How did she GET there?!

Hello again! So today was very fun but different. It's really late, so this blog will be brief. We woke up, ate breakfast again, and then we had our Bridging Cultures seminar again. This time we talked about budgets and basically realized we will all be broke when we get home. Yaaaaay, foreign transaction fees... We also learned about cultural shock and all the things we will probably experience and yet not recognize when it hits us. But maybe it'll pass me by! So anyway, after our seminar we ventured out to lunch at a cute restaurant where we had bread (of course), salad, and an Italian dish of our choice. I got the 5-cheese penne, I think. It was very cheesy! We then met up with Kostas again and he took us to the Byzantine Museum of Thessaloniki.

That was very pretty with lots of columns and tombs and pottery and ANCIENT HAIR! I actually remembered something from my anthropology classes: organic objects don't last the test of time. So the fact that they had HAIR is super amazing. I think it was from Egypt and was preserved with the intense heat.

Hair, ewww.

Then we walked around the city a bit and saw some painted bikes. I read about this project in the magazine on the plane. It's a city project where people donate old bicycles and then they get painted and placed around Thessaloniki to make the city more beautiful. Each color represents a different aspect of the project (like a green bike means there's not enough nature, etc).

So anyway, we walked around some, went to dinner for our last group (and therefore PAID FOR) meal, and then went out for a "cultural event"! We were given tickets to Rock the Ballet: Dance Boys (I think?) and it was pretty cool. It was a weird sort of modern ballet dance with 6 guys and 1 girl. The guys were muy cute (although probably gay) and we enjoyed utilizing the binoculars that our program leader provided. They played American music, lots of Michael Jackson, Queen, and Prince. The theatre was beautiful, though.

So when we got home, we had to celebrate Adrienne's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADRIENNE!). So we congregated in our hotel room and talked girly stuff. And I'll not repeat what was said because contrary to popular third grade belief, secrets secrets ARE fun. So that was about it today!

Oh, the title "How did she GET there?!" comes from a homeless lady that resides outside our hotel. She's always sitting on the sidewalk and it looks like she doesn't have any feet (really sad, sorry.) But today we passed by a loooong ways away and she was sitting on the sidewalk playing with her Nintendo DS. Fishy? Yeah.

So since it's like really late now (don't look at the time I posted this, mom...) I'll say goodnight. Below is a nice picture I took when walking around.

Emily

So I got a blog...

Hello! My name is Emily and if you're reading this you probably already know me. I'm studying abroad this semester for 4 months in Thessaloniki, Greece and just arrived yesterday. I've never had a blog before, so I don't know exactly how this works. But I'll make it up as I go along! Oh, and any typos you see, just ignore them, k? Thanks. :)

So I left Oklahoma and my family last Saturday at 12:30ish. It was pretty sad but I was very impressed my mom didn't cry.



Here we all are!



My flights were pretty uneventful until I arrived in Frankfurt, Germany. When I left Dallas I was sitting next to a German man named Toby. He was super nice and we talked quite a bit. He was in Chile on vacation with some friends and even showed me all his hundreds of pictures (it was a 10 hour flight--we had more than enough time). When we arrived in Frankfurt, he helped me carry my luggage (I had to re-check my HUGE bag) and find the check in. It was great having him translate for me, as I had nooo idea was they were saying to me. Anyway, when we went to re-check my bag (which was under 23 kilos), they made me put my BACKPACK on the scale! Now, knowing they didn't weigh my carry-ons in America, I, of course, packed them FULL of everything that wouldn't go in my big bag. So she was like, "You can only have 7 kilos of carry-on luggage. You have 16." So naturally I start to freak out. Toby totally saved me here. He helped me rearrange and pack my backpack into my other carry-on. He even kept my laptop and some towels and sheets in his bag until I had weighed it for the lady and then we snuck them back in. (Is that illegal?) But this is a HUGE shout-out to him and I'm so lucky I sat by him on the plane. So that was my German airport experience!

