Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't been on in a while - classes you know and I've been traveling quite a bit, including this five-day school trip to the Peloponnese region south of Athens with my study abroad program. It was amazing! I went to so many awesome places in five days. Here's a list of the places we went (including archaeological places): Corinth, Akrokorinth, Napflion, Epidarous, Mycenae, Sparta, Mystra, Methoni, Messene, Pylos, and Olympia. It was so great. I took 745 pictures and since I obviously can't upload then all, I've selected a few of my favorites for you. Enjoy!
This is the Corinth Canal. It enables ships to safely and quickly pass from the Ionian Sea on the west side of Greece to the Aegean Sea on the east side of the Greece. This is facing west. People actually bungee-jump off this bridge! Isn't that crazy?! The water is an amazing blue too. I'd hate to fall off the walkway were I was standing. It would be a long way down that's for sure.
This is the first gate entrance to Akrokorinth, where the town of Corinth was before its modern location at the bottom of this large hill. It's a large fortress that was used by the ancient Greeks, the modern Greeks, the Turks, and the French (maybe the English too but I don't recall). We drove up the side of the large hill but as far as I'm concerned if anyone could climb that hill with supplies and animals then they were welcome to the fortress. It sure would've been a hike. The walls go almost all the way around the top of the hill; there's a natural outcropping on part of the hill (you can see it on the right side of the picture) where there aren't any walls but the cliffs are hard to scale.
This is the world-famous Lions Gate at Mycenae. Of course, I had to take a picture of it. The stone blocks surrounding the gate and in the walls around Mycenae are absolutely enormous. Some of them weight many tons and are four to six feet high and wide. Crazy big. The ancient Greeks called these huge cyclopean blocks because they thought that cyclopes put them into place they were so big. The lions don't have any heads, and it's unknown of each of them had a head or if the two bodies shared one head. Supposed there was lion figure found at Mycenae or in the area of Mycenae that had a lion head with two bodies. Archaeologists aren't sure which option it is.
Napflion has the best gelato ever. Here's the sign for the gelato place. My advise: have gelato for dinner; it will definitely fill you up and it tastes great. Napflion is a medium-sized town about two hours south of Athens by bus. It's very nice and I'll make an effort to go back while in Greece. To the right, is the floating bastion. A bastion is a fortress where ammunition was stored. Today, it's just s castle where tourists can visit.
This is the bastion as Methoni (left). Methoni was by far my favorite place I visited. It was a fortress used in the Medieval times, I think. It was really windy the day we went but that was okay. The professors on the trip just turned all the students loose in the fortress and told us to go play (literally). They let us explore everything in there almost two hours. It was great being able to just run around and explore the buildings, rooms, and tunnels. Methoni was on the sea, as you can see by its bastion. I've took a picture of the causeway that you have to cross to get to the bastion. The water was rather turbulent that day. I got splashed on the causeway, and let me tell you, Mediterranean seawater tastes different than Atlantic seawater.
As we were driving to Olympia through the mountains, there were sheep blocking the road! It was crazy. I managed to get a quick picture before the bus scared them off. It was really funny. And you could hear the bells on the sheep too.
The final day of the trip we went to Olympia. This is just one of the many toppled columns from the Temple of Zeus. This is where one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World was - the statue of Zeus at Olympia. The statue was never found but the molds used to create the statues were found as was the probable workshop. The columns were pulled down by Christians traveling through Greece in order to topple (no pun intended) the "pagan" religion of the ancient Greeks. The archaeological museum at Olympia was really neat too with many sculptures from the Zeus temple and other temples and buildings in the Olympian complex.
As I was heading back to Athens, we passed the coastal city of Patras. This is a picture of one of the most famous bridges in Greece and one of the most revolutionary bridges in Europe: the Rio-Antirrio Bridge. As you can see, it's a cable bridge. It's firmly secured to land on both sides but it's not secured to the sea floor. The pylons are actually merely resting on the bottom to allow the bridge to move naturally with earthquakes.
This is the bastion as Methoni (left). Methoni was by far my favorite place I visited. It was a fortress used in the Medieval times, I think. It was really windy the day we went but that was okay. The professors on the trip just turned all the students loose in the fortress and told us to go play (literally). They let us explore everything in there almost two hours. It was great being able to just run around and explore the buildings, rooms, and tunnels. Methoni was on the sea, as you can see by its bastion. I've took a picture of the causeway that you have to cross to get to the bastion. The water was rather turbulent that day. I got splashed on the causeway, and let me tell you, Mediterranean seawater tastes different than Atlantic seawater.
As we were driving to Olympia through the mountains, there were sheep blocking the road! It was crazy. I managed to get a quick picture before the bus scared them off. It was really funny. And you could hear the bells on the sheep too. 
The final day of the trip we went to Olympia. This is just one of the many toppled columns from the Temple of Zeus. This is where one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World was - the statue of Zeus at Olympia. The statue was never found but the molds used to create the statues were found as was the probable workshop. The columns were pulled down by Christians traveling through Greece in order to topple (no pun intended) the "pagan" religion of the ancient Greeks. The archaeological museum at Olympia was really neat too with many sculptures from the Zeus temple and other temples and buildings in the Olympian complex.
As I was heading back to Athens, we passed the coastal city of Patras. This is a picture of one of the most famous bridges in Greece and one of the most revolutionary bridges in Europe: the Rio-Antirrio Bridge. As you can see, it's a cable bridge. It's firmly secured to land on both sides but it's not secured to the sea floor. The pylons are actually merely resting on the bottom to allow the bridge to move naturally with earthquakes.That's all for now! If you have any questions about any particular places or would like a blog entry with pictures about a particular place, let me know and I'll be happy to oblige!
