Our First Visitor

Well, we had our first visitor this weekend -- Jean Pond, our Greek teacher from Spokane, came up from Athens. She comes to Athens for about a month every year to work on her Modern Greek, and this was her first trip up to the "second city" of Greece.

I think I can safely say that she really liked it -- Jean, what do you say?

She arrived Saturday afternoon and we went to the Byzantine Museum on the way back to our place. Then we had dinner with our neighbors, the Lillies, and a new girl in town -- Emmanuelle, from France. Emmanuelle lives here in Panorama and, it turns outs, we're both in the exact same Greek class (which actually, finally, started today).

On Sunday, we gave Jean a whirlwind tour of Thessaloniki -- the White Tower, the Gulf, the Roman Agora, St Demetrios, Ano Poli, the Arch, Galerius Palace -- the whole deal. We also stopped at the Karcher's on Sunday evening for an American potluck and met the rest of the American theology students.

On Saturday evening, we also took Jean up to the roof of our building for an overview of Thessaloniki (see the top photo). The second photo is from Sunday, taken on Aristotle Square, at the waterfront. The third photo was taken when we came back and collapsed on Sunday night -- Momo (now the cat's name) liked Jean.

This morning, Jean headed to the train station and Pelagia and I both started our Greek classes. We were both very happy with them. Pelagia's may be a bit too slow for her, but she'll see if the pace picks up. My class has a really good group of students -- about 20 from all over the globe, including Sweden, Iraq and Palestine. I think the level is a good fit for me. Most of the other students are better with speaking and aural comprehension, but I feel more comfortable with reading and writing. Hopefully, I can catch up -- my teacher teaches 98% in Greek (using English for difficult words), so that should help me sink or swim. Well, I've got some work to do...check in later!