Greek and Squid

Hello everyone!
Obviously I have not updated for a while, and there are several reasons for that, the first being that I am terribly busy, and the second being that I still don't have internet service in my apartment. (Yes, I have a whole apartment! That's one of those things that I haven't had time to write about until now...)
Anyway, I could start way back with my flight, etc, but instead I'm just going to write about some more recent events and I'll fill you in on other stuff later.
Last night Brad and I (Brad, for those of you who don't know, is the other Grinnell Corps fellow here) went into downtown Thessaloniki for the first time and met Will (former Grinnell Corps member still living in Thessaloniki) and two other Grinnellians, Eileen and Bridget. We saw the beautiful waterfront, had crepes, saw the ruins of the ancient agora, and had a really nice dinner which included squid, octopus, salad, stuffed pepper, eggplant, chicken and more. I've had octopus and calamari a few times before, but I have to say that I did find the squid a little unnerving; it came unsliced, stuffed with cheese, and looking eerily like this exhibit at the Natural History Museum that used to terrify me as a young child. (It's the one of the giant squid attacking the sperm whale, and it's all the way in the corner at the ocean exhibit.) Luckily, once the squid was sliced it started to look a lot less like an ecology lesson and a lot more like dinner, and it was delicious.
This morning I woke up and decided to take a stroll through Pylea, the local village, where I was looking for breakfast. However, I managed, as I usually do in a new place, to get completely and utterly lost. All of a sudden I was just wandering through a bunch of houses, watching cars barrell past me, and making hopeless attempts to retrace my completely chaotic course through town. I spent about forty five sweaty minutes trying to figure out where the hell I was, silently rehearsing my Greek in hopes that I could ask someone "Signomi, Kseres Pu Ine Anatolia College?" (Excuse me, do you know where Anatolia College is?) Luckily, I found my way to a familiar street before I asked anyone, but I was proud of myself for being able to formulate the question in my head anyway.
I had another sucessful conversation in Greek at the Thessaloniki airport the other day; a strange man approached me, spent several minutes talking about what appeared to be a baggage claim issue but might also have been any number of other things, and I finally informed him, in perfect Greek, that I did not understand anything he was saying. He smiled and went in search of someone who actually knew what he was talking about, but I was pretty excited to have communicated something. Maybe I should have followed up "I don't understand" with "I like feta!" or "It is eleven thirty!", as those are other useful phrases that I know. Or perhaps I could have tried the ever-useful phrase George Bush Ine Mimu," meaning "George Buch is a Monkey." Oh well. Next time.