Sunday, July 15, 2012

Home Again

 This is a picture of the "Fab Four", as we called ourselves (because of our love for The Beatles and just our general awesomeness), or "Team Cheerbear", as everyone else called us (because we were so chipper and apparently upbeat?). From L to R: BrittBritt (or BeeBee), Linds, Amber, myself. Taken on a typical Saturday night, at one of our homemade dance parties down at the soccer shed (where the guys stayed). They would provide location and beer, we would bring watermelon and music.
 On a Sunday field trip, obviously before going to the beach. Here, Duncan is giving a presentation on the battlefield of Farsala spread out below us. The grass we are standing in got the nickname "death grass" because it would break off and work its way inside your shoes, your socks, and then your skin. Very painful and hard to remove, and we would often find pieces weeks later still stuck in our clothes.
 This is a picture of the stoa once we had cleared and started excavating. You can see a column base in the back, and the 3 large stones in front are just tumble from the outer walls. Oh, did you know the difference between a "rock" and a "stone"? Neither did I at first, but then I learnt that a rock is just naturally formed whatever way, while a stone has been worked by man.
 I am posing in front of Building 10 here. I worked here for the 2 weeks after the students left and we had finished the stoa, and while it was hard to be back under "adult supervision" (not really because we still all did our own thing), it was nice to be working with Britt and Linds and to see how far the house had progressed.
 This is on one of our early days in the stoa, and we are clearing the awful pournari. It looks so soft and fluffy here. Don't be deceived.
Pre-dinner watermelon party. We ate so much of that stuff. It was cheap; we could buy it for 4 euro off the back of the fruit trucks that thrice weekly drove through Narthaki, shouting out of bullhorns in Greek what they were selling. We would listen for the word "carcuzzi", or "carcuzza", which meant watermelon.


I have been home now for about one week. Flights were delayed and complicated, as has been the case for me in the last couple of years. I used to have such good luck. Like, insanely making flights on time, or just happening to sleep in the airport and wake up early when it turns out the flight had been advanced a few hours with no notification. But my luck has run out! And now everything that can go wrong does. Every time.
It's kind of funny.
So when I called my parents when I got in to Toronto and told them I would be late and on a different flight in Edmonton, I just laughed instead of cried. Because who was I to think I would make it home on time and as planned?
Anyways, my cousins wedding (the reason I came home a few days early) was spectacular and beautiful, and we have had 30 degrees + since I've been back (except today is raining). And my bag is unpacked and sitting in the storage room again, and all my clothes have been washed a few times, and the "perma-dirt" has left the creases in my wrists and elbows.
I have been biking everywhere otherwise I get achy from lack of exercise, and I still wake up pretty early which is nice because I can get lots of things done.
But I miss the Fab Four. Linds and I are the only two in Edmonton this summer, and we went out dancing for her birthday on Friday. But she is mainly working on a bee farm 3 hours North of here, so I don't see her much. I miss having these girls to gossip and laugh with. To silently read books with in our quiet time, and then to dance and sing and laugh with while eating watermelon. Even washing clothes together, I miss the community of hunching over a basin out in the sun and scrubbing cloth and sharing hopes and dreams. It feels like because we lived such a simplistic life, with few distractions and fewer aspects of angst, that we could really focus on bonding and making good friends with the people around us.
Ah. What a good experience. How different from 2 years ago, yet I couldn't tell you which was better or worse. I hope to maybe go back next summer. We will see.

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