Monday, Jun. 18th
Time goes by quickly. Believe it or not, it is already our second week in Greece. This Monday morning, while walking down the noisy, crowded streets to our morning Greek class, it seemed that nothing have changed. However, this Monday, to all Greeks, was a special one, one that contained uncertainty mixed with hope. With the Greek election results being released on Sunday evening, it felt like Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief. With New Democracy’s victory in Greece’s election, a Greek exit front the euro zone appeared to have been averted, at least for now. As foreigners in this city, though the election result would not have any significant immediate impacts on us, we still felt the weight that this election held for Greece and its people. It’s an interesting experience to be in Greece at this critical moment of change. In my mind, the image of Greek people smiling and socializing loudly on streets frequently clashed with the image of homeless men and dogs sleeping in the corners of the streets. Under the surface of a seemingly calm and beautiful city, I sensed that there were also infinite nuanced changes taking place, not just in the government, but also in people’s psychology. While witnessing modern Greece struggling to break away from this financial and political turmoil, I constantly caught myself wondering, questioning about the future, and hoping for hope for the Greek people, just like what every other Greek around me was doing.
As the second week started, everything seemed to be settled into place more. In the past week, we carried out adventures after adventures, some succeeded with pride, some failed with honor. With limited vocabularies in our Greek word bank, we managed to confuse the locals and made them almost believe that we were native Greeks! We naively but courageously “invaded” the noteworthy stadium near our school and learned the hard lesson that though the fences usually looked friendly, behind the fences, there always existed an alert, angry guard. It always amazed me how Athens could combine excitement and thrill in perfect harmony with control and order. Day after day, we announced our exotic presence to this lovely city while occasionally catching the Greeks in surprise with our Americaness. At the same time, we slowly picked up and learned the controlled rules that were emphasized in this dramatic city.
The Monday routinely started with our language class and acting class. The Greek classes were very useful and practical because they did not only teach us “survival Greek,” but also cleared up a lot of confusion we had during our adventures. For example, in Greek culture, there also existed different ways of saying “hi” depending on the person you were talking to. When encountering an elderly person, it would be better to use yasas (a formal greeting) instead of yasoo or ya, which were more informal ways of greeting.
Tonight, Tim also cordially invited us over to his house for a group dinner. In the afternoon, Annika, Rachel and Sean went to an open food market to go shopping for the first time. With only 25 euros, they bought multiple kilograms of meat, vegetables, eggs, cheese and pasta. Of course you can say that foods were relatively cheaper in those markets, but can you believe it, the shopping team was able to get deals like 1 kg of tomatoes for 1 euro. I believe that all the Greek merchants could not help but to be subdued by the shopping team’s charm and mighty bargain power. According to the shopping team’s first-handed report, the merchants in the open market were overwhelmingly kind and excited when they saw a group of Americans wandering around for groceries in local markets. Many were very impressed by the few words that the shopping team uttered during the purchase. Greek people, once again, made us feel so loved!
It was a busy afternoon, as Rachel, Annika, Sean, Savannah, and others cooked and prepared amazing food for us. For dinner, we had pasta with feta chesse and tomato sauce, fried cucumber (oh woops, it should have been zucchini, oh well, it’s the same, kind of!…), chicken in lemon sauce (the chicken was so tender that some vegetarians in the group could not help but to take a bite, hope that did no create too big of a problem for them), and some delicious Greek dessert (chocolate soft cake and honey cakes) brought in by Michael. Dinner ended in a delightful note. It was another memorable night. Though tomorrow will again be another new start, but these beautiful memories would remain with us, always and forever.
Peace, Lily