Sick and Stationary

You may be wondering why I've skipped a whole week in blogland. I wish I could say, "I was in Crete!" and tell you all about it, but the real reason is simply that my life of late has been pretty dull. Not because Greece is a dull place to live, but because I've been sick as a dog. A stray Athenian dog, with diseases you can't even imagine.

A rather healthy Athenian Stray

Actually, just a regular old sinus infection, but it wiped me out. I've spent a lot of time these past two weeks laying in bed. On Sunday mornings, I've listened to what sounds an awful lot like the call to prayer but is actually just Athenians driving around with loudspeakers asking people to give them their old TVs and junk. I've read a good chunk of the Odyssey, which I'm quite enjoying. It's fun to read about places I've been to or will go to soon, and about people who half of my students are named after.





By half, I mean the female students; there are plenty of Aphrodites, Artemises, and Calliopes in my classes. But almost all Greek boys have one of about five different names: Dimitris (Jim), Konstantinos, Giannis (John), Gorgos (George), and Nikolas (Nick).

Anyways, being sick put me into a pretty bad slump. Or should I say, aggravated the slump - A lot of the fellows have been feeling a little down lately, myself included. It's helpful and interesting to think about this in a broader context, because according to "The Phases of Culture Shock," the three month point is about exactly when shit is supposed to be shittiest:

"After some time (usually three months but it may be sooner or later depending on the individual), differences between the old and new culture become apparent and may create anxiety. That sense of excitement will eventually give way to new and unpleasant feelings of frustration and anger as you continue to have unfavorable encounters that strike you as strange, offensive, and unacceptable. These reactions [...] are typically centered on the formidable language barrier as well as stark differences in: public hygiene; traffic safety; the type and quality of the food..."

Word. Good to know.

For me, it's important to remember how much my physical state effects my mental state. For example:
Last wednesday we had another day off (not really sure why), and I went to the hospital (different one) to get some antibiotics. When asked if I had insurance, I tried to explain that I had some insurance through my job at Athens College. One of the secretaries then took my medical form and began making all these phone calls to the American College in Greece and put me on the phone with the director of that program, and while trying to explain to this stranger on the other end of the line and this secretary who didn't speak very good English that I had no connection with the American College in Greece I almost burst into tears. I was sick, tired, and utterly confused. The language barrier never gets any easier.

By the time I had regained physical strength, school was back in session. It felt great to be around other humans and not in bed by myself all day. And I'm really enjoying teaching, so it was nice to be back in the classroom with the kids. Although ideally my next step in life would be to become a singer on a cruise ship, it's good to know that I could be happy teaching as well.

In my eleventh grade class, we are reading "Macbeth." A little while ago I met a Greek actor who is acting in a Greek version of "Macbett" (Eugene Ionesco's "theatre absurd" interpretation of the original play). He told me to come check it out, so this weekend, looking for something different, Mandee and I went to see some Greek theatre.

I figured that since I'm reading "Macbeth" in class, I'd be able to understand what was going on in the play, even though it was in Greek. Not at all the case. Ionesco's script is pretty cracked out, and the six actor ensemble (who played the thirty something characters) went totally crazy with costumes and props and choreography, so I couldn't understand a bloody thing. However, this show was VERY entertaining. There were sequins and dance numbers and women in bikinis and people dying left and right and yelling and running around and women dressed as men and men wrapped in sheets dressed as Mother Theresa, and even though I had no idea what was going on, I loved it. So - if you ever want to see a piece of theatre in a language you don't understand, I highly recommend seeing something in "the Theatre of the absurd" genre. The visuals will keep you engaged.

My Greek is improving, though slowly. When I was sick I had some time to really sit down and study it, and just a few hours made a big difference. I need to get into the habit of just studying. The problem is that I almost never get a chance to actually practice saying anything, because everyone speaks English anyways. However, it is fun to learn a new language. It's like a puzzle, and I'm enjoying using my brain in a new way.


