Let me say a few words about language.

In Greek, a 'P' sounds like an 'R', an 'X' sounds kind of like an 'H', a 'B' sounds like a 'V', a 'v' is a lowercase "N', an 'n' is a lowercase 'H' that makes an 'e' sound, a 'u' is a lowercase 'Y', 'w' and 'o' are two different kinds of like a lowercase 'O', a 'D' sound is a combination of the "N' sound (which sometimes looks like a 'v') and a 'T,' a 'B' sound is a combination of 'M' and the Greek 'P' (but remember, the English 'P' makes an 'R' sound) and 'J' does not exist and is replaced entirely with 'TZ'.

People say that once you've learned one foreign language, it becomes easier to learn others. People told me that taking Latin would prove useful one day, because it would help me to learn some of those other languages. Well, Latin is useful. Very useful- when I'm doing Sunday crossword puzzles, or on those frequent occasions when I need to ask Quintus if I can borrow his catapult. Unfortunately, Latin is not really so useful when it comes to learning Greek. I guess this should not surprise me; the Ancient Greeks and Romans were very different in many respects. But didn't the Romans sort of appropriate lots of Greek culture, you know, classical sculpture and all of that? Why couldn't they have appropriated more of the Greek language along the way? It would make my life easier.

But maybe they did...after all, Spanish is one of those romance languages that evolved from Latin somewhere along the line, and there are some similar words in Spanish and Greek. For example, in Spanish, "aqui" means "here." The Greek "ekei", which sounds exactly the same, means "there." Spanish has words like "que" and "y", which sound exactly like the Greek "kai" and "H" (that sounds like "eee", remember the spelling lesson I just gave you?). Unfortunately, in Spanish, "que" means "that" and "Y" means "and," while in Greek "kai" means "and" and "H" is a feminine article that I can never quite put in the right place even without the dusty remnants of high school Spanish appearing uninvited from the file cabinet in the back of my brain where they have been mouldering for the past five years.

Speaking of my luckluster Spanish skills, I certainly hope that I am never called upon to use them again, because they have become hopelessly muddled and hybridized as of late; I can't even get through a simple "uno, dos, tres" without experiencing the urge to throw in a δυο or a τρια. All my foreign languages just become one big blob, like paint spilled by El Greco. Or Paella with octopus. Or just one big blob.

And to top it all off, "Ναι", pronounced "Nay", which sounds like "no" in pretty much every European language including Louxembourgish (go ahead- look it up), means "yes" in Greek.

Dead Monks, Dead Frogs, "The Dead"

This weekend I decided to go along on a field trip to Meteora and Ioannina with some study abroad students. I admit that I was a little hesitant about this, since I usually prefer not to travel in a huge group of Americans. However, it all turned out really well. The whole thing was organized by two professors (one a Grinnell alum!) who knew their way around, which meant that I got lost a lot less than I usually do in new places, and I also got to see a lot more, since it's convenient to have a bus always waiting to shepherd you around.
Meteora is apparently the "second most important group of monasteries in Greece." I don't know why I put that phrase in quotes, since I'm not strictly quoting anything, but it is something that I've read in various places. The first most important group of monasteries in Greece is Mount Athos, where I am not allowed due to my lack of a y-chromosome. That's right- only men are allowed on Athos. In fact, female farm animals are not even allowed on Athos.
However, women are allowed to visit monasteries at Meteora, which is good, because at least one of the monasteries is actually a monastery for women. (I don't really know the difference between a monastery for women, a nunnery and a convent. I also don't know the difference between female monks and nuns. Maybe there is no difference.) All of the monasteries at Meteora are built way high up on big cliffs. The entire area is full of these huge rocks that are jutting out of the ground. Many of them are full of these strange looking holes. Apparently, the whole area was underwater many years ago, and somehow the water helped create all of this. I don't really understand it, but it is awesome. (Awesome in the real sense of the word, not in the "if you could pass the ketchup, that would be awesome" sense.) Here are some pictures, and they will show you exactly what I mean:






See? Awesome. We actually visited two of these monasteries (There used to be 21 of them, but now there are only six still in operation.) The first was the monastery of St. Stephan, and it's the aforementioned women's monastery. The church inside, of which I did not take pictures (I did not want to make any nuns mad at me) was painted in absolutely beautiful, vivid, detailed frescoes. Of course, some of them were pictures of people being thrown into hell and eaten by dragons, or demons coming to drag people away, or various holy people having various unpleasant experiences. However, they were some of the most beautiful paintings of hellish demons and painful death scenes that I have ever seen.

