A plethora of choices

I am a research nerd, so before I left on my trip I did extensive research on all the places I wanted to go. I talked to people who had been to Greece (close friends, friends of friends, and randoms!). One of my best friends is Greek and told me about her summers in Athens, Nafplio, and Monemvasia. A friend of my boyfriend's mother told me about her yearly trips to the Peloponnesus, to the island of Kythira, home to the goddess Aphordite. Kythira (and Cyprus) claim to be the birth place of Aphordite from the foam of the sea. In fact Aphros- means foam in Ancient Greek.

I acquired quite a few guide books to Greece and also did extensive Internet research. I knew I wanted to spend time in Athens and go to Santorini. I wanted to see ruins, temples, artifacts, museums, and eat chicken souvlaki, pita and tzatziki. Could I maybe get to Crete, or see the ancient oracle of Delphi? Oooh I wanted to see Olympia on the east coast of Greece, and then perhaps ferry to bus 6 hours back and take a 12 hour ferry to Cyprus off Turkey. Could I get to Egypt? Malta? Ok, now this trip was getting out of hand. I needed a year to do everything I wanted too.

I soon came to realize that even with 5 weeks there was no way I could see everything I wanted to. It just drove me crazy to know I would be so close to everything and not be able to see it.

Lonely Planet's Guide to Greece is an awesome resource. I got the one for all of Greece, and one for the Islands. I started my investigation with my highlighter, marking everything of interest to me and trying to figure out how I was going to get around the country without a car. Part of me decided to go with the flow once I got to Greece, and the other part of me had a long list of place I hoped to hit.

I decided that maybe it would be a good idea to start the trip after time in Athens with some kinds of backpacker trip before I went off on my own. I came accross Fez Travel http://www.feztravel.com/ and decided to start the trip off on a Cycladic Island Hopping tour before I branched out solo.

Dolphins and the golden ticket

For years I had this ancient Minoan dolphin fresco from Crete on my desktop at work. It was my direct link to my goal to go to Greece one day. Dolphins are my favourite animal (besides unicorns of course) and I am drawn to any piece of art that depicts them. I first saw this fresco in an undergraduate course on Ancient Greek art and fell in love. I was adamant that I would see it one day in situ.

This particular piece is from the palace of Knossos in Crete outside of Iraklion (Heraklio). It was found in the Queen's room, or Megaron, and dates back thousands of years. The Queen's room also has a clay bathtub, a toilet, running water, and a dressing room - technology that was lost for millenia. The palace of Knossos was massive, around 20,000 square metres.

The Minoans were as old to the 5th century Greeks, as ancient Greece is now to us. Their civilization dates back to the 6000 BCE and lasted until around 1000 BCE. Sir Arthur Evans, an archaeologist named the culture after the myth of King Minos, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. No one knows what they called themselves.

The Minoans are thought by archaeologists to be a matriarchal culture, as all their religious iconography depicts goddesses of fertility and power. Minoan palaces served a dual purpose as a royal residence and ritual centres. The Minoans were seafarers and had connections with Egypt, African and other parts of Greece. It is believed that the inhabitants of Santorini (Thira) at Akrotiri and Thira were Minoan. Mainly I like that the women apparently walked around topless!

In 2005 I was working for a children's health and development program as the Operations Manager. Summers were always extremely busy and I had not been on a real vacation for years. At the end of the summer my boss and mentor gave me a gift. When I opened the wrapping, I found two guide books on Greece. My initial reaction was gratitude, as I thought she was encouraging me to go on the trip I had always longed for. However when I looked further, opening the first page of one of the guide books, I saw that she had written me a cheque to cover a return flight from Vancouver to Greece! It was one of the most overwhelming moments of my life. I was shocked, ecstatic, nervous, enlivened and overwhelmed. I could not process or believe that I was actually going to be able to go to Greece. I was amazed at her kindness and the fact she would facilitate something so amazing for me. As a world traveller herself, she know the value of travel and how it can change a person's life.

