Get Us to the Greece, Or: How Airplanes Suck

Finally in Greece with some WiFi access (believe me, you don't know how much you appreciate that until it's gone). Travel was...not ideal, to say the least. I left Grand Rapids to meet Katie and Tyler in East Lansing at 6:30 am on Thursday. From there we drove to Chicago, where our flight was delayed for about two hours due to storms and other general airplane nonsense. We did meet some French Canadians who were very concerned that we were going to miss our flight. Friendly people, those Canadians. Also, I decided to watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding on the plane. You know, as preparation. Anyways, we got into Montreal two hours later than intended and were gearing up to spend the night on Canadian soil when we found out our flight to Geneva was also delayed two hours. There was much rejoicing. And also a little bit of customs confusion. But we powered through. On this flight, I found out the most fascinating thing about non-US airlines: they give you all sorts of free food and drinks! Magical. Arrived in Geneva just in time to miss our flight to Athens. Rebooked to Athens through Munich, bought a cheese tart, a glass of wine, and 20 bucks worth of Swiss chocolate. After some debate, I decided to say no to the gallon of nutella.

Our flight to Munich was, of course, delayed. There was much napping in airports.

 Finally landed in Munich about 15 minutes before our flight to Athens was about to take off. Sprinted through Munich airport (Katie in her bare feet) only to be told they had switched gates and we were about 20 gates off. Finally made in on the plane to Athens, got more free plane food including awesome German chocolate (I'm telling you, they know how to do it right over there), and landed at about 11:30 Athens time which is 4:30 pm back home in Michigan. Jon picked us up at the airport, we drove through Athens (in the dark, it looked surprisingly like Grand Rapids...), we stopped once to stand on a bridge over a ridiculously deep canal, and finally made it to the hotel. Total travel time was about 37 hours. I thought about not even posting this so I'd just forget about it in years to come, but I guess that would be disingenuous. Plus it's part of my grade. And besides, it was definitely an adventure of some sort.

The Basics

The Blog

This is a blog to keep track of my (hopefully) amazing adventures in Greece from May 30-June 28 2013. I'm keeping this blog as an assignment for the class I'm taking while over in Greece, but if you're interested (mom), by all means, read on. I'll try to keep things at least semi-amusing. 

The Project

We're going to be working at the archaeological site of Isthmia which is on the mainland near Corinth. The dig is through Ohio State University, and their website, which can be found here will tell you everything you want to know and more. Along with working with artifacts and doing general diggy things (not entirely sure what that entails yet, but my guess is possibly some ancient curse fighting and almost certainly some weed pulling), my project specifically is to work on creating a virtual tour for the site that can be downloaded and used as an app. Needless to say, I'm pretty geeked about this. Location-based apps and I are becoming very good friends. I already have visions of augmented reality swirling in my head and am pretty excited to get to the site and see what I'll be working with.

The Trip

In addition to working at Isthmia five days a week, on weekends we will be traveling to other historical/generally awesome places. So fair warning, plenty of this will be pictures of beaches and delicious foods. Except olives. Olive oil maybe, but never olives. Sorry, Greeks.

So there you have it...stay tuned for more, I guess.