Last week ended pretty normal, just the usual classes and some odds and ends here and there. Thursday night, I booked my parents final hotel reservations AND a flight to Rome for three people. I am very excited for not only mom and dad to arrive this coming Thursday, but also to go Rome and have the opportunity to travel to Rome with them. It brings the biggest smile to my face.

     After coming in about 5 am Friday morning, I caught a bus ride with a class to go to Delphi at 8:30 am. Delphi is beautiful. It's a beautiful countryside of brilliant mountains leading to the sea. I slept most of the ride and woke up just outside of Archova, which is 11km from Delphi. I was stunned. The mountains spanned such a great distance, interlocked, cut through valleys, and were filled with steep stone cliffs and brilliant overlooks. It was great to get out of the city for a few days. Especially Athens which is not the cleaniest or most "green" city I've ever been to. Right: The mountain we climbed looking from the road leading to the Temple to Apollo/Oracle at Delphi.

     The first day, we spent some time down at one of the olympic stadiums checking out the running grounds and the treasuries along witha  few scattered temples before taking a hike to the top of one of the mountains. The mountain hike was fantastic. I don't think I could have asked for a better break. It felt so good to just be outside in fresh air and climbing mountains. This morning, we woke up, went to the museum, and made it to the rest of the sites at Delphi. It really made me mad though because the rest of the site at Delphi including the temple to Apollo was closed due to a rock slide one month ago. =( Anyways, we went back to the Olympic stadium to run a race. I ran barefoot and was victorious. The poem to the victor by Pindar was then read before I was crowned with laurel leaves. It was a fun time and one of those things I'll probably never do again - just neat to say I was crowned in a real Greek Ancient Olympic Stadium as victor. Left: The Olympic track.

     I had a couple of "deep" moments this weekend. The first was hiking the mountain and thinking about how many people before me would have trekked those exact mountains to try to reach the Oracle at Delphi. I know its completely dorky, but really, how many ancients had walked those same paths were were walking and for what purpose; it was just neat to feel sort of connected with the past like that. I got the same feeling walking around the treasuries and running down the olympic stadium path. It's a pretty neat feeling. The second was when we were in the museum talking about the kore which are early classical period and very stiff sort of Egyptian like statues (see picture) and how it tied into the philosophy that was going on then and I've been studying the Pre-Socratics, who are fascinating, and how the goal was to make sense of the universe and to try to organize the cosmos. Thus, the artistic representation is the doric style with these structured and stiff statues. It was just neat to see my education come full circle again. In my study abroad application essay, I wrote a line about "being completely immersed in the classics, having prior been immersed in the sciences," which was more of a plea at the time. But now that I'm here, it's really happening. I'm completely immersed in ancient studies and making sense of it. Finally, I'm not making sense of it because I'm connecting things in my brain. It's becuase I'm visually seeing these objects. In class we saw pictures of the kore and all, but it was not until I was actually standing next to this thing that I really grasped what we were talking about. It wasn't until I was standing next to the parthenon overlooking the agora and birthplace of democracy that I was overwhelmed with this sense of respect for the ancients. It wasn't until I was standing atop a mountain looking down at the monuments at Delphi that I was able to grasp the grandeouse nature of the place and really understand and feel connected with the past. Immersion learning has been crucial to my growth and development as an intellect.