Horizons Study Ablog : Jenna DeSousa

Jia sa! Today we embarked on our journey in Greece. After a long day of travel and sleeping on relatively hard beds, everyone had to muster up the strength to wake up for class at 9am. Thankfully, we delved right into the Greek culture by learning the language. We learned phrases such as hello, good bye, good morning, where is, how much is, etc... I learned how to at least communicate by introducing myself: me lene jenna. I can tell others "spudazo, ime fititria" which quite literally translates to I study, I am a student. Now we can build upon our greek knowledge as we continue in our study abroad program. Some of us also got to experience technology from the dinosaur age as we purchased brick phones to send/receive text messages from in country. It was very interesting to go back to middle school days where the only way to text a certain letter is to press the number three times.

Beyond class, we finally were able to do some exploring. For this, we took an open air city bus, but first we needed to travel to the bus stop. We took a city bus to arrive at our destination, and it reminded all of us purdue students about the busses on campus; You know, like the silver loop on a below freezing day where everyone is shoved in like sardines. Except this one was in 80 degree weather, more humid and everything was in Greek rather than English. Okay, so almost the same thing. Regardless, it was an exciting experience even though most of us failed to validate our tickets to get onto the bus, whoops! The open air bus city tour was absolutely breathtaking. We saw so many historical monuments, brick ruins, stray cats and dogs, random people laughing at us tourists, and of course, the highest point of thessaloniki. Looking out over the city, you could see millions of houses just packed right on top of each other all surrounded by blue water. I have never seen an area as populated as this city, and I cannot imagine what the rest of the country looks like. Tonight, we also experienced a taste of the Greek culture by attending a welcome dinner. The dinner consisted of 8 different meals, all ranging from cheese dips for rolls to chicken wrapped in grape leaves with a yogurt based sauce. The best part of the meal was the dessert, when we ate tree trunk. Don't worry, it wasn't actually tree bark. It was a sweet chocolate based dessert with bread pieces topped with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup. If heaven had a taste, it would taste like tree trunk! Now it's time to get some sleep and do all over again tomorrow. Good night, or as we would say it, kalinihta!