Thursday, 6.24: This is why I need a plan! [Notes in brackets]

Sorry for the [actually not too long] hiatus. I usually update pretty regularly, but some things came up this weekend that put me in a non-blogging, non-social, non-personable kind of mood and I needed some time to myself to straighten everything out. I will resume the stories of my adventures and misadventures, starting with an incidence of poor planning.

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Once a week, a cleaning lady comes to our apartment primarily to change our sheets and give us fresh towels. She also tidies up, takes out the trash, and puts things away when they're out of place, so to avoid embarrassment and to help her out, I try to straighten my room before she comes. This is not always easy because the first week, we didn't know when she was coming (she came on a Friday) and the third week, she came on Thursday [which we thought was an anomaly]. I have Thursdays off so my plan was to clean and leave to adventure before she got here, but she surprised me!

And thus an awkward encounter with blundering smiles and broken English and Greek on our respective parts ensued. As she cleaned Shivani's room, I mad-dashed straightened my room and lit out of the apartment without quite thinking things through. I should have planned better.

My objective this Thursday was to go to the University of Athens to visit their chemistry department and fulfill one of the items on the List. Let it be known also that the items on the List are less tasks for me to perform and more guidelines on things to do when I have time. So with only a vaguely helpful map, on which the university was a big blob of green, I set out.

I like to walk, I really do. I don't much like aimless walking when I'm tired, have to get somewhere or if it's really hot or cold outside, but otherwise, I'm not opposed to wandering about. Armed with my map, I walked for an hour eventually made it to the university gates.

But they didn't look like university gates and there wasn't a real college-campus feel, so I was very confused. The surrounding area was all green and I couldn't see any students, and the people I did see were carrying shopping bags and stuff. So I found a bus that took me along the perimeter but apparently I got off too early because I eventually reached a gym, tennis and basketball courts, and what appeared to either be housing or elementary school classrooms. [The laundry on the balconies clued me in that they were apartments.] I saw some unmistakably college-aged students wandering about [school had ended a couple of days ago, so they were probably on break], and I thought I was in the right area, but still, I saw no academic buildings. After making a huge loop, I found myself back at the gates, and, dejected and tired, took a bus, whose route I did not know, out of the gates and, luckily, back to an area that I knew.

The day was only half over so I decided to do some shopping around Monastiraki and ate lunch at Souvlaki Row. I'm sure that's not what it's actually called, but they do have super nom nom souvlakis for 1.80E to go, which is a pretty sweet deal. Thanks, Weike, for introducing me. :)

After I got back to the apartment, I rechecked the map of the university and it turns out that I was at the university, just at the outskirts. Next time, I'm going to take the bus all the way in and I will find the chemistry department. YES! I will prevail! With better planning. That being said, I did enjoy my impromptu shopping excursion in Monastiraki and it just reminded me that I am better at shopping alone when I actually need to buy things.



Word of the day: Πανεπιστήμιο [Panepistimio]
Translation: University