Classes at Anatolia have officially ended, and now the kids start on an intense, month-long battery of final exams. They must now study from 8:30 to 12:30, 4:30-7:30, and 8:30-10-eight and a half hours total. On top of following this grueling schedule, they must also be quieter in the dorm, which means that they aren't allowed to ball or hang out outside the building's main entrance, lest the noise disturb someone studying, and they are encouraged to go to bed early rather than watching the usual TV shows at night. And my job, as an advisor, is to be on duty for more hours in order to make sure that all this silent studying actually takes place.
The Greek education system seems to place much more emphasis on tests than the American, and tests here are more memorization-based than they are in the states. In order to get into University, high school seniors must pass the Pan-Hellenic exams, standardized tests in almost every subject. These tests require them to memorize literally hundreds of pages of material. When I make my rounds to check on whether or not the students are studying, I usually find the seniors hunched over their texts, repeating whole passages out loud to themselves. They remind me of rabbinical students memorizing the Torah. Ironically, much of the information they are learning is either outdated or irrelevant, and they will probably forget most of it by summer vacation anyway. As a result, the tests end up measuring students' sheer determination and willpower, rather than their command of useful information.
The kids' stress makes my job a bit more stressful. This week, I tutored my three girls in English every day. Though our lessons usually last only 45 minutes, we regularly spent an hour and a half reviewing grammar, vocabulary, and the stories in their anthology. But just as we got giddy during finals' week at Grinnell, the kids here are starting to get silly. Yesterday we giggled uncontrollably after one girl, mixing up her idioms, said she would "lend a helping finger." In fact, the whole atmosphere reminds me of Grinnell's Hell Week, when students do things like OD on ice cream and howl at the moon. Anatolia students, especially the boys, relieve stress by engaging in water fights-water wars-in front of the dorm. They are not technically allowed to do this, since our dorm director, Mr. Antoniou, had forbidden such roughhousing around the dorm, but they do it anyway. I let them. I don't have the heart to deny them a little fun when the rest of their day is all tests, studying, and more tests.
The tension of all these tests also seems to be leading to some romantic tension in the dorm. Happily, one of these romances is finally bringing about the kind of Bulgarian-Greek integration that Will and I had always hoped for. As we might have mentioned in previous reports, one of the most frustrating situations in the dorm is the Pinewood and Anatolia students' almost total separation from each other. They eat at different tables, rarely talk in the hallways, and hardly ever become friends. The girls tend to be especially insular. In this case, however, a Bulgarian girl has taken the initiative to break down some barriers. I've caught her flirting with this Greek boy after dinner and going on "walks" with him on campus. This relationship is yet another activity that is, technically, against dorm rules. On the other hand, it should be excellent for the lovers' English, since they can't communicate with each other in Bulgarian or Greek. Who would have thought of English as the "language of love"?
Meanwhile, I only have a month left here, so I am trying to absorb as much of the city and people as I can. Yesterday I went to the central market downtown to draw some impressions of Thessaloniki. Seafood caught my eye-fresh squid, octopus, cuttlefish--but no sooner had I begun sketching it than seafood vendors started gathering around me and peering over my shoulder. One wanted me to draw one of the fish in his stall. Another requested that I draw him instead of all those "ugly" fish ("so that you have something very beautiful for your sketchbookâ¦") A particularly helpful vendor kept arranging and rearranging an octopus, to display it to its greatest aesthetic advantage.
I wandered from the fish section to where the Russian cigarette vendors were sitting. About five women, all with their own supplies of cigarettes, had clustered in one square, and perched on crates, the curb, anywhere they could find to sit. I drew them, too. This amused them, and while I was drawing one, the others came around to look at what I was doing. When I had finished a sketch, my subject came over and eyed it critically, then tore it out of my book and tucked it into her purse. She eyed me defiantly. "This one is for me," she said.
In addition to capturing my impressions on paper and film, I'm also trying to educate myself about the city. I've started reading "Salonika, City of Ghosts," a recently written history of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities here since 1492. I learned that Thessaloniki, like Jerusalem and Istanbul, was for hundreds of years an important center for all three monotheistic religions. The book struggles with the fact that while it was religiously and ethnically diverse 70 years ago, the city is now over 95% Greek, most of whom are Orthodox. Only a few graffitied mosques and bathhouses attest to the 400 year Ottoman presence here, and only one synagogue remains to remember the over 50,000 Sephardic Jews who vanished from the city after WWII.
At a recent photography exhibit, however, I got to glimpse some of these vanished aspects of the city. In one, taken circa 1910, two Turkish porters trudged down a dirt road below one of the old towers, bent almost double under the weight of the carpets and cushions they were carrying. A woman preceded them, covered from head to toe in an Islamic burqua. The whole scene looked so middle-eastern I expected to see camels and palm trees. Another photograph, probably from about 1940, showed Salonika's Jewish cemetery, just outside the city gates. In the picture, the gravestones were so numerous they looked like buildings in a sprawling city. Apparently, Jews sometimes hired guides just to help them find their relatives' graves. A new building stood right beside the cemetery in the photo, and as I looked at it longer I recognized it as the same building in which Will and I took our Greek classes-I think I could even see the window of our classroom. Nothing remains of that cemetery now. The university campus, with its jungle of concrete post-war buildings, and the International trade fair grounds, now occupy the same space.
I don't want to go home, but in many ways this year in Greece has taught me to appreciate my opportunities in the States. When I was in the market the other day, I asked one of the vendors how their business was going. He shook his head, and responded that it was halia-terrible. I wondered if it was just that day, or if it was a general pattern. He answered that everything now was difficult. Since Greece adopted the Euro, rent and prices have both risen dramatically, and wages have not kept up. He said that a family of four had to get by on 400-600 Euro per month. Another woman encouraged me to go back home, go back to school, and move on with my life before I got stuck in Greece. Here, she said, people are locked into one job or one career as soon as they find one, without second chances or opportunities for further training.
So I'm taking their advice, and returning to the US for graduate school. Hopefully, though, that schooling will enable me to return to Greece with a more stable job, and "get stuck" here indefinitely. Regardless of what the Greeks say, that fate doesn't sound so bad to me.
