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Week 9.5/Spring Break Part 2

The next day, Paros poured. To combat the rain, we went hiked when we could and took refuge in coffee shops. For breakfast, we had absolutely delicious Greek yogurt with honey and strawberries. We found an outdoor restaurant covered with a roof and had delicious lunch for around four euros, and talked for hours afterward. We went grocery shopping for dinner items and decided to cook ourselves pasta with chicken and salad with a few glasses of wine, and later watched Mamma Mia that night. It is a fun movie that I never got the chance to finish, so watching it in Greece was a dream. The cozy hotel is the best accommodation I’ve had since coming to Europe, and only for $20 a night.

The next morning, we hopped on a ferry to Naxos. It was raining again, and my poor six-year-old Walmart sneakers had had enough. I walked in sopping sponges for the rest of the day. After the ferry ride was over, we found the hotel with the help of maps.me and waited for our room to be ready. The cleaning lady only spoke Greek, so I used my downloaded Google Translate to speak to her for me after I typed in my English requests. We made our way to the beach to see the curious artifact rising up from the sea- Portara. This gateway was the opening to Apollo’s Temple. It was built 2500 years ago facing Delos, Apollo’s birthplace.

You cannot go to Greece and avoid thoughts about time and humanity. Of course, there are ruins sprinkled all around Europe, but they grab your attention in some places more than others. In sprawling cities like Athens and Rome, the magnificence of history is all around you- preserved carefully for tourists and scholars. But I find that sometimes it’s easy to imagine Ancient People in these bustling cities, bartering and socializing as we do now. In the islands and more remote areas, where studies aren’t routinely done, it’s even more striking to see signs of Ancient life. Imagining how secluded they were, how small their population, and how rare they must have met with other peoples, yet still seeing lasting signs of their culture and worship- that was somehow more special to me than the tourist attractions I had seen for months before.

Reading Greek as I walked around the town was a treat. I felt like I was in second grade again, sounding each letter out before stringing it together, bit by bit. Sometimes the words would sound like an English equivalent, and I could tell what it meant. That was especially exciting.

The next day, we took a taxi to the beach- Aghios Prokopios. When we arrived, the taxi driver- with the little English he knew- told us that there are no taxis or buses in this area of the island. There was no one in sight. We laughed as we realized he was telling us we had no way to get home, until he gave us his card a moment later. Although it was very chilly, we put on our bikinis and took what little pictures we could in between the shade from the clouds. I asked questions from Ana’s list as we sat in the sand for hours. Thankfully, Melania had data to call the taxi driver, and we went back to our hotel around 3 pm.

I forgot to mention- this $8 hotel was exactly what we paid for. Our bathroom consisted of one toilet, one small sink, and a faucet sticking out of the wall with a drain in the floor, all confined to about 15 square feet. Our shower was the toilet. As Masha and I laid in the bed on our phones, I got up to grab my backpack and the mattress sunk. The bed frame had just broken below us and I could visualize steam coming from Masha’s ears. Everyone just kind of stared at each other. And that is when my engineering education and student council leadership kicked in! I had the girls help me remove the mattress and I diagnosed the problem after finding that the beam had bent. I had two of us stand on one side and two on the other, bouncing until the beam was sufficiently straight. After reattaching it to the bed and replacing the screw, we had to reassemble the wooden suspension one-by-one. It took some time, but we fixed the bed, and I felt proud of myself. As small as it was, leadership and problem solving used to define me. Since college, my confidence level surged below sea-level and I hardly ever try to lead a group anymore. It felt nice to be in that position again, especially after this semester of feeling incapable.