May 23, 2008: On the Plane
This is my first time ever flying by myself. My row is one of the first to board the plane, so I have the distinct pleasure of watching all the other passengers get on. It seems that every traveler boards with some version of the same facial expression: a combination of frustration, excitement, and absolute terror. Some handle it better than others. Admittedly, I’m not a very aggressive traveler. I think it suits me to be pretty laid-back about things, I don’t want to become one of those annoying snappish people who can’t have fun even on vacation. The rest of the people around me are foreign. They are mostly young and making a huge scene in another language and the flight attendant doesn’t seem too pleased.
My first thought getting onto the plane was “What if this is the wrong flight?” which obviously is ridiculous. I like traveling but I always get really serious social anxiety. Vacations for me tend to have little or no structure, which is good in terms of being flexible because no vacation is ever going to be perfect. But there are complications. I usually do my own thing and try to avoid interaction with people at all costs. Maybe a goal for this trip can be to actually talk to locals.
I thought for a minute about Papa, and how he said that if I wait until this summer to study abroad that he would help pay for it. He would have laughed so hard to hear that ASU paid for the entire trip. I wish he could have lived to see it.
In other news, I discovered that Gang Gang Dance is not very good airplane music.

May 24, 2008: First Impressions of Athens
Everything here is maddeningly familiar. It hardly seems to be another country. All signs are written in Greek and English, and all the people speak English, even sometimes to each other. Even the landscape is reminiscent of Arizona. Small shrubs populate low, dry mountain ranges. The first recognizable landmark in both Newark and Athens is (surprise!) an IKEA. Any closer to the runway and we would be landing on it.
This is not the ancient land I had anticipated. The city is every bit as modern as every other place, and it has more streets than I had thought possible anywhere. Traces of the city’s history are hardly noticeable from what I’ve seen (which actually isn’t that much yet so maybe I’m jumping to conclusions). I’ll probably change my mind once we get out more. I can’t wait to see Delphi, it doesn’t even seem real to me.
One of the biggest surprises/pleasures is the amount of graffiti around Athens. I’ve seen some that are ambiguously written in Greek or English, but I can’t tell which. My favorites so far have been “PUKERS”, which I was totally feeling at the time because airplane food makes me soooo sick, “City Forever”, and “Crew Bum”. I’ll post pictures later, once I have more to upload.