Americans Celebrating St. Patrick's Day in Greece

There aren't a lot of Irish people in Greece, but for the handful that there are, plus most of the study abroad students, Thursday night was a night to go out, have fun, and paint our faces with clovers. We headed to a bar called Lotus, which was hosting a St. Patty's Day party. We met the owner, Stavros, in our first few weeks in Thessaloniki--he's the guy who told us the Greeks like to celebrate everyday. They definitely fulfilled that saying on Thursday night. There was traditional Irish music, plus some Dropkick Murphys singing "For Boston," the unofficial anthem of Boston College. Green beer, homemade bread with green butter, hair dye, face paint, and free hats made for an exciting St. Patrick's Day celebrated Greek style.

Pounds, Pubs, and Pandas: A Brief Trip to London

Big Ben!                

Friday afternoon I left Greece behind for a weekend in London. Two and a half days wasn't nearly enough time to even begin to see all of the sights, but I made the best attempt I could. With advice from Laura, my British librarian in Greece, and a chance encounter with a random BC friend who is studying in London and I ran into outside a used booksale along the Thams River (very small world), I think I managed to make the most of my brief stay.   

Random run in with a friend from BC--in
London of all places

It was a little shocking to be in a city where i could actually understand what people walking down the street were saying, minus some very thick British accents. I realized I was getting so used to not being understood or being
                                                                     able to understand other people in Thessaloniki. Also I could read the street signs--rather than straining to try and sound them out like I have been doing in Greece. Not having to fous on the language barrier was probably a good thing because it allowed me to focus all my attention on not getting hit by cars. The United States might be strange for using Fahrenheit and our own measuring system, but at least we don't drive down the wrong side of the road. Luckily all the cross walks conviently told me which was to look before crossing.

Kyle and I outside the London Eye

I was met up with my friend Kyle for the weekend who is studying in Leiden, just outside Amersterdam. Seeing a friend from BC was a nice change for the weekend and we had a lot fun, besides walking about 25 miles on Saturday. We started out by visting the Tate Britain Museum, The Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey (from the outside), and of course, Big Ben. One of the great things I learned about London is that food and shopping may be expensive, but their free museums help make up for that fact.

We headed to the London Eye and then got some delicious Thai food at a Pub. Our hostel was in Victoria, pretty centrally located, but it had 21 people sleeping in a room: seven triple decker bunkbeds. Luckily most of the people tended to be college students on spring break or, like us, studying abroad and just visiting for the weekend. We met people from all over--Canada, Australia, New Jersey, Germany, Italy, and Kansas. It was an interesting type of sleeping arrangement, but I'm not sure I'll do it again.

Thames River with Palace of Westminster i

Lions in Trafalgar Square

The next morning we woke up bright and early for our free hostel breakfast. Nothing fancy, but they had peanut butter, which you can't get in Greece, so I was in heaven with my pb&j. We headed out and wandered around enjoying the beatiful sunny day. Seems like everyone else was too. There were runners everywhere (another thing you don't see in Greece), all training for the London Marathon in a month. We walked along the Thames, went to Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, Covent Garden, and Borough Market for lunch. I even tried duck there--tastes like chicken. Andrea, from Greece, was also in London on Saturday and we met up with her for the day. That night we did a pub crawl and got a chance to meet a lot of other students from abroad as well as a couple friendly pandas. 

Trafalgar Square

The tube was pretty hard to navigate, simply because it seemed like half the lines were shut down since they are getting ready for the Olympics in 2012. Or that just might be their excuse... 

Random Panda in Covent Garden
during our Pub Crawl

Sunday night we went to a traditional London pub before  heading to the Gatwick airport for a night of sleeping on the chairs due to our early morning flight. It seemed to be a surprisingly popular place to sleep. We landed in Greece about noon and took the public bus straight to class. It was a rude awakening. Sometimes I forget that I'm studying abroad. 

