Blue

So I´m here at an internet cafe after three and a half days on a yacht on the Mediterraenean. It has been absolutely incredible!

Blue. There is a reason that the Mediterraenean is called "The Wine-Dark Sea." It is not an average blue; it is a deep, all encompassing blue. It seems endless, immortal. There is a great reason that the Greeks loved her, that the Romans called her "Mare Nostrum:" Our Sea. When I ride the Mediterraenean, I feel her immortality. When I burn my shoulders, I feel a taste of her wrath. She is like liquid azure slate.

When approached correctly, nature has an incredibly humanizing effect on people

Up until the Mediterraenean I did not appreciate most of the natural wonders that I saw. I enjoyed Cappodiccia, but mainly for the cultural aspects that were there. At some point in our two day stay at Cappodoccia, I realized that I wouldn't mind if we didn't see another wind-swept vista of vulcanic rock wonders.

Then I came to the Mediterraenean with its impossible salt-watered beauty, with its deep, bluer than eyes look.

Over the past three days on the yacht, called the Arıf Kaptan B, we have seen virtually no ancinet sites, but in the water, watching the water, holding my breath and floating on the salt-bouyant waters, cimbling the summit of the adjacent steep hills with six people of varying climbing abilities, creating mythologies for imagined constellations of an octopus named Seminus, gazing at stars impossibly clear shimmering stars, sharing a shooting star with three friends. That is the Mediterraenean, and that is why I don´t mind not seeing as many ancient cultural sites as I had before.

When approached correctly, nature has an incredibly humanizing effect on people, much like ancient art and architecture. The key is to realize how many people have been there, and how human it is be be in awe.

We did see a series of sites while we were on the yacht. One of the most intriguing was Gemilier Island, an island that had only churches and no settlement. Archeologists think that the church at the top is dedicated to St. Nicholas, but we know little more about the churches and the complexes surrounding them. For example, the church at the top of the hill is connected to one of the churches at the bottom of the hill by a massive, vaulted causeway. It is unclear what it was used for. Maybe some sort of prosessional? It was the mystery that gripped me, the halfway-done aspect of the archeologist's task. I wrote a list of questions to answer, and I planned to go back the next day (since our boat was not that far away from it), but I ran out of time and was unable to return. This shows one of the main frustrations of the trip. It was necessarily a survey trip, tantalizing us with site after intriguing site, but we were never able to mine the depths of any.