remember the boat times?

i feel like college professors should know better than to assign description papers. i can't even imagine how to write a paper without an argument. in an act of protest, i'm going to blerg instead of writing a pointless paper on adonis. it's the athenian way.

in the past, i have expressed ambitious hopes of rocking the pr industry in new york and being a fly-as-hell business lady. clowning on paros and mykonos this weekend maybe convinced me that living on a boat, sailing from greek island to greek island, selling fish or kitschy tourist shit might be an ok option, too. i could have a pink pelican (see below) named stan as a sidekick. you look me in the eye and tell me that doesn't sound like a phenomenal lifestyle. CAN'T.

karen k, megan, katie and her visiting boyfriend derek and i hopped on a ferry to paros wednesday morning; someone had the spectacular foresight to buy deck seats when the temperature was topping out in the 40s, but after about half an hour we sneaky snaked into some of the lux numbered seats inside to snuggle during the four hour trip. paros was beautiful, despite the chill, and our hostel owners were adorable. it's one of the lesser advertised islands, but i recommend it for sure. 

we've noticed that traveling during the off-season has its pros and cons... the pros include fewer douchebag tourists, lower prices, street cred. cons: COMPLETELY DESERTED ISLAND. there was a bad news thunderstorm the night we spent on paros, and an anonymous menacing fisherman with a hook for a hand stalking us in our every move would not have been terribly surprising. horrifying, but not surprising. 

during the day we stomped around the hood, taking a bus to naoussa, a fishing village nearby. oh, also we stumbled onto a half-submerged venetian fortress, no big deal. dericious taverna meals were starting to take their toll fiscally, so we had a picnic lunch on a bridge. after the bus back, we wandered into the church of 100 doors, watched the sunset from a bar and caught the ferry to mykonos, arriving on the island around 11 that night. again, super cute hostel owners. this one picked us up at the port, somehow cramming all of us, some greeks and a canadian couple into her hilarious awkwardly sized van. we somehow booked sort of an apartment living situation, which was perfect, minus the treacherous stairs leading to our front door which posed a serious problem for a temporarily handicapped derek; poor guy got into a serious snowboarding accident the day before his flight overseas. greece is a terrible place to be on crutches, but he was a trooper. 

mykonos was also deserted for the most part, and though it was sort of a bummer to discover most of the restaurants and bars were closed, it was neat to see them all in renovation mode, getting ready for the tourist season. mykonos was breathtaking in general... i'll never get over watching sunsets on the aegean. probably the greatest part of the island, however, were the pink pelicans loitering around the fish markets. they were huge, no, HUGE, with super soft feathers. they were also borderline domesticated. i guess they must be used to a ton of people milling around the island. i love them and seriously considered taking one home if it would have me.

there was talk of secretly renting mopeds, but ultimately we just ran around the tiny narrow streets near the seaside and little venice for our two days on mykonos. the 5 hour ferry ride back was fairly uneventful, ooh except i learned how to play texas hold em, betting with torn up bits of paper... like i said, we poor. 

i feel like this is not an adequate representation of the past 4 amazing days, but it's now 9pm and i have not a sentence done on my paper, so i should probably get to it, for the sake of keeping up the "study" facade of study abroad. 

love,

kg

the final excursion.

i've found that calling them "excursions" as opposed to "field trips" keeps me way more interested and excited. humor me, please.

this particular excursion to delphi and olympia, our last of the semester, had all the makings for a goddawful weekend, but ended up being surprisingly dece in practice. first off, there were our leaders: our professor was named kriga, and it is putting it delicately to say she could easily be the lost greek hunchback of the acropolis... 'stache, perma-pregnant belly, janked up teeth and all. i would feel bad about saying this if she had demonstrated any proficiency in teaching or leading students in any way. i could not have learned less about each site if i stayed home, in indiana, under a rock, in a self-induced coma, and these were things i was actually interested in learning about. essentially, we showed up to each site, were lead around by kriga, who often supplied proven false information, to maybe 48% of the significant bits, told to look around on our own for 10 minutes [note: i don't know if you've ever tried to sprint up a mountain in skinny jeans that have gotten too baggy, but i tell you what, it is exactly as uncomfortable as the mental image you have right now might suggest... i almost mooned many a tourist/ruin... but i saw the stadium at delphi. boom] and got back on the bus generally an hour and a half ahead of time. 

