Pre-Santorini (yes were actually going this time!)
Trip Start
Sep 14, 2008
1
15
25
Trip End
Dec 15, 2008
Thessaloniki, Macedonia Region, Greece
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
All the more reason to get away from Thessaloniki is the fact that I won't have to worry about my Greek class while on vacation. Today I had my first quiz on all of the present and past tense articles, conjugations, verb tenses, and vocabulary. Jared had been helping me study non-stop since last Wednesday, and at 4:00 today when I went into class we both had our fingers crossed. Unfortunately, I don't think we crossed them hard enough. I won't know for sure until I get a grade back, but I'm pretty sure I only got about half of the questions right and others I couldn't even begin to answer, so I left them blank. I can honestly say that I have never taken a class that has given me so much trouble and grief. Oh well, I've got to stick with it now, but I'm hoping the teacher will have enough sympathy to not let me fail. Starting tomorrow I will have a tutor from the local high school to help me with the class. I guess that's a good thing, but I feel really bad admitting that I need help from a high school student.
Jared has been doing very well in all of his classes and has been spending every second of his free time reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King-no surprise there. Haha! He is loving his Greek class and thankfully is able to teach me the basics since my class completely by-passed all that. He also has everyone here thinking he is the next Iron Chef with all of the meals he creates from virtually nothing. Allie and I are definitely enjoying having him around at dinner time. The other day he created a dish that he likes to call "Galapagos Tortoise takes an Asian Vacation." Don't ask me where he came up with the name, but at least it tasted much better than it sounds. He prepared sticky rice with bits of egg (like fried rice), sautéed red, orange, and yellow bell pepper, marinated chicken in a sweet and sour sauce and then combined in all in a lettuce wrap. It was absolutely amazing! I made dinner tonight, but mine was spaghetti topped with a mound of cheese and frozen Mediterranean potatoes. We are obviously on different skill levels. We did wrap up tonight's dinner with an adventure in baking. While at the grocery store today we passed by boxed desserts and figured we would give it a try. We picked one called Choco-Delight, which sounded great, by Greek standards, but unfortunately all of the directions were in Greek. I was able to translate a minimal amount of words, but definitely not enough to make a Choco-Delight double-layer cheesecake. Thanks to my Greek to English dictionary we were able to translate the rest of it, but after putting it all together we had two packages that had not been used. We figured "oh well, maybe they are used for garnish" and went about making the cheesecake. We can't give you the results just yet because it is still chilling in the fridge, but hopefully it won't be too bad. And Mrs. Davis, just so you know, Jared did say "Man, I wish Mom was here to help with this," so you can use that against him next time he tries to push you out of the kitchen when baking.
Blog ya after Santorini! Wooo!
Megan and Jared
