Typical Sunday

Sundays in Thessaloniki are extremely lazy.  First of all, almost everything is closed.  It's even hard to find a place open for a quick bite to eat.  Secondly, it's ridiculously hot over here.  Since we're usually back from our trips by then and can't go anywhere because it's all shut down, we're left to bake in our rooms.  My roommate and I joke that we're getting really close really fast considering we usually run around in as little clothes as possible to try and stay cool.  Because it's so hot out, we leave the door to our balcony open to circulate the air.  (Just to clarify, we live on the "first floor", but that is different from the ground floor.  Living quarters are usually above the small businesses.  We're on top of an empty billiards place.)  The outside noise from people starting to get going in the morning usually wakes me up earlier than I would like.

Honestly, for the majority of the day, I just laid around in my bed alternating between napping and doing absolutely nothing.  And I must say, it was pretty awesome.  Around 5:30, a few of the girls went to hunt down some food.  Finally found an open place with quite a few people sitting around, so we assumed that was an indicator that they served pretty good food.  Looking back, I now know it was more likely because they were one of the very few places that were open.  The food was super salty and didn't really taste like anything.  As much as I like the gyro and crepe places close to our apartment that are considered "fast food", I really love when we get a giant group of us to go out and do a family style dinner at a nice restaurant.  The food is much better, still cheap, and it's much more fun that way too.

While we were finishing dinner, it started raining!  None of us thought we'd see that on this trip.  You'd think I'd be used to the lack of rain being from Texas and all, but it was very much welcome.  It was much cooler for the rest of the night.   The girls from dinner talked about going to see a movie around 9pm, but it ended up just being Jade and I.  We saw "What to Expect When You're Expecting"; it was really cute and funny!  But also made me tear up a bit... I'm such a sap.

Like I said, literally nothing exciting happens on Sundays.  I'm usually alright with that though after the hustle and bustle of the school week and traveling on the weekend.

A few things I forgot to mention in my posts about the weekend that I thought were interesting:

-I put on lots of sunscreen and I didn't get sunburned!  If you know me at all, you know this is a fairly big accomplishment for being at the beach for 48 hours.  Still managed to get a little tan though; also a feat to be proud of.

-There were almost NO animals in the sea.  We saw a few sea urchins stuck to the rocky areas, and a few tiny schools of tiny fish, but other than that there were literally none.  It was also interesting because the little fish were practically invisible to blend in with the clear water, where back home they're darker to blend in with our dirty, murky water.  Halkidiki beach was on the Aegean Sea, and this weekend when we go the opposite direction to an island it will be on the Ionian Sea, so I'll be able to compare and see if that makes a difference.

Tomorrow will be the first day of a full week of classes!  This probably means nothing terribly exciting will happen, but, when in Greece...