Blogging
From Abroad

Kalamara! (Greek Good Morning)

It’s Spring Break and I’m on the Student Affairs faculty-led study abroad trip. There have been so many exciting things to see and exciting things that have happened.

Upon arriving in Athens, we toured the city and enjoyed the sites. That night, we stayed up until 1 a.m. and watched the WVU Elite Eight basketball game. At the time, we didn’t realize that we would also get to experience the time change in Greece. At 3 a.m. the time automatically changed to 4 a.m., all of us were up until 4:30 a.m. watching the Mountaineers move to the Elite Eight! We were back up at 7 a.m. to see all of the sites in Athens- including the new Olympic stadium, the Temple of Zeus, the Parthenon at the Acropolis, and everything in between.

After Athens, we moved to Kalambaka. There, we went to the Holy Monastery of Great Meteoron and the St. Stephen’s monastery and viewed other monasteries at Meteora. One of the monasteries that we saw, the Holy Trinity, was used in the James Bond movie: “For your eyes only.” The town was small, but exciting. In Kalambaka, we all learned Greek dancing.

Delphi was where we went next. There was so many tiny shops and stores there! The first night, we had planned on going to a Greek disco, but chose to stay inside instead. Turned out, the disco closed that night because they were anticipating a mob after the “bus of beautiful American girls” arrived. This town was super small and everyone seemed to know all of our travel details. It was great to meet the locals, and we enjoyed the shopping!

The next day in Delphi, on our way to visit the Oracle of Delphi and the temple of Apollo, we were asked where we were from and when we responded “West Virginia,” we received a rendition of “Country Roads” by locals on mopeds. This always amazes me that WVU is truly a globally known group. It seems that everywhere we go, everyone knows or has heard of WVU or has seen the flying WV.

Today, we made it to Olympia and enjoyed seeing the traditions surrounding the Olympic games. We went to the ancient, original stadium of the games and the boys of the trip, all 9 of them, participated in a foot race one stadium long.

Tomorrow, we return to Athens with a trip to the island of Hydra on Saturday. As you can expect, we all plan on getting up (or staying up) to watch the Mountaineers on TV in their final four appearance. On Sunday, we return to Morgantown.

Will post again when I return home!
LETS GO! MOUNTAINEERS!