Athens at last!

Sorry that it's taken me so long to get around to writing something about my trip. I left home last Thursday and arrived on Saturday, but the computer labs at College Year in Athens (CYA) didn't open until today. So let the story begin.

Left from the Portland airport on Thursday evening with hugs and goodbyes to the family. The flight was long (with an 8 hour layover in New York's JFK airport) but consisted mostly of sitting around in airports waiting to get going. I did learn that children, although generally cute, very quickly cease to be so on airplanes, and that apparently New Yorker's don't know how to make coffee. I arrived in the Athens airport this last Saturday at about 9am, the same time as the group that traveled through the school, and got to wander around the airport for a while looking for the professor who was supposed to be picking us up. In the end, we all managed to find each other and took a bus into the city proper where we found out which apartments we were going to be living in and dispersed.

Our group has 23 people in it, all from Lewis and Clark College. Most of us are studying religous studies or classical studies, though we have a few biology and chem majors. They divided us up into five apartments, three girls apartments and two boys, all within a few blocks of each other in Kolonoki, a trendy district of Athens that's mostly apartments with a few stores on street level, although there is also a hospital a few blocks away from our apartment and a monastary directly across the street (where the bells go off for a few minutes at 7am and 7pm daily, a good wake up call if our alarms fail us).

Our apartment has five girls in it. I share a room with my friend Carolyn, there is another double room and one single. We also have a lovely little living room with a balconey that overlooks the monastary (where we've been eating dinner in evening and breakfast in the mornings), a bathroom with a sink and tub that both don't drain well, and a rather large closet with a Christmas tree in it for some reason.

Surprisingly, I'm already starting to feel at home in this strange city. Having lived in a large city in a distant past life, I find the absolute chaos of the streets, the tall buildings and the gum bespeckled sidewalks rather charming, while it seems most of the group is rather taken aback by all of it. The traffic is truly trecherous and micro cars (Minis, Smart Cars, etc), motorcycles and scooters dominate the streets. Little regard at all is paid to pedestrians, and the sound of screeching tires can be heard from our balconey at all times of day.

After a rocky start with the idea of grocery shopping in a foreign country (apparently everything in the whole city shuts down on Sundays, including grocery stores), we've managed to find a nice little shop around the corner from our apartment run by a nice woman named Athena who corrects our sorry attempts at conversing in Greek. We also get ice cream, cookies and beer from one of the ubiquitous kiosks down the street. A few blocks away is a whole row of coffee and pastry shops where they serve passible coffee that I've managed to figure out how to order in Greek. Here they drink Greek coffee (which is really Turkish coffee), instant coffee (which is truly ghastly), and regular filter coffee known as "philtrou". I stop by to get a cup every morning before class starts, as we lack a coffee pot in our apartment.

Fortunately for us, three of the girls in our apartment like to cook, so we've been saving a lot on food by having them cook in the evenings, and the two of us who don't cook do the dishes afterwards. Honestly, I eat better here than I do at home, or even at school.

Our apartment is about a 20 minute walk from CYA, which is a stately looking and nicely air conditioned building right in front of the Olympic Stadium that was built for the 2004 Olympics. There is also a nice view of the acropolis and the Parthenon from the school. I'll post pictures as soon as I figure out how to upload them on the school's computers.

For this first month, we're taking two full classes, so we have two three hour classes a day, four days a week: Classical Archeology and Byzantine History. Our archeology professor is a delightful English woman, the daughter of two archeologists who grew up on digs around the world. It seems that we'll be spending the majority of the class at important sites and museums around Athens.

Our Byzantine History class starts in just a few minutes so I'd better go, but I'll post more later. Yasas!