Midterm's over, so I SHOULD be working on a paper...

Ahhhhh, the "Byzantine History" midterm is in the bag. I won't find out how I did for another few days, maybe not until Monday, so I won't to jinx it by writing all about it. Suffice it to say, though, that I wrote two essays - one on emperor Julian and one on Constantine. And now it's over. So I SHOULD be working on my paper for "Art and Archaeology" (on wall paintings of Thera/Santorini, which is actually pretty interesting to me) but I only have an hour before a lecture... so I'll blog instead!

So, I said I'd write about our apartments: well here goes. I live in an apartment with 5 girls, there are two other apartments with 6 girls in each, and two MORE apartments with 3 boys in each. There's 3 bedrooms in my apartment, and I share a room with my friend from last year, Clariece. We have a small living room with a porch off it, and a small kitchen. You have to flip a switch in the hallway before you can use the stove, and you also have to flip another switch to turn on the hot water in the apartment 20 minutes before you can take even a warm shower. (Since I'm usually the first person up I've switched my morning routine to eating breakfast first, while the water heats, to save time.) Speaking of fun cultural differences in the bathroom, you can't flush toilet paper down in Greece, so you throw it in a wastebasket. (That's why all Grecian wastebaskets have lids.) It was hard to remember at first, but you get into the routine after a week or so!

The food situation at our place is pretty good. We all buy our own groceries, and everyone eats everyone else's food. (Unless you put your name on something, then it's off limits to others, and that's usually just ice cream.) We pretty much know what we have and what we need, and all the girls are pretty good about keeping up a regular influx of the necessities; milk, cereal, rice, pasta, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, chicken, veal, cheese and pita bread. We buy fruit from the fruit stand, and most other things we get at Athena's, the store around the corner. Maddie, Amanda and myself are the main chefs, but everyone takes turns doing the dishes and chopping things.

Our apartment is pretty quiet; we're kind of out of the way from the other students' apartments, so that's both good and bad. (Good after 10 pm for sure.) The other two girls apartments are in the same building and on the same floor, so between 12 girls and usually some of the boys (who live WAY up the hill,) there's always something going on over there. I should explain about the hill; you may recall last weekend I hiked up to a monastery? Well, the monastery's on TOP of the hill we all live at the base of. The boys live uphill from us, and the girls live slightly downhill. (Getting to our place with all our bags on day 1 was not terribly enjoyable; do you recall the myth of Sisyphus?) The best thing about our apartment, though, is that we have a garden in front and there are CATS living in it! Most of the cats in Greece are wild so we don't pet them, but the landlord takes care of these ones. There's 2 full-grown cats and one tiny little grey fuzzball, probably a month or so old, who we named "Tiropita" (a kind of fluffy feta cheese pastry; in English, Tiropita translates as "Cheese Pie.")

Kolonaki, our neighborhood, is really safe. It's kind of a trendy, chic district of Athens, so we don't eat in the tavernas around our apartments very much. We found a not-too-expensive one last weekend, but even there the bill for a moderate-sized dinner for 3 came to around 23 Euro (about 30 dollars), as opposed to HALF that much in Pangrati, the neighborhood our college is in, only a 20-minute walk away. So guess where WE go for dinner when we don't want to cook...

Wow, this is a LOT longer than I thought it would be. I'm gonna go. Peace out!