For "Study Time," I've discovered a lovely little cafe in Halandri: Le Petit Fleur. It's quite small and often hard to get a table, but well worth the wait. It serves the most incredible hot chocolate - it's so thick that it's more like chocolate soup than a chocolate drink. There are many flavors - my favourite so far is brandy, orange and cinnamon. The cafe is delightfully decorated (hot pink motif), serves delicious carrot cake and other pastries, and very pleasant to just sit in. They play old French records (Edith Piaf etc).

Finally, I should mention that being stationary these past two weeks has gotten me pretty stressed about not taking advantage of my time here. However, its important to keep in mind that I'm here for another EIGHT MONTHS. I guess I should allow myself to just kick back and enjoy Halandri and its amazing chocolate soup. Nai.

New Staple Food

Budapest

Here is how I'd imagined Hungary: very poor, lots of farms and farm animals, strange old women in clogs who want to bring you into their small houses with low roofs (really what I'm getting at here is the witch from Hansel and Gretel, and her house, if it weren't made of candy. I realize this is a German folktale, but for some reason in my mind it screams Hungary), highly caloric food (lots of bread), folk dancing involving a lot of strange little hops, ugly language. For some reason I'd lumped Hungary with Poland, though they're nowhere near each other on the map. But both have that harsh sounding language with a lot of "ch"s and both are small countries in Europe that I know almost nothing about. The only Hungarian person I knew was the evil cleaning lady "Ilona" on my painting program in Italy, summer 2008. She was fired half way through the program for being so rude to both students and faculty on the trip.

Anyways - Hansel, Gretel, and Ilona aside, Budapest is in fact stunning. It's the most underrated city I've ever been to - no one told me it was like a smaller, cheaper, funkier Paris - and I want to spread the word.

Train Station

Last Friday, Lizzie and I woke up at 5 am to make our 8:30 flight. We met Mandee at the airport. Two flights and a metro ride later, we arrived, exhausted, in downtown Pest. By then it was about three o'clock. After checking into our hostel, we decided to walk around and get our bearings. By about 4:30 the sky was pitch black, and I think we all shared the same odd feeling of not really knowing where we were or who we were or what time it was. Stumbling around Hungary under a black sky, feeling drunk with exhaustion, it was all very twilight zone.

But even in the dark, the architecture in Budapest is spectacular. It reminded me in many ways of Paris, because every building is its own brand of beautiful. There's a lot of art nouveau influence, which I was excited to recognize from my Modern Architecture class at Brown.

On Saturday, we headed to Margaret Island, a 2.5 km island, smack in the middle of the Danube River, which separates Buda from Pest. Budapest became a single city, occupying both banks of the river, in 1873.

The Danube

The island is like a little forest oasis in the middle of an otherwise fairly cosmopolitan city. It was lovely to see some flaming fall foliage - there's none of that in Greece. (It's also seventy five degrees here in Greece, which feels a little strange). The smell of fall reminded me of North America and got me pretty excited about going home for christmas.

Last year at Brown, I auditioned and was called back for a play called "The Danube," by Maria Irene Forbes. I didn't end up getting the part, but through auditions and callbacks I had to do a pretty thorough reading of the script. The play starts out as a fairly realistic love story, apart from the repetition of many lines in Hungarian. Gradually it becomes more hallucinatory as Budapest is overwhelmed by war, which goes unmentioned in the actual script. There's a whole lot of coughing and bleeding, and it's pretty damn depressing, not to mention weird. This play is what I thought of when I heard the name "Danube", and I'm glad I was able to replace that image with one of a river reflecting sunlight.

On Margaret Island

View of the city from Fisherman's Bastion

Fisherman's Bastion

We then made our way over to the Buda side of the river, and walked up "Castle Hill" to the Fisherman's Bastion.  It reminded me of the castle from Beauty and The Beast, and for a minute I convinced myself that Beauty and the Beast must have been set in Hungary. Then Mandee pointed out that the opening song in the movie begins with "Bonjour!" 

