My Easter with Athena :)

For Easter break, I bussed down to Athens on April 20^th to meet up with my friend Kathryn, who has been studying abroad in Dijon, France. We stayed in Athens for four days including Easter weekend. In the Greek Orthodox Church, Easter is the most important, biggest holiday of the year, more so than Christmas. They have mass almost every day of holy week and then the real celebrations begin Saturday night at midnight. We visited the most famous sites in Athens, including the Acropolis, National Gardens, Manastiraki Square, Parliament building, and the Olympic Stadium. Sites had shorter hours because of the holiday, but entrance into the Acropolis was free since it was Good Friday :) It was amazing to finally see the Parthenon in person since it’s such a universal symbol of Greece and ancient civilization. One of the coolest things was that we then visited the New Acropolis Museum, which has a full size model of the Parthenon with pieces of its statues that had been taken down. Then I was able to imagine what this grand temple of Athena actually looked like when it was built thousands of years ago. We also walked up Mars Hill, sat in the Theatre of Dionysus, and shopped in the famous tourist districts Manastiraki and Plaka.

 It was awesome to walk around the Panathenaic or Olympic Stadium and imagine all of the  ancient athletes and gladiators that competed in the first Olympic Games. Later we went to Syntagma Square with the Parliament building and watched the changing of the guards. They wear traditional Greek clothes and march with a super weird high step :) We attended an outdoor  midnight candle light mass on Easter Saturday at ‘The Cathedral’, the head church for the Greek Orthodox Church. The priests started chanting, led a processional out into the square and began lighting the candles of the crowd. The original flame comes from a church in Bethlehem and is flown to Greece and then spread to all of the churches in the entire country, so it was a pretty interesting tradition to take part. Our breakfast was Easter bread, kind of floral tasting bread baked into a circle with a red Easter egg in the middle. They do paint Easter eggs here, but only red to represent Christ’s blood and they also don’t have the Easter bunny. For dinner we accidentally went to ‘God’s Restaurant’ :) They were roasting lamb on the spit out on the street, which I got a chance to turn for a while. We ate a traditional Greek meal of a Greek salad, lamb, potatoes, baklava and ouzo, but didn’t try the Easter soup which is made from lamb intestines. The waiters were very entertained by my attempts at speaking Greek and that Kathryn didn’t speak any at all, so it was a fun meal. My Easter this year was a bit different than it would have been at home, but it was really interesting to experience another culture’s way of celebrating the holiday. Also it was great to have an extra break from school for a week and half, just because Easter is a national holiday ;)