Greek has begun!

1.26.08 – Saturday

Life has been good here in Greece…. This week back in Athens after the Santorini trip has been fun! We’ve had a good amount of classes to attend, and finally my new Greek class started! It is the Third Level of Accelerated Greek, and it fits my needs perfectly. In the class consists of me, 2 other guys, and the teacher. The 2 other guys are actually Catholic priests from Poland studying Greek because their bishop has them serving in a church on the Greek island of Crete starting after Pascha this year. The class is taught only in Greek (the teacher doesn’t speak English at all, unless I completely don’t understand something, or if she herself cannot describe a Greek word with other Greek words) and one of the Polish priests does not speak any English, only Polish and a little bit of Greek, and the other Polish priest speaks a decent amount of English, Polish, and Greek a little better than I do. The Athens Centre director helped me find a class, so I joined it (but it had already started a week beforehand). The teacher is pretty laid-back; she is even helping me work this class’s schedule around my other classes. This class is supposed to meet everyday Monday through Friday for 3 hours, but my other schedule doesn’t allow me to meet for all 3 hours any day except for Friday. I’ve only had the class for 3 days as of now, and I already feel myself speaking better. It helps a lot being completely immersed in the language for 3 straight hours!

My other classes are pretty good so far… my Byzantine history teacher, John, is pretty awesome; he’s a very interesting speaker. He reminds me a lot of my 10^th grade American History teacher, Mr. George, in that he knows a heck of a lot about the subject he teaches, he presents it in a way that keeps you interested (even though you may not necessarily care about the subject), and he has a lot of “catch phrases”, i.e. “simply put”, “interestingly enough”, “at the end of the day”…. where as Mr. George would say things like “guys”, “actually”, “literally”… they both say these things an incredibly ridiculous amount of times during their lecture periods, both as much for tally-mark proportions. John also showed us a clip of the movie Gladiator the other day because he was talking about the Roman Empire and their war techniques… pretty awesome! My Archaeology class is good, and the instructor isn’t too bland, but I’m just not that interested in archaeology. Either way, it’s not a bad class. Finally my two philosophy classes (each taught by the same professor) are probably going to get better, but as of now, the prof likes to talk in circles and forget what he’s talking about, or forget the main point of the days lecture sometimes. He’s very smart though—knows a lot about philosophy. I feel that I will learn a lot from him – if he gets his act straightened up.

Yesterday (Friday), none of my fellow students had any class except me, because of that new Greek class I’m taking, at 11am. So I woke up relatively early and went to the farmer’s market (laiki agora) that’s just passed the square where my apartment is. Got some cheap apples and bananas…. mmmmmmmm good stuff. After class me and this other guy Pat ventured into the “downtown” area of Athens via the bus system, and we checked out the University of Athens. Pretty cool stuff. We also found this awesome Gelato place. Did you know that the Pizza Hut we found in Greece is actually really nice—like a fancy Italian restaurant??? It really surprised us; people were wearing suits and nice clothes! We’ll have to go eat there some day. Anyway, that’s enough update for now…

MANNY OUT