Here's Toby:

Now you're probably sick of reading my long story about nothing really, but I want to talk about Thessaloniki! It's beautiful here. We have a "Bridging Cultures Program" we're doing right now, so we're staying in a hotel for a few days. It's interesting, I guess electricity is very precious here, so all the lights flicker on when you walk by and to turn on the lights in your room you have to stick your room key in a slot by the door. That's so you don't leave your lights on when you leave. Makes sense. We were so exhausted yesterday, I felt like I was in a haze. But we did walk around the city and they took us out to dinner, which was nice. We're about a block from the water and Aristotle Square in right down the street. We went to a taverna for dinner and they served us a bit of everything, it seemed. We literally had at least 10 dishes and I had to try everything! I'm going to have to find a gym as soon as I get to campus.... I was surprised by how many varieties of potatoes they eat. They had baked potatoes, fried potatoes, hash browns, potato chip things, and ALL drenched in olive oil, of course. My stomach didn't take too kindly to the food last night, so I was glad my mom made me bring those digestive vitamins (sorry for doubting you, mom). That was really all we did yesterday, and I slept for just about 11 hours. Sleep felt great.

This morning we woke up and had breakfast in the hotel. Breakfast was different, and I'm excited to try things tomorrow that I overlooked today. We then had our "Bridging Cultures" seminar where they talked about culture and not getting date-raped and good stuff like that. Then we went to lunch at Goodie's, which is kinda like McDonald's but waaay better. I said thank you (EfxarisTOE) to our waitress, my first Greek to a Greek!

Our tour guide, Kostas, met us there and we took a tour of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. It was good. A lot of gold and pottery, but interesting. Kostas is so knowledgeable about everything in Thessaloniki and he was a great tour guide. After the museum, he took us around the city to look at historical sites. We saw an old castle ruin:

And some ancient baths (quite a lot of baths, actually...) and then we went to the church of St. Demetrius, which was beautiful. Kostas told us that Demetrius had been preaching the Christian gospel and somehow ended up being challenged to a gladiator duel by some other pagan guy. Demetrius killed the guy so the emperor got mad and imprisoned him beneath this church, in the baths. It was so awesome to go down there, it was like a cave and all secretive. Demetrius was actually killed there by spears, making him a martyr. But that's depressing, sorry! Here's a pretty picture to make up for it:



One of the baths! (In the lower part of the pic)



So then we came back to the hotel to rest up before dinner. Before we got to our hotel, we walked by the waterfront right as the sun was setting and got some very beautiful scenes. A local lady came up as we were taking our group picture and rearranged us so we were in order by height. Later, she started yelling at us to come take a picture of a duck. When we said we were from America she said, "Oh, America! Yes sir!" with a salute. It was hilarious.

After resting up at the hotel, we went out for dinner. Dinner was again, quite the event. We went to a different taverna and again had a FEAST before us. Salad, vegetable dishes, grape leaf wraps with rice, seafood risotto (really good, although the shrimp was literally staring at me), a meatball tasting sausage thing, eggplant, feta, and 2 cheesy dips for the excessive amount of bread we had, and Greek cheesecake with chocolate bread and ice cream to top it all off. SOMUCHFOOD. I only had a bite or two of each one and I'm so stuffed! Here's a picture of our table:

So that was pretty much it for today. It was busy, but full of awesome facts about Thessaloniki! I'm sorry this blog was so long, there was just so much to tell! To end I'll tell a funny story, so maybe it'll be worth all this reading. I was going to write in the journal my mom gave me (although this blog is pretty much a journal) but I was looking for a phrase to write in the front to kick it off. I googled a translator and then typed in "My Greek Adventure" so I could be all cool and write that in Greek in the front cover. It said, "we're sorry, but we don't have that in our records" or something and then it had other suggestions for me. The first one?

"My big adventure is staying at my Grandma Pearl's with her toe fungus"

Suitable? I think so.

Anyway, that's all for tonight! I'll try to keep up, but no promises. If you're reading this part, you either read it all or skipped to the bottom, but thank you either way!

Emily