Well, what a semester! We’re back home in Pennsylvania now, but I wanted to get one last post in about our fantastic study abroad experience with the Bucknell/Penn State in Athens program.
Our final archaeology field trip with Prof. David Scahill took us back to central Athens and the Roman agora and Hadrian’s library. As had been the case for much of the term, we experienced not only the sights/sites of ancient Greece, but also the smells. As you can see below, the agora space is blanketed in a cover of chamomile across which we tromped repeatedly, unleashing its familiar and soothing fragrance.
This lovely scent persisted even to the Tower of the Winds and the ancient privy situated just next door to it. So, you know, we had that going for us.
We also made time in our final week to reconnect with friends and family before we had to go. This included a much-needed return to Kaisariani for a nature hike with Maria (The Greek Herbalist) and a family dinner with Christina’s cousins in the Egaleo neighborhood of Athens. Christina and I had occasion many times to reflect on how much we loved the chance to live in a city for a while, but part of that was also wrapped up in how easy it was for us to find some nature with very little effort.
The end of April also saw the end of our program in Greece. The Athens Centre, which hosts the academic elements of the program, does this part up right. Yannis Zervos and Rosemary Donnelly, the co-directors of the centre, give a summation talk to the assembled students and faculty, and then the students get certificates of completion.
It’s also an opportunity for the faculty to reflect with the students on the experience that we’ve all just had. Christina used this to review our time in Greece with a collection of photos that none of the students had seen up until then, which I think they all enjoyed immensely. When we were finished with the mini-graduation events, we all walked down the street to the Vyrinis Taverna for a group dinner at the same place where we had our very first group dinner in early February.
The next morning we vacated our erstwhile home in Pangrati and lugged all of our bags back to the front of the Panathenaic Stadium, where we always meet our buses. This time, they would be taking us back to the airport for our departures. It was of course bittersweet to be leaving Greece without our beloved Nibbler, who passed away in early March, and that weighed on us in addition to all of the additional leave-taking we needed to navigate. But David, Keti, and Dimitra arrived to see all of us off and to wish us well. We miss them all terribly already.
I wasn’t able to travel on the same flight as Christina and most of the students, since we expected that I would be traveling home with Nibbler, and this led to me having one of the strangest flights of my life so far. This United flight from Athens to Newark was only about 10% full. Anyone who wanted to could choose a center row and lay down across the seats for the 10-hour flight. They never got out the food or beverage cars; they just came to each of us individually, asked what we wanted, and then fetched it. Crazy talk. Nibbler still would have hated it.
It helps that we both left behind a neighborhood full of lovely street cats and that we were coming home to a house that still had Madeleine Albright and Annata, the cat of one of our housemates. The photo below is really of some of those wonderful Pangrati cats, but it’s also a passable rendering of what our bed looked like the first night that Christina and I made it home. Madeleine jumped right up and wedged herself between us, making sure it was us, marking us, welcoming us back into the colony.
