Our Yard - BEFORE Pictures

Sorry for the inactivity on the blog recently. Nothing much exciting is happening here. I’m trudging my way to the end of Greek class, which is this week. Our big exam is next Saturday, June 2, and I can’t WAIT for this to be over!

When I say that not much exciting is happening, this is true. But on the other hand, I’ve been reflecting recently on how much I’ve learned about Orthodoxy just by living here. Maybe I’ll write a post about this some time, but for now I can only say that I think I didn’t really understand anything about Orthodoxy before coming here. It has taken some time to adjust to the differences between the Orthodoxy in the US and here, but the benefits are beyond words. I’ll have to leave it at that for now, since this post is supposed to be about our yard.

Thanks to former resident Jesse Philo (who lived in this apartment circa 2001?) for the request to see the yard.

The photos you see in this post are from when we first arrived back in August 2006. The yard was almost entirely weeds, except for the places where trash was being stored for some unknown reason (along with about 10 big bags of gravel which appear to have been sitting in the yard for several years – Jesse, can you comment on this?).

To orient you, our yard is accessible from our back porch. We are the ground-floor apartment, with about 5 stories above us. Technically, we are not considered ground floor, but rather the sub-basement. You see, the building is built into a hill, and the front of the building accesses the road, two stories above.

Originally, our level of apartments was not intended for human habitation, but rather storage. In Greece, apartment buildings are frequently constructed through a partnership of an architect, an engineer, and a constructor, who then divide up the apartments among themselves to rent or give to their children, etc. This floor was designed as storage, as I said, but at the last second, the constructor secretly abandoned the plans and made them more apartments, which he then kept for himself. Ah, Greece! ( ;

Anyway, this is all good news for us, because since we’re considered a sub-basement, the rent is abnormally cheap for an area as nice as Panorama. We’re VERY fortunate to have this apartment.

Well, on with the yard photos…