Most days I take the free bus to and from campus, arriving at 10 til 11 and getting home around 6:30. However, some days I cannot just sit around in the library wasting time online until the bus comes to pick us up so I venture out the gates of ACT to the city bus stop. Most of the time other people are with me, although I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll catch the bus by myself because I know for sure where to get off to transfer now.
The bus is sort of an adventure. I don't have a ton of experience on city buses to begin with because, hello, Rockford/New Milford and Monmouth aren't really big bus towns, but Thessaloniki is a big city. In a city the size of Philadelphia, a person without a car can't really rely solely on walking, and a college student not trying to go bankrupt (or bankrupt her parents) and planning a trip for fall break cannot rely on the taxi all the time. It's .60 Euro (so 60 Eurocents) for a bus ticket that let's us ride the bus around for 70 minutes.
So to get home, we get on the 58 bus. The 58 bus is sort of special, because it doesn't come that often, not to the panorama that our school is in at least. This means that it is CROWDED. It's probably past some legal code or something, I mean seriously. We pile onto this bus, yesterday just Taylor and I, and we actually had some breathing room which was nice and a change of pace for the bus. But even with breathing room, it's still not the most fun time. It's hot, because well, it's actually hot out, but there's also the body heat. We of course have to stand and hold onto to the lovely handles hanging from the ceiling, which is a lesson in how sweaty your hands can get before you have to switch and hope that you don't let go at an inopportune moment. And we somehow always manage to be standing right in front of the ticket machines.
There are two ways you can get a bus ticket in Thessaloniki, you can buy one at a kiosk for 10 cents cheaper or you can get one on the bus. The machines are next to each other so we end up blocking both of them pretty much. This combined with the crowd translates to us being handed tickets and being asked, in Greek of course, to push them into the machine to get stamped. This is not a problem, despite the language barrier. It doesn't take words for me to understand what the woman next to me wanted when she had her ticket in her hand and tapped my arm because I was right next to the machine. Even later on the bus trip, the language barrier was unimportant, when more people got on the bus and this same woman moved to in front of me and bumped me and apologized. I understood signomi and parakalo (excuse me/sorry and please) but what I understood more was the look on her face. It didn't matter at all that we we're from completely different places, headed different places, or speaking different words, we were both just crowded and uncomfortable on a bus. When she continued, I'm sure saying something about how annoying the situation was, or how unavoidable it was, I still couldn't understand the words, because well, three days of modern Greek doesn't include "talking about shitty bus situations with Greeks," but we could communicate our mutual feelings of resignation with a smile, a sigh and a slight eye roll.
Another thing I noticed on the bus yesterday was the religious observance people have here. Every time we passed a church, people would make the sign of the cross. Every time we passed a cemetery, people would make the sign of the cross. Religion is a very regular thing for people here, more so the people of the generation before mine (I think partying is the religion of the people my age here, which is just like home). It was interesting to see someone who wasn't like incredibly devout, preaching or wearing a collar or anything, being visibly religious on a city bus.
It might be a little early for this, as I've only been here for two and a half weeks or so, but I've come to a sort of conclusion about people from being here. I don't think people are really that different. It's a different language and different scenery, but people essentially do the same things here as they do at home. They're on a less strict schedule to do all these same things, but they have jobs, they go to school, they go grocery shopping and clothes shopping and eat ice cream, they go out with their friends. They have clubs and bars that don't care if you're 21 or 17, but it isn't as though here in Greece those things have some magical chemical in the air to make everything more fun. There is nothing intrinsically better about being in Greece, it really is just much more beautiful scenery. But the things that make me unhappy at home with people are pretty much the same way here. Not being able to sleep here is not better than not being able to sleep at home or at Monmouth.
I hope that last paragraph doesn't make it sound like I'm unhappy I'm here, because that isn't true. I'm happy I'm here, but all the times people told me "oh, studying abroad will change your life and your whole perspective on life", I hope they didn't mean it happens immediately, because if so, then I'm missing something. I also don't mean to sound like I'm being close-minded, because I'm really not doing that either. I just feel like college students are college students, here and at home. It'd probably be a lot different if I weren't in this developed, broke right now but still developed, country in the second largest city.
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