Happy Rosh Hashanah people! Let me tell you, it is weird being in a Greek Orthodox country on the Jewish new year. Even though i am from bum fuck no where Minnesota… there were at least some jews around. Beside the like 6 of us in my LC group, i haven’t met one jew here (not to mention anyone who isn’t Greek Orthodox in general). I tried looking up a temple tonight thinking that maybe i could go and find some apples and honey… but no. There are like 2 temples in all of Athens and like 112 Greek Orthodox churches. My solution was to drink some orange jewish (to replace the apples and honey), run around and sing hava nagilah with my roommates, and then proceed to find youtube videos of the shofar playing. ( if you aren’t you jewish you may not know what a shofar is… but it is pretty cool so you should look it up.) All in all, my greek style rosh hashanah…wasn’t too damn bad.
September 2011
31 posts
I just took a nasty hour long art/archeology exam. Not only that, but he is expecting us to sit through another 1/2 hour lecture about our next chapter on the archaic period. GOOD JOKE! My form of protest is writing this post.
It is so nice to hear you in my life again. You always make me happy and think of my favorite times.
Greece is going to run out of money by the second week of october unless they pass some sort of bailout plan this afternoon.
i am finally content with the way things are going to be.
I literally just bought a fridge shelve worth of food for only 5 euros at the farmers market. I got tomatos, onions, olives, zucchinis, grapes, nectarines and plums. The greatest thing about it though was the vendors. It isn’t a quite place by any stretch. They are yelling as if they are trying to talk to someone on mars. Even though i could never actually understand what they were saying i assume it is stuff about the prices of their produce or that everything they have is poisonous and i will die when i eat it (Really who knows). Either way, the greatest part about it was that it wasn’t annoying. It fit in so beautifully with all the bustling of mothers, young couples, and grandmas who would literally fight you to the death for a good zucchini. The greek government may be a cluster fuck but the greek culture is becoming more beautiful everyday.
I have watched hercules four times in the last five days….
is watching Hercules while sitting in front of the Acropolis. Yeah, it’s beautiful.
I just woke up from the most realistic dream that i was in portland, screw you subconscious i don’t like when you are mean.
so basically for about 10 minutes this evening, i was very convinced that the apocalypse had hit athens. A few other girls from my program and i were on our way to an art show when we started seeing loads of police passing by the streets and even some staked out at specific corners of the national garden. This is a pretty normal thing in athens so we kept walking without a blink of an eye. As we get farther away from our apartment and syntagma square (where most of the protests happen) we notice traffic has stopped and still police on mopeds are buzzing by the stopped traffic. Then we notice that public buses are starting to let all of there passengers off in the middle of halted traffic. People are starting to get out of their cars and yell something (god knows what) to the cars in front of them. This puzzles us. We decided after the art show we would go down to syntagma and see what was going on. 1 hour later we get to syntagma. It is completely nuts. There is lots of yelling over microphones and riot police all around the square. ( strangely enough we walk right in to the protest without a problem… they were 20 some yr old male cops, we were three american girls…enough said) Once we get in to the protest we walk around and talk to one of the women there who says that it is a protest by the taxi drivers. We talked to her for what seemed like hours but must have only been 15 minutes about what they wanted from the government, what greek people thought of the government in general, how the U.S saw the greek society and anything else we could think of quickly to ask. the protest seemed peaceful enough ( mind you that yelling and screaming with random flares in the air is peaceful here) so we are confused why it seemed sooo intense on our way to the museum. We later find out from another gentleman who is at the taxi protest, that at the same time they were protesting in syntagma, there was a riot ( tear gas and all) at the square in front of our school by the (believed to be) communist youth organization. This is why when we were on our way to the museum we saw so many cops… they were moving from the taxi protest to the crazy commy riot. The gentlemen said that the riots at the square in front of our school almost never happen and it is even less common that 2 different protest would happen so close to each other (hence the reason why i thought the apocalypse was happening). After walking through the protest we found a coffee shop in syntagma square went to the second floor, got some coffee, and just sat and listen to the protest for almost a hour. In general, i went to a protest and didn’t get tear gased… success!
