moment of truth.

kg is tuberculosis-free. i know you were all very concerned...
on another far more irritating note, my macbook pro died. computer whiz roommate karen thinks it's the hard drive, which i thought i had replaced a year ago, but maybe they just repaired it. damn you, genius bar. it could be way worse, and could have happened at a much more inconvenient time, but it's still a huge pain in the ass that i have to deal with this while in a non-english speaking country. i have a greek apple phone number to call... i'm just praying one of their reps is fluent in anglika.
i have my second modern greek test in an hour, so i must be off. roommates katie, other karen and i are heading to istanbul on thursday. i don't think they know what they're in for once we find hummus... they're about to see something special.

love,
kg

carnival in greece

is sort of a let down, to be totally honest. this is probably because we as a suite are missing the BIGGIE carnival weekend, as half of us will be in istanbul (holla.) and the other half will be in cairo (bomb blast killed a 17-year-old french tourist in hussein square yesterday... we are concerned, to put it mildly) this friday through monday. 

thursday was tsikopempti, which everyone calls 'meat thursday' to save time; tsiko actually means "the smoky smell that rises up when you grill meat" so the entire city has reeked of grilled meat since thursday. i wouldn't have it any other way. this falls into the sympathetic magic category of ritualistic practices; it's thought that if you eat meat on this day, you will have meat available to you for the next year, meaning you're making bank. it marks the official beginning of carnival season, which leads up to lent, though there have been babies running around in costume since the weekend. they get to go to baby discos and have parties. i'm down with anything that incorporates small pirates into my daily routine. 

carnival is the european grandaddy of mardi gras; it's characterized by excess and drank. my modern greek teacher eleni, whom i love, made a point of telling us that all babies in greece are born 9 months after carnival... jeez. public revelry is expected, including drankin in the streets, singing dirty songs, and mackin on strangers in masks. 

practices vary from place to place in greece. i'd love to see how it is in a smaller greek village, but alas, hummus awaits in turkey (priority). 

this weekend we did our damnedest to take full advantage of the festivities, but nothing really blew my mind. we went to a taverna in plaka on thursday so everyone could eat meat and be joyful. on friday we chilled, saturday we wore our masks over to a friend's apartment for clownin and then went to pangrati square, not knowing that we would need reservations to actually go into a bar. this shouldn't have been a surprise; when we visited mike's irish pub a few weeks ago for karaoke and beer (and creepy 45 year old men named giannis. they are all named giannis) even the bar stools were reserved. thank god the stage was free, right? 

we also went to a parade yesterday. it was gray and freezing out, but a lot of fun, minus the mouth-breathing old men pressing up against us. i don't want to talk about it. 

so this weekend is the big blow out, which we are missing, and then it's clean monday and the city shuts down so everyone can repent and start their lent bidness. i guess the following 40 days are a good time to be vegan in greece. dietary restrictions according to the greek orthodox church include abstaining from anything that has blood (for some reason this doesn't include squid... i'm pretty sure they have blood though. right? whateva.) some super orthodox badasses take this to the vegan level by not eating dairy and eggs, and monks also stop using olive oil; for the average greek joe though, it's just 40 days without meat. rough life, yea?

i have to go to a visa extension doctor's appointment to get an xray and a tb test. this is the only type of shot i have ever tolerated, i think, and also the only disease i have never convinced myself of having. [edit: except for that time junior year of high school. whenever i coughed i checked my hand for blood. i'm tight.] but i'll let you know how it turns out, fingers crossed!

love, 

kg

update: that was the sketchiest hospital i have ever been in. also it was not a cute scratch tb test, it was a straight injection in my forearm. i'm upset. and lastly, i hope all monday mornings from now on include getting topless with a strange greek man... n't!

it's always sunny in nauplion.

no. false. leave it to cya to schedule a field trip the one weekend it is 40 degrees and rainy in greece. 

this past weekend all 170 of us traveled to nauplion and saw some old stuff, to put it as eloquently as possible. i think i have a physical aversion to field trips, most likely caused by my nine year tenure at sycamore school for the gifted. any trace of ADD in my blood worms its way up like a ptsd 'nam flashback to the countless museum trips from the ages of 5-14. i ultimately miss out on any chance of enrichment while on these mind-numbing excursions. i cannot listen to save my life. i mean, i saw the lion's gate at mycenae but i couldn't tell you a thing about it besides "it's big. there were two lions, i think." this is a serious affliction. i can guarantee that if i had gone to these sites with just my suitemates, i would have gotten way more out of the experience, publishing an informative and enlightening blog and subsequently not disappointing my parents... this says something both about my apparent problems with organized learning, and about the overwhelming combined knowledge of my smarty-pants roommies.

anyway, the classics nerds (in the nicest way possible) of my program were all hot and bothered, but i was mostly cold and pissed. i did get some dece pics, but i will probably not put them up on facebook. i know from experience that scenery pictures from friends' travels abroad have a fairly short half-life in terms of intrigue for the rest of us. since i was barely interested and i was actually there, i can't imagine why anyone else would want to look through them. 

according to my planner (since i blocked most of this from memory), we went to the following between thursday and saturday: corinth (seen't. going to see it again for the bungee jumping), heraion, mycenae, the argos museum, tiryns, epidaurus and the castle of palamadi (walked down the 999 steps, it was rad. calf muscles were doing the jitter bug by the end, which is endlessly hilarious and fascinating to me.) we also had ample time to wander around nauplion, which is a hot spot for buying the worry beads old men all over greece use as stress release. it was a cute town, but we were over it by the time we had to leave saturday afternoon. 

i have another field trip this week to brauron and sounion with the same professor who showed us around this last weekend. she is hilarious, primarily because she resembles professor trelawney of harry potter fame. also she tells us stories about her childhood that closely shadow roald dahl's "matilda." hopefully i'll be able to actually get something out of this one...

love, 

kg

three posts in one day? THIS IS MADNESS.

