Did I mention the midterm?

No post yesterday; I was wrapped in the grip first of an excursion to the Aeropagus (finally saw it, Dr. Weninger!*), then dehydration leading to the worst headache I’ve had in ages and some faintly hysterical tellings and retellings of the Persian Wars. Er, not that the dehydration led to the Persian Wars, but the terrible headache and the Persian Wars were simultaneous. Maybe that’s why Aristagoras was such a flip-flopper — he just had a headache the size of Crete.

Yeah, um, we have a midterm today and we’re all a little anxious about it. And don’t even get me started on the related paper due Friday, because . . . I haven’t started it.

Spring break is next week, and we can’t wait. There is an overwhelming sense among the student body of wanting to be at the beach; it’s hard to focus on ruins and poetry and essays, whether read or written, when Meteora and Dublin and Mykonos are waiting for so many of us.

It’s also hard to focus on all those when you have a midterm covering like 1500 years of history. Did I mention we have a midterm? Topos, temenos, bomos, naos, anthemata . . . sorry.

Rachel and I were discussing on our walk to school this morning the difficulties of getting jaded. We’ve been here about six weeks. The walk to and from the Athens Centre, or even to the Acropolis, is routine. I’m not tired of seeing the Parthenon, but I have trouble focusing on the new ruins we’re shown. (Hopefully I’ll be rested enough to appreciate Sounion and the other Attic sites we’re seeing tomorrow.) And I dislike that in myself — I don’t want to become inured to the crazy, improbable adventure of living in a foreign country for three months (more like two months now, of course, which is also crazy).  If nothing else, I don’t want to waste the money that’s been spent to get me here.

How do you regain fresh eyes? How do you regain the exciting disorientation of the first weeks here, when you’re starting to understand the language?

I think you start — well, I start — with getting the responsibilities out of the way. Midterm, quiz, papers: one way or another they’ll all be done by Friday. I’ll book my hostel today and stop worrying about that. And next week, I’ll sleep; I’ll spend a day on an island; and I’ll see if I can get a little lost in Athens again.

One thing that remains exciting is the laiki, the street market, and that deserves a post all of its own.

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*An explanation: Before leaving for Athens I temped twice as a receptionist at the Anchorage Community Mental Health Clinic. One of the doctors there, a tall, smiling, soft-spoken James Cromwell type named Dr. Weninger, was very impressed by my upcoming trip. He and his wife went to Athens some years ago, and he mentioned how interesting it was for him, as a psychologist, to see the agora, the source of “agoraphobia” — and then mentioned going to the Aeropagus. He said as a Catholic kid growing up in Kansas, he always heard about St. Paul preaching to the A-thin-ians, and thought it was nice of Paul to preach just to skinny people like him.

And he went on thinking St. Paul preached to the A-thin-ians right up until his Athenian tour guide said, “And this is the Aeropagus, where St. Paul preached to the Athenians.”

Ooooh.

So, Dr. Weninger — I finally got to climb it myself, and thought of y’all.