if we had been staying in super fly locales such as santorini, this unexpected free time would have been a dream. olympia is no santorini. to be fair, our first night spent in delphi was pretty nice: amazing view from a cozy hotel, good company, and an appropriate amount of time to appreciate what was essentially a one-street town. the next two days and nights spent in olympia were borderline madness-inducing. it is worrisome when a 5 hour nap in a trife hotel on a bed constructed of sofa cushions seems more appealing than exploring greece. 

i should also mention our other leader, maria, an administrator for cya. greece has never known a snarkier woman, and after spending 2 months getting mean-mugged by every woman between the ages of 9 and 65, that is saying something. but i can appreciate a little snark... what i can't handle is legitimately THE most patronizing tirade i have ever been subjected to, at 7:30 am, one-on-one in the hotel dining room, about how unnatural it is to be vegan and how i am going against evolution in doing so. oh bitch no you didn't. all i said was no i don't want a goddamn hard-boiled egg, coffee is fine thanks. step off. we are now mortal enemies, a fact she may or may not be aware of.

our final day, we checked out of olympia and headed further into the mountains and had a weirdly refreshing experience with snow? i sort of miss maine? we stopped for literally 8 minutes to learn a little more nothing at an open air museum about water power, which in no way relates to anything any of us have ever studied... ever. at this point, my fairly small group of 18 had so firmly bonded in our unified hate of so, so many things that the trip in retrospect was pretty fun in social terms. i'm actually totally okay with suffering under less than stellar circumstances as long as the clowning is above par.

i have two days of classes this week, and we leave for paros and mykonos on wednesday morning. i checked the semi-reliable weather report, which says it will be a high of 60... but i'll be damned if i don't get in the sea again and wear an inappropriate sun dress. i am deeply committed in my idealistic romantic standards. 

love,

kg

dis n dat

i've been meaning to update this for a while, but things have been crazy. midterms are sort of over? hard to say, as a lot of papers have been pushed back... greeks are pretty chill about deadlines and getting things done. it's physically hurting the type 'a' psycho in me, but pretty handy when it comes to traveling and athenian clowning.

i finally got new computadori... it is the prettiest thing in the world. unfortunately it is a law-abiding mac book and refuses to pick up the stolen internet in the apartment. i'll let it slide.

we went to hydra this past weekend (see facebook for photos) which was about a two hour hydrofoil ride. we only ended up running around the island for about 5 hours, but it was a perfect day... amazing weather, greek island, those are really the only two ingredients needed. i cannot wait to get to paros and mykonos next week. i have a total of 4 school days left in march. hilarious.

i'm leaving tomorrow morning at 8am for a field trip to olympia and delphi. as previously expressed, field trips are not my favorite, but i'm actually looking forward to this one. beej has been telling me to get my ass to delphi since i first mentioned maybe studying abroad in greece. doin' it.

academic center is about to kick me out for the night, will update after the f-teezy.

love,

kg

amurrica!

wow, importante, i totally forgot to mention that a few friends and i had a lovely evening at tgifriday's last thursday. i love trife american culture abroad, i've decided. our server openly hated us, clearly dismissing us as unadventurous tourists rather than mildly homesick students, there for the irony. the ever-classy decor was the same, except do they have live bands in fridays in the states? i don't think i've actually been inside a friday's since high school... it's not what one might call vegan-friendly.
in keeping with our amurrica theme, we went to see "he's just not that into you" afterward. greek movie previews are completely perfect in every way. also i brought shame to my country again and embarrassed everyone affiliated with me during a commercial for god knows what, featuring a charging midget in viking gear... i lost it, in a completely silent theater. god i'm tight.
it was nice to see ben affleck in a movie role that didn't make me want to punch him in the forehead, but it was hard to find any merit in a movie that only reinforces the relationship/dating myths it claims to be above in the end. and ginnifer goodwin, i hate you so hard. get your ass back to "big love" and stop assaulting my eyes with implausible and irritating cuteness.
while on the subject of dating (jeez, check the flow of this blog) the paper i am half-working on right now is the end result of weeks of interviewing greeks about the characteristics their ideal mates absolutely have to posess... and by "weeks of interviewing" i mean "weeks of venturing out to cafes, becoming too intimidated to be productive and leaving after overpaying for tea and wasting an hour." our optimistic professor had us thinking greeks would be totally down to clown in answering our questions... not so, say the athenians. i started entirely too many conversations ("parakalo, xerete anglika?") only to be shot down either because the potential interviewee did not in fact xerei anglika, or because they just did not feel like talking to a silly amurrican girl. rough. i ended up going into pharmakeios and bakeries and forcing them to answer my questions in exchange for buying something... the suitemates were more than happy to take the guilt-fueled purchases of chocolate off my hands. i ended up with only about 10 usable interviews, so i'm about to make some damn broad generalizations in this bidness.
ooh also i think solo adventure might be cancelled this weekend... cover letters and writing samples are taking up the front burner for a while it seems. bummer jams, but we might do a day trip to an island though... i will never say no to a greek island.