(this is sparta. whatever, you wanted it.)
side note: i'm pretty sure greeks invented cat-calling. a popular vocal leering is the "pss-pss-pss-psss-psss" sound that i can only associate with beej beckoning to cats. i have also been meowed at. they take the colloquial idiom super seriously.
i made the dire mistake of wearing the candy-striper dress out to run errands today, one i won't make again. not only did i accidentally accept a coffee date invitation with a round 75+ year old man (liver spots and all), i also attracted the attention of literally every seemingly unattached man in athens. including a truck of gypsies who gave me an "ooowwwwwwww" as they drove by, and a man who simply shouted "thelo" at me: "i want." stop that.
katie, megan, anita and i went to the flea market in monastiraki today, which, i don't know if you knew this already, actually translates to "grab katy's ass as she reaches for antiques." hilarious.
despite the frequent episodes of sexual harrassment however, it was all-in-all a really great day (including a passable substitute for hummus, pureed fava beans) and a dece ending to a dece weekend.
greece is good again.

love,
kg

meteorites

my bad, i didn't realize it had been over a week...
on friday i hopped on a train for 6 hours (roughsies) with my roommates to go to kalambaka (or kalabaka... signs used both names for the same place, probably to discourage people like us. i called it clambake just to be safe) which is a teeny tiny town surrounded by meteora which is in. sane.
i was not at all looking forward to this trip, but it was completely worth the commute. even the trip over was beautiful. OH GOD a man with no teeth playing an accordion strolled through our car. i did not even care that my dozing was interrupted. i want to marry that man. or at least pay him quarters to play yearround in the corner of the house that i share with the man i marry for entertainment purposes. god bless him.
we got in around 2 or 3 in the afternoon and started wandering around the town looking for our hostel. instead we were accosted by a man offering us hotel rooms for the same price, 15 euros a person. i'll take it. we spent the rest of the day/night adventuring in the town, which consisted entirely of eating and drinking coffee at cafes, because there's not really much else to do there. also i napped, because i started feeling mad sick at the end of the train ride. what timing.
the next morning, we ate breakfast at the hostel we were supposed to stay in (and navigated the awkward guilt-tripping from the nice old lady who made us brekky) and then started up the mountain. ok so i made it a goal to not have my camera attached to my person like a third arm, but hot damn, when you see meteora, you can't NOT take pictures. words can't even do it justice. the mountains, the rock formations, the monasteries, and there were SHEEP. also my roommates are all shutterbugs (i even think this word in a goofy voice... see if you can guess which one) so when they stop for pictures, you sort have to go with the flow. it was a pretty great day all around in terms of doing amazing things in greece and bonding with the 5 people i live with like we're in a goddamn sorority [note: the benchmark of true familiarity, bonding, and comfort among girls is being able to freely discuss poop. this is consistent with every group of friends, sports team and church organization i have ever been a part of since the age of 14. we hit that point this weekend.] see facebook for pictures soon.
we hiked pretty much all day, stopped for late lunch in a taverna and then got on our train back to athens at 5:36 (fi tirty siiixxx. oh my god high school.) i was under the impression that we were all tired, but not so, say the roommates. so i went to bed when we got home at 11pm because i'm tight and got the old lady genes from beej and frank, while 3 of the roommates went out. it is 8:30 the next morning and i am still wearing the clothes that i hiked and travelled in. filth.

love,
kg

pirates? naw girl, piraeus

suitemates 1-6 went on an epic journey to piraeus yesterday, involving two metro rides, hopping on a bus for a while (note: when excited, i am too loud for public transportation) and walking around aimlessly and cluelessly for hours. but we were determined to see some sea, and eventually we did. we had many a photoshoot walking around the harbor (tourists) and finally stumbled upon a beach... it's hard not to get smacked in the face with "WHAT WE LIVE HERE HOLY HELL" several times a day. hopefully we'll be able to find some swimmable waters when it's a tad warmer.
our adventures on the athens nightclub scene have been varied and hilarious. last night we held off on going out until about 1am, ending up at kalua in syntagma square, but apparently athenians don't start their evenings until 2:30-4 am. what. partying in athens is not for the weak. endurance and hydration are key. OH we also recently found out that the hot spot in athens is the bar in TGIFriday's... i kid you not. i sincerely wish i were joking. what a let down, athens. oh don't worry though, i still plan to scope it out for myself one of these evenings.

love, kg

an unfortunate follow up

not only is there no hummus, but pita chips and MAYONNAISE are sold as packaged deal instead. 

you must be joking.