Life in the Unknown: Day 3 - 23 Things I've learned about Greece

Day 3 was awesome. But before I get to that, I need to apologize for not writing any captions yesterday for the pictures. Although pictures say a thousand words, I would like to give you about a thousand and thirty, because I would like spend around thirty words explaining each picture. What is the purpose of a picture, if nobody explains the meaning behind it? My point, exactly. Now, to Day 3!

Thanks to the incredible generosity of the Gieseckes, (some great friends of our family who work at the school), we got the incredible opportunity to visit Philippi today. It was about an hour and thirty minute drive to that city. You might be wondering why we went ninety minutes away to see historical sites, when they are all around us. The answer is actually fairly legit. About four hours ago my time, (so about 12 PM) your time, the Prime Minister of Greece made his most important speech of the year in Thessaloniki! So the day after I got here, the president of Greece comes a couple blocks from my house and makes his most important speech for the next year. Amazing, right?! Except, on this same day, anarchists from all over the Balkan reigon, in protest of the speech, wreck havoc upon the streets. You saw some examples of the riot police in yesterday's post. Allegedly, for several hours the anarchists are expected to throw things at the riot police, flip some cars, burn a few buildings and then go home. Apparently this isn't a big deal, it's not even noteworthy. Several people died last year because some homemade bombs were thrown into stores, which exploded and killed store workers. All of that to say, we decided to go to Philippi today, instead of risk our lives with mad anarchists running around with bombs, (as tempted as we might have been to stay).

The following pictures are from the Ruins of Phillip as I said, several famous biblical locations, the place where Lydia was baptized and finally a Venetian Castle. And as a further attempt to make amends for last night, and the future times where I will be just too tired to post captions, I'm going to talk about some things I've learned so far in Greece. There are a million other pictures I will put up at some point, but right now I'm just doing the some of the humorous.

1. An Explanation for Caleb's Odditys. The idea behind this picture was for everybody to look contemplative and thoughtful, like the statue. This is the reason why everybody did the classic pose from the Rodin's the Thinker. However, if you observe Caleb, he has no exaggerated body position, in fact he looks no different from how he normally does. This showed me that Caleb is merely always contemplative and off in some distant land dreaming about things.


3. Never say that a mountain top in the distance looks cool in front of Caleb. We were driving along the highway and Mr. Giesecke or Hans, pointed out this Acropolis of the city of Philippi on this mountain top, I said "O thats cool!". Caleb was like yeah, let's climb it. Mr. Giesecke said okay, an hour later I was lugging a backpack as we trekked our way to the top.


This is the theater where Paul preached to the Philippians. Pretty amazing stuff if you ask me.


4. The Ancient theater of Philippi has better acouustics than my 21st Century Church (Wintonbury). It's pretty incredible, you can say something at a normal voice in the center, and it can be heard all the way up the steps.


5. Historical Sites in America are Terrible Compared to European Ones. Reason 1: Expensive. Reason 2: The places really aren't that cool. Reason 3: They are empty-nobody goes to them. Reason 3: They are free, because I'm a student.

6. The Ancient Greeks used to play Twister. This is a stone spinner.

7. Restroom Accommodations have significantly improved since the Third Century BC.

8. Greeks are not extremely trusting, as I first thought, they are actually just extremely lazy. This is a priceless Mosaic. See picture 2 Mosaic.


This is Daniel infront of the priceless Mosaic. As you can see the only thing protecting the 3rd century AD Byzantine church mosaic made from tens of thousands of tiny, individually painted and carved stones, fit together over years of work into an intricate puzzle masterpiece, is a little fence. There are no guards, cameras, lights, charges... anything really blocking you from vandalizing it. It is not that Greeks are too lazy to build a bigger fence, it is just that they assume you're too lazy to climb over their little fence. I guess they were right, we just looked.

9. Everything at the ruins of Philippi is in ruins. See picture 2

even the 21st century tour guide map, put up by the Hellenic Ministry of Tourism.

10. Ancient roads are really rocky. lol

11. It's a scary experience climbing on ruins. I don't know whether to feel comforted, or worried that these ruins have been standing for over 2000 years.

12. They don't have Teddy Bears in Greece. They actually have Teddypuses as they put it. Platypuses, in teddy form.

13. There were two essentials to every Greek household. A jar of Spam

And a jar of cheese-wiz.


14. Never let Daniel lead. You turn your back for a second, and he's leading you up a mountain. His justification was, "I want to get to the top!"

15. I'm sorry to be unpatriotic, but from a purely aesthetic sense, the Greek flag is much more cooler than America's.

16. There's a reason cities took years to siege. I'm scared of dieing just climbing on the ruins as Ruins-let alone when they're in their splendor, stories high, with burning oil pouring down on you and thousands of people trying to shoot you.

17. These Wild Grapes are not infact Grapes and not Poisonous. When Caleb asked our guide whether they were actually grapes or not, the guide said that he didn't know. Caleb's response was to eat one and find out.

18 I asked for you Sam, but unfortunately this is not a Ramen bowl. I asked. He was kind of offended, I don't know why. He said it's for something about baptizing kids. I didn't get it all, it's all greek to me. (lame joke I know, but I needed to say it at least once. That phrase has been stuck in my head since I got here.)

19. Joey you are going to be so Happy. In Greek there is no "B" so use two other letters as a replacement. Knowing that, what does this spell? This is the oldest recorded use of that word.

20. Tourists in Greece are Shameless. This is a refurbished BC theater. *See next picture*

Sheesh.... Respect the Classics man...

21. There are stray Cats and Dogs EVERYWHERE!!! So much so that a lot of the roadkill around here is kittens and puppies. These ones weren't though, and they were pretty cute.