good. It was a single man performance, and was a recitation of the Apology by Plato. It was fantastically done, the actor was fabulously expressive and it was impressive as all get out that he had memorized more than an hour and a half of monologue. Here he is with one of my favorite faces: ^^

Yesterday we visited more of the acropolis and the National Museum, which we have been doing in bits and pieces. On the acropolis we talked about the south slope and the Erechtheum (which I got to touch! We went up on the north porch, since the inside is too destroyed and robbed out to actually go in, but it was still so awesome!). Totally touched that doorjamb: ^-^

And then today! Oh my gosh, I think I am kinda almost caught up. Today we took a day trip out to Eleusis, which was awesome, save for the part where the lady stopped to talk to us for nearly a whole hour in the sun with no shade. I think I only heard the first part of her talk, because by the time we were halfway through I was more preoccupied with calculating the temperature at which a human body would physically melt. But still! The site was cool :) After that we stopped by two border forts which were used to control key passages, but one side or the other, between Attika and Boiotia or Attika and the Peloponnese. They were actually really cool, though you could really only see the walls, because the walls were preserved to such great heights. Like this one:

That little shady spot about halfway down the wall is probably about as tall as I am. They certainly knew how to build a fort! So those were awesome. And now we are home again and about to have dinner. Hope all is well! I shall try to go back and add pictures to some of the previous posts. Love you all!