Traveler

A Week in Greece #6: Beginning Level II

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This week has been great!  Last Saturday I went to Sounio, which was a much-needed mini-adventure to somewhere new, beautiful, and fun.  It really rejuvenated me and gave me the energy to jump back into life in Athens.

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On Sunday, after church, Argyris and Dina took me to a lunch for a group of church planters. I was not excited about it, because church always drains me. There is so much Greek to listen to and so many introductions and opportunities to forget even the most basic of Greek phrases. But I went to the lunch, and I’m so glad that I did!  There were a bunch of people there that I already knew, which was nice. I got to reconnect with Joy, an American woman who has worked in Athens as a counselor for about four years.  And I met Sarah, a woman from Illinois who married an awesome Greek guy (Leonidas) last year and moved to Greece. She’s 33, and she told me to wait until I’m 33 (like she did) before I get married so that I can take advantage of being single in my 20s.  It was the best thing someone could tell me on Valentine’s Day (which, wonderfully, is not really celebrated much in Greece).  Her husband translated the mini-lecture at the lunch for us, and I like them both so much!  Continue reading →

10 Wanderlust-Inspiring Quotes

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The Travelettes posted a list of 20 Paulo Coelho quotes that inspire wanderlust, which were incredibly effective in inspiring me to create my own list of quotes!

1|  “If you are brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.” – Paulo Coelho

2| “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” ― Cesare Pavese

3|  miller

4|  “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Unknown

5|  “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but, by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” ― Maya Angelou

6|  “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” ― Pico Iyer

7| “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

8|  travelquote2.jpg

9|  “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where -‘ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.” – Lewis Carroll

10|  “The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.” – Pico Iyer

Do you have a favorite wanderlust quote?  Share it in the comments!

Sounio Vlog!

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I created a YouTube channel, creatively named ItIsTrish | inGreece, to post videos and vlogs about my adventures in Greece!

Last Saturday, Anthi and I went to Sounio to explore beaches and see the Temple of Poseidon.  It was SO good to get outside of Athens and be surrounded by nature.  And it was fun to get a little creative and tell my story with video rather than the written word.  I hope you enjoy this peek into my life in Greece!

A Week in Greece #5: Level I Ends, Other Things Happen

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I’m done with my Level I Greek class!  YEAH!  I’m going to celebrate this weekend by going to Sounio, which I will talk about in a separate blog post sometime in the next few days.

I need to celebrate the occasion, because on Monday, I’m going back to class to start Level II.  This time I’ll be taking a three-week course for FOUR hours every day.  I’m already exhausted just thinking about it.  But not nearly as much as I could be, because I’m really looking forward to continuing to hang out with Elvira and Emi (and maybe Stewart – he is undecided).  Plus, this week I had a decisive shift toward self-confidence that actually makes me excited to keep learning Greek.  It first happened at the grocery store when I handed the cashier €20 and said, “Oh, I think I have change, just a second.”  When the transaction was finished, I grabbed my bags and walked out the door and suddenly realized: I could have said that in Greek.   Continue reading →

A Week in Greece #4: One Month Anniversary, Feeling Homesick

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It’s been a month!  I’ve officially stayed in Greece longer than anywhere other than Senegal (this week I passed the Mongolia mark).  I’m happy with this milestone – although I’m missing my homes in the United States, there’s nothing about Greece that I actively dislike.  It’s a really nice place to live.

As always, my life continues to revolve around my Greek class.  I was planning on saying, “Only one more week!” in this post, but on Thursday I talked with Dina and Argyris and we decided I should go ahead and take the Intensive Level II course.  It starts immediately after this one ends, and it will be FOUR hours a day, but for only three weeks.  I’m already exhausted just thinking about it.

However, if I’m going to continue studying Greek, this is definitely the best option.  1)  I will continue to study with Elvira and Emi, and I really like my new friends.  2)  It will be taught by Rosa (my teacher the first two weeks) and she is fantastic.  3)  I used to think I needed a break to let my knowledge settle, but when I gave myself last weekend off, I wound up forgetting a million things.  It’s better, I think, to keep going.  4)  I will be done on March 4, which will be when House Damaris renovations will be winding down and furnishings/planning will be winding up!   Continue reading →

Athens Goes on Strike!

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One of the things I miss most about the Midwest is how, out of the blue, all your plans are cancelled and you are forced to spend the day cocooned in your bed with Netflix automatically streaming episode after episode.  I am, of course, talking about:  snow days!

It turns out Greece has them too, only they are called strikes.   Continue reading →

My Desperate Search for Books in Athens

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I mentioned a few days ago that I was struggling with the phase of culture shock where everything unfamiliar feels like a personal attack.  Nowhere did I feel this more strongly than in my search for books written in English.  I love to read, books are my happy place, when I see them my face goes all wistful, etc etc.  But everywhere I went, the titles were maddeningly indecipherable.

Duh, Tricia, you may be thinking.  You’re in Greece.

But you’ve forgotten – I’m incredibly privileged, and I expect everything to be available in my mother language!