So my planning began. I knew I could take time off work in the fall, and wanted to make the most of my time and ticket, so I planned to go for 5 weeks. My boyfriend was working and it was impossible for him to take time off work. That is when I realized that this was going to be a solo trip - my first one ever, alone as a woman in Eastern Europe in a country where I did not speak the language. There were a few things I knew at this point: (a) I was going to backpack (b) I was going to to plan my trip around archaeological sites and museums, and (c) I was going to come back different.

The Allure of Hellas

I have always been a lover of Greek mythology. I remember reading and re-reading stories of ancient heroes, demigods, goddesses, monsters, the underworld of Hades, Mt. Olympus, Titans and mortals. I was enamoured with ambrosia, the food of the gods, brought into Olympus by white doves, that offered a chance at immortality. I watched every cartoon, movie, television show that centred around the ancient world.

When I was 14 years old I had the good fortune to stand on the edge of the Roman forum and gaze down at the ruins of over 2500 years of history. I remember the feel of the railing that separated the columns and myself as I gazed downward staring at the place where Augustus Caesar had his temple built to glorify his dynasty. I wanted so badly to be able to walk amongst the ruins, and to touch the stone and marble that lay scattered ac cross the ground.

Compliment that view with the coliseum and I was hooked. I felt a movement inside my young heart, a yearning, to learn everything I could about the ancient world. I was conscious at that moment that my life path would never be the same.

Fast forward to the summer after my first year of university. I had taken a program at UBC called Arts One, an interdisciplinary and humanities oriented program (centred on lectures, tutorials, and seminars). Each year the literature and learning focuses on a different theme, and the year I attended it was: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Apocalypse. Each week we had to read a major text as we studied literature from the west and east and wrote papers. One of these works was Plato's Republic.

Plato's republic has influenced all of western literature, and movies are still made today derived from the allegory of the cave (i.e. the Matrix or Inception). The idea it that our reality is not truly reality, but a mirror of images that we are chained to in ignorance, not realizing that if we broke free and climbed out of the cave, we would eventually come to see the real truth, or enlightenment of sorts. Since I am a very spiritual person, I fell in love with this notion that we are unaware of our true potential, and the ancients were aware of this fact thousands of years ago.

Around Christmas of that first year I had unfortunately contracted mononucleosis and had been sick the majority of the school year. I wasn't diagnosed until the year was over, and my marks suffered because of it. However between a trip to Ireland and Scotland that May (for another time) and working as a cashier at IGA in Dunbar, I managed to take a summer course just for the sake of interest on Women in Ancient Greece.

The course descriptions reads: "the course examines the cultural representations and 'real lives' of women in ancient Greece in the archaic (c. 800-500 BCE) and classical (c. 500-330 BCE) ages. The images projected in myth, literature and the visual arts are compared with the "realities" of women's lives insofar as these can be reconstructed from historical, legal and archaeological records. Two important purposes of the study of women in antiquity are to recover Greek women's history which, until recently, has been missing from general histories of ancient Greece, and to gain insight into the cultural dynamics of a society that subordinated women."

I had the most amazing sessional professor Dr. R who brought everything to life. She was the most compassionate and wonderful teacher I have ever had. She not only facilitated my falling in love all over again with Greece, but with women's studies, and the roles of women in ancient society. After that first course I decided to major in Classical Studies and devote my undergraduate university career to ancient history, archaeology and psychology. I was fascinated with people past and present, and infused with passion. I took every course of Dr. R's I could get my hands on over the next 4 years.

An overview would be:

Archaeology - Classical (Greek, Roman), Biblical (i.e. Israel, Syria, Palestine, Jordan), Near Eastern (i.e. Babylonians, Persians, Assyrians, Sumerians), Ancient Latin American and Mexican Cultures (e.g. Incas, Mayans, Aztecs)

History - Rome, Greece, Athens, Alexander the Great, Women's, Medieval (i.e. ancient Britain and Ireland, pre-renaissance Italy)

Myth & Religion - Greece, Rome, Near East, Origins of Christianity

Literature - Greek and Roman Epic Literature, Greek Tragedy and Comedy

Art & Architecture - Islamic, Greek, Roman

Languages - Latin

...on top of other courses in other disciplines.

This is where the love affair all started and serves as the backdrop for my future travels.