Zen at 10,000 Feet

 I made it to Athens! Who knew spending as little as four days in a place could seem a whole lot longer?

The only issues with my flights seemed to be with me. First, my Kindle freezes on me. I couldn’t turn it off and couldn’t reset it. Every so often, it would unfreeze but the darn thing would never keep my place! I kept having to rifle through the pages until I found where I had left off. Usually, it would freeze again during this process. Eventually, it wouldn’t even unfreeze itself. My Kindle has been on the same exact page these past four days. I still can’t reset it. Looks like I have to just wait until the battery dies, recharge it, and hope for the best. This would NEVER happen with a normal book. Add that to the list of reasons why the Kindle is stupid.

Now that my technology-is-ruining-my-life rant is over, I had another problem to deal with; my noodle arms. I’m not sure if everyone reading this knows that I’m training for a marathon so…I’m training for a marathon! The Athens Classical Marathon! You should look it up…or not since I’ll probably be talking about it a lot in the months leading up to the grand race. Anyway, I started training about a month before I left. This means my legs are most definitely in shape as are my lungs (kinda).  I even did some abs work. But my arms? Nope. Nada. Zip. So here I was in this giant plane getting ready to jet me off to another country with a carry-on that had to weigh at least 40 pounds, staring up at the overhead compartments thinking, “I’m supposed to put this up there?!?!”

I couldn’t even reach the darn thing on a normal day, but with a heavy suitcase in hand? Impossible! But I persevere and try to lift it anyway. I get the suitcase at about head level before my noodle arms start shaking and I feel as though I’m about to have a near-death experience. I try this a few times, hoping and praying that some kind [muscular] soul will see me struggling and ask for help. No such luck. Instead I stared down the guy sitting down the aisle and asked him if he would help me. He stands up, heaves my suitcase into the compartment, then sits back down without a word or even a glance in my direction. Not only was I embarrassed that I couldn’t handle my own luggage, but this guy made me feel as if I was burdening him. To make matters worse, I had to ask for help getting the darn thing back down 9 and a half hours later. If that’s not a sign that I need to start lifting weights, I don’t know what is.

Besides this, however, the flight was actually pretty enjoyable. There were nice movie options (I watched The Avengers [Yay Tom Hiddleston!] and took a walk down memory lane with Forrest Gump). I had a window seat and got to see Greece from above as we descended. I sat next to a nice British lady (who actually lived in Florida) and chatted with her about the different places we’ve been. She’d been to Antarctica.  I was a little bit jealous.

Seeing the landscape from above for the first time was truly breathtaking. One moment I was staring at these little ice crystals forming outside the plane on my window as we descended into a cloud. And then suddenly I saw the vast expanse of mountainous faces reaching with all their might towards the sky as if they were all Titans struggling to free themselves from their prison beneath the Earth’s crust. Just like that, the warm sun started to slowly melt the ice crystals, turning them into happy little beads of water. And just like that, the worries that had been running through my head the entire day also seemed to melt into happy little beads of anticipation, wonder, and hope. As I looked down on the ever increasing stone, every ounce of homesickness coursing through my veins dissolved into the brief shards of memories from the last time I was in Greece. I then began to look forward to all that would happen in the months to come.

Greece also happens to have by far the EASIEST customs to pass through simply because there is none. Sure there’s passport control where you have to wait in a long line for what feels like forever x 2 and you watch as they examine your picture on your passport, trying to see if the put together (if not washed out) person they see in the little book is the same as the exhausted, hair-mused, antsy person before them. Then you get your bags and move on to the exit gates. Do you know what “customs” was? A small section between baggage claim and the exit gates where one lone airport security worker glances at you and your bags as you wheel them through as if saying, “Yeah, I guess that bag of yours looks legit.”

I found the CYA personal after a few minutes of panic, searching for a dinky little white sign instead of the massive red stand-up poster of a castrated marble man. I then received a little packet with my keys, address, and map of Athens before I was whisked away into a taxi with two other students from my flight (we had talked to each other briefly at the JFK airport). As we drove (quite crazily, might I add—I swear, there must be no traffic laws of any kind in Greece), I again saw the mountains rising up around me and the small houses towards the outskirts of Athens. They were all of bleached white stucco with that classic brick red roof shingles and large windows. The closer we got to my street—Eratosthanous—the taller and more colorful the buildings became. Instead of the classic white stucco, I saw some different shades of lemonade (both regular and pink), some off-white, and even some a light baby blue. There was also the fact that more and more buildings had colorful splashes of graffiti (some of which, oddly enough, added to the building instead of subtracting from its beauty).

I got to my apartment and said thank you to my taxi driver after he helped get my things through the front door of the building (he showed me a small smile when I thanked him in his native tongue, one of only two words of modern Greek I knew coming in). I then took this little dinky yellow elevator that was smaller than my sister’s closet up to my floor. We would know it as the 3^rd floor but since the Greeks call the first floor either the ground floor or just label it “0”, I am living on the 2^nd floor. Alas! I was faced with another problem: our room door. The apartment is really cute and cozy. Our kitchen is actually larger than I had expected but you’ll hear no complaints from me! It took me some time to choose which room I wanted to claim—as I was the first of my roommates to arrive. The double? The single with the mirrors which is connected to the double? Or the single in the back with all the closet space?

I chose the latter. Hey, a girl needs her closet space, right?

It was then time for me to find the Academic Center. By. My. Self. Sure they gave me a map of the city. But they didn’t realize how bad I am at directions. I didn’t even realize how bad I was at directions until I found myself in a small alley after having climbed four flights of stone steps. And I could have sworn I was reading the map correctly. Eventually I got within a close enough proximity to the Academic Center to run into a worker who gladly showed me the way. You know what’s sad, though? My apartment is only about 2 minutes away from the Academic Center. I literally walk about 10 paces from my apartment, make a turn, and follow that street to the AC.

I gathered my orientation materials, got a copy of my passport, paid my damage deposit, then I had pretty much the rest of the day to myself. My roommates arrived one by one, and we all clicked quickly. We explored around our street, finding a small fresh fruits store where we bought a lot of different fruits and vegetables. We also found our way to a supermarket for the rest of our kitchen needs.

While in the liquor aisle (what? You really didn’t think a bunch of 20 year old Americans would take advantage of Greece’s lack of a legal drinking age and not buy any alcohol did you?) a nice older man came up and started talking to us in English. He was Greek American, he said, and frequently traveled between the two countries with his wife. He loved meeting the American students. We asked him if there was any particular brand of wine (we are classy women after all) he would recommend to us for, of course, the labels were all in Greek. He pointed out a few and then we made our decision. Suddenly, he took the bottle out of our hands and insisted on buying it for us. A welcome to Greece gift, he said. We met his wife and she helped us with our quest to find white pasta sauce. She hunted down one of the workers and everything.

Never did I think I would be unofficially adopted by a cute married couple on my first day in Athens! All the way back to the apartment, we couldn’t stop smiling. Also, may I add that besides my very first outing I have failed to get lost? We seem to always be able to find our way back. It’s a good thing Athens has a lot of large landmarks to help us find our bearings. I wouldn’t know what I’d do without the Acropolis or the Parliament building.

In a nutshell, that was my first day in Athens. I feel a little bad that it took me this long to post. I will try and catch up with the rest of my week after this weekend. Now that orientation is over, I think that I might finally come into some free time (it’s a weird concept, since I’m also starting my classes next week). Tomorrow I’m going to the island of Andros and will be there until very late Sunday night. It’s sure to be very exciting and positively amazing! Don’t worry, I’ll post pictures!