I should also mention the dress code. Visitors to the monastery are required to dress modestly; ie, no tanks tops, no shorts, and skirts below the knee for all women. Since most women tourists don't arrive in long skirts these days, the monastery provides them for everyone, so you get to walk around looking very fashionable, like this:


Here's something interesting about monastic life; it follows a completely different daily schedule than the usual one. The monks (regardless of gender) go to bed when the sun goes down, get up at 2am to pray for eight hours, eat their main meal of the day, work for eight hours, and then go to bed. It doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun to me, but I guess fun isn't really the point. I'll admit that I spent some time puzzling over the fact that I knew I had read something about monks getting up at 2am, and I couldn't for the life of me remember where. Finally, I realized it was this passage from "The Dead":

"He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins. He asked what they did it for...The coffin, said Mary Jane, is to remind them of their last end.”

Well, James Joyce was right about one thing; monks do get up at 2am. I'm pretty sure they speak, though, since they talked to us when we paid our admission fees. I don't know if they sleep in coffins; they didn't let me see their bedrooms. (Besides, there are a few differences between Irish Catholic monks and Greek orthodox monks). However, this picture, taken at the second monastery we visited, is definite proof that they try to be reminded of their "last end" on a daily basis. Look at this:

These are skulls of dead monks. Apparently, after three years of being buried, the dead monks are dug up, their bones cleaned with wine, and put on display to remind the current, living monks of their own mortality.
We also saw a sort of monk dining hall (is it called a refectory? I don't remember) filled with wooden tables and benches. Monk's food is very simple, but it is also rumored to be very good. However, all monks are required to eat in the short period of only ten or twenty minutes, while psalms are being read. This is to prevent them from enjoying their food too much, since food is an earthly pleasure, and should only be for the sustainment of life, not pleasure. To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time believing this. This is Greece, after all. It takes most Greeks several hours to finish a cup of coffee. The enjoyment of food is practically the national pasttime. How could any Greek, even an exceptionally pious one, give that up for ten minute meals? I guess it all comes down to the fact that I won't be joining a monastery anytime soon.

However, there are those people for whom monastic life is, apparently, not difficult enough. These people have apparently been known to take up residence in the holes in the mountain rocks, to live a life of solitude. There are even some holes with remnants of wall paintings in them, because the inhabitant decided to decorate their home. However, these people appear to be a dying, if not entirely dead, breed, possibly because, well, to me it looks like it would be very easy to roll out of those little holes in one's sleep. Take a look:


Anyway, after we left the monasteries and removed our skirts, we got back on the bus and headed to Ioannina. The road from Meterora to Ioannina snakes through the mountains on tiny little roads that go perilously close to steep drop-offs. It is positively gorgeous, though you do feel like you are going to die through most of the trip. I spent all four hours with my nose plastered to the window, watching the mountains go by, colored yellow and orange from the fall foliage. I would have taken pictures, but if you've ever tried to take pictures from a bus window, you know it's pretty much a pointless endeavor. You can choose the perfect shot, but by the time you actually click the shutter the bus has invariably just driven by some power lines or a huge tree, and you get a blurred picture of these obstacles, with some extra glare from the reflection of the flash on the window. It's just maddening.

We arrived in Ioannina after about four hours, which included a stop at a truck stop, where everyone was sitting at little tablecloth-covered tables drinking wine and eating platefuls of food. (I'm telling you, the Greeks are not ten minute meal people. You can't even buy canned soup in the supermarket. I can just image the horrified reaction that Kraft macaroni and cheese would elicit.)

Ioannina is a lovely little city on a big lake, which is unusual, since Greece doesn't have many lakes. The people of Ioannina take full advantage of their lake, however; they use it for frogs. Yup, frog legs are the specialty of Ioannina. About six of us decided to order a plate of them at dinner, probably mostly so that we could take pictures and put them on our blogs. Here's what frog legs look like:

And, in case you were wondering, they really do taste kind of like chicken. They look like frogs, but they taste like chicken. I think that next time I am craving something that tastes like chicken, I will choose something that does not look like frog. But hey, I guess that if you're really freaked out about bird flu, frog could be one alternative. Or maybe if you're a monk and don't want to enjoy your food, you could just order food that looks like frogs.

