From Athens to Sparta

I'm sorry for the delay in my posts. The past weekend was quite a spectacle and I've decided to write about it in parts, also because I have limited time on the internet this morning and may only get half of it up.

Our weekend trip was intended to be Athens to Sparta to Tripoli to Argos to Mycenae to Nafplio and back to Athens. It wound up being Athens to Sparta to Tripoli to Nafplio to Mycenae back to Nafplio and back to Athens. Let me describe for you the events of Friday morning.

We were instructed to take a cab to the bus station, that it was the easiest and most efficient way to get there. I believe this was a subjective rather than objective opinion, because for us, hailing a cab in Greek turned out to be quite a challenge. We started on one road then decided to move to a different plateia (square). There, everytime a taxi would stop we would shout to the drive where we wanted to go, "KTEL Alpha!" but had little success. After splitting our group of 6 into two sets of 3 we tried to divide and conquer. My group was able to get a cab with relative ease (and I mean relative to the other group of girls), but only after throwing our Greek out the window and shouting "Bus Station!" Once in the cab, with another lady already going somewhere, the cab driver spoke little to us and had small coversation with the woman. After she got out he picked up another person and proceeded to recount the story of how he wasn't sure where we were going because apparently we so horrifically mispronounced "KTEL Alpha" that he didn't understand us. Of course this conversation was in Greek and while I could understand enough to get that that was what he was talking about, my conversational skills are not strong enough to point out how rude he was being. But in the end we got to the bus station, so we can't complain too much.

The other group of girls were not so lucky. While we waited at the bus station they tried fervently to hail a cab. Finally they got one and let us know, so we bought their bus tickets for them (if we missed the 8:15am bus we would have to wait there until the 10:00am bus). Katie asked the woman at the desk to see if they would hold the bus for us and they said they would wait 5 minutes. It took about 8 for the girls to get there and the YaYas on the bus were getting annoyed. As soon as they got out of the cab and saw me, I yelled for them to run and we hurried our way to the bus. It was quite an adventure, but we made, just barely.

Sparta was probably the most uninspiring place in Greece I've been to thus far. There was a miniscule archeaology museum, a sanctuary to Theonides that looks like a random pile of rocks in the middle of a park, and, most interesting of all, the Olive Museum. Thankfully we only spent a couple of hours there, just long enough to see everything there is to see in Sparta. From there we took a bus to Tripoli, the smoothest of our travels that day.

Check out my next post to read about the rest of my weekend, it's too long to put in one post alone.