First Day in Crete!

Hello! My internet access will be spotty the next week so my blogs could come sporadically!
When we went to CYA to meet the bus we found out the other boy in our class arrived. And that he’s in his 50’s…it’s really awkward honestly. None of us know what to say to him and he always goes off on his own. We know he’s married but that’s about it. He asks the professor a lot of questions but won’t always be where we’re supposed to. It’s just so weird and I know our professor feel’s weird about being in charge of something his own age.
We left for the ferry from CYA at 7:00, got there at 7:15 and the ferry didn’t leave until 9:00…I’ve already noticed that our professor is very bad at estimating time. He has said things are two hours away and it’s only one hour and things like that. So we all decided to meet at the bar for a drink and we sat and talked before we took off. We watched a little of the World Cup game too, Greece was playing Argentina and lost.
We got an actual overnight room with four bunk beds; it was me, my roommate Justine, Nancy Thomas from UNC and Ann Marie Maly from University of Cincinnati. We had met them before and they’re really nice so it worked out well. The ferry ride wasn’t too bad except twice during the night we were all woken up by all the shaking, it had felt like we hit something! So naturally we didn’t sleep well and had to meet for breakfast at 6:30 am. These Greeks really know how to carbo load, we had two pieces of pound cake, two rolls, and one hardboiled egg. I ate it all because I knew I had to be cheap for lunch and I wasn’t hungry until 12 when we ate! This is going to be my strategy: eat as many carbs that the hotel offers for breakfast, grab one for lunch and just buy a cheap snack, and then eat a big dinner!
We went straight from the ferry to the bus for Knossos and got there a little bit before the opening time, 8:00. I’m glad we did because right at about 9:00 there were hundreds of people there! We were the first ones inside so got to see a lot of stuff without the crowds. It was cool but didn’t hold my attention too long. It was the first European city so a lot of the stuff is very archaic looking which I don’t find as pretty. But the frescoes they restored were very pretty.
There’s a big debate about the restoration at Knossos that apparently is very heated. The man who discovered Knossos, Arthur Evans, did tons of restoration in order to preserve some sense of what the city looked like. They’ve recently found out however that most of his ideas and explanations were wrong and things were restored incorrectly. I do think it’s important to have at least one city fully restored just as an example and for the rest of the sites you can use your imagination. On a sad note, Nancy fell and rolled her ankle while we were there. I feel really bad because it was our first real day of class!
After we were finished we went into Heraklion, the port on Crete and had lunch and walked around a bit. While we were sitting at lunch (I got Greek yogurt with honey and strawberries, bananas, and apples, yum!) we actually spotted a boy from our last class walking around so he joined us.Then we went into the museum to see some of the artifacts from the site we were at earlier. It was a small museum, luckily, we were all so tired.
We drove about an hour to our hotel in the small village of Zaros, it’s so cute! It actually is surrounded by mountains and has a bunch of great fresh water springs that a big bottling company uses. It ‘s a cute room and has a pool and there are so many pretty flowers everywhere! There are also orange trees scattered around outside. I’m rooming in a double with Lindsey from Princeton. She’s one of the first girls we met and she’s already been over to our apartment twice and she’s really nice.
Tonight we’re going to a tavern next to our hotel to have some authentic Creten food. I’m excited! I have a feeling there are going to be odd dishes like octopus involved…we’ll see.