Here I must pause to drift off on a tangent about culture differences. Since arriving in this country, Brad and I have spent most of our time with Greeks and Americans who are already quite integrated into the Greek way of life. So it was somewhat amusing to find myself thrust back into a group of Americans who are more, well, American. Most notably, I find that meals suddenly became very different affairs. First off, though America college students are generally quite fond of alcohol, they choose to go drinking after dinner, and drink vodka, rum, or tequila in outrageously priced cockails. (I cannot bring myself to pay seven Euros for drink. I just can't do it.) However, when they sit down to a meal, they don't drink at all. This is completely opposite to the Greek way of life: Greeks will never sit down to a full meal without some form of alcohol; retsina, wine, ouzo, and tsipouro all tend to appear on the table at a taverna with the same regularity as salt and pepper. However, Greeks also tend to stop drinking before they become belligerent or start to vomit, possibly because legal alcohol doesn't have the same quality of novelty to someone who's been able to drink legally since birth. I can't help but feel that the US has kind of screwed up when it comes to dealing with alcohol issues.

The next morning we all took a trip to the castle inside Ioannina, where they have several museums and a beautiful view of the mountains.
A Turkish leader named Ali Pasha lived in Ioannina some several hundred years ago, and he is buried within the walls of the castle, in something that looks vaguely like an ornate bird cage. Apparently, his mistress was drowned in the lake sometime in the early nineteenth century. I'm going to have to do a little bit more research on that, since I'm once again not clear on the details.

And, finally, we stopped at a cave on the way back, where we were treated to a long tour and some beautiful views of stalactites and stalagmites. I'll let you see this for yourself, and now I'm going to go plan our Thanksgiving celebration.

The Communists are coming.

Damn. It's the first night in a long time that I'm not working, and I have a lot of errands to run, and I'd like to go to a movie, but I can't go downtown. Why? Because the Communists are protesting.
See, about thirty-some years ago, Greece stopped being a dictatorship and became a democracy, and it all happened on November 17th, when some students from the Polytechnic University had an uprising. Unforunately, that military dictatorship was backed by the US, because the Americans saw it as a safer alternative than Communism.
Nowadays, the 17th is a holiday in memory of the students who died in the uprisings. It's also a day when all of the Communists (and there are quite a few here, apparently) take the streets and protest, because they believe that this should be their day - that it should be a Communist holiday. I'm not so clear on the specifics, but from what I hear, they generally don't have warm feelings towards Americans on this day.
So I guess I'm staying in, though I'd really kind of like to go see what's happening downtown. Oh well. Maybe I'll sit here and yell at my Woody Guthrie poster instead. That would be a safer way of confronting the communists, though not quite as interesting.

Anyway, here are some pictures to give you some insight into the radical political scene in Greece:





This second one isn't really relevant, as it's Anarchist graffiti, not Communist graffiti. However, I thought it was sort of funny. I hear that the Anarchists often leave funny graffiti around town, but I unfortunately fail to understand it most of the time, as it is usually in Greek. My friend Will tells me that they sometimes scrawl the Greek word for "ballot box" on the trash cans.

Subbing 2: The Revenge

No, not really. Actually, it was a great day. I subbed two classes: the first was an extremely quiet and obedient seventh grade class. Once again, we talked about the first Thanksgiving, and I described maple syrup, although it was a short class period so I decided not to hand out samples this time around.
My second class was a group of ninth graders. The head of the English Department suggested that I play some games with them, or come up with some fun non-academic activities. I had several games in mind, including twenty questions, dictionary, etc. However, they all wanted to play a game they called "Name Animal Plant", which involves choosing a letter and coming up with words that start with that letter in a variety of categories. First was J, and I got a number of interesting replies, including "Jailbird" for the animal category, "Junk food" for the food category, and "Justin Timberlake" for pretty much every category.
Next was 'Q'. They had a hard time with this letter, because, well, it's a tough one. The two girls sitting in front of me spent several minutes struggling to find a country or city beginning with Q. They kept suggesting Cuba.
"How about Queens?" I said. They looked confused. "It's a part of New York," I explained.
"Are you from New York?" the girl asked.
"Yup," I answered. "I'm from New York."
At this, a general shriek of excitement emanated from the student body, and followed by a grinding screech as about twenty adolescent girls dragged their desks forward until they touched mine.
"Have you seen famous people?" they all demanded.
"A few," I said. I was tempted to tell them about the conversation I had with David Sedaris, since that is probably the most exciting famous person encounter that I've had, but I knew they were talking about movie stars. I told them a few stories about the summer I spent working at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. They went crazy when they heard that I had actually seen Natalie Portman and Meryl Streep, but I had to explain that I had just seen them, not actually talked to them.
"Have you met Brad Pitt?" one kid asked me.
"Nope," I said.
"Why not?" he demanded, as though he were under the impression that Brad Pitt just hangs out in Central Park shaking hands.
"Uh, " I said, "Uh..I'm not sure. He just doesn't really come around visiting, you know?"
"How about Nicole Kidman?"
"Nope," I said. "I've never met her."
"Have you been on TV?"
"Well, kind of." I explained about how I've been briefly on camera a few times, but I think they expected me to say that I had guest starred on
Friends or something.
"Have you met George Bush?"
"No, and I really don't want to."
"You don't like George Bush?"
"No, not at all!"
"Do you like the Chicago Bulls?"
"I really don't follow basketball..."
"Do you like Greece? Do you like Greek food? What's your favorite movie? Who is your favorite actress? Do you know my second cousin who lives in New York? Have you ever been to Hollywood?" The questions kept coming, and despite the fact that I was giving some really dull answers, they were all hanging on my every word. At the end of the class period, I had four girls ask for my email address so they could show me around Thessaloniki. It was quite adorable, and very strange. I'm back in high school, but I am definitely way more popular this time.

