Greece

Welcome to My Greek Home

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Months ago, I was told that I would get a room to myself when I moved into the school in Pikermi.  A week before I left, I was told: actually, maybe not.  I tried to prepare myself for 24/7 socialization.  I’ve gone 27 years with my own room, and maybe it was time I learned to share my space?  I’m an introvert, but surely it would, like, be helpful to have a roommate in a new country?  A guaranteed friend?  That is, if she and I would even be compatible.  The whole flight over to Athens, I reassured myself that rooming with someone would not be the end of the world.

PSYCH, it turns out I DO have a room to myself!  Hallelujah, I can be honest:  no way could I stand to have someone always around.  No way could I come back from a draining day of language learning or counseling or teaching and say Hello and make Small Talk, ugh.  When I’m stressed, I need, at minimum, five hours to myself.  Hahaha, I wish I were joking, but on Tuesday I spent eight hours alone in my room recovering from five hours of desperately trying to listen to Greek conversation.

So I’m rooming alone, but in a dorm building, so my new friends Olga and Natasha are just a few dozen feet away.  Lunch is communal, so I’m always meeting new people there.  I’m socializing – I just have an escape route.  And a cute little cozy one, too!  Here, let me give you a tour.  Continue reading →

I’ve Arrived in Greece!

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The power went out three times during the flight from Detroit to Amsterdam. Everyone had settled in with movies or TV shows when suddenly all the screens went blank. A couple seconds later, all the overhead and tracking lights went off too. In the dark, hundreds of people sat silently for a good three minutes before someone official made an announcement saying yes, the power was out, and they were rebooting the media system. 

It was a real testament to people’s patience and endurance…and also a hilariously scary picture of how useless we would all be in an emergency. 

Halfway across the Atlantic, I hit the “What am I doing!?” part of moving. It’s such a strange feeling to realize you’ve decided to leave everyone and everything you’re familiar with and intentionally surround yourself with the unknown. Not only that, but I spent nine months fundraising and preparing to do this to myself!  With all that forethought, it took actually flying for the panic to set in.    Continue reading →

I’m Packed!

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There’s nothing I like more than packing and planning ahead, so of course three days before I’m due to fly out, I’ve got my suitcases filled and stacked by the doorway.  They were even under 50 lbs on my first try!

When I tell people I’ve got to pack a year’s worth of possessions into two suitcases, most people furrow their brows and look sad for me.  They are so wrong!  I LOVE IT.  I love moving and having the opportunity to choose the things I really like, abandoning everything else.  I love leaving holes in my possessions, looking forward to the things I’ll buy in Greece (shampoo and boots).  I love the feeling of knowing that I can fit my life into two suitcases, a backpack, and a computer bag.  It makes me feel free.   Continue reading →

Packing for a Year in Greece: Entertainment

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Based on this blog, it should be obvious that I take entertainment very seriously.  Ingesting stories is how I grow and/or stay alive.  So when it comes to preparing to move to Greece, the majority of my planning has revolved around books and media.

The one problem?  I have to pack a year’s worth of possessions into two suitcases and a backpack.  While I would LIKE to take two suitcases full of books, even I know that is impractical.  So I’ve improvised.   Continue reading →

I’m Officially Moving to Greece!

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As of yesterday, all of my paperwork is in place, and I am set to move to Greece in just seventeen days!

stay calm

I thought that fundraising was hard, but the last couple months of visa-planning and document-acquiring have driven me up a wall.  Maybe someday I will write a blog post about what a headache it is to get a student visa, but right now I’m still feeling the emotional headache and I don’t want to relive a second of it.  (That’s not true, I totally want to complain about it all the time.)

Now I have my passport, my visa, and my one-way flight itinerary.  I AM MOVING TO GREECE.  I always knew I was, but also….I worried.  Moving to another country is too good to be true, so something was bound to keep me from it, right?  But it turns out that I CAN have good things, and I intend to enjoy this one as much as possible.

The next couple weeks will be a whirlwind of last-minute purchases, packing, and goodbyes.  It’s going to be crazy, but I am so excited.  It’s happening!!

Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace

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51bQ2iwdmPLA travel memoir about a woman who lives in Athens for a year?  How could I pass that up?

Fortunately, if I ever write a memoir about MY year in Athens, it will be distinctly different in feel and tone.  Storace is almost to poetic in her language for my taste – instead of describing where she’s going or who she’s hanging out with, she jumps over the details in order to describe general trends and observations.  Which are totally interesting, don’t get me wrong.  But it doesn’t actually feel like a travel memoir.  Instead, it’s something more like an emotional evaluation of Greece – past, present, and future.   Continue reading →

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill

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I’ve already begun thinking of myself as part-Greek, which is, I know, very ridiculous.  Just because I will live in the country for a year does not mean I have a right to claim their heritage as my own….except that Cahill has written an entire book about how the Western world has been shaped by the Greek worldview for the last two and a half thousand years.  So while I may not be Greek in heritage, I am in spirit.

Cahill divides his chapters into themes that also follow a general chronological pattern.  I found this to be a much easier way to track with the history and culture presented.  He also makes use of a lot of literature, which, as a book nerd, I found especially delightful.  Beginning with Homer’s The Iliad, Cahill describes Greek warriors and their obsession with glory on the battlefield.  We then move on emotions, celebrations, politics, philosophy, art, and religion.  Over and over again, Cahill reminds us just how strongly our present-day culture resembles the ancient Greeks.