Ethiopian food from Brick Lane

"Clean" Monday

Bright and early monday morning a bunch of study abroad kids headed to the town of Tyrnavos two hours away for a festival celebrating the start of Lent. We had the day off from school for Clean Monday--a day meant for fasting (no meat, dairy, eggs). The city each year holds a festival in honor of the god Dionysus, the god of fertility and wine, to mark the start of fasting in the Greek Orthodox Church before Easter. This famous Phallus festival as it is called is known throughout Greece, and drew quite a crowd despite the bad weather (cold, snowy, damp in general). And let's just say that it was quite the spectacle. There was good food (no meat though) and deserts, as well as a spinach soup called bourani that men make in cauldrons on the street and try to force you to eat. Everyone was munching on bread in the shape of phalluses that the bakeries made since bread was technically just about the only food you were supposed to eat today. The funniest part was how into the entire event the old men in the town got. They were dressed up and chasing people down with all sorts of inappropriate objects... I'll leave it up to your imagination and my photos to explain. Needless to say I'm sure I'll never experience anything quite like this again. Of course we all stuck out as Americans, but we had fun attempting to Greek dance in the street. Many Greeks tried to show us how to do it--not many really caught on, but it was a sight to see. It was some of the most fun that I've had in Greece so far. The Greek Church, however, doesn't really approve of the festival due to its celebration of a pagan god. And I'm sure also because it's a little irreverent and generally inappropriate. 

At a taverna in Tyrnavos with a couple Greek students (Giannis and Nantia)  from Aristotle University

BUT (there's always a but), getting home turned out to be some of the least fun I had in Greece so far. We took a bus from Tyrnavos to the town of Larisa and from there we were supposed to catch another bus back to Thessaloniki. I made the mistake of saying, as we sat on the warm bus drying from the snow (yes SNOW in Greece, who would have thought?), that in three hours we would be home, warm in our beds. WRONG. First we learned that they had overbooked our bus back and since we didn't check in ahead of time we would have to wait for the next bus. Tomorrow morning. Five minutes later they said we could sit on the stairs/in the aisle for the two hour ride home. We agreed because we didn't want to spend the night in the town. Twenty minutes into the ride the bus is forced to pull over. We have no clue why because no one speaks English, but everyone was pretty worked up (Greeks yell a lot--or talk really loud and it sounds like yelling). We sat for over an hour in the blowing snow, not going anywhere. Finally we got going, but drove only ten minutes. The police were on the side of the highway yelling at all the drivers to turn around. They closed the roads for half an inch of snow! Greece can't handle any bad weather apparently. So we drove back, unsure what we were going to do now. We spent over two hours on the bus and ended up back exactly where we started. Luckily we met three very nice Greek girls who were heading to Thessaloniki as well, and served as our translators. They got us a taxi to the train station, tickets to Thessaloniki, and on the right train headed home. If we didn't have them helping I would probably still be stuck in Larisa... So around 12:30 a.m. we made it back to Thessaloniki tired, a little grumpy, and only five hours later than we had wanted to get back. Some of my friends and I like to joke that we do things "for the story." I think that this is one of those days that was all done for the story. 

Babe's dead, but I bought my first piece of meat in Greece!

No, I didn't buy pig head, tongue, or feet, but I did by some fresh pork at the outdoor meat market. I think the FDA would have something to say about how sanitary the conditions are there, but at least you know your meat is fresh. The shop owners like to shove the meat in your face as you walk by to try and entice you. It smells pretty awful because there are tons of vendors with dead animal or fish just sitting out on ice. Then every once in a while they decide to spray the lanes down and there is a fishy smelling water you have to walk through. BUT I decided to brave the odor and sights and ventured into the meat section and for only 1.80 euro I probably got the freshest pieces of pork I'll ever eat in my life. Now if I could just learn to cook it. If you have any recipes let me know... Plus the experience in general was a lot of fun. I got to use my very rough and broken Greek to talk to random meat sellers. There was an Albania and I was able to tell him I was from American, studying at ACT, and my name, as well as ask him his. I would say the day was a success!

In other news... after countless hours, four hospital trips, three bank trips, investing in Greek health insurance, endless paper work, trekking to the municipality, creating my own passport photos (I'm thinking of starting a business), and many euros, not to mention the stress of it all, I have finally been granted me TEMPORARY residence permit!! I'll honestly probably never see my real residence permit because of the processing time to get it, but I am officially not going to get kicked out of Greece in 90 days or arrested at the border when I try and enter or leave.

Weekend Trip: Ioannina & Meteora

Saturday and Sunday there was a school sponsored fieldtrip to two towns in Greece: Ioannina to see the famous Perama Cave and a castle where Ali Pasha once lived, and then on Sunday to Meteora to see the famous monasteries "Suspended from the Sky" (literal translation of Meteora).

Thessaloniki to Ioannina is about 2.5 hours. From there to Meteora
was about 2 more hours.