Inspected, Injected, Detected, Neglected, etc.

Wow, it's been a long time since I last updated. Well, there have been a number of things keeping me busy, most notably my quest to be legal in Greece.
Last week Brad and I found out that we are required to apply for residence permits before our three month student Visas expire. That gives us aout three weeks to finish a gigantic, massive ugly stack of paperwork. We've got to have proof of financial support, and proof of our citizenship in the US, and proof of insurance and proof that we are students, and proof that we are healthy, and then to top it all off, we've got to pay the government 150 Euros.
Most of these documents can be easily required by speaking to the right people at Anatolia, who then provide us with letters in Greek that hopefully say what they are supposed to say (this can be a little tricky; yesterday I managed to translate one of these letters and discovered that it did not, in fact, say the right thing.)
However, by far the most unpleasant part of the process thus far has been the trip to the hospital that Brad and I took yesterday.
We arrived at 8:40 for an 8:45 appointment. We waited in one waiting room until a nurse escorted us to another waiting room, and then, half an hour later, to a long line snaking out of an office door. Although we had no idea what we were actually waiting for, Brad and I got on line. About twenty minutes after that, we finally made our way into the office, where we discovered that the people in the office didn't speak English. We did manage to communicate our names and personal information, however, and we were sent to wait in yet another line down the hall. The people at the end of this line were all going into a little room and coming out of the little room with swabs of cotton pressed to their arms, so we assumed that we should be prepared to be poked by some sort of needle.
Sure enough, when it was my turn to enter the little room, the nurse started to prepare a needle while chatting to me in Greek. When she asked me a question, I explained δεω καταλαβαινω, or "I don't understand". She then proceeded to inform me in no uncertain terms that I should learn Greek, because the Greeks all learn some English and the Americans never learn Greek. I would have been upset with her for yelling at me, but the lecture definitely took my mind off of the needle that was entering my arm as she spoke, so I didn't let it bother me. Actually, I didn't even look at my arm through the entire procedure, which is kind of bad, since I now have no idea what they did to me in there, but is also kind of good, because I think it my have been unpleasant. The man after me fainted during his session with the lecturing woman, and he had to be taken away on a stretcher.
After Brad and I were done with our first needle encounter, we were to taken to yet another waiting room, where we sat until they called us in to be given TB tests. This time there was no doubt as to what exactly they were doing to me, partially because the nurse spoke English and explained it all, and partially because they finished the test by drawing big black circles around the spots where the tests had been administered, and then labelling them with the date and the name of the test. Brad and I were both sent on our way with sharpie writing all over our forearms, and instructions not to wash the area for the next few days. Personally, I wasn't thrilled about the fact that I was expected to spend the next few days with black writing all over me, and no advance notice; I mean, what if I was planning to attend a black tie event and needed to wear a strapless evening gown? What if I had had a hot date for that evening? What if I just didn't feel like looking like a dissection specimen for two days?
Luckily I never go to black tie events, my boyfriend is across the atlantic, and I don't really care all that much about the sharpie marks, although they are not overwhelming attractive, I must say. I'm more upset about the prospect of going back to the damn hospital tomorrow to have them check up on my TB spots again. I'm hoping there's no line, but I don't think I have much hope.
Meanwhile, one of the kids asked me about the writing on my arms today, and I explained the whole situation.
"Oh!" he said. "So you had to have shots?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Wow," he said. "I once had to have three shots in one day. It was really awful. But I told the doctor that I just wanted to get better."
"What was the matter?" I asked.
"Well," he explained, "All these blood vessels around my eyes kept breaking. I had all these little spots around my eyes."
"Oh no!"
"Yeah. Well, it was kind of my fault. It was because I was coughing really hard all the time." He mimicked some unpleasant sounding coughs for me. "But it was fake coughing. I was just coughing like that so I wouldn't have to go to school. Don't tell my mom, OK?"