First Week's Oddities

I have been on Aegina a week now and finally seemed to be settled in, and by settled in I only mean used to the conditions.  The conditions are quite different from America, as I expected, although I had no idea what to expect originally.  There are so many things that I will probably forget to discuss but as I remember them I will include them in blog posts.

First of all our living conditions are quite lacking probably because we are stuck thinking about the brand new University Suites we were in last semester.  Of course we still have everything we need it's just different.  For example, our stove top consists of one big and one small hot plate and our sink's highest point is the drain (-_-). This makes some things difficult such as cooking.  It has been hard to find a lot of meat that is easy to cook because we either do not know what kind of meat it is, it is too expensive, or we do not know how to prepare it.  I have been itching to find canned chicken and/or tuna, although the cheapest canned tuna I have found is like 3-4 euros a can.  With most meats out of the question for now at least, we have been reduced to lunch meat and some sausage besides all the gyros we have been eating.  When you put our kitchen conditions and lack of real meat together, you get a wonderful new series called Cooking with Retards: International Edition.  We have managed to put together to a billion sandwiches and some spaghetti together a couple times at least.

This entire week it has been raining and there has not been much going on on the island.  Most nights people have not been out because of the rain and cold.  Saturday night Tony, Graham, Zach, and I went to a bar very close to us called "International Corner".  I don't know if the owner's idea was to attract us international kids but of course it did.  It seems to be in a prime location for business, but every time we would look in, there would just be this old man behind the counter. We have come to the conclusion that he must be a bookie to keep his bar open.

We were actually there a while Saturday night.  He is a very talkative person as he should be to keep his customers there when he gets them.  He first talked all about the people on the island and how the number going out to spend money are down.  He said something like what used to be 20% of the people having their own drinks on boats and 80% at restaurants spending money has turned into 80% of people on their boats and only 20% at restaurants.  He said something else about how he knows a doctor in Athens who makes only 850 euros a month, and he had us guess how many euros a month we thought the doctor would make.  We all said numbers into the thousands and he comes back with 850.  Apparently times are harder here than I thought.

As we stayed there longer, he began to show us his vast collection of CDs.  He has shelves of them all with mixes and everything.  The old guy would play one song after another and we were all looking at what he had while asking him to play it for us.  Then if it could not get any better, he whips out a microphone and we all go to town singing, just the four of us in this bar with an old bartender.  I took center stage for most of "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne.  Even though there was not much going on we managed to have a lot of fun with the old guy and I am sure we will go back there a lot.

Current Living Quarters

International Corner Bar

Water during a rain

Dark alley we had to walk down