Wut Wut

Ya su, America.

I’m settling in a little here in Athens, finally. I can sleep through the crazy motorcyclists and everything!

I thought you all should know that the other day I thought we were all going to die, but then we didn’t. See, we heard shouting and chanting, and it got louder, and then it got SUPER loud and there was banging and drumming and then this huge crowd of people came marching down the street, blocking traffic and pissing off motorists and everything. They had banners and such and I’m pretty sure they set one on fire, because there was smoke going down the street.

Turns out it was just soccer fans, though.

It was actually pretty cool, once we asked a Greek dude on the street and he assured us that it was for a football team and not some sort of giant protest. They came right down under our balcony and were cheering and fist-pumping at us.

We’ve started orientation classes at the university, which mostly consists of a few lectures about history and literature and things like that, and then we talk forever about which islands to visit and which neighborhoods have the best shopping and stuff.

We’re getting brave enough to go around in smaller groups now, which is nice because I can choose where I want to eat and stuff instead of just going around with the crowd of twenty-five. The group I’ve been hanging out with is maybe five people, mostly roommates of mine. We do awesome stuff like go to the giant electronics store and take the Guitar Hero away from Greek twelve-year-olds, which is fun times.

Our professor told us about a tiny little souvlaki place that is like fast food except a billion times better, you can get a pita with a fresh skewer of grilled meat and veggies and fries and yogurt sauce and stuff and they are SO GOOD. And less that 2 euro, too. There are also these kiosks like every twelve feet where you can get drinks or chips or a magazine. I bought myself sudoku there yesterday because my books aren’t enough when we have down time.

I’m super addicted to this Greek brand of fruit juice called Amita, they have flavors like honeydew grape and apple-apricot-orange and they are all delicious.

My roommates are all super-cool, I was really lucky to get placed with them because everyone gets along really well. Last night we had a chicken-off against the boys’ apartment. We bought whole chickens from the meat market (“They were probably alive a few hours ago,” said our professor). And cooked them up in our crappy ovens and then all met us and had a huge dinner with potatoes and fruit salad and stuff. It was amazing because most of us haven’t had a real nice dinner since we went out last week. Also, it was a tie. We made a victory banner for our chicken anyway though, and named it Kostos.

Today we had a class on traditional Greek dance, which everyone was terrible at but it was fun anyway because everyone had good attitudes, etc. Mostly we went around in a circle doing the steps wrong while the instructor went “oompa!” and got really sweaty. Then we went out for dinner in Monastiraki and it was really nice.

Tomorrow we spend the night at Meteora so we can see the monasteries up on rock pinnacles and cool stuff like that. We have to wake up at 6 am ewwww but I bet it’ll be awesome anyway! Toodles till then, I’ll upload pictures whenever I get to an internet café.