Which is, you know, selfish.  But also true.  And anyway, it just felt like a slap to my face every time I saw a book and knew that it’s pages – MY PAGES, MY LOVE – were stories and words and phrases that I would never understand.  Street-side book sellers hosted tables full of familiar covers and unfamiliar titles.  The center where I volunteer had a bookcase full of Greek books; I pulled out the most basic books for children and wilted with my inability to translate more than one sentence.  In a desperate attempt to find normalcy, I returned to Omonia where I had once walked through a bookstore to get to a bathroom.  It was made of several rooms, but I found only two bookshelves with English books.  There was nothing worth reading, and I left really dejected.

I complained about this to Argyris on Sunday, and an hour later he exclaimed, “Oh!  There is a big building at Syntagma, next to the McDonald’s!  Public, it’s orange.  There are many books there.  I’m sure they have some in English.”

“You mean there’s been a bookstore right next to my metro stop, and I’ve ignored it for two weeks??”   Continue reading →

The Beginnings of Culture Shock

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This morning I was in a bad mood.  I felt sickness twisting in my stomach and I was just annoyed by everyone, and no, I am nowhere near being on my period.  Instead, I was suffering from….CULTURE SHOCK.

Everything was wrong.  Nothing was familiar.  I made a list of all the things I miss about the United States:

  • being able to read street signs
  • knowing where to buy a straightener
  • TFC’s worship service
  • Eatzi’s salads
  • being able to watch current TV shows on Hulu
  • Target
  • Rory, my cat
  • speaking quickly
  • libraries
  • knowing that Old Navy is guaranteed to have pants that fit me
  • lots of restaurants with various ethnic foods

As I am very slowly learning, talking about your problems can make them seem more manageable (being a counselor means advising people to do things you are only barely able to do yourself).  So during our break at Greek class, Emi, Elvira, Nir and I sat on the roof to drink tea in the sun.   Continue reading →

A Week in Greece #3: A Greek Play and Exploring on My Own

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Although my mind is still consumed by Greek lessons, I had a bit more of a life this week (for better and for worse).

Last week I felt overwhelmed by all the verbs and vocabulary and grammar that I had to juggle every day in my Greek class.  I also felt overwhelmed by making new friends.  So last weekend, I stayed in my room as much as possible and worked my butt off mastering the Greek we had worked on.  I’m talking 8 hours of Greek on Saturday and another 6 hours on Sunday.  The payoff was worth it – when I returned to class on Monday, I felt like I was swimming through the lessons instead of drowning.  Classes continued, my friendships with Nir and Elvira continued, and I started to really like our teacher Rosa, which is unfortunate because next week we have a new teacher.

I already wrote about the excitement of how we have a location for HD.  The continuation of that is that Anthi took me to see the outside of the building on Thursday night, and it’s nicely secluded with a lot of trees, and there are balconies and…you know, outside of a building stuff.  Eventually I will see the inside and have a stronger opinion.  I’ve also been helping Dina write fundraising updates and letters.  She came to my room Thursday morning and said, “We need $200,000 to fully renovate the house.  God will give us the money!”  Later I told Anthi that I’m just going to kind of borrow Dina’s faith body-of-Christ-style, because I definitely don’t have it.  But, well.  Maybe I do.  Because God came through with providing us the house, so why not the money too?

On Thursday night, I went to Anthi’s house after class.  We had dinner, she took me to see the house, and then we went to Ambelokipi (meaning “grape garden” because there were vineyards in the area before there was city) to meet up with Dina, Francisca, and Natasha to see a play!  It was a three-hour production of Crime and Punishment in Greek.  When the music started and a man slowly walked on stage, lighting a lantern and pouring a glass of water, Anthi leaned over and whispered, “Do you understand what has happened so far?”  She filled me in every ten minutes or so, and I could mostly keep up.  I wondered how much of the exaggerated emotion (there’s nothing quite so strange as listening to gibberish spoken normally SUDDENLY JUMPING TO SHOUTED GIBBERISH) was due to the plot and how much was due to the Greek actors.  When it was over I found out that several of the cast were famous Greek TV actors, and Natasha made Anthi take multiple pictures of her standing with one of the men.   Continue reading →

A Week in Greece #2: First Week in a Daily Greek Class

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Υεια σασ!  Τι κανετε;

Δεν ζερω ελλινικα ακομα, αλλα καταλαβαινω λιγα.

This week has been all about GREEK.  I’ve gone to class for three hours a day (we’re supposed to get a half hour break, but some days we get only fifteen or twenty – one day we went over by half an hour).  It’s crazy intense.

Every day I leave feeling like my brain is about to explode.  This is compounded by the fact that my classmates have lived in Greece for several months.  When we practice speaking in class, they’ll throw in phrases they’ve heard or learned, and it’s all I can manage not to throw a fit and scream, “You can’t say things we haven’t learned in here!!”  I feel very dumb, especially since the girl who struggled the most dropped out.  I’m now definitely in the bottom three.

It’s easy to focus on that, because, well, perfectionism.  But on Wednesday I skyped with my mom and later with my grandparents, and I read them a paragraph from my textbook.  I mean, I read it in Greek.  “Do you know what you read!?” my mom asked.  “Yeah,” I said dully, because I’d mispronounced “δυο.”  “WOW,” she enthused.  “Three days ago you didn’t know any Greek.”   Continue reading →