awesome adventure and real food!

Today I opted for no cafeteria breakfast, as did everyone else in my program, including my professor. Since I haven’t been to the store to buy breakfast food yet, I had milk and cheddar cheese and crackers, which was delicious. In Greek class we spent some more time talking about “to be” and we also discussed “I like,” although we don’t really know any vocab yet. Nouns also don’t become pluralized just by adding an “s” at the end, so “I like (something plural) is harder to write. It’s nice to be learning, though. Our teacher also just spent a while chatting with us about where we’re from and where we’ve traveled. It’s sort of odd to be in a language class but not get reprimanded from using English (which is a good thing, since our vocabulary is still limited to a very small number of words).
After class, I went on a run with Tina, Katlynn and Anna. It was fun to run with other people; I haven’t in a long time. We went down a neighborhood road behind the hospital, which is adjacent to the university, and then ran back to the cafeteria for lunch. There was actually a variety of fish options, so it looks like Taso was fortunately wrong about us never having meat again. Of course, only one of the options looked good haha: there was a normal fish fillet, little three inch long fish which were rather black, or an entire fish, including skin and eyes, served over French fries. Guess which one I went for haha. I had my own dessert, which was Kinder chocolate. It’s SO good. The melt-in-your-mouth factor rivals Cadbury milk chocolate :)
At 3pm, we met for our first excursion, a trip to the Parama Caves. Now I’ve seem far too many caves, tunnels, canyons etc in the last few months and I was not particularly excited. We boarded our bus with Taso and my Greek professor Fay and drove to the other side of the city, which was only about 20 minutes. We stopped in the small town of Parama, where we walked up the hill to an unimpressive entrance to the Caves. As soon as we went in the door, though, I realized this was 500 times cooler than anything else I’ve seen recently. We spent 45 minutes walking 1000 meters though amazing stalactites and stalagmites of all sizes. At first we weren’t allowed to take pictures, but once we got to the “Big Cave,” she told us that we were allowed to photograph with the flash in that room only. After, we could use cameras without the flash. My camera’s anti-shake fancy shmancy capabilities were very useful since I didn’t have a tripod.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the caves tour. We went up and down (but mostly up) many stairs, and ended at the top of a hill overlooking a huge flat valley. We walked down and had some time to wait before the bus returned. A few of us went to the only open restaurant (from 2 or 3 to 5, everything closes for the siesta) and I had a fabulous tomato and cucumber salad. MMMM vegetables! We ran out of time and I had to wolf down half of it, but I’m good at eating fast so it wasn’t a problem.
We caught the bus and drove on a different route to go back to school. The road went right (as in VERY close) to the edge of the lake, and it was neat to have a different view of the area. Taso decided that we should go into town for dinner instead of going right back to school, so we got dropped off in Ioannina. Taso chose a traditional Greek restaurant that he’d been to a couple times and the staff brought some tables outside which we crammed around. 26 people is a lot. We ordered family-style and they kept bringing out more and more food which we had a hard time fitting on the tables, but an easy time fitting in our stomachs. Everything was fabulous, particularly because we were all craving good Greek food. (Well, the deep-fried fish and goat intestines were sort of weird, although not terrible. Everything else I loved). It made me remember why I was especially excited to come here haha. Side note: I’ve barely seen hummus anywhere, which is a bummer. They have tzatsiki frequently, though, which is great. We ate a TON of food and were all very happy but decided to top off the meal with dessert crepes from across the street. Gracie and I shared a nutella, strawberry and banana crepe. It was on of the best dessert I’ve ever had. SO GOOD. Most other people got their own, which was a mistake since we were all incredibly full. Even I didn’t want to eat anything else haha.

Then I came back home and started working on homework and digesting. For each lecture we have (4-6 a week, 2 hours each…), we have to write a 1 page summary or essay. I’m not sure exactly what they’re looking for, but if the lecturing professor doesn’t give a prompt, we’re just supposed to organize our notes into something coherent, I think. I finished up my “Geographical Placement of Greece” lecture summary and wrote some sentences such as “moo ar-EH-si toh pa-gho-TOH,” which means I like ice cream. I hope. I wrote them in my extremely slow greek handwriting, though.
Tomorrow I have Greek class, 2 lectures and dance class. It should be a long but hopefully interesting day!
Love Alex