XPONIA POLLA, ELAINE!

First of all, I want to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my sister Elaine!! The Big 2-6!!!

An update on the passing of the Bishop… on Wednesday after class, I walked down to Syntagma Square to find the church where the Bishop was being laid out. I got in a line along with a multitude of others who wished to visit the body of the Bishop. I got in line—which extended with a mass of people around the whole block around the church and down the street—just before 5:00pm… the line moved about a half street after about 5 HOURS!!!!! I conveniently decided to exit the line at 10:00pm, having gone basically nowhere. I felt bad for all the other millions of people who were probably going to wait ANOTHER 6 or 7 hours… and the scary part was—a lot of people got in line behind me, even at 10:00pm! Ridiculous…

The next day (Thursday) was the Funeral, which took place at the cemetery, which is directly behind my apartment complex. We indeed had classes, as they were not cancelled. Instead, I had my Greek class even earlier than usual – 9:00am – which was hard to wake up for, but I did. After Greek, I had a free hour before my next class, so I tried to walk down to where the funeral was taking place, but the police had the streets roped off, and I could not walk any further. There were a lot of people EVERYWHERE, so many extra cars in places that they should not be parked, and a helicopter flying overhead (probably doing the news), but by 3:00pm, everything was back to normal.

Let’s see…. what else is going on? Not really too much else. I’ve been watching a lot of The Simpsons DVDs and Everybody Loves Raymond DVDs that I brought on the trip with me, as are my roommates. It’s nice to have brought a little something from home to remind me where I’m from… :)

Oh yeah, on Tuesday we went to the National Archaeological Museum for our Arts & Archaeology class. This is in fact the same museum that Mike and I went to in 2005 (again, I did not take any new pictures because everything looked the same as when we took pictures then). It was pretty cool… I felt a little bit smarter than the rest of the class, because I had remembered seeing a lot of the artifacts, and when the teacher called on me, I was relatively prepared to give an answer. It was cool seeing the Mask of Agamemnon, and pointing it out to everyone else :)

Also, this weekend is Super Bowl weekend (as I’m sure everybody knows). We will be able to watch it at this one bar that we frequent, as the owner has Satellite TV, and the Super Sports channel that we need to watch it (we have been able to watch all the NFL Playoff games there too on the SS channels). It’s going to be fun watching it in a different country… our group is planning on having a potluck-type dinner Sunday evening, and then we’ll all take naps afterwards and wake up in time to watch the game which will start at 1:30AM Monday morning. WOOO!

MANNY OUT!