endless wine

Day 2 was crazy, or at least the night was but I'll start from the beginning so I can remember what I did in the morning to help me study for my first quiz tomorrow.

So today I got woken up by my alarm this time except I fell asleep with my pillow over my head so I didn't actually wake up from my alarm upon the first sound. This scared me b/c I'm a light sleeper but I figured I haven't gotten much sleep in the past couple days that once I actually fall asleep I'm out like a lightbulb. So we met our student leader at 8:30 in front of the same church we meet at every morning and began our class. We did A LOT of walking today. We basically walked all over the city of Athens talking about the "different layers of the Greek identity." We went to the Plaka, Monastiraki, Roman Agora, Byzantine Churches of Plaka, the Ottoman Bazaar and the Modern Bazaar. I didn't take as many pictures today as I did for the Acropolis because honestly, I was just too tired to take pictures. I was really just too tired to even look at anything. But I made it.

So we get back to Pangrati, which is the town in Athens where my apartment is and I met up with some girls and had lunch in this cute old man's restaurant cafe. One thing about old men restaurant owners is that they like to give you wine and free food which is great but when you want to leave they bring you another bottle of wine and food! They are all very friendly but it's so hard to leave these places. Lunch was really good though. We all shared and ordered an authentic Greek salad, pizza and saganaki. New Greek food to know except I didn't really like it that much. Saganki is fried cheese with an oil base - some people liked it but I thought it was gross. So we are sitting there eating and all of a sudden the old man owner came up to us with a bottle of wine and a calzone looking food. We were like "oh no no," but the man didn't really understand and was just like "sit sit, enjoy." So we sat and enjoyed what he brought us. We were there for about 2 hours.

I went back to my apartment after lunch and slept for an hour. We had class again at 5:00pm so I got up for class and went to listen to a really interesting lecture on the history of foreign policy in Greece. By the way, the freakin Turks suck! The Greeks have always had a "poisoned" relationship with the Turks, as our guest speaker told us. See there's this island called Cyprus which is located south of Crete (one of the Greek islands) and over the past century Greece and Turkey have been fighting over control of Cyprus. So Greece and Turkey have fought back and forth for this freakin island trying to prove who's the better country. Till this day there's a stagnation between the two countries but it just goes to show you that some countries are far from peace. The thing is how many people know about this stuff? I'm one of them for sure.

After class we headed back to the apartment and got ready for dinner. I went out with Steph, Julie, Alex and Veronica. We found the cutest restaurant cafe for dinner. So we walk in and there's literally nobody there. It was 8:30pm and the sun was setting and it was just beautiful. So we walk in and once again there is this old man who's serving us. We sit down and try to talk to the man but the only english he knew was "yes, no, thank you and hello." Oh and he also knew what we ordered in english because we would be like "chicken filet" and he would be like "chi-cken fi-let, yes." I ordered a Greek salad and split a zucchini salad with Veronica. We also ordered ONE bottle of red wine. So we're sitting there taking pictures, enjoying the sun setting and just having a grand old time when the man walks out with a basket of bread and our bottle of red wine. That bread was so good! The wine was alright - not too strong but not too light. He then brought our food out which tasted amazing! Everything was soooo good! We all agreed to definitely come back before we left. So we finished eating and we're just laughing and enjoying each other's company and we're feeling like we should finish the bottle of wine. So Steph pours each person another glass and we're each working on our last glass thinkin "alright, when we're done with this glass we'll go out and try to find a club and go dancing." So we're finishing up and we see the man walking over toward us with another bottle of wine in his hand. He placed it on our table and pointed to himself signaling "this one's on me." So we all looked at each other and were like "uh, we don't really want any more wine but since he brought it out we didn't want to offend him by not drinking it," we poured another glass for each person. So we're taking our time still laughing and talking about babysitting stories and we're noticing that we're almost done with this second bottle of wine. Steph pours everyone the last glass and 5 minutes later, the old man is back with another glass of freakin wine! We were like "no, no, can we have check??" He was like "take take" and he noded signaling he would bring the check shortly. So once again we felt bad that he brought out this wine and if we were to leave it we would feel bad so Steph poured everyone another glass. At this point I'm really giggly and I can't stop laughing, haha. Then everybody else couldn't stop laughing because I was laughing. So he brings the check, the total came out to be 45 euros. We all pitch in some money and we're sitting there thinking we should finish the wine because he just gave us this one on the house and we don't want to feel bad for not finishing it. So Steph pours the last bit of wine left into everyone's glass. We all finish it and we get our bags because we're thinkin he might bring another one out if we just sit there. We get up to leave and right as we're about to head down the stairs, the old man comes walking with another freakin bottle of this red wine we've been forcing down all night! We're like "no no" but he didn't understand so we turn right around and begin again working on this bottle of wine. We told the man "this is our LAST one! no more." He understood after this one. So we basically finished that bottle and then went to the bathroom b/c we had to pee like wo. So if anyone ever goes to Greece, just don't order any wine - that will solve the problem! hahaha. Gosh walking down the street was crazy. But the night wasn't over then...