Wednesday, June 28, 2006

So they definitely weren't lying about the crazy hot temperatures...at 9 am it was already scorching in our living room.  The whole apartment feels like a shabbily decorated sauna.

Last night was one of the most irritating and disappointing nights of my entire life.  Three of us got all dressed up and ready to go, a process involved the use of hot curling irons in our stifling apartment.  We were gorgeous by 10:30 and went outside to wait for the guys and the other two girls who were coming with us.  They finally showed up around 11:30 and gave no excuse other than something happened-turns out they got busy playing volleyball in the apartment and broke a glass.  By that point we were already supposed to be on a train for Glyfada because it takes an hour and a half to get all the way down to the beach and Maren's friend who had reserved our table was meeting us at 12.  They were so late that we missed the train and had to wait almost 20 minutes until the next one arrived.  We finally decided to just get off the train and take a taxi the rest of the way there since we were almost an hour late and we finally got to the club around 1am.  By this point I was already exhausted and irritated, but the night only got more interesting from that point.

The club was amazing-it wasn't a dance club, it was more of a beach-side lounge with huge benches and a long wooden deck that stopped about 5 feet from the water, which was lit by spotlights from above and was a gorgeous shade of turquoise.  The weather had finally cooled off so Laura and I spent most of the evening either sitting on the deck by the water or walking down the beach, it was shaping up to be a really fun night. 

Then the other members of our group decided to start acting stupid (in the fashion of a sterotypical group of frat boys) and they ended up literally disappearing from the club before paying Maren's friend who had reserved the table for us.  Maren, Laura, and I ended up at the club frantically trying to track them down since they owed the guy money, which he needed to get home.  After over an hour of searching, we finally just gave up and walked half a mile or so down the road with her friend to an ATM so I could pay him for the rest of the group and just get payed back by them later.  Thankfully he was really nice about the entire thing; then he walked us back to the main road and got us a taxi back to Syntagma. 

It was quite possibly one of the most irritating experiences of my entire life, and makes me so incredibly grateful that I was raised to be a decent person-one who doesn't drink, act like an idiot, and then abandon her friends.  I was also very grateful that my roommates are also people who were raised with a shred of decency, the fact that Laura and I both think well in a crisis and don't generally run around acting stupid made the situation a lot better than it could have been had we not been there.

Still, sometimes its really annoying to be the responsible one, although I don't think I could ever live with myself if I acted like the rest of them.

I'll just chalk it up to a good learning experience; at least now we know for sure that these are not people we want to be going out with or really doing anything with from here on out.  We're just going to stick to our little group of four for the rest of the trip, which will make things a lot more enjoyable and much less stressful.  Santorini should be interesting because we are all at the same hotel, including the Geneseo group, but we shouldn't have too much trouble just doing our own thing since I know my way around the island and they don't.

So far today I have made breakfast, cleaned up the apartment, worked on my Philosophy paper, and am getting ready to shower and go get lunch at Subway before coming back to do some more work on my paper before my class starts at 3:00.  Tonight I will be studying furiously for tomorrow's midterm exam and putting the finishing touches on my paper.  I'll probably trek over to Starbucks again since that seems to be the only surefire way I ever get any school work done-even in a foreign country.  Somethings never change.

Kali Orestia.

~RLM

GotD:  s'agapo mon amou - I love you, my darling
(we of course are learning the most important greek phrases first)