love,
kg

all things considered.

it's midterms. i should be writing a paper or working on a massive study guide for my myth test. what a splendid time to blerg instead...

- typical of march, all things that can go wrong, have in the last several days. i have never before had such a ridiculously off week in my life. on the bright side, things can only go up, yea?

- i got my hurr did on thursday, and it. is. blonde. like BAM! blonde. the greeks are all bout the dark roots platinum strands look, one i was hoping to avoid... oh well, maybe i'll blend in better this way? chyea right.

- sometimes i'm sort of bummed i'm not living with a greek family. the immersion element is defintely missing. greek is a fly language and i'd like to be semi-fluent in it, but we speak anglika all the time, so there's not much chance of that happening here. but hot damn am i good at asking people if they know english...

- i've been running several times a week here, which is lovely for the most part. the streets and sidewalks of athens provide many an obstacle to keep the hour lively. i have learned, however, that it is not advisable to go for a yog when i'm tired, as all people-weaving skills of my carefully honed craft go out the window, and i run into athenians... a lot of athenians. luckily i have not injured anyone or myself, though i have had my fair share of near-death experiences with sneaky snake taxis. also, for real athenians, how are you that bewildered by what i'm doing? or, at the very least, how does it not occur to you to get the hell out of the way when someone is running AT YOU, panting "parakalo"? figure it out, goddamn...

- i can't believe i'm almost halfway through with greece... that's completely insane.

- on friday i went on another field trip to brauron and sounion, and surprisingly, had a great time. i chalk this up to three major factors: first, it was a day trip, not a 4-day excursion like nauplion. second, i had my roommate megan with me to keep me interested in ancient greek bidness. third, the professor in charge of my group was GERMAN, and therefore, captivating. his name is wolfgang drecker (ok.) and he looks like he very easily was involved with some dirty under the table black market dealings in berlin before joining the witness protection program and becoming a prof of ancient greek athletics for cya. except i think if you were in hiding, you would probably consider a less conspicuous name... also poseidon's temple was pretty amazing the second time around. add it to the reccomendations list.

i should probably pretend that this is real school and get crackalackin on these scholarly endeavors.

love,
kg

not constantinople.