To get to Ioannina we traveled on Egnatia Road, which was originally constructed in the second century BC by the Romans and is known as the road from Rome to Istanbul. The actual road that crosses northern Greece that we traveled on was only just completed in the last five years. The town of Ioannina is located in Epirus and has about 120,000 inhabitants. It was established in the 6th century AD by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and is situated around Lake Pamvotis. It's a beautiful city with mountains surrounding the lake and a fortress built through the city. Some of the students climbed on the ruins without noticing the large rope sectioning them off--I don't think the Greek man yelling at them was too happy. But who knows? We couldn't understand him and all Greeks seem to yell when the speak anyway... at least we got some cool photos. 

STAY OFF the ruins... oops

                                                                                                                                

                         

                           Lake Pamvotis from downtown Ioannina looking out toward the mountains

Sheep crossing

Later we went to a Perama cave to check out the stalagmites and stalactites. It's an "active" cave so we couldn't take photos because we might disturb nature's natural processes, but I managed to find one online: 

                   

Perama Cave

On Sunday we headed to Meteora by bus through the mountains. It was a very strange experience because the road was a lot of tunnels varying in length (some up to 2.7 km) and when we came out of the tunnels cutting through the mountain the weather would have changed completely. We went from sunshine and green everywhere to snow covered trees in a matter of minutes. Then we would enter another tunnel and we came out into the densest fog I have ever seen. I don't know how we continued to drive at that point. We made it to the town of Kalambaka, which is where the monasteries are located. 

Now imagine you can see through the fog to the little monasteries sitting on top of these huge rocks.

These were an amazing site to see. Situated on the tops of rocks there are now only six monestaries remaining and still functioning. At one point there were 24, but many were destroyed during WWII. Starting around the ninth century hermits had begun living in the rocks in the cracks and crevices. How they got to the tops and built the actual monasteries I am still not sure. We had a lot of climbing to do to get there, but roads have been built today that will get you close. We went to two of the monasteries. The Holy Monastery of St. Stephen was built in 1545 and is run by nuns. The second and largest of all is The Holy Monastery of Great Meteoron, built in the mid 1300s. Only ten monks live there now and it is still the largest number of any of the monasteries. Prior to the 1990s the only want to reach it was by net (yes, net) and this cable they have strung from one rock to the next. Now they have a convenient set of very solid stairs you can take.

Great Meteoron and the stairs leading up to it

Being a monk is not a profession that is in high demand, hence the low numbers living in the monasteries. Their day consists of eight hours of prayer, eight hours of work, and eight hours of leisure (sleeping, hobby, etc). Once the monks die in the monastery there is very little space for burying them on the giant rock so they'll bury them only for seven years, allowing the body to decay, and then exhume it. Then they take the skeleton apart and they end up like this:

Yes, they are real. And yes they still do this.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside the actual churches in the monasteries, but they were very ornate and colorful. Every inch of wall and ceiling was painted with vibrant scenes from the Bible in very great detail. We learned that this was how the illiterate learned about their religion, since they could not read it themselves.

The view from the top, looking down.

Tsiknopempti: Burnt Thursday

February 24th marked one of the important carnival days in Greece--Tsiknopempti or Burnt Thursday. It's celebrated eleven days before Lent begins. The burnt part refers to the cooking of massive amounts of meat, which everyone then consumes before they have to give it up for for Lent. People gather at the Tabernas and there was a parade in Aristotle Square, as well as parties throughout the day and night.

 


At school we celebrated with a BBQ with souvlaki (meat on a stick, the only way they seem to eat meat here and I won't be particularly sad if I never see again) and a costume contest. Easter, to the Greeks, is the most important holiday of the year, so they have many celebrations prior to Lent and of course once Easter arrives. Next week we get Monday off from school for Shrove Monday (Clean Monday) which marks the beginning of giving up all non-fasting foods and leaving behind our sinful attitudes/begins the countdown till Easter!!

Strike Notification

We receive emails keeping us up to date on current events in Thessaloniki...

Dear all,

 

I hope you are doing well.

 

I would like to inform you about a general strike by general workers union this coming Wednesday, February 23.

The buses will run without problem from 8:00 am to 9:00 pm. Before 8:00 am and after 9:00 pm there will be bus disruptions.

Demonstrations in Thessaloniki will be held down town (Kamara Arch, Venizelou and Egnatia, Aristotelous square) ...Please avoid the areas of demonstrations, and if you find yourself too close to a demonstration, move in the opposite direction.

 

Have a nice week.