Saturday night we went to a lovely orchestra concert in St. Stephan's cathedral, which puts some of those grand old cathedrals I saw in Italy to shame.

Sunday, Mandee and I went to the baths. Actually, we went to the largest medicinal bath in Europe, Szechenyi. That was relaxing but also just weird. The building was impressive, yes, but so are all of the other buildings in Budapest. Szechenyi's beauty did not make up for the horrible smells inside. We opted for the standard bath: it was basically just ten different public pools, each of a slightly different temperature, that we went and soaked in with a bunch of old Hungarian people (thankfully this was not a nude bath).

Buda Castle

Then to the national gallery, which is housed in Buda Castle (the first Hungarian royal residence). There was a lot of cool art - I especially liked the room with poster prints.

Poster I was diggin at the National Gallery

Sunday night we went to a Hungarian opera called "Bank Ban." We got the 2 Euro seats so couldn't see anything, which was fine because it was a concert version of the opera anyway. It was nice music, but I must confess- as much as i love music and singing, operas bore me to death. When my brother Alex was a young and budding opera star and performed in "Tosca," I think I fell asleep. That was about twelve years ago, and things haven't changed. However, it was worth it just to see the building - the Hungarian Opera house is pretty spectacular.

Inside the opera house

Opera House Ceiling 

I guess I caught the travel bug, while there. This past Tuesday, I booked a flight to Berlin for this coming weekend, because (surprise suprirse) we have another long weekend. But then Wednesday I woke up feeling pretty sick, and today cancelled my flight.  :(

I guess you could say I'm hitting a bit of a "slump" in the program, and maybe my desire to get out of here, and my sickness, reflects that. It's nice to have all this time off, but I  feel pretty tuned out when it comes to work, and have no routine at the moment. I'm also feeling pretty lonely. Please come visit me!

Hearing Hungarian and not understanding a single word made me realize that I actually DO know some greek, so that was satisfying. I would find myself trying to speak Greek in Hungarian restaurants and museums.




More pretty stuff:

A painting I like

Dudes on Unicycles (there were lots of these)

Proof of Life in the Danube

This house reminds me of a cake

Budapest at Night

Over and out!

Hospital

This week the teaching fellows were given another two days off of school (Tuesday and Thursday) to finally obtain chest x-rays and tuberculosis tests. A clean bill of health is needed to acquire a Greek residence permit.

One of the teachers I work with emailed me and said, "Have fun on your field trip, Claire," when I told her I wouldn't be coming to class Tuesday.

And a field trip it was! The hospital, near the city center, has a beautiful exterior. 

The inside wasn't so nice, but I guess most hospitals aren't exactly places you want to hang out in.

Strange Woman who called herself a Surgeon

The paint on the off-white walls was peeling, you could see the concrete through some of the beige linoleum floor, fluorescent lights flickered. I sat in a tacky orange chair, in a row like those you find in airports, and attempted to get some reading done. 

In my grade ten class, we're reading "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri. In the first chapter we meet Ashima, an Indian woman who has moved with her husband (by arranged marriage) to Cambridge, Mass., where he will pursue his career as a Professor. Ashima is pregnant. When she is rushed to the hospital to give birth, Lahiri describes Ashima's view of hospitals. "Ashima thinks it's strange that her child will be born in a place most people enter either to suffer or to die," (4).

Not that I was about to give birth this week, but looking around the νοσοκομείο, (Noso-comeo- this explains why infections you get from the hospital are called "nosocomial infections,") I too felt how death pervades hospitals. Besides the teaching fellows, everyone in the hospital was so old.  I saw quite a few people, rolled by on gurneys, with tubes attached to clear bags of liquid sticking into various parts of their bodies. They looked like they weren't going to be around for much longer. We don't see this in our everyday, which makes it all the more sad when we do.

