My time in Napflion has flown by, and we leave for Olympia at 7:00 AM tomorrow. We’ve fallen into a nice pattern of spending the morning in class or at some ancient ruins and then heading to the beach for most of the afternoon. I thought I was doing astoundingly well at protecting myself from sunburn until someone today told me that I looked really different with my lighter hair and “pink skin.” I have also somehow managed to continue collecting bruises on my legs, so I’m now just trying to avoid mirrors.
I couldn’t tell you the number of ruin sites we’ve visited lately, and unfortunately they’ve all started to blend together a bit. The reflection pieces we have to write following the field trips have become more difficult, and it’s not uncommon to see groups of students in the lobby trying to remember whether the giant head statue was at Corinth or Ellesius. Fortunately, we’ve been kind of alternating between really old stone ruins and less old but still old marble ruins, so that makes it a little easier to associate the correct memories with each of the places.
Something that has become abundantly clear over my two weeks in Europe is that, as my friend Ben put it, “Going to the bathroom is always an adventure because you’re never quite sure what you’re going to find in there.” That remark followed a particularly exciting bathroom visit on an elevated water skimming boat, but there have been an abundance of unexpected aspects in this area. Today in class we were supposed to come up with a list of things that have confused us, and a full three quarters of my list were about toilets, sinks and showers.
- Toilet paper goes in the trashcan, not in the toilet.
- All the bathrooms flood every time you shower, so there’s a drain in the floor.
- The shower heads are all hand held, but sometimes there’s a rod to attach it to.
- Sometimes, public restrooms have pictures of the opposite gender on the door. (Specifically, a café near the hotel has a picture of George Clooney on the women’s room door.)
- There are retractable clotheslines in the hotel bathroom.
- I haven’t seen a bathtub since I’ve been here.
- There is no uniformity in the way that the toilets flush. I’ve seen buttons, lever, handles, pedals and about a million other ways. There have been far too many bathroom visits where the majority of the time was spent trying to figure out how to flush.
- And most perplexing of all, there is a cord in the shower for which I can’t determine a purpose! I have pulled it while I’m showering, while I’m not, while the people next door are showering, while the electricity is off, and just randomly throughout the day and I can’t figure out what it does! Someone told me it was an emergency call cord that alerted the front desk, but if that’s true I hope I’m never really in trouble because they have failed to respond to any of the (many, many) times I’ve pulled it.
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