i now have one month left in the semester. tensions are high and the writer’s block is hitting. i just got back from a week in greece which i just simply cannot sum up in words how impactful it was. writing is so hard sometimes with this. i have a big google doc with all of my blog posts so far. it is forty-two pages, longer than my thesis will be. though it is so long, i still feel i have said nothing. i think this means a few more blog posts when i get back to whitman to sum it all up. anyways. this is how a ex-convict (sorority drop out) starred in mamma mia (visited greece on a class trip).

we started the morning bright and early. i was up writing an essay until midnight before, and then i woke up at three thirty in the morning to go to the airport. i set so many alarms because i was running through the worst scenarios in my head. i even told my dad to call me at night his time which made it work for me. i woke up without a hitch, as i was not getting deep sleep anyway. a friend from class is in my kollegium so we got a taxi (courtesy of DIS) at around four, got there at four-thirty to meet up with our bright-eyed, cheery classmates. 

since we are going to a remote greek island, (oh ya i forgot to mention that. we are going to lesbos greece to study refugee law, which we will get to later. back to scheduled programming.) getting through the day would be the biggest challenge. we got through security, with only a few hiccups being that three of our classmates were on the standby list and it would be a question of if they would get on the plane or not. after we sorted that out and our lovely trip lead sacrificed her bag by checking it, we were all accounted for and our first flight was to munich. literally nothing happened on the flight, i listened to music and pretended i was the main character even though i was in the middle seat. having short layovers in large airports was very scary and i was worried about the transfers. first one was around an hour through the munich airport. the trip lead had sorted out airport transport where i was gonna get driven around in one of the little cars. lemme just tell you that might have been one of my favorite conversations i have ever had in my time abroad. i would give this german woman a kidney. she was amazing. she starts out by telling me that she was visibly shocked that dis was paying for this trip, saying “fleeing the country for the class trip, okay then…” which, believe me, was the tamest statement of them all. the woman goes on to ask “so you are a politics major, you becoming next politician?” i told her, nope. then she tells me how her daughters, husbands, best friend was a politics major in germany and is doing politics. i smiled and say “yep, i’m confused”. then, she goes onto to say “you like biden or trump?” then, there was an awkward pause and i said “um neither, but not trump”. she asked questions and i kept smiled and nodding. i got on the flight before she could ask me any more questions but i hope to cross paths with that woman again. i cannot emphasize that i would move to germany to meet this airport lady again. ANYWAYS, kate’s romantic love story of being obsessed with an airport lady aside, flight from munich to athens went off without a hitch and was very easy. athens airport was chill too, airport transport wanted me to sit in a wheelchair and i said nope, disability is a spectrum buddy. then, we got on our finally flight from athens to mytilini (lesbos) (island of lesbians) (foreshadowing). the flight was super short (<an hour). however, it felt like a roller coaster as it was bumpy, but a fun roller coaster bc i didn’t think i was gonna die.

 

finally, after waking up twelve hours before, we made it to lesbos. i got a single room which was a dub of the day, yet i had two keys to keep the electricity on in the room at all times bc i can’t reach the slot, it’s a euro thing, hard to explain. i slonked (new word) for an hour and a half and then we were set to go on a walking tour. dis gave us a hundred euros for food the entire week, but everything was so cheap we did not need that much. even though dis gave us that money, since we all went together and our trip leads knew that we were tired, they bought us din din, which was cute of them. we all hate a lovely dinner and i had such good greek food ohmigod. the fried feta, i cannot. i love it. tzatziki, bussin. i just loved it. after the savory fun time dinner, we went to get a sweet treat with some people in the class who held back. i got gelato but i forget what was in it, and apple pie which together was two euros, which was $2.15.  if i got those treats in copenhagen, probs upwards of twelve dollars. point being, i love greece prices so much. then, we went out to a bar, and had a fun lil time.

day two rolled around and waking up in the morning in a completely new country is always an experience i will never be able to understand. just being an entirely new place, but sleeping just the same as the night before you left.

the day started by a breakfast provided by the hotel, to which i had lovely grapes and a variety of other forms of fruit, yet the grapes were top tier. that morning after breakfast, we went into a hotel conference room where we had a presentation by Fenix, a legal aid non-profit, aiming to help disadvantaged refugees gain legal assistance for getting residence status. this session was really impactful because we got to learn about a variety of different subjects and got to discuss privilege and saviorism. the one line i will take from that meeting was when asked what the future for Fenix will look like, the woman representing them said “can’t look more than a few months in the future, not getting funding and might shut down soon”. i think that was a really hard thing to hear. bad things always seem to happen so far out in the future. however, when lack of funding has been a prominent issue for years now, it may be months until these refugees won’t have any access to legal aid, meaning more and more will get rejected by the government for asylum. talking to them now after, i realized i could potentially work there this summer. would i want to? would i want to be surrounded by that? that level of intensity is something i think about often now that i am back in copenhagen.

we had a lunch break after that and it was a good time to process what we had heard about. we all met up at a restaurant, and made it back just in time to go drive up by a refugee camp. we were initially supposed to go, but peaceful protests made it now the best time to go. we met with someone who gave an interesting take on the situation, referencing that the refugees make the locals feel uncomfortable. it didn’t make sense to me. i was upset and angry and after giving us a fifteen minute talk of pure bias, he took a photo of our group and cut out some of us, i think it was on purpose. we went back early from looking at the refugee camp and had some time on our own. later that night, we all went out to dinner together. i was able to take a circle of .5’s with everyone together and it is one of my favorite accomplishments.