I’ve always loved Greek mythology, my high school English class spent some time with Sophocles and Homer, and I took art history classes as electives in college.  I’m a little familiar with a lot of Greek history and thought, but Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea put everything into context.  For instance, the shift in Greek sculptures from rigid idealistic poses of men to the twisting, agonized figures in the famous Laocoon and His Sons came about as the strength of Athens waned, first to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and then to Rome.

This book hits all of my interests:  art, literature, history, culture, and GREECE.  Perfect.  Continue reading →

Beaches Around the World

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Without thinking for more than two seconds, I assume that there are three kinds of nature people:  1) beach people, 2) mountain people, and 3) forest people.  On further thought, perhaps there are also desert people?  Leave a comment if you are one of them, because I would like to know why.

Growing up in the Midwest, the beach was idealized.  We were so far from any kind of ocean that those lucky few who vacationed by the Atlantic or the Gulf returned as mystical creatures, tanned and boasting about seashells and tides.  I never fully understood this obsession, because I am 100% a 3) forest person.  Who wants sand in their swimsuit when they could breathe in deeply, inhaling the scent of dirt and photosynthesis, looking up through sun-dappled leaves to a blue sky?

I am a forest person, but I’ve never quite been able to shake the thought that, perhaps, there is something to beaches that I’ve been missing.  So I keep visiting them, hoping someday this missing piece will click within me, and I’ll fully appreciate the wonders of hot sand and salty water.  These are some of the beaches I have visited so far, each with a very different experience and enjoyment level.  Continue reading →

The Struggle to Go with a Servant’s Heart, When I Want to be a Hero

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I’ve been thinking about working in HD.  My reflex is to think of myself as these girls’ savior, and I plan how I will help them and love them and show them Christ.

Today I got a glimpse of something else.  I stepped outside of myself for one moment, which is both a profound relief and an intense discomfort.  I thought about each individual woman I will meet.  I thought of a young girl who will be bold and brash and powerful.  I thought of another woman who will be timid, thoughtful, and scared.  I thought of another who will ignore me, lost in her own world, unwilling to be helped.    Continue reading →

Gifts of SIngleness: Use Them or Become Resentful

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While I was trying to decide whether to stay in Dallas after I graduate from DTS or else move to Athens, my biggest Dallas advocates were repeating the same variety of advice:  Settle down.  Start investing in long term 1) relationships, 2) career, 3) housing.  Stop running.  These messages were internal, too.  After all, I’m 26-years-old, and Facebook is full of my peers marrying, buying houses, and even creating the next generation of adorable little girls and boys.  Picking up and moving overseas is such a post-college phase (and, uh, coincidentally, exactly what I did post-college).  A phase you’re meant to grow out of, right?

I felt vaguely guilty about my decision to choose Athens over Dallas despite feeling deep in my bones that it was the best choice and that it was where God was uniquely calling me.  That guilt disappeared during a conversation with my friend Jennie.  She affirmed my decision, then said, “It’s so great that you can just decide to move halfway around the world.  I have a hard enough time [taking her four children] into town to buy groceries.”

Suddenly things made a little more sense; stability and security are wonderful things, but so are freedom and adventure.  The former are more easily acquired through marriage, while the latter tend to find expression in singles.  This is, obviously, overly simplistic.  Singles can be stable and marrieds can have adventures.  But generally, I think this division is fairly accurate.

I have a long and varied relationship with my own singleness.  Sometimes I am desperate to be married, and other times I want to run as far away from the possibility as I can (these mood swings often coincide with the health or destruction of my friends’ relationships).  I have felt the cultural and Christian pressure that implies I am “less than” because I am single.  I have also felt the warmth and inclusion of marrieds and singles who welcome me into their homes and lives.  I used to think that being single was essentially a waiting game; over the years I have started to embrace my singleness and see it as the gift that it is.

I have more time to myself, more creative energy, a greater ability to serve others.  I can make decisions without aligning my plans to someone else’s, and I can be spontaneous in a way my married friends (especially those with children) simply cannot.  In short, as a single woman, I have more freedom and adventure.

So back to those itching thoughts about security and settling down.  Talking with Jennie, I realized that in many ways, I was hearing the message “Act like a married person.”  Having described the benefits of being single, I’ll now say I think the benefits of marriage are primarily security and stability (relationally, vocationally, and geographically).  I was being told to value the gifts of marriage above the gifts of singleness.  And subconsciously, I had started to agree.

Now that the subconscious was conscious, my anger flooded in.  No way was I going to feel bad about being single!  No way was I going to agree with societal pressure.  If I get married some day, and I hope I do, I will pursue and enjoy the gifts of stability and security.  Until then, I intend to embrace the gifts of singleness–I want to pursue freedom and adventure.  I want to be spontaneous, to use my nomadic ability to travel the world and connect with a vast network of amazing people.

Not that all single people need to travel in order to feel self-actualized.  But I do think that single people need to look at their life situation and seek out opportunities for freedom and adventure, whatever that may look like for her or him individually.  If single people do not take advantage of these gifts and instead pursue security and stability exclusively, I think we will become resentful.  I did, when I imagined my life in Dallas, living in the same place, working in the same place, year after year after year…alone.  I have seen this happen to single men and women–they get so locked into finding a good job and buying a house that they then obsess over finding the missing piece:  a husband or wife to complete the set.

I don’t want to become so focused on what I don’t have that I forget to appreciate what I do have:  the ability to relate broadly and meaningfully with many people, the freedom to be spontaneous, and an adventurous spirit that says “yes” before “let me check with so-and-so.”  I want to love being single while I’m here, for as long as that might be.  Deciding to move to Athens has renewed my ability to embrace my singleness.