Days 21-22 - Athens to Corinth to Athens to Rome

No pictures again today, I'm too tired to upload them. Tomorrow I should have time to post pictures for both the last post and this one.

This will be another double post. I’m here in Rome and I’m pretty wiped out. We have two more full days here and then I have three days in Paris and then back home.

Yesterday we woke up in Athens and then drove out to Corinth, the Acrocorinth specifically, which is this huge hill where the temple of Aphrodite was. Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty, so naturally her temple was a huge brothel. Corinth was a big time port city, any ship travelling east or west would travel through Corinth so the temple of Aphrodite was the first stop that a lot of the sailors made as when they got to Corinth (and let me tell you, that wouldn’t be easy, we drove half-way up the Acrocorinth and it was still about a 45 minute hike up to the top.)

Every other year there is a Talbot class that goes to Turkey, Greece, and Rome and the alternate year a class goes to Israel. There are some people on the trip this year that went to Israel last year and yesterday a girl came with us who went to Israel last year but now lives in Greece. She is starting a ministry here in Athens that is focused towards girls who are involved in human trafficking. I guess Greece is one of the top ten countries that are destinations for human trafficking (Italy and the U.S. are also in the top ten.) The girls get tricked into thinking they are signing up for a job and then are forced into prostitution when they get to the new country. She told us about one girl who she met at a women’s shelter whose story is pretty typical. She is a Ukrainian girl who was from a small town and applied for a job to work at the Athens Olympics. She went through a whole interview process, she was 17 but lied and said she was 18, she said there were 13 and 14 year old girls who did the same thing. She got the “job” and so did a bunch of other girls from her town. The girls all left on a bus, thinking they were headed for Athens. The bus took the girls to Istanbul, where they were checked into a hotel and brutalized for a couple of days to break the girls and get rid of any resistance they had. After that they were taken to Athens (prostitution is legal in Greece) and forced to work in a brothel where they worked 14 hour days and saw 20-30 clients a day. The girls are threatened if they try to leave, if threats to them don’t work their families are threatened (the girls give all their personal info when they think they are applying for a normal job.)

It was pretty wild to hear Kelsey (the girl who is trying to work with these girls) talk about that then go and visit one of the major prostitution centers of both the Greek and Roman worlds. I’m not sure what the temple of Aphrodite was like, but I’m sure there were plenty of things that went on like that in the 1st century as well.

After the Acrocorinth we went and visited the old forum (or agora) in Corinth, had lunch, and then visited a shop where they made authentic museum copy pottery and statues. I got two small pieces, a little vase with Hector on it and a little container that had Achilles. I really like both of them. Before we headed back to Athens for the night we visited a port town that Paul stopped at on his way back home from his second missionary journey. I skipped some rocks there and we tried to get Jin to break open some sea urchins but she said they were too small to eat.

After dinner a few of us hiked from the hotel up to the top of the highest hill in Athens, it was really cool. It was another beautiful night and we had a great view of the city. We looked down on the Parthenon, which was cool. There was a church up top there, and we prayed for a little bit and then headed back to the hotel.

This morning we got up extra early, headed to the airport, and said goodbye to Athens and hello to Rome. The flight wasn’t bad but it was delayed about 45 minutes and then it took forever for us to get our bags so we were a little behind schedule for our first day in Rome. From the airport we drove straight to the town of Ostia which was the primary port for Rome for a while, and then was the secondary port for Rome. If Paul ended up going to Spain like he said he was going to in the book of Romans, he would have come through Ostia.

After that we drove to the Appian way and walked the last two miles into the city, which was the main road into Rome and the road that Paul took. Then we saw some catacombs and then drove to the hotel.

Our hotel here in Rome is very nice, it’s about ten minutes from the Coliseum and the Forum and it is practically across the street from the church called St. Peter in chains, which has Michelangelo’s Moses. I had pasta and pizza for dinner (it was great,) gelato for dessert (won’t get banana again,) and then walked around and saw the Coliseum and the Forum (St. Peters was closed; I’ll try to see it tomorrow.)

Tomorrow morning we’re going to the Vatican and St. Peter’s basilica, and I’m really excited about both of those. We have seen a whole lot of archeology stuff, and I’m ready to see some art. So tomorrow is the Sistine chapel, the school of Athens, and I think the Pieta. And I’m sure there will be other really cool stuff too.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.