Northern Greece

Pictures from our second field trip - this time we went to northern Greece, mainly to see Thessaloniki and Pella.  The first picture is Mount Olympus, which we passed from the bus.  It’s huge!  At the port in Thessaloniki, the sky was perfectly clear, and the only thing in the sky that looked like clouds was actually the snow-capped top of Mount Olympus in the distance.  The second picture is from a small tour we took at Ambelica on the drive up to Thessaloniki - this town is very small, but it was worth the stop because it had its own kind of Rennaisance in the 18th century when they discovered that they had the resources to manufacture and trade a special color of dyed cotton.  The town educated their people in business and languages so they could trade successfully.  This painting is from the house of one of the very influential families, and it shows the port of Istanbul.  That was cool to see after revisiting Istanbul the previous weekend with my family!

Then I have a couple of pictures of the water at Thessaloniki, which is right next to a strip of nice bars and restaurants.  We had much more free time on this trip than we had in the Peloponnese, so we were able to explore this area a lot!

While we were there, Thessaloniki was hosting its annual documentary film festival, with international documentaries playing all day.  I got to see two documentaries, one on the hostage crisis in Tehran, and another on an American man who went to live with Pigmies in Africa.  I also got to go on a walk through a certain neighborhood of Thessaloniki with a CYA professor who specializes in ethnography, so I learned a bit about the population exchange between Turkey and Greece a couple of generations ago.  We also visited an art exhibit (I have a picture of it) featuring a photographer’s work on the crisis in Greece.

We spent about three days in Thessaloniki and one visiting Pella, the city where Alexander the Great and Phillip came from.  The site itself was not particularly impressive, but it’s always cool to see where these people lived!