Thanksgiving, and some stuff before and after

Well it's Monday again, and it seems like I just wrote my last entry a few days ago, when really it was a full WEEK ago. The trip is almost over and the time is FLYING by, probably because I don't notice it passing, because I spend most of my days staring at a computer. I was talking to Alex yesterday about how our memory of the events of the trip so far are already starting to get blurry. I realized then that I'm so glad I've at least kept track of most things on this journal, so I can look back and at least get the chronology of events right! But in a way it's true that the little details will never be as fresh in my mind again as they are now; the feelings I get when I walk past a certain building (like every morning when I walk to CYA and I get to Spyridonos, the block where I could turn left and get a pastry and/or coffee at Angelina's, the little bakery near school) or at a certain time of day when I do certain little routine things. Like getting out of bed and walking down the hall to the electrical box cabinet thingy, to see if the hot water switch is on so I can take a shower. Or little things to small to even recognize, they're more like subconscious things. Like the comfort of stepping onto a Metro train and glancing up at the map, with its reassuring little green and blue and red lines with pictures on it that let you know you're going in the right direction. Maybe I'll go and take a picture of that map later.

I turned in my final Art & Archaeology paper for Nicola this morning, so that's some work that's out of the way. And I'm 1,750 words into my Byzantine History paper for Karavas, which he hasn't set a page minimum for yet, but which he's said shouldn't be LONGER than 3,000 words. (Because he's kind of lazy like that. There's even some speculation among our group, half-jokingly, as to whether he'll actually read our essays at all...) So I'm getting to the point where that's almost done, which is good because it's due on Wednesday. Then after that it's just the Attic Tragedy paper and written response to the performance we're doing, which is this Thursday. (I'll be premiering the role of Hecuba 2 in our weird avante-garde version of Kassandrama, a "theatromontage" put together by our very own theatre professor Anthony Stevens. I'll keep my mouth shut about how very self-serving this play is, how little we're learning from the experience, etc.)

On a lighter note, we had an awesome Thanksgiving dinner last week! On Wednesday night, Sam and I started making a gigantic batch of eggnog in the biggest pot we could find. (The recipe is from Southern Living.com I think, and I highly recommend it. Oh my gosh, it's mostly milkfat, eggs, and sugar. Also some vanilla, cinnamon, nugmeg, brandy and rum.) We had a lot of fun making it, and even more fun serving it! Thursday was a crisp, gorgeous day. Part of it involved dragging chairs up to the boys' house, and part of it involved sitting around with Renee and Ashley and Emma, stirring whipping cream and mixing it into the eggnog mix from the night before. It's fun having good, quality "girl time" with them sometimes, they're really funny. That night there were about 17 of us who gathered at the boys' house, where they had put all of their desks together in a long row to look like a banquet table. The girls who cooked the turkey, stuffing and sweet potatoes in the boys' kitchen had spent part of the day decorating, so there were turkey napkins and wreaths of orange boughs from the trees in our neighborhood, and little tea candles all over the room so the light had a very warm and festive glow. I had come prepared with my iPod, ready to play "Merry Christmas Charlie Brown" (which I'd already listened to twice that day) but eventually people wanted to put on '80's dance music, which was fine with me. Everyone showed up looking fabulous, feeling well-rested from having the day off, and happy for the excuse to sit around and eat a feast! Speaking of which... the feast itself was HUGE. There were 2 turkeys(!), an enormous pot of stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, 2 kinds of green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, broccoli with cheese, and lots of gravy and cranberry sauce for everything. And that was just dinner. Most of us had volunteered to bring something, but that translated into about a dozen people walking in the door with desserts and festive drinks. So there were about a bazillion pies, puddings, and stuffed dates, plus there was ample wine throughout the meal, in addition to my eggnog, Charles' spiced cider, Clariece's hot buttered rum, and David Stephens' Irish car bombs. Despite having one and a half plates of food at dinner, I think I drank most of the calories I took in that night!

After the feast, we all went to the Ethniki Theatro (National Theatre) to see a production of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. I stayed awake for about 20 minutes, and then gave in to the triptophane (i.e. Turkey sleep chemical.) Then I was nudged awake just in time to applaud for the curtain call. When I asked Elder Chris how long the play was, he told me "a little over an hour." What a nap! At least the parts of the play that I managed to see were cool. Prometheus was strapped to a gigantic mill-like wheel in the center of the stage, which made for an interesting visual effect on the whole. Also very impressive was the chorus; they were spot on in their synchronization. But when the play's in a different language it's kind of hard to maintain interest, even though I'd already read the play in English. It's such a poetry-intensive, language-driven play though! All of Aeschylus' plays are like that, I think. If you can't hear and comprehend the words, there's almost no point in watching it, after seeing the initial staging and visual set-up.

The weekend after that awesome Thanksgiving was fun, although I spent a lot of it in the library. Friday night a few of us went to see some live Rembetiki music (the traditional music of Greece that you hear everywhere here, dating back to the Revolution in 1821.) That was fun for a while, but it was kind of weird just standing at the back of this over-crowded bar where I felt extremely out of place. So I went to go and get a coffee with Alex, and that was cool, it was like being back on Lesbos again, hanging out in Musiko Kafeneion. We joined up with the group again after a while, and walked around looking for a club to dance in. That idea sort of failed, although we walked all the way up to Syndagma before giving up and heading back to Kolonaki. Then I called Avery on the phone, which was extremely nice, and went to bed around 3 a.m. Saturday night was great too. (Isn't it funny that I have to refer to the events in my life in terms of what NIGHT they were on, because my days are so dang boring because all I do is sit in the library?) Anyway, Saturday NIGHT a bunch of us gathered in the boys' apartment to watch the movie "Knocked Up." It's a hilarious movie which everyone should see, and it's especially fun when you've spent the last 7 hours working on a paper. We walked to a bar in Kolonaki for a while, but I called it an early night around 1 and went home.

Sunday was fun, I went to the Poet Sandalmaker with Alex, who wanted to buy a leather satchel but needed a second opinion to make sure it wasn't too much of a purse to be a guy's bag. Elder Chris came too, to get some sandals for his mom, and I ended up being his foot model. We took a long time getting back to CYA; although we had the best intentions of being there when it opened at 3, we actually hung around near Syndagma drinking coffee for a while, then went to the park talking about movies until like 4:30, and then went to get pizza at Domino's for dinner, so didn't get to studying until about 5:30. It's really, really, really hard to get started working on your paper when you're in another country and there's tons of fun stuff you could be doing, and it's not due until Wednesday and you're already halfway done! In fact, I ended up making ZERO progress whatsoever on my paper on Sunday. I went onto WebAdvisor (the website where we search and register for classes at Lewis & Clark) and shopped for classes for like an hour, and figured out what classes I still have to take and how much room I'll have left over for electives my senior year. I think it'll be a good year.

Today I've been pretty good about getting work done; I added about 200 words to my essay, and turned in my paper for Nicola. And it's only 2:30! The question is, will I stay here after class, or go home to make dinner? It's so tempting to just leave at 7 after rehearsal, but I should probably stay and make some more headway on this thing. It'll get done eventually...