[actually, according to mod greek prof eleni, greeks still call it constantinople... typical of a lot of greek things we've encountered, it's difficult to say for sure whether this is traditional or just archaeic]
ooh this is bout to be a biggie.
i'm totally gay for istanbul, to put it nicely. i was not a fan of turkey during the 2006 trip, but we only visited ephesus, and while i would not trade the experience of having the turkish tony danza as a tour guide for the world, istanbul 2009 kicked that trip's ass.
we (katie, blonde karen and i) left the apartment friday at 4:20 am, booking it to syntagma to catch the X95 bus to the airport. we arrived in istanbul around 9am, and got into a number of wrong lines while trying to pay the 15 euro visa fee. karen's almost-stepmom arranged for a van to pick us up and take us to the hotel empress zoe (i know. this was not at all the dirty grungy hostel stay of yesterday's study abroader, but this hotel was super fly. i wasn't mad.) we dropped our stuff off and set out to have our adventure, but not before a brief mid-morning snack in the ultra quaint dining area. our hotel ended up being incredibly close to both hagia sophia and the blue mosque, and walking between these two massive entities, watching european tourists milling around, trying and failing to ignore the persistent shouting vendors, while the call to prayer blasted all over the city was like stepping on a cultural landmine. unbelievable. we also made the observation that both the blue mosque and hagia sofia look like palaces straight out of the newer (suckier) star wars movies... we're on to you, lucas.
hagia sofia was definitely my favorite of the two. in it, i had my first of many awkward interactions with turkish men, generally characterized by nervous laughter, high fives and probably sexual tension? it's hard to say. in any case, i swear to god this guard was telling me to put my foot in a certain spot on this pillar inside, but apparently not... i still don't understand that exchange, and i probably never will. so be it.
hagia sofia is truly breathtaking, and the history of it all blows my mind, that they just took a church and decided it would be a mosque. what? how does that happen? inside there was a wishing... hole? i don't really know what to call it. but you stick your thumb in it and turn your outstretched hand all the way around to make your wish come true. as far as i can tell, normal human joints can't do this. thank god for my freakish swimmer/rower shoulders.
after sofia we stopped for our first of many tea breaks. i wish i could adequately put into words how perfect and delicious apple tea is. we ended up having a lot of time to kill during our trip, as the grand bazaar/spice market were physically and mentally (and fiscally...) exhausting after a while and it was a whopping 35 degrees outside... for the most part, though, it was hard to get too upset about losing the feeling in our toes while stomping around istanbul.
we were exhausted by friday evening, opting for an early dinner and smoking shisha afterward (it's legal beej, keep your shirt on)... we actually finished out most of our evenings this way, but sunday night was particularly good. we met a charming man from south africa named darren, whose profession we never quite figured out. we spent a lot of time talking about "the big lebowski" and road trips, two of my favorite things in the whole world. i can't express how much i love meeting people while traveling, especially if they are also foreigners. ooh, next time you are at a hookah bar, ask for apple and mint combined, which the bar owner reccomended to us. it is the tastiest.
i forced katie and karen to go to a sufi whirling dervish ceremony on saturday night, which was clearly a tourist affair, but still really rad to see. that mevlana, he knows what's up. and how can you resist something that utilizes the tag line "800 years of LOVE"? i mean... come on.
another major highlight of saturday was finally finding HUMMUS. it is also apparently not a turkish food. what is wrong with me? how do i keep picking these places that don't understand the beauty and goodness of hummus? in any case, it wasn't that tight, but mama got her fix.
sunday we went to topkapi palace, which featured hilarious sultan attire and completely ridiculous jewels, and later crossed the bridge to asia, no big deal i walked to asia don't worry about it.
monday i was determined to go to the turkish baths, which ended up being a little more expensive than we thought, so that quickly turned into a solo excursion, which was for the best, considering i was the only one who was actually excited about it... little did i know. steamy, sweaty, old-ass turkish ladies, completely naked. i'll let you simmer in that mental image for a while. it was a lot louder (and NAKEDER) than i had anticipated, but i'd say it was worth it. consider it reccomended.
we tooled around for the rest of the afternoon, eating our bodyweights in turkish delight samples at the markets and walking along the shoreline in the rain, before getting picked up for the airport.
our trip back went smoothly, excluding the scuffle at security when karen's souvenir dagger got me into mad trouble (the upswing? the fact that the official asked "is there a dagger in your bag?" not knife. dagger, specifically. i love turkey.) once it became clear that this was just a souvenir and was inside of a bag that would be checked, they let us go, but not before taking down my passport information... ruh roh.
so now i'm back in athens, where the weather has come back around the bend to 65 and sunny. this computer thing is becoming more of a hassle as midterms draw near and the internship search continues. the academic center internet is embarrassingly slow, and our stolen greek internet in the apartment is unreliable at best... but i can't complain.
i have a god forsaken field trip to brauron and sounion (i haven't the slightest idea what or where these are... oh actually poseidon's temple is in sounion... seen't.) on friday, said midterms the following week, and then i'm planning a kg-only trip for the following weekend... destination tbd. we'll see.

love,
kg

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