Back in the USA!

Well, I've made it back from another reasonably good trip abroad.  I need to catch up on some posts on TravelPod (the blogging platform we used for class when we were in Greece and Turkey), but that should happen shortly - if only because the blogs must be completed by tomorrow night.  If you want to see what I was up to when I was doing the travel course, go check that out over there.  I have a link in my last post, I believe.

Anyway, now that I'm back, it's interesting to see the differences among cultures, and also the similarities.  Greece and Turkey obviously have more in common with each other than they do with the USA, in everything from length of history to kinds of food to even the coffee (there is a strong, bitter coffee in both countries that is served in a small cup with the dregs at the bottom; the Greeks call it Greek coffee and the Turks call it Turkish coffee), but that doesn't mean that there aren't things that are similar to the US.  For example, when we went out in a social context with some Greek high schoolers in Kavala, we did two rounds of bumper cars before going ice skating, and then we went for coffee (or hot chocolate, or alcohol in some cases).  There are hookah bars in a lot of places (particularly in Turkey, because that's a Thing That People Do).  Personally, if I go for hookah, I'm just there to talk to people; for me, the smoke smells good, but I don't want to inhale it too much.  I did try it a bit, just to say for sure whether or not I like it, and my conclusion is that the atmosphere is more my thing than the actual smoking.

It's hard to pick my favorite archaeological site, because we went to so many.  Going to the Parthenon was absolutely amazing, because it was something that I've really wanted to do since middle school.  One professor at our school is the director of the Agora excavation, and he was able to give us a behind-the-scenes tour of the place, which was also really cool.  Going to Greece especially was really cool for me: it's one thing to hear about these places in class; it's another thing to read about them in Ancient Greek; it's altogether a separate event to actually be there in person and to see each of the places that I've heard about so often.  My dad asked if I could check in with the Oracle of Delphi about the winner of this year's Super Bowl, but the Pythia wasn't around for predictions that day, unfortunately.

You may be wondering whether I'm going to be posting my journal here later; unfortunately, I am not.  Half of this is because we did so much that I just didn't feel up to writing a blog AND a journal for the entire second week.  The other half is that it turned into something that had more of my personal thoughts - things that I wouldn't want people to see (for example, off-the-cuff opinions of people that aren't the most flattering, because I was writing in the journal in order to vent off the negativity).  So, unfortunately, y'all are going to have to go check out my TravelPod blog if you want to go check what I was doing.

At any rate, it's good to be back in the US.  The trip to Greece and Turkey was a wonderful experience, but it's nice to not be moving around every few days.