People kept giving us Americans funny looks because we were all so young and vibrant and LOUD. Once again, we were out of place. Ashima also says, of being a foreigner, that it's a little like being pregnant: "For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continous feeling out of sorts." (49). Word. I'm two months in to life in Greece, and although I'm getting to know my way around, I feel totally pregnant.... I mean, foreign. And this feeling can really weigh down on me, at times. I'm trying to learn the language, but right now I'm still at the point where I can't make out anything anyone says to me but for a single word here and there. I always end up stammering, "Sig noh mee, Milate Agglika?" (Excuse me, do you speak English). And I feel defeated whenever I do. 

Because my last name comes first alphabetically in the teaching fellows group, I was first up for the chest x-ray. It went like this:

A sexy blonde nurse in knee high black boots calls out my name and brings me into a large room, shutting the dungeon-like blue door behind her."Take off your clothes," she barks at me. I'm confused - this is an x-ray, which penetrates through my skin, so shouldn't it penetrate through cotton as well? Also, I don't know which clothes she's talking about. She motions to my shirt, so I unbutton my sweater and lift my T-shirt over my head. I ask if I should also take off my bra. 

Yup.

I'm not particularly modest about my body - I go to the pool two or three times a week and shower completely naked with a bunch of old Greek women. But this was unexpected. No gown, no nothing. Now, completely topless, I have to walk a good fifteen feet across the room over to a strange silver machine. Luckily at this point the only other person in the room is the female nurse. Two of the other female fellows had three male doctors hangin out just lookin at charts while they had to strut their stuff on over to the x-ray. 

Doctor in Greek is γιατρός.

There was no heavy, lead coat to protect the body from the x-ray's harmful radiation. Just me and the cold metal machine. I was told to press my body into it and wait. It made a strange, spaceshippy noise, and then the nurse told me I was done. I walked back across the room and clothed.

Then we made our way over to the TB test:

A young male nurse asks me a bunch of questions and tells me to sit on the bench. A very fat old doctor comes in. They get the needle but realize there isn't enough liquid, so the older doctor goes to get more liquid while the young nurse interrogates me about what I'm doing in Greece while rubbing alcohol all over my forearm. The fat doctor returns, needle in hand. I look away.

The second time I got Gardisil (HPV vaccine, incredibly painful shot), I complained to the nurse about how it was going to hurt. She told me the best thing to do to beat the pain was to take a really deep breath and just breath it out hard and steady as the needle goes in so that your muscles dont tense up. I've been using this trick for all vaccinations since. Not in Greece, though. They tell you to take shallow breaths - to pant, essentially. 

So the needle goes in, and it's fine, like a little pinch.......... until ten seconds later, when the needle's still in, and the nurse is wiggling the needle around in my arm. I'm not sure why he did this. It was pretty freakin unpleasant. By fifteen seconds I was practically yelling at him to take it out.

However, apparently this experience was a vast improvement from two years ago, when Whitney (one of the fellows) was studying abroad here. When she came to get her TB test, the doctor was, yes, smoking, as he administered the shot.

Speaking of smoking, when we went to a second set of doctors to have our chest x-rays approved, the doctors asked me if I smoked. I replied no, believing this was a standard question. But then I discovered that none of the other fellows had been asked if they smoked. I asked the doctor if my x-ray looks as if I smoked, and he nodded. When I persisted that I didn't smoke, (those of you who know me, which is probably anyone reading this blog, know that I don't smoke), he smiled and kinda laughed. "You're young," he said. "There's plenty of time to quit."

Fun facts:
The most important figure in Ancient Greek medicine, Hippocrates (the "Father of Medicine") did a lot of important work regarding the thoracic cavity. He was the first documented chest surgeon, and his findings are still valid. He also brought the categorization of illness into acute, chronic, endemic and epidemic about. He developed the Hippocratic Oath for physicians, which is still in use today, an oath taken by doctors who swear to practice medicine ethically.
NOTE* Hippocrates is not the same as

hyp·o·crite,  

a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religiousbeliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actuallypossess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.

This word comes from the ancient Greek hypokrites  "stage actor, pretender, dissembler."

We also have the day off tomorrow and next Monday for elections, so I'm headed to Budapest tomorrow morning. Reports to come soon.