Made it!

Well, I made it. I am here at school in Athens, mostly in one piece and with all of my stuff intact. I'm even feeling not that jet-lagged, which is a positive sign considering that I'm ten hours removed from Seattle, and I've only been here since 3 in the morning on Friday.

Living arrangements: I am sharing an apartment with four other girls, none of whom I have met yet. Two of them are here, judging by the luggage which I saw when I moved my stuff into the apartment, but they themselves where not there. The apartment is on the third floor of a little apartment building on Enzonon Street in the Kolonaki neighborhood, for those who care about such things. I arrived at the apartment building at 4 pm, which is right in the middle of siesta. I knew that we were supposed to be quiet during siesta, but I was unaware that "quiet" was defined as "if I can hear that you're alive, you're being too loud." Needless to say, I was making an unacceptable amount of noise as I moved my suitcases from the elevator and tried to figure out which of my keys fit in which of the locks on my door. A man from downstairs came up to tell me so much, unlocked my doors for me, and told me that I had too much luggage, which may or may not be true. I didn't even try to unpack any of my stuff, as I figured that that would also create too much noise and I would like to try to start off on the right foot with my new neighbors.

Athens: I've been here since Friday, as I said, but this is the first that I've been in the neighborhood in which CYA is located. I'm not sure what I was expecting of Athens, other than the Acropolis, which I haven't visited yet (as I'm sure that I will make many excursions there with my Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology class), and as such, I'm not sure whether it has fulfilled expectations or not. The neighborhood in which my hotel was located was composed of many narrow streets, with many hotels and shops. It was loud, and it had many places of eating with outdoor seating. There seemed to be a pharmacy and souvlaki place on every block. There was much graffiti, many of which I photographed. As far as I could make out, a lot of the graffiti was either anarchist or communist, judging from it being signed either with a hammer and sickle or the anarchist sign. There were multiple newsstand kiosks on the streets, selling everything from newspapers and magazines to gum and water to cigarettes to belts and purses. There is a lot of smoking here, but the people who smoke don't do it obnoxiously, and I haven't been anyplace yet where I couldn't breathe for the smoke. The neighborhood where I am now seems to be more middle-upper class than the neighborhood where the hotel is, and I haven't been here long enough to register any meaningful impressions.

Language: I don't read Modern Greek so well as I thought that I did. Modern Greek in its written form isn't supposed to be very much different than Koine, but I forgot that there was an additional two-thousand years of vocabulary that I was going to have to deal with. And while Greek is like German in that in order to create new words, you put two existing words together, that's not enough to ensure that I can recognize all two thousand years of new vocabulary. Additionally, I realized that my reading vocabulary in Koine isn't all that great either. If Plato or Lysias didn't use the word, I probably don't know it, and if they did, you're still taking your chances. Compounding my difficulties is that most of the signage is in all upper-case letters. This may not sound like much of an impediment, but in Ancient Greek, there might be two or three upper-case letters on a page. Consequently, I don't recognize upper-case Greek letters as quickly, and I'm reading them one letter at a time instead of being able to recognize entire words, which is really slow. ImAgInE iF aLl EnGlIsH wErE wRiTtEn LiKe ThIs, AnD iT mIgHt GiVe YoU sOmE iDeA oF wHaT iT's LiKe. For spoken Greek, I don't know very much, but that's still more than my father did. My speaking vocabulary consists of stuff like: "Good morning" "No" "Yes" "Thank you" "Please" "Water". Not really enough to get by with. Luckily, I'm enrolled in the Survival Modern Greek class during orientation, where they attempt to impart enough Greek in four hours to enable us to, well, survive. Most of the people I've run into speak at least some English, but I feel terrible speaking English in a foreign country.

People: I haven't talked with very many people from CYA yet, but those I have encountered have been nice enough. The first person I really started talking to, I discovered, has a younger brother who's starting his freshman year at Haverford and is living on 3/3. What are the odds? We then had a nice session of Classics geeking, which was fun.

I think that that's about all I have to say at the moment, and siesta is over so they won't kill me if I make a reasonable amount of noise moving things around in my apartment, so I think I might go do that now.