Day 6- Sat. May 16

Day 6 (Saturday, May 16): Athens

Saturday we had a LONG bus ride. We chartered a bus from Athens to go to Sparta, and then Mystras. The countryside was filled with a lot of olive trees, brush, tall grasses, and rolling green hills.

We stopped in Corinth on the way, and walked out over the Corith Canal. Its quite famous, but rather unpretentious in person. It was started in the 7th century but was never finished until the 19th century by the French (hello, dynamite?) It is VERY deep, 300 feet down, and maybe 70 feet across. And what most impressive is its length. It spans the entire peninsula – quite the feat.

At Sparta, we looked at the arena where they trained, and then walked to their theater and acropolis. Its amazing how unimpressive the whole place is. If people had not written about the Spartans, there certainly isn't really anything to indicate how powerful they were. The theater was one of my favorite sites so far though. Its in a field of wildflowers surrounded by mountains.

On the way up, we got a surprise, too. We were walking by a school, and we heard a weird noise. – it was a peacock! They had a pretty pimp school-yard though. Palm trees, tons of grass, toys, and a peacock wandering around. Pretty cool :)

We finally made it to Mystras, but it was a white-knuckle bus ride! The bus driver – this crazy white haired old Greek man, just kept driving fast around every corner, honking as he went. He tried to turn around too, on the super tiny mountain roads, in this giant bus – we all thought we might be backed off a cliff. Then we had to negotiate around another bus! Yikes! Neeedless to say we were all quite relieved to be done.

Finally, we checked into our hotel, which was very nice, and had late lunch/ early dinner at a really nice cafe where the owner had a cute little male long haired terrier type dog with a blue bow in its hair. And one of the guys Ryan got scared when a (very large, 1.5 inch?) beetle landed on him. So of course, he starts, makes a noise, throws it onto my friend Paula, and sends the whole table to shrieking, and subsequent laughter. It was pretty funny.