My Big Fat Greek Spring Break

My Spring Break in Greece was fantastic! What an unbelievable trip, certainly one that I’ll never forget. We did so much and saw so much. The prospect of blogging about this entire week is extremely daunting. So, I will break it into sections and try to do the best that I can to sum it up.

First off, all of my 250 I’ve chosen to upload (out of about 350 taken…) can be seen HERE.

Getting to Greece was an adventure in itself. I woke up around 5:45 AM because I could hardly sleep from all the anticipation. I took the #25 Bus to Santa Maria Novella Train Station, where I met William and Alanna. We bought our train tickets and caught a 7:30 train to Pisa Airport. We arrived around 9:00 and got ourselves checked into our flight, which was quick because we had no baggage to check. We lived out of only our backpacks the whole week, which was fine.

We got through the incredibly lax security in a matter of minutes and were sitting at our departure gate roughly an hour before our flight was even boarding. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

This was good, though, because it gave me an opportunity to practice my newly acquired skill of SOLVING A RUBIK’S CUBE! Yes, this is what I learned on my trip to Greece. We had a lot of spare time while traveling, etc. Thanks to the help of the cube-master William, I have now mastered the art of the Rubik’s Cube (although I need to work on my speed). That’s a cool thing to be able to say you can do, though, right?

We took a plane to Rome (about a 40 minute flight…) and had a 3 hour layover. We ate lunch and hung out in the terminal. Our flight was a little delayed getting out of Rome, but even so it’s only a 2 hour flight to Athens.

From the airport, we stalked up on a few toiletries, checked our email at the free internet kiosks, and withdrew some cash. Greece uses the Euro, which is nice.

They do not, however, use the Roman Alphabet…which I hadn’t really considered in our preparations for this trip.

None of us speak Greek, but luckily most Greeks speak English. It’s just easier to find yourself completely helpless because you can’t even recognize most of the letters, let alone understand the meaning of the words. But often they put the English translation right underneath, and this is a great place to discover which letters mean what.

We took the X95 Bus right from the Airport to Syntagma Square in the heart of the city (about an hour’s ride) and from there we took the subway to our hotel. The way tickets work here in Greece and Italy is very different from the US mentality. In New York, for instance, you HAVE to swipe your metro card to get in. Payment is mandatory and essentially unavoidable. Bus and metro tickets in the places I have been work differently. You buy your ticket at a ticket window, and then you have to “validate” it in a machine that makes the ticket “good” for a certain period of time.

However, there’s no one to check your ticket other than that. So…technically you don’t HAVE to buy a ticket…or validate it. However, if you’re caught (by the rare and random ticket-checker man) the fine is usually something like 60 times the price of the ticket. So that should discourage people from not buying and validating their tickets. Personally, I think these people have too much faith in people. I have NEVER bought a bus ticket in Florence, and never been checked or fined. I figure, by the time I actually AM checked, I’ll have ridden the bus more times than even the cost of the ticket…so I’m not too worried.

We slept Saturday night at the Hostel Aphrodite, run by Australians. We ran into a lot of Ausies in Greece…but more on that later…

We were famished and ate a late dinner in the bar downstairs at the hostel. The bartender was a red-haired girl from Australia who was fascinating…something about her was very guarded and mysterious, but she was fun. We all watched the old Disney movie Mighty Joe Young in the bar that night, which I hadn’t seen or even thought about in years…

We slept for a few hours before getting a wakeup call at 5:00 AM so we could head down to Piraeus Port to buy our ferry tickets to Santorini. But I think that’s enough for one post.

In more recent news: I saw The Reader last night at the Odeon Cinemas here (which shows American movies on certain days of the week). Kate Winslet won the Oscar for Best Actress this year for it. It was very…heavy, but moving. I suppose any movie related to the Holocaust isn’t typically a “pick-me-up” but I like drama, so I enjoyed it. Check it out if you still have the chance, although I’m sure it’s gone from the American movie theaters. I am so out of touch with American pop culture, it’s ridiculous…

Midterms, Spring Break, and a Haircut

Well, I officially survived midterms!

• Monday: Music Theory
  
• Tuesday: Italian Oral exam
  
• Wednesday: (thankfully nothing but a composition lesson…)
  
• Thursday: Italian Written, Aural Skills, Music History II
  

For my Italian oral exam I had to talk to my professor about a trip I took this semester (I told her about Switzerland)

My Aural Skills midterm included singing some atonal melodies and this rhythm sheet where you “sing” the rhythm written on the page (on “tah”) and clap another rhythm (like beats 1&2 or 2&3 or 3&4). That was individual. Then we did dictation as a group (where we write music that he plays on the piano…in various forms…).

We had that Music History essay due on Thursday on “the meaning of ‘Baroque’ as it applies to the music of the late 16th and 17th centuries. But for our in-class final we had to write ANOTHER essay on one of three topics, I chose the topic of comparing and contrasting the Baroque drama and music in Italy, France, and England. Woo! Exciting stuff! 

They say that study abroad courses are supposed to be a joke, and that they’re really easy, but honestly this is perhaps the most stressed I’ve felt about midterms in my college career. Maybe it’s because this is the first time that they’ve all really fallen on the same week. They’re always “supposed” to but professors I’ve had often do their own thing.

Now that midterms are over: SPRING BREAK IS HERE.

And I’m off to GREECE.

I’ll of course blog when I get back about all of it, but here’s a brief itinerary:

• Saturday: Fly Pisa to Rome, fly Rome to Athens, sleep here.
  
• Sunday/Monday: Ferry boat to the island of Santorini, staying here.
  
• Tuesday/Wednesday: Ferry to the island of Paros, stay here.
  
• Thursday/Friday: Ferry back to Athens, stay here.
  
• Saturday: Fly home.
  

I’m travelling with my friends William Spinnato and Alanna Fox, whom I knew from choir back at NYU. Alanna’s roommate (also named Alanna, ironically…) will be joining us for our time in Athens at the end of the week. Several of my friends here are also going to Greece with touring companies (like how I went to Switzerland) and they will be in Athens at the end of the week as well. So there’s potential to hook up there.

One small anecdote before I leave for a week: today I had my first haircut in Italy! “Un taglio” (OON TAL-yo) it’s called in Italian. There’s a small barber shop at the bottom of the hill on Via Bolognese where I live. I looked up in my travel dictionary all the phrases it had about getting your haircut and I marched down there. It was a gorgeous day today (it rained all week during midterms…and now is mysteriously sunny and beautiful once they’re over…hmm…) and I managed to hold a fairly decent conversation with the barber about the weather. I told him I was a student at NYU studying here and that I was going to Greece tomorrow.

He was such a character! I suppose caricature is a more appropriate word, though. He was this old man with kind of wild, receding hair (funny that he’s a barber) and these large glasses that magnified his eyes considerably and made him look cartoonish. You could tell he LOVED cutting hair and had been doing it for years. The whole thing was a grand production it seemed…the way he glided around the chair and twirled his instruments. If anyone reading this has seen Toy Story 2 where the old man (from the Pixar short where he plays chess with himself) comes as a doll repairman…that’s what this guy reminded me of. It was well worth the € 14.50 and I’m sure I’ll be going back before I fly home in May.