Anyway, luckily Fae was joking when she suggested we conduct class entirely in Greek, so all we had to do was conjugate all the verbs we've learned, which wasn't too bad. Tomorrow we have to "conjugate" nouns, depending on whether they are masculine, feminine or neutral, singular or plural, and subject, possesive, object, or direct. Why, yes, that is 24 options for three verbs, and their are other endings as well, these are only simple ones haha. Greek is sort of challenging.
After class we had the most painful meeting of my life with everyone in our program, Taso, and the housing coordinator. There have been a few noise complaints against us (all but one of which were unwarranted, I think, although I'm not a PhD student studying 24/7). We also discussed problems like the missing towels; it turns out there were (only) 100 missing, and they've since been found. I think their disappearance had to do with the fact that their cleaning staff is too small due to budget cuts. We also learned that building-wide shower curtain theft happens twice a year because now and November are the only two times that the dorm gets money to wash them. So, we are without shower curtains for one week. I literally laid down in the bathtub to wash my hair today. We're lucky to have a bathtub, though; half the people have little showers so even just turning on the shower will be a disaster.
For today's field trip, we took a charter bus into town (again; so unnecessary) and took a ferry to the island near the other side of the lake. The island had a community on it; there are restaurants, houses and lots of tourist shops with cute jewelery. The architecture is mostly stone buildings, which are extremely picturesque. Our main destination was a monastery from the 12th century AD. We sat outside it and listened to a lecture on Byzantine art, which was mainly religious, and then we went in the monastery church. Every wall was painted with biblical scenes, and they were remarkably well-preserved. The ceilings had large portraits of Jesus (and others, maybe?) on them, and some walls showed stories or long panoramas of events, since most people back then were illiterate. The woman who monitored the monastery was actually almost as fascinating as the location itself; she was a TINY old lady, maybe 4.5 feet tall, who spoke rapid and forceful Greek at us the whole time, even though Fae and Taso were the only people who could understand. She was possibly one of the scariest people I have ever seen. When we tried to enter the second room, half the group got in without a problem, but she stopped the rest of us and kept gesturing for us to move away while speaking insistently. We eventually realized that girls wearing shorts couldn't go in, but girls wearing skirts, dresses or pants could. I had jeans on, luckily. She also complained bitterly (says Taso) that foreigners say they shouldn't have places like this since Greeks can't take care of them. She told us this in a third room, which had a lot of chips in the wall and carved graffiti, presumably from incredibly dumb Greek kids. That was a bummer, but the paintings were still impressive. We couldn't take pictures and no one snuck any for fear of the wrath of this woman, but it was an enjoyable visit.
We walked around the island a bit more to Ali Pasha's house. He was a ruler in the Ottoman Empire who was so successful that his power began to rival the sultan's power, so the sultan had him killed. That's the Cliff Notes version of the story, at least. The house architecture, or at least what we saw (the front) was the same as the scene at the wax museum that graphically depicted his decapitation. Pleasant, I know. The house is sort of a tourist trap now, though; I don't know if you can enter it but we just looked at the outside, which had lots of trinkets and postcards for sale.
This is one of the touristy items being sold. This is also pretty much an example class every day. If Fae thinks we'll mess up on something easy, she (jokingly, of course) threatens to kill us. She also says she's going to kill Nikos, the other teacher, for going to fast.
That concluded our field trip, so I went back into town for some dinner with a few of the other girls. I wasn't too hungry so I just got a spanikopita, but I wasn't impressed; it was smaller, colder and more expensive than one I had the other day from a different bakery. I did mooch off my friends' salads, though, so I still had my fill of delicious vegetables :)
The pictures are taking FOREVER to load because midnight here is more or less the official Facebooking hour for everyone in the dorm and the internet. I might add more later, but they're all up on Picassa if you want to see more!
Love Alex
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