THIS IS SPARTA!!!

So the day after Thanksgiving when my retail buddies were getting up at 3am to wrastle with angry Moms fighting for that last $2.99 toaster, I went to Sparta. We left Nauplion early in the morning and first headed to Tiryns for a little site visit.  It was only 15 minutes outside of Nauplion and we could still see the acropolis hill that we climbed the day before.  The site that we visited was a ancient Mycenaean palace.  Robert, our prof, would let us 'walk through the walls', but made us walked around the site as if it wasn't ruins and go through the proper doorways.  I really like that, it made it seem more real.  We had a little lecture about the layout of ancient palaces and then headed out the door.  Robert doesn't mess around.

From there we went to Mycenae to see the biggest Mycenaean palace in the area.  There was quite a bit there that was still intact which was really neat to see including this really deep cistern.  After our lecture, Robert said we could climb down in it.  The first 20 feet or so is just a regular stairwell, but then you round the corner into this tunnel, still with stairs, and it gets really dark.  No one had a flashlight and no one had a cell phone, so people were frantically searching their pockets for iPods and cameras.  We were taking pictures left and right just to see where we were going.  They're some of the most horribly candid shots I've seen :)   Since we were in the complete dark, we started getting a little giddy and excited, much like how you feel in a haunted house.  People we claiming to see snakes and spiders, even though we clearly couldn't see anything.  My personal favorite was Sam yelling "Rachel!  Get your hands off my ass!"  Don't worry, my hands were on the wall trying to feel my way down the well, not trying to feel up Sam.  The bottom was just a boring dead end, but the 20 minute adventure to get down there was worth it.

From Mycenae, we headed to Sparta.  People were running around yelling THIS IS SPARTA! and high kicking people.  Watch 300 if you don't get the references, it's pretty darn good.  There aren't a lot of ruins left from ancient Sparta, which is kind of a bummer, but Robert told us this neat quote from an ancient historian that I quite like, "People will see the remains of Athens and think she was 4 times as great as she was, but they'll see the remains of Sparta and think she was half as great as she was."

That night we goofed off in the hotel.  Kayla's family was there and her mom, Mama Sue, knows a bunch of parlor tricks that we played in the hallway.  After we got shushed enough, we watched 300 and played some card games to end the day.